This reminds me of an answer to the old gotcha, “Could God make a rock so big that he couldn’t lift it?”
I’m paraphrasing from memory, but the answer is no. God can do anything or assume any state, except those things or states that would render him less than omnipotent. He can’t do things that are incompatible with omnipotence.
“Aha!” you retort. “If there are things he can’t do, whatever they are, for whatever reason, then he is not omnipotent!”
“Whatever,” God replies.
Anyway, is there a coherent definition for omniscience that takes a similar approach? God knows all knowable things. He knows all things, except those things incompatible with omniscience.
A common response from Christian philosophers, such as Norman Geisler or William Lane Craig, is that the paradox assumes a wrong definition of omnipotence. Omnipotence, they say, does not mean that God can do anything at all but, rather, that he can do anything that is possible according to his nature.
IOW they get around the paradox by Nerfing the definition of omnithing.
You might as well just skip right to the “a human’s puny brain can’t understand God” stage of the argument. Because an explanation like that just creates a mass of new questions.
If such a discussion ever did get to that stage, I would be asking the interlocutor “why are you trying to explain the unexplainable then? If you want me to have faith, it’s counterproductive to try to convince me with reasons (however specious).”
I keep thinking, I’ve just skimmed the thread, so if someone said it already, sorry, but I just come back to the Star Trek movie, the one they’re searching God.
Kirk says, “Excuse me, Why does God need a Starship?”
Seeing all of time laid out before you (which is implied by some theories of time) makes things even worse. I can see a meta-play where the character in the play sees all their lines and cannot change them. Omniscience implies God’s lines are set in stone, which negates omnipotence. And then there is the problem of when does God decide what to do. An eternal being would have “decided” at t = - infinity.
I think the whole concept only makes sense to the ancients who didn’t have the tools to think about it too much. It is easy to say four sided triangle, it is a lot harder to come up with one.
I think the ancients generally didn’t have omnipotent and omniscient gods. (And often they weren’t benevolent, either.)
I suspect the TriOmni god kind of crept up on people. ‘My god is bigger than your god! My god can do x!’ – ‘No, my god is bigger than your god! My god can do x too, and can also do y!’ – ‘My god can do x and y and z!’ – ‘Well my god can do anything at all! Try beating that one!’
OLD MAN: Yes, a guy – Phil. Philip was the leader of our tribe.
INTERVIEWER: What made him the leader?
OLD MAN: Very big, very strong, big beard, big arms, he could just kill you. He could walk on you and you would die.
INTERVIEWER: You revered him?
OLD MAN: We prayed to him. Would you like to hear one of our prayers? “Oh Philip. Please don’t take our eyes out and don’t pinch us and don’t hurt us….Amen.”
INTERVIEWER: How long was his reign?
OLD MAN: Not too long. Because one day, Philip was hit by lightning. And we looked up and said… “There’s something bigger than Phil.”
And the Bible was written before. I doubt that the priests knew about logic, at least not until Alexander the Great conquered the area, and probably not even then.
The god of Genesis didn’t know where Adam and Eve were hiding. I know it has been retconned into him just pretending, but still.
By the time of Christianity, the average person believed in a whole bunch of gods, so their
god did have to be bigger, and Jesus had to become a demigod at least as powerful as the emperor. And they had to throw hell in to seal the deal.
I’ve always thought that a lot of Christian theology could be explained as effective tools for sales and marketing rather than any reasonably consistent view of a god. People don’t want to convert because they’d have to stop eating prawns? Toss the kosher laws. You want to appeal to monotheistic Jews while making Jesus a god to make him more than just a guy. Bingo, invent the trinity. And circumcision? Right out.
I’d argue, and not just as a theist, it ain’t the same as “there are other gods” either. It’s open to question. If a Jewish mom tells her kids not to leave out cookies and milk and stockings for Santa, she is NOT stating that Santa exists.
What on Earth does that have to do with a triple-Omni God? The Hebrew Bible God is certainly not triple-Omni (and Christianity has to work pretty hard to make the stories fit a triple-Omni God).
Christianity developed as it did precisely because of that Greek and later Roman influence. Not in the areas of logic, at least until much later - that was brabded thoroughly pagan. But other influences, certainly.
That could be because they thought there were other gods, or they did and figured they’d better not say it because the kingdoms believing in those gods had more warriors, swords and chariots than the Hebrews did. So the commandment was ambiguous.
Nothing to do with the tri-omni god per se, but if they were aware of logic maybe they’d have written the Bible with fewer internal contradictions. But I was mostly reacting to the claim that the tools of logic existed for the priests.
“Benevolence” is a relative term, but I think the God of the Hebrew Bible, on the whole, is certainly omnipotent and omniscient. That doesn’t really mesh with Him not knowing where Adam and Eve were in Genesis 3, but so it goes.
Voyager appears to think the people who “wrote” the Bible should have been more internally consistent, but that’s a historical misunderstanding. The text as we have it was written by many different people at different times, and eventually codified into one document. The result isn’t necessarily logical or internally consistent, but if it were, I doubt it would have held people’s interest for 3000 years.