Credo in Unum Deum.

I believe in one God, who is eternal, immortal and indestructible. He (I will stick to the conventional male pronoun, at least for now) is omnipotent, in that he can do anything that is not logically impossible - he cannot create square circles, but can do anything allowed by logic - and is the creator and sustainer of the Universe we live in, and any others that might exist.

By 'eternal' I mean that God exists forever - he existed before the 'Big Bang', and will go on existing after the Universe has reached thermodynamic equilibrium, or 'Heat Death', which it must do at some future point, according to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, when all motion ceases.

I concur with the First of the Church of England's XXXIX Articles of Religion that God is 'without body, parts and passions.' The attribute of 'impassibility' may be a late Greek addition, and nothing much to do with the Jewish God we see in the Tanakh, or Jewish Bible (Christian 'Old Testament') but it makes sense, given what I shall say below. The First of the XXXIX Articles is also consistent with the view that God, from a metaphysical perspective, has the attributes of 'simplicity' and 'unity'.

God is also omnipresent, in that he is everywhere and everywhen in the Universe - present at all times and places within it, as well as beyond it. The same would also be true of any and every other Universe that may exist. God is both transcendent and immanent.

He is omniscient, knowing absolutely everything there is to know - and his omniscience includes foreknowledge. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which applies to humans, does not apply to God, as A.H. Compton pointed out to Niels Bohr. God knows the exact positions and momenta of every last electron, proton, neutron, photon, neutrino, etc., in the Universe at any given time - as well as the thoughts, words and deeds of each and every one of us. Nothing escapes him, nothing is hidden from him - nor has it been since before the dawn of time, and nor will it be - not ever.

We are supposed to believe that God is supremely good - that, in fact, he is perfect, and the source of all good, the supreme legislator and judge of the Universe, who is also compassionate, merciful and loving towards all the beings he has created.

If this is the case, why is there evil in the Universe? That there is death and unavoidable suffering is consistent with the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and with the very nature of physical and biological existence. Death is not, as St Paul believed, the result of Adam's sin (Romans 5:12, 6:23), but has existed for as long as life itself has, about 3.7 billion years. Nowadays, the 'death' he refers to is interpreted as spiritual, rather than physical, death, but palaeoanthropology - and biology - tell us that Homo sapiens, which emerged about 250,000 years ago in Africa, could not, and did not, originate with a single pair. The story of Adam and Eve, the Garden of Eden, the Serpent, and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, is mythology, not history.

The standard answer is that God must not do anything which interferes with the human exercise of free will, even if they exercise their free will to cause unnecessary suffering and/or death to other human beings or non-human animals. This answer is obviously dependent for its success on human beings possessing free will. If all their actions are determined, it fails.

I would like to believe in what is called 'libertarian free will'; without it, the concepts of moral and criminal responsibility are null and void. Unfortunately, this fact is insufficient, of itself, to negate determinism.

If God is the cause of the Universe's existence, which he is; and of that of everything in it, at all times and in all places within it, which he is; then is he not also the primary cause of all events within it? 'Quantum indeterminacy' - and any and every other kind of indeterminacy - doesn't apply to God, anymore than the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle does.

There is no 'free will'. All our actions are determined - indeed, have been predetermined since the dawn of time. Consequently, no-one has any responsibility for his or her actions, except for God, who is the cause of all the evil in the Universe, as well as all the good. Why? It makes no sense!

If God was aware, even before the 'Big Bang', of the events of the Holocaust, of the Killing Fields of Cambodia, and of the current massacre of innocent civilians in Gaza, why did he do nothing to prevent them, and why is he doing nothing to prevent yet more slaughter? Is he not, in fact, the ultimate cause of these events, and does he not endorse them? So much for being the 'God of love'!

The French novelist Stendahl (according to Albert Camus) claimed that 'God's only excuse is that he does not exist.' In my view, God doesn't have that excuse.

In my humble opinion, God has every single one of the traditional divine attributes, except that of omnibenevolence, or supreme goodness. That is the way I account for the simultaneous existence of an omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent deity with evil in the world.

That there exists a universal law of good, I do not doubt - but it has nothing to do with God, or his will. It is the Dao, or dharma, and it would be incumbent upon all of us to obey it, if we were free to do so. It is every bit as eternal and indestructible as God is. I wish God did obey it, but all the evidence points in the opposite direction.