God Quote by Sir William Temple, 1st Baronet

Temple’s line tightens the screws on the oldest theological escape hatch: the idea that God merely “allows” evil while remaining morally intact. He takes aim at the comfort word permit, then quietly detonates it. If God is omnipotent, he argues, permission collapses into authorship; allowing something you could prevent without cost starts to look indistinguishable from choosing it. It’s a lawyerly move with pastoral stakes: he’s not flirting with atheism so much as refusing a cheap acquittal.

The subtext is a critique of religious language that functions as anesthesia. “God permits evil” can sound humble, even pious, but Temple notices how it smuggles in a moral distinction that may not hold up under the very definition of omnipotence. His parenthetical aside is doing most of the work: it’s a compressed syllogism dressed up as clarification. That’s why the sentence bites. It’s polite, almost Anglican in its restraint, yet it forces the reader into a corner where either God’s power is limited, God’s goodness is complicated, or the human categories of “power” and “goodness” are inadequate.

Context matters: Temple, an early 20th-century Archbishop of Canterbury, lived through industrial misery and global war, an era when evil wasn’t an abstraction but a headline and a body count. The intent isn’t to win an argument; it’s to make evasive answers feel dishonest in the face of real suffering. The rhetorical power comes from stripping away euphemism until the raw dilemma remains, unsoftened and unavoidable.