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To: Mad Dawg
My fave professor said "all-powerful" could be construed "All the power that is, is God's". Then such power as anything else might have, if any, would have been delegated or handed over. Our Calvinist brethren seem to be doing an pretty exhaustive job of looking at that.

So God is ALL powerful, and if he ceded his power to another He has stopped being ALL powerful.

Similarly with "all-knowing".

You have God violating His nature all over the place . When God knows no more than man, he ceases to be omniscient and becomes as limited as his creatures. Prophecy becomes a lottery guess.

And this leaves the questions about the future and making a rock so big He can't life it to other parts of the conversation.

That is only a conversation if one believes God can stop being God. If God could not life the rock he would stop being God.

Does God have free will?

417 posted on 01/06/2005 3:14:27 PM PST by RnMomof7
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To: RnMomof7
Woah! I didn't predicate anything about God's knowledge -- certainly not that He knows no more than Man. Even if I had said he gave up SOME knowledge, that doesn't mean he gave up so much that He knows no more than man. Please let me be outrageous before you jump all over me.

But making predications about God is always tricky. All we know is created stuff, so our language and our thoughts are always going to have to be tricvky when talking about God.

It seems to me I heard God wanted us to be "sons, and if sons then heirs". And all I know about being a parent is that I want my kid to choose the Good and to do so Freely.

In my case that means acknowledging that my power over her chossing is limited. If God has given free will (to humans or angels)(and I know that's vexed) I'm just suggesting that that would seem to imply that He gave up, in some way or another, some of His power.

Even in that sense, though, time helps us understnad it. If I give my kid the responsibility of feeding the sheep, and she skips it, then there is a consequence. The sheep are hungry. But then I go out and feed them and punish my kid. When a deputy misuses his power, he's fired and the Sheriff sets things to rights. But the sheriff does have to fix what the deputy messed up.

I don't think it's entirely off the wall.

418 posted on 01/06/2005 3:47:22 PM PST by Mad Dawg (My P226 wants to teach you what SIGnify means ...)
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