A Gun is still powerful enough to kill someone, whether it is used or not.
the comparison of power being negated because it isn't used seems pointless.
the comparison of power being negated because it isn't used seems pointless.
Omniscience and Omnipotence are incompatible
- Thread starter James R
- Start date
Sarkus,
Erm, like putting out sandbags in the path of a tsunami.
You're in favour of my point?
Do you understand my point?
All of them.
We haven't got to that point yet.
Yet you talk of square circles.
How do you personally discriminate between reality and illusion?
Everything is a perception. God gave us the material reality of death, while simultaneosly giving us the reality of the spiritual. We each percieve it according to our understanding. If we accept a square circle, no matter what it's shape, from such an authority, then it IS a square circle. Just like, God died, even though God cannot.
Good boy!
When the omniscient, and omnipotent Wills, it is absolute. Well done.
Now we're getting somewhere.
I've easily given you explanations, it's up to you to understand what has been told to you.
You have no idea what a square circle is, so how can it be a logical impossibility?
Then it is a pointless question.
You only ask it because it is impossible to you, therefore it is impossible for God.
It only highlights our own lack of imagination, and limitations.
jan.
Erm, like putting out sandbags in the path of a tsunami.
You're in favour of my point?
Do you understand my point?
All of them.
We haven't got to that point yet.
Yet you talk of square circles.
How do you personally discriminate between reality and illusion?
Everything is a perception. God gave us the material reality of death, while simultaneosly giving us the reality of the spiritual. We each percieve it according to our understanding. If we accept a square circle, no matter what it's shape, from such an authority, then it IS a square circle. Just like, God died, even though God cannot.
Good boy!
When the omniscient, and omnipotent Wills, it is absolute. Well done.
Now we're getting somewhere.
I've easily given you explanations, it's up to you to understand what has been told to you.
You have no idea what a square circle is, so how can it be a logical impossibility?
Then it is a pointless question.
You only ask it because it is impossible to you, therefore it is impossible for God.
It only highlights our own lack of imagination, and limitations.
jan.
Rav,
Which religious ideas would those be?
A definition of God is a great place to start. Unfortunately you don't have definition of God hence the reason you have this materialistic notion of how God came to be. This idea has to be put foreward, if a gross materialist wishes to explain origins, because God is simply out of the question for him.
You are simply substituting a spiritual idea with a material one, nothing more.
Whatever it may be? Yet you think you've outlined reality in your above speil.
Nothing ridiculous about it. You claimed, ''Your conception of God derives from religion.''. Okay? Now please explain to me the religion or religions, which MY concept of God is taken. Otherwise don't make claims, unless you can back them up when asked. Okay?
Will you quit being arogant.
It may be absurd for you, but that doesn't mean it's absurd.
Part of the reason why the discussions get railed before they even begin, is because you think you're right, therefore any contradition is wrong.
Now unless you can show that such an idea can only come about because of the notion of God, you have to accept it as part of the argument levelled against you.
You're talking to yourself again.
Are you saying that the Gods' preceedence of material reality, coupled with the notion that He created the material reality does not demonstrate transcendance?
jan.
Which religious ideas would those be?
A definition of God is a great place to start. Unfortunately you don't have definition of God hence the reason you have this materialistic notion of how God came to be. This idea has to be put foreward, if a gross materialist wishes to explain origins, because God is simply out of the question for him.
You are simply substituting a spiritual idea with a material one, nothing more.
Whatever it may be? Yet you think you've outlined reality in your above speil.
Nothing ridiculous about it. You claimed, ''Your conception of God derives from religion.''. Okay? Now please explain to me the religion or religions, which MY concept of God is taken. Otherwise don't make claims, unless you can back them up when asked. Okay?
Will you quit being arogant.
It may be absurd for you, but that doesn't mean it's absurd.
Part of the reason why the discussions get railed before they even begin, is because you think you're right, therefore any contradition is wrong.
Now unless you can show that such an idea can only come about because of the notion of God, you have to accept it as part of the argument levelled against you.
You're talking to yourself again.
Are you saying that the Gods' preceedence of material reality, coupled with the notion that He created the material reality does not demonstrate transcendance?
jan.
Yazata
Valued Senior Member
Big Chiller said:
gmilam said:
Wouldn't that line of argument make God and God's actions subject to, dependent on and hence inferior to logic? Logic would have some kind of existence even prior to God, and logic would define the admissible set of God's possible actions.
That might present problems for theologians who want to say that logic is part of God's creation and that it was established by a divine act of will. It threatens to dethrone God from his seat as reality's ultimate principle.
Only if we ignore
1. that it is us, humans, who are doing the reasoning here,
and
2. that we, humans, need logic in order to make sense of things.
The ones that you've derived from religion. Only you can provide a comprehensive account of what they are.
Actually, my argument doesn't preclude that God exists. God might. But God might also have absolutely nothing to do with the authoring of any religion, and the metaphysics of the transcendent realm that he occupies/actualizes, and it's relationship with the material world, might be profoundly different from any of the existing descriptions. In fact I'd say that's extremely likely, since the existing collective metaphysics are an absurdly inconsistent mess. That's precisely what it would look like if different groups of people were just making shit up as they go along.
You're simply substituting the mystery of existence with arbitrary invented metaphysics.
