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To: Aquinasfan
God can do anything that is good and logically possible.

IOW, he cannot do yet some other thing, and he is therefore still not omnipotent. This strikes me a simply your personal a posteriori requirement, that he can only do certain things and not others.

Regardless, if I accept the truth of this assertion, why assume that God must be consistent and logical in a manner that is evident to us? Surely if God is beyond our ken, then he can act in logical and consistent ways that are simply too subtle and complex for us to understand their logical consistency, don't you think?

But the assertion that God can change is contradictory and therefore meaningless . Your assertion (really a meaningless group of words) does not rise to the level of being an assertion and therefore does not logically warrant refutation.

And yet, here you are. ;)

Speculation about God changing is simply a category error.

And what sort of error is it when Aquinasfan speculates that God can only act in ways that are understandable and logically consistent to Aquinasfan?

642 posted on 05/22/2002 10:10:04 AM PDT by general_re
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To: general_re
IOW, he cannot do yet some other thing, and he is therefore still not omnipotent.

If this is taken at face value, then man is capable of doing things God cannot, which opens a whole new can of worms.

645 posted on 05/22/2002 10:18:06 AM PDT by Junior
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To: general_re
IOW, he cannot do yet some other thing, and he is therefore still not omnipotent. This strikes me a simply your personal a posteriori requirement, that he can only do certain things and not others.

But it's not. It just strikes you that way. Can God make a yellow pink? Think about it.

Regardless, if I accept the truth of this assertion, why assume that God must be consistent and logical in a manner that is evident to us?

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.

Surely if God is beyond our ken, then he can act in logical and consistent ways that are simply too subtle and complex for us to understand their logical consistency, don't you think?

Yes. But that doesn't mean that He can be illogical. For example, God can reveal to us "super-logical" truths like the existence of the Trinity that are not accessible by unaided reason, but he "can't" make a yellow pink.

658 posted on 05/22/2002 11:14:45 AM PDT by Aquinasfan
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