Friday, July 6, 2007
Born Losers?
The theologian Paul Tillich believed that the only thing God couldn't do was to stop being God. I would suggest that another thing impossible for a deity such as that hypothesized by the Abrahamic religions is to be surprised. Virtually all adherents of such belief systems maintain that the invisible, intangible, non-corporeal, undetectable, personified, individuated supernatural entity they worship is not only omnipotent but also omniscient; how can you ever be surprised if you have absolutely perfect and complete knowledge, of every conceivable sort, about everything that could ever in any sense whatsoever be known? This, of course, leads to another question: in a universe created by an arbitrary, non-contingent, unconditioned act of will by such a deity, is "free will" objectively possible (as opposed to an illusion of free will that OUR limits in knowledge might create)? Didn't God know what would go down if he were to make beings with the characteristics we do have? Is any conclusion possible other than that God rigged the game from the beginnning to ENSURE that the majority the creatures he had made would suffer for all eternity?
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