The Omnipotency Contradiction

[cpayne]

The position that “we can do something God cannot” is more correctly stated as “we have to do something that God does not need to do.”

Hallelujah!

And on this note, I happily unsubscribe from this thread, too. Bye all!

 

[PEPCIS]

"PEPCIS:

No, there are a few things that I didn’t feel were necessary to talk about, because we are in such close agreement over the other things that matter much more.

I would agree that man can choose to attempt a life of perfection, but since he can NEVER achieve perfection, then he is not “free” in any real sense of the word. It is an illusion.

Man cannot achieve perfection by himself, but he can choose it; and he can do so by repenting and making an honest effort to change.

True enough.
MoM:

Nothing that is perfect can possibly fail to be perfect.

I agree.
MoM:

It is therefore meaningless to speak of God as choosing not to be evil.

Then it is therefore meaningless to speak of God having free will. You can’t have your cake and eat it too.

If God CANNOT choose to do evil, then you CANNOT state that He is Holy, because Holiness REQUIRES that a being would actively choose to do right.

MoM:

You have a faulty understanding of holiness.

Really? Well, I shall have to compare it to your idea, then.
MoM:

Perfection is holiness.

Holiness deals with sin. It is improper to speak of “perfection” unless you contextualize it to speak of God’s perfection from sin. How is God “perfect from sin”? By never choosing to do evil.
MoM:

God is not potentially holy.

I never said that he is/was. My claim is that he is perfectly holy. This is reflected in His free will choice of always choosing good.

But if God cannot actively choose to do what is right, then He ceases to be Holy. He just becomes a creature without a conscience, just like the rest of His creation.

MoM:

That is false.

Well, so says you.
MoM:

When we choose to do good, do we become eternally good?

Because we are talking hypotheticals, it is necessary to introduce these concepts as if such a missing attribute would cause a specific correlating attribute. God does not cease to be holy if He lacks free will. He would HYPOTHETICALLY not have free will. Free will is a necessary component of a logical presentation of Holiness.

 

[Pro_Domina]

I’m not the Pope, so don’t take what I say to heart !!!
This is just my own half-baked theorizing ;

I suspect that one of the reasons for Christ’s life was so that God could walk a mile in mans shoes. Indeed, to be honest, to me this is the most emotionally touching aspect of Jesus.
I don’t really care that God is powerful.
I don’t really care that God is the best.
I don’t really care that God will win.
All of that leaves me cold. If that is what I found in God, then I might as well worship the US government, but more likely my sympathies would be with Satan.
No, I like Jesus because he knows what it feels like to be me.
It occurred to me very early, around age 8 or 9, that to know something is not at all the same as to experience something.
So what if God knows everything?
God does not, in point of fact, have to worry about being damned !
So, as I indicated, I think this was one of his purposes in becoming a man, and not as a prince or a conqueror either, but as a penniless, powerless common laborer.

So : God WAS a man. So he’s got that base covered too.

My favorite piece of music is Handel’s " Messiah " .
Handel was a protestant and he wrote it for a protestant prince but I’m convinced that God was working through Handel.
That is, Handel wasn’t solely the author of it.
In my own case, I love to write. The curious thing about this compulsion is that it seems to come from OUTSIDE OF MYSELF, HEEDLESS OF THE WILL THAT IS WITHIN ME.
No, no, no, I don’t wish to suggest that I’m inspired by God…but the creative spark seems to be independent of me, outside of me, given to me.
Do humans actually create anything?
I’m inclined… to doubt that they do.

You are right, but not exactly for the reasoning you are trying to develope. Not all human creativity is inspired by God, but certainly possible do to the participation in God’s creation.
But what is true is that we are prideful peaple and don’t realize that good ideas are not the sole results of our creativity. No, we don’t realize the great interaction of man-angel, both good and bad.

How many inventors all of the sudden had an unfounded, sudden “click”? Many or most. Why? I am inclinded to say that in modern times it is probably not a good angel. Why you may ask, seeing that somethings, like the lightbulb have greatly improved our lives?
I’ll explain.

Progress is good. But like all good things, a deviation is always a deviation to evil. If modern technology was born out of Christian Civilization striving for perfection and desires of heavenly things, than it will come out great and in an organic process.

But when it is a plan of the Devil, he will take a good thing and put into play for his plans.

What is a good example of this contact with the angelic world?
Take the middle ages. The medieval man was a man with horizons, compunct of with the call to sanctity. He wanted to contemplate God and please him with all there abilities.
Their mystical union with God gave rise to the most beautiful civilization ever. The one that gave rise to the gothic cathedrals, Gregorian chant and above all, inumerous saints.
This was all the fruits of the Most Precious Blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ.

