Nowhere357

Your lack of charity is disturbing.

Tercel

Yes it is. Which is why I'm inclined to ignore atheists when I see them proclaim "omnipotence is impossible".
FYI, this was Origen's (c230AD) opinion of God's omnipotence.

Yes, but you're just being unhelpful and deliberately looking for ways to make a "vague concept" into a useless one. My "power" over the sun is only an influence by the fact that I exist. It is nothing I can control or do anything worthwhile with. You don't need me to tell you that, and I don't intend to write further posts responding to people writing silly avoidences for the sake of it.

Someone capable of creating or destroying both with ease clearly has more power than either. Yes?

That nice. So you want to include "Significantly" in front of "more power than any other being". I don't have a problem with that.

Ironically, I don't think it's as vague as what you just wrote. Despite your assertions to the contrary, I doubt most people would have a problem with this definition.

I did say "has that power over this universe" referring to the ability to actualise a possible state of affairs, but it doesn't really matter.
"Not a concrete definition". What kind of objection is that? :banghead:
The only essentially meaningless statement I can see is your statement that "This is an essentially meaningless statement"... though can a self-referential statement be both true and meaningless?

The theist probably doesn't propose to know the answer to that question. Hence why the property of omnipotence is defined in such a way that that question and others similiar are left open.

Were you planning on going out and measuring proposed God's to see if they fitted a formal definition of omnipotence? Yeah right. Omnipotence is a concept suggested by theologians to effectively say that God is very powerful indeed and of all entities He's the most powerfullest. This naturally is vague and leaves open questions, but the point of it is not to mathematically define God, only to guide us in our thinking about what God is kindof like: Very powerful.

MrFrosty

Congratulations! You have made it to the end of this activity.

You took zero direct hits and you bit 1 bullets. The average player of this activity to date takes 1.37 hits and bites 1.09 bullet. 101693 people have so far undertaken this activity.

You have been awarded the TPM medal of distinction! This is our second highest award for outstanding service on the intellectual battleground.

The fact that you progressed through this activity without being hit and biting only one bullet suggests that your beliefs about God are internally consistent and well thought out.

A direct hit would have occurred had you answered in a way that implied a logical contradiction. The bitten bullet occurred because you responded in a way that required that you held a view that most people would have found strange, incredible or unpalatable. However, because you bit only one bullet and avoided direct hits completely you still qualify for our second highest award. A good achievement!

fishbulb

Concrete definitions of omnipotence tend to be paradoxical. Vague definitions are simply inscrutable. We can't evaluate what we can't define.


I don't have to look for ways. Your definition is so vague as to be useless all by itself. Power is the ability to affect other things. If you can be affected by other things, you aren't all powerful. You may be very powerful, but there is an important qualitative difference between being extremely powerful and being all-powerful, and it is vital that you make the distinction.

Yes but that is not germaine to this particular definition of yours, where you simply state that being omnipotent means being the most powerful being. Given a set of different kinds of things, you can't simply declare one to be the most powerful without reference to the context in which you are evaluating the things' power. If you are going to talk about power, you must have some sort of criteria for evaluating power. I.e., power to do or affect something particular. Power in a generic sense can't be usefully measured.


That's fine. Significantly more doesn't guarantee dominance. The Ottawa Senators are a significantly more capable hockey team than the New York Islanders, but they still lost their first playoff game against them.

Probably not, but it's still not a coherent definition. Or, if you think it is, why don't you clarify. If you can't be bothered to clarify your definition, I am more inclined to assume that it is nonsense than I am to assume that it is correct, or even meaningful.

Look, the point of honest communication is to get one's idea across to another. If you are honestly interested in people understanding your idea, you must make every effort to communicate that idea as precisely and clearly as you can. If your idea is a difficult or complicated one, it may require extra effort to communicate. You can't just sate a complex idea in one or two sentences and then get upset when people respond that you aren't making any sense; you need to clarify what you mean. If you can't do that, then perhaps it means that you aren't really sure what you mean either.

How else would you determine whether something met a particular definition? If you don't know what a term means, it is meaningless to apply that term to something. If you can't evaluate something, it is meaningless to propose that it meets a particular definition.

Then just say very powerful. Don't use terms that imply one thing to mean something that can be less ambiguouosly expressed using a common term. If you use terms like "omnipotent" to simply mean someone who is very powerful but not qualitatively different from other beings, you need to expect that you will be accused of being vague or deceptive. If you really mean that omnipotence means something qualitatively different from simply being very powerful, then you need to be prepared to explain that qualitative difference in clear and concrete terms.

Albert Cipriani

Dear Copernicus,
Yeah, I can accept your categorization of Islam being a blend of religions rather than a break with Judaism. Sort of like the Mormons of today.

But in a sense, every religion as all life forms are derivative. By a reductio absurdum we could be blinded to all heretical schisms and see only blends. This leaves out the notion of growth, which is essential to understand the relationship between Judaism and Catholicism and even between early and late Catholicism. – Sincerely, Albert the Traditional Catholic

Dominus Paradoxum

"Congratulations!
You have been awarded the TPM medal of honour! This is our highest award for outstanding service on the intellectual battleground.

The fact that you progressed through this activity neither being hit nor biting a bullet suggests that your beliefs about God are internally consistent and very well thought out.

A direct hit would have occurred had you answered in a way that implied a logical contradiction. You would have bitten bullets had you responded in ways that required that you held views that most people would have found strange, incredible or unpalatable. However, you avoided both these fates - and in doing so qualify for our highest award. A fine achievement!

Click here if you want to review the criteria by which hits and bullets are determined.



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JERDOG

You answered "True" to questions 6 and 13.

These answers generated the following response:

Because evolution has evidence to support it while god does not!!

If I were to answer they way it wanted me to I would be in a sense saying that evidence for god is just as mush as the evidence for evolution. And it obviously is not.

The contradiction is not in my philosphy but in theirs.

Dr Rick

Consider "gods" as nothing more and nothing less than anything else.

Rick

copernicus

Jerdog, I still think that they have a point. You believe in evolution on the basis of "revocable" proof. Since similarly strong evidence for God's existence would be "revocable", you cannot demand "irrevocable" proof of God's existence in order to believe in him. I passed this part of the test because I considered God's existence extremely implausible. If I felt that I had evidence that God's existence were plausible, then I would feel compelled to believe in it. However, there is no serious evidence for God's existence that I can find.

Tercel

Well this gets to the crux of the matter. I don't think omnipotence is any different to "very powerful". Theologians have been using the word for millennia to mean exactly this.
It is only modern day atheists and unlearned Christians who want to twist Omnipotence into being something qualitatively different and/or logically incoherent. People do know what "very powerful" means, however-much you might try to obfuscate the issue. And if the didn't the related beliefs that God is the creator and ruler of the universe might give them some idea.


We both agree that it is to some degree difficult to pin down what we mean when we say "power". Sometimes it is hard to say if something has "more power" than something else. I would propose a simple solution to that is to use an Anselmian-style negative definition: God posseses a level of "power" the greater of which cannot be conceived. That is: there exists no logically possible being whose level of "power" is certainly greater than God's.
This avoids the assertion that the must be a distinct maximum on the scale of "power", and I think captures what I am really thinking of when I say "omnipotence".