Sentences with phrase «omnipotence only»
The real complaint, we finally learn, is that «Plantinga evidently affirms the logic of I omnipotence in general, and applies the doctrine of C omnipotence only in relation to human beings» (GPE 271).
http://www.religion-online.org/ Not exact matches
Additionally, it removes god's omnipotence in that he can not act according to his own «free will»; rather, he is obliged to act only in accordance with this «good nature.»
Placing omnipotence first, even before divine goodness and wisdom, is the preference not only of Christianity but also of Judaism and Islam.
Hence, only the first interpretation is meaningful, and it can not be used to deduce from the existence of (genuine) moral evil the nonexistence of benevolent omnipotence, since «whether the free men created by God would always do what is right would presumably be up to them» (GPE 271).
This universe ensemble of the many so many cosmos of celestial omnipotence is ever lingering within the great seas of absolute nothingness being the Holy Spirit of the Almighty One and only God that ever so was and is and forever will so be!
It is Griffin's contention that only a theism that entails «C» omnipotence is able to reconcile divine power and goodness with the genuineness of evil.
Not only creation out of nothing but omnipotence in general is absent from the Bible.
It is only when we turn to Irenaeus of Lyons that we encounter full blown a philosophical defense of divine omnipotence, but precisely in Irenaeus we are dealing with a leading Christian thinker of his time whose influence was extensive.8
If there is an eternal torment, it would have to be created by God for the express purpose of punishment, and only by His divine omnipotence would anyone ever be contained within.
In addition to this being a case of special pleading via definitional fiat, the immutable good nature of god argument places the «objective / absolute» standard beyond the control of the god in that god has no choice but to obey this good nature (which also confounds the notion of omnipotence in that god is restricted to only a limited set of possible behaviors).
Omnipotence (alas, our only word for perfection of power!)
Nearly half a century on, in his wittily entitled Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes (1984), Hartshorne reviewed two meanings of «all - powerful»: the traditional, of course — the (benevolent) tyrant ideal of absolute, all determining, irresistible power18 — and what he previously had identified as the greatest possible power in a universe of multiple centers of power: «The only livable doctrine of divine power is that it influences all that happens but determines nothing in its concrete particularity.»
If God is «omnipotent in the sense of being the only power there is... where there is not competing power, omnipotence means little... The power that counts is the power to influence the exercise of power by others.»
Hartshorne's analysis in Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes is defective insofar as it recognizes only three possibilities — the two identified by classical theism and the third which is Whitehead's doctrine of the objective immortality of the past.
They then argue that only «C» omnipotence is defensible even by a classical theist.
Faustus Socinus and his followers were the first to break, not only with trinitarianism and the worship of Jesus as literally divine but above all with the one - sided view of God as immutable and merely infinite, also with the tragic error of omnipotence in a sense contradictory of freedom in human beings.
Not only that, but the crazy god of the Christians seems too susceptible to exploits by their «Satan», which despite Christian god's supposed omnipotence, that god can not overcome.
I believe that we can illuminate the problem of evil not only by recognizing that there are other creative agents of action (a reinterpretation of the omnipotence of God) but also by recognizing that destructiveness is an essential part of creativity (a reinterpretation of the goodness of God).
Rather it affirms first and always that God, the determining Power governing my individual life, can be rightly called omnipotent only if I experience this power in my own life, only if God allows me to realize it as fact, if He reveals to me His omnipotence.
Instead, faith is for him the power, in particular moments of life, to take seriously the conviction of the omnipotence of God; it is the certainty that in such particular moments God's activity is really experienced; it is the conviction that the distant God is really the God near at hand, if man will only relinquish his usual attitude and be ready to see the nearness of God.
Not, indeed, an omnipotence that is only a general principle of confused motion... but one that is directed toward individual and particular motions.
Christianity is the only religion on earth that has felt that omnipotence made God incomplete.
And this «active power» is, of course, infinite, unqualified by any power outside itself.19 The only qualification allowable regarding God's omnipotence is that which involves self - contradiction.
Man has departed from God; he does not see God's activity in the everyday events of the world; the thought of omnipotence is to him an empty speculation which gains meaning only if he sees God's miracles.
The affirmation of faith, that God is Almighty, is then always dependent upon the insight that I can not perceive and reckon with this omnipotence as a universally valid fact whenever I please, but only if it pleases God.
Their positive meaning is lit up only by the fact that in this act He is this God and therefore the true God, distinguished from all false gods by the fact that they are not capable of this act, that they have not in fact accomplished it, that their supposed glory and honour and eternity and omnipotence not only do not include but exclude their self - humiliation.
Although we probably can not imagine, given our experience with this world, a substance that would quench our thirst without having the capacity to drown us, the empirical connection between these two qualities is not a logical connection... Furthermore, if God's omnipotence is limited only by logical principles... why do we need water at all?
72 Further along, he explicitly affirmed that «the omnipotence of God is the power of love... To say that God is omnipotent can only mean that nothing diminishes his love.»
66 He rightly observed that God «is omnicompetent, that he can appropriately deal with any circumstance that arises; nothing can ultimately defeat or destroy him,» 67 but he believed this is only a working out of the inherent meaning of omnipotence while, elsewhere, he gave that word its far more classical tonalities.
Given the only understanding of omnipotence that makes any sense (the social view), the conclusion is, rather, that not even an omnipotent being could completely determine the activities of other beings and thus guarantee a world lacking evil.
This final part of Griffin's argument for the process theodicy turns on an assumption that he appears to have borrowed by Hartshorne, viz., that the so - called «social view» of omnipotence is the only alternative to the monopolistic (and thus to the standard) view.9 The critique of the latter thus established the former as (in Griffin's words) «the only view that is coherent if one is talking about the power a being with the greatest conceivable amount of power could have over a created, i.e. an actual world» (GPE 269).
Although the concept of omnipotence used in traditional Christian literature is not a paradigm of clarity, the questions asked in this passage can only have resulted from a somewhat surprising misconstrual on Hartshorne's part.
Having found the monopolistic and thus (on his account) the standard view of omnipotence unintelligible, Griffin argues that a being having perfect power would have power only to «influence» the activities of others.
Attempts are made to offer excuses for Luther by pointing out that he never doubted the omnipotence of God and thus determined only narrow limits for the Devil's activities.
The full significance of this is clear only as we visualize the prophet proclaiming the unity, eternity, and omnipotence, not of the deity of an ascendent and victorious people, but of a humiliated, decimated, and exiled nation, «despised, and rejected of men.»
Faith in the divine omnipotence is not an anterior conviction that there is a Being who can do everything: it can only be attained existentially by submitting to the power of God exercising pressure upon me here and now, and this too need not necessarily be raised to the level of consciousness.
Just as the divine omnipotence and omniscience can not be realized existentially apart from his word uttered with reference to a particular moment and heard in that moment, so this Word is what it is only in the moment in reference to which it is uttered.
Today gold is understood from a Common Knowledge perspective only as a shadow or reflection of a powerful stand - alone Narrative regarding central banks, particularly the Fed... what I will call the Narrative of Central Banker Omnipotence.