Re: Mel'n'balls

Marc Wilson wrote:

If God is omnipotent, can he make a rock so big that he can't lift it?


I don't know. However, I can grasp, for example, the essential ideas behind our current technology of space-flight, even if I am hazy on pretty much all of the details. My daughters guinea-pigs, however, are unable to grasp the concept of space flight at all. Such inability does not disprove the existence of Saturn V's or the space shuttle, any more than our inability to comprehend the infinite disproves anything.
Alternatively, cancer existed before modern cell biology allowed us to understand it to any degree, and humans were selectively breeding animals long before Darwin, Mendel, Watson, Crick and Franklin began to work out the details of How.

The whole concept falls down on omniscience- if God knows everything, he
knows what we're going to do before we do it. Therefore, free will is an
illusion, and punishing us for breaking the rules is a the work of a crazed
psychotic.

I've just finished reading the Harry Potter books, so if I re-read them, or watch the DVDs, I personally know what is going to happen even though I had nothing to do with the decision-making process. Of course, it is a pretty limited analogy , as Someone decided what would happen there, but as I said above, our very limited reasoning and comprehension does not disprove anything.

Another hfrshy analogy was given by that great humanist, Mr Pratchett, in Eric. He described the demons as viewing the world something like a huge video-recording showing everything happening at once. Being less than omnipotent, they struggled to actually find what it was they wanted to watch. I think that humans great difficulty with comprehending the interaction between omniscience and free will is because we are constrained by time, which, physicists tell us, only came into existence with the rest of the universe. Any being with an existence beyond that universe would have a different experience of time. IIRC, old Screwtape touches on some of this.

--
JonG
I went to the polling station, but the only option
given was to vote for one or other of the politicians.
.

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