RE: Is God a logical contradiction?
July 29, 2019 at 6:07 am
(This post was last modified: July 29, 2019 at 6:08 am by Belacqua.)
(July 29, 2019 at 5:42 am)Tom Fearnley Wrote: Belaqua: "I've already addressed this. When theologians say that God is intelligent, it is not in the same way that a person is intelligent. If you skipped my description of this before you can look again, at my first post here. "
So in what way is God intelligent?
You've been saying he is, not me.
I say that according to theologians he's omniscient, in that he and the truth are one. All the things that people may know are at one with him.
Quote:"He takes no actions. This would require change, and he doesn't change.
He causes things to be and to change because of what he is, but this doesn't require his own change"
Wouldn't causing things to change required a change of thought?
Here's an analogy:
The guy who plays Thor is asleep on a park bench. He's doing nothing, has no plans. Yet he causes action all around him, because people react to him. This is the Neoplatonic view: God causes action in the world because the world is motivated to be like him or near him.
That's just one analogy, but it might serve as an example of how something that doesn't act causes action.
Quote:Create a universe?
I don't know of any arguments about how God created the universe at a point in time. Normally "creation" is taken by these people to mean a thing that must be the case in order for other things to be the case. For example, for human life to exist, the warmth of the sun must exist. For the warmth of the sun to exist, the sun must exist. For the sun to exist, hydrogen has to exist. For hydrogen to exist, space/time has to exist. For space/time to be the case, existence itself must be the case. The basic thing that must at root be the case is existence, but existence isn't caused by something that exists, because that would mean that something existed before existence. So God -- the case that all other cases rely on -- is existence.