RE: Arguments against Soul
September 15, 2019 at 11:51 pm
(This post was last modified: September 15, 2019 at 11:54 pm by Belacqua.)
(September 15, 2019 at 10:54 pm)FlatAssembler Wrote: Well, God of Aquinas and Spinoza is omnipotent, since the Ontological Argument argues for an omnipotent God. A perfect being is supposed to be omnipotent, don't you think?
I don't know what such a thing is "supposed to" be.
I can only say what others have tried to work out.
In the case of Aquinas, "omnipotent" doesn't mean he can do anything. For one thing, God is impassible and ideal, and therefore takes no action. So the idea of "doing anything" is incoherent.
Aquinas uses Aristotle's vocabulary about act and potency. Potency is the potential to do things, and act is the fulfillment of that potential. The contingent, changing world is full of potential, moving from one state to another. God, on the other hand, has no potential -- it is pure act. Actus purus. As the full activation, however, God is necessary for potentiality in the world to be fulfilled.
I know that this sounds unconvincing as presented here -- it's a long involved argument. The key point, though, is that when Aquinas and other Christians in that tradition say "omnipotent," they mean nothing like the popular image.
And this means that the popular complaint -- that God's ability to do anything is incompatible with supposed other attributes -- is irrelevant to this basic view.
Likewise, various versions of the ontological argument, in which God is imagined as the greatest possible thing, don't rely on "greatest" meaning "most powerful" in the sense that God is like a larger version of the Incredible Hulk. This would be anthropomorphizing, in which we imagine what a great person is like and then say God is a little greater than that.