Q&A: Is the Holy One, blessed be He, omnipotent?
Is the Holy One, blessed be He, omnipotent?
Question
Hi Michi,
At long last I’ve reached a point where the spirit within me is troubling me, and I can no longer refrain from bothering you with a question that perhaps I already asked in a somewhat different form in the past.
At the very beginning of our dialogue I presented you with my claim that, as I understand it, God is not omnipotent. Later I refined this claim into a different version, namely, that God cannot, for example, produce an earthquake from this very moment to the next, but God can time events so that an earthquake will ultimately help realize God’s plan.
Later it occurred to me that defining God as “compassionate and gracious” is especially challenging in light of the fact that God allows horrors to take place in our world—horrors in which tender infants suffer hellish torment until death redeems them from their suffering. And the prayers go unanswered.
To the best of my knowledge, nowhere in the entire Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) is there any explicit statement that God is omnipotent. One of the people arguing with me quoted a verse [I think from the book of Hosea] from which one can infer God’s omnipotence. But I think that, based on the fact that the Torah contains no explicit statement about God’s omnipotence, it seems to me that theologically it is preferable to assume that God is not omnipotent rather than to assume that the explicit statement that God is compassionate and gracious is not true!
I would be very grateful if you would address this claim of mine.
Answer
First, I don’t know whether He is omnipotent or not. If you insist, you can quite easily find sources for it, such as: “Is anything too wondrous for the Lord?!” and a few others. And likewise philosophical considerations support this too (that at the foundation of everything there must be something immensely powerful, and if it is not omnipotent then it too would require something else that sustains and creates it, and so on). But I agree that none of this is absolutely conclusive. In any case, I don’t see why it matters. By the same token, you also cannot know whether He is or is not omnipotent. Nobody knows that. What practical consequence does this question have?
As for your argument about evil in the world, in my opinion it doesn’t hold water for several reasons: 1. If He created the world, then even if He is not omnipotent it is clear that He can at least control the world He created. So again the question returns: why is there evil here? 2. On the substance of the matter, human evil is not a question. Human beings cause it, not God. As for natural evil, I wrote about that in a book I am currently working on (which presents an updated Jewish theology). I’ll try to explain briefly here. Let me preface this by saying that even the omnipotent cannot overcome the laws of logic, only the laws of nature. A violation of the laws of logic is something meaningless, not merely physically impossible. Thus He cannot make a round triangle or a square whose diagonal is shorter than its side (these are examples given by Maimonides and Rashba, who certainly thought that God is fully omnipotent). Now let us return to the question of evil. In my view, evil is a byproduct of the laws of nature. There is no system of laws that governs the world as it exists today (for that is what the Holy One, blessed be He, wants), but without the “bad” elements. It’s like a law of gravity without heavy bodies being pulled to the ground when someone is sitting there and might be hurt. Either the world is governed by laws or it isn’t. But if it was decided to govern it by laws, then there is no question why there is evil, because it is a byproduct of the laws. To run the world according to those laws and at the same time without evil is like a round triangle, and that the Holy One, blessed be He, cannot do even if He is omnipotent. The omnipotent can do anything that is doable, but not things that violate logic, if only because there are no such things.
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Questioner (another):
I know that You can do all things, and that no plan is withheld from You (Job 42:2)
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Rabbi:
Indeed. Though one can always interpret it as a metaphor for immense power rather than omnipotence. Or alternatively, that this is Job’s opinion but he is mistaken about it (how does he know that this is omnipotence and not just immense power?).