For instance, creatures may walk, swim, dance, commit suicide, etc… Creatures may choose not to believe in God.
And God can’t.
But if God is omnipotent and superior to creatures, how is it possible? There is something here which seems imperfect in the ordinary concept of God.
not that I believe in god or anything, but why can’t he?
-Imp
To walk, dance and swim, one has to be a spatial being, and God is beyond space.
To commit suicide, one has to be contingent, and God is necessary.
but how do you know god is beyond space? he created it didn’t he? he must have interacted with it at some point…
and god is necessary for whom? besides, if you buy the christian story god did commit suicide (at the hand of the romans or whomever- they call it suicide by cop nowadays, back than it was suicide by crucifiction I suppose, but he was god, he called the shots)… for 3 days at least…
-Imp
For God to be beyond space does not means he has no relation with it. I am speaking of the nature of God, not of the extent of his powers.
And the philosophical god is necessary, regardless of the story of Jesus.
how can anything be known about the nature of god? you limit him with your interpretation…
necessary for what or whom?
-Imp
I don’t make any claim about the real nature of God. I am dealing with a description which have been often used in the context of classical theism, either to support it or to deny it.
To say that God is necessary means that he cannot not exist. He exists by nature (provided that he exists).
You must know all that. Perhaps your questions mean that this attribute does not make sense to you.
God could be in heaven swimming and committing suicide every day for all we known.
Another possibility is that god is in all creatures. So, when you swim he swims and so forth. This is very plausible as you are god’s creation and he has the power to experience the totality of your experience if he desires. In fact, he would be able to do this simultaneously with every creature and thing if he was so inclined.
I think you’re onto something with the statement that creatures can choose not to believe in God. Forget the rest of the things such as swimming, walking etc.
God can hardly not believe in his own existence. I’m sure he is familiar with cogito ergo sum.
Okay, Samkhya, just from a philosophic position? Those things are (almost) all limitations. We must walk from here to there because we are limited in position, and God doesn’t need to, because he’s everywhere. Not believing in God is also a severe limitation of oneself, as one might say suicide is – although a pantheist who believes the universe will contract into itself someday might say the Prime In-Movement can commit a form of suicide. Can God walk (as i think it says in Genesis 2) or dance? Not being able to dance in jubilation seems to me a true limitation, but maybe He dances the Dance of Creation? – compared to which our dance is limited, and perhaps, imitative.
Si vale valeo,
my real name
god cannot be defined… but you make my point in your explaination of necessary… “(provided that he exists)”
it is not provided…
-Imp
Hi Sam,
The classical theistic definition of God might be wrong. The apriori assumptions that have to be made to assign attributes to the concept of ‘God’ are challengable. (Imp has pointed this out) After all of our feeble attempts to say, ‘God is like…’ we still do not know. To posit if-then questions may be fun, but without foundation.
JT
God is in a different position than man, so therefore there are some things God can do that man can’t, and vica versa, all playing in logical (im)possibility. It should be obvious why God can’t cease believing in God- it’s for the same reason that I can’t draw a square circle. Now, one may argue that God can, in fact, walk, swim, and fly, since he appears to have been “God in man” once, according to Christianity. If God can embody Himself, then he can do those sorts of things that a creature can do.
Or, there is something wrong with your concept of of 'omnipotence' and 'supriority'. It sounds very odd indeed to say that Immortality and Omniscience are [i]limiting[/i] because they don't allow one to die or have false beliefs. Are you really just playing with words here?
Ah, I see that My Real Name has covered it better than I did. Carry on! 
EDIT: I will point out one thing, and that is that words can be deformed beyond their usefulness. One may say that a particular Xbox videogame is [i]incapable[/i] of having worse graphics than a particular Atari 2600 videogame. You would be correct, in a sense, to call this a 'limitation'. But if you do, you've done something to the word 'limitation' that makes it less good for what we typically want to use it for.
So, if you insist that a "Truly" omnipotent being would be able to kill itself or have false beliefs, a theist is free to say that God isn't Omnipotent based on the strange definition you've insisted on, and is further free to point out that there is another, more reasonable way to understand "Omnipotence".
Suppose that the Ultimate nature of God is impossible to pin down, it remains a fact that the classical theistic understanding of God is fairly well understood, and IT can be examined just fine. One can evaluate the classical understanding by asking such questions as “Is the ordinary understanding of Omnipotence coherent?”, and this is a very fruitful thing to do. To say that it’s is without foundation sounds like you’re claiming that before one can discuss a particular concept of God, one must convince everyone in the studio audience that that particular conception is actually true, which sounds very perplexing to me.
Uccisore,
You’re right. I shouldn’t have said ‘withoutout foundation’. What I should have said is that you are free to construct any explanation of “God” that you wish. That construction can be based on logic or Tarot cards and enjoy all the internal consistency you can devise. But after all the machinations of mind, “God” escapes the net with which we would enmesh her, and remains ineffable. Positing characteristics, making attributions can be fun, maybe even useful, but only inside the construct.
JT
I think God can walk and even wrestle; didn’t He wrestle Isaac in the Bible and break Isaac’s hip?
It’s simple. If any such thing as God exist than we are better than him. After all in being nessisary he cannot have freedom, in the end he cannot rightly be said to act. For all his actions are a nessisary extension of his nessisary nature. In fact you fall into some sort of Spinoza like pantheism quickly. Sure God exist, be he is only nature. And if there is anything that glorifies man its the conquest of nature. In fact, it could well be said that God created us in order to get rid of him- to be the next stage and the next advancement. Which makes perfect sense, because something good would not bother decreasing the average sum of the universe by creating something lesser than itself.
God is perfect, and he made us imperfect, because imperfect is better.
hi
Please explain.
EZ$