is omnipotence logically possible?

[Philosoft]

indeed. and it depends also on how one defines good, evil, God and his actions.

God can only do good things... can be interpreted in 2 ways:

1) The actions of God, regardless of what they are or any possible justification/reason define what good is. if God kills you, that is good, because God did it, and so killing you is good.
2) God is restricted by some "absolute Good" this would put God in 2nd place, underneath some overriding concept of Good, that is proverbially set in stone. hence if God was going to kill you, but this was not "good" then God could not kill you.

the 2nd statement limits his power and stops him from being all powerful, the first does not.

I realise that this is a digression from your point.

Quite alright. This is a nice examination of the Euthyphro Dilemma, which, to my knowledge, has not been adequately satisfied.

 

[Jet Black]

Perhaps in a narrow-minded definition of faith. Since this is a "Christian Forum", and the faith in mind is "Christian faith", the definition would need to be a "Christian definition". The Greek word used in the Bible for faith means "to be convinced (by argument)" which is coincident to logic, not opposed or ignorant of logic.

That's interesting, thanks, however I am not an ancient Greek. Your post has been enlightening though, so please do not treat the last comment as a dismissal; when I use the word logic, I use it in it's modern context. when I use the word faith, I also use it in it's modern context. perhaps this is where some of the difficulty arises when I discuss faith and logic with christians... maybe they are thinking like ancient Greeks.

 

[Jet Black]

I have been pondering on this and attempted to construct a logical universe (based on ours) in which omniscience is compatible with free will.... with partial success I believe;

let us take our universe, in which time moves linearly forwards. and let us assume that there is some element of this universe that is not predeterministic (in that it is impossible to tell from a prior state what the exact outcome of the following state will be).

say we have some event, some state that can become one of two possible states. and in the mechanism converting between our initial state and the two follow up states it is nescessarily the case that the mechanism cannot be known. now from the perspective of the state, the future is not known, and cannot be determined even given an arbitrary amount of knowledge of the initial state. even from an "omnipotent state" the choice between these two mechanisms cannot be derived, because we have nescessarily denied knowledge of the choice mechanism in the states (this is why it is only a partial success... we have a situation where the omnipotence can know everything that happens, but does not know why) ... in short, knowing everything that happens does not create any effect over the things that happen... the things that happen are entirely independent of knowing that they happened.

What I have just described is quantum mechanics, with one minor subtraction; that in that "unknowable mechanism" is also that all aspects the initial state cannot be precisely known to an arbitrary precision.

 

[tcampen]

Jet Black,

So, in a sentence, what's your point? I'm still trying to digest the relevance of your post to the topic.