The Problem of Evil - Common Sense Atheism

The Idea of God 29
Here I will remark only that whatever omnipresence may come to, it is
obviously incompatible with God’s having any sort of spatial or physical
structure (and hence with his being either male or female).
And what is our relation to this omnipotent, omniscient, eternal, immutable,
omnipresent being? He is, of course, our creator and we, like the
heavens and everything else besides himself, are the work of his fingers:
In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was
without form, and void. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the
waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. (Gen. 1: 1–3)
For thus says the Lord, who created the heavens (he is God!), who formed the
earth and made it (he established it; he did not create it a chaos, he formed it
to be inhabited!) (Isa. 45: 18, RSV)
I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and
of all things visible and invisible. (The Nicene Creed, The Book of Common
Prayer)
To say that God is the creator of all things besides himself is not to
say that he formed them out of some pre-existent stuff, like the cosmic
craftsman of the Timaeus. If there is a God, then there never was a
chaos of prime matter that existed independently of his power and his
will, waiting through an eternity of years for him to impress form on
it. This could not be, for, if there is a God, nothing does or could exist
independently of his will or independently of his creative power. God
creates things from the ground up, ontologically speaking. His creation
is, as they say, ex nihilo. And even he, in his omnipotence, is not capable
of bringing a thing into existence and then leaving it entirely to its
own devices, for a thing that exists, even for an instant, independently
of God’s creative power is as impossible as a gaseous vertebrate or an
invisible object that casts a shadow. This fact—I mean this conceptual
fact—is sometimes emphasized by saying that God is not only the
creator of everything but the sustainer of everything as well; but this is
only for emphasis, for sustainer is included in the meaning of creator—at
least in theological contexts.
Having said this, we must face a minor logical problem created by
our criterion for membership in the list of divine attributes; for we said,
among other things, that an attribute was to be included in this list only
if it was an essential attribute of God. And being a creator is, according to
the Abrahamic religions, one of God’s accidents: it is a property he lacks
in certain perfectly good—but, fortunately for us, non-actual—possible