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On God's Sovereignty

Enoch07

It's all a sick freaking joke.
Premium Member
It wasn't argue that God self-created or began to exist. I tried to denote I wasn't talking about a temporally initial set of properties, but a causally initial set: these aren't the same thing. It's still the case that it would be putting the cart before the horse to say God had any control over what God's properties were because no matter what point in eternity you check, it requires an already existing property of knowledge and power to do.

Also, that's a curious position; even most theists grant that omnipotence is still bounded by logical possibility. It isn't logically possible to even claim logical impossibilities, as a note.

He just is. There is no other way to express it.

Everything about God defies logic. Here is a single example.

2 Peter 3:8King James Version (KJV)

8 But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.

1 day with the Lord is 1,000 years (with man)

This is not an exact mathematically formula. This is just used to convey the message that God pretty much exist outside of time. It is backed up by the Genesis example I gave you on other post about how 20 years in Eden was 20,000 or 30,000 years outside of Eden.

This defies all logic. It can kind of be explained with physics to some degree as Einsteins theory of relativity proves. If an object has a intense mass or gravity time will slow down. So one could say that God has a very large mass or strong gravity, not unlike a black hole, it could explain how time is slowed in the presence of the Lord. Although it does not explain everything like where is this mass etc. So it still defies logic.

I could go on all day but I don't have time for it. So I'll just leave it as God defies all logic, at the very least He defies our current understanding and logic. Maybe some day we will understand.
 

Meow Mix

Chatte Féministe
How does it imply that?

Are you familiar with calculus and limits? If we had something like a timeline of eternity and we had some function of God's properties as we approached negative infinity, we wouldn't end up with a set of properties that God self-determined because even at THAT point, God must have already had properties (at least knowledge & power) to determine God's own properties. You will never find a point where God has a set of properties that were fully determined by God; because imagining you did would be a contradiction: to have THOSE properties, God would have already had to have properties of knowledge and power. You never get to a point where God's sovereignty explains God's properties fully.
 

Meow Mix

Chatte Féministe
He just is. There is no other way to express it.

Everything about God defies logic. Here is a single example.

2 Peter 3:8King James Version (KJV)

8 But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.

1 day with the Lord is 1,000 years (with man)

This is not an exact mathematically formula. This is just used to convey the message that God pretty much exist outside of time. It is backed up by the Genesis example I gave you on other post about how 20 years in Eden was 20,000 or 30,000 years outside of Eden.

This defies all logic. It can kind of be explained with physics to some degree as Einsteins theory of relativity proves. If an object has a intense mass or gravity time will slow down. So one could say that God has a very large mass or strong gravity, not unlike a black hole, it could explain how time is slowed in the presence of the Lord. Although it does not explain everything like where is this mass etc. So it still defies logic.

I could go on all day but I don't have time for it. So I'll just leave it as God defies all logic, at the very least He defies our current understanding and logic. Maybe some day we will understand.

God existing atemporally doesn't defy logic though -- that is perfectly logical. It defies physicality, it defies physics, but not logic.

Logic is specifically simply about things existing as what they are, without contradictions. Mathematics is extended logic.
 

Enoch07

It's all a sick freaking joke.
Premium Member
God existing atemporally doesn't defy logic though -- that is perfectly logical. It defies physicality, it defies physics, but not logic.

Logic is specifically simply about things existing as what they are, without contradictions. Mathematics is extended logic.

Mayhap. I shall roll it around my old noggin, and if I come to a reasonable conclusion, I will get back to ya on it. Right now I got more important matters to entertain.

Thank you for even considering the ideas at all (even if you disagree). You are a breath of fresh air around here and I look forward to more correspondence with you. :cool:
 

Kemosloby

Well-Known Member
Premium Member
I know these things; I mean it makes no logical sense to have three separate things which are supposed to be one whole thing. It makes sense if there are three phases of one thing, but you can't have separate things being a thing and not a thing at the same time and in the same respect. (I'm trying to discuss the philosophy without being disrespectful to the religious belief, it's hard)

If the meaning of love is to do good for others, and God is love. Perhaps there logically needs to be others to do things for.
 

