There’s a fair bit of talk about “omnipotent beings”. Is such a thing possible, in terms of human understanding?
I’ve already seen on this board it mentioned that it’s impossible to have 1 + 1 = 1 (for example) - that is, it’s impossible to have mathematical/logical impossibilia. Another example is the old classic the immovable object - an object that the being couldn’t create for the obvious reason(s).
So where does the being’s power end? Is he just a man with a hell of a lot of energy at his disposal? A man who can pull all kinds of strings, but within limits?
My hunch is that god (as we may call him) is inconceivable at best, and non-existable at worst, and that we therefore shouldn’t do things on the basis of his postulated existence.
Hey look. If an omipotent being exists it has to be one that’s logical. That solves it. It’s over. Now it just depends on whether that being exists.
Now Omniscience I’m not so sure, that one I’ve heard is a paradox but I’ve never studied it. Not sure if it’s possible for a being to know all things. If that’s not possible then an omnipotent being doesn’t have that ability. But all abilities that are possible a omnipotent being has.
But there must be other limts as well as the immediate logical ones. For example, he mustn’t be able to know the future, otherwise he could tamper with it, giving rise to paradoxes.
I think we’re dealing with nothing more than masses of power.
Well I think I discussed that with omniscience, it could be used the same in logic. Knowing everything that is possible to know. Is it possible to know the future? Doesn’t seem likely, and if it’s not so than no an omnipotent being would not possess this skill, but he’d possess all that was possible. The being who is omnipotent would be the greatest and most powerful, most capable being. That’s how I see an omnipotent being if one existed. And of course if it’s not logical the word omnipotence loses it’s meaning anyway. Usually though, the omnipotent being is used in religion many times, by people with low knowledge of logic, and you here them say God can do anything! That’s why! But most schooled apologetists and people who know logic as religionists will tell you the same thing I’ve said, that for an omnipotent being to exist it must be logical, but… I guess there’s always that small chance that an omnipotent could do mutually exclusive things, could contradict itself, could do things that seem impossible, and then it arises that maybe all of these he can’t do either at the same time. Then the world is turned upside down and I see that as chaotic, too chaotic for me.
I will say I’ve heard a defense of omniscience before that I kinda like. For instance a tree will grow, you know it will be a tree, but you don’t know what it will look like or which way it will bend, or how many limbs it has. And possibly this is how an omniscient being could see the future events. Quite possibly the being is so intelligent it can calculate our choices based off many determining factors and reach a conclusion. Who knows, those are just ideas for the sake of representation, it’s not an argument just thoughts.
Let me stir the pot a bit. Is knowing the future the same thing as being able to correctly guess the future 100% of the time? I don’t mean to ask if it’s practically the same, it certainly is. I’m asking if it leads to the same logical problems.
As far as power is concerned, I tend to agree that God isn’t Omnipotent in the way that atheists use the word. No term like that appears in the Bible that I know of. But He is very powerful, and I think the best way to define his amount of power would be to say “such that it is impossible for anything to be more powerful than He.”
And you will most certainly know that whenever you want sex.
God’s mood be done!
And God said, “Let there be sex, and it was so, and God experienced the sex and God said that it was good [size=42]or at least as good as could be expected, given that a speedy little man was involved[/size]”.
I am not saying that God is illogical. If you read Club 29’s posts you will see that he has questioned every attribute of his understanding of God except logic. But, perhaps the problem really does lie in our understanding of what it means to exist. Thanks.
If an omnipotent all-powerful being can be categorized or somehow separated, is it marginalized? I mean, if it can be defined by human understanding in any way, then isn’t it limited? Doesn’t it have to have logical limits or constraints for humans to have any logical understanding of it? It seems there are many paradoxes we run into with the idea of an omnipotent all-powerful being that is separate from anything in the universe. I think the idea that an Omnipotent Being could be separate, as its own being, from anything existing creates one such paradox.
