This thread seems to have moved from the original question and onto a general attack/defense of theism.
Don’t they all?
First, please note that I am a total atheist. But having said that, I once got an answer from a Catholic Priest (when I was a kid in Catholic school) that made sense.
The priest had been asked “If God knows everything, he knows if I am going to Heaven or Hell. He already knows every one of my future sins, etc. So how can you reconcile that with free will? But if God doesn’t know he is not omniscient, is he?”
His answer was: "Imagine you have an apartment with one of those corner-turret windows that look out over an intersection of two busy streets. The roads are icy.
"You look down one road and you see a car full of people passing around a whiskey bottle and hardly looking at the approaching intersection. You look down the other road and there is another car, about the same distance away, full of partying drunks, also approaching the intersection. Both cars are going WAAAAY over the speed limit.
“You have a fair idea of the horrible tragedy that is going to take place. It is not perfect preknowledge of the kind theists attribute to God,(they could both swerve at the last minute) but it will do for the purposes of this analogy. The fact that you know what is going to happen does not alter the fact that the end result, a horrible crash, was largely the result of choices made by the drivers of the cars using their free will. One does not invalidate the other.”
As I say, I am an atheist, but you gotta admit some of these priests could come up with some doozies! Maybe it was because they don’t get laid that much (little boy scandals notwithstanding) and have time to think about stuff.
RickJay above has said several times that in Christianity, god isn’t subject to the laws of logic. But most thoughtful Christians (not all, but most) have not agreed with this. Most believe that even God could not create a square circle.
ETA see my post 67 for an explanation as to why free will is compatible with God’s foreknowledge–an explanation which makes no recourse to questions of the limits of logic etc.
But if you can mention a square circle then it is “something”. And “something” is included in “everything”. And if God cannot do everything then he is not omnipotent. So God would either have to be able to make a square circle or else relinquish the title “omnipotent”.
I don’t believe an omniscient God violates free will.
It just makes free will utterly and completely without purpose.
If God knows how the show is going to end, why is he watching it? Why even let the whole debacle play out? Just call it quits and put the game away.
Huh? Why?
As for God being “omni,” I liked what Alan Smithee had to say in another thread:
[QUOTE=Alan Smithee]
The whole tri-omni thing is one of my pet peeves when it’s brought up by (my fellow) atheists in order to show its logical impossibility.
“Omni-benevolent,” “omniscient” and “omnipotent” are clever catchwords for describing the Judeo-Christian God, but they are just descriptions, not logical predicates postulated by the Bible as axiomatic traits of God’s being. The Bible calls God “almighty” (I forget the Hebrew word), which may have been translated “omnipotent” in the Septuagint, but it clearly doesn’t mean “capable of performing any act describable by human language, however nonsensical.” It clearly means that God is “maxipotent,” that is, that he is the most powerful being in existence, possibly the most powerful being possible. Some passages imply or state that all lesser forces derive their power from his. The Hebrews (and to a lesser extent the authors of the Greek scriptures) weren’t writing philosophical treatises. For the most part, they were writing poetry. Whatever the Hebrew word was for “almighty,” it was close enough for them, without necessarily implying that God can (or can’t) create a rock so heavy he can’t lift it. Since words are defined through usage, not by–well…divine fiat, I think you could very well argue that “most powerful” is a more technically accurate translation of that word anyway. The Bible describes plenty of situations where his power appears limited, or at least inefficient.
[/QUOTE]
Personally, I’m not sure the word “omnipotent” isn’t, in and of itself, meaningless, so therefore I don’t care whether or not God has to “relinquish” it.
You lost me there. Can you explain what you mean by “something” here?
They don’t.
Religious beliefs are schizophrenic in nature, they contradict reality, yet religious people choose to adhere to those beliefs for psychological reasons, to be accepted to a group, to gratify their ego, etc.
Reconciliation of two ideas requires the application of reason in a logical sense. The religious just drop the paradox or the illogical or the unreasonable as soon as they realize they will have to abandon a symbol or construct that they perceive as a key to their acceptance and their social safety.
“Some thing” is one of the things contained in the term “every thing”.
Just as “some body” is one of the “bodies” contained in the term “every body”.
Imagine the following conversation:
John: I know everybody in this room.
Tom: Do you know that person?
John: No, he is somebody I do not know.
Tom: Then if there is somebody you don’t know in the room, it cannot be said that you know everybody.
Is a square circle some thing? Since you mention it and give it a name, it must be counted as a thing, if only on the grounds that it can be named. Every thing means the sum total of all things. Or if you wish, anything (any thing) means any one item from the sum total of all things.
God can do everything? Can God do anythingThen one of the things included in the term “everything” or “anything” is a square circle.
Okay, but then, what is “every thing”?
I’m not being cute here–I think that the clearer you become as to what you mean by “something” and “everything” the more you’ll realize that what you’ve said about square circles being “something” won’t work.
