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goout
Guest
Yes God is omnipotent.
Does God have the power to not make someone exist anymore who once existed?
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TK421
Guest
Yes, but the question is problematic because “person” denotes a rational soul, and God only makes rational souls with the intention of them being in eternity with them, so if he were to make them not exist, it would mean he is changing his mind about them, and God doesn’t ever change his mind because he always knows everything he does from eternity to eternity. Even if that person does what God doesn’t want them to do, and changes their own subjective future (‘subjective’ meaning ‘what a person experiences’), the future that they were meant to have - objectively - remains in God’s mind forever.
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Randy_Carson
Guest
Not exactly similar since the latter question is incoherent because it requires that God be able to perform something that is a logical contradiction.
Regarding the first question, while intuitively I feel that God COULD essentially rewind the tape and unmake someone thereby requiring all subsequent history to unfold differently, it is possible that God could NOT do this if he does not exist outside of time now that time has been created.
This is not my “thing”, but William Lane Craig argues along these lines if you want to go deeper.
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fred_conty
Guest
Let’s say that a goodly number of soldiers in an army died in combat. And that these men knew that they were in an un-Godly war which meant that upon their deaths, they went to eternal destruction. Let’s say thousands.
Let’s say further that one of these men was a father of eight children and had a wife. Of the eight children, all later married and had 50 children. And of these 50, 40 married and later had 160 children. And of these 160 children, 120 married and had 500 children.
Now it so happened that of the first 8 children, 2 went to destruction. So the memory of these 2 were wiped out which means that the 12 children they had would not have any memory of their father, nor would their relatives, friends, neighbors, wife, and the state government have any memory of him. So now we have these people with no apparent father and a wife with no husband and yet these children were born. On top of that, all that the husband did for his wife and children would be wiped out as well, and all the help he gave them. So because of this loss of good to his children, some of them went to hell too because they needed him for his support and direction. Unless we believe that the good or bad we do does not affect others.
Need this be extended for all the thousands of soldiers whose memory was wiped out? The example if drawn out in time, but vertically and horizontally, would just be one big mess for all involved and for those who were not directly involved.
And in addition, some of those going to hell, if their memory had not been wiped out, would have influenced others to heaven but instead they too went to hell. So as a result, wiping out memory of the bad also caused those who would have gone to heaven to go to hell.
I think drawing this picture out would show how the good are deprived because the bad were wiped out. Is that fair … for the good to suffer because of the bad? Or wouldn’t it be more fair to let each go to his own level of good/bad?
What I just wrote may not be the easiest to read, but I think you get the drift. Try making up your own stories and see where that leads you too.
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fhansen
Guest
We certainly depend on God for our existence. And I’ve sometimes wondered if the fear of that power might be the genesis of pride, Lucifer unreasonably preferring to believe himself equal to God in order to alleviate that fear, the fear of non-existence. Just a thought.
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