Post by FilmFlaneur on Dec 24, 2020 1:32:19 GMT
See my final words below. The actual original premise actually leads with 'if God can do anything...' Any certainty here is all yours. Look back and check. Is that something "I failed to mention" before?
And, as has been pointed out to you with good logical reasons, the premise is, quite simply a false one. To accept it as valid, as it appears you do with that "my argument" above, is to misunderstand the way biblical scholars and thinkers commonly view the nature of an 'all-powerful' deity. Sorry about that. The point is, still, that to go on as one might and argue in favour of that type of god, inevitably leads to qualifying such a being into existence, as I have shown ... a process of special pleading that we are surely all over-familiar with elsewhere.
In short, what you are so taken with here is a duff idea, one inevitably propped up by with logic-busting special pleading ('... so a triangle can have four sides if ever God wills it' 'God can lift rocks that He made that are unliftable' etc). I can't falsify such assertions, other with logic, which of course is rendered useless by qualifying a supreme being as one which, being special, of course can do the illogically incoherent, can't it now?
I don't refuse it. I refute it- but only when, as you have done, it is taken as an absolute, rather than the conditional, statement that the original poster submitted. And even then only when normal rules of logic apply, without special pleading.
Then why did you change it from a conditional to absolute statement and dispute around that?
You seem to have been conflating the original premise with something you want it to read and the tone of your reply before last was a bit intemperate.. Remember what I said earlier about emotion and (personal) psychology playing an important part in religious matters? I do.
I say omniscience doesn't include the ability to know things that can't be known,
To which (assuming you mean "can't be known by God"), the same rebuttal of logical incoherence applies. And, as we have not discussed omniscience here I am not sure why you would even want to open a second front. Perhaps if God knows everything then He knows that, despite all claims to the contrary He cannot actually do what cannot be done, which is why He does not try?
...and omnipotence doesn't include things that can't be done.
This appears a sudden change from your previous claim that an omnipotent being can do literally anything, and here I fully agree with you.
But the OP's premise (ie, the conditional you acknowledge) does not exclude intrinsic impossibilities. Therefore, if God can do anything, then there's nothing he can't do.
But here you are just contradicting what you said above. There is no reason why intrinsic possibilities (or potential) would not apply equally in the instance of a God which might be able to do such-and-such, and one who definitely can do it.
It doesn't destroy my argument to point out that he could be both visible and invisible simultaneously given the premise as stated - it bolsters it.
In which case then, why does a God, whose will is supposedly to bring all to salvation, not fulfil his own will and do it, by doing just as you describe, something quick and easy? And what would it look like, being half on and half off? No points for special pleading.