It may be possible. It's not a fool's errand. It may prove the real God.
If that's your belief, continue in your vain quest; it will end in failure.
I disagree. To call God a "thing" is to suggest that God participates in existence in the same what that every "thing" else does. To be "thing", we would be able to say that God has a participation within (and necessary reliance upon) "existence" which is common to the genus of "things". But while we will say that God exists, we must moreover affirm that God is also existence; God is God's own existence, but this existence is not the existence that other "things" share, but the actual outworking of God's existence. God does not derive existence from an external source, as if it is something that defines God by attribution; no, God exists as the
doing of God's existence itself. So in this very important sense, God is certainly not a "thing."
Gratuitous assertion. Prove it.
Prove that I'm wrong. Prove that God is a "thing", that God derives existence in the same way that other "things" do. To call God a "thing" is to lump God into the same ontological dependency that other "things" share, which is certainly an undermining of any traditional understanding of the Christian God, not to mention a serious misunderstanding of some very elementary philosophical concepts.
Says you. Why should I believe you? Prove your assertions.
I'll prove mine once you prove yours. You were not shy in throwing around assertions. If you can prove them, do so and then I will prove mine.
You are redefining the word "good". On what authority do you do so? None. "Good" means what it means in English. If we have to redefine the word "good" to talk about God, then the original question "prove God is good" is meaningless.
Again, you misunderstand some very basic philosophical categories. As I've already demonstrated numerous times in this tread, there is a fundamental and necessary difference between what we mean by "good" when applied to human behavior and moral assumptions, and what we mean by "good" in reference to the nature of God. In the former, "good" is subjective determination based on moral assumptions and causal analyses; it is a conclusion based on the adjudication of a behavior or outcome against some assumed standard.
With God, however, no such thing can be done. There is no standard against which God's goodness (whether we are speaking of inherent goodness, or the analysis of God's actions) can be measured, for if God is good, it is God's own nature against which such an analysis must be made. But as God is eternal, simple, and immutable, the assumption of God's goodness must be essential with the existence of God. That is, if we are to say that God is good, this goodness must be part and parcel of what it means to be God qua God, for goodness could not be something which God, in eternal undivided immutability, accrues by virtue of action or self-expression. To the contrary, any divine action or self-expression would have to be understood as immutably "good", for God would be incapable of anything else by virtue of being God.
Again, as I argued before, when we speak of God
qua God, we cannot apply attributes to God as we would to that which is other-than God. To do so only reveals that our understanding of God is that of the "biggest person", the ineffable mystery that is truly God.
These attributes are important. A thing that lacks them is not God.
They may have some minimal importance, but you are overstating the importance quite significantly. While a thing that lacks them certainly isn't God, you haven't demonstrated that a "thing" (see my point above) that does possess them
is God. As I mentioned before, we can easily perform a mental experiment in which we apply these attributes to any number of things. The possession of these attributes does not create any exclusivity by which to differentiate the possessors, and so we would be left with a pantheon of super-things, but not yet be any closer to an understanding of God
qua God.
A thing that has all of them is God, by definition.
By
your definition, but not by any other. A few basic readings in elementary theological studies would help you a great deal.
In Scripture, God thought his almightyness, eternity, omniscience and omnipresence were important enough to include them in various passages from his own mouth. Christian prayers have noted those things since time immemorial. They are important.
You say they are not important, and dismiss my attention to them, preferring to substitute what you think is important. That's swell, but it isn't persuasive.
I didn't say they were unimportant; I said they were perhaps the least important when it comes to discussing the nature of God
qua God. There is a subtle, yet extremely important difference between the two. Try reading a bit more carefully next time.
No, you end up with God. A big human is not omnipresent or omniscient or eternal or omnipotent.
But the biggest human *could be* omnipresent, omniscient, timeless, and omnipotent. This would not make them God.
What does that even mean? Christianity (mostly) asserts that God is a Trinity - and the Trinity is a mystery. There isn't any simplicity at all in eternity, or omnipresence. God is not simple. The Christian God isn't even a monad. Divine simplicity does not exist. If God were easy, people would not spend years of their life studying him.
