commonsense wrote: ↑Fri Jun 26, 2026 5:34 pm
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Fri Jun 26, 2026 5:26 am
commonsense wrote: ↑Fri Jun 26, 2026 12:11 am
So by “omnipotent” I mean all-powerful and having the power to do anything. And yes, this means the power to do evil.
"Anything?" Does it include the power to do the self-contradictory, like creating square circles? Or is it reasonable to suppose that God is not obligated to do the absurd?
And if "anything" includes evil, then the God of the Bible is not, by your definition, "omnipotent" at all, since it is Biblically clear that God does not do evil, cannot lie, cannot deny Himself, cannot break His own word, and so on. It's quite explicit about that, actually.
However, we should pause here: it's not at all clear that the inability to do wicked or stupid things ought to count as a lack of "potency." After all, what sort of an entity is compelled to act against His own nature and will? That surely wouldn't be the God of the Bible. The Biblical God is described as one who never has to act contrary to his own will and nature -- and that that feature is perhaps the best summary of what it means to be truly "omnipotent": being so powerful as to never have to act in any way that you are not inherently oriented toward doing.
Or to put it another way, take something like lying. Men find they have to lie because they lack the power to make what they wish to be true, true. But God, since He never lacks such power, has no need to lie: what he says always is true, and He never lacks the wherewithal to bring it about. That's what many Theists understand by "omnipotence."
That's the problem with a word like that. It's an invented word, a word people use differently, and is not used at all in the Biblical account. So at best, it's a kind of theological place-holder, an attempted description of a feature of God that might work in some cases, but something that, on your definition, wouldn't fit at all.
So now I'm not sure which God you're hoping to indict. Your description no longer fits the God that Christians and Jews believe in. Other religions would have to speak for their own, I suppose.
I take it that the Biblical God exists as a partially powerful Being...But how can I feel safe in the hands of a partially powerful God?
That would depend on what you regard as "being powerful." If evil is the ability to do a bad thing, you probably ought to feel more safe in the hands of a God who is not like that, than one who is, right?
But is the inability to do evil really reflective of a lack of power? I suggest not. I suggest that human beings often do evil because of the limitations of their power. So, for example, I lie, steal or swindle because I lack the means to make my will happen. But why would a genuinely powerful being ever need (or even want) to do those things? If He has the power to make anything He wishes to happen (perhaps other than the obviously absurd or self-contradictory), what need would He ever find for lying, stealing or swindling? His word is always truth, He owns everything by right, and He can simply take whatever He wishes. It would seem odd...and rather weak, if I may say, if God had to do those sorts of ruses in order to get the things He wishes to come about, would it not?
Since evil does occur, the power over evil might be possessed by an entity called Satan. And a perpetual war between good and evil is sometimes won by evil.
That's a possible explanation, but not the only one, and I suggest, not the best one, either.
Let's go back to the concept of evil. Some people think it's a thing, an independent
existens: there's a thing called "good," and then a thing called "evil," and they're just opposite things. Okay, that's what they think.
But I suspect that the truth is more subtle. It's that evil is not a thing-in-itself, an independent
existens, but rather a corruption of something good. As such, it cannot exist without good, since it borrows from good; but good can exist without evil, because good is the real thing, and evil merely the corruption of the good thing.
So, for example, lying (which is an evil), is actually, failure-to-be-truthful. Theft is failure-to-honour-property. Adultery is failure-to-uphold-marriage-commitments. Murder is failure-to-sanctify-life. And so on. The "evil" part derives from the fact of a good thing having been debased. Disease is similar: disease is the absence of health, the invasion of a body by corrupting forces. But it does not exist unless there is such a thing as a healthy body possible. Whereas, health could plausibly be a real thing, even if there were no diseases. We'd just probably take no special note of health, since the body would never be unhealthy. We would have
the experience of the good; but none whatsoever, and not even a name for, the concept of evil.
If that's right, we can't properly speak of evil as "existing" independent of what it corrupts. There would be no possible world in which evil existed without there also existing the concept of good. But in the reverse case, there might be such a thing as good in a world with no evil; redundant to name, perhaps, in a world with no evil, but still real and substantial. It is what we would all experience, on a regular basis, every day. But we would not have the knowledge of evil, so we would not think about the good, at least, not in the same way, not as an alternative to evil.
Let me know how that all strikes you. We can go a further step in that thinking, but only if I'm clear so far, and if you're content with it.
