God and Omnipotence/God and morality

[Cheerful Charlie]

A few thoughts on this thread. This really isn't about omnipotence, but its about the nature of God and Perfect God theology. If God is of necessity is a perfect being, God is then necessarily perfectly good, that is impeccable. The real problem is how to reconcile God's perfection and moral perfect with the existence of evil, moral and natural evil. It naturally follows if God is perfectly good, and creates all and is omnipotent, there should be far less evil than we observe. Anselm of Bec wrote that some thing are good, some more good and thus something must be supremely good, that is God. This idea later became one of Aquinas' 5 ways, proof of God.

How then do we reconcile all of this? Luther and Calvin and others gave up trying, because it is impossible. They simply stated God is incomprehensible. Logic and reason are abandoned. The Arminian/Catholic way is to pretend its a matter of free will of mortals, and to misread the Bible, Calvin and Luther and others have called them on that.

Omnigenesis scuttles that also. We can have no free will if God creates all and is omniscient. Luther in his Bondage of the Will demonstrates the Bible leaves no possible free will, Calvin agrees.

Not much of this is new. Except (as far as I know) maybe omnigenesis as I have formulated it. But perfect being theology isn't new, nor are the problems that claim raises. Its an old issue theologians have wrestled with to find an answer for centuries.

The great potter who makes some elect and some reprobate at random does not seem to me to be a perfect being and perfectly good, morally impeccable. YMMV. Stay focused.

 

[rizdek]

I agree with you.

I wouldn't have called out atheists HERE at this website, because of all groups, most seem to have shed NOT just their belief that a god exists but even beliefs of what a god might even be. That, I think, is a useful outcome of atheism. I not only don't think there is a god, but I can't even imagine what a god might be like except, it seems, it must somehow be able to create things and has some sort of personality. Even that is uncertain. But if it doesn't have personhood, make decisions and create anything, why call it a god? Certainly there is nothing contradictory in a god who doesn't care about humans. Why should it? IMHO, it is sheer hubris for atheist and theist alike to imagine the only kind of god would be one interested in the goings on of humans.

But that aside, it seems to me that it is the theist, particularly the Christian theist, who so often demonstrates to me that they have absolutely NO concept of what true omnipotence might be. The problem of evil comes to mind. There are theodicies coming out the ying yang. But ALL of them depend on a God having to concede one thing to get another thing. Sorry, but that simply does not have to happen. If it does, we're just talking about a person here who doesn't as you say, control everything. If an omnipotent god wants freewill without suffering, he can have freewill without suffering. It is NOT a logical contradiction, it is a concession that this world with this exact amount of evil was necessary and exactly what an omnipotent god wanted. Referencing the trolley dilemma, there IS a person at the controls who is operating the train and your forced decision of whether to allow the deaths of 5 as opposed to the death of 1 is an arbitrary test of YOUR ability make decisions that an omnipotent god already knows you're going to make.

I can't demonstrate or prove that a world created differently would be better, but I contend that a god who is omnipotent (and omniscient to boot) would be able to do it if it wanted to.


"And we don't need to posit a God to explain existence. "

Exactly, put simply, positing a god solves nothing and in fact increases exponentially the difficulty in explaining anything. Even if there is a god, its existence explains nothing. It still doesn't tell us HOW matter/energy was created. Like the old example, if someone asks the question "how do you tie shoe laces." The answer, "my mother ties my shoe laces" is not useful or astute. It still doesn't tell us HOW to tie shoe laces.

Neither does positing the existence of a god answer any question of WHY. It does not tell use why things are the way they are. Even if a god decided to do it this way, we don't know why he decided to do it this way. Saying "things are this way because a god wanted them this way" does not answer why in any useful sense. More importantly it still doesn't answer the big question of WHY there is something rather than nothing. By positing a god one has created something else for which the question "why" can be asked. Not only do we not know why there is a physical universe instead of another kind of universes. But now we also don't know WHY there is a god instead of no god.

 

[rizdek]

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