I’m not sure I follow. Many phenomena are not all-powerful, but I care what they are. Someone may define God in a non-omnipotent fashion (e.g., God is the life-force that animates us, or something similar), and I may be interested in the phenomenon they’re calling God despite its lack of omnipotence.
That’s a pretty big question, certainly. For myself, I’ve never heard any explanation of an omnipotent God that satisfies me that the omnipotent God isn’t supremely evil. Disbelief in an omnipotent God is actually something I find comforting.
No, thank you. I posted that before I had read the whole thread, and now I have I can see that others have covered similar ground, but I think that’s the first time I’ve really got those particular thoughts down in writing. So thanks for starting this thread and giving me the opportunity.
If god is uninterested in us (or incapable of being interested…yet another definition), I would have as much interest as I do any other scientific exploration of a concept. But I would not be interested in a worship capacity any more than I would worship the works of any of the great physicists. I have no reason to believe the origins of the universe are religious in nature but I will continue with scientific curiosity.
God is pure love. God has qualities of philos, storge, and eros. Is he more than this as well? Sometimes these definition remind me of the Monty Python Spanish Inquisition sketch where another quality is added each time the list is repeated. Does the definition end? Do we eventually get to the point where the god is everything? (Not trying to challenge any definition, just trying to understand it.)
Huh–that’s an interesting point. I’m not sure what kind of God I would be capable of worshipping: the idea of worship seems alien to my demeanor, as I understand it. I can imagine an entity that I would love and admire and whose advice I would consider very strongly; does that constitute worship? I’m not sure it does. And certainly a deity that requires worship in the conventional sense–a deity who wants me to sing songs in its praise–would strike me as less worthy of love and admiration than would one who didn’t care about that sort of thing.
I’ve never thought about that aspect of theism before. Interesting!
That’s still silly, and contradicts reality. We do not live in a world and we are not a species designed by something that had love, or even compassion in it’s mind.
And why do you keep insisting God is subhuman ? A God who “is Love” is less than a human, who is so much more than that.
That first part is your opinion, but not mine. As for the latter half, I dont quite understand your point. I’m not saying Love is God, I’m saying God is Love.
All worshippers (honest ones) must be theists, but not all theists must be worshippers. Satan is a theist, knowing that God exists (also Matt and Ben in Dogma) but he’s not a worshipper.
Is does not always make pure equations in the English language. For example, an apple is a fruit. A fruit is an apple. One is a description, and the other is listing a type of fruit. Both are not pure equally-sided statements.
Saying God is agape is describing in the most succcint form what God’s modus operandi is. Saying agape is God is describing Godlike powers to a philosophical idea, At the least it sounds extremely strange, and at worst can lead to extremely dangerous quasi-Christian heresies.
He’s not using those words in the common meaning. You should search for some old threads on this.
I can see that the concept of necessaryness implies eternal, since if a god is necessary at time T he is also necessary at time t + n. However it does not imply all powerful and loving. I don’t recall him ever advancing the all powerful characteristic, but he does the all-loving one, and I don’t see the connection.
Nowhere in the proof of necessity are any other characteristics mentioned, so we might well have a necessary slime mold. Also, remember the definition of god is that he is necessary in all possible universes. I’ve never understood why a universe V without a god, identical to universe U with a god, is not possible, unless you assume god must be in all universes.
Liberal’s concepts have problems, but they are not so simplistic as you make them out to be.
That’s because they aren’t connected. The all-loving follows from a different premise, which itself is induced from the way I define God (facilitator of goodness). It is merely a fortunate coincidence that the eternal, necessary, and essential being is loving. (Thanks for making an honest assessment of my argument, even in light of your disagreement with it.)
“And God so loved the world that he caused a great flood, killing everyone but a handful of Noah’s kin and two of every animal but dragons, unicorns, and dinosaurs.”
:dubious: I am not a fundamentalist, as in I dont believe that was a historical event. But hey, thanks for the easily refutable Christian-bashing argument. It saves me stamina for debating Der Trihs and other well-reasoned posters.
I would also like to point out that even if it did happen literally, there are arguments for that as well (Re: God is agape), albeit not strong ones IMO.
I have a question for you. Did your recognition of God come before your definition of God, or vice versa? That is, did you come to believe in God and so draw his characteristics into your definition, or did you arrive at your definition which implies God must exist and so start to believe?
That’s a good question, even if the answer is pretty obviously that the recognition came first (if my recollection of Lib’s posts about his spiritual awakening are accurate). The post hoc definition of God is curious, because it seems intended for the benefit of some mythical individual who is completely ambivalent about the existence of a deity (think: Vulcan), and who would be swayed into believing by a purely logical argument—and frankly, I’m not convinced such a person exists, or ever has existed.
Even in the case of Liberal—one of the more strident (at least that I have seen personally) in applying ontological and logical proofs to justify God’s existence—there was apparently a wholly personal, emotional, “spiritual” event that incited the conversion process, and the analysis came afterward.
(If I am wrong, please correct me—but gently, for I know barely what I do.)
