The God Problem in Philosophy


Often readers of my blog that what St. Thomas Aquinas wrote was so powerful he would defeat any atheist or any competing Christian view today. This turns out not to be the case.

A current Professor of Philosophy wrote of the philosophical problems embedded in the current Western version of God. He summarized the various definitions of God as, "A being believed to be the infinitely perfect, wise and powerful and ruler of the Universe." This is a western version of a god and would not match the definition in other cultures. Since the god definition came from philosophers, this version has been called, "The God of the philosophers."

Among philosophers, the Western version of a god runs into many logical problems. An elementary one dealing with the god's omnipotence is called the "Paradox of the stone."

It begins with the question, "Could God make a stone too heavy to lift?" If he made such a stone but could not himself lift it he is not all powerful. If he could lift any stone he could make, he could not make a stone too heavy to be lifted.

Another is about lust. There is the assumption that one cannot know lust unless he/she has experienced it. If God knows lust he has experienced it and thus is not without sin.

These arguments are countered with the claim we cannot saddle God with experiences of humans because he was not a human (leaving out the Jesus part here). This latter argument is also pillared by philosophers because it violates the requirement of all knowing.

My thinking in philosophy only goes as deep as, "If it sounds too good to be true it probably is." That is the Christian god or any other god.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/25/opinion/-philosophy-god-omniscience.html

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