RE: If you learned that the god of [insert religion] is real, would all bets be off?
January 7, 2024 at 11:01 pm
(This post was last modified: January 7, 2024 at 11:38 pm by Sicnoo0.
Edit Reason: kajndsf
)
(January 7, 2024 at 10:52 pm)Belacqua Wrote:ok, so you agree that any real god would have to have some limitations(January 7, 2024 at 10:44 pm)Sicnoo0 Wrote: if I woke up to learn that god is real, I'd be very confident that he is not fully, truly omnipotent. I'd still cling to my sense of what's logically possible or impossible.
As you know, I'm sure, there are a lot of different versions of God, even among Christians. Some of them make more sense than others.
Generally the serious theologians don't hold that "omnipotent" means "can do anything." So Thomas Aquinas, for example, is clear that God couldn't create a 4-sided triangle.
In this tradition, "omnipotent" has to do with potentialities and actualities. Good old Aristotelian stuff. God is said to be full actualization with no potentiality, but such a thingy is said to be necessary for any potentiality in the world to be actualized. So "omnipotent" in that case means "the source and actualizer of all potential."
I'm not arguing this is something you should believe -- only that this is a description of God which doesn't include logical paradoxes.
thank you