Q&A: Kindness and Omnipotence
Kindness and Omnipotence
Question
If I understood correctly, the honorable Rabbi argues that free choice cannot exist together with God’s knowledge of the future.
My question is whether, by the same logic, one must also give up God’s kindness, or His omnipotence, in order to remain consistent and logical.
If God is omnipotent, why does He allow suffering? I know the parable about someone who sees a child being pricked by a needle and does not understand that the child benefits from it, because he lacks medical knowledge, and so on.
But the point is that even there, the pain inflicted on the child stems from the doctor’s limitation in achieving the positive goal of vaccinating the child without causing him pain. My question is whether one can simultaneously maintain both the idea that God is omnipotent and that He is good without limit (in the naive senses of those terms, because if “good” and “omnipotence” are defined differently, then the question never gets off the ground).
Answer
Search the site for columns about evil in the world.
Thank you very much