The meaning of “square” and “circle” are such that there could not be any object which instantiates them both. Nothing square could count as circular, and vice versa. It doesn’t matter who created them. If God himself created an object, the rules governing English still would not allow us to truthfully call it a “square circle”. This is not a limit on God’s powers. It’s a fact about the way the language works, nothing more.
Christians (and the other Abrahamic faiths) believe that God has taken the effort to communicate with us, and to reveal some things about God that we are able to understand. He’s used things like natural law, the prophets, the scriptures, and some say the church to help us understand him just a little bit.
You can’t come up with nonsense criteria and say “well if God can’t do this illogical task, he must not be God.” Contrary to what RickJay said earlier, most theists do believe that God follows his own rules of logic. C.S. Lewis said (in The Problem of Pain, I think), “Nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk it about God.”
I disagree with Mr. Lewis.
Disagreeing with Lewis means you think what he said is false, right? So what you think, then, is that nonsense does not remain nonsense when we say it about God?
In other words, when nonsense is said about God, it makes sense?
That’s what you think?
As going with the idea of God existing outside of space-time, this question doesn’t really make any sense. To imply “watching” is to imply that he is somehow constricted by space-time. Instead, I try to liken time to simply being another spatial dimension, and imagine God as having created this 4-D object, and liken his “observation” to being like looking at a piece of art or a sculpture.
Imagine it more like this. I’m looking at a sculpture that is representative of this 4-D projection, and let’s say I’m looking it over mostly left to right akin to how time might pass. Now lets say I’m at some point A on it and I get curious and wonder what some point B farther to the right is. There’s nothing to stop me from looking over farther to the right, seeing what point B looks like, and then returning to looking at point A. Point A is exactly the same as when I was scanning over it, but now I have knowledge of point B, when I didn’t before. The sculpture was complete before I scanned it, at every process of scanning it, and after I scanned it.
IOW, I see omniscience as, more or less, being a derivative property of being the creator of the universe and being outside of it, rather than as an axiomatic property.
In the same way, I see the act of creation now as simply setting things up and pressing play and sitting back with popcorn and watching what happens, but more as an act of sculpting the entirety of space-time. That is, there is no moment of creation, as there are no moments as we understand them from the perspective of God.
I very much like this explanation, and it’s exactly how I look at it. I think the idea that God can do anything we can imagine, even things that are self-contradictory is, at best a pointless exercise, and at worst, a disingenuous approach to disproving God’s existence. There’s as many silly arguments used by theists against atheists, and I think the same of them.
So, can God make a square and a circle the same thing? Can he change the value of pi? Maybe, but we’d probably be talking about a very different universe. And what if we say he can, does that make people believe he exists? Probably not. And what if we say he can’t, is it somehow unimaginable that someone can create existence but can’t do something inherently contradictory? At best, all it disproves is a particular usage of the term omnipotent.
Instead, likening creation back to art, I’m more interested in the changes that an artist might make in a piece. What would impact does it have on a painting if the artist uses water color or oil? What impact does it have if he uses marble or wood? What impact does it have if certain proportions are adjusted?
In the same way, relating to God’s power over the universe, I see the materials of the art being the physical laws and constants which, perhaps under the guidance of a masterful artist, could be adjusted to make us look or behave slightly differently… its hard to imagine the implications of such things on such a large scale.
Blaster Master, basically what you are saying is that you can conceive of God being in such-and-such a way that allows him to do this-and-that. The problem is, you’re stuck with drawing comparisons to concepts that exist in our limited world, while at the same time making God somehow exempt from logic.
And so I go back to the dilemma I expressed in my spin-off thread. Do you really think it’s possible for us to have a handle on how God operates? Not being snarky when I say this, but when I read your explanations, all I see is the work of a creative imagination. But I get the feeling you believe this stuff. Do you?
Christians do not claim to have a complete understanding of God. And we do not claim that it is necessary, either. We each have our own limited understanding, accept it, and try to increase it.
The real gap in understanding between theists and atheists is that our belief in God is ultimately based on faith. Either you are willing to believe something with only limited, subjective evidence, or you’re not. Explaining how subjective, unprovable our beliefs are is nothing we haven’t already considered (at least for intellectual Christians).
By the way, Blaster Master, your posts in this thread are very good!
You know that he *failed *to brush his teeth. Knowledge of the past is not knowledge of the future.
You know that she *usually *gets home at 2, which is knowledge of a pattern, and again, knowledge of the past. You don’t know that she *will *get home at 2.
If God has perfect knowledge of the future then yes, it does.
You seem to be denying we can have knowledge of future events. Do you mean to be denying that?
You can predict, with some degree of certainty derived from previous patterns, what will occur in the future. For instance, we assume that the sun will rise tomorrow only because that’s what it has been doing everyday since the beginning of the world.
But that’s not the same thing as knowing the future.
Unless you think humans are clairvoyant, I’m not sure why how this is disputable.