Seriously, read some basic theology.
When I speak of divine simplicity, I am speaking of the necessary theological premise that God is not composed of distinct parts, or even distinct properties; to the contrary, God is essentially simple, so much so that we cannot even distinguish between God's essence and existence. In this sense, God is not a "being" in the sense that other beings are beings, deriving their existence from another source (or participating within a common genus of existence); rather, God is the absolute ground of being and also the doing of God's existence itself.
This, ultimately, is why the "attributes" you use to define God are insufficient, for they are applicable only when we speak of God within the assumption of the creation. Apart from the assumption of creation, these attributes are not terribly meaningful, and really only serve to create distinctions within the divine nature when we are thinking of God
qua God. And this is why we can certainly imagine an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, and timeless superhuman, for we do so from the perspective of an domain of existence in which these attributes have application. Apart from this domain of existence, in the eternal act-of-self-existence that is the simplicity of God, they have no place whatsoever.
You have prejudged the case. This saves you the time of having to discuss it with me.
I didn't prejudge the case. I read your statements, judged them lacking, and provided my conclusions. Perhaps you should offer stronger arguments next time.
If your "philosophical training" leads you to that conclusion, it wasn't very good.
I'm not quite sure that you are in position to be making judgements of this kind, given your severe lack of familiarity with basic theological concepts.
Too bad for you, then, that the Hebrew and Christian God described himself so often precisely in terms of these unique attributes
So there are two Gods we have to define now? This is getting tedious
I'll stick with the God of Job, who has stretched out the sky and knows where Leviathan roams, and with the God of Jesus, who has numbered every hair of your head, who knew the prophets in their mother's wombs and who makes the deer calve. No superman can do those things.
Why could a superman not do those things? To borrow your favorite phrase, "prove your assertions".
No we can't. We can't imagine two omnipotences. It doesn't work, by definition.
We can't? Why not? Who's definitions are we using?
Omnipresence. Eternity. How does on "imagine" these things, let alone apply them to ourselves?
Well, we do it every time we use the words. We can't demonstrate what they mean, so we apply them to ourselves, multiply them by a sufficient factor, and then say that they are true of God. But the words do not signify the actuality of God, what God is in God's own self-existence. They are feeble attempts on our part to describe the relationship of the ineffable, self-existent God to the contingent universe.
However, as the content of these attributes is firmly rooted within the contingency of the universe, it is quite simple to apply them mentally to any number of "things." As the "proof" of such assertions is equally impossible whether we apply the attributes to our notion of "God" or to an infinite number of imagined beings, the usefulness for defining "God" is equally negligible.
You have asserted a fact that is not true. We cannot, after all, imagine the attributes of eternity, omnipresence, omnipotence and omniscience to anything in creation.
Sure we can. We do it every time we think of these terms. As they are attributes, and attributes modify "things", we will always imagine a "thing" to which these attributes are applied. Whether we call this thing "God" or "headphones" or "XYZ", the
thing we are imagining is certainly not God
qua God (as God is not a thing, see above).
Whatever unified those four attributes would of necessity by God.
This is not true at all. We can imagine any number of things in which these attributes would be united, and it would in no way bring us closer to identifying "God".
The best we could do is note the apparent omnipresence, eternity and omnipotence of an abstract blind "natural law" like the pantheists and natural evolutionists do, but in this natural law, omniscience is still absent. You are right that, in the literally true sense, natural law + omniscience IS God, by anybody's definition, but the fact of omniscience removes the randomness and blindness from it, turning pantheism into highest order monotheism. And to talk with a secular scientist that is what you would have to do to prove God to him. He's already got natural law, which is random but real, everywhere, controlling all things. He's three quarters of the way there. You would have to prove omniscience to him. That's the hard part. The miracles God has left for all to look at help.
This analogy is pretty poor, but to keep with it, omniscience would also be present, for it would be equivalent to all of the information in the universe. So again, you've proven my point that we can imagine these attributes applied to any number of things without these things being God.