Meow Mix

Chatte Féministe
If the meaning of love is to do good for others, and God is love. Perhaps there logically needs to be others to do things for.

You can do good for others without suffering existing.

For instance imagine you're in a world without suffering. It's your birthday. Your friend high fives you and wishes you a happy birthday. Have they not brought joy to you?
 

Tumah

Veteran Member
I'm not sure I would agree this response is tenable philosophically. "Created the world" is something like a property that could be ascribed to God if it's believed that God created the world -- to argue that God has no properties doesn't work, I wouldn't think. God has power, God has knowledge if God exists, etc. If I'm interpreting you incorrectly or if you disagree, could you clarify maybe?
Creating the world isn't an inherent quality of G-d. G-d wasn't the Creator before He created the world. Because He created the world, we call Him the Creator, but it's not a description of His nature, it's a description of His actions.
This approach is called is connected to Divine Simplicity. G-d's existence, knowledge and power aren't distinct qualities of G-d. The way I understand it is "G-d is" and the result of that statement is that G-d has knowledge, power, etc. What are qualities for us are all just a singular expression of G-d's being [in existence]. They become differentiated in our perception of G-d's being: sometimes G-d's being causes us to perceive Him as wise and sometimes as powerful, etc.
 

Grandliseur

Well-Known Member
This was one of my first posts to this forum, but I think it's been long enough to bring some fresh blood into the discussion.

There are two commonly held intuitions about God which create a paradox (which Alvin Plantinga calls the "aseity-sovereignty paradox"):

1) God exists a se, unto God's self, meaning God isn't relevantly dependent on any other states of affairs in order to exist and to exist as God: nothing created God, God needn't rely on anything existing causally prior in order to exist, etc.

2) God is sovereign, meaning that God's will is supreme; anything which exists exists that way because God wills it to be so.

The paradox is introduced when we ask the question: is God self-sovereign? Did God choose to be God?

Here, things get sticky: if God had no choice but to be God, then God isn't self-sovereign. But then why does God exist as God unless something transcendental to God and outside God's control makes that the case? If God isn't self-sovereign, then God is neither a se nor completely sovereign, and this goes against our common intuitions.

So, what happens if we try to argue God does have self-sovereignty (and chose to be God)? Well, we quickly find that this is impossible. It puts the cart before the horse: in order for God to do something like, say, pick and choose God's own properties, God must paradoxically already possess some properties -- for instance, knowledge of what properties are possible for God to possess and power to actualize them. The question immediately arises -- where would those properties have come from? It's obvious God couldn't have chosen them because in order to choose them God needs to have already had properties of power and knowledge -- and I hope you can see this is an endless quagmire. In the end, we find that God having self-sovereignty over God's "initial" properties isn't even a possibility to ponder.

As this dilemma is dichotomous -- either God is a se/sovereign or not -- turns out the answer can only be "not." If a God exists, something must exist transcendentally to said God in ways that said God has no control over (if anything, at least whatever that is that allows God to have the properties that God has).
Well, if you begin with the beginning of things which we have been given some information about, things become simple, and the need to cause difficulties through philosophy disappear.

What has been given is that time as we know it didn't begin until God began to create. While I am using human logic to rationalize this, this is all I have.
If you take an empty reality, except for one single sphere, or cube existing in it, it can neither go up or down, left or right, travel in a line, and time doesn't pass. It cannot rotate about itself either. The reason is that it lacks points of reference outside itself. Within its own self, it may if it has parts within itself have all these things, and it might be sentient.

So, in the beginning when God was all alone in his reality, time as we know it didn't happen. God was God if he thought of it, or king, or whatever other definition you might choose. Usually when someone is a god, they have worshipers, or other beings recognizing that one as special and as god. Being God without worshipers is like being king and having no subjects - it is an empty title without anyone else around. Of course, the title may be empty, but the being is still alive and unchanged.
God has life within himself and needs no outside source to keep his life-force alive. He is self contained and has immortal life.​

We are told that time began when the one we know as God begot, created, the first thing to exist beside himself. From then on linear time began, time counted from this first creation. I don't think God told this son of his, his exact copy, that 'I am God'; rather, I think he told him, 'I am your father, your creator.'

