Question about two possible attributes of God

[Godscreated]

Your U.S comparison sucks and is wrong. You are saying God CAN NOT, not: he refuses to. You are correct, just because the U.S refuses to use nuclear weapons does not mean they are not a great nuclear power. However, if you are trying to apply the argument it would sound a little more like this: The U.S can't use nuclear weapons (because they don't have them), therefore are not a great nuclear power.
You are also correct, it has nothing to do with omniscience. Omniscience means he is all knowing, it has nothing to do with power. You are correct again refusing to abuse power does not negate omniscience, it negates omnipotence. It has everything to do with Omnipotence. And you are telling me to study scripture?

You're correct used the wrong omni, so replace omniscience with omnipotent.

[Ryantology]

If a judge sentenced every firstborn child in America to death because President Obama refused to follow that judge's command to free a certain group of people from prison, would this be immoral?

Depends on who the judge is.

Last weekend I sentenced every member of two colonies of ants to death for digging in my patio. Few people would call this immoral. However, if another ant did the same, that very well could be immoral.

If you had the ability to reason with the ants and get them to move elsewhere? If you had the ability to instantly, and effortlessly, move the ants to a remote location where they could exist without troubling you, if you had the ability to know ahead of time that ants, which are ignorant of the idea that your patio is anything but a unique obstacle which they have to work around, would nest in the spot you chose to build your patio in the first place and still decided to build it without taking any steps to prevent the ants from one day proving to be a hindrance? If you had the ability to make ants simply not want to go anywhere near human habitation?

If you had any of these powers, and still chose to kill the ants, that would be immoral. Assuming that you're not a psychopath who enjoys killing for the sake of the pleasure it gives you, you most likely killed them out of some necessity; there was no other plausible method available to you to deal with the problem their presence caused. It's certainly not moral purity, but rather what we would consider an acceptable circumstance of our own imperfections.

So, you're right, it does depend on the judge. If a judge has the power to solve any problem in any way imaginable, absolutely any decision to solve a problem non-violently is about as absolutely immoral as one can imagine, no matter how inferior the victim, because a virtually infinite number of non-violent alternatives are available to this judge yet ignored in favor of violence and death, which means that if that judge kills, the only reason for it is because it enjoys killing.

[John V]

If you had the ability to reason with the ants and get them to move elsewhere?

Even if I could communicate with them, I couldn't reason with them, as I don't have a reason other than my own pleasure. Or are you saying that my pleasure, coupled with my power, should be sufficient reason for the ants to obey me?

If you had the ability to instantly, and effortlessly, move the ants to a remote location where they could exist without troubling you,

If I can instantly and effortlessly move them there, then it's nonsensical to say such location is remote to me.

if you had the ability to know ahead of time that ants, which are ignorant of the idea that your patio is anything but a unique obstacle which they have to work around, would nest in the spot you chose to build your patio in the first place and still decided to build it without taking any steps to prevent the ants from one day proving to be a hindrance?

I took steps - I installed polymeric sand, and just resanded a couple weeks ago.

If you had the ability to make ants simply not want to go anywhere near human habitation?

Control their minds, making them my slaves? You find that moral?

If you had any of these powers, and still chose to kill the ants, that would be immoral. Assuming that you're not a psychopath who enjoys killing for the sake of the pleasure it gives you, you most likely killed them out of some necessity; there was no other plausible method available to you to deal with the problem their presence caused. It's certainly not moral purity, but rather what we would consider an acceptable circumstance of our own imperfections.

They don't bite or sting or carry disease. They just annoy me. So, if other creatures annoy me and can't fight back, that's an acceptable circumstance to kill them?

[bennyboy]

They don't bite or sting or carry disease. They just annoy me. So, if other creatures annoy me and can't fight back, that's an acceptable circumstance to kill them?

I find it a little funny that in this age of established science, the idea of God as experimenter doesn't come up much. The Bible explicitly says that God gave us free will but wants us to behave a certain way. This sounds like a psych experiment to me.

It may be that God's omniscience doesn't extend to time, because time is in fact not a dimension, and there's nothing to be omniscient about. IF God created creatures with free will, and IF time is not a dimension where you could theoretically look into the future and see how things turn out, then there's no conflict-- except "If God is really all powerful and omniscient, he could have created a universe where he could see the future." But that's pretty weak.

The bigger problem with God isn't this stuff about free will and morality; we're not confined to the morality of ants, if such a thing even exists. It's the fact that nobody can define a specific God who doesn't instantly fail to logic and lack of evidence, and any general God concept fails to lack of disprovability.