The Great and Powerful Oz (or not…)
June 6, 2007 by TJM Admin
Omniscient adj. Meaning: Having total knowledge; knowing everything: an omniscient deity; the omniscient narrator.
Omnipotent adj. Meaning: 1. almighty or infinite in power, as God. 2. having very great or unlimited authority or power.
Do these words fit into the description of your god? If so, feel free to read on as we examine the inherent contradiction in one of these terms and the moral dilemma with the other.
Let’s first deal with the concept of omnipotence. It is within this term we will find the inherent contradiction. Ascribed to a deity, most people translate this to mean that their god can simply do anything. The problem with this is that when you stop to think about what this actually means, it truly does not make much sense at all.
Can god create a black hole whose gravitational pull is so enormous that even he/she cannot escape it? It is questions like this that pose a problem to the idea of an omnipotent god. Should we answer the question positively, we are admitting that god is not omnipotent, as he could not escape the gravity of the black hole. Should we respond negatively, again, we admit to a limited god who cannot create a reality that a mere human has imagined.
We could go beyond the contradictory questions and into others. Can god create a square circle? This is a logical impossibility and cannot exist.
The end of the story for Christians is one that is easily laid out: God and those that praise, worship and serve him in heaven; while Lucifer, his demons and those that chose not to accept god in hell. That is the end of the means. For an omnipotent being, there needn’t be a means to an end. You simply create the desired end.
As for omniscience, this term also holds little hope. If we hold that god is omniscient, then freewill is nothing more than a glorified Magician’s Force1. The difference is in the perception. You, being a limited being, do not know what tomorrow may hold in store for you. (You don’t have a clue about the next five minutes, for that matter.) However, an omniscient god has already seen the track of your life play out to its’ end. You feel that you have freewill due to your limited ability to foresee events, while god has the next millennium in his log book.
This brings up certain moral questions that need to be examined. Was is morally responsible for an omniscient god to create a being, lay out a tremendously harsh punishment for the flaw that he knew existed, and allow that being to fail? Does the flood fall under the idea of premeditated mass murder? There are a whole slew of questions we could ponder should we accept the idea that god is omniscient.
Couple these terms together, and you can start pulling the curtain back on the Great and Powerful Oz…
1 A magician’s force is a means of having a spectator select the card that you want him to while having it appear as though they freely chose it. Example: There are 5 face down cards on the table, one of which is the five of clubs and you know its’ position. You want the spectator to choose that card. You ask the spectator to point to two cards. If neither of the cards are the five of clubs, those cards are discarded and the process is repeated. If one of the cards IS the five of clubs, the remaining cards are discarded. He is then asked to choose between the remaining 2 cards. If he points to the five of clubs, the other card is discarded. If he points to the other card, it is discarded leaving the five of clubs as the only card left.
Re: Omnipotence
I don’t think that the arguments you’ve presented are as strong as they appear. There’s a problem with each.
Black Hole argument: This argument is flawed in that it assumes this omnipotent being to be substantial and functioning within the same physical laws that we, as mortal, material beings function under. I don’t think that this necessarily the case with “God” as most theists understand the principle. It’s possible that I’m just avoiding the issue by raising this point, but it would need to be pressed further and in a more precise manner to come up with physical constraints for a nonphysical entity.
“Square circle” argument: This isn’t really a problem for omnipotence, because the argument itself literally does not make sense. If I present to you the case of a “round square”, I’m really just speaking nonsense. If I were to suggest an all-black shirt, that is a shirt that is created from nothing but black material, and then say that it has white checks on it. Linguistically, a square circle has as much significance as “Omnephedola crekka mah featesash,” it just doesn’t have any kind of real significance.
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Re: Omniscience
I’m not sure that this presents a terribly troubling moral dilemma. Atheists, for example, face a similar difficulty but have no trouble in determining themselves to be moral agents capable of making moral decisions. Many atheists will happily and readily accept the idea of a universe which began with the “big bang” and continued to form through a series of remarkable coincidences that, however improbably, resulted in our lives as we experience them; complete wiht consciousness. Really, the result of our planet, our sun, our lives, and indeed our consciousness has been inevitable since the first .000000000000000000037 seconds of “time”; the moelcules that were around at that time have simply been reacting in accordance to the various physical laws of the universe, and we are simply a result of these inevitable, calculable reactions. Our brains are made up of these same molecules, and are reacting just exactly as they must within the confines of this particular universe.
