It is often claimed that we prove God doesn’t exist, and it is true that we can’t disprove all possible Gods. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t show some Gods are impossible. There are two conflicting aspects of God we often see. There is the philosopher’s God, who is somewhat distant, omniscient, omnibenevolent, and omnipotent, and then there is the God of the Bible and the average parishioner, who is emotional and personal. Most believers really believe in the second God but move to the philosophers God when forced to defend beliefs or asked to carefully define God. However, these two Gods cannot both exist.
The philosopher’s God is unchanging. If you are all good you can’t get better, if you are all knowing you can’t learn more. If you were to explicitly ask most believers, they would agree that God is unchanging and eternal. But they also believe in the God of the Bible. That God gets jealous or angry or has mercy. You can have a personal relationship with him. These are characteristics of a changing God. Any show of emotions is a change. To have mercy, God must change his mind. To respond to prayer, he must change in response to a request. An unchanging perfect God simply can’t have emotions. He certainly can’t have a hissy fit and flood all of creation and then afterwards say I’m sorry, my bad.
We can disprove some Gods. We can say that a God that is unchanging but also gets angry cannot exist. We can say that the God of the Bible that you have a personal relationship with cannot be all knowing, all good, and all powerful. The Gods of the ancient Greeks were basically just superheroes. They had much power, but they could get angry, have lust, even be defeated or tricked. I kind of like those Gods, they are at least a lot of fun. The God of the old testament is clearly one of those Gods as well. Theologians later cleaved on the philosopher’s God, but it’s a marriage that doesn’t work. Yet most people need both of them. The philosopher’s God is too impersonal to care about, but a God that is as human as Zeus cannot be logically defended. So most people continue to believe in an impossible God.
June 3, 2008 at 10:12 pm |
And yet the Bible claims that God doesn’t change. Malachi 3:6. So any perceived change isn’t really change after all.
Making God in our image, we definitely muddy the waters . . .
Interesting post. Methinks you’ve stirred the pot.