s may become plausible. The rejection of the traditional God by nineteenth- and earlytwentiethcentury thinkers, such as Nietzsche, Feuerbach, Marx, andFreud, was influenced by a change in fundamental assumptions about thenature of reality. The ideals of freedom and self-government obviatedthe need for the traditional "supreme ruler" God. Today, a new set of ideas that may influence concepts of God areentering popular consciousness. Two major concepts to imbue modernthinking come from science: the ideas of evolution in biology and ofrelativity in physics. We can call these the Darwinian and Einsteinianinsights, although they extend well beyond the theories of CharlesDarwin and Albert Einstein. A fundamental idea behind evolution is that all things areconstantly changing, that nothing stays the same. For some, this ideasparks the need to reaffirm an image of God who is unchanging andeternal. But this would make God an exception to the metaphysicalprinciples that govern all of reality. In other words, it would placeGod outside the margins of understandability and availability. A God whois outside of time and change is a God who cannot intervene in history.Such a God would be useless, and believers in this God would behard-pressed to draw a practical distinction between their belief andthat of atheists. A better solution, one more in keeping with the Darwinian insight,would be a temporal and changing God, listening to prayers andresponding appropriately. Curiously, such a God could still beomnipotent, at least according to one interpretation: that God isall-powerful not in an absolute sense, but in a relative sense. God isas powerful today as He can possibly be, but He can (and does) exceedHis own power at every point in the future. In other words, like us, Godis changing, growing, evolving. He is always more than He was and willalways be more than He is. And at every moment, this changing God isomnipotent. Note also the seco...
