RE: Four questions for Christians
July 10, 2013 at 2:36 am
(This post was last modified: July 10, 2013 at 2:43 am by Ryantology.)
(July 10, 2013 at 1:30 am)Consilius Wrote: Free will means that you can do both good or evil without God physically pushing you in either direction. If I do wrong, I am responsible for what I did and deserve punishment for it, but that does not mean that the evil I did thwarts any former plans of God. God knew what I would do beforehand and plans were made to accommodate it, but he did not ask or intend that I did it.
As God knows what will happen and possesses unlimited ability to stop it, he must share in the responsibility of every event. Christians do not make free will exceptions for good things Christians do. It is a virtually-universal trait among Christians to attribute acts of human goodness or fortune to God's goodness and grace. Why should God get any credit for positive results of free will if he is assigned no blame for the negative results? Either both apply or none, if you are going to appeal to free will when assigning responsibility. Otherwise, it is an unjustified exception for your god.
Quote:Simply because the government has emergency services for road accident victims and has determined the compensation I owe them does not make it OK if I cause a road accident, although the potential victim will have his health restored because of government planning.
Governments are neither omnipotent nor omniscient, therefore it would not make sense to assign to them omni-responsibility.
Quote:To make a rock bigger than himself, God would have to create this rock and make it heavy by an authority higher than himself, which cannot be called upon because it does not exist. This authority would be God. Therefore, the rock can not exist. God can not make something that can not exist. Such a creature would be illogical. The illogical cannot come from a being that is logical. Or else the being would be illogical and would cease to exist.
The term 'omnipotence' implies no limits of any kind, but if God must act within the rules of logic, then there are rules even he cannot circumvent and it is incorrect to think of him as all-powerful or even a supreme authority. I would think that if God was the prime mover of all existence, then the rules of logic should be his invention and as malleable to him as any other aspect of his creation.
Which is to demonstrate that 'omnipotence' can never exist, logically. It would mean that God is just a great deal more powerful than we are.