Given this situation, it appears that there is truly very little that we can control. Especially if our universe is a closed system, then everything that happens within the system is predictable (though the calculations for minutae such as ourselves are infeasible for us to predict). This is similar to the omniscient God. Somewhere, somehow, there is a “plan” which all of our actions must adhere to; whether they come from a deity or simply result from the inevitable physical reactions set in motion during the very beginnings of our universe. Nonetheless, we still consdier ourselves to be capable of “creating our own path” so to speak, and living our lives the way we see fit. It is possible that we are deceiving ourselves, but this is a possibility that is as true for atheists as it is for theists, and it is a possibility that I, forone, neglect to consider when pondering my own moral decisions - whether they are predetermined or not, I am under the impression that I have a choice, and therefore I have a responsibility to make the best choice possible. I think that a theist could make a similar argument; “Whether or not God knows my life’s results, because I am aware of the possibility to change, I therefore must accept responsibility for my actions.”
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Arete,
You totally missed the point. This article is not about the morality or consciousness of humans, it’s about the morality of an all-powerful, all-knowing god. The atheist does not face a difficulty of burning in eternal torment with no relief due to the falicies of a sedistic god. The Christian, Muslim, and Jew all face that difficulty and have to explain how their god could be so cruel and heartless. Are we not made in his image, as they say? Would any of us create a being that we knew would be in torment FOREVER and then proceed to carry out such a punishment? No, not unless we’re mentally instable. Therefore, if such a god exists, he is no better than we, yet he is supposed to be the supreme being? There is a simple answer that requires very little thought. No such god exists.
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Thank you both for the comments thus far.
Arete, what you fail to understand is that we are dealing primarily with mainstream deities here. I do not profess to know that much about Buddha, Shiva, the Moon Goddess or any other gods outside of the Judaic-Christian god and Allah. The reason for this is that I have not had the time to study them in depth. However, I have studied the Christian and Islamic gods quite a bit. Both have books that are supposedly from them through the pens of their respective servants. Within these books, one can find various allusions to the nature of its’ respective deity. From those sources, we find that those gods have very human (super or not) qualities to them both emotionally and physically.
For example, if we say that god did indeed create man in his own image, we must assume that god does indeed have a physical image from which to model his creation. If this is true, than the “black whole” paradox still stands as astrophysics would still apply and act on a material body.
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ComputerGuyCJ: You’re right, I did get sidetracked. However, I think that what you’re talking about in a problem of goodness, or the supposed omnibenevolence of this God; a deity could certainly be omnipotent and omniscient but not all-good. What I was trying to show (and perhaps I got too far off the subject) was that the arguments in the initial post didn’t really support the conclusion that omnipotence and omniscience are inherently flawed or troublesome. However, I think the original post and your comment are leading toward a discussion of the Problem of Evil - quite probably the best place to argue against the existence of an all-good God, and a really excellent discussion that probably belongs in a different post.
TJM Admin: I’ve noted before that I don’t consider myself a scholar of religions (western, eastern, pagan, greek, nordic, whatever). For that reason, I try my best to learn from those that do have such credentials; PhDs in Religious Studies and Theology, and often Philosophy, are excellent sources for me to learn about the nature of God. From these sources, I have understood this concept to be one of metaphysics; that is, the being which many call “God” is, to some extent, beyond our comprehension of the material world. A mark of good scholarship is being able to work through texts as convoluted as the Bible, Torah, and Qu’ran and arrive at a significant understanding. Often times this understanding seems contradictory to some passages within the works, and it seems to me that the general understanding of God is contradictory to the idea that he is a physical, material being in the same way that we are.
Regardless, I’m not sure that it’s really worth arguing about the nature of God. It seems that the problem you have posed is this: omnipotence is actually impossible; no being could ever be omnipotent because it could potentially be self-defeating, e.g., they could create a box from which they could not escape, etc. I think that framing the argument around the nature of omnipotence, rather than an omnipotent being, makes for a stronger argument, and I do enjoy strong arguments.
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