Hence, although God does not bring into external being all that He is able to accomplish, His power must not be understood as passing through successive stages before its effect is accomplished. Omnipotence is perfect power, free from all mere potentiality. A proposition that is necessarily true is one whose negation is self-contradictory.It is sometimes objected that this aspect of omnipotence involves the contradiction that God cannot do all that He can do but the argument is sophistical it is no contradiction to assert that God can realize whatever is possible, but that no number of actualized possibilities exhausts His power.Hence the consideration of the knowledge and will of God precedes the consideration of His power, as the cause precedes the operation and effect. Or we may say, that the knowledge or will of God, according as it is the effective principle, has the notion of power contained in it. Power is predicated of God not as something really distinct from His knowledge and will, but as differing from them logically inasmuch as power implies a notion of a principle putting into execution what the will commands, and what knowledge directs, which three things in God are identified. When it is said that God can or could do a thing, the terms are not to be understood in the sense in which they are applied to created causes, but as conveying the idea of a Being, the range of Whose activity is limited only by His sovereign Will. The transition from possibility to actuality or from act to potentiality, occurs only in creatures.This standard scholastic answer allows that acts of creatures such as walking can be performed by humans but not by a deity. The statement "a deity can do anything" is only sensible with an assumed suppressed clause, "that implies the perfection of true power". On the other hand, even though no creature existed, God's power would not be barren, for "creatures are not an end to God." Regarding the deity's power, medieval theologians contended that there are certain things that even an omnipotent deity cannot do. Indeed, the production of secondary causes, capable of accomplishing certain effects, requires greater power than the direct accomplishment of these same effects.
![]() ![]() ![]() Omnisphere 2 Response Code Free From AllLewis has adopted a scholastic position in the course of his work The Problem of Pain. Nor is this contrary to the word of the angel, saying: 'No word shall be impossible with God.' For whatever implies a contradiction cannot be a word, because no intellect can possibly conceive such a thing." C. Hence it is better to say that such things cannot be done, than that God cannot do them. Making square circles, Aquinas says that "everything that does not imply a contradiction in terms, is numbered amongst those possible things, in respect of which God is called omnipotent: whereas whatever implies contradiction does not come within the scope of divine omnipotence, because it cannot have the aspect of possibility. In response to questions of a deity performing impossibilities, e.g. The capacity to sin, for example, is not a power but a defect or infirmity. It is no more possible for God than for the weakest of his creatures to carry out both of two mutually exclusive alternatives not because his power meets an obstacle, but because nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk it about God. If you choose to say 'God can give a creature free will and at the same time withhold free will from it,' you have not succeeded in saying anything about God: meaningless combinations of words do not suddenly acquire meaning simply because we prefix to them the two other words 'God can.'. This is no limit to his power. You may attribute miracles to him, but not nonsense. Torrent books on macRejection or limitation Some monotheists reject the view that a deity is or could be omnipotent, or take the view that, by choosing to create creatures with free will, a deity has chosen to limit divine omnipotence. Winnicott took a more positive view of a belief in early omnipotence, seeing it as essential to the child's well-being and "good-enough" mothering as essential to enable the child to 'cope with the immense shock of loss of omnipotence' - as opposed to whatever 'prematurely forces it out of its narcissistic universe'. In some narcissists, the 'period of primary narcissism which subjectively did not need any objects and was entirely independent.may be retained or regressively regained."omnipotent" behavior'. Freud considered that in a neurotic 'the omnipotence which he ascribed to his thoughts and feelings.is a frank acknowledgement of a relic of the old megalomania of infancy'. At birth 'the baby is everything as far as he knows - "all powerful".every step he takes towards establishing his own limits and boundaries will be painful because he'll have to lose this original God-like feeling of omnipotence'. 'As Freud and Ferenczi have shown, the child lives in a sort of megalomania for a long period.the "fiction of omnipotence"'. 2) If a being has some active tendency, then it has some power to resist its creator. The idea is grounded in Plato's oft-overlooked statement that "being is power."My notion would be, that anything which possesses any sort of power to affect another, or to be affected by another, if only for a single moment, however trifling the cause and however slight the effect, has real existence and I hold that the definition of being is simply power.The argument can be stated as follows: 1) If a being exists, then it must have some active tendency. Philosophical grounds Process theology rejects unlimited omnipotence on a philosophical basis, arguing that omnipotence as classically understood would be less than perfect, and is therefore incompatible with the idea of a perfect deity. Deities are manifested in the world through inspiration and the creation of possibility, not necessarily by miracles or violations of the laws of nature. This view is known as dipolar theism.The most popular works espousing this point are from Harold Kushner (in Judaism). Thus, if a deity does not have absolute power, it must therefore embody some of the characteristics of power, and some of the characteristics of persuasion. If a deity's power is to be great, it must therefore be over beings that have at least some of their own defenses and agenda. Power can only be said to be great if it is over something that has defenses and its own agenda.
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