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For the God who created and upholds the universe was not created – he is eternal. He was not 'made' and therefore subject to the laws that science discovered; it was he who made the universe with its laws. Indeed, that fact constitutes the fundamental distinction between God and the universe. The universe came to be, God did not.
Likewise, God cannot make a being greater than himself, because he is, by definition, the greatest possible being. God is limited in his actions to his nature. The Bible, in passages such as Hebrews 6:18, says it is "impossible for God to lie". [9] [10] A good example of a modern defender of this line of reasoning is George Mavrodes. [11]
Other means of reconciling God's omniscience with human free will have been proposed. Some have attempted to redefine or reconceptualize free will: God can know in advance what I will do, because free will is to be understood only as freedom from coercion, and anything further is an illusion. This is the move made by compatibilistic philosophies.
As opposed to a theodicy (a justification for God's actions), Plantinga puts forth a defense, offering a new proposition that is intended to demonstrate that it is logically possible for an omnibenevolent, omnipotent and omniscient God to create a world that contains moral evil. Significantly, Plantinga does not need to assert that his new ...
Jewish philosophy stresses that free will is a product of the intrinsic human soul, using the word neshama (from the Hebrew root n.sh.m. or .נ.ש.מ meaning "breath"), but the ability to make a free choice is through Yechida (from Hebrew word "yachid", יחיד, singular), the part of the soul that is united with God, [citation needed] the only being that is not hindered by or dependent on ...
[86]: 38 Leibniz introduced the term theodicy in his 1710 work Essais de Théodicée sur la bonté de Dieu, la liberté de l'homme et l'origine du mal ("Theodicic Essays on the Benevolence of God, the Free will of man, and the Origin of Evil") where he argued that this is the best of all possible worlds that God could have created.
God, as a being that is maximally great, must hence exist necessarily. It is possible that (i.e. there is a possible world where) God, a maximally great being, exists. If God exists in that world, then, being maximally great, God exists in every world. Hence, God also exists in the actual world and does so with necessity. [45] [47]
The only assumption that we made was that the expansion rate of the universe never gets below some nonzero value, no matter how small." According to Vilenkin and co-author Alan Guth , the past boundary described by the Borde–Guth–Vilenkin theorem does not necessarily represent a cosmic beginning , instead the beginning of cosmic inflation ...