Having argued that God cannot be omnipotent, and that He cannot be good, Dr. Branden now undertakes to show that it is even more absurd to suppose that he is both at once. He asks:

If God is omnipotent and all-good, why does he allow evil to exist in the world?

To this a theist might reply, by way of opening the debate, that God cannot, for purely logical reasons, eliminate all evil from the world without eliminating a greater amount of good, thereby making the world as a whole worse rather than better. But to this, Dr. Branden would perhaps retort that when we are talking about an omnipotent God, the word “cannot” has no place in the discussion. Which brings us to our first difficulty.

Before we can reply to Dr. Branden’s question, we must ascertain what it means. For example, is he using the word “omnipotent” in the special Branden sense, to mean “capable of doing anything, including the contradictory,” or in the standard theist sense, to mean “capable of doing any non-contradictory thing”? If he means the former, then he can easily brush aside the theist objection. But then his own case collapses, for it rests on the premise that God cannot permit evil and still be perfect. (I shall write “perfect” for “both omnipotent and all-good.”) Let us therefore suppose that Dr. Branden is speaking of omnipotence in the standard theist sense, and therefore, that when he demands that God produce a certain kind of world, he will be prepared to withdraw the demand if it turns out to be contradictory.

References
[Editor’s notes are in blue.]

* In the dot-matrix printout, this section begins with the unexplained notation “(p7) 8 May 81.” Since the discussion of disasters and pain occupies quite a large number of pages of the printout, and are listed as “Section 7” in James’s table of contents, it is entirely possible that this section was completed nearly a year later than the rest of the printout.]

† The title refers to Nathaniel Branden’s lecture “The Concept of God,” from his lecture series “The Basic Principles of Objectivism.” That lecture is fully transcribed in his book The Vision of Ayn Rand, chapter 4. Partial and perhaps complete audios seem to be available throughout the Internet. See also R.A. Childs, “The Epistemological Basis of Anarchism,” Note 19.