ThymeParadox t1_iybz3yy wrote
Reply to comment by Winnmark in For The First Time, Less Than Half Of UK's Population Is Christian: Report by khushraho
I take issue with 2, especially.
God is supposed to be omniscient and omnipotent. Nothing happens that he did not foresee. And since he would be the first cause, everything that happens, happens as a consequence of his act of creation.
With those three traits combined, how can you going to hell be anything other than an active choice on god's part? God established the 'rules' for which afterlife you go to. God established the rules of causality that lead to your existence. And god has the ability to tweak the initial conditions of the universe in such minute ways to cause your life to play out differently.
If god is omniscient, omnipotent, and the first cause, it follows, as a logical necessity, that god absolutely makes an active choice and is directly responsible for the afterlife that every single person goes to.
Maeglin8 t1_iyeqcf1 wrote
Not a Christian, but I can't help noticing that while God is posited to be omniscient and omnipotent, people are also posited to have free will. But, if people have free will, then God cannot, by definition, be omnipotent: if you have free will, you have some of the power, however small a sliver, and God does not have literally all of the power, which is what "omnipotent" means.
You can't solve a logic problem if the premises of the logic problem contradict each other.
If one treats this as a logic problem, and tries to resolve the contradiction in the premises by assuming that people have free will and God is only Really Powerful, not literally omnipotent, then it's entirely logically consistent to posit a universe where people can decide that they are going to go to Hell and God can't do anything about it.
Why would an omnibenevolent God set up a universe like that? I'm not a Christian so I'm not going to worry about it too much. But I will observe that any universe God creates where people have both meaningful free will and the ability to meaningfully affect each other, will be a universe whose people have the ability to make choices that are... suboptimal... for each other. And maybe you don't want some of the people who have shown that they consistently make choices that are suboptimal for each other going to Heaven. Especially since God's not legally obligated to scrupulously follow the descriptions of Hell in medieval literature when making it.
ThymeParadox t1_iyer7gj wrote
I think, based on my understanding of Christianity, a Christian would simply say that god has the power to override your free will, but simply chooses not to, and as such god is still omnipotent in that he still can do all logically possible things.
But there are still lots of problems with the tri-omni stuff, a very obvious one, in the context of this conversation, being 'is god incapable or unwilling to give people that don't accept Jesus a pleasant afterlife?'
Winnmark t1_iybzp5z wrote
He may have set things in motion, but he does not prohibit us from changing the outcome, if we choose to.
The rules are set, but we get to choose how/if/when we follow them.
ThymeParadox t1_iyc10s1 wrote
So god, in all of his omniscience, didn't know what choices we would make from the first moment of creation?
Winnmark t1_iyc14d6 wrote
He did/does.
He'll just never force anyone to do anything.
ThymeParadox t1_iyc1m9m wrote
With omniscience and omnipotence, he could alter the initial conditions of reality in order to lead someone to make a different choice. By setting up reality the way he did, god is choosing to lead everyone towards the choices he knows they will in fact be making.
You can't have it both ways. Either god is not omnipotent and/or omniscient, or god is responsible for the choices that we make.
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