Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
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]
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.
The Kalam cosmological argument was influenced by the concept of the prime mover, introduced by Aristotle.It originates in the works of theologian and philosopher John Philoponus (490–570 AD) [10] and was developed substantially under the medieval Islamic scholastic tradition during the Islamic Golden Age.
At the turn of the 14th century, medieval Christian theologian Duns Scotus (1265/66–1308) formulated a metaphysical argument for the existence of God inspired by Aquinas's argument of the unmoved mover. [37] Like other philosophers and theologians, Scotus believed that his statement for God's existence could be considered distinct to that of ...
First, Plantinga, using modal logic, pointed out that omnipotence is the power to do all things logically possible, and thus God could not be expected to do things that are logically impossible. [63] God could not, for example, create square circles, act contrary to his nature, or, more relevantly, create beings with free will that would never ...
One of the earliest statements articulating the concept of creatio ex nihilo comes from a ~ 100 B.C. Jewish text, 2 Maccabees 7:28: [21] [22] "I implore you, my child, observe heaven and earth, consider all that is in them, and acknowledge that God made them out of what did not exist, and that mankind comes into being the same way". [23]
A being that exists as an idea in the mind and in reality is, other things being equal, greater than a being that exists only as an idea in the mind. Thus, if God exists only as an idea in the mind, then we can imagine something that is greater than God (that is, a being-than-which-none-greater-can-be-imagined that does exist).
In his dialogue "Is God a Taoist?", [32] published in 1977 in his book The Tao Is Silent, Raymond Smullyan claims to prove that it is logically impossible to have sentient beings without allowing "evil", even for God, just as it is impossible for him to create a triangle in the Euclidean plane having an angular sum other than 180 degrees ...