Is there anything God can't do?

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Yea, and I’m telling you that it cannot be done because it would no longer be a square or a circle. Once it doesn’t fulfil the criteria we use to identify circles, it no longer becomes a circle but another shape.

Can God create a married bachelor?
A stick with no ends? Etc.
 
I don’t disagree. But I was trying to point out that a logical contradiction would be against his nature, as Aquinas argues
 
Some things God does cause to happen, like the Flood. That flood drowned a lot of pregnant women, thus killing their unborn children. God did cause those deaths to happen.
 
The whole “married bachelor” thing is essentially the same as “square circles” and “four-angled triangles.” Can God make them? Not without so changing what it means to be a circle and what it means to be a square, or what it means to be a bachelor and what it means to be married, that the whole exercise becomes meaningless, and the equivalent of doing nothing, at least in this universe and this reality.

tl;dr - I agree, and, to quote CS Lewis, “Nonsense does not become sense simply because the phrase “God can” is affixed to it.”
 
I agree, it is not against His nature. That nature is one of the reasons I am not Christian. God kills, and orders the killing of, far too many people. He acts just like the Iron Age war god he started as: “Lord God of Hosts” where host = army.
 
Nothing drives me crazier than the square circle argument. God can make anything, but if He makes something that is square, it won’t be a circle. If He makes something that’s a circle, it won’t be a square. These are definitions. Why don’t people get tgat.?
 
Can God effect transubstantiation at a Protestant service? If so, the assertions here (particularly about Protestants “playing church”) would seem a little odd.
 
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The more responses I see, and the more I think about this, the more I think that there are way too many different approaches to ontology running around here for this discussion to actually get anywhere. I’m sorry if I missed this, but what was the goal of the OP? To spark a discussion about ontology? To clarify the Catholic position on it? Or something completely different?
 
No, I do not, but the Buddha did. The Christian God is not enlightened, His actions show it. Count up how many people God kills in the Bible; count up how many people the Buddha kills in the Tripitaka.

Of the two, I prefer the Buddha’s morality.
 
No. Read through the thread.

Such intellectual sloppiness is not becoming of Catholics.
 
No, that’s not it. People were not talking about altering a circle to make it a square. People are saying, can God created an object that is both a circle and a square?
 
Lion_IRC said:
Well, wadya know.
God can do the ‘logically impossible’.
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God has a nature. God is consistent and simple. In other words, God’s unity of being and acting does not have contradictions or partitions. And God is not subject to anything, whether it be forces or concepts.

God’s potency does not violate this nature. If it did, then we would observe God acting in a way that contradicts God’s being, and that can’t be (pun intended).

God does not exercise power in the same way creatures would exercise it. Human beings might exercise power in arbitrary ways; to murder others for instance. Because God is consistent and immutable, God’s potency to do something does not mean it’s in God’s nature to do it.

And here’s the practical human application of this:
We have people claiming that although it seems to be in their nature to be a man or a woman, they have the power to claim something else, and they do claim something else, and they go to the extent of maiming themselves in the exercise of personal power over their nature.
And that’s irrational.
God is not irrational. God is not necessarily logical like human beings are logical in materially based ways (the resurrection is not really logical), but God is reasonable and approachable. If God is love, then God communicates himself, and to communicate one’s self means to approach the beloved and be approachable in mind, body, heart, soul…the whole person.

And so we have Christ, who is God’s logos, or reason-ability. Christ is the full and final revelation of how God is. God so desires to communicate with us that God becomes of one nature with us while retaining the mystery of God’s divine nature as well.
 
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rossum said:
No, I do not, but the Buddha did. The Christian God is not enlightened, His actions show it. Count up how many people God kills in the Bible; count up how many people the Buddha kills in the Tripitaka.

Of the two, I prefer the Buddha’s morality.
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If you read the bible with the fundamentalists, yes.
Catholics don’t read the bible in isolated snippets.
We read the bible:
  1. in the context of the whole bible. The bible is a collection of books, not isolated proof texts.
  2. as revealing God, rather than God revealing the bible. The bible is not God, it speaks about God in inspired human words
  3. most importantly, we read and interpret scripture in the light of Christ. Scripture cannot contradict God’s revelation of God’s self through Jesus Christ, because Christ is God’s full and final revelation. All of Scripture and human thought point to him.
So if a passage seems to reveal a God inconsistent with Christ, you must find a different sense of it than the isolated literalist sense. Human beings writing scripture before Christ can teach us about God, but their sense of who God is cannot have the benefit of Christ’s life.

Context is everything.
And Christianity is not a religion of the book, it’s Christianity, it’s about a person.
 
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goout said:
So if a passage seems to reveal a God inconsistent with Christ, you must find a different sense of it than the isolated literalist sense.
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“Must?” Why? Christ was a Bodhisattva, which places Him higher than almost all gods. YHWH was a fairly standard Iron Age War God/Chief God who acted in much the same way as other such gods, such as ordering the killing of the tribe’s enemies. The two are different. One knows the date of the second coming while the other does not. No single entity can both know and not know the same fact.
 
rossum said:
No, I do not, but the Buddha did. The Christian God is not enlightened, His actions show it. Count up how many people God kills in the Bible; count up how many people the Buddha kills in the Tripitaka.

Of the two, I prefer the Buddha’s morality.
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The Buddha is a man, not God. You seem focused on viewing God as a man and not the Ultimate Reality that transcends yet is immanent with our existence.
 
rossum said:
Christ was a Bodhisattva, which places Him higher than almost all gods.
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What you call “gods” are at best (should they exist) just creatures and rather small things compared to what we refer to.
 
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