omnipotence (spinoff thread)

[© tweed]

Scott locked the atonement for sins thread, which is his prerogative, but there was a discussion within the discussion that I'd like to return to.


Scott astutely noted in Reply #18 that my statement in Reply #17, "in order to defeat that underworld God had to take human form", was very possibly inconsistent with the concept of an omnipotent God.  how could an omnipotent God be compelled to do anything?  compelled by what?  to Scott Ernest replied, in Reply #20, "It depends on one's conception of omnipotent.  Strictly speaking "omnipotent" means having all the power that it is possible to have, not that one has the power to do anything."



so from here I have a few questions.  if it there are powers that it is not possible for God to have -- where does this closed range of possibilities come from?  what exactly is God constrained by, are there rules He must obey?  and if so where did these rules come from, do they not then point to a being higher than God, surely a contradiction within the confines of Christian theology?

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

Well as I mentioned in another thread, C. S. Lewis in The Problem of Pain pointed out that God cannot do the logically impossible.  He can't make red blue, nor can can he make 2+2=5.

In my own theology that helps explain why there is evil, without any need to attribute it to God or a second supernatural power. It is logically impossible for us to both have free will and to not have evil, since free will implies the ability to choose and thus evil must be an option or there is no free will.  Paradoxically, while we have free will, if God is good, then God has no free will, but is constrained to always select the good choice.

[Mad Deadly Worldwide Communist Gangster Computer God]

If you take God as the ground of all being - the driving force behind all that is possible and the component that makes all things what they are - then I do not believe you can limit God by what is "possible."  You can argue that God adheres to His own rule and does not violate His laws of nature (excepting, say, miracles), but you cannot say that it is impossible for God to make a square-circle, or heavy rock He cannot lift, because the human idea of what is possible is not the dominant one.  To think otherwise is to assume there is a force higher than God that is limiting Him, and once you do that you've created an endless loop with no dominant force or being at the end of the tunnel.

[© tweed]

so we seem to be holding that the idea that God could provide a road to salvation without assuming form and suffering death to be (or must-be) logically impossible in the way of square circles of 2 + 2 = 5?

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

If you take God as the ground of all being - the driving force behind all that is possible and the component that makes all things what they are - then I do not believe you can limit God by what is "possible."  You can argue that God adheres to His own rule and does not violate His laws of nature (excepting, say, miracles), but you cannot say that it is impossible for God to make a square-circle, or heavy rock He cannot lift, because the human idea of what is possible is not the dominant one.  To think otherwise is to assume there is a force higher than God that is limiting Him, and once you do that you've created an endless loop with no dominant force or being at the end of the tunnel.

Within Euclidean (or even non-Euclidean) geometry it is impossible for even God to make a figure satisfy the conditions of being a square and a circle at the same time.  One of the properties of a circle is that at any point along a circle, you can construct one and only one tangent line. At the vertex of of any polygon, unless the angle of intersection of the sides is 180° there is no tangent line.  While it is true that God need not use our conception of geometry, he can't within the selected axioms of geometry make a square that is a circle. (Altho in non-Euclidean geometry, anyone can make a quadrilateral that is a circle since in non-Euclidean geometry a quadrilateral is not constrained to having the sum of its angles be 360°.)

As for the old bromide about whether God can make a rock too heavy for him to lift, the less said about it the better.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

so we seem to be holding that the idea that God could provide a road to salvation without assuming form and suffering death to be (or must-be) logically impossible in the way of square circles of 2 + 2 = 5?

Yes.  Tho in this case, I feel the limit is not in God, but in Man, who was unwilling to accept another path and God could not compel Man to accept salvation without causing Man to lose free will.  Clearly Man having free will must be good, otherwise God would not permit us to have free will.

[Mad Deadly Worldwide Communist Gangster Computer God]

If you take God as the ground of all being - the driving force behind all that is possible and the component that makes all things what they are - then I do not believe you can limit God by what is "possible."  You can argue that God adheres to His own rule and does not violate His laws of nature (excepting, say, miracles), but you cannot say that it is impossible for God to make a square-circle, or heavy rock He cannot lift, because the human idea of what is possible is not the dominant one.  To think otherwise is to assume there is a force higher than God that is limiting Him, and once you do that you've created an endless loop with no dominant force or being at the end of the tunnel.

Within Euclidean (or even non-Euclidean) geometry it is impossible for even God to make a figure satisfy the conditions of being a square and a circle at the same time.  One of the properties of a circle is that at any point along a circle, you can construct one and only one tangent line. At the vertex of of any polygon, unless the angle of intersection of the sides is 180° there is no tangent line.  While it is true that God need not use our conception of geometry, he can't within the selected axioms of geometry make a square that is a circle. (Altho in non-Euclidean geometry, anyone can make a quadrilateral that is a circle since in non-Euclidean geometry a quadrilateral is not constrained to having the sum of its angles be 360°.)

As for the old bromide about whether God can make a rock too heavy for him to lift, the less said about it the better.

But isn't God the very reason those axioms exist?  Sure.  Logically, God could not make a square that is a circle, but the laws of logic are the laws that were set by God, and those laws cannot govern the one Who determines them.  That would imply that God created something more powerful than Himself.  Indeed, if God cannot violate that law, then why can't He?  This problem can only be resolved if we understand God's laws themselves as God, rather than as a product of creation, and that's akin to Spinozism.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

But isn't God the very reason those axioms exist?  Sure.  Logically, God could not make a square that is a circle, but the laws of logic are the laws that were set by God, and those laws cannot govern the one Who determines them.  That would imply that God created something more powerful than Himself.  Indeed, if God cannot violate that law, then why can't He?  This problem can only be resolved if we understand God's laws themselves as God, rather than as a product of creation, and that's akin to Spinozism.

Who says that logic is a creation of God and not of Man?  Certainly our conception of geometry is a creation of Man which we use to help us understand the Universe.  Consider Genesis 2:19-20.  Much as the man named each animal, whatever the man called each geometric figure, that was its name. So the man gave names to all the Platonic solids, the polygons in the plane and all the hyperbolic surfaces.

[Mad Deadly Worldwide Communist Gangster Computer God]

But isn't God the very reason those axioms exist?  Sure.  Logically, God could not make a square that is a circle, but the laws of logic are the laws that were set by God, and those laws cannot govern the one Who determines them.  That would imply that God created something more powerful than Himself.  Indeed, if God cannot violate that law, then why can't He?  This problem can only be resolved if we understand God's laws themselves as God, rather than as a product of creation, and that's akin to Spinozism.

Who says that logic is a creation of God and not of Man?  Certainly our conception of geometry is a creation of Man which we use to help us understand the Universe.  Consider Genesis 2:19-20.  Much as the man named each animal, whatever the man called each geometric figure, that was its name. So the man gave names to all the Platonic solids, the polygons in the plane and all the hyperbolic surfaces.

We use logic to understand established truths.  If the universe was established differently, we would still have logic and geometry to make sense of it, but it wouldn't be the same logic that we are familiar with.  Man gave names to the shapes because man knew that they were there through observation.  I will concede at this point that reality is, to an extent, subjective (for example, the color we know as pink doesn't actually exist; it is a product of our brains selectively mixing red and blue, as there are no pink wavelengths), but there are many elements of reality that we cannot quite muster a case against or use to doubt our use of logic.