(June 5, 2022 at 6:15 pm)Thumpalumpacus Wrote: Who said the hypothetical demon you may be worshipping is omnipotent? I sure didn't. I pointed out that you, by your own logic, have no way of knowing that you're not worshipping a demon -- not because that hypothetical demon is omniscient, but because you've already admitted that you don't have all the facts at your command.
You can't really argue "we don't know, because we believe he's omniscient", and then claim to know whether what you're worshipping is omniscient or not.
Put shortly, if you can't know the panoply of your god's decisionin', you can't know if he is actually a god or not. So just believe what you believe.
Remember: you cannot know what goes into your god's decisions, according to your own argument. It follows that you cannot know if he knows everything, or simply knows more than you ... or simply doesn't exist.
I think you're entirely missing the context of this thread. We assume we know God exists here for the sake of this discussion, usually for independent reasons that have nothing to do with his benevolence/malevolence. And by God we mean the object of worship as defined in classical theism, e.g. omnipotent and omniscient.
With this in mind, you don't get to say : "the purported demon isn't omnipotent" because in this case we're no longer under this hypothetical, and we need to have a separate discussion about the existence of God. And I assume, of course, that you have no independent reasons for believing a non-omnipotent demon exists.
