lab (04/12/83)
Do we really expect to comprehend infinity with finite minds? Can we even BEGIN to? Can our finite 3-dimensional minds understand omniscience, omnipotence, or omnipresence? Infinity is not scientifically measurable. "The universe is not only queerer than we imagine - it is queerer than we CAN imagine." That's just the universe - consider its Architect. I don't make any claims to fully understand omni-anything. I have enough trouble with a zillion zillion, much less infinity. Such a supreme being could do things we can't begin to dream of. How it would choose to work would blow our minds. "Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high, I cannot attain unto it." (Psalm 139:6) I will not lower myself to the sarcastic or similar tones of recent authors. Suffice it to point out that they have deliberately chosen to ignore the clear teachings of the Bible in favor of their own preconceived views of God: either like man (n orders of magnitude higher), or somehow accountable to man. They have denied the very nature of the God of the Bible. In quoting Scripture, they have seen the branches and missed both tree and forest. Let us see the whole picture. Job: The greatest of all the men of the east lost ALL TEN children, ALL his fortune, ALL his earthly comforters, ALL GONE. Job's attitude: "Blessed be the name of the LORD." (1:21) His wife wanted him to curse God. The only friends (?) who would visit him accused him of hidden sin. When Job wanted an answer for his condition, God gave him some lessons about Himself, never answering Job directly. Job's attitude: "I ABHOR myself, and REPENT in dust and ashes." (42:6) Isaiah: When the holy man of God saw the LORD of hosts, his first words were "Woe is me!" (6:5) The lesson stuck with with him, for he would later write (64:6) "All our RIGHTEOUSNESSES are as filthy rags" (much less our normal state). This same Isaiah was God's scribe for many Messianic prophecies, including "unto us a child is born ... and his name shall be called ... The mighty God, The everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace" (9:6) Or in Egypt: Exodus 12:12 and Numbers 33:4 both indicate that the plagues were JUDGMENTS by the LORD against the gods of Egypt. Check it out; each plague specifically embarrassed an Egyptian god, whether of the Nile, of frogs, of the sun, of the first-born, etc. Or in Canaan: the LORD did not want His people to pick up Canaanite worship - ergo, carry out the judgment already proclaimed. Psalm 51:5 indicates that NONE of us are innocent before the LORD, so He can show His grace. The LORD lays down some heavy penalties for what we might consider "light" sins. Yet James clearly writes (2:10) "whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of all." Getting anything LESS than death is mercy from God. Be glad God even puts up with us at all. Romans 9:22,23: "What if God, willing to show his wrath, and to make his power known, endured with much longsuffering the vessels of wrath fitted to destruction: And that he might make known the riches of his glory on the vessels of mercy ..." God's glory - Moses asked to see it. Exodus 34:6,7: "The LORD, The LORD God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth, Keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and that will by no means clear the guilty ..." Indeed He is Merciful. Merciful and gracious - that God would condescend even to be mindful of man (Psalm 8). The "exceeding riches of His grace" (Eph 2:7) shine forth in what He will do when He "shall change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto His glorious body" (Phil. 3:21) Remember Isaiah 64:6. So who is any of us to argue with God? Be thankful! Larry (4 Celsius) Bickford decvax!decwrl!qubix!lab
soreff (04/13/83)
Reply to Larry Bickford: <flame on> Doesn't it seem peculiar to you that your god is "merciful" in that it opts to defer punishment for transgressions of laws that it wrote itself? Where is the legitimacy of its power from in the first place? Why should anyone be more thankful for the absence of hostile actions from a malicious deity than for being left alive by the last mugger they met? If some ruler were to write a law code that was impossible to follow, then make all the rules punishable by death, occasionally torturing a follower to see how far they could push them, then to announce his/her great mercy in reducing the occasional sentence, I would not consider them very merciful. A deity of that form, if it existed, doesn't need prayer, thanks, or praise, It needs replacement. It's broken. <flame off> -Jeffrey Soreff (hplabs!hplabsb!soreff)
hutch (04/15/83)
Well, folks, the unibus on tekmdp seems to be at least operational again, and I therefore get to make religious noises to the net again, so if I missed any diatribes I ought to have seen, during the hiatus, let me know via private mail. To Jeffrey Soreff, HP, regarding "Understanding an infinite God" You seem to be taking a rather judgemental view of this deity you slander (yes, I mean slander, not libel, nor any milder word). I will make a weak analogy by bringing up-to-date an old, old analogy. Say you write a program, a nicely complex program that talks to you. Say further that you want that program to do certain things, but that a pseudorandomly driven, self-modifying piece of code causes the program to miss meeting your spec. Since you know that the excision of that code will be painful to you, and since it has much about it that you like, you decide to incorporate an awareness of the purpose of the system into the code. IF you cannot convince it, by introducing the restraints, to behave in a fashion which meets specs, then you will unceremoniously JUNK it. The weakness of this analogy is that it does not really reflect the complexity of the human nor of the Deity. The strength of the analogy is that it does reflect that the Deity is the CREATOR and has every right to expect the creation to do what it was designed for. The creation can complain all it wants, but it will only be committing hubris in claiming that its creator is broken based on the much more limited preception it has of itself and its creator. (Is tha napalm burning, George? -Yep) Steve Hutchison Tektronix, Logic Analyzers, via tekmdp when she works
dap1 (04/19/83)
#R:qubix:-21000:ihlpf:22600003: 0:1072
ihlpf!dap1 Apr 18 17:32:00 1983
I think that Steve Hutchison has missed the mark by a little bit. In my
opinion, the analogy breaks down when we start using a psuedo-random number
generator. I don't think that the comparison of a programmer with limited
knowledge of the output of a psuedo-random number generator and a God with
precise knowledge of the future of his creation holds up. I think a better
analogy would be a run where the programmer knew the generator was going to
generate a zero as the tenth number and he also knew that if any zeroes were ever
generated that the nuclear plant he worked for would have a meltdown. What's
more, he had the ability and the knowledge to rearrange the number generator
so that no zeroes ever appeared, but he chose not to. Now whose fault is it
when the reactor has a meltdown?
To me, omniscient means he had to know that the zeroes were going to
appear and omnipotent means he had the power to change that fact.
Darrell Plank
BTL-IH