It was that simple, yet pious glassmaker, who wanted to make the perfect blue for a stained-glass window to depict Our Lady.
Years and years he kept striving, his soul ardent for to honour Her. At last, he reaches it and exclaims, Nunc dimittis servum tuum, Domine…

If you asked three stone workers of different times what they were doing, one would say hammering stone, another making a column and the medieval man, making a cathedral.

And all fruits of the Precious Blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ.

 

[Agripa]

You are right, but not exactly for the reasoning you are trying to develope. Not all human creativity is inspired by God, but certainly possible do to the participation in God’s creation.
But what is true is that we are prideful peaple and don’t realize that good ideas are not the sole results of our creativity. No, we don’t realize the great interaction of man-angel, both good and bad.

How many inventors all of the sudden had an unfounded, sudden “click”? Many or most. Why? I am inclinded to say that in modern times it is probably not a good angel. Why you may ask, seeing that somethings, like the lightbulb have greatly improved our lives?
I’ll explain.

Progress is good. But like all good things, a deviation is always a deviation to evil. If modern technology was born out of Christian Civilization striving for perfection and desires of heavenly things, than it will come out great and in an organic process.

But when it is a plan of the Devil, he will take a good thing and put into play for his plans.

What is a good example of this contact with the angelic world?
Take the middle ages. The medieval man was a man with horizons, compunct of with the call to sanctity. He wanted to contemplate God and please him with all there abilities.
Their mystical union with God gave rise to the most beautiful civilization ever. The one that gave rise to the gothic cathedrals, Gregorian chant and above all, inumerous saints.
This was all the fruits of the Most Precious Blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ.

It was that simple, yet pious glassmaker, who wanted to make the perfect blue for a stained-glass window to depict Our Lady.
Years and years he kept striving, his soul ardent for to honour Her. At last, he reaches it and exclaims, Nunc dimittis servum tuum, Domine…

If you asked three stone workers of different times what they were doing, one would say hammering stone, another making a column and the medieval man, making a cathedral.

And all fruits of the Precious Blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ.

Yes, but what of all the beautiful, glorious things created in the name of and for the:shrug: glory of other gods? I watched a special on India and the great civilizations of the Indus Valley - they too created tremendously gorgeous things in the name of their gods - as did most of the ancients. None of these things were created for Christ, they did not even know Christ, and yet they too found spiritual expression through offering up their work and skills. So is this a common human need? To offer up work for a deity?

 

[grannymh]

I read some of the discussion on the “Can God Think?” thread, and followed to this one. I suppose defining Omnipotence might have some value, but it does not seem to me to be the actual issue here.

Basically, we think about God’s creation. God simply creates. We don’t understand everything there is to understand about our reality. God does.

The position that “we can do something God cannot” is more correctly stated as “we have to do something that God does not need to do.”

That is to say, God doesn’t have to think about Calculus, while Newton and Leibnitz had to think about it. They were pondering aspects of existence, plumbing areas unknown to them, and wringing out a deeper understanding. This has been variously called “thinking” or “spontaneously creating information” but I would suggest that thinking actually entails more of a reorganization and re-presentation of pre-existent items, be they facts, observations, or someone else’s thoughts (which would of course be their synthesis…) and not spontaneously creating information. Could it not be so that the “creation” of the calculus may be nothing more than the discovery of the calculus?

The initial facts (be they for the calculus or any other topic of thought) would be the evidence of our material world. We interact, find things to think about, ponder, attempt to understand. We are attempting to fill a rather large and empty cup. We discover things along the way, reach understandings as we go - we don’t create them.

The fact that God’s cup is full (to stretch the analogy) says more about what we have to do than what it says about what God cannot do.

Factoring Jesus into the equation would take us in a new direction - presuming there would be agreement that Jesus was both God and Man. In such a case, as Man, God thought. - fb

Dear Frater Bovious,

Thank you for this great post. You definitely should post more often. Since you went from "Can God Think? to here, how about about moving on to “Omnipotency Revisited”? That would be appreciated.

Blessings,
granny

 

[grannymh]

Yes, but what of all the beautiful, glorious things created in the name of and for the:shrug: glory of other gods? I watched a special on India and the great civilizations of the Indus Valley - they too created tremendously gorgeous things in the name of their gods - as did most of the ancients. None of these things were created for Christ, they did not even know Christ, and yet they too found spiritual expression through offering up their work and skills. So is this a common human need? To offer up work for a deity?

The offering up of work for a deity or an emperor is a byproduct. The commonality through all civilizations is: Creating beautiful objects is an expression of the spiritual element in human nature. In this context, spiritual refers to that part of human nature which is neither matter nor physical energy.

 

[Agripa]

And as a general follow up to the above. . . . might we observe a decided lack of spirituality in modern church / temple / mosque architecture in the latter half of the last centuries? All I see is horrid modern “produced” buildings and related art. Even the music in the Catholic church seems wholly uninspired - Foley et al should be ex communicated!

