omnipotence (spinoff thread)

[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.

[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.

[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.