Did God choose to be the Creator, the Almighty. Well, God chose to be the Creator, and therefore he chose to be God vis-a-vis his creations, his sons, his lower life forms. He could have chosen not to create, but didn't. By choosing to create, he also chose to be God. He didn't choose to be the Almighty, this is a quality of his being -- whether it means that he either contains all energy existing, or, he has no limit to the energies available to him. Since he can split Zero into untold amounts of positive and negative energy, . (refer to this answer of mine for explaining this sentence. Link: I Don't Believe in Gravity!). I go with unlimited energy.

I do not see a difficulty with this situation. If you think things more complex than this, please let me know.
 

Kemosloby

Well-Known Member
Premium Member
You can do good for others without suffering existing.

For instance imagine you're in a world without suffering. It's your birthday. Your friend high fives you and wishes you a happy birthday. Have they not brought joy to you?

Sure but that's 2 dimensional. Suppose a better friend comes along and gives a higher high five, there would be more joy in the better friend. Then the not so good friend kicks you in the shin, which reminds you the mediocre friend was not so bad. At the very least it's a more interesting party with a variety of friends.
 

12jtartar

Active Member
Premium Member
This was one of my first posts to this forum, but I think it's been long enough to bring some fresh blood into the discussion.

There are two commonly held intuitions about God which create a paradox (which Alvin Plantinga calls the "aseity-sovereignty paradox"):

1) God exists a se, unto God's self, meaning God isn't relevantly dependent on any other states of affairs in order to exist and to exist as God: nothing created God, God needn't rely on anything existing causally prior in order to exist, etc.

2) God is sovereign, meaning that God's will is supreme; anything which exists exists that way because God wills it to be so.

The paradox is introduced when we ask the question: is God self-sovereign? Did God choose to be God?

Here, things get sticky: if God had no choice but to be God, then God isn't self-sovereign. But then why does God exist as God unless something transcendental to God and outside God's control makes that the case? If God isn't self-sovereign, then God is neither a se nor completely sovereign, and this goes against our common intuitions.

So, what happens if we try to argue God does have self-sovereignty (and chose to be God)? Well, we quickly find that this is impossible. It puts the cart before the horse: in order for God to do something like, say, pick and choose God's own properties, God must paradoxically already possess some properties -- for instance, knowledge of what properties are possible for God to possess and power to actualize them. The question immediately arises -- where would those properties have come from? It's obvious God couldn't have chosen them because in order to choose them God needs to have already had properties of power and knowledge -- and I hope you can see this is an endless quagmire. In the end, we find that God having self-sovereignty over God's "initial" properties isn't even a possibility to ponder.

As this dilemma is dichotomous -- either God is a se/sovereign or not -- turns out the answer can only be "not." If a God exists, something must exist transcendentally to said God in ways that said God has no control over (if anything, at least whatever that is that allows God to have the properties that God has).

Meow Mix,
What your post is: the term is called Doping Out. This means that when a person, any person tries to reason within his own mind, something other that what the Bible says, you run up against the problem of Egocentric Predicament, Epistemological Predicament. This means that any person who tries to Dope Out anything is stymied because we know so very little. The smartest men today use around 5% of the original brain power we had when first created.
This is what everyone needs to believe; God, whose Personal, Proper Name is Jehovah, in English, is Absolute in all His Qualities, attributes. Since God has always existed, He has always been Allpowerful, omnipotent, Allknowing, Omniscient, so He never had to name Himself God, He has always been what He is today. His name actually means, He causes to become., and I am what I am, Exodus 3:23-15, 6:2,3.
Since God’s mind so so much greater than men’s, how can you expect to be able to reason on anything about Him, and come up with anything different than what the Boble says, without it being a Dope Out? Isaiah 55:8,9, Job 37:5, 26:14, Job 36:4, 37:16, 40:2-9. Proverbs 2:2-12, 1Corinthians 2:9,10, 3:18,19, Proverbs 3:5-7.
 

Tmac

Active Member
This was one of my first posts to this forum, but I think it's been long enough to bring some fresh blood into the discussion.

There are two commonly held intuitions about God which create a paradox (which Alvin Plantinga calls the "aseity-sovereignty paradox"):

1) God exists a se, unto God's self, meaning God isn't relevantly dependent on any other states of affairs in order to exist and to exist as God: nothing created God, God needn't rely on anything existing causally prior in order to exist, etc.

