RE: How far reaching are God's powers?
November 11, 2020 at 11:19 am
(This post was last modified: November 11, 2020 at 11:19 am by MilesAbbott81.)
(November 11, 2020 at 11:05 am)Angrboda Wrote: For God, anything short of moral perfection is behaving badly. Would Jesus saving himself have been as moral as sacrificing himself? If not, then he didn't have a choice. You didn't answer my other questions, btw.
This brings up a related question. Is it coherent to think of God as being moral, but not virtuous? If God's virtue demands a sacrifice, he again had no choice.
I suppose you have somewhat of a point here. My only problem with your premise is that since we all deserve to die, Him not sacrificing Himself would have been perfectly just. The problem with that is that He did subject us to this horrible experience in the first place, which would obligate Him to eventually save us, therefore one could view His sacrifice as a responsibility, which any moral character would fulfill.
However, all one must do in this case is rewind to before He created anything at all, and realize that that was when He made the choice. God always has a choice, or He isn't God at all.
I think it's coherent to think of God as being righteous. Moral seems to me to be a human word, since our morals are created in the first place by God. Virtuous I think is basically synonymous with righteous, but I think the latter works better in the context of God because virtue doesn't necessarily imply perfection. I think righteous does. All subjective, of course, those are just my thoughts.
As for your other question, I'm not familiar with Plantinga's free will defense, so I'm afraid I can't thoroughly answer, except to say that free will is an illusion, and that we all behave badly except by the grace of God, so we are automatically all immoral and can't even make a decision to be anything other than that. We're rotten to the core. I don't see how the argument can be applied to God.