In addition to omnipotence and omnibenevolence being implied in any Argument from Ignorance with regards to theodicy. In other words, the Mysterious Ways argument. Waving away the existence of evil by saying “God has a plan but He works in Mysterious Ways”, implies that God can and does have a solution to everything, and will implement the best solution possible.
If you ask “hey, it would be less evil if all those children didn’t have to die of cancer”, the response is not “hey, sometimes God just can’t fight genetics,” or “hey, sometimes God is sort of a dick”, but it’s always “since it happened, it is because God willed it, and since God did it, it is ultimately in service of the best good”.
The tri-omni God wasn’t invented by atheists, that’s true, but it is mostly brought up by them. The Protestant theologians I mostly studied largely rejected that kind of language because it leads to semantic confusion like this thread. Catholic theology is still much more rooted in Aquinian scholasticism, but I believe they’ve moved in more in less the same direction, towards treating the divine as the object of personal encounters and experiences, not the subject of algebraic propositions.
Many theologians do believe that God’s omniscience includes the future. As far as I know, that is probably still Catholic doctrine. But some theologians disagree. Some argue, as I’ve presented, that the future (especially where free will plays a part) isn’t subject to knowledge, and therefore falls outside of what omniscience comprises. My point is that omniscience does not by definition include knowledge of the future. Some theologians think it does, others disagree. You can’t, therefore, argue, “Knowledge of the future is impossible (or incompatible with some other doctrine) therefore God doesn’t exist.” Even if your argument is airtight and convincing, the most you could possibly accomplish by presenting it to the Vatican is to have the Pope say, “Huh, I guess we were wrong about omniscience including the future!” It doesn’t get you any closer to proving God doesn’t exist.
Similarly with all the other stuff in this thread. It’s why I try to shift the language in these debates away from “omniscient,” “omnipotent,” etc. and towards ordinary English phrases like “most powerful,” “knowing everything,” etc. Almost every Christian, including theologians, will affirm belief in a god who is omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent, but for some reason people like to assume fixed and absolute definitions with specific philosophical implications for those Latin terms and resist any attempt to change them, even when it is clear that those definitions and those philosophical implications are not what the Christians had in mind when they coined the terms. Even when logic shows that they couldn’t (intelligently) have meant those things. Instead of thinking, “Maybe I’ve misunderstood these terms,” many people say, “Ha, gotcha!”
So yes, most Christians believe in a God who is most powerful, knows everything, and loves every being. Most Christians will say that their God is tri-omni, and go further to say that “there is nothing God can’t do” and “nothing God doesn’t know,” and even in the same breath say, “God can only do good.”
Any Christian with the brains to walk upright and breathe, though, when confronted with “Aha! But if God can only do good then he can’t do everything, can he? God is logically impossible!” will respond not by saying, “Oh no! All my beliefs are wrong!” but by saying, “Let’s talk a bit about what ‘able to do anything’ entails and whether I maybe should have said will only do good.'”
On this board, however, some atheist will inevitably say, “Oh no! No backpedling allowed! Your God is impossible and you just don’t want to admit it! Why won’t theists ever debate honestly? Why won’t they define their terms consistently? They know it’s all a big sham, that’s why!”
And of course it is all a big sham (or at least large error in reasoning), but the discussion hasn’t actually gotten us any closer to that point, or to anything anyone can agree on.
Of course that isn’t the definition, it is just a consequence. And I never said do no evil, I said do the minimum amount of evil possible.
The typical defense of God’s omnibenevolence is to show that this is the best of all possible worlds I’ve never seen a defense of omnibenevolence talking about God’s wishes.
And Curious George always wanted to be good, some attraction got in his way. Sounds like a God who wishes to be good but just isn’t.
A lot of ink has been spent defending and attacking a God no one believes in then. And if they don’t mean the obvious definition of tri-omni, what do they mean? They tend to retreat when talking to someone pointing out the problems and then are right back to tri-omni defense the next day.
I believe that. We have a big problem getting a definition of God from theists at all. You certainly have run into the people who, when pressed for a definition, say God is indescribable - but the next breath they know exactly what God thinks about our sex lives and abortion.
We’ve been through this already. Choice is not the issue. If God chooses to make it rain today, he clearly could have chosen not to make it rain also, right? Now, a single omni god clearly does have the power to do evil. So he can choose to do evil. But, if he chooses to stop the rain, he does not violate and part of his definition, but if he chooses to do evil, he violates the omnibenevolent part of his nature.
A single omni god cannot actually do everything, but can potentially do everything. A tri-omni god cannot even potentially do everything a single omni god can do without violating a part of his nature. Thus the contradiction.
BTW, the title of this thread is about a tri-omni god. I think everyone agrees that if you define away this characteristic of God he is no longer logically impossible in this way, and that gods who are not defined to be tri-omni are not logically impossible. So it sounds like you agree that a tri-omni god is logically impossible, and say that the response is that God is not tri-omni at all. I don’t know enough about current theology to argue, but I know a lot of religious people don’t accept this.
