[Serious] Could an omnipotent and omniscient god prove that he was God?

[Objectivist]

No, the argument is that if an omnipotent god wanted us to know it existed and have a relationship with it then we'd know and have a relationship with it.

Right. You're saying IF an omnipotent god wanted a certain thing, he would certainly do certain things. 

My response is that we don't know what an omnipotent omniscient God would do. We don't know what it would want for us, if anything. 

Also, if God is the ground of being and the form of the good and the actualization of all potentials, as Christians claim, then we DO have a relationship with it -- an extremely involved one. It's just not the kind of anthropomorphic relationship which people here seem to want. 

There are no other kinds of rationality, you either think in accordance with facts and logic or you don't.

I don't know of any other kinds of rationality. But I am a human being, and I think like a human being. It's a big universe -- who knows what things exist which humans can't begin to grasp.

Also there's the question of what the facts are. History shows that people's ideas of the facts tend to change. Naturally, we think we are the only time and place and social group in history to have the facts right. But more skeptical people keep in mind that we may be wildly wrong -- and are certainly severely limited.

  You are right, I don't think an omniscient being would have any need for reason guided by logic because it would not need a method of thinking to weed out errors, it would be incapable of errors.  If you want to know what led me away from Christianity, it was the fact that this god supposedly created us with this wonderful, capable brain and then expected us to believe in it based on faith which is nothing more than wishful thinking.  That was the contradiction that led me to start questioning my preacher who had no answer for me but to pat me on the head and tell me to go have some cookies and not think so much.

It does sound as if your personal experience of Christianity was not a persuasive one. As with all human institutions, a great deal of what we encounter is disappointing.

Hello and good evening, Belacqua.  I apologize because I don't know how to do the quote function on this forum.  I haven't spent much time here on this forum and I haven't learned it yet.  Plus, I'm not very good with computer stuff.  So Bear with me.

I'm saying an omnipotent being gets what it wants.  There would be nothing denied to it.  

To your point about reason:  I don't know what else exists out there in the universe either regarding other ways of thinking but if it were fundamentally different to human reason then I don't know why we would identify it as the reason. My answer is if we discover some other type of reason then we'll deal with it then.  Until then it's just an arbitrary and useless concept. I think that reason and faith are entirely incompatible with each other and faith destroys the ability to reason since things taken on faith can not be integrated with our other knowledge.  I like Harry Binswanger's saying:  faith is an icepick to the brain.  

Of course, we can't know what a god will do because it is a completely arbitrary notion.  But I do know that if this god supposedly created us then it knows our means of knowledge is reason and it would be able to perfectly interact with our way of knowing and it would not ask for us to have faith.  

As far as anything being the ground of being, I think this is nonsensical.  Existence exists.  It doesn't need grounding.  Our knowledge of it certainly does but being itself does not and metaphysically it can't have a grounding.  The fact that existence exists is absolute and the idea of there being a ground to being rests on stollen concepts.  So I reject it completely. 

As far as there being disagreement on facts, we have a way to resolve these disagreements.  Your statement essentially says that we can't have knowledge because we can never have certainty that we have the facts right.  If that's the case then there's no use discussing anything.  But I know that this is not the case.  We can have certainty.  There are certain fundamental facts that we can all know and we can't be wrong about them.  These are facts that are self-evident, fundamental, conceptually irreducible, and inescapable.  They ground our knowledge in reality.  We can use them as a standard by which to judge all knowledge claims.  They represent an objective starting point for knowledge.  

Yes, my experience with Christianity has been nothing but a disappointment but that is not why I reject it.  I reject it because it isn't true.