The Problem of Omnipotence

[ScienceRocks]

The Problem of Omnipotence



This pretty much makes your god look really stupid. It is impossible to be omnipotent! Yet another nail in the bible.

 

[ding]

The Problem of Omnipotence



This pretty much makes your god look really stupid. It is impossible to be omnipotent! Yet another nail in the bible.

Wrong. We are never to think of God's power in terms of what he could conceivably do by the exercise of what we may call sheer omnipotence which crushes all obstacles in its path. We are always to think of God's power in terms of his purpose. If what he did by sheer omnipotence defeated his purpose, then, however startling and impressive, it would be an expression of weakness, not of power. Indeed, a good definition of power is "ability to achieve purpose. Does it fulfill its purpose?

“Religion’s Answer to the Problem of Evil”

 

[toobfreak]

The Problem of Omnipotence



This pretty much makes your god look really stupid. It is impossible to be omnipotent! Yet another nail in the bible.

Right, please. Now some abysmal USMB fool pops up with a YouTube video that "proves" God cannot be all powerful using a character from Star Trek? ARE YOU KIDDING ME? I am loathe to find a term below "idiot" capable of expressing how stupid you really are. Our nation is in trouble.

 

[ding]

We must realize that God's power is not put forward to get certain things done, but to get them done in a certain way, and with certain results in the lives of those who do them. We can see this clearly in human illustrations. My purpose in doing a crossword puzzle is not to fill in certain words. I could fill them in easily by waiting for tomorrow morning's paper. Filling them in without the answers is harder but much more satisfying, for it calls out resourcefulness, ingenuity, and discipline which by the easier way would find no self expression. Similarly, to borrow an illustration from William James, eleven men battle desperately on a field, risking falling and injury, using up a prodigious amount of energy, and when we ask why, we learn that it is to get an inflated, leather covered sphere called a football across a goal. But if that is all, why doesn't someone get up in the night and put it there? Football games are not played to get a ball across a goal, but to get it there under certain conditions, in a certain way, with certain results in the lives of those concerned. Power to get the ball across the goal is to be interpreted in terms of purposes and only makes sense in the light of those purposes. Action, then, which defeats purpose is weakness. Power is the ability to fulfill purpose. No one knows what it cost God to refrain from intervention when wicked men put his beloved Son to death. But the restraint was not weakness. The Cross became the power of God unto salvation.

“Religion’s Answer to the Problem of Evil”

 

[ding]

C.S. Lewis weighs in...

The position of the question, then, is like this. We want to know whether the universe simply happens to be what it is for no reason or whether there is a power behind it that makes it what it is. Since that power, if it exists, would be not one of the observed facts but a reality which makes them, no mere observation of the facts can find it. There is only one case in which we can know whether there is anything more, namely our own case. And in that one case we find there is. Or put it the other way round. If there was a controlling power outside the universe, it could not show itself to us as one of the facts inside the universe—no more than the architect of a house could actually be a wall or staircase or fireplace in that house. The only way in which we could expect it to show itself would be inside ourselves as an influence or a command trying to get us to behave in a certain way. And that is just what we do find inside ourselves. Surely this ought to arouse our suspicions?

 

[onefour1]

Well, I certainly do not feel that anticitizenX is a god of omniscience. I do however believe that he does have the definition of omnipotence close to being right. He states that it is "The ability to do all that is logically possible". My first question with this is whose logic are we going to use to determine this? anticitizenX's? Not good enough for me. I think the word 'logically' should be removed from the definition. It should be the ability to do all that is possible.

God can do all things that are possible. Man does not have a knowledge of all that is possible. Man cannot determine what is logically possible without knowing all things. Therefore man cannot judge God as to what is possible and what is not in all things. There are however somethings that man can logically deduce that God cannot do. For example, God cannot cease to exist and still exist. God cannot be perfectly good and perfectly evil simultaneously. God cannot create that which is self-existent out of nothing. These things are eternal impossibilities. They cannot be done. period! God can only do all things that are possible. In this way he is omnipotent. In this way he can do all things and there is nothing save he can do it (that is possible to do).

His use of scripture does not give any leeway to the weakness of language and those who use it. God is a being of free will. Nobody tells God what to do. He does all that he does of his own volition. But to be God, he must be a good being otherwise he would be a devil. When the scriptures say that God cannot lie, etc. What is being said is that he cannot do evil and still be God. He certainly could choose to fall and loose his Godly status, but being an all wise and knowing being, he would never do such a thing. That would be like committing Godly suicide. God will not do that. Thus when Apostles and Prophets speak and say that God cannot lie, etc, what they mean is that he cannot lie without ceasing to be God. God is God because of his attributes of perfection. As a God he enjoys the greatest amount of love, power, knowledge, wisdom, joy, etc. that any being can have. He would not throw that all way for a lie.

