(April 1, 2016 at 5:34 pm)athrock Wrote: Even God cannot do something that is contradictory such as make a square triangle or a married bachelor.

Can it make something out of nothing?

(April 1, 2016 at 10:51 pm)Stimbo Wrote:

(April 1, 2016 at 5:34 pm)athrock Wrote: Even God cannot do something that is contradictory such as make a square triangle or a married bachelor.

Can it make something out of nothing?

Yeah, if god can violation the Conservation Laws (Energy, Momentum, Angular Momentum, etc.), why can't he/she/it make a flat triangle whose interior angels sum to something other than 180 degrees?

(April 1, 2016 at 10:51 pm)Stimbo Wrote:

(April 1, 2016 at 5:34 pm)athrock Wrote: Even God cannot do something that is contradictory such as make a square triangle or a married bachelor.

Can it make something out of nothing?

Seems to me that nothing can't be made into something even by a deity.
If it could, then it wouldn't have been nothing.  It would have had a characteristic, the potential to become something through the actions of a deity.
I don't even think we could refer to a nothing because we could name it and then it would have another characteristic, a name.

This is really silly, but no sillier than:

SteveII Wrote:From Wikipedia:


The term omnipotent has been used to connote a number of different positions. These positions include, but are not limited to, the following:

1 A deity is able to do anything that it chooses to do.[1]
2 A deity is able to do anything that is in accord with its own nature (thus, for instance, if it is a logical consequence of a deity's nature that what it speaks is truth, then it is not able to lie).
3 Hold that it is part of a deity's nature to be consistent and that it would be inconsistent for said deity to go against its own laws unless there was a reason to do so.[2]
4 A deity can bring about any state of affairs which is logically possible for anyone to bring about in that situation.
5 A deity is able to do anything that corresponds with its omniscience and therefore with its worldplan.
6 Every action performed in the world is 'actually' being performed by the deity, either due to omni-immanence, or because all actions must be 'supported' or 'permitted' by the deity.

In which a deity's "nature" is invoked to avoid the simpler, straightforward explanation that the deity was made up by bronze age clerics and their ancestors and has no existence other than an incoherent concept in the clerics' minds.  To counter this, apologists have to stretch, twist and torture logic to get to a point where the deity is no longer the logically inconsistent paradoxical thing described. Even then, they are only able to, under special circumstances, argue that such a being could exist, not give actual evidence that one does.

Logic is more powerful than god.

Who created logic? Can God change logic?

(April 1, 2016 at 5:40 pm)athrock Wrote:

(April 1, 2016 at 3:52 pm)Whateverist the White Wrote: But what I wonder about from these reported meetings with Jesus is how the believer goes from the private, intra-psychic experience of being with .. something -> to verifying the alleged omni powers of God.  Presumably it is the immediacy of the meeting which seals the deal, but the content of what gets believed comes from elsewhere.  On account of the experience one becomes resolute in believing a number of things about the nature of God which was in no way conveyed by way of the experience.  Shouldn't that bother people?  What if they're having a genuine experience of some significance and immediately misattributing it out of some pre-existing bias?

Put God in the natural world as an intra-psychic phenomenon or else leave Him in the round file of the supernatural zone.  Your choice.

W-

I would say this about that: If someone MEETS God, I don't think that it will be the case that he or she walks away from that encounter unmoved by the awesomeness of God. I mean, it won't be like striking up a casual conversation about the Mets with the vendor at the train station magazine stand, ya know?

So you doubt what believers experience is a genuine meeting with God? I don't. I think what they experience is actually all there is to God. You guys are always insinuating that God is omni-capable of incredible empirical feats. I think you have that wrong.

(April 1, 2016 at 5:40 pm)athrock Wrote: But at the same time, your point is fair. As a result, I think that someone who has a genuine experience of God will still need to LEARN theology in order to understand what has been reasoned out and gathered from experiences like this from others over the course of several thousand years.

I can't tell that you actually understand my point.

(April 1, 2016 at 5:40 pm)athrock Wrote: IOW, just because Jesus speaks to you in the shower, it does not mean that you will have anything intelligent to say about the hypostatic union or the filioque.

Neither does the experience in the shower suggest anyone needs to learn anything intelligent to say about whatever those things might be. Why should the person trade in the significance they can feel directly in that experience for the conformity of the bible? I don't get it.

I just found out what IOW stands for!

It's been puzzling me for a while. I thought it was "I often wonder" or "I only wish"... but they never quite fitted the context.

My work is done for today.

In other words, the penny finally dropped?

Yup!

Did you notice how if you drop a small coin like a penny you'll probably pick it up again, but if you saw a penny on the floor that no one wants, you'd probably ignore it?

That's not my experience. I'll usually go for anything even apparently numismatic. Though it all depends on what it may have dropped into as to whether I fancy picking it up.

Fair enough!

Yeah, a quid in the urinal is not worth two in the bush.