Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
[120]: 186 Therefore, if God wants (X) to be a part of creation, and free, then it could mean that the only option such a God would have would be to have an (X) who goes wrong at least once in a world where such wrong is possible. (X)'s free choice determined the world available for God to create.
Omnipotence, they say, does not mean that God can do anything at all but, rather, that he can do anything that is logically possible; he cannot, for instance, make a square circle. 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.
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.
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]
Less formally: Consider all possible (not actual) worlds in which someone always chooses the right. In all those, there will be a subpart of the world that says that person was free to choose a certain right or wrong action, but does not say whether they chose it. If that subpart were actual (in the real world), then they would choose the wrong.
In the world we see things that are possible to be and possible not to be. In other words, perishable things. But if everything were contingent and thus capable of going out of existence, then, nothing would exist now. But things clearly do exist now. Therefore, there must be something that is imperishable: a necessary being.
written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God. The World English Bible translates the passage as: But he answered, "It is written, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God.’" The 1881 Westcott-Hort Greek text is:
For, inasmuch as we desire to form an idea of man as a type of human nature which we may hold in view, it will be useful for us to retain the terms in question, in the sense I have indicated. [25] Leibniz adhered to the doctrine as well, and employed it as part of his theodical argument that the actual world is the best of all possible worlds. [26]