The idea of creating a rock so heavy that it cannot be lifted, not even by God, is asking God to create an impossible situation for himself. Unless the thing that God is asked to do is an eternal impossibility, then God should be able to do it. But since the question itself creates an eternal impossibility, then the task itself is impossible even for God. It is much like asking him to be an all good being and an all evil being simultaneously. There are many logical contradictions that are eternal impossibilities. Because they cannot ever be performed, they are outside of what is possible. Thus they do not affect the omnipotence of God who is able to do all that is possible.

Although the scriptures say that God can do all things, if you research the phrase 'all things' in the Bible, you will find that you cannot apply literally 'all things' to this phrase as it is used in many situations. This leads us back to the weakness of language and the weakness of those who use it. As a small example of this take 1 Peter 4:7:

1 Peter 4:7
7 But the end of all things is at hand: be ye therefore sober, and watch unto prayer.

Now if you took 'All things' literally to mean absolutely all things, then God and all heaven and the universe itself would come to an end. I don't think this is what Peter meant.

 

[JohnPrewett]

God cannot do everything. God can do everything that can be done.
God does not know everything. God knows everything that can be known.

 

[badger2]

Absolute knowledge is death. God is death.

'Derrida alludes to Augustine's famous question concerning why he confesses to God when God already knows everything about him. Augustine's answer is that we do not confess to God in order to inform Him about anything He does not know; we confess in order to repent for our sins and thus to transform ourselves rather than God. Confessing to God is what Augustine calls "making the truth" (veritatem fecere). To make the truth is not simply to tell the truth but to make the truth come into being in oneself buy turning toward God.
....
In contrast, Derrida's motivation for writing Circumfession is to undermine Geoff Bennington's (addressed as "G." in Derrida's text, which would be the position of an omniscient God, in command of everything) "theologic program" by by bearing witness to events that G. "will not have been able to recognize, name, foresee, produce, predict, "unpredictable things to survive him." The point is not to transcend temporal events but, on the contrary, to make them disrupt the theological program that tries to erase them. An Omniscient God is ot only unattainable but undesirable,since there would be "nothing left to say that might surprise him still and bring something about for him." Derrida's inversion of Augustine's basic premise is brought to a head when he proposes that "Augustine still wanted, by force of love, to bring it about that in (arriving [italics]) at God, something should happen to God." There could be no more radically atheist argument to be made against Augustine. For Augustine, the crucial point is that nothing happens to God and that such a timeless eternity is the most desirable. For Derrida, on the contrary, the eternal presence of an omniscient God is the most undesirable. If there were such a God, everything would be decided in advance, and Derrida would be "deprived of a future, no more vent event to come from me.

Hence, Circumfession is written against "the theologic program of the SA". SA is both an abbreviation of Saint Augustine and for the idea of absolute knowledge (Savoir Absolu) that would be able to comprehend everything and thus cancel out the unpredictable coming of time. For Derrida, such an absolute knowledge is not impossible because of our human limitations; it is impossible because it would cancel out the condition of temporality that is the possibility for anything to be. It is necessary that there be "the chance of events on which no program, no logical or textual machine will ever close, since it always in truth has operated only by not overcoming the flow of raw happenings, nor even the theologic program elaborated by Geoff."

Derrida's point is not actually an objection to Benington's formalization of the logical matrix of deconstruction, since the matrix accounts for why any purported totality is exceeded from within by events that it cannot master. Derrida himself reminds us that the matrix of deconstruction "remains by essence, by force, nonsaturable, nonsuturable." because it entails that there must be an opening to "the unanticipatable singularity of the event." '
(Haegglun d, Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life)

 

[badger2]

The theologian gets crucified in this case for an ego trip, no LSD required. John's intensive time on Patmos is exemplary.

paralogism: a formal fallacy; a fallacy of arguing from the empty concept of the ego to its substantiality and eternality.

 

[ding]

Show me a philosopher and I'll show you someone who likes hearing the sound of his own voice.

Which is why they say so much without saying anything at all.

 

[ding]

Absolute knowledge is death. God is death.

