Even the formidable vocabulary of John C. Wright struggles to find the words required to address the most cogent argument in defense of atheism ever articulated:
When George Lucas sat down some autumn afternoon out on one of the verandas at Skywalker Ranch and began penning The Phantom Menace, with its two-dimensional characters and pointless plot, no all-powerful god living somewhere in the clouds stopped him.
When the first test footage of Jar Jar Binks surfaced and Lucas said something to the effect of, “Great job, guys. This really fulfills the vision of what I had in mind for this character,” no omnipotent deity struck him dead. There was no lightning from the sky, no sudden cardiac arrest. When we needed God most, he was silent.
He didn’t come to judge Lucas at any point during the travesty that was Episodes I-III. Any good and powerful god would have turned Skywalker Ranch into a smoldering crater where nothing else could ever grow, and yet your god remained silent.
I posit, then, that your “god” is no god at all. Either he was powerful enough to stop the Star Wars prequels from happening and didn’t, meaning he can’t possibly be all-good—or else he wanted the prequels stopped and couldn’t do it, meaning he can’t possibly be all-powerful.
Even the evils of Mao and Stalin and Hitler can be rationally explained by the ruthless pursuit of power. But there is no explanation for the so-called prequels. Free will? Nonsense! Nobody willed that. Natural selection? Even a blind and random process would not have chosen thusly.
It is a conundrum indeed.