Friday, June 13, 2008

Ominpotence

I was recently reading a Progressive Christian blog that I like and the following views on God were posted:

1 - God in Omnipotent

2 - God is not Omnipotent

3 - There is no God

It was a very interesting post that dealt with the power of God and the issue of theodicy (suffering in the world). These three viewpoints were given on the nature of God and how God relates to suffering in the world.

However, a problem exists with these choices from the Deist point of view. The problem is that there is another option that is not given here.

Let me explain.

In Deism, we reject the view that God is a being or more to be more technical that God has human qualities (also called anthropormorphic). In this case, God cannot be understood as omnipotent (or not omnipotent) because power is a human quality which does not apply to God.

So, I put forward this fourth choice:

4 - Omnipotent is not a term that can be applied to God.

Omnipotence, Omnibenevolence, Omnithis and Ominthat have no place when discussing God as they are terms that made sense when God was viewed as a human-like being but have no use anymore once we come to look at God from new points of view. This can be very hard for people to do because it is hard for us not to view God as human-like but when we do we have the ability to move past what has caused us many problems which is creating God in our image.

You may be asking what God is then and all I can say is that the totality of God is beyond what we can comprehend and our use of language that serves us so well in other aspects of our lives serves very little purpose here.

I talk more on this later.

I choose number 4 as my option.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hello,

I strongly agree with you and your assessment of the supposed omni's surrounding god. We cannot make any claims about this to a deity because it only makes it more human than it actually seems to be.

JayDeist said...

Anthropomorphism is my biggest problem with religions. I've said many times, man created God in his own image, not the other way around. I got into a conversation yesterday with the boys and girls club (my kids daycare) about my beliefs, and she was so confused, that she said I must have had some kind of traumatic experience in my life to believe the things I do, and that she would pray for me. It is hard for a christian to view God from any other aspect, since they've been programmed from birth to believe what they do.

drlobotomy said...

I disagree with the premise of your argument. "Power" is not an exclusively human attribute. The sun has power. In physics power is "is the rate at which energy is transferred, used, or transformed" (Wikipedia). The Big Bang was a very powerful event. So I don't think you can come to the conclusion that you do.

Anonymous said...

Or ...

5. God is omni. (More of an origami thing than is usually visualized. Down in the trenches so to speak.)