 

[grannymh]

And as a general follow up to the above. . . . might we observe a decided lack of spirituality in modern church / temple / mosque architecture in the latter half of the last centuries? All I see is horrid modern “produced” buildings and related art. Even the music in the Catholic church seems wholly uninspired - Foley et al should be ex communicated!

We sure might make that observation! Ditto for me. The exception would be the St. Louis Cathedral. Finally got to see the completed mosaics last summer.

 

[Shike]

MindOverMatter;4697495:

It is therefore meaningless to speak of God as choosing not to be evil.

Then it is therefore meaningless to speak of God having free will. You can’t have your cake and eat it too.

Correct. It is meaningless to speak of God having free will… in this specific case. Saying that God has free-will in this case is like saying “sdasdfsdf” has free-will. What is “sdasdfsdf”? I have no idea.

This is the central point that we keep going in circles with. Basically the view is that God choosing to be or not to be evil is not actually a category that free-will can be applied to for God; it is a contradiction and therefore nonsense (indeed, since it is nonsense it is not actually a category at all); it is not nonsense for humans, however. greylorn would see this as evidence for God not being omnipotent, as something humans have that God doesn’t. But as has been numerously pointed out, it is not evidence against God’s omnipotence… if anything, it is for it.

Your view is that God choosing to be or not to be evil is not nonsense and furthermore is a category that free-will can be applied to. Have you read Aquinas? Perhaps he might be the next source you could go to for a better understanding of this issue; it definitely won’t be a waste of your time!

ciao,
Michael

 

[jkiernan56]

And as a general follow up to the above. . . . might we observe a decided lack of spirituality in modern church / temple / mosque architecture in the latter half of the last centuries? All I see is horrid modern “produced” buildings and related art. Even the music in the Catholic church seems wholly uninspired - Foley et al should be ex communicated!

I have to respectfully disagree with your opinion of John Foley.
He has written some excellent music such as the likes of the prayer of St. Ignatius - “Take Lord Receive”.

 

[PEPCIS]

"MindoverMatter:

It is therefore meaningless to speak of God as choosing not to be evil.

PEPCIS:

Then it is therefore meaningless to speak of God having free will. You can’t have your cake and eat it too.

Correct. It is meaningless to speak of God having free will… in this specific case.

Saying that God has free-will in this case is like saying “sdasdfsdf” has free-will. What is “sdasdfsdf”? I have no idea.

Well, Michael, here’s the problem. Either God has free will in all areas, or it is meaningless to say that He has free will in ANY area.

Why is it “meaningless to speak of God having free will…in this specific case”? Why do you suspend logic for this specific case? Why not for all cases?

 

[Shike]

Well, Michael, here’s the problem. Either God has free will in all areas, or it is meaningless to say that He has free will in ANY area.

I agree… but God choosing to be or not to be evil is not an area at all.

Why is it “meaningless to speak of God having free will…in this specific case”? Why do you suspend logic for this specific case? Why not for all cases?

No logic is being suspended, it is in fact being used to show that there are some major differences between humans and God and the difficulties that arise with our language.

By “in this specific case” I don’t want to exclude other similar special cases (such as God choosing not to exist); I just used that to denote the difference between these specifics cases and the ones that apply to free-will (such as God creating the universe).

But why are these specific cases nonsense? Because God is all actuality, in the sense that an effect exists perfectly in a cause. If an effect, such as choosing not to exist, does not reside perfectly in God, then there are two possibilities: God is not omnipotent, or the effect is in reality nonsense. God is omnipotent (I won’t expound for the sake of time), therefore the effect must be really nonsense.

But, but, but! What if the effect actually does reside perfectly in God? If that is the case, then you have non-existance and existance at the same time (weakness of language, there is no time for God) which is a contradiction. ‘Fine’, you say… ‘let the possibility of choosing to not exist be actual in God, as an effect is perfectly in a cause; It is an actual possibility… what’s the problem?’ The problem is that an actual potential is not fully an actual… so no matter how many actual potentials we regress, it must come out actual (God being all actuality by virtue of being the uncaused cause). And if it comes out actual, then we have a contradiction, which is nonsense.

This is a very very brief (and probably not that great) explanation why. I urge you, if you find any of this interesting to go to the source of Aquinas in the Summa (through a well-made translation of course, unless you know latin!).

Thanks for asking questions. I always learn something more.

ciao.
Michael

 

[grannymh]

Thanks for asking questions. I always learn something more.
ciao.
Michael

Dear Michael,

What do you think about the word “sophistry” as a description for the contradiction? Maybe I should ask if you were the one who used that word in a post three miles back?

