Three Gods?
The notion of a Good God and a rival bad one was popular in the ancient world.
Its biggest difficulty is how black and white it makes good and evil. It
is never that simple. Let us forget that for the moment.
Is there a good God to explain goodness and a bad one to
explain badness and a mad God to explain the crazy things or things that are
attributable to neither of the other two? For example, does it makes sense to
believe that the other two Gods would have made countless planets and stars?
They would have made beings that could be happy and suffer instead.
The other two Gods could stop mad God wasting his power if it is him or wait
till he changed his mind before making anything. Why can’t they trick him to get
him to do one thing when he thinks he is doing something else?
Perhaps it is best if he wastes his power. But they want him to make people.
The three Gods will not do anything until they agree on it for without
compromise they will do nothing as their magic will be working at cross-purposes
and the result will be deadlock. The first two had to give in to mad God to get
acting, to get making people and he to them.
It could be that all miracles that have been attributed to the God of Jesus
Christ are really the work of the good God who did them not to deceive those who
would only consider taking them to be from Jesus’ God but so that those who
sense that there could be three Gods could or would take them as evidence for
this. God is not guilty of deception if he does miracles so that their true
meaning will be discovered later when he can’t do as he pleases.
If the threesome theory is true then Good God would not have let the others act
unless he was sure that we would at least have as much happiness as sorrow. And
Bad God must be sure of the same thing. Mad God does not care either way but
likes being awkward.
The fatal flaw in the theory seems to be that when it is two Gods against one
both of whom would like to strip Mad God of his power then they would do it. So
why don’t they? It is unlikely that with all the power they have the only thing
they cannot do is to take away the power of the third God. If they have power at
all then they must at least be able to prevent him from using it.
What Mad God wants will be either bad or good so when he is good he and the good
God could and would remove the Bad God.
A Mad God who wastes power making the universe could easily give his power to
the other gods and be destroyed by them and that would have to happen sometime.
It would have to have already happened so the theory takes us back to Dualism
again.
Perhaps the Gods left time and went into the eternal state not even knowing that
the mad God existed until it was too late. A being who enters timelessness will
still be in that state even if he leaves and is destroyed in time. This would
explain why the other two cannot get rid of him or make him powerless. To be mad
requires the power to change and Mad God can’t change or be mad if he becomes
eternal.
But if there is a fourth God who is a duplicate of the third God, meaning that
there are two mad Gods who are crazy in the same matters, then the problem is
seemingly completely solved. There will be trouble if the mad Gods are not in
total agreement. But there cannot be another mad God for when three Gods are
good they could rob bad God of his power.