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The God of Classical Theism - why He can’t exist
There’s no point in attempting to prove or disprove the existence of a God. A strong case could be made that it’s impossible to prove or disprove a cabbage - merely touching, seeing or eating something doesn’t prove it’s existence, as we have to remember that we can only experience things through the faculties we possess. When we see a cabbage, we do not experience the Ultimate Reality of the Cabbage - it’s merely our brains interpreting eternal phenomena. I don’t know enough about neuroscience to know whether or not we have the knowledge to do this yet, but it’s theoretically possible to simulate the experience of eating a cabbage by applying the correct electrical impulses to the right parts of the brain (though why anyone would wish to is beyond me)

If the existence of something as solid as a cabbage is empirically unproveable - then trying to prove/falsify a deity, something usually represented as completely other, is an utterly futile gesture.

However, I’m not going to try and disprove the possible existence of A god, but rather that of THE God that I was brought up to believe in as a Catholic - the God of Classical Theism as theologians like to call Him.

This God is eternal, omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient, omnicogniscent, omnibenevolent and a variety of other things beginning in omni. Apparently, we draw all our knowledge of Him from the divine inspiration we read in scripture. As the Catholic Bible is a closed canon, for them at least the sum total of revealed theology must be contained within its pages.

So, from the Bible apparently we can derive these truths about His nature. So how is it that an all-seeing (omnivisual? omnioptical? anyone know the right word?) God didn’t see Adam and Eve eat the apple, and omnicogniscent God didn’t know they had or were going to do it, and an omnipresent God wasn’t there to observe?

So if all this theologians didn’t discover this nature in the Bible, where did they get it from? If the doctrine of him being completely other is true, it can’t come from natural theology.

Aside from all this, the terms themselves are mutually contradictory. Omnipotence - the power to do anything (with no exceptions) Omnibenevolence - being completely good

If someone is completely good, there isn’t even the tiniest bit of badness or wrongness in them - they would only be capable of being good. But if God is omnipotent, He is capable of anything, including horrific evil. But someone who is capable of evil and chooses not to do it is only benevolent, not omnibenevolent, for there would have to be something about them capable of being not good.

Similarly, if he is omnicogniscent, he is incapable of not knowing something - he cannot forget. If there is anything you cannot do, you can’t be omnipotent.

The problem is in trying to define God. Nothing that actually exists is capable of being defined by words, because words must draw arbitrary lines that don’t exist in real life, or else mean a different thing to different people - either way they don’t accurately define a thing. Think of the word blue? Can you accurately point to where blue ends and turquoise or green begins? Would everyone agree with you? No, because blue isn’t a thing, it’s an abstract concept.

With objects we experience, it’s necessary to coin arbitrary terms such as blue, however inaccurate they may be, because we have no more efficient means of communicating. With God however, we don’t experience his omniscience, nor, when you think about it, do we have any evidence for it whatsoever, other than that some religious types decided it was true. Faith in things we experience through our faulty senses because it’s the only way we have is, to a certain extent, necessary. Faith in something it’s not actually possible to experience, like someone/thing else’s omnipotence isn’t.