From: utzoo!utcsrgv!donald
Newsgroups: net.religion
Title: Omnipotence considered harmful
Article-I.D.: utcsrgv.1243
Posted: Tue Apr  5 15:20:35 1983
Received: Tue Apr  5 15:47:40 1983

Ralph's (watmath!rtris) reply to Yigal brings up an interesting topic
(far more interesting than sniping at the Bible, which I lost interest
in a long time ago).

For the moment, let "God" refer to the traditional Judaeo-Christian diety.
God is OMNIPOTENT (ponder upon the true meaning of that word).
It is not apparent that anything that He does has any cost to Him; that
includes things like sending Jesus to die on earth.  Does it make any sense
to claim that God sacrificed his only son for us, and get emotional about it?

>From a reductionist point of view one could say that God merely caused
a sequence of quantum-level events to happen, such the macroscopic
appearance was that of a man apparently born of a virgin, who went about
the business of disseminating His opinions.  Can an OMNIPOTENT God be
sensibly said to have been distressed by the crucifixion of Jesus,
anymore than V'ger would have been distressed by the loss of the Ilya probe?
(sorry for the Star Trek reference)

It seems to us that there is a great amount of injustice in the world.
Does God sanction this? Getting down to brass tacks:
God created the universe.  Since He is omnipotent, at that time He knew
all of what was going to happen as a result, in precise detail.

Consider an event E in the universe.  If E happens, then God must have
known it would happen, indeed He caused it, for He created the initial
conditions of the universe so that it would come about.  Thus, one can't
say that God doesn't want E to happen.

If someone doesn't want something to happen, then if it is within his power
to stop it, he stops it from happening.  In the case of God, it is always
within His power to rearrange the universe to cause or un-cause an event.
Thus, any event that happens was intended to happen by God.

Conclusion:  if God didn't INTEND for the world to be like this then He
cannot be all-powerful.  I don't think Christians can have their cake and
eat it too.

I get the impression that the Christian view of God is highly anthropocentric,
and that seems to me to detract from His omnipotence.  But then I think that
the Christian view of a personal deity doesn't require strict omnipotence.
That way, a Christian can say that there is injustice in the world, but
God doesn't want it that way.  God is no longer omnipotent, but He is more
human.

I don't think it makes sense to say that "God loves us" if that god is
truly all-powerful.  The verb "love" loses its meaning when the subject is
omnipotent.  Most verbs like that only have meaning when the subject has
certain human limitations (yeah, Doctor McCoy was right).
Is it just hubris to require omnipotence of one's god?


				Violating the Prime Directive,
				Don Chan