William Lane Craig
There may be no world feasible for God involving universal, freely embraced salvation which comes without other overriding disadvantages...Your pun on Sophie’s Choice (a choice between two bad options) reveals that you haven’t yet grasped the theory of middle knowledge, for God doesn’t create such a choice for Himself. The counterfactuals of creaturely freedom which confront Him are outside His control. He has to play with the hand He has been dealt.
Rabbi Harold Kushner
TIME: Your books, including this one, challenge the idea of God's omnipotence. Could you explain your reasoning?
Kushner: Given the unfairness that strikes so many people in life, I would rather believe in a God of limited power and unlimited love and justice, rather than the other way around. Why do we worship power? Why do we assume that total power is the most wonderful thing we could ascribe to God, even if it means compromising his fairness and his love? I believe that God is totally moral, but nature, one of God's creatures, is not moral. Nature is blind. Floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, disease germs, speeding bullets, they are all equal opportunity offenders. They have no way of knowing whether it's a good person or a bad person in their path. In fact, there's a passage in the Talmud [Jewish scripture] that says that God's justice would demand that certain things not happen, but nature is not just and those things happen.
TIME: Does that separate you, to some extent, from the Orthodox Jewish community?
Kushner: I get a better reception from Mormons than I do from the Orthodox Jews. It's precisely because of that point. They feel obliged to defend God's omnipotence, irrespective of the fact that that holds God responsible for every retarded child, every flood and earthquake, every plague and everything else that happens in the world, and they have to twist themselves into all sorts of theological pretzels to explain why bad is good.
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