The General Religion, Mythology, and Theology Thread

Omnipotence is a remarkably vague term. Thus the entire "Could God create a stone so heavy that even He could not lift it?"?" argument.

The Irenaen theory works with the idea this world is the best of all possible worlds, so God's omnipotence is limited by its own inner logic.

Perhaps he is the ultimate martyr because he's so human like us.

edited 15th Dec '17 7:44:05 AM by Gaon

I like that, but I dont think that is what St. Augustine was arguing, or Iraneous either, for that matter.

The simplest answer to that question?

"Yes, He could. And then He would lift it anyway."

edited 15th Dec '17 7:49:42 AM by M84

Augustine, probably no. Irenaeus (whose name is almost the perfect vessel for mispellings, though your Iraneous was the best thus far) is murkier. Irenaeus greatest focus when talking about Jesus was on the flesh aspect, his physical and entirely human nature. So, maybe.

Maybe. When dealing with omnipotence, responses are far more complicated.

Allow me to introduce option number 3, the Palagian heresy. Quoth the other wiki:

"...For Pelagius, "grace" consisted of the gift of free will, the Law of Moses, and the teachings of Jesus.[11] With these, a person would be able to perceive the moral course of action and follow it. Prayer, fasting, and asceticism supported the will to do good."

Though its still technically a heresy, every non-evangelical Christian Ive ever met (and a fair number of them) agrees with this, they just dont associate that set of beliefs with a formal doctrine.

If most Christian agree with it, isn't not agreeing with it the heresy?

From what I gather, what tripped him up was his denial of Original Sin (believing humans are entirely a-ok) much more than anything else.

The "stone so heavy he can't lift it" actually runs into another problem. Lifting is a relative term.

Every time you pick something up, technically you're also lifting the earth away from it.

For me, it's simple. Omnipotence means you can do anything. Anything. So what if it's a reality breaking paradox? So what if it doesn't make sense to us? If an omnipotent being wanted to make a stone they can't lift and lift it anyway, they can. If an omnipotent being wanted to divide by zero, they can. That's what omnipotence is.

Omnipotence is reason why it whole sacrifice thing confuses me, I can get the "Its God sacrificing for humanity, not humanity for humanity" aspect, but I don't get WHY it was necessary besides "dude its whole point of Christianity".

Another thing that confuses me about whole Jesus thing: If person argues that Jesus was without Sin and perfectly good, then how the heck it was God empathizing with humans if humans are sinful and God isn't capable of sin? If Jesus is infallible, then he is rather inhuman so whole point kind of becomes moot if God is such inhuman existence that humans can't comprehend it <_< So whats the point of sacrifice if it isn't even the "God endured the pain and death" if such concepts mean completely different things for such being.

Bible's narrative wise Jesus being god incarnated into human form with all the faults and everything would make more sense than the other more popular option

...Oh yeah forgot to say it earlier, but while I'm interested in theology and stuff, I'm not actually arguing from point of theology, I'm wondering from point of "how the heck this makes sense as story". So while the options you present are interesting to read and think about, reinforcing that Christianity is about martyrdom doesn't explain me how it makes logical sense, just that its the theme.

edited 15th Dec '17 10:16:10 AM by SpookyMask

It doesn't make sense because it's an anthology of related stories written by a bunch of different people that has been translated with varying degrees of accuracy multiple times over centuries. Maybe it made more sense to its original intended target audience in its original language.

The people who originally transcribed the Bible also probably clarified to their flock whether or not they should be taking it literally. Currently, they're a bit too dead to do the same for modern audiences.

edited 15th Dec '17 10:20:40 AM by M84

Hmm, yeah. Though I would hope people would have made sense of the book since they had thousands of years worth of time.

That's probably why it makes little sense. So much may have been Lost in Translation over these centuries. And again, the original people who created the Bible are long dead, so they can't confirm whether they were speaking metaphorically or literally.

edited 15th Dec '17 10:23:21 AM by M84

@Spooky

Believe me man, people have been asking all these questions and more for the past two thousand years. There are all sorts of answers and I don't pretend to know really any of them since this is not a topic I particularly care about. It might interest you to know however that "Christology" is a very interesting, diverse topic that presents all sorts of ideas about Jesus. Not everyone who considers themselves Christians believed he was the perfect Son of God. A lot of these alternative ideas - such as Jesus being all spirit or all human - were declared heretical but we are fortunate to be alive at this time since Christian sects and ideas are probably more diverse now than they have ever been since the 1st Century.

I would leave it to a Christian though to offer a real answer to why it matters that Jesus died if he wasn't really human. But I do seem to recall part of the Bible being that he did resist temptation. Something about a desert and Satan maybe? I dunno the details but he apparently wasn't a paragon of virtue. To be tempted means he must experience...well, doubt and desire.

Also ever seen the movie Dogma? I always liked the part where they mention "where exactly was Jesus for the first 30 years of his life and what did he do?" That's something a lot of people don't really think about it. There are ideas he went to India but I don't think those are historically backed up by anything.

