@Bonaventurian,
Bonaventurian;38368 wrote:
If someone creates something, the logical sequence (even if there's no temporal sequence) is basically this:
Concept of the thing in the mind (Knowledge) -> Intention to create -> The act of creation
For example, take a carpenter. Before a carpenter makes a house, he first has to know what a house is. Knowing what a house is, he has to will to make one. Willing, he then creates it.
Likewise in God we find the same logical sequence. God knows all possibilities in knowing Himself. Knowing all possibilities in knowing Himself, He wills. Willing, He creates from all eternity.
What is obvious from the above is that both knowledge and intentionality require a proper object. You must know a thing. You must intend that thing.
I want to point out an interesting thought I had here. No one has ever created anything in the sense that it is generally though by the religious that god has. They have manipulated what was already there into a different form. Anything that is possible is a preexisting aspect of the object(s) being manipulated, so nothing new is created, its just that old things are rearranged. Creation in a total sense is alien to humans, yet we ascribe this action to god. We have never experienced(I would argue even mentally) absolute creation in the sense that seems to be implied in God's creation of the universe, so we are left with a vague concept that we cannot totally grasp.
I can conceive of an entity that rearranges, but I do not know what is meant to create from scratch, as I have no mental or logical picture of nothing(what would precede something). So when we speak of god the creator, we must consider this creation in terms of the human paradigm. The problem is that many creationists seem to disagree with that claim, so all they are left with logically, is that we cannot know the mechanism by which some ill defined event occurred that relates to a creator(in some ill defined sense).
I don't know if you are in the same boat, or even if there might be a few flaws in what I have put foreword. It simply seems like an idea worth discussing
Bonaventurian;38368 wrote:Going back to the idea of "the impossible." When I say "the impossible" I mean contradictions. I say that God cannot make it both rain and not rain at the same time in the same place under the same circumstances...and so forth and so on. Yet, there are those who say otherwise. To them I answer in this fashion:
Suppose for a moment that "the impossible" can be willed. Well...ok. Well what's being willed? "The impossible" is not. It is not an object. It is nothing. Ok. Therefore, if God wills the impossible, He must know, will, and create nothing.
Interesting line of thought, its been said before and I think that it is valid. There is no object behind a logical contradiction. It doesn't make any sense to speak of a round square or both raining and not raining in the same time and place, because nothing is denoted by a logical contradiction, so there is nothing to make/create.
Bonaventurian;38368 wrote:Here's the problem though:
God is the proper object (and the only object) of His intellect. If God knows nothing, then since God can only know Himself, God must be nothing.
Said another way: if God wills the impossible, then there is no God.
The moment you posit that God can will the impossible is the moment that you slip away into atheism.
Is nothing something? Can we use it as a noun or state of being? I don't think that we can. To say that 'god can will the impossible' is to speak of absolutely nothing at all. It is senseless(there is nothing behind the word, no idea is being presented).
