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techstepgenr8tion
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21 Jul 2018, 7:01 am

Somewhat old thread and I'm arriving really late so this will be a bit off topic (ie. responding to OP).

I believe this whole concept seems to relate to ex-nihilo creation, ie. that 'God' is creating things out of a supposed foreign substance that isn't itself. Even without building boulders too big for it to lift or drawing square circles the very problem is this - just to say a deity 'speaks' things into creation is a translation of its own energy and in that case its still building things out of itself. If it weren't just that, ie. something like a masculine principle fertilizing a feminine one - okay, then you have maybe something like a conscious/unconscious dipole going on. In that later case though, can you even really say it's a separate substance? Sure, you can say otherwise, that God just formed things that already existed but that's then saying that 'God' is just a lower-case g god in a pre-existing universe, not all-powerful, etc. in which case the concept of omnipotence is vanquished.

This is where I think Abrahamic orthodoxy swallowed some really bad ideas, such as walling God off from matter, and some of those ideas seem like they might have been in reaction to other problems - mainly distinguishing what they had to offer from what their competitors did. The strange thing about Christianity even is it seems to be of two conflicting minds. One mind presents Jesus as something like platonic archetypal man (Adam Kadmon) showing up in Jesus of Nazareth at age 30 and using a lot of very tree or root-structural language about humanity and God and where he is between the two. The rest of it is very Manichean/Zoroastrian in flavor, posits matter as fallen or evil, and speaks in terms of belief for salvation or perdition. All of that raises questions of mechanics, like in a universe with nothing present but God how do things get shot out, lost, or destroyed and especially why on such flimsy circumstances? I think that's where anthropological answers to the origins of most organized religion make sense - ie. too many disagreeing chefs in the kitchen and most likely all kinds of political and organizational needs specific to that time guiding the dialog.


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naturalplastic
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22 Jul 2018, 1:14 am

techstepgenr8tion wrote:
Somewhat old thread and I'm arriving really late so this will be a bit off topic (ie. responding to OP).

I believe this whole concept seems to relate to ex-nihilo creation, ie. that 'God' is creating things out of a supposed foreign substance that isn't itself. Even without building boulders too big for it to lift or drawing square circles the very problem is this - just to say a deity 'speaks' things into creation is a translation of its own energy and in that case its still building things out of itself. If it weren't just that, ie. something like a masculine principle fertilizing a feminine one - okay, then you have maybe something like a conscious/unconscious dipole going on. In that later case though, can you even really say it's a separate substance? Sure, you can say otherwise, that God just formed things that already existed but that's then saying that 'God' is just a lower-case g god in a pre-existing universe, not all-powerful, etc. in which case the concept of omnipotence is vanquished.

This is where I think Abrahamic orthodoxy swallowed some really bad ideas, such as walling God off from matter, and some of those ideas seem like they might have been in reaction to other problems - mainly distinguishing what they had to offer from what their competitors did. The strange thing about Christianity even is it seems to be of two conflicting minds. One mind presents Jesus as something like platonic archetypal man (Adam Kadmon) showing up in Jesus of Nazareth at age 30 and using a lot of very tree or root-structural language about humanity and God and where he is between the two. The rest of it is very Manichean/Zoroastrian in flavor, posits matter as fallen or evil, and speaks in terms of belief for salvation or perdition. All of that raises questions of mechanics, like in a universe with nothing present but God how do things get shot out, lost, or destroyed and especially why on such flimsy circumstances? I think that's where anthropological answers to the origins of most organized religion make sense - ie. too many disagreeing chefs in the kitchen and most likely all kinds of political and organizational needs specific to that time guiding the dialog.


The three monostheistic cults that survived the end of classical times to become the dominant religions of western Eurasia today (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) all share the notion that God sits on his own thrown in a separate room from creation. In contrast primitive peoples and the religions of the east (Hinduism,Taoism) tend to be pantheistic, and to place God into creation.

So apparently you're saying that if we went back to the drawing board and redesigned Christianity to be more like Eastern religions then God and any putative boulder would be one and the same thing. The same god-stuff.

Maybe. But the question is about theology as it exists now. God as he is conceived of in existing theology, and to exploring the seeming contradictions that arise from that theology.



techstepgenr8tion
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22 Jul 2018, 9:21 am

naturalplastic wrote:
So apparently you're saying that if we went back to the drawing board and redesigned Christianity to be more like Eastern religions then God and any putative boulder would be one and the same thing. The same god-stuff.

I'm more trying to point at where the Abrahamic theistic model of God self contradicts and fails on its own terms with respect to ex-nihilo creation because, as far as I can tell, it's an oxymoron. The foundational concepts paint themselves into a corner and self-destruct pretty fast.

A god rather than a God could be said to mettle with what's already there or shape/transform it or bring it into physical existence out of non-condensed energy or fields (which is also transformation not creation) but a god would also not be omnipotent. Omnipotence would require absolute mastery over the set of all being through all of space and time, and I'm hard pressed to think of a way for that to be possible for a being who resides 'in a separate room from creation'.

One can't argue for an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent God and at the same time argue that things could happen that it couldn't foresee, or that there would be some sort of foreign substance that it could create.

Maybe another good theism brain-teaser: can an omniscient deity escape its own omniscience? I would have to argue, reflexively on that definition - no. Would that mean it's not omnipotent? Ah, that's another case perhaps where omnipotence as a concept not only self eviscerates (ie. boulders too big for an absolute conscious agent to lift) but now it also suggests that absolute omniscience and absolute omnipotence couldn't coexist.


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22 Jul 2018, 6:40 pm

naturalplastic wrote:
If God exists, and if he is omnipotent then could God build a boulder so big, that even he, God, couldn't lift it?

:D That is a very interesting question.