All Knowing, All Powerful; one tiny question...

[Alerik the Fortunate]

Everyone start praying, God's been hitting the Water of Life pretty hard lately!

But really, is there anything other than physical violence that can be done to reach someone who is more certain in the existence of something they have simultaneously defined in and out of existence than that of the world surrounding them? I suppose the only thing that saves the average believer from absolute irrevocable insanity is refusal to examine everything all at once in all earnestness.

[Alerik the Fortunate]

I suppose it boils down to the question, what distinguishes God's "imagining" of something from his "creation" of it, when his knowledge is supposedly equally perfect in either case? Does he arbitrarily declare a created reality more real than an imagined one?

[Patrick Degan]

Assume the all knowing, all powerful creator god exists.

Why does the universe itself exist?

Doesn't all knowing and all powerful mean that every minute facet of the universe's existence was known intimately by god before he created it?

He's an artist.

[TithonusSyndrome]

There's a hadith in the Koran that states that "I was a treasure longing to be known; that is why I created the world." Why an omnipotent being would be full of longing is beyond me, however.

[Elaro]

The best answer is that the universe would exist entirely as a facet of the imagination of the Supreme Being. His imagining the universe, essentially, Willed it to exist, and the whole existence of the universe is an Idea in the mind of the Supreme Being.

He's an artist.

That is the God Author Theory. But if God is an author, why aren't we? Maybe our fictional worlds are also equally "real" as our own, but are removed from our existential location (As ours is to God's world). Maybe our choices are actually made for us for the sake of the Storyline. Maybe God is an overworked writer relying on the whims of his publishers.

(Those were my thoughts about God until I shut off the madness and stopped believing the whole thing, thus firmly shifting my position from "non-worshipper" to "atheist".)

[CaptJodan]

In all seriousness, I think the analogy works.

There's a hadith in the Koran that states that "I was a treasure longing to be known; that is why I created the world." Why an omnipotent being would be full of longing is beyond me, however.

Well I wasn't kidding with my theory either. Truly, if we look at the text of the Bible (and apparently the Koran then), we DO see a god who has a need to be...well...needed. The 10 Commandments have a slew of "Love me!!" commands in it before we get to anything important like not killing your fellow man. He wants to be needed.

Hell, who knows. Maybe God did the equivalent to Data turning off his internal chronometer with the "watched pot never boils" experiment, and turned off some of his omiscience to be surprised every once and a while. Maybe he CAN see every atom, but he chooses not to. Only way to justify how he was surprised that Adam and Eve ate from the tree.

I know, I'm making this up. I sound like a fundie, but only because I was raised under them.

[Walsh]

If you want to seriously examine the idea of an all-knowing, all-powerful being instead of just mock it, you'll need to form a more workable definition of "omnipotence" than the classic "ability to do literally anything conceivable".

Excuse me, but most fundies, when pressed in debate, will literally tell you that God is able to violate logic itself, which is precisely the kind of omnipotence that you say we shouldn't use. As far as they're concerned, God can make parallel lines meet or contradict himself without being inconsistent.

It's funny how they then try to use logic to argue that he is omnibenevolent despite all the horrible shit in the world, saying things like "good cannot exist without evil", which a logic-bending god would have no problems changing.

[Duckie]

[
Excuse me, but most fundies, when pressed in debate, will literally tell you that God is able to violate logic itself, which is precisely the kind of omnipotence that you say we shouldn't use. As far as they're concerned, God can make parallel lines meet or contradict himself without being inconsistent.

Wouldn't God merely in this case need to shift the universe from Euclidian to Hyperbolic or Spherical or whatever he desires to make parallel line hijinks?

[Darth Wong]

Wouldn't God merely in this case need to shift the universe from Euclidian to Hyperbolic or Spherical or whatever he desires to make parallel line hijinks?

You are aware that Euclidian geometry is a self-contained system of rules in which parallel lines do not meet by definition, correct? The nature of the universe is irrelevant to Euclidian geometry; it is an abstract mathematical system. You can't make parallel lines meet because they are defined in such a manner that they do not meet. To violate this rule would require a violation of logic itself.

It's like setting up a mathematical problem that looks like this:

Let X=5
Let Y=2X+10
God is omnipotent
Therefore, X=Y if God says so