2) God is sovereign, meaning that God's will is supreme; anything which exists exists that way because God wills it to be so.

The paradox is introduced when we ask the question: is God self-sovereign? Did God choose to be God?

Here, things get sticky: if God had no choice but to be God, then God isn't self-sovereign. But then why does God exist as God unless something transcendental to God and outside God's control makes that the case? If God isn't self-sovereign, then God is neither a se nor completely sovereign, and this goes against our common intuitions.

So, what happens if we try to argue God does have self-sovereignty (and chose to be God)? Well, we quickly find that this is impossible. It puts the cart before the horse: in order for God to do something like, say, pick and choose God's own properties, God must paradoxically already possess some properties -- for instance, knowledge of what properties are possible for God to possess and power to actualize them. The question immediately arises -- where would those properties have come from? It's obvious God couldn't have chosen them because in order to choose them God needs to have already had properties of power and knowledge -- and I hope you can see this is an endless quagmire. In the end, we find that God having self-sovereignty over God's "initial" properties isn't even a possibility to ponder.

As this dilemma is dichotomous -- either God is a se/sovereign or not -- turns out the answer can only be "not." If a God exists, something must exist transcendentally to said God in ways that said God has no control over (if anything, at least whatever that is that allows God to have the properties that God has).

Ah, some one who has actually thought about God, the concept. First I'd like to say that we aren't talking about God (whatever that is) but humanities awareness and understanding of what God should be in order to be God.
So to answer, my thought of God is, it is aware of itself but unconcerned, all things come forth from it but it is none of them, its like everything comes out of nothing. So the argument hinges on whether or not God chose to be God, my simple answer is no, we anointed it as God. Now if you were to follow Jesus's line of reasoning that God is where we come from therefore our parent, so we are all sons and daughters of this concept and heirs to the throne why is it that we do not think of ourselves as God.
 

Etritonakin

Well-Known Member
While interesting, this doesn't help the conundrum of self-sovereignty: no matter where in eternity we might check, it would be the case that in order to have whatever properties God has, God would have had to have already had properties. It turns out God couldn't have *ultimately* chosen God's own properties; and that's a problem for aseity and sovereignty. It would mean there is at least something which is transcendental to God and something over which God had no control.
It is only a conundrum if you need it to be so for some reason.
The truth is not necessarily so.

I don't see any problem with God not having chosen the most basic properties and tendencies of all things -or himself -which could also be called "the truth" -upon which are based all other truths as things become more complex.

If God has a most basic nature he did not choose, what is wrong with that?

If something can be controlled -then that thing must have inherent properties.

The tricky part is that though the most basic nature of all things can never change -which allows for both absolute spiritual truth and stability of creation, inherent to that most basic nature is (at least the development of) self-awareness and self-determination.
It did not determine that it would develop to the point of self-aware self-determination, but that would not matter once it did.

In other words, it is and/or becomes a self -is a simple then complex self - before it can determine its own future knowingly -but still based on the most basic truths.

If God/everything was a most-simple self with most-basic self-awareness (interaction itself) -and developed "naturally/by its own basic nature" into a complex self with complex self-awareness and complete knowledge of itself, and then was able to control the future states of itself/all things.... What is wrong with that?

Ironically, the things which God decided to do are essentially "no-brainers". Though they required a mind to first exist (some things do and some things do not -though a mind must be preceded by that which allows it and causes it to develop ), they were also perfectly logical -and the best logical choices. The most basic decisions were essentially inevitable -creating environment and others like himself and otherwise -the universe and all therein -but the joy of creation is in the details which are not of great importance to anything except enjoyment.

The debate between creation"ism" and evolution would have us choose one or the other, but evolution -in its most broad sense -and creation are essentially both aspects of the same overall reality.
 
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David T

Well-Known Member
Premium Member
This was one of my first posts to this forum, but I think it's been long enough to bring some fresh blood into the discussion.

