What if God wasn't omnipotent...

[Beleth]

if a maxipotent being is to have all the potential that is possible and some beings have the potential for mortality, the maxipotent being must also have the potential for mortality, unless you want to revise the definition of maxipotent (it being your word, after all)?

I still don't buy it.

Mortality isn't a potential. It's a lack of potential.

The ability to die is not an ability. It is the absence of the ability to stay alive. The ability to die is a weakness, not a strength.

 

[arcticpenguin]

Well if God was impotent, he couldn't have knocked up that Mary chick, could he?

Wait, did I misread the thread title?

 

[specious_reasons]

A circle has no corners... some kind of 90-side-a-gon might eventually look like a circle, but it is not.

I thought that the limit of an n-sided regular polygon as n approaches infinity is a circle. I also thought that it was an alternate definition for a circle.

That's it, I renounce my faith in an omnipotent god.

 

[ceo_esq]

Let’s assume for the sake of argument that mortality is a potency:

CEO_ESQ: I have the power to destroy my physical body.

GOD: So? I have the power to destroy your physical body too.

CEO_ESQ: That’s not what I meant. I possess the capacity to shuffle off this mortal coil.

GOD: I’ve done that too.

CEO_ESQ: Okay, right… but that was just a physical form you assumed. When it died, you didn’t really snuff it because you continued to exist in non-physical form.

GOD: What makes you think the same thing won’t happen to you? You haven’t demonstrated that you possess a potential that I don’t.

I’m not sure this gets us anywhere.

 

[PogoPedant]

hot burritos

There's a claim that God making a burrito too hot for God to eat makes for a logical inconsistency. I don't buy it. If God is omnipotent, then surly it has the power to render itself powerless? If God creates this hot-hot-hot piece of divine chow, then God has destroyed it's own omnipotens. Why is that logically inconsistent? Surely it merely grants God one more power which is usable once, and only once.

Edited to remove an inconcistency of my own...

 

[Gregory]

I think many religious scholars dismiss this whole problem by simply granting that God is not really "all-powerful." This viewpoint is less unpopular among the religious community than you might expect; I believe that it was Saint Thomas Aquinas who argued that God was literally incapable of doing evil, and therefore more limited than humans in some ways.

 

[Upchurch]

I think many religious scholars dismiss this whole problem by simply granting that God is not really "all-powerful." This viewpoint is less unpopular among the religious community than you might expect; I believe that it was Saint Thomas Aquinas who argued that God was literally incapable of doing evil, and therefore more limited than humans in some ways.

I think Augustine was in this camp too. Seems to me I remember something about "God doesn't create evil, but only allows evil to be" or something to that effect.

 

[ceo_esq]

Here's a brief but interesting essay on the "stone" argument:

http://www.wiccan-refuge.com/omnipotence.html

Among other things, it considers an argument that not only can God create a burrito too hot to eat, but he can eat it too.

 

[voidx]

If all God does is lift unliftable rocks and eat inedible burrito's all day, is he really a necessary variable in explaining the universe?