This is true, but there are arguments involved in both. When the believers claim (2), they run into the Burrito argument.
However, implicitly, "(1)" and "Not (2)" together says that there are things that God cannot do. Then the argument is what the space of actions is, which noone can say.
No, it doesn't. "God can make a square circle" is false, but a square circle is not a thing. Making a square circle is not action. Therefore, even if that proposition is false, there is no "thing" that God cannot do.
Well, that's not necessarily right either. It's possible to be of an unbounded topology, in which case it is meaningless to talk about 'boundaries' and suchlike.
That is true. The context referred to a bounded topology, though, so I simply assumed that to be the case. Sorry if that was misleading.
I also think that while your explanation is more or less correct, the concept of "Before" and "After", and by corollary, causality in general, are all inherently tied within a framework of time (and space), and so it is literally without meaning to talk about "Before the start of the universe." That phrase has as much significance as "Flingy nongy uilsyt".
I would agree. I have argued the same thing in previous posts as well. I decided to go for another angle, though, to see if it would work better.
This seems to be implying that physics can interact with the boundaries, which is not necessarily true. Rather than saying we can't tell what physics is like at the boundary, it's possible that boundaries don't exist, and "ripples" may not occur at all because the universe may not be able to interact with the boundaries anyway.
Well, it is a figure of speech. The point is more that boundaries naturally lend themselves to different rulesets.
It's still faith. Faith doesn't have to be reasonable; it just needs to be a nonzero possibility. It's still faith to believe your brother will pay you back, even if you would be wiser to go with the more-likely outcome.
Come on, you know what I mean.
It's not a conclusive statement that he doesn't, and the universe is still potentially consistent (i.e. can make sense) even if you see apparent inconsistencies with a subset of your information.
Actually,
I am not sure that it can. Let's call God's plan GP. Whatever GP is, let Brain's Plan (BP) be the exact same as GP, except suffering on Earth is greatly reduced and then memories of people are changed so that they believe they lived on Earth as normal, so that GP can proceed normally. I fail to see in what situation GP could possibly be considered superior to BP from the perspective of the average human, and I fail to see how any other perspective is relevant, considering that "omnibenevolence" is a human concept. The issue here is that it really seems that
regardless of what God's plan is, a plan that serves us better can be directly engineered.
Again, this is unreasonable, not inconsistent.
I said incoherent, though.
Dragonmaster said:
Here's the problem with arguing in the supernatural: we assume in things we've never seen before, we can't feel on earth, and can't emperically test. In addition, we cannot disprove the inane arguments because NEITHER SIDE has experienced the supernatural.
Look, it is simple. Whatever the heck the supernatural is, we are talking about God here. And thanks to his omnipotence, we of course assume that God has dominion over it. Now, if God is omnibenevolent, one would assume that the design of the supernatural would be
subordinated to this omnibenevolence of his. This renders the supernatural completely irrelevant in this context. It is pointless to imagine "what if hell existed" - the point is that if God is omnibenevolent there shouldn't be a hell in the first place.
hobo bob said:
There is where your problem is. You think everything about God must make sense, but part of believing in God is that you won't understand God completely. Maybe God isn't omnipotent, maybe he is but we just don't know. Why does it seem so hard for you to accept that this world may not make any sense? Why must everything have a logical conclusion?
Oh, no, I don't think everything about God must make sense. But see, I'd rather hedge my bets a little. Between a God that makes sense and one that doesn't, why would I choose to believe in the one that doesn't? Why strain myself to believe that God is good and that he can do anything, with all the crap I see everywhere? If no God concept made any sense at all, I guess I might choose to be optimistic. But that's not true. Many God concepts make total sense - indifferent ones, mostly. So I'm left choosing between wishful thinking and realism. And I hate wishful thinking. It's intellectually dishonest.
Here's a hint: theories that make no sense have a pretty damn poor record of being true. This goes for God, as it goes for anything else.
If you argue that if something doesn't make sense then it isn't true, than the Big Bang and many other popular theories are not true since they cannot be proven. It does not make sense that the universe came from nothing, which is where the supernatural part comes in. Something else must have caused the Big Bang if it indeed happened and it would have to be out of our laws of physics. Could that something perhaps be God?
Nobody argues that the universe "came" from anything, let alone from "nothing". The universe just "is", which makes perfect sense and does away with useless entities. Your claim that something else must have caused the Big Bang is entirely unsubstantiated and is based on dubious metaphysics.
Dragontamer said:
If you believe in a Benevolent God (which, Catholics at least believe in), you must also realize that God won't lie to us. A Benevolent God would not lead us astray from the truth. Therefore, our methods of truth finding must be consistent with God. At least, if God ever hopes for us to find the truth.
There is no reason why a benevolent God would not lie. There are many situations where lying is the right course of action. And if there's no way the actual truth would be found out, there is no possible downside.
