Can God change?

[Tomdstone]

God the Son is a Person. You cannot have both of the following true simultaneously:
A person is entirely outside of time.
A person is not entirely outside of time.
It has to be one or the other.

 

[Tomdstone]

God the Son is a Person. I don’t see how you can have both of the following true simultaneously:
God the Son is entirely outside of time.
God the Son is not entirely outside of time.
According to the rules of logic, you cannot have both P and not P true simultaneously.

 

[Peccavi]

Not being God I wouldn’t care to speculate.

 

[Tomdstone]

God the Son is a Person.
I don’t see how you can have both of the following true simultaneously:
God the Son is entirely outside of time.
God the Son is not entirely outside of time.
According to the rules and truth tables of logic, you cannot have both P and not P true simultaneously.

 

[dahbeegs]

First you say that God exists entirely outside of time, then you say that God entered time. Which is it?

A metaphor that has allowed me to visualize this nature of God may help.

Suppose we have a two dimensional drawing on a piece of paper, which we have created. We then imbue our drawings with sentient life. Now, we are not present in and constrained by the two dimensions of our creation. However, at any moment, we may put pencil to paper and add to or take away from the drawing. Our two dimensional drawing of Tomdstone may then argue that if these changes were the result of our creators, they must be contained by the two dimensions of his observable reality; if the creators are outside of those dimensions, then they can’t affect them. However, from our ‘higher’ position in reality, we can see that isn’t true.

Of course, this is an imperfect metaphor, as are all attempts to communicate divine realities. We can see how difficult it would be to communicate a third spatial reality to our two dimensional creatures. The very words we would need to do so would have no meaning to them. So we would have to use left/right and up/down to communicate the concept of depth. How much more difficult for finite beings such as ourselves to comprehend an infinite, perfect being? Infinitely more difficult.

You see passages that speak of God being angry or changing His mind, and read them as a finite creature who is imposing his perception of time and finite space on an infinite being. It just isn’t going to work. All this language is the best means we have to approach the meaning of God and His actions. He is outside of, beyond, and surpasses creation; there is no logical contradiction, such that you are attempting to demonstrate, in God affecting creation. It is His infinite pen to the paper of creation.

 

[Tomdstone]

Logic is the study of right reason. One law of logic is the law of non-contradiction. The law of non-contradiction states that a thing cannot be both A and not-A at the same time and in the same sense. All knowledge depends on the rule that A =/= ~A. If you are going to claim that religious truth can deny the rule of non-contradiction, then you are breaking all reasonable thought and as a consequence you would be stating in effect that religious knowledge and scientific knowledge are incompatible. You cannot have any scientific knowledge whatsoever if you deny the logical principle of non-contradiction. All mathematics would collapse into incoherence. The law of non-contradiction is a fundamental law of thought upon which all rational discourse is based. To say that God can violate the law of non-contradiction is to say something like:
A square is a rectangle with four equal sides.
God can make a square with five equal sides.
If God is all powerful, can He make a square with five equal sides, after all, He is above logic?
To say that the following are both true simultaneously is to break the law of non-contradiction:
God the Son is entirely outside of time.
God the Son is not entirely outside of time.

 

[Tomdstone]

Logic is the study and the use of right reason. One law of logic is the law of non-contradiction. The law of non-contradiction states that a thing cannot be both A and not-A at the same time and in the same sense. All knowledge depends on the rule that A =/= ~A. If you are going to claim that religious truth can deny the rule of non-contradiction, then you are breaking all reasonable thought and as a consequence you would be stating in effect that religious knowledge and scientific knowledge are incompatible. You cannot have any scientific knowledge whatsoever if you deny the logical principle of non-contradiction. All mathematics would collapse into incoherence. The law of non-contradiction is a fundamental law of thought upon which all rational discourse is based. To say that God can violate the law of non-contradiction is to say something like:
A square is a rectangle with four equal sides.
God can make a square with five equal sides.
If God is all powerful, can He make a square with five equal sides, after all, He is above logic?
To say that the following are both true simultaneously is to break the law of non-contradiction:
God the Son is entirely outside of time.
God the Son is not entirely outside of time.

 

[Aloysium]

God as the living Truth cannot create a lie.
When a conflict arises in one’ understanding of God as He has been revealed, the problem lies in the understanding, not within the revelation.

 

[Tomdstone]

The soul is in purgatory for a certain length of time. If we pray and offer Masses, God will oftentimes change the sentence. Whether this is done at the beginning of time, or whether it is done at the time that the prayers are said is irrelevant to the fact that God will often change the sentence of a soul in purgatory if we on earth say certain prayers.
“It is very likely that our deceased loved ones, like us, will spend some time in Purgatory. …, souls can spend several decades in Purgatory as they are slowly purified. You and I have the power to speed up that transition. We can help to move a loved one upward and out of Purgatory more quickly by praying for them… We have to pray for and offer Masses for our deceased family members so that they will be able to move upward and out of Purgatory much more quickly.”

 

[Tomdstone]

God as the living Truth cannot create a lie.

Exactly my point. IMHO, You are absolutely correct. Statements about God must obey the law of non-contradiction because otherwise a lie would be created.

The logical rule known as the principle of non-contradiction does and must apply to statements about God.
God cannot create a square with five equal sides, each side having length one.
In Euclidean geometry, God cannot create a right triangle that does not satisfy the pythagorean theorem.

 

[inocente]

Oftentimes we see Catholic philosophers saying that God cannot change.

One argument is that if God is creator of all, then God cannot have been created and so must necessarily exist. Therefore God cannot consist of parts, for then he would be contingent on how the parts are arranged. Therefore there is nothing which can be rearranged within God, therefore God cannot change.

A more simple argument is that if God is absolutely perfect, then any change would make him less perfect, but absolute perfection cannot contain a flaw which would make it less perfect, therefore God cannot change.

The logic of those arguments seems robust, so there would have to be something wrong with the premises - that God is the absolutely perfect creator of all - to claim that God can change.

To say that God can violate the law of non-contradiction is to say something like:
A square is a rectangle with four equal sides.
God can make a square with five equal sides.
If God is all powerful, can He make a square with five equal sides, after all, He is above logic?

The logic would be that by definition a square is a rectangle with four equal sides, so fine, God can make something with five sides, but we couldn’t then call it a square since that would contradict the definition.

 

[Bahman]

…A more simple argument is that if God is absolutely perfect, then any change would make him less perfect, but absolute perfection cannot contain a flaw which would make it less perfect, therefore God cannot change…

There could be many states of perfection hence God can stay perfect and change.