(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.
So how, exactly, does God know that She's NOT a brain in a vat?