'Derrida alludes to Augustine's famous question concerning why he confesses to God when God already knows everything about him. Augustine's answer is that we do not confess to God in order to inform Him about anything He does not know; we confess in order to repent for our sins and thus to transform ourselves rather than God. Confessing to God is what Augustine calls "making the truth" (veritatem fecere). To make the truth is not simply to tell the truth but to make the truth come into being in oneself buy turning toward God.
....
In contrast, Derrida's motivation for writing Circumfession is to undermine Geoff Bennington's (addressed as "G." in Derrida's text, which would be the position of an omniscient God, in command of everything) "theologic program" by by bearing witness to events that G. "will not have been able to recognize, name, foresee, produce, predict, "unpredictable things to survive him." The point is not to transcend temporal events but, on the contrary, to make them disrupt the theological program that tries to erase them. An Omniscient God is ot only unattainable but undesirable,since there would be "nothing left to say that might surprise him still and bring something about for him." Derrida's inversion of Augustine's basic premise is brought to a head when he proposes that "Augustine still wanted, by force of love, to bring it about that in (arriving [italics]) at God, something should happen to God." There could be no more radically atheist argument to be made against Augustine. For Augustine, the crucial point is that nothing happens to God and that such a timeless eternity is the most desirable. For Derrida, on the contrary, the eternal presence of an omniscient God is the most undesirable. If there were such a God, everything would be decided in advance, and Derrida would be "deprived of a future, no more vent event to come from me.

Hence, Circumfession is written against "the theologic program of the SA". SA is both an abbreviation of Saint Augustine and for the idea of absolute knowledge (Savoir Absolu) that would be able to comprehend everything and thus cancel out the unpredictable coming of time. For Derrida, such an absolute knowledge is not impossible because of our human limitations; it is impossible because it would cancel out the condition of temporality that is the possibility for anything to be. It is necessary that there be "the chance of events on which no program, no logical or textual machine will ever close, since it always in truth has operated only by not overcoming the flow of raw happenings, nor even the theologic program elaborated by Geoff."

Derrida's point is not actually an objection to Benington's formalization of the logical matrix of deconstruction, since the matrix accounts for why any purported totality is exceeded from within by events that it cannot master. Derrida himself reminds us that the matrix of deconstruction "remains by essence, by force, nonsaturable, nonsuturable." because it entails that there must be an opening to "the unanticipatable singularity of the event." '
(Haegglun d, Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life)

And yet there is a practical application to confessing one's sins outloud. It releases the power sin holds over us. We are only as sick as the secrets we keep.

Anyone who has experienced this can testify that telling someone else their "sins" is like having a weight removed from them.

Therefore, I call BS on everything you just wrote.

MLK responds...

We are never to think of God's power in terms of what he could conceivably do by the exercise of what we may call sheer omnipotence which crushes all obtacles in its path. We are always to think of God's power in terms of his purpose. If what he did by sheer omnipotence defeated his purpose, then, however startling and impressive, it would be an expression of weakness, not of power. Indeed, a good definition of power is "ability to achieve purpose. This applies to the power of a gun, or a drug, or an argument, or even a sermon! Does it achieve its end? Does it fulfill its purpose?

We must realize that God's power is not put forward to get certain things done, but to get them done in a certain way, and with certain results in the lives of those who do them. We can see this clearly in human illustrations. My purpose in doing a crossword puzzle is not to fill in certain words. I could fill them in easily by waiting for tomorrow morning's paper. Filling them in without the answers is harder but much more satisfying, for it calls out resourcefulness, ingenuity, and discipline which by the easier way would find no self expression.
Similarly, to borrow an illustration from William James, eleven men battle desperately on a field, risking falling and injury, using up a prodigious amount of energy, and when we ask why, we learn that it is to get an inflated, leather covered sphere called a football across a goal. But if that is all, why doesn't someone get up in the night and put it there? Football games are not played to get a ball across a goal, but to get it there under certain conditions, in a certain way, with certain results in the lives of those concerned. Power to get the ball across the goal is to be interpreted in terms of purposes and only makes sense in the light of those purposes. Action, then, which defeats purpose is weakness. Power is the ability to fulfill purpose. No one knows what it cost God to refrain from intervention when wicked men put his beloved Son to death. But the restraint was not weakness. The Cross became the power of God unto salvation.

 

[Moonglow]

God wasn't strong enough to destroy Satan...

 

[Dogmaphobe]

Omnipotence is a problem, is it?

I've never been bothered by it.

 

[ding]

Omnipotence is a problem, is it?

I've never been bothered by it.

Me either.

I think the problem these people have is that they are intellectually dead.

Often times ignorance is insolent. This is especially true for ignorance that thinks it knows.

