Free For the Time Being by Annie Dillard Page A

spiritual…. Why does God stress this point so much? Because he wants to be ours exclusively.”
    It is “fatal,” Teilhard said of the old belief that we suffer at the hands of God omnipotent. It is fatal to reason. It doesnot work. The omnipotence of God makes no sense if it requires the all-causingness of God. Good people quit God altogether at this point, and throw out the baby with the bath, perhaps because they last looked into God in their childhoods, and have not changed their views of divinity since. It is not the tooth fairy. In fact, even Aquinas dissolved the fatal problem of natural, physical evil by tinkering with God’s omnipotence. As Baron von Hügel noted, Aquinas said that “the Divine Omnipotence must not be taken as the power to effect any imaginable thing, but only the power to effect what is within the nature of things.”
    Similarly, Teilhard called the explanation that God hides himself deliberately to test our love “hateful”; it is “mental gymnastics.” Here: “The doctors of the church explain that the Lord deliberately hides himself from us in order to test our love. One would have to be irretrievably committed to mental gymnastics … not to feel the hatefulness of this solution.”
    E V I L              Many times in Christian churches I have heard the pastor say to God, “All your actions show your wisdom and love.” Each time, I reach in vain for the courage to rise and shout, “That’s a lie!”—just to put things on a solid footing.
    “He has cast down the mighty from their thrones, and has lifted up the lowly.
    “He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty.”
    Again, Paul writes to the Christians in Rome: “In all things God works for the good of those who love him.”
    When was that? I missed it. In China, in Israel, in the Yemen, in the Ecuadoran Andes and the Amazon basin, in Greenland, Iceland, and Baffin Island, in Europe, on the shore of the Beaufort Sea inside the Arctic Circle, and in Costa Rica, in the Marquesas Islands and the Tuamotus, and in the United States, I have seen the rich sit secure on their thrones and send the hungry away empty. If God’s escape clause is that he gives only spiritual things, then we might hope that the poor and suffering are rich in spiritual gifts, as some certainly are, but as some of the comfortable are too. In a soup kitchen, I see suffering.
Deus otiosus:
do-nothing God, who, if he has power, abuses it.
    Of course, God wrote no scriptures, neither chapter nor verse. It is foolish to blame or quit him for his admirers’ claims, superstitious or otherwise. “God is not on trial,” I read somewhere. “We are not jurors but suppliants.”
    Maybe “all your actions show your wisdom and love” means that the precious few things we know that God did, and does, are in fact unambiguous in wisdom and love, andall other events derive not from God but only from blind chance, just as they seem to.
    What, then, of the bird-headed dwarfs? It need not craze us, I think, to know we are evolving, like other living forms, according to physical processes. Statistical probability describes the mechanism of evolution—chance operating on large numbers—so that, as the paleontologist said, “at every moment it releases a given quantity of events that cause distress (failures, disintegrations, death).” That is, evolution’s “every success is necessarily paid for by a large percentage of failures.” In order to live at all, we pay “a mysterious tribute of tears, blood, and sin.” It is hard to find a more inarguable explanation for the physical catastrophe and the suffering we endure at chance from the material world.
    “Even when we are exercising all our faculties of belief,” Teilhard continues, “Fortune will not necessarily turn out in the way we want but in the way it must.” Karl Rahner echoes this idea: It is a modern heresy to think that if we do right always, we will