I do have a Bible, I should go through it sometime. lol

edited 15th Dec '17 10:44:44 AM by Nikkolas

There's illogical omnipotence (God creates a stone too heavy for him to lift it and then lifts anyway) and logical omnipotence (God creates a stone too heavy for him to lift it and then doesn't lift it). Both interpretations are valid for Christianity, and neither is particularly more more plausible than the other. If anything, "logical omnipotence" fits more with Christianity because it can be likened to the very Christian idea of self-abdication, with God imposing limits upon his own power (which is a running theme no matter which way you slice it). It's under a broader, more quantum perspective of "logical omnipotence" that Irenaeus and many other Christian theologists operate.

Jesus was probably capable of sin by virtue of being born in flesh (that's our boy Irenaeus talking again), he just never committed any. That's why there's an entire portion in the gospels where Jesus is tempted by the wanderer in the desert (commonly Satan), seems somewhat interested, but then refuses.

The only person born without sin (if we're going by Catholic doctrine) would be Mary.

If we go by Irenaeus again, he says that Jesus is reverse-polarity Adam (and much greater). direct creation of God, born of flesh, offered sin by the Serpent, but chooses righteousness rather than sin and thus kickstarts the opposite process that Adam did (i.e Adam kickstarted sin, Jesus kickstarts salvation).

I won't pretend I understand the full complexities of Irenaeus but that seems to be the gist of it. It's an interesting perspective.

Well, I appreciate my rambling is being productive.

But onto the actual point, I think there's been a miscommunication here. My meaning wasn't just that martyrdom is the central theme of Christianity as a narrative. My meaning is martyrdom is the central universal constant of Christianity as theory of universal existence. You seem to grasp the idea of God paying mankind's bills. Well, that payment is only acceptable via martyrdom, because that's the big universal constant that makes things matter. Christianity proposes a universe guided by morality, and Christian morality works on a self-sacrifice basis, so actions (even divine actions) chiefly matter when operating under self-sacrifice.

That's why asceticism is such a big deal among monastic christian sects. Self-abstaining is a universal moving force.

PS: While I'm enjoying this I feel like I'm pulling all the stops on weapons-grade Catholicism here. Protestant sects may have differing perspectives.

edited 15th Dec '17 10:55:22 AM by Gaon

Jesus' early life was talked about in some apocryphal texts. For example as a child, he actually needed to learn to control his powers. Killed a friend of his in anger (accidentally) and promptly resurrected him.

You might find something if you search in the non-canonical texts.

edited 15th Dec '17 11:01:10 AM by TerminusEst

Oh I've read and heard of some of those. I know that particular story from one of The Great Courses lectures I've listened to. I've been interested in "Gnosticism" for a long time now thanks to a lot of popular culture being riddled with it growing up. The Matrix, the video games Xenogears and Xenosaga, probably other stuff.

Some of those stories are pretty wild but i've talked to some Christians about this and they tend to get kinda of...displeased with me since only Thomas is supposed to have come about around the same time as the other Gospels. So if we're gonna talk strict Christian doctrine I try to be as conventional as possible.

Buddhism is a lot friendlier to incorporating texts from several centuries apart, by the way. Something I've been noticing as I learn more about it.

edited 15th Dec '17 11:25:09 AM by Nikkolas

With “a Stone too heavy for God to lift”: the typical answer I get is “no”. There are things God cannot do, and that would be one of them. Dividing by Zero would be another thing God cannot do. He can’t do the logically or tautologicaly impossible. For example, he couldn’t make a tornado over the water, because then by definition it’d be a water spout.

I think the problem is that god is so overline powerfull that even paradox dosent being to understand it since only him make sense of things.

he is the ultimate "because fuck you, that is why" chararter.

Depends on how omnipotence is defined. I would say that a being can be omnipotent without being able to divide by zero.

On a sidenote, I did once analyze the "rock so heavy" paradox from a physics perspective, and while I think this was deliberately Comically Missing the Point, this was my conclusion:

God could create an object with infinite mass, and that would be immobile via conventional means, likely even with infinite energy. Having said that, God could do any number of things to get around this, such as moving the universe around the object.

An interesting way around the problem, but isn't the point of that thought experiment that there's an upper limit to God's power, thus He cannot be omnipotent?

The point of the experiment is exploring the type of omnipotence he has. If it is a omnipotence with an internal logic or not.

It's all a silly semantics argument, no one can define what omipotence even is, let alone test for it. The statement "A rock too heavy to lift" is semantically incoherent. "Heavy" and "lift" are objective qualitiies or actions that can only take place in the material universe—but in that universe nothing could be too heavy to lift. So what does the statement mean? To have some sort of philosophical coherence, we would have to define the logical context within which a rock might possess a "weight" that is not limited by the constraints of physical existence. If we are not referring to a physical rock with a measurable weight, then we must be using some other logical framework and deriving the meaning of "weight" from that framework. What framework? By which I mean, if we aren't basing the concept of weight on an object's mass in the observable universe, then what do we mean by "weight"? And if we are just using our imagination as the basis of a fanciful notion of "infinite weight" or something like that, well that carries no more metaphysical meaning than "can yellow be purple?" or "can you be so tall that you end up short instead?". It's just a string of concept strung together arbitrarily that conforms to a set of linguistic rules so that it appears to mean something, but actually it doesnt.

I am not aware of any passage in the Bible that claims God is omnipotent like that (or omniscient, or omnibenelovent for that matter). So really, it's an inconsequential argument.

Both are very heavily implied. In fact, I think the Bible it does say something to the effect of "Through God all things are possible".