God is almighty

When we say that God is almighty we mean that as creator he has power over all things and he is the source of all power. (1)

This is not the same as saying that God can do anything.  God cannot, for example, make a square circle because that is a logical contradiction. (2) In the same way, God cannot give human beings free will and at the same time withhold free will from them. (3) Furthermore, God cannot do anything that goes against his nature as God. (4) So God cannot sin.

The laws of Nature

If you plant an acorn, it will grow into an oak tree; it cannot grow into any other sort of tree.  When water gets very cold it becomes ice; when ice is warmed it melts.  These regular and predictable processes are regarded by scientists as the laws of Nature.  From a Christian perspective, laws of Nature are “signals of God’s reliability and faithfulness, made known in his creation”. (5)

The belief that God preserves the regular order of the world does not, however, imply that the universe is mechanistic – that it works like a huge machine.  Advances in physics, for example, have abolished a merely mechanical view of the universe. (6) Furthermore, we know that human beings are not robots; we have free will.  In exercising our free will we can do things that upset the balance of nature and damage the Earth; for example, the world’s emissions of greenhouse gases contribute to global warming.