Kevin's Watch

What I mean by 'Omni-God' would be a god that has one if not all of the 'omni-characteristics', such as omnipotence, omniscience, omnibenevolence, omnipresence, etc.

To many believers in a personal God, these qualities are essential. If their God didn't have these qualities, then it wouldn't be worth worshiping.

For example: if God isn't omnipotent, it means there isn't a guarantee that it could save your soul, forgive your sins, give you advice, and so forth... after all, it may lie outside of your ability. Likewise, if this God is going to make judgement calls, it better not mess up. Being omniscience allows it to not make a mistake due to ignorance.

However, it seems that God having these qualities does not make it advantageous to worship it. God could be all these 'omni-qualities', but a fundamental misunderstanding on one of our parts produces a being who can not be concerned with our mere existence. Take the 'omnibenevolent' quality. We assume, when applying this to God, that it, being all good, has our best interests in mind. This is demonstrably inaccurate if God is said to possess certain other qualities like 'omnipotence'. At this point, answers to the question 'whence cometh evil?" produce questions that limit (aka negate) one of the 'omni-qualities'. (For example, to say God has to allow 'free-will' is limiting his 'all power').

This can be worked around to say that God is all good with respect to some universal, objective good. At this point, though, we may find that this objective good does not, in any way, require God to do anything with us.

So, that seems to be a problem with the Omni-God, in my mind. Either it ends up not being an Omni-God, or it ceases to be a personal one concerned with our well-being.

I think you have it all wrong. IMO, the most benevolent thing God could give is free will. It's not a "has to" situation. It's a gift. Without it, what are we? And the ability to choose evil is necessary to have free will. If we couldn't choose to do evil, then doing good wouldn't be a choice, either. It would just be all there is. Yes, we'd live in a world of peace. But we wouldn't know it. We wouldn't even have a word for "peace" if we didn't have anything to compare it to.

Also, I think you're putting your own values into that list of omnis. It could be omnipotence, omniscience, omnimalevolence, omnipresence, etc., just as easily as omnipotence, omniscience, omnibenevolence, omnipresence, etc.

And an omnimalevolent God would still include good and free will. Surely, the worst malevolence is in letting someone else know of and experience peace/health/joy, then giving them war/sickness/sorrow. If we were all in horrible pain every moment of our lives, we wouldn't know it as horrible pain, because we'd never have had anything else to compare it to. So we wouldn't think it was a bad state of being. We wouldn't be upset about it. An omnimalevolent God would have to include both in order to make us aware of the fact that we were suffering.

If the granting of free will and awareness was an enactment of omnibenevolance, then that calls into question why only humans are granted it. Why would god's omnibenevolance be limited to only humans?

Yeah, the question of why an omni God would care about humans any more than anything else is puzzling to me as well.

Christians say he made us in his image, but....why bother?

And I'm not sure one can apply omnibenevolence [or omnimalevolance] to free will just by giving choice...you'd also have to remove anything subjective/relative from the perception/experience/understanding of good and evil. Otherwise it's not choosing, it's just gambling, guesswork and imaginary systems to beat the house.

Well, if I was able to create a universe, I imagine I'd give some characteristics to some of the things I created, and other characteristics to other things. Free will to some, but not to others isn't entirely out of the question. OTOH, I don't get to flyI can't fly. And I can't put out a huge amount of energy that can sustain life on a planet 93 million miles away.

And it's possible that some things are better off without it. Stars? They might be necessary things for the universe as I envision it to be. Necessary for the gravitation; energy; building of complex elements; etc. But would I give them free will? Everything can't have it. It's not a punishment to not give it to something.

But this conflicts with your original free will argument.

Without it, what are we? And the ability to choose evil is necessary to have free will. If we couldn't choose to do evil, then doing good wouldn't be a choice, either. It would just be all there is."

Without it we'd be as the animals that do not possess the awareness necessary for free will. And if there is no problem with keeping other animals from it, then humans lacking it would not be concerning either.

It leaves the question of why god would choose to pick out one species over others. The only answer in the scenario we've framed here is that it was his whim to do so. If he is therefore a whimsical being, his actions are necessarily unpredictable and therefore his will indeterminate.

Murrin wrote:It leaves the question of why god would choose to pick out one species over others. The only answer in the scenario we've framed here is that it was his whim to do so.

There is another answer, that he created the universe for a purpose, and that giving free will to humans serves that purpose.

(The purpose of the universe, I feel, is to create God. But that's just me.)

An omnipotent god can reach ends without requiring means, and cannot be unmade by the end of the universe. One that is constrained such that they must make things in a certain form to achieve a certain purpose is not omnipotent.

If god is omnipotent, the universe and all within it must be an end and not a means.

wayfriend wrote: (The purpose of the universe, I feel, is to create God. But that's just me.)

Jethro Tull, and at least two SF novels I've read agree with you.
I don't think the universe has a purpose, yet I think there's a pretty good chance we [or intelligent life somewhere, if we're not up to it] will manage to create Him/Her/It anyway...heh inverse creation science: because there is a watch, we can build a watchmaker.

BTW, Murrin, I love this:

An omnipotent god can reach ends without requiring means

Murrin wrote:An omnipotent god can reach ends without requiring means

A fair rebuttal.

