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ON THE PULPIT
An Inquisitive Enquiry into the Deity
By Nyasaking
"The important thing is not to stop questioning."
Albert Einstein
The Judo/Christian/Islamic god is invariably ascribed the following weighty attributes 1) Omnipotence 2) Omniscience 3) Omnibenevolence 4) Perfect 5) Free willed. As a logician I shall endeavor to handle the proverbial bull by the horns and prove that these qualities cannot be lumped together to describe a ‘being’ without running into serious contradictions and logical flaws. If any of the qualities contradict each other then according to the law of contradictions the existence of such a ‘being’ is immediately called into question.
God is omnipotent, He can do anything. Question 1, can he make a triangle with four sides? An immediate outcry from apologists would be that a triangle cannot have four sides! Precisely! That’s the whole point! Its either you bring to an end all logical debate by forfeiting all reason and logic in order to maintain God’s omnipotence or accept he can’t make such an
illogical and impossible triangle which will mean his powers are limited by logic and are subject to the rules of mathematics or simply put God can only make things that are logical possible, that will mean God would automatically loose his omnipotence. Question 2, can God make a “being” more powerful than himself? There again we run into a massive brick wall. If the answer is yes then God’s supremacy and sovereignty comes into question, i.e., the concept of a supreme creator becomes meaningless, on the other hand if the answer is no, again God automatically looses his omnipotence.
God is omniscient, He knows everything absolutely. Question 1, can God truly know what it is like to personally experience a mistake? If yes it implies he had made mistakes before hence he looses his perfection, if no he looses his omniscience because he doesn’t know everything. So he can’t be both perfect and omniscient.
The problems with omnipotence and omniscience become more evident when we add free will to our God. Most of us believe God is free willed. Is it possible for God to both have free will and be omniscient? For example, if God is truly omniscient He has perfect knowledge of the past and future. He knows what I will be doing, what you will be doing, and what He will be doing. Perfect or infallible knowledge of the future locks God to that knowledge, there can be no logical escape! Question 1, Can God escape doing what He sees Himself doing? If He can, then He isn’t omniscient. However, if God cannot escape what He sees Himself doing in the future, not only does His omnipotence come into question, but can it truly be claimed that God is free willed? God knows every single moment in the past and future, including the present. God knows what He will be doing in thirty seconds. If at any point God cannot escape what He sees in the future, He loses his omnipotence and free will. If He can, He looses His omniscience.
When it comes to the issue of answering prayers, we must question whether or not God is actually acting on His own volition, or doing what His knowledge of the future predestines Him to do. If God is omniscient therefore He knows every single prayer that He will answer before it is even uttered. So, is God really answering a prayer or merely doing what is required i.e. what He is programmed to do by His own infallible and perfect knowledge of the future? Remember His own infallible knowledge of the future irrevocably locks Him to that knowledge lest He looses his omniscience.
So, we find that God cannot have free will and be both omnipotent and omniscient at the same time. If God is free willed, then God cannot be omniscient because He can’t know the future. If God is not free willed, then He isn’t omnipotent because his actions are predetermined. God cannot be both omnipotent and omniscient because He either is or is not free willed. I must say at this point, God can be saved and kept for further discussion by either abandoning His omnipotence or omniscience.
God is omnibenevolent. His love knows no boundaries. Question 1, why would an omnibenevolent god create a world that has or would come to have so much pain and suffering in it (the examples of suffering in this world are so ubiquitous and myriad to catalogue). A lame and feeble argument is that the current state of the world is a result of man misusing his free will, rather than God’s fault. However, God knows all things and is capable of doing all things.
God knew we would fail, knew that He would have to drown all but a few of the entire species at some point, knew that He would send a majority of us to Hell in the end. Still, He chose to create things in a manner that would allow such things to happen. Was it truly necessary for God to place a tree of good and evil in the Garden of Eden? It was not necessary to do that if God is omnipotent or let alone be omniscient since it can be argued he had perfect knowledge of the outcome. So, by placing the tree in the Garden from the start, it seems as if God were the original tempter with the serpent being the agent provocateur. God either created humans perfectly or imperfectly. Of course, if God created humans imperfect and then demanded perfect obedience, the fault is on God and God alone. So, it is then imperative to assume that God created humanity perfectly. Man couldn’t have been created perfectly bad, because he would have been an unmitigated sinner. On the other hand if God created man perfectly good, a perfectly good being would never have sinned. So, that leaves us with the middle ground, God created us perfectly neutral. Why an omnipotent God couldn’t create a perfectly good species that also had the quality of free will is yet another point that effectively cancels God’s omnipotence.
Evil and suffering wouldn’t exist in a universe created by a perfect God who is omnibenevolent. God created all things, including evil. Yes! He created evil! Apologists and doubters are referred to Isaiah 45:7 “I form the light, and create the darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things”. God created the first doer of evil, perfectly knowing in advance it would perform evil. That evil and suffering contradicts an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent god cannot be denied unless we abandon our reason and logic or make an appeal to God’s unknowable nature. In which case it is illogical to claim any veritable knowledge of God or ascribe any characteristics to God, including loving, powerful, knowing, creating, or even existing.
Unless we are willing to abandon our reason as previously pointed out, which is a form of ridiculous and unthinkable intellectual suicide, we see that God, because of the very qualities we ascribe to Him, vanishes in a cloud of logic.
Blantyre
