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Infinitely Powerful

Just thinking said:
Not to derail your argument, but perhaps instead of saying that God wants evil (as we apply it) to exist, it might be more accurate to say that He tolerates it being around. Again, in order to have "free will".
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Yes, but if he tolerates it even though he doesn't want it, then he is not all powerful. There is no logical way out of this paradox.
 
Tricky said:
The word "exist" has a time-based definition. It means "to be". Existed, exists, will exist. If you say "exists" you are implying present tense. You cannot separate it from time.

A timeless God could not "do" anything, because "do" is also a word that implies a process.
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That says more about our ability to imagine or articulate timelessness than the actual possibility of same. Astrophysicists do not have any problem with saying that time did not exist "before" the Big Bang, but all the same, it is hard to discuss the Big Bang without using terms like "before," which are not strictly correct.

Tricky said:
But the illogic is simple.
Premise one: God can do anything.
Premise two: God does not want evil.
Premise three: Evil exists.
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This is more simplistic than simple. As I pointed out on the Evil/hypothetical thread,

If not even God can do the logically contradictory, then it becomes a possibility that even he may be forced to make tradeoffs in order to maximize the good, and the problems we see are the downside of those tradeoffs. Now this possibility may be unlikely because we can think of alternative scenarios that would seem to produce less suffering than we see. The catch, however, is that we don't necessarily have the capability to fully trace out the results of the scenarios to see if they have hidden problems that would actually make them worse than our current one. This means that it is difficult and perhaps impossible to establish that the presence of evil really does contradict the idea of an omnipotent, omnibenevolent God.
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See here for how messy and tangled the Problem of Evil can be: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/evil/
 
After a long weekend. Santa jumps into a "god" debate. What am I thinking? As anyone mentioned the logical impossibility of omnipotence and free will? Perhaps this as already been shown as possible, but from my view, god cannot be omnipotent while also granting us free will. They are contradictory concepts and fundamentally prey on the basic premises of a god who is both omnipotent and omnibenevolent.



Santa
 
To the two most previous posts ...

I think that the concepts of all-powerful and all-knowing are pieces of evidence indicating God as being a man-made construct. Others have suggested that the all-powerful concept likely arose from one-upmanship in the battle over whose god is supreme, and who is "in charge". I can see that easily happening through time.

As for all-powerful and all-knowing to be necessary together, I'm not so sure. For example, the universe is not of infinite energy or mass (at least as we know it, and certainly not as the ancients knew it), so it would not require infinite power to create it. Even 100 million universes would not scratch at the door of unlimited power for their creation. And with finite matter, there comes finite combinations and events -- again, infinite knowledge seems unneeded.

The concepts of power, energy, work, etc. were not understood long ago the way we understand and use them today -- so to just toss out the claim of infinite power and knowledge back then may have seemed logical and necessary to the general populations. And one logical way out of Tricky's paradox is to see how these concepts are non existant -- by anyone or anything.
 
jjramsey said:
That says more about our ability to imagine or articulate timelessness than the actual possibility of same. Astrophysicists do not have any problem with saying that time did not exist "before" the Big Bang, but all the same, it is hard to discuss the Big Bang without using terms like "before," which are not strictly correct.
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Yes, saying "before" the Big Bang is not strictly correct, but most Astrophysicists and most scientists I've seen here agree that the term is meaningless.

But the reason you cannot articulate timelessness is that it is a concept which cannot exist in the universe as we know it. Did God exist yesterday? If you say "yes", then you have placed Him in a time-based frame.

jjramsey said:
This is more simplistic than simple. As I pointed out on the Evil/hypothetical thread.
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I'm afraid that adding verbiage to it will not get around the basic circularity of the statement. You seem to understand the concept when you note the nonsense of the "rock that God creates but can't lift" statement, yet you cannot grasp that timelessness is meaningless in a time-based universe.

And that doesn't even address the problem of causation.

jjramsey said:
See here for how messy and tangled the Problem of Evil can be: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/evil/
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Yes indeed it gets very tangled when people try to explain inherently meaningless concepts. It will eventually reduce to the realization that we cannot give a defintion of "evil" that is not circular.
 
