How do YOU rationalize away the fact that omnipotence and omniscience are mutually exclusive (see below)?
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Consider:
If God is all-knowing then, for any given situation, he already knows in advance how he is going to intervene (if at all).
But if he already knows THAT, then he is powerless to change his mind and do something different — otherwise, he would have already KNOWN that that was what he was going to do.
Thus, it is impossible for any entity to be both all-knowing and all-powerful.
So…how do YOU pretend like this paradox doesn’t actually exist?
Indeed — should you even BOTHER? I mean, wouldn’t it actually make more sense if your God WASN’T both all-knowing and all-powerful? It’d certainly require a lot less tap-dancing around the issues, like trying to explain:
* Why God had to go LOOKING for Adam & Eve after they ate from the Tree of Knowledge?
* Why God would repent of creating humanity, when he knew from the outset how it was going to turn out?
* Why God would trust the writing and dissemination of His Word to flawed and untrustworthy humans, when he’d already set the precedent for writing things down himself with the Ten Commandments?
* And on, and on…?
Your thoughts?
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18 Comments
December 5th, 2009 at 6:11 am
1Cor.14:34-35 Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience as also saith the law.
35 And if they will learn any thing, let them ask their husbands at home: for it is a shame for women to speak in the church.
December 5th, 2009 at 7:10 am
Get over yourself.
December 5th, 2009 at 8:05 am
A good question, if it hadn’t been solved about one thousand years ago by St. Peter Damian, who stated God acts out of time.
Thus, he cannot see the future, as there is no future and past for him.
December 5th, 2009 at 8:40 am
You are assuming that God is obedient to time. Taking a logical approach (as I see you have); If God is not obedient to time, and we alone must abide by it’s rules, then our decisions are eternal, and what we choose now and tomorrow are judge on an eternal scale. If you read The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis, you will find an excellent description of this theory. Yes, theory. Just as your logical explanation is a theory.
Being that God is all-powerful, you cannot deny that He is not obedient to time… even if you are only analyzing Him from a hypothetical view. “All-powerful” states the limitless, and thus he is not limited to time.
sly phy .. ouija bonfire::: Remember, even if we are talking about this hypothetically (which I assume you are), then you have to consider the fact that God is far beyond our understanding, and therefore you cannot subject an all-powerful being to the same conditions in which our “thoughts” are considered. Yes, our thoughts require time, but an entity that is all-powerful, hypothetical or literal, cannot be limited.
NOTE: I’ve noticed that the atheists (who claim that logic and science are their gods) are discrediting the most logical statements here… call them sore losers or call them idiots… but it seems they just don’t want to accept anything that doesn’t put shame to Christians and/or God.
If you don’t believe in God, you sure do hate someone a lot… someone that you supposedly don’t believe exsists…
December 5th, 2009 at 9:01 am
@Peadar & Gabriel – this is the worst solution I have ever heard.
without observance of time how can God ‘decide’ to create the universe?
A decision is a mind-state change in time.
You can’t have it both ways.
@Gabriel – true but there are paradoxes that even superbeings can not escape and this is what we are talking about.
To simply state that God is greater and can not be known is a losing argument by default. If God can not be known then we can not know God which makes God completely pointless from our perspective – God might as well not exist.
If on the other hand you believe there are things that are known about God (say for example all the rubbish printed in the bible) then you must agree that some inferences can be drawn against that knowledge.
Once again – you can’t have it both ways.
December 5th, 2009 at 9:52 am
the flying spaghetti monster, doesn’t have to answer to the likes of you infidel ,
December 5th, 2009 at 10:46 am
“god acts out of time”?
Isn’t that just a bit like saying “well my friend’s invisible. He really is there you just can’t see him”
It’s another little bit of meaningless sophistry, another “god moves in mysterious ways” excuse
Either a god acts on and in this universe and is omniscient and omnipotent as described or it doesn’t – and therefore isn’t a god
December 5th, 2009 at 11:19 am
I was going to mention Lewis’ work.
Do you * really * think that you’ve stumbled upon something new? Some previously unknown wrench in the whole works? Perhaps I’ll chuck the whole thing in response.
You give yourself far too much credit.
December 5th, 2009 at 11:45 am
Have you heard the verse that says, “My ways are not your ways and my thoughts are not your thoughts?”
I believe that God will show us answers to questions such as this one but I don’t think He will do it when someone challenges Him to prove Himself through their logic and He won’t show things to people who are outside the kingdom of God, either.
If you want to know the deep things of God you need to approach Him on His terms and Jesus told Nicodemus, “You must be Born Again to see The Kingdom of God.”
December 5th, 2009 at 12:01 pm
God is real.
he doesn’t care about the daily routines of human or world existence.
December 5th, 2009 at 12:34 pm
Only an all-knowing and all-powerful God could be aware of future events but choose to not disturb Man’s free will choice. The concept of unrestricted free will permits man to make free will choices even though the result was already known to God.
