Well, perhaps some day you will reconsider your chronological snobbery.I’m frequently amazed (and a little disturbed) that Aquinas, a man who died in 1274 and could have had no knowledge of science in the modern sense, is still regarded as an authority on the origins of the universe.
To create a rock to heavy to move. Movement implies that the rock has a Potential to be moved, and we know a t hing can not move from a potential to an actual unless it is moved by something already in motion. Since God is the Unmoved Mover, the source of all motion, He could not create a situation that He couldn’t change, since motion is change. In the act of creation, potency and act are essential characteristics of things created. The creation of a rock implies this condition.I have actually come to agree–that in creating out of nothing, God did in fact “create a rock too heavy for him to lift.” That is to say, God created something that, by definition, he could not completely control. I don’t think this compromises omnipotence, since God’s ability to create something out of nothing is the most fundamental kind of omnipotence imaginable.
Edwin
But is that the God of the bible?No, no. I get the First Cause argument. It has more teeth than the answer to why creating a rock so heavy God can’t lift it.
Aquinas didn’t do modern physics. So I think you might be putting claims in his mouth he never made.I’m frequently amazed (and a little disturbed) that Aquinas, a man who died in 1274 and could have had no knowledge of science in the modern sense, is still regarded as an authority on the origins of the universe.
When it is said that God created out of nothing, it is meant that other than God, nothing else was.Just listening to the ca live podcast and a caller asked about if God could create a rock so heavy God couldn’t lift it (as a limitation on his attributes) and the host explained how that’s a non reality, impossibility and absurdity. But it would seem to me that the notion of one being able to create out of nothing would also be an impossibility and absurdity…no different than 2 + 3 never = 12. Yet here we stand as proof of its reality.
Can you specify exactly what it is you’re referencing?I have become disturbed for a long time at the veracity given to so many of the early ignorant theologians who seem to have made the rules for what we are to believe today.
Yes, because in scripture God revealed His nature when He stated “I Am Who Am”. ,meaning “I Am Existence” Therefore the creation of a rock is the effect of The First Cause, God who gave the rock existence because it could not cause it own existence.But is that the God of the bible?
Might be the mother of all conspiracy theories!!!“I’m frequently amazed (and a little disturbed) that Aquinas, a man who died in 1274 and could have had no knowledge of science in the modern sense, is still regarded as an authority on the origins of the universe.”
I have become disturbed for a long time at the veracity given to so many of the early ignorant theologians who seem to have made the rules for what we are to believe today. They knew nothing of modern physics, cosmology, psychiatry, etc. Also the revelations of the various saints who supposedly communicated with Jesus, Mary, etc. I suspect are going to be found to be just mental illusions brought about by excessive mind disturbing meditations. The entire revelation-apparition scenario seems to be a well orchestrated experiment in controlling how we think. Not by a loving God but by someone far less powerful but in control of the human race.
Part of the problem is that human language can only describe objects or events that we have experience with. When we speak of “lifting” we mean that we are accelerating something away from the Earth’s center, against its gravity. But since a rock would have to be infinitely heavy to be too heavy for an infinite being to lift, it would generate so much gravity itself that all things would be pulled into it, and then the concept of “lifting” as we use the term no longer works at all. There would be nowhere to accelerate it because it would literally be “everywhere”. There would be no center from which to lift it off of because it would be everything.I know I’ll be in the minority here. But the usual answer people give to this seems very hand-wavy. The answer usually comes down to “because that’s the way we say things are.”
I suspect that these revelations are actually implanted thoughts, orchestrated by sinister lizard-waffles who have all of humanity plugged into a computer simulation in order to harvest our body’s energies to power their toasters. I have no reason to think this, I just suspect it.“I’m frequently amazed (and a little disturbed) that Aquinas, a man who died in 1274 and could have had no knowledge of science in the modern sense, is still regarded as an authority on the origins of the universe.”
Also the revelations of the various saints who supposedly communicated with Jesus, Mary, etc. I suspect are going to be found to be just mental illusions brought about by excessive mind disturbing meditations. The entire revelation-apparition scenario seems to be a well orchestrated experiment in controlling how we think. Not by a loving God but by someone far less powerful but in control of the human race.