My own view about this is that religious traditions are at their best when they back away from the classical virtues of God. God is elevated in some traditions to being above good and virtue, or in Hume’s down-to-earth phrase, has no more regard to good above ill than heat above cold. In other traditions, he is by no means omnipotent, but subject to forces not of his own making. Each of these at least affords some kind of theodicy.
