How essential is the "All-Powerful" Definition of

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Sophisticated theologians have defined God as omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, and omnibenevolent. I'm sure it took a while for this definition to trickle down to the average member of the faithful flock (as I've been told certain ministers refer to their congregations). My question for today's monotheists, particularly Christian or other Abrahamic monotheists (you Zoroastrians just aren't on the top of my mind at the moment, sorry) is how essential is this doctrine to your faith? Is your God limited somehow?

I'm beginning to think omnipotence and the rest aren't that important, after all. This pop evangelism site - Christian Answers Net - has said that God cannot do (hence is limited in power by) what is impossible by the laws of logic.

http://www.christiananswers.net/q-aiia/ ... cles2.html

Of course, since this is from a section of a site that is meant as an outreach to atheists and skeptics, it may not be representative of what average Christians believe.

So I ask, how important are the four "Omni"s when it comes to definng God?

Well, part of the view about limitation also depends on how one views the laws of logic. If the laws of logic are just matters of coherence, consistency, and all of that, then why should it really be viewed as a limitation to say that a being must be consistent?

Even further though, if it was written into the definition of a being's capabilities as defying logic, then how could the defiance of logic actually be a disproof of such an entity? I mean, one has to rate the likelihood that logic always holds above the likelihood that such a being exists, but that's all that one must do. (and there are notions of logic that are cynical to the idea that logic is always true, and I think that Quine's view falls into this category given his attack on analyticity in the Two Dogmas of Empiricism)

Didn't Quine retreat from that view a bit latter or was it other theorists who reconstructed his "web of belief" into a badminton racket with logic as the hard edge?

I don't know honestly. I'm stealing this more from philosopher Stephen Law to be honest.

http://stephenlaw.blogspot.com/2008/08/ ... phers.html

I'm bluffing from secondary works as well.

Hey, well, that works. I am not surprised in either of our cases. I don't know your source, but mine is somewhat authoritative, and honestly I don't think it matters whether Quine literally espoused the view so much as whether it can reasonably be attached to his work.

The consensus that I have observed seems to be that omniscience does not extend to God contradicting His own nature- ie God can not sin, can not lie, cannot cease to be God.

Anyways, most of the laity probably implicitly holds to a non-omnipotent God when the invoke free will, because human free will and an omnipotent/omniscient God are incompatible.

Passing lightly over questions about logic, I will cut to the chase:

Though a goodly number of professional and amateur theologians, miss the point, and religion-focussed human institutions pervert the point, for us here and now figuring God is comparable to extrapolating how the rest of the universe looks from inside a black hole.

We have a limited number of statements attributed to God himself, and millenia of academic logical and political thinktanks defining doctrines.

In school I was taught electrons flow from the positive end of the battery to the negative. In tech school I was told that holes migrate from the negative to the positive end. In real life I push the button and usually something lights up.

Yes, we can yack back and forth about what omnipotence really means and how Thou Shalt Not Kill relates to mandated ethnic cleansing when the twelve tribes moved in on the promised land and whether communion involves transsubstatiation, consubstatiation, or none of the above.

And we can blackball Giorgio from church membership because he derinks a sixpack a week and does not think ordination makes the pastor somebody special.

But definitions do not change facts, and allegiance matters mostly to the humans.

Omnipotent is a show stopper. It leads directly to a logical contradiction. It becomes literally impossible to say anything sensible, comprehensible or coherent about an omnipotent god.

In addition to that, if God is responsible to any degree for the structure of the lumbar region of the human spine, then He is Incompetent.

ruveyn

Also, omniscience leads to a dead god. Omnipresence leads to a god that can't be conscious. Omnibenevolent leads to me not existing, because only a stupid god would love me. That was a joke, but I don't see how any god can be all loving without being all nurturing.

I don't see how "omniscience leads to a dead god". Especially given that often the theistic notion of God is also timeless from the start.

I also don't see how omnipresence negates consciousness.

I can see your point about all-loving and all-nurturing.

I wonder why these omniwhatever questions keep coming up and keep getting the same answers. Is there any consciousness as to how mechanical the process is and how ineffective it is on changing anybody's opinions or beliefs? Apparently intelligent people do this dumb verbal dance over and over and over. I wonder why.

If a god knew everything and had unlimited computational abilities, at the start of the universe it would use chaos theory to predetermine every event to ever happen, and seeing as it caused them, and knew every thought it would ever have, would have no reason to ever think again.

If this same god was omnipresent, it wouldn't be able to get thoughts from one side of it's brain to another fast enough to make coherent thoughts, and would therefor rely on a different system than consciousness. You can't have a brain be too big before funny things start happening. This last section is based off the absence of the previous ones. If your omniscient, then you really don't need to be omnipresent, because you already know what's going on everywhere.

That's the short version.

If god is timeless, then god never thinks in the first place. That being said, if god is in time, then god will think thoughts even knowing in advance what they will be simply because beings think as they act.


So you are saying that a god's divine thoughts have a speed limit? Why can't instantaneous actions occur? It is not as if spirits are bound by physics. (and this could get weird, but weird in ways that are why some theists say God is timeless)

If god is omniscient, then it doesn't need to act. After the initial speeds and directions of all the particles have been set, god would only have to sit back and enjoy the show. Everything was planned from the start, as in the first moment of creation. It doesn't need to interfere after that. Because this god knows exactly what will happen and has no need to act, it is as good as dead, simply because it no longer thinks.

If there was no speed limit to god's thinking, than god would be omniscient due to its infinite computation abilities. Assuming that god is omnipresent and not omniscient would require their be a speed limit to its thoughts. If we are to assume that it is omnipresent and omniscient, then the above argument comes in.

I love chaos theory.

Um... if god is omniscient, even though the initial uses of particles may be sufficient for a lot, there is no reason why this being would never want something that requires direct intervention to achieve, for instance an occurrence that would otherwise be considered miraculous.

Also "as good as dead" is certainly a questionable assumption. What if god through some means is really the sustainer of matter? Also, if god is considered timeless, such an entity is still relevant but never would be considered "alive".


A thought can lack a speed limit while the overall computations might take time. For instance, part of god in the Andromeda notices that a black hole is forming. Even though all of the information is available, it is still logically possible that god could suffer a sensory overload due to being unable to process all of the information or still lack the cognitive abilities to predict future aspects of the formation of this black hole despite getting on the spot information about each functioning of it, both of which would mean that god is not omniscient.