Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The follow on question "Then can he lift it?" assumes that the rock has already been created, so the correct answer would be "Assuming he makes the rock, no". And if asked "Is God thus not all powerful?", the correct answer would be "God is indeed all powerful until such time as the rock is created". The "Paradox" then is not really a paradox.
[119]: 90, 97–98 Second, there is Mackie's statement that an all powerful God, in creating the world, could have made "beings who would act freely, but always go right", and third is the question of what choices would have been logically available to such a God at creation.
Epicurus was not an atheist, although he rejected the idea of a god concerned with human affairs; followers of Epicureanism denied the idea that there was no god. While the conception of a supreme, happy and blessed god was the most popular during his time, Epicurus rejected such a notion, as he considered it too heavy a burden for a god to have to worry about all the problems in the world.
The finite God theodicy maintains that God is all-good (omnibenevolent) but not all-powerful . The best of all possible worlds theodicy, a traditional theology and defended by Leibniz, argues that the creation is the best of all possible worlds. The original sin theodicy holds that evil came into the world because of humanity's original sin.
For some thinkers, the existence of evil and hell could mean that God is not perfectly good and powerful or that there is no God at all. [62] Theodicy tries to address this dilemma by reconciling an all-knowing, all-powerful, and omnibenevolent God with the existence of evil and suffering, outlining the possibility that God and evil can coexist.
Omnipotence is perfect power, free from all mere potentiality. Hence, although God does not bring into external being all that He is able to accomplish, His power must not be understood as passing through successive stages before its effect is accomplished. The activity of God is simple and eternal, without evolution or change.
Plantinga's free-will defense begins by noting a distinction between moral evil and physical evil (Plantinga's defense primarily references moral evil), then asserting that Mackie's argument failed to establish an explicit logical contradiction between God and the existence of moral evil.
The idea that God is "all good" is called his omnibenevolence. Critics of Christian conceptions of God as all-good, all-knowing, and all-powerful cite the presence of evil in the world as evidence that it is impossible for all three attributes to be true; this apparent contradiction is known as the problem of evil.