On God who does not rule

On the proof of the nonexistence of God starting from the proposition that God is all-powerful, perfect, and good:

The God as power idea ended with Auschwitz. There are other, and better, options.

Perfect means throughly made (per + facere), and omnipotence means perfect power, but that means God's essential attribute is power, and secondarily totality. But only Being can be susceptible of totality. 'God' rather names the divinity of Being that is its essence. Not a person or power who 'rules' the world.

Creation, revelation, and redemption are aspects of the temporality of Being that may be figured as love, and therefore also justice, which is a form and aspect of love. There is a movement that perfects itself. God desires not power but the good of Being and of beings. God is not a person but we may relate to God in a personal way. Persons, including and particularly of our species, participate in the good and the becoming (becoming-more-perfect is another name for becoming) of it. And because of this, God needs us as partners in the becoming of the world. In an imperfect world, there is unnecessary suffering, but persons can respond to suffering and evil. Being in itself does not have the option of not-being or being as a choice, though we do, and we also can change and thus choose our form of life or being. The evil we suffer we can only respond to; the evil we cause we can learn not to. We can also wonder if "God might not have created the world, and why he did." This is better put by seeing that we can wonder why there is something instead of nothing. Is it better to be than not to be? How can that question be answered? Non-being lacks all of Being's perfections, while Being lacks non-being's freedom from suffering. "God's gambit" was on Being. We don't get to choose to be born, nor that we will die. But we can chose how to live. We don't gambit on Being, only on the choices we can make of how to be, what to do, and not to do, and whether or not to choose to not-be. We will all individually pass into not-being. The world we live, at least in in the normal case and so far, goes on when we no longer do. There is happiness in this. There is love in this. In this we participate in God's participation in the goodness of a world and beings in it that go on as they do apart from him, like grown-up children who leave their parents. The world itself might end, and humanity and its powers could cause this or allow it to happen. Today we know this. Love makes space for the other and wants him to go on. Love wills what is to be. That does not mean it wills it to remain as it is. It wills its going on. It wills its going on despite suffering, despite risk. So God plays dice (as with genetics) and gives us over to some risk, but with some power and responsibility to manage the risk. Why love? What have a faith that rests partly on a hope? How can Being be better than non-Being if in Being there is suffering and lack? Which of these questions can we answer, practically, in what we do, in the choices we may make? Wondering what is and is not, which things are, and whether the concept of God is 'satisfied' with an object corresponding to it (such that the being with the named properties exists), what does it mean to pose this question? Why ask it? Why ask 'whether' of existence, and why ask the 'why' of it? Why not only ask questions that it can make sense to want to answer? The principal question about God is only what the name refers to or means. I 'prefer not to' have faith in a God whose desire and ambition is power over the world. This sounds to me like a (real, as it political) monarch; it sounds too much like a Pharaoh, which is your conclusion. You have defined God and then proven he cannot exist. Of course there cannot be a Boss of it all who both desires absence of intolerable suffering and desires the good, because these three propositions together yield a contradiction, and obviously so. The object of faith is Being loved in its essential aspect as good. That there is good in Being is well in evidence, but there is evil also. If evil were primary, the desire for happiness would be vain, and love and existence would be vain, but if evil were the essence, a pure and total destruction would have prevailed long ago. Good (happiness and justice) is the norm, evil is failure or lack of the norm; it can only be thus. 'Is my worth living?' is the only genuine religious question, and it can only be answered not just be observing but also by choosing. How to live the good (just and happy) life is the question that motivates all of religion's details. The omnipotence idea is not an idea of the sacred but of technology; metaphysics need not be religion. Religion is a binding (ligere) of the willing self to the good.

We have a role in perfect both world and God. Abraham did this by arguing with him. God is not a person but the idea of God in religion images God as a person. We have needed this idea of relationship. A strong and successful self needs some relationship to an idea of authority vested in an other. This God is then like a father, and also like a mother, as the process-oriented terms ‘creation, revelation, and redemption’ all are notions of a poeisis or bringing-forth rather than a techne or making, or a founding and instituting creation ex nihilo, though both metaphors, the paternal and maternal ones that these clearly are, are useful for us in living a good life. A parent should not be thought perfect, and anyway, no person can be. The idea of a divine person who is absolute, perfect, and has all perfections, is clearly also relative to our imaginations. The idea of the Covenant, which is the basic form of this relationship in the Abrahamic religions, is an idea of a relationship of ourselves to this demanding and commanding image of perfection. We certainly are imperfect not only because mortal but also because particular. Our finite encompasses both. You cannot love or be loved by a perfect person or being, as, lacking nothing, he or she would desire nothing, and so would not desire the Other that we are to him/her, and so could not love enough to let us be as we are and have the moral freedom to be creative. At the root of creativity is the good. God is a necessary fiction. This God should not be thought of as perfect. Paradoxically, the best kind of parent is the “good enough” mother or father, who is tolerant, and whose nurturing, protecting, and above all potentiating care for us is limited, and desires both the good and this limit. For one a force is limited, the being it is exercised over has a freedom. Down with power! Down with love as command and obedience! Piety within limits!