The "Omni-God"

Orlion · Posted: Wed Sep 07, 2011 12:36 am Post subject: The "Omni-God"

What I mean by 'Omni-God' would be a god that has one if not all of the 'omni-characteristics', such as omnipotence, omniscience, omnibenevolence, omnipresence, etc.

To many believers in a personal God, these qualities are essential. If their God didn't have these qualities, then it wouldn't be worth worshiping.

For example: if God isn't omnipotent, it means there isn't a guarantee that it could save your soul, forgive your sins, give you advice, and so forth... after all, it may lie outside of your ability. Likewise, if this God is going to make judgement calls, it better not mess up. Being omniscience allows it to not make a mistake due to ignorance.

However, it seems that God having these qualities does not make it advantageous to worship it. God could be all these 'omni-qualities', but a fundamental misunderstanding on one of our parts produces a being who can not be concerned with our mere existence. Take the 'omnibenevolent' quality. We assume, when applying this to God, that it, being all good, has our best interests in mind. This is demonstrably inaccurate if God is said to possess certain other qualities like 'omnipotence'. At this point, answers to the question 'whence cometh evil?" produce questions that limit (aka negate) one of the 'omni-qualities'. (For example, to say God has to allow 'free-will' is limiting his 'all power').

This can be worked around to say that God is all good with respect to some universal, objective good. At this point, though, we may find that this objective good does not, in any way, require God to do anything with us.

So, that seems to be a problem with the Omni-God, in my mind. Either it ends up not being an Omni-God, or it ceases to be a personal one concerned with our well-being.
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Fist and Faith · Posted: Wed Sep 07, 2011 10:37 am Post subject:

I think you have it all wrong. IMO, the most benevolent thing God could give is free will. It's not a "has to" situation. It's a gift. Without it, what are we? And the ability to choose evil is necessary to have free will. If we couldn't choose to do evil, then doing good wouldn't be a choice, either. It would just be all there is. Yes, we'd live in a world of peace. But we wouldn't know it. We wouldn't even have a word for "peace" if we didn't have anything to compare it to.

Also, I think you're putting your own values into that list of omnis. It could be omnipotence, omniscience, omnimalevolence, omnipresence, etc., just as easily as omnipotence, omniscience, omnibenevolence, omnipresence, etc.

And an omnimalevolent God would still include good and free will. Surely, the worst malevolence is in letting someone else know of and experience peace/health/joy, then giving them war/sickness/sorrow. If we were all in horrible pain every moment of our lives, we wouldn't know it as horrible pain, because we'd never have had anything else to compare it to. So we wouldn't think it was a bad state of being. We wouldn't be upset about it. An omnimalevolent God would have to include both in order to make us aware of the fact that we were suffering.
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I'm Murrin · Posted: Wed Sep 07, 2011 10:53 am Post subject:

If the granting of free will and awareness was an enactment of omnibenevolance, then that calls into question why only humans are granted it. Why would god's omnibenevolance be limited to only humans?
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Cambo · Posted: Wed Sep 07, 2011 11:12 am Post subject:

Yeah, the question of why an omni God would care about humans any more than anything else is puzzling to me as well.

Christians say he made us in his image, but....why bother? Laughing

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Vraith · Posted: Wed Sep 07, 2011 2:43 pm Post subject:

And I'm not sure one can apply omnibenevolence [or omnimalevolance] to free will just by giving choice...you'd also have to remove anything subjective/relative from the perception/experience/understanding of good and evil. Otherwise it's not choosing, it's just gambling, guesswork and imaginary systems to beat the house.
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Fist and Faith · Posted: Wed Sep 07, 2011 8:45 pm Post subject:

Well, if I was able to create a universe, I imagine I'd give some characteristics to some of the things I created, and other characteristics to other things. Free will to some, but not to others isn't entirely out of the question. OTOH, I don't get to flyI can't fly. And I can't put out a huge amount of energy that can sustain life on a planet 93 million miles away.

