That’s basically a post-modern perspective. It’s certainly not the classical Judeo-Christian view.
That seems a bit silly. The question is if he genuinely could, not if he would. What if he would, but couldn’t is a much better question, IMHO.
This is the same as the first question, dealing with the will of the being rather than said beings actual ability to complete the object in question. It’s like answering the heavy stone paradox with “maybe, but it’s Saturday and he’s got a total hangover, so that’s totally not happening–let’s just forget about it.”
The words can be broken down into mathematical statements. By someone more experience in symbolic logic than I am, of course, but if the words do not parse into a coherent statement, then it would seem to imply that being able to violate one’s omnipotence would be fundamentally illogical, necessitating the nuanced definitions of “everything but that which is impossible” and driving another nail in the grave of “yes, whatever he wants, and that is completely coherent.”
I think it’s the most fundamental divide in humanity - the divide between the people who want to believe and the people who want to know. Both groups perceive that there is a group that disagrees with them on many issues but they both assume that they share some basic things in common. But in reality each side is trying to sway the other side with arguments that the other side finds meaningless.
It’s like a baseball team and a football team playing each other and both teams thinking it’s their normal game. The baseball team will think they’re winning because the other team hasn’t scored a single run or even an out. The football team will think they’re winning because the other team hasn’t scored a single touchdown or even a first down. Then at the end of the game the two teams get together and finds out that the other team thought it won a huge victory.
The god of the Jews and Christians is by NO MEANS omnipotent! :dubious:
Judges 1:19 And the Lord was with Judah and he drove out the inhabitants of the mountain; but could not drive out the inhabitants of the valley because they had chariots made of iron.
WTF!??! I can stop an iron chariot with my .300 Winchester magnum no problem. I guess he’ll be surprised that just about everyone has an “iron chariot” when he returns in all his majesty (until someone runs him over!) :rolleyes:
A sufficiently charismatic human can convince throngs of supporters to give him money, power, groupies, etc. despite what to a disinterested observer seems like misperceived or misapplied logic. God’s pretty good at this, I admit, but shouldn’t it be universal? Whotta loser.
As someone once said, “Godzilla is more powerful than God, because he can take on iron chariots !” 
I’m assuming nothing, and it has nothign whatsoever to do with how powerful God is or isn’t. If I define something, it becomes outside of God’s ability to control, in that it is not based in the physics of the world at all. It’s simply an entirely independent mental construction. Even if I die, the definition “lives on”, in that the definition still could be applied if anyone knew what it was.
For example, suppose I define that the symbol “1” can be referred to by the character sequence “one”, in some system of math or writing I’m developing. Once I’ve defined it, it’s simply true. God doesn’t have the power to change it; if he says “1” = “two”, that doesn’t change the definition; it just means that god got it wrong. Even if god somehow makes us all think that “1” = “two”, that doesn’t change the defintion; it just means that we’re all wrong. Even if we all forget about the first system and make up a new system in which “1” = “two”, that’s a new system; in the original unaltered system, “1” still equals “one”. Unchangeably, forever.
All of logic is just such a set of arbitrary rules. So is all of math. So is all of geometry. If you or god or anyone “changes the rules”, then they’ve just switched to a differerent system, leaving the original intact and unaltered, impervious to their efforts. And if they claim to be operating in the same original system (which they tacitly are if they don’t say otherwise and they use the same terms and symbols), then they’re just flat wrong.
Square is defined as having four sides. Trianges are defined as having three sides. Under the system of geometry that the terms ‘square’ and ‘triangle’ work with, every specific thing has a specific number of sides. So, by definition, no square circles can be created. Not by god, not by anybody. Period. It doesn’t matter how powerful they are.
It does? Didn’t God define you, hence anything you can come up with is just based on whatever arbitrary rules God built into you? Hence, you can’t come up with anything God hasn’t anticipated, by definition, and his control remains intact.
What does that have to do with it. Sure, God can control what I define. But once I define something, it leaves his, and my, control. We can ignore it and go do something else if we like, but we can’t change the definition that was made without altering the system we’re speaking about to a sligtly, or significantly different one.