Given everything I know about science and the universe I don't have enough faith to be an atheist. Especially a militant one.

 

[ding]

God wasn't strong enough to destroy Satan...

You are exactly the kind of person I am talking about.

 

[ding]

God wasn't strong enough to destroy Satan...

Would you like to debate this in the bull ring?

Don't be afraid. I won't bite.

 

[badger2]

#11: Nuts.

'Making the truth for Derrida is not a matter of devotion to God but of a singular (testimony [italics]) that is always open to the possibility of perjury and lying. Even in testifying to his singular life Derrida is liable to to violate the truth of his life. He bears witness to what he has been, but he can do so only by speaking in the name of someone who is no longer and without guarantee that he remains faithful to his former self.

As Derrida writes in the last sentence of Circumfession,: " you are less, you, less than yourself," and the testimony to you alone whose life will have been so short"can only take place as " the crossing between these two phantoms of witnesses who will never come down to the same." Nevertheless. it is the divisibility of the instant -- the fact that the moment passes away without ultimate witness witness -- that induces the passion for testimony. To testify is to make truth by saying: " this happened to me, please believe me." Such a plea would be inconceivable without an interval that separates the past from the future. Without the disappearance of the past and the coming of the future, there would be no need to bear witness in the first place.

Due to the interval of time, the one who testifies may always lie or perjure himself -- since he testifies to and experience to which no one has direct access -- but this possibility of deceit and distortion is not a privation of testimony. Rather, the possibility of deceit and distortion is a necessary condition for testimony. A testimony would be meaningless before an omniscient god. One testifies because something is (not[it.]) known and to prevent a finite event from being lost without a trace. It is the passion for such testimony that pervades Derrida's Circumfession. A recurring phrase declares that ït only happens to me," and Derrida persistently returns to his desire to hold on to his irreplaceable life. He recounts the singular events that happen to him not only in order to "dismantle G,'s " theologic program " but also to make G. recognize and remember his unique existence.'
(Haegglund, pp. 154-5)

This also answers to the "uniqueness" of the avatar christ, for the diversity of particularizations the term represents for all others except christ..

 

[TheOldSchool]

The Problem of Omnipotence



This pretty much makes your god look really stupid. It is impossible to be omnipotent! Yet another nail in the bible.

The problem of evil argument has been around for a long time. The usual response is always along the lines of “well, we don’t know what God is thinking.”

 

[ding]

The Problem of Omnipotence



This pretty much makes your god look really stupid. It is impossible to be omnipotent! Yet another nail in the bible.

The problem of evil argument has been around for a long time. The usual response is always along the lines of “well, we don’t know what God is thinking.”

I think the Utopian society you are looking for is in Canada.

 

[ding]

#11: Nuts.

'Making the truth for Derrida is not a matter of devotion to God but of a singular (testimony [italics]) that is always open to the possibility of perjury and lying. Even in testifying to his singular life Derrida is liable to to violate the truth of his life. He bears witness to what he has been, but he can do so only by speaking in the name of someone who is no longer and without guarantee that he remains faithful to his former self.

As Derrida writes in the last sentence of Circumfession,: " you are less, you, less than yourself," and the testimony to you alone whose life will have been so short"can only take place as " the crossing between these two phantoms of witnesses who will never come down to the same." Nevertheless. it is the divisibility of the instant -- the fact that the moment passes away without ultimate witness witness -- that induces the passion for testimony. To testify is to make truth by saying: " this happened to me, please believe me." Such a plea would be inconceivable without an interval that separates the past from the future. Without the disappearance of the past and the coming of the future, there would be no need to bear witness in the first place.

Due to the interval of time, the one who testifies may always lie or perjure himself -- since he testifies to and experience to which no one has direct access -- but this possibility of deceit and distortion is not a privation of testimony. Rather, the possibility of deceit and distortion is a necessary condition for testimony. A testimony would be meaningless before an omniscient god. One testifies because something is (not[it.]) known and to prevent a finite event from being lost without a trace. It is the passion for such testimony that pervades Derrida's Circumfession. A recurring phrase declares that ït only happens to me," and Derrida persistently returns to his desire to hold on to his irreplaceable life. He recounts the singular events that happen to him not only in order to "dismantle G,'s " theologic program " but also to make G. recognize and remember his unique existence.'
(Haegglund, pp. 154-5)

This also answers to the "uniqueness" of the avatar christ, for the diversity of particularizations the term represents for all others except christ..

Would you like to debate it in the bull ring, comrade?

Don't be afraid.

I won't bite you.