Defining Omnipotence

I don’t know if this is better suited for IMHO or GD. With all the God talk lately I was wondering as to the nature of omnipotence.

Does a God HAVE to be omnipotent? Why not just hyperpotent? Why not just “practically” omnipotent? True omnipotence is fantastic and as with all things infinite, hard to envision in the real world. How about just super powerful? Would that qualify someone as God or merely “a” God?

Would you be more willing to accept the Christian/Islamic/Jewish God if he was merely hyperpotent? Petty? Emotional? Basically… Q?

For my part, yeah. If someone came around and said, “My God can move mountains, but as far as crushing galaxies, no, of course not, get real,” I’d be far more likely to take him seriously.

“Infinitely” powerful? Self contradictory. Also pointless. Once you accumulate enough power to crush 10^Googolplex galaxies, what does that even mean? And 10^Googolplex is actually a very small number. Far more than 99.99% of all numbers are trillions of times larger.

“Infinite” is just a child’s game. “My god is infinite.” No, bub, he ain’t. The term has no meaning.

Vast power? Sure. That, at least, has meaning. Warn me that Zeus is about to smite me with the force of a thousand anvils…and I’ll worry. Warn me that JHWH is about to smite me with infinite force, and I can only shrug and say, “Come back when you know what you’re talking about.”

Yes, there is some level of potency at which I would admit that a given supernatural being is a god, but maybe not the God. The contradiction between the supposed loving and omnipotent being and the one who supposedly allows such stuff as goes on today and in the past is too huge a gulf for even merely a pretty-darn-powerful and pretty-darn-loving God to exist.

Now, if such a being existed, and was hyperpotent, but pretty much a big jerk like it would appear it would have to be, I don’t know what I would do. Thankfully, very few worshippers of this supposed deity describe God as being a colossal asshole, so considering this possibility isn’t necessary in most theological debates.

I’ve often posted that I do accept the Jewish God as merely hyperpotent: capable of doing plenty in six days before resting on the seventh, and et cetera.

The whole “God is everything, knows everything, can do everything” thing is a major ideological cop-out. It’s like the immature imaginings of a little kid who has a need for his dad to be stronger and bigger than all the other dads. Just like the belief that God is love, God as an all-powerful being is convenient and makes for a simple religion. A perfect God is an easy one to worship. Anything less than an ominiscent god is inherently inferior. Who wants to side with an inferior god?

The honest position would be for Believers to simply admit they don’t know if God has limitations, rather than confidently describing him as omnipotent. But this requires revealing ones skepticism and doubt. Religious people don’t like this.

All the boys were sitting around talking about their fathers. “My father is the lieutenant governor.” “My dad’s a navy chief petty officer.” “My dad is a fireman.”

But not little Timmy, whose father had died earlier that year.

Little Timmy braced himself, looked up, and said, “My father is infinite.” And then added, “By definition.”

The problem (for believers) with a limited, or as you style it, “hyperpotent” God is that by acknowledging limitations on the deity, you almost by implication drag it out of the realm of the ineffable into the real Universe. And that drags it into the light of Empiricism, and that effectively kills it.

Well, not necessarily.

“I believe in a mighty deity who doesn’t much give a crap about us.”
“Hmm. So, just how powerful is he?”
“What difference would it make?”

The Abrahamic religions are the worlds most popular and they have totally dominated dialogue on dieties, but they are a small subsect of religious belief. Didn’t the Greeks think their gods were hyperpotent rather than omnipotent?

Would a hyperpotent god make me more likely to accept it? Not really. I’d still be an apatheist. God doesn’t purify my drinking water, manufacture my antibiotics, grow my food, etc. I don’t think it would matter if a diety was considered all knowing or just super wise, it still wouldn’t be relevant.

Sad part is my brain is wired for religion. I keep getting sucked in even though I know its all just advanced fantasy.