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Just thinking said:
Not to derail your argument, but perhaps instead of saying that God wants evil (as we apply it) to exist, it might be more accurate to say that He tollerates it being around. Again, in order to have "free will".
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But free will is optional. He choses to give us free will knowing that it comes with evil.

Still goes back to his preference.
 
Just thinking said:
Unless of course, the concept of "free will" does not exist. This may be another human construct.
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I was just assuming for the sake of argument. Even if you were correct, that he tolerates it to give us free will, then that is still by his own design, and not anything implicit to the situation.
 
Tricky said:
But the reason you cannot articulate timelessness is that it is a concept which cannot exist in the universe as we know it.
--snip--
yet you cannot grasp that timelessness is meaningless in a time-based universe. [emphasis mine]
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You have moved the goalposts. First, you tried to assert timelessness itself was illogical on the ground that it violated the "principles of existence." This would imply that God could not be timeless because nothing could be timeless. Now you merely assert that timelessness is meaningless within the universe, which is banally obvious, and not too helpful when talking about a God who supposedly can easily be outside the universe.
 
jjramsey said:
You have moved the goalposts. First, you tried to assert timelessness itself was illogical on the ground that it violated the "principles of existence." This would imply that God could not be timeless because nothing could be timeless. Now you merely assert that timelessness is meaningless within the universe, which is banally obvious, and not too helpful when talking about a God who supposedly can easily be outside the universe.
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Oh. I thought you were talking about this universe. As you may suspect, all of the words and definitions we use are based on this universe, not having any evidence of other ones. Of course, if this God is part of a different universe with different rules, then He cannot have any effect on us whatsoever. So I have no problem with a timeless god that doesn't interact with us in any way. But if He so much as sets a toe in this universe, then He is not timeless. Not a very useful concept though.
 
Just thinking said:
William of Occam is doing quite a spin at this point ...
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Um, God not being a part of the universe is standard-issue Christian theology, and Occam was a Franciscan friar, although perhaps a heretical one. But that has more to do with the beliefs of Occam himself rather than the proper use of Occam's razor.

Now as for Occam's razor itself, that has to do more with probablistic reasoning than strict logic, and would come into play more in the arguments that the nonexistence of God is a more parsimonious explanation for the existence of evil, rather than the arguments that insist that the presence of evil logically precludes the existence of an omnipotent, omnibenevolent God.
 
jjramsey said:
I don't have to be a part of something to interact with it.
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It looks like an issue of words ...

For something to interect with anything in this universe, then this something must exist within this universe. A particle will obey all known laws of physics at all times; in order for it to behave in a manner unlike that which it would otherwise be doing, then some force must act upon it. A force within (which is now a part of) this universe.
 
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jjramsey said:
I don't have to be a part of something to interact with it. Why should God?
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You'd have to be part of the same universe in order to interact with it. So if God intereacts with anything IN this universe, then He must at some point be IN this universe, and while anything is IN this universe, it is temporal, because this universe is temporal. Anything that God does to or with this universe is time-based. That is why a God which interacts with this universe but is not temporal is a meaningless, illogical concept within this universe.
 
Iacchus said:
Guess again. Am merely asking why there is something, in the absolute sense, as opposed to nothing in the absolute sense.
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It depends on what your definition of nothing is. Do you mean simply an absence of matter and energy? If so, then your question is (relatively) easy to answer. But if, as I suspect, you mean an absence of space and time, then that's a whole lot harder, and for one I've got much better things to do with my intellectual capacity.

We know that the universe exists. It's as sure as anything else. Asking "why" the universe exists is, to me, fairly spurious unless you're planning on getting into the fine nitty-gritty of cosmology, which for me is far too much work.

There are a bunch of people working on it though. I will wait for the fruits of their labour.
 
Tricky said:
So if God intereacts with anything IN this universe, then He must at some point be IN this universe,
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This presumes that God must physically touch the universe to affect it, ignoring the possibility of what might best be called remote influence. It also assumes that God would be made of "stuff" that could be in or out of something.

Careful now. One problem here is that we are talking about things so abstract that it is hard to tell whether our problems in comprehension are due to faults in the concepts that we are discussing or due to failures of our imaginations. I think you are falling into the trap of "I can't imagine it, therefore it can't happen."
 
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