by jimwalton » Sun Oct 29, 2017 5:14 am
> Omnipotence encompasses omniscience.
This doesn't work in logic. Power and knowledge are separate entities and separate expressions of my person (or any person). What I know and what I do are not the same. Though sometimes they are intersecting sets, one doesn't encompass the other, nor is one necessarily dependent on the other.
> If you are all-powerful, then you by default have the power to be all-knowing.
To me this is a non sequitur. Power and knowledge are not related this way, and if you think they are, I guess you need to prove it rather than just state it. Even God's all-powerful-ness doesn't mean that God can do anything. No one defines omnipotence as the ability to be self-contradictory (God has the power to be not God), the ability to do absurd impossibilities (to make a square circle), or the power to go against his own character (God has the power to sin). NO one defines it that way, and so it doesn't logically follow that an omnipotent being has the power to be all-knowing.
> but if you set events in motion with absolute certain knowledge of the outcome then that puts responsibility for that outcome on your shoulders
This would be true, but this is not what the Bible teaches. You have left out some important steps that change the meaning. The Bible teaches that God set events in motion with billions of variables subject to cause and effect relationships and the free-will decisions of sentient beings. Your first sentence made it sound like it was a closed, deterministic system, which is not what the Bible teaches. Now, just because God has a back door on time (maybe like Matthew McConaughey in "Interstellar") doesn't mean he determined everything. It just means he can see it, but his seeing is not causative.
> He has the power to make any changes he wants to get any desired outcome.
This is wrong also. God's omnipotence doesn't give him a place to interfere in the free will decisions of men. That's not what omnipotence is or does.
> I also find this idea of absolving God of responsibility because he uses his powers selectively so that we can have free will problematic.
If we didn't have free will, we wouldn't have the ability to reason, because reason necessitates the ability to weigh options, consider alternatives, and make choices. There would then also be no such thing as science, because science requires reasoning. Without reason, science, and therefore intellect, we would lose our capacity even to survive. It's necessary that God restrains his powers so as not to interfere with our free will. Therefore, God allowing a certain amount of evil and suffering, as part of our free will, doesn't negate his character as good, loving, or just. As any parent knows, sometimes you have to let your children learn hard lessons to teach them to hardest truths.
> There is simply no reason why an omnipotent God would need to allow an innocent child to be raped or suffer a horrifyingly painful death unless he wanted it to happen.
There is nothing true about this, but it's a much longer discussion about God and the existence of evil. Allowing evil is not contradictory to the existence of a good God any more than a surgeon causing pain to bring about a greater good. There are sufferings that are necessary to achieve a greater good, as any oncologist will tell you. As a matter of fact, if any good can come from any suffering it negates the argument that God knowingly allowing any evil and suffering rules him out as all-loving, just, and good. What you must prove to make your point is that ALL suffering is unjustified and that no good can EVER come from ANY of it—something I know you can't do. We don't have the space to go into this here in its fullness, but we can talk about it in a separate post if you wish.
> Omnipotence encompasses omniscience.
This doesn't work in logic. Power and knowledge are separate entities and separate expressions of my person (or any person). What I know and what I do are not the same. Though sometimes they are intersecting sets, one doesn't encompass the other, nor is one necessarily dependent on the other.
> If you are all-powerful, then you by default have the power to be all-knowing.
To me this is a non sequitur. Power and knowledge are not related this way, and if you think they are, I guess you need to prove it rather than just state it. Even God's all-powerful-ness doesn't mean that God can do anything. No one defines omnipotence as the ability to be self-contradictory (God has the power to be not God), the ability to do absurd impossibilities (to make a square circle), or the power to go against his own character (God has the power to sin). NO one defines it that way, and so it doesn't logically follow that an omnipotent being has the power to be all-knowing.
> but if you set events in motion with absolute certain knowledge of the outcome then that puts responsibility for that outcome on your shoulders
This would be true, but this is not what the Bible teaches. You have left out some important steps that change the meaning. The Bible teaches that God set events in motion with billions of variables subject to cause and effect relationships and the free-will decisions of sentient beings. Your first sentence made it sound like it was a closed, deterministic system, which is not what the Bible teaches. Now, just because God has a back door on time (maybe like Matthew McConaughey in "Interstellar") doesn't mean he determined everything. It just means he can see it, but his seeing is not causative.
> He has the power to make any changes he wants to get any desired outcome.
This is wrong also. God's omnipotence doesn't give him a place to interfere in the free will decisions of men. That's not what omnipotence is or does.
> I also find this idea of absolving God of responsibility because he uses his powers selectively so that we can have free will problematic.
If we didn't have free will, we wouldn't have the ability to reason, because reason necessitates the ability to weigh options, consider alternatives, and make choices. There would then also be no such thing as science, because science requires reasoning. Without reason, science, and therefore intellect, we would lose our capacity even to survive. It's necessary that God restrains his powers so as not to interfere with our free will. Therefore, God allowing a certain amount of evil and suffering, as part of our free will, doesn't negate his character as good, loving, or just. As any parent knows, sometimes you have to let your children learn hard lessons to teach them to hardest truths.
> There is simply no reason why an omnipotent God would need to allow an innocent child to be raped or suffer a horrifyingly painful death unless he wanted it to happen.
There is nothing true about this, but it's a much longer discussion about God and the existence of evil. Allowing evil is not contradictory to the existence of a good God any more than a surgeon causing pain to bring about a greater good. There are sufferings that are necessary to achieve a greater good, as any oncologist will tell you. As a matter of fact, if any good can come from any suffering it negates the argument that God knowingly allowing any evil and suffering rules him out as all-loving, just, and good. What you must prove to make your point is that ALL suffering is unjustified and that no good can EVER come from ANY of it—something I know you can't do. We don't have the space to go into this here in its fullness, but we can talk about it in a separate post if you wish.