The Kalam Cosmological Argument

[Pat Mustard]

@Pat Mustard
You're insisting that a god must be able to do a thing you've deemed impossible for it to be called omnipotent..but, again, plantingas omnipotence does not make such a demand or claim.

Plantinga doesn't get to redefine omnipotence. Otherwise we could declare "inability to carry out any physical or mental action" as omnipotence and start worshipping a random rock.

That's the problem with all these christian arguments, they take terms with quite specific meanings and twist those meanings into something else rather than facing up to the fact that their god cannot posees the suite of attributes ascribed to it under any circumstances.

[The Grand Nudger]

Constraints of the game, really. Any logical definition of omnipotence could not include the ability to do the impossible - that would be illogical. Plantinga doesn't make this demand on omnipotence or a god and his argument would logically fail if he did. You do. Honestly.....imo, so do christians at large. They very much want their god to be capable of doing impossible things. They claim it can. That's what it means for something to be a miracle or a mystery. Doing the impossible just proves that god is super duper giga powerful!

Hell, even in the kca, they make such a demand. That their silly god is somehow a first cause candidate. That all the stuff that predates it, and even the creature that created it, are causally dependent on it, somehow, instead of the other way around which is the straightforward and logical inference to make about that particular causal chain. We're gods cause, so unless some really funky shit is going on in the universe, it can't be ours. Nevermind who or what is the first cause of the universe, if anything - because this shit is doa at a level faaaar removed from that.

[Silver]

Perfection is a non-existent characteristic. It's merely something we attribute to that which we idolize.

[Belacqua]

take terms with quite specific meanings and twist those meanings into something else

Unfortunately, if we look at history, it appears that the modern English usage of the word "omnipotence" is severely twisted away from what it used to mean. 

The idea comes from Aristotle, like so much else. It doesn't mean that God can do anything. It has to do with the very basic Aristotelian/Thomist structure of act and potency. God is said to be the fulfillment of all potency -- that is, all potentiality in the world achieves its actualization in God. "All potent" here doesn't mean that he can do anything but that all potency ends there. God's essence is pure act. This is why one of the most important synonyms for God in this tradition is actus purus. 

My guess is that the meaning of the word has been twisted by the sola scriptura literalist Christians, and the atheists who argue solely according to such people's terms. I'm told that such people are in the majority now, but I have no idea of percentages. 

Platonists, Aristotelians, Neoplatonists, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and all the Thomists, Sufis, Sikhs, and several branches of Hinduism use the term in the way I've defined it above. For them, the idea of God flying around the world deciding to do things is just nonsense. A key point of these traditions is that God takes no action. In fact it's kind of a funny picture -- God goes around doing stuff until he finds something he can't do, and then he says, "Oh Myself! I guess I'm not omnipotent after all!" 

I don't know how Plantinga is using the term. I've never read anything by him. But we have to be careful when reading theology not to twist the word into a modern meaning that its originators never intended. 

https://hal.science/hal-03002478/document

[The Grand Nudger]

The Catholics got in on it too. 1+1+1=1....more "verified miracles" than you can shake a stick at... and all that.

[Disagreeable]

It may just be my mental limitations, I just can't make the connection between something being possible, therefore true. I think perhaps there may be a big difference between something being conceivable and something being possible.

I agree that there is a difference. Conceivable just means logically possible but just because something is logically possible doesn't mean that it is metaphysically possible.

[brewer]

It may just be my mental limitations, I just can't make the connection between something being possible, therefore true. I think perhaps there may be a big difference between something being conceivable and something being possible.

I agree that there is a difference. Conceivable just means logically possible but just because something is logically possible doesn't mean that it is metaphysically possible.

People have conceptions of things that are not logically possible all the time. Example....



I see it as all things that are logically possible are metaphysically possible but not all things that are metaphysically possible are logically possible. But not being a philosophizer there will be someone that comes along and tells me I'm wrong.

[Disagreeable]

I see it as all things that are logically possible are metaphysically possible but not all things that are metaphysically possible are logically possible.

I'd put that the other way around. All things that are metaphysically possible are logically possible but not all things that are logically possible are metaphysically possible. For something to be logically possible, or conceivable, it merely has to not be self-contradictory. But for something to be metaphysically possible it has to have some sort of chance of actually happening in the world.

[Thumpalumpacus]

By Plantinga's logic, Lord of the Rings is history.

[Mister Agenda]

Couple more steps, not much - but..yeah.  There are lots of systems that yield unintuitive results.  The arguments form was chosen by plantinga for exactly that operation.  It's not like he stumbled across it.  What if I'd introduced it to you another way, though?

What if I'd said that it was possible that there are two possible worlds that share no elements.  That if a maximally great being exists it would have to exist in all possible worlds.  That there was at least one possible world that did not contain a maximally great being.  Thus maximally great beings cannot exist.

Would it seem counterintuitive then - or does it just look fact-check true....?

I think that gets you to a maximally great being either existing in all possible worlds, or not existing in any of them. That's what I got from the Ontological Argument too, that it proves there must be a God or there must not be a God.