debate-points, paradoxThere are several properties most deities have, e. g. omnipotence and omniscience. The mentioned properties are mutually exclusive, because if deity knows he’s going to reduce Sodom and Gomorrah in ashes he already cannot change his mind and not abandon the cities, or if I quote R. Dawkins:
If God is omniscient, he must already know how he is going to intervene to change the course of history using his omnipotence. But that means he can’t change his mind about his intervention, which means he is not omnipotent.
The other paradox is “Could an omnipotent being create a stone so heavy that even that being could not lift it?” Certainly, it couldn’t.
Are there any other interesting paradoxes on deities’ properties?
Drange (1998) discusses many incompatible properties that people traditionally ascribe to god:
(a) perfect
(b) immutable
(c) transcendent
(d) nonphysical
(e) omniscient
(f) omnipresent
(g) personal
(h) free
(i) all-loving
(j) all-just
(k) all-merciful
(l) the creator of the universe
Many permutations of these characteristics results in incompatibilities. I’ve distilled a few of them into quick bites:
Perfect v. Creator: If god was perfect, he wouldn’t need or want anything. So, why go to all the trouble of creating a universe?
Unchanging (Immutable) v. Creator: If god cannot change, then he can’t go from a state of “wanting a universe and having none” to “having a universe.”
Just v. Merciful: Just is doling out punishment in proportion to the crime. Merciful is doling out less punishment (or none) relative to the crime. You can’t do both at the same time.
The one that many fall back on is, if God is so loving and omnipotent, why is there so much misery and suffering in the world?
If you took up those with a modern theologian, they’d just tell you that omnipotence is the ability to do all possible things, so making a square circle, a stone too heavy to lift, etc, don’t apply.
Likewise the “problem of evil” is often dismissed via ineffability and free will. Either the suffering is good for you, or other people are causing it, and there’ll be pie in the sky when you die.
It’s important to remember that you’re not refuting god with these paradoxes, you’re refuting Anselm who came up with the definition. Omnipotence, etc, is nowhere in the bible. The closest the bible comes is “All Mighty” which lacks the philosophical baggage. Doesn’t take much to be allmighty to a bunch of jewish shepherds.
I think the fact that there is no correlation between belief and outcomes like finances or health. A loving God that listened to adherence but doesn’t make a statistical difference is a poor definition of a God.
The one I like is the following argument:
but
therefore
In conclusion
Why should God intervene to change the course of history? The Universe is one four-dimensional (at least) space-time continuum that God created. He doesn’t need to experience the Universe like we do. We watch and learn about world as events unfold in the passage of time. According to this definition, God is not part of the Universe, but the reason for it’s existence. He created it in its entirety, he doesn’t ‘change his mind.’
I like to say this to refute deities:
If there was one true god then every ancient civilization that sprout a religion should have been aware of said god and believe in him. Instead each one of them had one or several gods of their own.
That clearly says that either all of those gods are real, or all those civilizations are lying about it. Since the existence of any of those gods would automatically deny the existence of the others then the only answer is that gods don’t exist.
I don’t see that my free will (if it exists) is affected by the ability of an omniscient being to know what I’m going to do. My decisions are my decisions, no matter how predictable.
Similarly, many theories about God say that God is not strictly in the normal timeline, and therefore doesn’t so much predict decisions (including God’s own) as observe them. Alternately, you could say that God made all divine decisions simultaneously. There’s lots of ways to deal with this.
My personal problem is with the idea of an omnipotent, omniscient, loving God. The empirical evidence doesn’t seem to support that hypothesis. All the answers I’ve heard sound to me like fudging uncomfortable truths.
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