From: CXAD@MUSICA.MCGILL.CA (CXAD000)
Newsgroups: talk.philosophy.misc
Subject: Re: God and Omnipotence
Date: 11 Oct 92 09:04:01 GMT
Organization: McGill University

In article <1992Oct7.221348.23588@beaver.cs.washington.edu> simonson@cs.washington.edu (Kevin Simonson) writes:

>>Why should God obey logic?  Proving he exists or doesn't exist, using
>>logic to say that he has or lacks some quality, all these things rely
>>on human logic.  If God is all powerful, why should we be more
>>powerful than him by constraining him to what we puny humans can
>>conceive of?
>>
>     This looks like a fine display of human logic right here, Alejo.  So
>obviously it can't be right.
>

Seems like no one else is really taking the God beyond the
categories of human logic here seriously, so let me give it
a whirl.  If anyone's wondering where this is coming from,
it starts with Plato in the Timaeus, moves through the
early Christian tradition of Negative Theology, finds a
modern friend in Heidegger, and is now debated by Derrida.

"God" can neither be affirmed nor denied.  One can neither
authentically say that God "is" or "is not", for such claims
attempt to place God within the realm of human language, human
conceptualization, and hence human limitations.  Surely we are
all familiar with the famous #7:  Concerning that about which
one cannot speak, one must remain silent.

Thus, Descartes' and Anselm's attempt to limit God to the
concept of perfection or "that than which nothing greater etc."
are limitations that immediately make God (perhaps the
Wholly Other?) into something that is wholly human.

The only thing that is left is to remain silent about God.  But
that in itself is impossible, for the instant that we say that
we must remain silent, we have already SAID that we must remain
silent.  Wittgenstein falls prey to this in the above statement.
No doubt many will object to the absurdity and paradox that is
here present.  I would reply that paradox is PRECISELY that which
constantly plagues any discussion of God, for that discussion will
be an attempt to pull God down into a realm that is not God's.

BTW, a Christian loves to play with the idea of Jesus Christ
as the ultimate paradox, both wholly Other and wholly Same.
Jews occassionaly play the same game when talking about God's
inlibration in the Torah and God's revelation through history.
I'm sure it exists elsewhere.  So my question to the original
question about God's omnipot/scie/benevolence is to say that
any conception of God that includes these three categories
avoids God's true "nature", but that perhaps these three qualities
are three excellent metaphors for the way we, as humans, can
understand "God", the Wholly Other.

If you didn't guess already, I'm new around here ...

Tony D

_____________________________________________________________
Tony Dugdale            |  The perfect                      |
McGill University       |        solidarity of              |
Philosophy of Religion  |               mutual              |
CXAD@musica.mcgill.ca   |               misunderstanding    |
------------------------------------------------------------|
Attempts to separate "spiritual" concerns and "social/political"
concerns have been front and centre ever since Pharaoh tried
unsuccessfully to persuade Moses that religion had nothing to
do with Egypt's domestic policy on the status of nonindentured
servants.                   -Robert McAfee Brown
Newsgroups: talk.philosophy.misc