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Assuming God Exists, Could an Omnipotent God,

If the Book were unmovable could an omnipotent God deliver it?

What life is questions!
 
There is an argument I've heard for the authority of the Bible:

It starts by assuming "yes", God could write a book, and furthermore, would. Since God is not mocked (Gal 6:7) then He would not allow anyone to presume His authority. Therefore, the Bible that we have-- though it be translated and copied, redacted and innovated-- must be the inerrant word of God.

Of course, you could also turn this around: since we don't have a trustworthy scripture, then by contradiction, God must not exist.
 
Brainache said:
If He is all-powerful, then he could snap His fingers and we would all understand Hebrew or Aramaic or whatever.

This method of semitic whispers that he's been using up til now obviously isn't working. Why not change it?

It's pretty clear JHWH isn't the brightest Deity in the Pantheon.
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And definitely NOT the most likeable either. Baal and Asherah seem to have been quite addictive to the Jews....not to mention Cast Gold Bulls.

In fact YHWH had to keep smacking the Jews and torturing and punishing them to eventually attain the position of prominence that he now holds.

Uniqueness was not in fact required or assumed. The Monotheism part is a later development.
 
JudeBrando said:
... an all-knowing and all-powerful Creator of the Universe and everything in it,

could such a God handle everything necessary to being able to get a Book delivered to us as He intends?
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He could.

Which makes the sheer number and sheer variety of bibles out there even more of a mystery for christians.
 
Giza said:
Would God really have time to spend playing around with 1 single planet when space is so vast and has the possibility of having millions+ of planets?
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Try more like a million of millions of millions of stars, and obviously even more planets than that :p

But IMHO the question isn't whether he'd have the time. An omnipotent God, sure, would have all the time. If anything he does requires any effort at all or any time at all, then you could conceive a god who does it in half the time and with half the effort. Which kinda ruins the superlative.

IMHO a better question would be more like, dunno, why would he care about your opinion or mine? He's got probably billions of billions of sentient people to play king-of-kings with, yet he's described as so insecure that he cares whether ONE person questions him and gets upset about it. Someone so insecure that he'd actually kill a bunch of innocents just to test Job, because he wants to be REALLY sure that Job REALLY loves him, and throws a kiddie tantrum when Job just says he'd like to ask God why. That's not a king-of-kings, that's an insecure teenage nerd.

I mean, seriously, one of the things my father taught me and I'm grateful for that, is the idea that those who really are powerful and know it are not the guys insecure enough to have to prove it at every turn. You don't see the formula one champion trying to keep someone in a fancy car on the highway from passing him by. And you don't see a boxing or martial arts champion have to punch people left and right to prove that he's the toughest son-of-a-witch in town.

Plus, what would it prove? To really show anything at a certain level of power, they need a suitable challenge, not to show they can punch a first grader. A boxing champion would prove something by defeating the challenger who made it to second place in the ranking, not by punching someone way below his level. And ditto for knowledge stuff or whatever. If you're the local chess champion, you don't prove anything by defeating a preschooler and have no reason to worry whether the preschooler has faith in your chess skills or not. You prove your mighty chess skills against someone at your own level.

So really, God just isn't acting his power and knowledge and all. Someone that powerful should not be that insecure, nor feel like he has to show his might by killing some dude who spilled his seed instead of impregnating his sister-in-law.
 
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Foster Zygote said:
Why not? I mean, if we can hypothesize that Santa Clause can deliver toys to all the good little boys and girls in one night, why can't we hypothesize that an omnipotent god can control the scribes copying a book?
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He doesn't even need to actually control the scribes. He could just tell his apostles how to make a printing press the last time he was down here, and give them the official plates to print from. Since copying by hand was THE number one reason for all the distortions and omissions and additions, that alone would solve most of them.

Or here's an even simpler idea: tell them to number the verses, and cite the verse numbers when quoting. Seriously.

Few people realize that the numbering was a very late idea. Previously, basically they just had a non-numbered text. Which is why for example when you see Paul quote from Sarah, he doesn't say "as written in Genesis 21:10". They didn't have such numbering yet.

In fact, tell them to skip the chapter and just number everything from 1 to the end of the document.

A lot of the insertions and deletions would be harder to make if you had such numbers, because then you could see that some versions have shifted the numbers. And you could even see at what paragraph that happened.

And if they actually cited verse numbers, then you could see that Paul means the OT, not some scripture about Jesus, for example.

It's a trivial idea that doesn't even require giving them any new technology.

So why doesn't Mr Son Of God do that?
 
Why not just suggest that God intended for those verses and texts to be altered?

After all, he must have known things would change, so it makes sense to allow the book to change.

Inerrant words of god all the way down.

:P
 
Leumas said:
He is Jewish...he only speaks ancient Hebrew. Although he may also know Aramaic through having had a fling with an Aramaic speaking young married girl.
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Everyone knows God speaks King James English.

Jude. You've made the error of begging the question. If God can deliver the Bible "however he intends", then the way it's delivered is the way he intends, regardless of how inane it is.
 
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"Could god write a book so heavy he couldn't understand it?"
Atlas Shrugged" (cause I sure don't get it) signed: GOD
 
Frankly, I'm thinking that a god who supposedly can fashion an entire planet from his sheer will doesn't need no stinking printing press. A flick of his finger, a nod of his head, a simple "fiat!" and hey presto, a book. A book that says exactly what he means it to say. And it being the immutable word of god, then anyone who tries to reprint it, make changes, alter it in any way, drops dead from the effort.

We're talking an all-powerful god here.
 
If we are also talking about the same god who supposedly created the world why wouldn't that god inscribe some of its basic rules somewhere that no one could disbelieve. I mean, it would be a lot harder to be an atheist if the ten commandments were written in giant letters on the moon, visible to us here on earth.

Let's face it, a book is kinda wussy if you really do have unlimited power.
 
counter-question:

Assuming God exists, why would an omnipotent god create a work of absolute truth, and then surround it with similar (and yet not true) works, thus making it next to impossible for a layperson to determine which is the "true" one?
 
counter-question:

Assuming God exists, why would an omnipotent god create a work of absolute truth, and then surround it with similar (and yet not true) works, thus making it next to impossible for a layperson to determine which is the "true" one?
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That's easy. To encourage faith.

C'mon Jude do I have to do all the answering for you?
 
JudeBrando said:
... an all-knowing and all-powerful Creator of the Universe and everything in it,

could such a God handle everything necessary to being able to get a Book delivered to us as He intends?
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Assuming such a concept is even rational, no. But then the Bibble is full of contradictions so even that alone disproves the Christian god and the divine inspiration of the bad book.
 
JudeBrando said:
... an all-knowing and all-powerful Creator of the Universe and everything in it,

could such a God handle everything necessary to being able to get a Book delivered to us as He intends?
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Of course. However if such a God exists, it seems to have chosen not to deliver a Book that we can reasonably determine is of divine (or even alien) authorship. Everything we have is indistinguishable from the products of human effort.
 
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