Which leans one to ask ... can a god then even have a purpose in what he/she does? For to have a purpose means that there is a need or desire which is as yet unmet. Why would such a god have a need? Why would such a god have a desire?

Perhaps we have discovered the paradox of an omni-god.

However, I was only thinking originally that God might have a purpose for the universe, and he would choose the means as well as the ends for that purpose. If he wanted to reach that ends via free-willed humans, then he could have it.

Murrin wrote:But this conflicts with your original free will argument.

Without it, what are we? And the ability to choose evil is necessary to have free will. If we couldn't choose to do evil, then doing good wouldn't be a choice, either. It would just be all there is."

Without it we'd be as the animals that do not possess the awareness necessary for free will. And if there is no problem with keeping other animals from it, then humans lacking it would not be concerning either.

True. Free will isn't necessary for a universe to exist. (And not making any creatures that can fly would not be concerning, either. Any number of scenarios for a universe are, I assume, possible.)

Of course, we can't claim to fully understand what an omnipotent, omniscient creator intends. Maybe free will is necessary, for some purpose or other. Some purpose that beings without omnioptence and omniscience can't imagine. [Just for the heck of it, here's an idea I came up with for a fantasy story long ago. Maybe God's lonely. He wants an equal to talk to. So he set up this reality so that sentience and free will would come about. Also, telepathy would come about. And sentience and telepathy would spread, until the universe was completely filled with sentient beings who were all linked. Like the Borg. (Although I came up with this idea 30+ years ago. Heh.) THEN, God would have someone to talk to. ]

Murrin wrote:It leaves the question of why god would choose to pick out one species over others. The only answer in the scenario we've framed here is that it was his whim to do so. If he is therefore a whimsical being, his actions are necessarily unpredictable and therefore his will indeterminate.

I guess "whim" is as good a way of saying it as any. Could have picked dogs. Or planaria. Or sunshine.

Can an Omni-God be omnibenevolent, since God must have created All, including evil / disobedience to him? Or do we have to accept that any Good God is a demiurge?

Who says animals don't have free will? How can you tell by looking? Free will doesn't necessarily require intelligence or language (which many animals actually do have), otherwise we'd have to say that freewill is an emergent property that develops gradually after children have been conscious for several years. And that would mean that freewill is a continuum, not a binary on/off quality. Which would mean that animals can certainly have a degree of it.

I do find it ironic that often the same people who see the necessity of freewill in theological contexts absolutely abhore the concept in political or economic contexts. If "leaving people to their own devices" is okay for an omnibenevolent God, why isn't it good enough for us finitely benevolent mortals? Is it because we don't have enough benevolence to leave people to the consequences of their own free choices? (I'm serious.) Why is it empowering for a god to do this, but cruel for man? Why do we simultaneously feel the need for people to be free, but then go about protecting them against the consequences of their free choices? If we see victimhood within freedom, victimhood in need of correcting, then why doesn't god? Are you telling me that God allowing little kids to get raped is more essential to God's plans than us allowing poor people access to my money? How the hell does that work?

We hold ourselves to a higher standard than an omnipotent god. Think about that for a second. We expect finite, mortal citizens to care for the poor, the elderly, the sick, the young, when god (who, one would imagine, has infinite resources for just this sort of work) couldn't be bothered to lift a finger for them. But we make excuses for god, and point fingers at each other.

God HAS to be OMNI- because no one else could get away with such cruelty and contradiction.

Z, what free choice did the elderly have, other than not to die before they needed care, that is?

Exnihilo2 wrote:Z, what free choice did the elderly have, other than not to die before they needed care, that is?

Not relevant. The point is that WE, at sometimes very high cost, are somehow bound by a religious morality to care for the suffering/elderly, while God at no cost to itself, and the source of that morality, is not only not responsible for the care of them, but the actual source of their condition.

Exnihilo2 wrote:Can an Omni-God be omnibenevolent, since God must have created All, including evil / disobedience to him?

Hassan-i Sabbah wrote:nothing is true, everything is permitted

Perhaps there is no evil and no good.

--A

Vraith wrote:

Exnihilo2 wrote:Z, what free choice did the elderly have, other than not to die before they needed care, that is?

Not relevant. The point is that WE, at sometimes very high cost, are somehow bound by a religious morality to care for the suffering/elderly, while God at no cost to itself, and the source of that morality, is not only not responsible for the care of them, but the actual source of their condition.

What if morality needs no divine source or absolute truth to back it up?

Zarathustra wrote:Who says animals don't have free will? How can you tell by looking? Free will doesn't necessarily require intelligence or language (which many animals actually do have), otherwise we'd have to say that freewill is an emergent property that develops gradually after children have been conscious for several years. And that would mean that freewill is a continuum, not a binary on/off quality. Which would mean that animals can certainly have a degree of it.

I understand what you're saying, but what kinds of choices are animals free to make? How they will behave? Where they will live? What they will eat? Are some kinds of free will more significant than others?

Perhaps free will is the wrong way to frame it. Better to talk of sentience, sapience, and self-awareness, verifiable traits that some animals possess and some do not.