But that’s the purpose of coming up with fancy Latin terms–to allow for specific, precise definitions. And, from the sources, the Christians at one point meant exactly that omniscience means that God knows all things, past, present and future; that omnipotence means that God is capable of doing all things that are not intrinsically impossible; that omnibenevolence means that God is perfectly good. These are not “misunderstandings”. Again, atheists didn’t come up with this stuff; Christians did–and not random medieval peasants, either; but high-powered theologians. It’s clear they were not unaware of the contradictions and logical paradoxes, but they evidently believed they could somehow talk their way out of them. (There’s a reason smartass atheists invented concepts like the Invisible Pink Unicorn.)
When people come up with–and carefully, precisely define–concepts which are inherently contradictory or logically incoherent, it’s perfectly fair and reasonable to follow the implications of their precisely defined philosophical constructs to the point of incoherence or self-contradiction, or in layman’s terms, to say “Ha, gotcha!”
Now, (at least some) modern theologians, having been succesfullly “gotacha-ed” by too damn many smartass atheists (and no longer having the option of just having said smartasses threatened with burning at the stake) may have re-defined their terms, which is all well and good (though one hopes they would have the grace to admit that they are re-defining things: “Those earlier conceptions were in error, but now we believe X, for reasons Y and Z”).
Nothing you just wrote rebuts my post and I wasn’t talking about a tri-omni god; I was talking about your claim that a god can’t be both omnipotent and omnibenevolent. Choice is the issue. I can be a vegetarian and have the power to eat any food I like. God can be all good and have the power to do anything including evil, making him omnipotent.
I already mentioned above why omniscience is required for omnibenevolence - otherwise, how can God decide what action maximizes the good. So you can’t have bi-omni in this sense without tri-omni. (You can have bi-omni in the sense of omnipotence and omniscience, thought that has its own problems. I don’t know about omnibenevolence and omniscience without omnipotence. That would be God doing the best he can, but does not require the world to be the best possible. Interesting, but most people want God to be omnipotent.)
If by vegetarian you mean someone who never eats meat, then the vegetarian has the choice to eat meat, but the moment he does he is no longer a vegetarian. If your require vegetarianism, then you restrict the effective choice. Unless you consider someone munching a Big Mac a vegetarian because he really wants to only eat vegetables that is.
Can God make free choices?
Can God commit evil acts?
It seems to me that if God can do anything (logical possible), then he can create beings who only freely do the good (as someone else stated). If he can’t, that’s a problem.
It also calls into question why he would create beings that could commit evil. Is it for a “greater” good? If that’s the case then it suggests that an entity that is capable of committing evil can achieve a greater good then one that cannot (you could also sub a non omniscient being here, I think).
If that’s the case then it suggests that an imperfect, non omniscient, “free” being can achieve a greater good then an omnibenevolent God… But how can that be the case?
One of which is that it means that such a good being is impossible - not merely a standard hard to live up to, but logically impossible - and therefore God himself cannot be good to that degree.
None of the responses to this thread have answered the question. Typical of problem-of-evil discussions.
A few years ago I was staying at the house of some Christians who own a Christian book store. One of the books in their store was dedicated to resolving the problem of evil by raising the same question as the OP: “So where did this omnibenevolent+omniscient+omnipotent characterisation of God come from?” It’s clearly riddled with problems, so much so that atheists routinely call it out as logical “proof” that believers are irrational. But as several respondents have noted, the Bible does not use these three words. (Same goes for God making a rock so heavy he can’t lift it … the Bible doesn’t mention these kinds of questions, which have more to do with naive logical systems than with religion per se. Modern modal logic might circumnavigate a lot of those apparent problems … google goedel’s modal logic update of St Anselm’s argument for example.)
I can’t find the exact name of the book through Google, but the following seems to be similar:
The author of this book, like the one I picked up in their store, argues that the o+o+o conception is a Hellenic concept, unrelated to any of the early schools of Christianity. I haven’t read the whole thing but it seems like maybe Constantine is to be blamed for re-defining God. Or perhaps those annoying medieval scholastics. But in any case the problem comes from those who tried to square Aristotelian propositional logic with Christian theology.
What about earthquakes, hurricanes, tsunamis, tornadoes, floods, volcanoes, etc.? They don’t need free will. If God can’t prevent them, he’s not very all-powerful. If God can, but doesn’t, he’s evil.
I predict an argument that they are necessary side-effects of natural world-shaping processes. But what about, say, AIDS, the black death, measles, polio, smallpox, guinea worm, the tsetse fly, malaria, and so on? There is no necessity for those diseases/vectors to exist, let alone be so nasty.
No, the problem is trying to pin down Christian theology in the first place. As I’ve mentioned earlier in this thread, attempts to identify the exact attributes of the Christian god have been pretty much useless-just when we think we’ve got a handle on a particular ability of this deity, a religionist pops up and “No, that ain’t it.”
True - one could also add in unnecessary suffering. Why do we suffer throughout the ebola process that culminates in our deaths? What benefit is it?
Why not have human beings who beneficially suffer (say, when they touch a hot stove), but have that suffering cut off when it is no longer beneficial (when it wouldn’t matter, such as in ebola).