Blessings,
granny

 

[Agripa]

I have to respectfully disagree with your opinion of John Foley.
He has written some excellent music such as the likes of the prayer of St. Ignatius - “Take Lord Receive”.

Well, perhaps we must catagorize what is meant by inspired music, per se - I am thinking of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis or the sacred works of Vittoria Aleotti or Severo Bonini, or Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius or Haydn’s Masses, or any of the works of Salieri, Verdi, and Vivaldi? Surely we can say these reflect the prior discussions of offering our best in the name of and for the glory of a deity?

But where Foley and the rest make worship music accessible, “guitar-able” and simple (truly in line with Vatican 2), I think its still a stretch to consider it inspired.

 

[grannymh]

Well, perhaps we must catagorize what is meant by inspired music, per se - I am thinking of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis or the sacred works of Vittoria Aleotti or Severo Bonini, or Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius or Haydn’s Masses, or any of the works of Salieri, Verdi, and Vivaldi? Surely we can say these reflect the prior discussions of offering our best in the name of and for the glory of a deity?

But where Foley and the rest make worship music accessible, “guitar-able” and simple (truly in line with Vatican 2), I think its still a stretch to consider it inspired.

While I’m not a fan of Foley, do you think this is the place for me to confess that my favorite song is “Here I am Lord” the one by Dan Schutte? I’m inspired by it. (I do change the word “if” to “where” in the refrain.)

 

[Shike]

Dear Michael,

What do you think about the word “sophistry” as a description for the contradiction? Maybe I should ask if you were the one who used that word in a post three miles back?

Blessings,
granny

Who is deliberately making an ingeneous invalid argument in the hopes to deceive someone?

The contradiction arises due to language issues, but the contradiction isn’t just words either. There seems to be 2 very different positions here.

I guess I don’t understand fully what you mean.

 

[grannymh]

Who is deliberately making an ingeneous invalid argument in the hopes to deceive someone?

The contradiction arises due to language issues, but the contradiction isn’t just words either. There seems to be 2 very different positions here.

I guess I don’t understand fully what you mean.

Dear Michael,

Horrors :bigyikes: My kids would say I was busted.

Chalk the wrong meaning of sophistry to my using a word I haven’t heard in 50 years.

As I remember, sophistry was a tricky argument that appeared plausible or probable but wasn’t. It was connected with an extremely old usage of sophomoric. I see that a current dictionary uses the word fallacious regarding sophistry. In the part of the country where I was, sophistry meant no harm. It might be considered a mind game today. Example of the kind of argument would be this old saying – philosophers like to debate how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

I have read the post on the two issues involved and I definitely was not referring to any post in particular. However, some of the comments offered on the contradiction did not strike me as quite real, like they were two steps to the side.

By the way, I never debated about angels dancing. I was one of those who did not live in the ivory tower, another very old saying…

Seriously, I’m glad you questioned the usage. Have to get this granny up to speed.
Keep doing what you are doing

Blessings,
granny

 

[Shike]

Dear Michael,

Horrors :bigyikes: My kids would say I was busted.

Chalk the wrong meaning of sophistry to my using a word I haven’t heard in 50 years.

As I remember, sophistry was a tricky argument that appeared plausible or probable but wasn’t. It was connected with an extremely old usage of sophomoric. I see that a current dictionary uses the word fallacious regarding sophistry. In the part of the country where I was, sophistry meant no harm. It might be considered a mind game today. Example of the kind of argument would be this old saying – philosophers like to debate how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

I have read the post on the two issues involved and I definitely was not referring to any post in particular. However, some of the comments offered on the contradiction did not strike me as quite real, like they were two steps to the side.

By the way, I never debated about angels dancing. I was one of those who did not live in the ivory tower, another very old saying…

Seriously, I’m glad you questioned the usage. Have to get this granny up to speed.
Keep doing what you are doing

Blessings,
granny

I might have guessed there was a different understanding being promulgated these days. Those crazy kids.

 

[greylorn]

"Frater Bovious:

The position that “we can do something God cannot” is more correctly stated as “we have to do something that God does not need to do.”

This is very good.

Yes, very good indeed. It means that we get to do whatever is irrelevant.

 

[greylorn]

Well, perhaps we must catagorize what is meant by inspired music, per se - I am thinking of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis or the sacred works of Vittoria Aleotti or Severo Bonini, or Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius or Haydn’s Masses, or any of the works of Salieri, Verdi, and Vivaldi? Surely we can say these reflect the prior discussions of offering our best in the name of and for the glory of a deity?

But where Foley and the rest make worship music accessible, “guitar-able” and simple (truly in line with Vatican 2), I think its still a stretch to consider it inspired.

Kindly stay on point. If you wish to discuss music, please initiate your own thread.