I don't claim knowledge of any transcendent realm, but I do claim, with complete confidence, that people make shit up about it, and have been doing so since before civilization began.
The mystery of existence is real. The possibility that there may be some sort transcendent quality behind it, or pervading it, doesn't seem entirely impossible to me. But that you have actual detailed knowledge of such? Please. It's a joke.
First of all, I'm allowed to make as many unsubstantiated claims as I see fit. Do you know why? Because that's how you've set up the playing field. If you permit yourself to build arguments on the unsubstantiated premise that God exists, and that actual truth about the details of transcendent affairs can be found in scripture, then I'm free to build arguments on my own unsubstantiated premises. And then you're free to embarrass yourself with your profound hypocrisy when you demand that I back up my claims.
Having said that, if you give me an adequately comprehensive description of all the qualities that you think God has, along with the related metaphysics and the specific details of his relationship and interaction with the material world, I will try to identify religious parallels.
But even if you don't, I know you've read quite a bit of scripture, and I know you've discussed religious ideas with other theists, and I know you've read many articles on the topic. That much is clear from your interactions around here. I also know that you have a soft spot for Vedic texts. You can try to tell me that such things haven't shaped your view of God, but I simply wont believe you, because you'd be full of shit.
No, I wont. In fact since I'm talking to you, I'm likely going to become even more arrogant. It's like a positive feedback loop you see. Your own ever present arrogance serves to increase the magnitude of mine.
Let's grant that there is some sort of transcendent reality from which the universe emerges, or from which it is emanating. Demonstrate that omnipotence and omniscience are necessarily features of this reality.
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Probably. Don't really care what problems it may present for a theologian.
To me, asking for a square circle is akin to going to the store to buy a can of paisley paint.
Yazata
Valued Senior Member
How can we possibly know that everything that God does is good? (Assuming that there's a God, and that God does things.) That's just a pious projection, as far as I can see.
But even assuming for the sake of argument that your assertion is true, how is it relevant to JameR's problem in the original post?
That problem suggests that if God did change his mind, then his doing so would contradict his omniscient knowledge of everything he does.
That hypothetical scenario doesn't need to suggest that God will ever want to change his mind, let alone that he will ever actually do so. (All of that fundamentally temporal human psychology language is kind of meaningless when we are talking about a supposedly timeless being anyway.)
It's just pointing out that that God's possessing omniscient knowledge of everything that he's going to do would seem to create tight logical bounds around what he can hypothetically choose to do (regardless of whether he actually makes those choices or whether he would even want to make them) without contradicting the omniscience attribute.
It might not be a fatal theological difficulty by any means, since the theologians could argue that God's knowing what he's going to choose X doesn't mean that he couldn't do Y instead, if he wants to. It's just suggesting that he isn't going to want to. In other words, this theological rejoinder might say that omnipotence and omniscience are talking about two different logical spaces. Omnipotence refers to a logical space of all possible choices, while omniscience refers to a much smaller logical space of those possible choices that are consistent with a particular set of descriptive propositions.
After all, we humans predict what ourselves and others are going to do all the time. Those predictions don't exert any binding force on us. We often violate them, and when we do, all we've done is contradict the prediction, showing that the prediction was in fact mistaken.
In the divine case, the theologian might argue that God's freedom to act is no more bound by predictions than ours is, the only difference being that God's predictions are never mistaken.
As far as I can see, the quality of actions is irrelevent.
We could refer to actions with letters like in logic if we like. If God knows that he's going to do X (regardless of the "quality" of X), then he seems incapable of doing Y instead (regardless of the quality of Y) without contradicting the supposed-knowledge that he was going to do X, proving it wrong and showing that it wasn't knowledge at all.
As I just argued, this doesn't really represent a proof that God couldn't have chosen Y if he wanted to. So, some theologians would argue, it doesn't contradict God's omnipotence.
But... he couldn't choose Y without violating the omniscience condition, proving his purported-knowledge was mistaken. So God does seem to be limited in his options, if he wants to keep everything consistent and avoid being caught in a mistake. And that, again arguably, might constitute grounds for arguing that his omnipotence has already been violated, since he seemingly is limited in what his would-be omnipotence attribute can do without generating contradictions with the contents of his would-be omniscience attribute.
Even if God decides to rewrite the rules of logic to give himself more breathing room, he still seems limited in what he can consistently do within the existing set of logical principles.
Then why do people talk about divine attributes? For that matter, why do people talk about God at all? How can we say anything about anything, without employing our human concepts?
Cannot - as in "it is impossible to kill you."
"There never was a time when you and God did not exist."
i think i am misunderstanding you, as it is not impossible to kill me,nor have i existed before i existed..
(although i have contemplated both concepts..)
Do you really believe that you are your body?
What about it?
Do you have any worthy evidence that states otherwise?
Well, accepting a extremely implausible tall tale at face value...
God did lot's of good flooding the entire Earth, killing everything except two of each kind (And an entire family of great apes) on the claim that man was so wicked, he would wipe them all out.
Only to have apparently changed his mind during all this and Instructing Noah to survive, take two of each kind of animal, so that everything he wipes out can survive and repopulate the Earth. With a good deal of incest.
Lots of good and no mind changing at all.
didn't work, did it?