this is sort of an expansion of the omnipotence paradox, viz can god create a rock so heavy that not even he can lift it?

omnipotence kills the notion of free will. if you are truly omnipotent, no event in the universe, at any time isn't your will: since you know about everything, both acting and not acting upon it is your decision, and therefore your will.

this is a basic conflict between pillars of abrahamic religion: if God is omnipotent, you don't have a free will (and therefore God can not hold your actions against you--since your actions are his actions); if you have a free will, God isn't omnipotent.

Exactly.

Maybe you are God, and All is God, and All is One, and God is One?

Maybe you are God, and All is God, and All is One, and God is One?

Maybe you could post something that actually makes sense?

this is sort of an expansion of the omnipotence paradox, viz. can god create a rock so heavy that not even he can lift it?

omnipotence kills the notion of free will. if you are truly omnipotent, no event in the universe, at any time isn't your will: since you know about everything, both acting and not acting upon it is your decision, and therefore your will.

this is a basic conflict between pillars of abrahamic religion: if God is omnipotent, you don't have a free will (and therefore God can not hold your actions against you--since your actions are his actions); if you have a free will, God isn't omnipotent.

Let's reduce this first the two humans. If I can lock myself in a cellar and predict you actions exactly one hour before you carried them out. Would my knowledge effect your actions? There is no reasonable assumption that it would.

Mere foreknowledge of an action caused by a independent actor does not effect the independence of that actor.

However for the whole punishment thing, there are explanations offered. Perhaps hell is what is experienced when a should unready for heaven enters it. Perhaps there is process by which even the most damned souls can enter heaven after a period of punishment. Perhaps damned souls are merely burnt up in the pretense of God's might and lose their individuality.

I stick with the Alpha Omega theory, it starts with god and ends with god. what ever happens in between is up to us.

I think thats what it means by omnipotent, it knows the beginning and end, thats all you really have to know.

I'll take the Biblical angle here, since that's what most of you tend to center your discussion around: Each of us being a small facet of the One (gods under God)...through these individual expressions of God, the will we possess is indeed free, but it is really God's will (as we are nothing but pieces of God), and thus truly God's knowledge.

This presents an interesting scenario in which it is possible that 'free will in a system of omnipotence' is simply a paradox (seemingly contradictory but truthfully congruent) rather than an impossibility.

I'll take the Biblical angle here, since that's what most of you tend to center your discussion around: Each of us being a small facet of the One (gods under God)...through these individual expressions of God, the will we possess is indeed free, but it is really God's will (as we are nothing but pieces of God), and thus truly God's knowledge.

This presents an interesting scenario in which it is possible that 'free will in a system of omnipotence' is simply a paradox (seemingly contradictory but truthfully congruent) rather than an impossibility.

*orgasms*

maybe there is no God?

this is sort of an expansion of the omnipotence paradox, viz. can god create a rock so heavy that not even he can lift it?

omnipotence kills the notion of free will. if you are truly omnipotent, no event in the universe, at any time isn't your will: since you know about everything, both acting and not acting upon it is your decision, and therefore your will.

this is a basic conflict between pillars of abrahamic religion: if God is omnipotent, you don't have a free will (and therefore God can not hold your actions against you--since your actions are his actions); if you have a free will, God isn't omnipotent.

I can't agree, just because something is omnipotent , doesn't automatically mean that every action has been taken by that something. Omnipotence seems to me to be a term to describe having the capacity to do anything, rather than actually doing everything. God's omnipotence, as I have read the Bible at least, refers to God's ability to do anything, rather than God doing everything.

Let's reduce this first the two humans. If I can lock myself in a cellar and predict you actions exactly one hour before you carried them out. Would my knowledge effect your actions? There is no reasonable assumption that it would.
Yes, it would. Or rather, your prediction wouldn't change anything, but it is an indication that, in fact, nothing can be changed. If you know with 100% certainty that he will do something, how could he do anything different?

omnipotence kills the notion of free will. if you are truly omnipotent, no event in the universe, at any time isn't your will: since you know about everything, both acting and not acting upon it is your decision, and therefore your will.
Omniscience and omnipotence together, and I'll agree with you. You'd both know of everything, and be able to change everything. Therefore, anything that happens must be because you want it to.

Omniscience and omnipotence together, and I'll agree with you. You'd both know of everything, and be able to change everything. Therefore, anything that happens must be because you want it to.

But this seems to completely ignore God's free-will.

Now, I don't take God's omniscience to mean that he knows the future (but I accept that God being a timeless being, it would be as though he knew the future), But I'll try argue anyway. It'll be a little ragged, so forgive it a little.

Right, first I'm assuming that everyone else is assuming that fore-knowledge of something ultimately affects it's outcome (Something I don't believe.... Although I don't know wahy). In this case, because God has omniscience, he knows everything before it happens, because he knows about it before it happens we cannot change it.

Effectively, then, we do not have free-will. We seem to be puppets.

Now, God would surely be a problem here. Without free-will we cannot choose between right and wrong. God is widely reputed to be heavily interested in our choices of right and wrong. We have a dilemna.

The solution?

God uses his omnipotence to give people free-will, makes it possible for people to choose, his omnipotence means he CAN do this. He also limits his omniscience to what is happening, what has happened , universal laws, so on. He then withdraws from mankinds affairs, because the moment he helps one person from without, he impacts on their free-will.

Right, I was going to write more, but I'm off.

Maybe you are God, and All is God, and All is One, and God is One?

That makes perfect sense to me.

To put it another way--"I am God, thou art God, all that groks is God."

God being infinite by definition, pretty much anything you might say about God probably has some validity.

Maybe you could post something that actually makes sense?

Maybe you could stop being an idiot?

Nice, nice, very nice.

This is often discussed in contexts like the "problem of evil." That is, if an event occurs, it was necessarily willed by God, since if he did not want it to occur, then he, being omnipotent, could have prevented it. The idea is that everything you will and everything you do have already been "set out" in advance by God -- he created you to do and to will just those things that you actually do and will -- and therefore it makes no sense for him to be angry at you or punish you based on things that he in fact must have desired you to do. If I set a hungry lion loose on a caged man in order to execute the man, why should I be angry at the lion when it kills him?

As far as I can tell, the idea that if an omnipotent God exists, everything that happens must necessarily be what he desired to happen is a sound one.

^agreed. To put it another way, if you want to know what God's will is, just look around.

Thing is--at the risk of sounding like a nihilist--in the long run (infinity), nothing that happens now on the material plane really matters, since we are all, at the highest level, composed of energy and information which is immortal, immutable and eternal--as is God.