Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
God obeys the laws of logic because God is eternally logical in the same way that God does not perform evil actions because God is eternally good. So, God, by nature logical and unable to violate the laws of logic, cannot make a boulder so heavy he cannot lift it because that would violate the law of non contradiction by creating an immovable ...
Theists generally agree that God is a personal being and that God is omniscient, [note 2] but there is some disagreement about whether "omniscient" means: "knows everything that God chooses to know and that is logically possible to know"; or instead the slightly stronger: "knows everything that is logically possible to know" [note 3]
Plantinga writes in God, Freedom, and Evil that J. L. Mackie has presented the objection that God, being omnipotent and omnibenevolent, would easily be able to create the best of all possible worlds. He reasons that such a world would be one in which all humans use their free will only for good – something they do not do.
Omnipotence is the quality of having unlimited power. Monotheistic religions generally attribute omnipotence only to the deity of their faith. In the monotheistic religious philosophy of Abrahamic religions, omnipotence is often listed as one of God's characteristics, along with omniscience, omnipresence, and omnibenevolence.
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 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.
The logical form of the argument tries to show a logical impossibility in the coexistence of a god and evil, [2] [10] while the evidential form tries to show that given the evil in the world, it is improbable that there is an omnipotent, omniscient, and a wholly good god. [3]
In 1955 he published "Evil and Omnipotence", which summarized his view that belief in the existence of evil and an all-powerful, all-knowing and all-good god is "positively irrational". [ 18 ] Mackie's views on this logical problem of evil prompted Alvin Plantinga to respond with the " free-will defense ", which Mackie later responded in his ...