It doesn’t matter if god himself defined what square and triangle mean. All that matters is that they have definitions, and the definitions are incompatible. Period.
It’s not that belief can create reality but faith in God can reveal reality and pierce the deception.
A person can help advance God’s kingdom but that is not doing their part to help God, God does not need that help - He allows us to serve for His honor and Glory. Withholding support for God only hurts the person, not God, perhaps a person in a very early stage of faith may think this, or if they are worshiping a false god, but the above statement is so totally out of step with the relationship people have with God.
The way I see it is either God exists or we don’t.
Do you want to be in darkness or light, do you want life or death?
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It doesn’t matter whether a billion people or ten people or no people believe in God - God exists because He exists. Faith is important to the people who have it but it has no effect on God.
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God choses to work through us (again to His glory, not ours)
Then why do you need Him? If everything, once created (or “defined”, if you will), is outside His control, what role does He play that couldn’t be as easily filled by, let’s say, nothing?
What the hell? The way I see it, we exist or unicorns don’t. Take that for a rebuttle.
Really. That’s nonsense. What are you on about?
No, faith leads to delusion, because faith is about ignoring reality. Someone who believes something due to faith can only be right by sheer luck. This is true even if there really is a God, because if you have faith you’ll cling to it rather than what he’s telling you; that’s the nature of faith.
That’s an excellent argument for going out of your way to frustrate and ignore God, not follow him.
God is unnecessary. This argument, a baseless claim about baseless God, is simply another attempt by a believers to assert that their fundamentally useless, destructive beliefs are not merely worth something, but absolutely necessary.
The belief that without God the universe can’t exist. As silly as belief in God of course.
Kanicbird, you said “By it’s very definition, being part of the faith makes it true - it defines truth.” You explicitly said faith makes things true and defines truth. If you’re drawing a distinction between the claim that faith makes things true and belief creates reality, then I’ve missed the subtleties of your position. Either claim seems the same to me - both are saying something is true because it’s believed rather than being believed because it’s true. And I disagree - truth and reality exist independent of belief and faith. If everyone in the world believed a lie, it would still be false.
You have to look at it from the point of view that there is a God, and the person has faith in that (correct) God. Also that God is the source of all truths. So that person’s faith will define all truths as from God, and are absolute. It will also place man’s truths as inferior to God’s truths so man is operating under deception and can’t know truth “what is truth?” Pilot asked of Jesus.
It’s not that faith makes things true, but faith in God’s truth. Belief does not create reality, reality was always there, God just exposes it
If faith in the existence of God is based on the actual existence of God, then is faith in the existence of Allah based on the actual existence of Allah? Doesn’t the fact that some people have faith in the existence of Allah or Xemu or Zeus or Thor mean that these dieties are as real as the Christian God? And if it doesn’t mean that those dieties are real, then doesn’t faith in God not necessarily mean that God is real? How do you tell the difference between faith in a real diety and faith in a false diety?
Well, personally I don’t need him; I have other hobbies.
However, you’re misunderstanding, with your conflation of “created” and “defined”. Once something is “created”, by which I assume you mean created in the physical world, then you can change it by physical means. You could take a triangular block of wood, grab your axe, and hack it into a square block of wood. Now, in doing so, you haven’t made a square triangle, because the immutable definition of “triangle” no longer applies to your block of wood. But that doesn’t mean you were unable to change the block.
The only things that are impervious to alteration by definition are definitions themselves; which are simply concepts; non-physical things. Ordinary physical objects lying around in ordinary reality can still be changed in all sorts of ways, so if you find that you need a god to help you turn water into wine or to hold open unnatural dry paths across lakes or to annihilate cities for you, then that’s still all theoretically reasonably possible for a god to do.
This is a personal answer, false gods, such as Zeus are real living entities, either demons or fallen angels and are part of the satanic kingdom of deception, but they are real, or false prophets teach incorrect ways to reach the true God, making their prayer meaningless.