Being omnipotent has it's limitations. God, for example, can't do anything wrong. "But", you would say, "God wouldn't want to do anything wrong." Yep - another limitation. I can want to do something wrong - God can't. God will never know what it truly feels like to personally commit a sin. I remember watching George Carlin with his trick questions for Catholic priests like, "Can God create a rock so big that he himself can't lift it?" Yes - this is all funny - but there really are some serious limitations to being omnipotent.
The Bible says God knows the future. So - if God knows the future, do we have free will? I mean - since God already knows what we are going to do - then we really don't have any choice. We seem to have a choice because we don't know what we are going to do. But - if God knows the future then reality is like a movie that's already been written and it's like we are watching the movie for the first time - so we don't know what's going to happen - but God has already seen the movie and he knows what's going to happen - and that's it. The movie can't change.
What this means is - there really is no such thing as "free will". Free Will implies that we have a choice and that we can do A or we can do B but if God already knows we are going to do A then we are going to do A. We can't chose to do B because if we chose B then God would have been wrong about knowing we were going to choose A, and God can't be wrong. Thus there really is no real choice.
Everything that Satan does is 100% in accordance with God's will and Satan is doing God's work.
In the beginning God created everything and had total knowledge of everything that was going to happen. God, for example, had to have known that the Devil was going to become evil (how could God not have known if he can see the future) and God created him anyhow. One has to assume that God did so because he wanted to create an evil Devil and that God knowingly and deliberately created Satan and that everything that Satan has done is 100% in accordance with God's plan. One has to assume that or else God doesn't know everything and if God doesn't know everything - the Bible is wrong - and God himself is wrong.
If God can see his own future - then God has no free will..
And - since God can see into the future - then God must know his own future - and therefore God has no free will either. Since God already knows what he's going to do - he can't change his mind, can he? I mean - if God changed his mind then God would be wrong. How could he not know that he was going to change his mind? So praying to God for God to do something has no effect because in praying to God to do something - you are lobbying God to make a different decision or influencing him to decide something differently than what he has already foreseen he is going to do. In praying you are wasting your time because God already knew what he was going to do long before you were born and that is the only thing he's going to do. God can not change his mind. God is totally bound by his own laws and has absolutely no free will to change anything in even the slightest way.
Being able to see into "the future" is the most limiting power of all because once you can see the future then you can see your own future and you no longer have the illusion of choice. You become infinitely powerless by becoming infinitely powerful. Imagine if you will God looking into the future and seeing himself remembering the moment that he looked into the future seeing himself remembering the past. Kind of like a tunnel of mirrors, enough to even give God a headache. (Whoops - another limitation - God can't get headaches!) Of course - this assumes God is subject to time (entropy) and if he is not - if God exists in all time simultaneously, then God is as stagnant as a lump of concrete and has no power to change anything at all. hmmmmm .... maybe God depends on John Ashcroft and the Reverend Sun Myung Moon to do his work for him?
|