December 5th, 2009 at 1:11 pm
God is beyond out ability to comprehend, therefore we cannot disprove him through logic and terminology that we as humans created
December 5th, 2009 at 1:49 pm
This is why God invented The Multiple Worlds.
December 5th, 2009 at 2:37 pm
I agree that it is a paradox, but only if you use the first definition of the word: “a statement or proposition that seems self-contradictory or absurd but in reality expresses a possible truth.”
Dealing with God’s foreknowledge is very difficult for us because we have so little in our own world that we can use as a base of understanding. We have no ability to see into the future, so we don’t understand how God can and how this can be done without violating some rule of logic. God has not shared the details of how this works, but I have some thoughts on the subject that I have developed from reading some thinkers about the subject over time.
I think that you have to start by understanding that God is not in time–he is outside of time. What happens in the future to us is not something that is fixed in any sort of way in God’s eyes. He has said certain things will happen in the future (according to the Bible), but very few details have been exposed. But we have to remember that God is not living in time like we are, so when God says things will happen it isn’t because he is seeing into the future — rather, he is seeing what is the present to him.
Like the author of a good book who knows how the story will end, he is able to write the history as it goes forward. He is free to change his mind in response to the requests and petitions made to him because he can change the ending at the same time. In doing so , he does not somehow violate his omniscience about future events because they have not yet been fully written because he has written it, is writing it and will write it. In this sense, God’s omniscience means that he knows not only THE future, but all possible futures. He will not choose a future that would destroy his overall revealed plan, but there is no reason that he cannot choose any number of variations as he goes along.
Does God ultimately know which future he will choose? Since he exists outside of time, yes. Does that mean he has no power to choose? No, he already made the choice and is continuing to make the choice. If that is paradoxical in the first definitional sense, then so be it.
December 5th, 2009 at 3:04 pm
My thoughts are that God’s creatures are predictable to God. He knows them so intimately, that his “All-knowing”-ness about the future has to do with his knowing our nature and being wise beyond our comprehension.
The people who go crazy most do so because they are “logical” to a fault. Mathematicians, logicians… meth addicts. You are depersonalizing God and turning him into a riddle of sorts to figure out. You’re thinking in terms of Aristotle’s god, and not the Bible God. You’ll go nuts doing that.
God intervened many times in the Bible with warnings for people to change. In his covenant with Israel he said their faithfulness to his covenant would determine if it was everlasting. Why warn if there’s no hope that people can alter the future by their actions?
God is not some riddle to solve. He is a somebody that, from our vantage point, is incomprehensible to us.
EDIT- reading some of the answers you’ve received it appears that you’re not the only person who has confused Aristotle’s God with the God of the Bible.
Christianity used some of Aristotle’s arguments to prove monotheism a superior belief over polytheism, but the apologetics wasn’t intended to promote Aristotle’s concept of God as superior to what is revealed in sacred scripture.
December 5th, 2009 at 3:52 pm
Pretend for a moment that “language” does not exist. If we had no words and language/languages did not exist and we could only communicate with/through our spirits/spiritually; and there was only God’s Holy Spirit and your/our spirit in existence; the spirit would either accept or reject God’s Spirit. Essentially, this is the bottom line. God DID give us words and especially His Holy Word; but it is the spirit that must decide. God’s Word is alive and living today; but if you reject the Holy Spirit; you reject it as well. You will not find God in ‘explanations’ and logic (though I believe that it is logical to believe IMO). When/if you trust Him with your spirit; all of these questions will become so clear to you because you will be spiritually alive then and able to comprehend. Spiritually dead people cannot comprehend God.
December 5th, 2009 at 4:27 pm
Hi,
Omnipotence was never used by knowledgeable christians to mean “able to do anything” but to mean that God can do whatever he wants to. That’s a huge difference.
So God does not want to change his mind because is mind is always perfect.
Your “why” could be explained in two ways:
=> God uses anthropomorphic languages to be understandable by humans.
=> He does anything he wants to and he does not need to have you understand it. So he can sometimes write, sometimes give his message to another. Or he can decide to have a visible form to search for Adam and Eve instead of burning them right the thoughts of sin came.
Regards,
Emmanuel
December 5th, 2009 at 5:13 pm
Philosophically, I have to disagree with your premise. I completely agree that omnipotence and omiscience cannot be reconciled with free will. However, I do see that they can be reconciled with each other. I can concieve of an omnipotent being, who can control time, being able to simultaniously control and know multiple futures, across multiple “dimensions.” Einstein showeed that we are just beginning to understand the relationship and interchangability between time and space and matter.
But I do agree with your points about questioning the logic behind creating something you know will fail, and the need to create anything at all. Such a God would have no needs or wants, and it is obvious that no God such as the Christian God could exist.