Posted on 05/20/2002 12:53:27 PM PDT by rpage3
See source for details....
Of course, if that's true - and I think it must be if God is supernatural - then God would also be utterly unable to do anything to the material world. How would He perform miracles if He couldn't even move one atom around?God is eternal. Outside time. Never changing. Perfect. To be perfect God must be a simple substance. Pure act. No potency. God cannot change in any way because change necessarily implies motion (in the philosophical, Aristotelian sense) . Since God lacks potency, He cannot logically change.
To ascribe "Changing his mind" to God is simply an anthropomorphization of God and a category error.
Ah, but if God were to say that adultery was no longer sinful, then...it would no longer be sinful, right? And if it's no longer a sin, then it's not really sinful for God to say that adultery is no longer sinful, don't you think? We do get to take God at His word, I presume ;)
It's like changing the speed limits, I suppose. If it's a crime today to drive faster than 30 miles an hour, then when the speed limit changes, the criminality of the act changes. Once the speed limit is 55 mph, it's no longer a crime to drive faster than 30, right?
Clearly gore3000 is wrong.
At long last, a breakthrough (I hope). He has to be wrong in this if God is truly omnipotent ;)
As far as my meeting with Gould went, it was in '81, before I knew about his "issue" with truth; however, we did argue, politely. He felt I was much too much "genetically" oriented in dealing with intelligence. I told him he was denying reality when supposing that the grandest achievement of human evolution--intelligence--had negligible influence from genes!
I also wrote a letter finding holes in a piece he wrote in Natural History that they told me they were going to publish (it was on intelligence). It never got published: he killed it. He was a liar; sorry to burst your bubble. He also tried to stifle free speech on campus (fascistic tendencies).
And, I answered you anyway even though your tone in addressing me was lousy. You're welcome.
If God is truly omniscient, then I tend to think that He can if it pleases Him to do so, regardless of how nonsensical the notion seems to us. He can probably turn whole hosts of blingnarbs into gerflipples also, regardless of how nonsensical it seems to us to be. If He couldn't, He'd be something less than omnipotent, I think.
Certainly God "thinks" higher thoughts than we do. But He cannot contradict first principles of reason that are knowable with certainty by the human mind (i.e., that the good should be done and evil avoided, the law of non-contradiction, etc). Why? Because He is the author of the eternal principles of Reason. In contradicting Reason He would be contradicting Himself, which is an impossibility.
IOW, He can't contradict himself, and thus there is some other thing that He cannot do. He must therefore be something less than omnipotent. I am left to goggle in wonder at the notion that you and I can do something that an ostensibly omnipotent God cannot, as Junior has already pointed out - you and I can contradict ourselves at will, yet this is a power that God cannot exercise. Omnipotence is obviously not quite all that it is touted to be.
But consider this - who are we to say that God cannot operate according to some higher-order reason that we neither know nor comprehend? Why does it have to make sense to you in order for it to make sense to Him?
The French have an expression for that, from Diderot - l'esprit de l'escalier, or "staircase wit". It's the clever retort that you think of about twenty minutes after the conversation is over. Maybe for you it can be "where-was-this-cleverness-about-twenty-years-ago? wit" :^)
Spiritually correct but intellectually unsatisfying. Knowing how thoroughly curious and inquisitive most human beings are (with, of course, the exception of those who smugly assert they know it all), can you fault anyone for asking the questions general_re asks and not being satisfied with the answer you've given, above?
The Lord said, "Thou shalt not murder" and yet He personally (not through intermediaries) wiped out the entire world's population (with the exception of eight people) at one time and a couple of cities at another. He sent his angel to kill the first born of the land of Egypt. Through his intermediaries he has ordered the extermination of the native people of the land of Canaan.
God is eternal. Outside time. Never changing. Perfect. To be perfect God must be a simple substance. Pure act. No potency. God cannot change in any way because change necessarily implies motion (in the philosophical, Aristotelian sense) . Since God lacks potency, He cannot logically change.To ascribe "Changing his mind" to God is simply an anthropomorphization of God and a category error.
Uh-oh. For someone who recognizes the trap of anthropmorphization, I think you've fallen into the related, subtler trap of reification. To say God is "pure act", or as some others claim "pure thought", is like saying God IS the number 9. Or "God is love". Either way it's a floating abstraction, unrelated to anything concrete. You can't get to a concrete entity - like a conscious personality which God supposedly is - from a floating abstraction. You need more; something physical. Otherwise, as you point out, God is incapable of moving atoms around.
But it's worse than that. It not only implies that God couldn't perform miracles, but it implies He couldn't create the physical universe to begin with, and neither could He even form the idea of creating the physical universe! How would such an idea be sustained? There's nothing like a neural network to hold the thoughts. And something within God has to change in order for the new thought to even exist. You can't just claim that God forms a thought without implying that there's some embodiment somewhere whose shape or form or state changes in order to hold the new information inherent in this thought.
An unembodied god is metaphysically static, & therefore powerless & trivial. Vacuous.
Well said.
Cordially,
God is not only transcendent but immanent. If he was not immanent then he would be limited (or not perfect), and therefore not transcendent.
In fact, God is Being itself. He sustains everything in its existence. All things that exist participate in God's existence, since existence does not belong to the essence of any thing.
For example, is it not in the nature of a dog for it to exist. I know the nature of my deceased dog. But my dog no longer exists. Therefore existence is not a part of my dog's nature.
Cordially,
And people say that Christians are irrational?
Hmmm, so I do. If I had known, I would have made it bit more...diabolical ;)
Worked for me. I don't know what a DNS error is.
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