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At a glance
An all-powerful God, it is often assumed, should be able to do absolutely anything — including removing suffering without changing anything else about how the world works.
Omnipotence means the power to do what is intrinsically possible. A world with real choices and real cause-and-effect cannot also guarantee that every choice turns out painlessly, any more than a shape can be both square and circular.
Scripture for reflection
“Ah Lord GOD! behold, thou hast made the heaven and the earth by thy great power and stretched out arm, and there is nothing too hard for thee.”
Jeremiah 32:17 KJV
UECF.NET summary
Lewis examines what “omnipotence” can coherently mean. He argues it never meant the power to make logically self-contradictory combinations of words into things — a “square circle” is not a real object left undone by a limited God; it simply fails to describe anything at all. On this view, such “impossibilities” are not a limit on God’s power but a fact about language.
He applies the idea to the material world: a stable, law-governed universe — where wood is reliably hard and water reliably wet — is the necessary backdrop for creatures to act on one another predictably, including for good (a shared meal, a rescued swimmer). That same reliability is also what allows wood to splinter and water to drown; you cannot have the benefits of a fixed order without its risks.
In the same way, Lewis argues, a freedom capable of real love must also be capable of turning away from love; a “freedom” engineered never to choose wrongly would not be freedom in any recognizable sense. UECF.NET’s note: this chapter does not claim to explain every individual case of suffering — only to clear away a common misunderstanding of what “all-powerful” can coherently mean.
Main themes
- Intrinsic possibility versus mere difficulty
- A fixed, reliable natural order as the condition for love and cooperation
- Genuine freedom as necessarily including the possibility of choosing wrongly
Key ideas
- Omnipotence is the power to do the intrinsically possible, not to make verbal nonsense into fact.
- A law-like universe is presupposed by any world where creatures can genuinely help or harm one another.
- Freedom that could never fail would not be freedom in the sense that makes love possible.
Important concepts
- Intrinsic impossibility — Something that is not really describable as a “thing” once examined carefully — for instance, a two-sided triangle — as opposed to something merely difficult.
- Natural law (physical sense) — The fixed regularities of matter, like gravity, that let one event reliably follow another — not to be confused with moral law.
Related Bible references
- Job 38–41
- Jeremiah 32:17
- Genesis 1
- Isaiah 40:28
Practical application
- The next time you are tempted to ask “why didn’t God just…”, pause and consider whether the alternative you are picturing is coherent, or whether it quietly asks for a different, freedom-less kind of universe altogether.
Questions for study
Reflection questions
- Had you assumed “all-powerful” meant “able to do literally anything imaginable”? Does Lewis’s distinction change how you would answer a skeptic?
Small-group discussion
- Can you think of a good thing in your own life that depended on the world being reliable and law-like, even though that same reliability sometimes causes harm? Is a freedom capable of choosing wrong still worth having?
These notes are an original UECF.NET study companion and are not a reproduction of C. S. Lewis’s text, which remains in copyright. Read Chapter 2 (“Divine Omnipotence”) in The Problem of Pain itself — from a library, bookseller, or the Internet Archive’s access-restricted lending copy — then use this page to review its themes and questions. Scripture quotations above are the King James Version. No quotations from Lewis are included on this page.