And it's possible that some things are better off without it. Stars? They might be necessary things for the universe as I envision it to be. Necessary for the gravitation; energy; building of complex elements; etc. But would I give them free will? Everything can't have it. It's not a punishment to not give it to something.
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I'm Murrin · Posted: Wed Sep 07, 2011 9:26 pm Post subject:

But this conflicts with your original free will argument.

wayfriend · Posted: Wed Sep 07, 2011 9:43 pm Post subject:

I'm Murrin · Posted: Wed Sep 07, 2011 9:53 pm Post subject:

An omnipotent god can reach ends without requiring means, and cannot be unmade by the end of the universe. One that is constrained such that they must make things in a certain form to achieve a certain purpose is not omnipotent.

If god is omnipotent, the universe and all within it must be an end and not a means.
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Vraith · Posted: Wed Sep 07, 2011 10:09 pm Post subject:

wayfriend · Posted: Wed Sep 07, 2011 10:09 pm Post subject:

Fist and Faith · Posted: Wed Sep 07, 2011 11:41 pm Post subject:

Don Exnihilote · Posted: Thu Sep 08, 2011 3:16 am Post subject:

Can an Omni-God be omnibenevolent, since God must have created All, including evil / disobedience to him? Or do we have to accept that any Good God is a demiurge?
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Zarathustra · Posted: Thu Sep 08, 2011 3:22 am Post subject:

Who says animals don't have free will? How can you tell by looking? Free will doesn't necessarily require intelligence or language (which many animals actually do have), otherwise we'd have to say that freewill is an emergent property that develops gradually after children have been conscious for several years. And that would mean that freewill is a continuum, not a binary on/off quality. Which would mean that animals can certainly have a degree of it.

I do find it ironic that often the same people who see the necessity of freewill in theological contexts absolutely abhore the concept in political or economic contexts. If "leaving people to their own devices" is okay for an omnibenevolent God, why isn't it good enough for us finitely benevolent mortals? Is it because we don't have enough benevolence to leave people to the consequences of their own free choices? (I'm serious.) Why is it empowering for a god to do this, but cruel for man? Why do we simultaneously feel the need for people to be free, but then go about protecting them against the consequences of their free choices? If we see victimhood within freedom, victimhood in need of correcting, then why doesn't god? Are you telling me that God allowing little kids to get raped is more essential to God's plans than us allowing poor people access to my money? How the hell does that work?

We hold ourselves to a higher standard than an omnipotent god. Think about that for a second. We expect finite, mortal citizens to care for the poor, the elderly, the sick, the young, when god (who, one would imagine, has infinite resources for just this sort of work) couldn't be bothered to lift a finger for them. But we make excuses for god, and point fingers at each other.

God HAS to be OMNI- because no one else could get away with such cruelty and contradiction.
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Don Exnihilote · Posted: Thu Sep 08, 2011 3:32 am Post subject:

Z, what free choice did the elderly have, other than not to die before they needed care, that is?
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"Constant development is the law of life, and a man who always tries to maintain his dogmas in order to appear consistent drives himself into a false position." – Gandhi

"It is not the responsibility of knights errant to discover whether the afflicted, the enchained and the oppressed whom they encounter on the road are reduced to these circumstances and suffer this distress for their vices, or for their virtues: the knight's sole responsibility is to succour them as people in need, having eyes only for their sufferings, not for their misdeeds." – Don Quixote

*The poster formerly known as Exnihilo, Exnihilo2, Exnihilotto, Ron Burgunihilo, and counting...

Vraith · Posted: Thu Sep 08, 2011 4:04 am Post subject:

Avatar · Posted: Thu Sep 08, 2011 5:00 am Post subject:

Don Exnihilote · Posted: Thu Sep 08, 2011 6:32 am Post subject:

Fist and Faith · Posted: Thu Sep 08, 2011 10:44 am Post subject:

I'm Murrin · Posted: Thu Sep 08, 2011 11:27 am Post subject:

Perhaps free will is the wrong way to frame it. Better to talk of sentience, sapience, and self-awareness, verifiable traits that some animals possess and some do not.
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