Yes, Jesus and I agree about omnipotence. Jesus said "with God, all things are possible". He did not say "God can do all that is possible". So yes, I am comparing myself to Jesus — Bartricks
No, if all things are possible, then all things are possible. When you see 'push'do you reason 'push....therefore pull'? Yes. Yes you do. And that is why you are not allowed the metal cutlery. Plastic spoon only. — Bartricks
"hoity toity, far be it for me to hoity toity, but McTaggart was surely toity, hoity, hoity, toity toity." — Bartricks
For many years I used to teach the philosophy of Descartes in a special course for undergraduates reading French; year by year, there were always two or three of them who embraced Descartes' defence of absolute omnipotence con amore and protested indignantly when I described the doctrine as incoherent. It would of course have been no good to say I was following Doctors of the Church in rejecting the doctrine; I did in the end find a way of producing silence, though not, I fear, conviction, and going on to other topics of discussion; I cited the passages of the Epistle to the Hebrews which say explicitly that God cannot swear by anything greater than himself (vi. 13) or break his word (vi. 18).
victory by the Deplorable Word is a barren one; as barren as a victory by an incessant demand that your adversary should prove his premises or define his terms.
The nature of logical truth is a very difficult problem, which I cannot discuss here. The easy conventionalist line, that it is our arbitrary way of using words that makes logical truth, seems to me untenable, for reasons that Quine among others has clearly spelled out. If I could follow Quine further in regarding logical laws as natural laws of very great generality—revisable in principle, though most unlikely to be revised, in a major theoretical reconstruction—then perhaps after all some rehabilitation of Descartes on this topic might be possible. But in the end I have to say that as we cannot say how a non-logical world would look, we cannot say how a supra-logical God would act or how he could communicate anything to us by way of revelation. So I end as I began: a Christian need not and cannot believe in absolute omnipotence.
God is Reason — Bartricks
What is the criticism? — Bartricks
The point is a simple one. If god is indeed absolutely omnipotent in the sense you propose, then they cannot be subjected to logical analysis. — Banno
↪Banno Geach: master Dummo is surely correct and has expressoriumed my point to, I may say, a pointus perfectum pointlessium. As the Greeks might say, he is a man - a hummus - of the utmost tediousos emptous nonsomous. For of course, what one is able to break, one has brook. And what has been brook, cannot be brack. That is why I cannot use this glass or that one or that one to drink my sherry from, for as I can break them, then they must, ad fallatium grotesquium, already be broken, and so I must drink from the bottle instead. — Bartricks
Why are you putting your words in the mouths of Descartes and Jesus though? — Gregory
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