“How many tails does a dog have, if you call a tail a leg?”
“Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it one.”
There are many reasons to disbelieve in an omnimax god, including but not limited to sudden infant death syndrome, Yersinia pestis, and the state of Arkansas. Your argument seems…ill-thought.
I think there are better arguments about why God can’t be ‘omnimax’ than that s/he/it feels emotions…
(I believe that there was a discussion about why God can’t be omnipotent in GD fairly recently, where I show why it doesn’t pay to try and debate with philosophy majors while drinking heavily…)
I don’t know about this. A person can know what “falling in love” is without having experienced it. A person can know what hate is (I’m thinking particularly of racial hatred) without hating anyone or anything.
I think the logic breaks down here. A higher being could know everything about an emotion without feeling it itself. Much like how a human could know everything about a how a bacterium responds to some stimulus, with also experiencing that same response.
I’m not saying it’s the most powerful argument out there, but it does seem to be the neatest (after Arkansas). It clearly demonstrates that the very idea of a totally perfect God is logically incoherent.
Well, I’d venture to say that most people struggle with racist and homophobic thoughts from time to time. That doesn’t mean we’re all bigots but it does mean we’re not perfect.
Here’s where your argument doesn’t hold water. Omnimax-ness is miraculous; it’s not concerned with your petty assertion of impossibleness here.
The presumption of omniscience is that God has all knowledge without a source. He hasn’t experienced the future yet - but he knows it anyway. He hasn’t sat down and written out PI - but he knows all the digits anyway. He’s never not been God, but he knows how it feels to be you anyway. And, presumably, he might not have ever personally experienced anger - but being omnimax that would be no impediment to knowing what it feels like anyway.
I second the sentiment of sticking to the POE. That’s watertight.
I think Cort did a decent job. If nothing else, I had never heard the term omnimax before.
But a human can’t know all there is to know about bacterial response without 100% empathy with that bacteria. A human can only know some aspects of bacterial existence. Of course that’s fine: we really only need to know about the bits that are important to us.
For God to fully understand humans, He needs to have the experience of being human. So He therefore can’t be all-loving. Luckily He can’t be all-hating either.
But the Bible doesn’t really say that God is omnimax. See for example the Book of Job. And unlike the POE, this argument can be dispensed with by saying: “Ok then, maybe we were being a little hyperbolic. God isn’t omnimax, so what?”
Sure He could… then He’d just locally change the definition of gravitational attraction so that the term “weight” is meaningless when applied to the boulder. It’d be a miracle.