ramifications of omnipotence for God

Well an act or rebellion or disobedience to God is certainly not necessarily a survival instinct! In the myth of of Adam and Eve, was survival the motivation for taking the bite from the fruit? What survival reflex causes people to use the Lords name in vain? violate the sabbath? dishonor your parents? covet thy neighbors spouse.... errr.... scratch that last one. I believe you still are, because you say crazy things like this.... So do more intelligent people have more free-will? If God granted us a doubling of our intelligence would our propensity to disobey God also necessarily double? No that is not what I am saying or anything close. Again free-will and propensity to obey God are not correlated.I going to use an analogy even though I beginning to hate analogies as means to communication an idea.Take a wolf pup and a border collie pup and raise these animals in a similar environment. These animals are closely related and have roughly equal intelligence (free-will according to you). However, the wolf will completely disobey any and all commands, will never come when called, almost impossible potty train, will escape at the first opportunity, etc.However, the border collie has a built in desire to please its master, is easily house broken, can be easily trained, comes when called and will return love and affection.They both have the same measure of free-will but one is noticeably more obedient. We are so happy that you are so patient with our simplistic difficulties While these objections maybe simplistic I also find them fundamental.The response that rationalist have too simplistic objections to articles of faith allows the faithful to imagine that there are a wonderful set of sophisticated, complex, and a water-tight religious justifications which are just too deep for the uninitiated to grasp and permits them to shrug off pointed, obvious and specific criticisms.Remember the most sophisticated and complex defense of a false belief doesn't somehow rescue that false belief from being wrong! Even if we grant that there are complex and sophisticated theological ideas, arguments, and beliefs, none of that matters if the ideas and arguments are bad and beliefs are false.

One knows it's master, or rather, knows a different master. They both have equal propensity to obey what they see as the leader, and that is good for their survival. What did the serpent tell them? He said they shall not surely die, and they would become as gods. Yep. Sure, but beliefs that don't reflect anything which we can observe, or do not make sense, wouldn't stick around too long.

I think you see why this reasoning fails. Most Christians already believe God can and does intervene, and even in some cases interferes with free will. Take Paul of Tarsus. He may have had free will after his visions, sure, but if you saw God or Jesus, hypothetically, wouldn't that weigh in on how you exercised your free will?

Right! and this brings us right to crux of the matter. God could have given a much stronger innate desire to know and follow the one true master - the Godhead, and not some other false master. God could have given us the same measure of free-will but a desire to follow him and his laws so that disobedience to God is extremely rare. Whoaa the motivation to disobey God was *not* self-preservation, they supposedly already had eternal life. God warned that if they eat they will die - the serpent said if you eat you will not die - ie don't believe God. Eve actually risked death to be like God. The motivation was the temptation of being like God."When you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil." You really believe that? Do more intelligent people by and large have a greater propensity to disobey God's calling and participate in debauchery to a greater degree? hmmmm..... the history of religious ideology and theology serves as a forceful counterpoint.Let's examine something we can probably both agree that doesn't make sense; Astrology - doesn't reflect anything we can observe and doesn't make sense - but has a history of thousands of years.

Man can have free will and God have omnipotence. That limit is only temporary.Today you and everyone else are free to choose to believe in God or not, in fact you can believe anything you want to believe.But all good things must come to an end.One day you will die.Then God will say you chose to believe what you wanted to and lived the life that pleased you.Now I exercise my omnipotent power. He does not give you free will forever, only until you die.God The Son gets the last word. If there is a God this will happen sometime in the future.Can you prove there is no omnipotent God?

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"John 5:39 (KJS) Search the scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life: and they are they which testify of me."

Hi iceage, I got a problem here. MythMyth - Wikipedia If the story of Adam and Eve is a myth, something people believe but is false.Myth = FalseMy problem if there was an absence of anything.(humans in particular)How could there be an act or rebellion or disobedience to God?If Eve did not exist how could she bite the fruit must less have a motive for doing so?If it never happened how could it have any effect on God's omnipotence?

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"John 5:39 (KJS) Search the scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life: and they are they which testify of me."

Actually I prefer to look at it asMyth = SymbolicThis is similar to a parable. The actual Eve in the Garden did not really exist in the same way there wasn't really a specific merchant who sold all to buy the pearl of great price. In our usage here the Eve story is metaphor that can be applied to humanity in general.

How is that any different from being "filled with the Holy Spirit" or something to that effect and subsequently believing in God and only desiring to please Him?

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"You are metaphysicians. You can prove anything by metaphysics; and having done so, every metaphysician can prove every other metaphysician wrong--to his own satisfaction. You are anarchists in the realm of thought. And you are mad cosmos-makers. Each of you dwells in a cosmos of his own making, created out of his own fancies and desires. You do not know the real world in which you live, and your thinking has no place in the real world except in so far as it is phenomena of mental aberration." -The Iron Heel by Jack London

http://mw1.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/symbolic I don't see where symbolic has anything to do with parable or myth.If Eve did not really exist how could she bite the fruit must less have a motive for doing so?How could there be an act or rebellion or disobedience to God?If it never happened how could it have any effect on God's omnipotence?

