Non-tri-omni big gods?

[lpetrich]

God Not Really Tri-Omni? mentions how believers in supposedly tri-omni gods often act like they believe that these entities have only some of the tri-omni qualities: omnipotence, omniscience, and omnibenevolence.

Most polytheist deities are anything but tri-omni but Greta Christina once described how she believed in a big god that was anything but tri-omni:

Greta Christina's Blog: All-Knowing, All-Powerful, All-Good: Pick Two, or, How Christian Theology Shoots Itself In the Foot

Take my own now- abandoned religious beliefs. Back in my woo days, I believed in a World-Soul, a metaphysical substance that infused all conscious life forms with, well, consciousness; a being made up of all the souls of all the living things in the world, but that was more than just the sum of its parts, a being that had some sort of selfhood or identity.

It wasn't a belief that was supported by any evidence. It wasn't supported by anything, particularly. Except by my own personal vague feeling that consciousness couldn't just be a function of the physical brain, because... well, because it couldn't be. Because it just didn't seem that way.

That's the  Hard problem of consciousness, why we have a sort of subjectivity.

But at no point did I think that the World-Soul was all-powerful, all-knowing, or all-good. In fact, it was very clear to me that it wasn't. I didn't think it was any of these things, much less all of them. Actually, back in my woo days, I often said that the meaning of my life was to add to the learning and enlightenment of the World-Soul. I thought of the World-Soul as a powerful being, certainly wiser and more powerful and more knowledgeable than me... but I still saw it as limited, flawed, with room to learn and grow.

And this made my belief much easier to cling to... and much harder to let go of.

It wasn't a tremendously defensible belief. But it was a lot more defensible than the belief in the completely perfect, completely powerful God who created, and regularly intervenes in, this profoundly flawed world full of cruelty and pain.

She's right about that, though she concedes the attractiveness of the idea of a tri-omni god. "But in many ways, the old, flawed pantheon made a lot more sense." Because that is more like the Universe that we live in.

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

Process Theology. Process Theology has acknowledged that the tri-omni God doesn't work so has abandoned that. Invented by Alfred North Whitehead. The collective material Universe is God's body.

 

[Tigers!]

God Not Really Tri-Omni? mentions how believers in supposedly tri-omni gods often act like they believe that these entities have only some of the tri-omni qualities: omnipotence, omniscience, and omnibenevolence.

Classically the christian's God characteristics were omnipotence, omniscience and omnipresence.
When did it change to omnipotence, omniscience, and omnibenevolence? I missed that announcement.

 

[skepticalbip]

God Not Really Tri-Omni? mentions how believers in supposedly tri-omni gods often act like they believe that these entities have only some of the tri-omni qualities: omnipotence, omniscience, and omnibenevolence.

Classically the christian's God characteristics were omnipotence, omniscience and omnipresence.
When did it change to omnipotence, omniscience, and omnibenevolence? I missed that announcement.

I gotta agree that omnibenevolence did seem to sneak in there uninvited. The bible is slap full of examples of god being a spiteful, vicious, uncaring, sadistic son of a bitch.

 

[Atheos]

To answer Tigers! question the riddle of Epicurus predates Christianity by several centuries, and it references power, knowledge and goodness as the 3 incompatible attributes. Omnipresence is the newcomer that slipped in, not the other way around.

The Problem of Evil definitely doesn't disprove the 2+omnipresent god but it absolutely disproves the 2+omnibenevolent one.

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

God Not Really Tri-Omni? mentions how believers in supposedly tri-omni gods often act like they believe that these entities have only some of the tri-omni qualities: omnipotence, omniscience, and omnibenevolence.

Classically the christian's God characteristics were omnipotence, omniscience and omnipresence.
When did it change to omnipotence, omniscience, and omnibenevolence? I missed that announcement.

With Anselm most likely. Some things are good, some things are better than good, something is the supreme good. That is God. later adopted by Aquinas as one of the 5 proofs of the existence of God, proof by degrees.