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"John 5:39 (KJS) Search the scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life: and they are they which testify of me."

ICANT myths and parables are symbolic in nature and don't convey actual events. If you like here goes.From: myth | Definition, History, Examples, & Facts | Britannica

quote:

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Myth a symbolic narrative, usually of unknown origin and at least partly traditional, that ostensibly relates actual events and that is especially associated with religious belief.

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You don't? So you think that there really was a specific merchant the sold all to buy the pearl?http://bibletools.org/...m/fuseaction/Library.sr/CT/BS/k/182

quote:

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"Parable" (Gk. parabole, Strong's #3850 from #3846) is a "similitude, i.e. (symbol) fictitious narrative (of common life conveying a moral), apothegm or adage." In the KJV this Greek word is rendered "comparison," "figure," "parable," and "proverb." Thus, a parable is not a straightforward description of an event just as it occurred or will occur. It is intended to be similar to a real event, a comparison that has to be interpreted to reveal the true meaning.

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Check out Strongs if you have more interest - i don't care to continue this line of off topic diversionary chatter.

the issue is you are thinking like a human , not as a all powerful being .. if you can do anything you can change how reality works so as to fit you desire , thus you can make a reality where man has free will and yet you are still omnipotent .. you are unlimited the impossible does not exsist to you .....god is not a man with omnipotents , god is god with omnipotents .. he chose to order night to follow day .. he could have picked day , night ,day ,semiday ,day ,night ,night, day ,day ,day ,day , restday , night weekend ..... unlimited means just that .. the fact we can picture how it works is the great unknowablity of god and her/his /their mind/sthis is how god can be good and allow evil to exsist , if god is omnipotent then the answer to everything is god wills it .. end of debate ...
this is where faith and belife come in ,truth and reality(as we see it ) are not limits on god ... god can make anything occur .. it all down to gods motive ....Edited by ikabod, : reorder wording

i think here you are forgetting the work of the churchs in keeping their version of religon in the public eye .. grand buildings , VIP religious figure , major political control , setting the social agenda , controlling the writen word ,...these make the belief system very visiable , with out any direct action from the godhead ,eg by making the catholic faith central to the nation states of europe it forced itself to be noticed and it status and beliefs are maintained ..astrology is a poor example as the night skys always draw our eye .. we forget that with out modern lighting and air polution the night skys are so much more that what we urbanites see today .. just go way out into the countryside or a nice big desret and look at the night sky , its hard to tear your eyes away .. for 1000's of years that has hung over our heads .. astrology has offered a "meaning " to it

Sorry about that we did get a little off the track.My point is this.You say the Genesis account of the Garden was a Myth.Myth being a symbolic,(false story) parable,(false story)naration of an event that did not happen.Therefore the Garden did not exist.The tree of good and evil did not exist.Eve did not exist.The non existent Eve did not eat the fruit from the non existent tree, in the non existent garden.Does that about sum up your position on the matter.If that is your position, would you agree that there is then no free will since a choice did not have to be made?Then God can have His omnipotence without any ramifications.

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"John 5:39 (KJS) Search the scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life: and they are they which testify of me."

Essentially, you're arguing that if Long John Silver was fictional, no real pirates ever exixted.The fictitious/mythical "choice" made by Adam and Eve is symbolic of all choices made by all people. The true/false value of one story has no bearing whatsoever on free will.

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Seriously, if we had some overwhelming desire to follow the true master, how would that be free will?If we have free will, the only useful thing this could mean is that we should have entire freedom to choose whatever master we like.If I allow my daughter to go shopping, and I tell her in no uncertain terms which dress I want her to buy, and also tell her it is ultimately her choice, how does that stop my being her parent? I still have the final say so. On the other hand, if I allow her to go shopping, and I don't pressure her decision, I may be a better parent. Either way, I am the parent, the 'omnipotent' figure in her life, and parenting is not about being a control freak. Yeah, supposedly, but no evidence of that. Everyone has equal tendency for debauchery. Everyone has the same measure of free-will. I do certainly believe that an intelligent evil is far worse that a stupid evil.'To he whom much has been given, much will be demanded'...the parable of the talents says something like this. Then you have AC Doyle 'when a doctor goes wrong, he is very dangerous indeed'. Look at any sci-fi movie, and you can see how 'evil' super-hero types can be. Astrology made sense to people. I think for many it still does, but since we are in an age where we 'know' better, as far as science and evidence, the 'usefullness' of astrology is viewed as an illusion.