There are two commonly held intuitions about God which create a paradox (which Alvin Plantinga calls the "aseity-sovereignty paradox"):

1) God exists a se, unto God's self, meaning God isn't relevantly dependent on any other states of affairs in order to exist and to exist as God: nothing created God, God needn't rely on anything existing causally prior in order to exist, etc.

2) God is sovereign, meaning that God's will is supreme; anything which exists exists that way because God wills it to be so.

The paradox is introduced when we ask the question: is God self-sovereign? Did God choose to be God?

Here, things get sticky: if God had no choice but to be God, then God isn't self-sovereign. But then why does God exist as God unless something transcendental to God and outside God's control makes that the case? If God isn't self-sovereign, then God is neither a se nor completely sovereign, and this goes against our common intuitions.

So, what happens if we try to argue God does have self-sovereignty (and chose to be God)? Well, we quickly find that this is impossible. It puts the cart before the horse: in order for God to do something like, say, pick and choose God's own properties, God must paradoxically already possess some properties -- for instance, knowledge of what properties are possible for God to possess and power to actualize them. The question immediately arises -- where would those properties have come from? It's obvious God couldn't have chosen them because in order to choose them God needs to have already had properties of power and knowledge -- and I hope you can see this is an endless quagmire. In the end, we find that God having self-sovereignty over God's "initial" properties isn't even a possibility to ponder.

As this dilemma is dichotomous -- either God is a se/sovereign or not -- turns out the answer can only be "not." If a God exists, something must exist transcendentally to said God in ways that said God has no control over (if anything, at least whatever that is that allows God to have the properties that God has).


1)nature exists a se, unto nature's self, meaning nature isn't relevantly dependent on any other states of affairs in order to exist and to exist as nature: nothing created nature, nature needn't rely on anything existing causally prior in order to exist, etc.

That's consistent

Nature is sovereign, meaning that nature (will) is supreme; anything which exists exists that way because nature (wills) it to be so.
Suddenly just kinda consistent

The paradox is introduced when we ask the question: is nature self-sovereign? Did nature choose to be nature?

Here, things get sticky: if nature had no choice but to be nature, then nature isn't self-sovereign. But then why does nature exist as nature unless something transcendental to narure and outside nature's control makes that the case? If nature isn't self-sovereign, then nature is neither a se nor completely sovereign, and this goes against our common intuitions

So, what happens if we try to argue nature does have self-sovereignty (and chose to be nature)? Well, we quickly find that this is impossible. It puts the cart before the horse: in order for naturr to do something like, say, pick and choose natures own properties, nature must paradoxically already possess some properties -- for instance, knowledge of what properties are possible for nature to possess and power to actualize them. The question immediately arises -- where would those properties have come from? It's obvious nature couldn't have chosen them because in order to choose them nature needs to have already had properties of power and knowledge -- and I hope you can see this is an endless quagmire. In the end, we find that nature having self-sovereignty over nature's "initial" properties isn't even a possibility to ponder.
 

joelr

Well-Known Member
This was one of my first posts to this forum, but I think it's been long enough to bring some fresh blood into the discussion.

There are two commonly held intuitions about God which create a paradox (which Alvin Plantinga calls the "aseity-sovereignty paradox"):

1) God exists a se, unto God's self, meaning God isn't relevantly dependent on any other states of affairs in order to exist and to exist as God: nothing created God, God needn't rely on anything existing causally prior in order to exist, etc.

2) God is sovereign, meaning that God's will is supreme; anything which exists exists that way because God wills it to be so.

The paradox is introduced when we ask the question: is God self-sovereign? Did God choose to be God?

Here, things get sticky: if God had no choice but to be God, then God isn't self-sovereign. But then why does God exist as God unless something transcendental to God and outside God's control makes that the case? If God isn't self-sovereign, then God is neither a se nor completely sovereign, and this goes against our common intuitions.

So, what happens if we try to argue God does have self-sovereignty (and chose to be God)? Well, we quickly find that this is impossible. It puts the cart before the horse: in order for God to do something like, say, pick and choose God's own properties, God must paradoxically already possess some properties -- for instance, knowledge of what properties are possible for God to possess and power to actualize them. The question immediately arises -- where would those properties have come from? It's obvious God couldn't have chosen them because in order to choose them God needs to have already had properties of power and knowledge -- and I hope you can see this is an endless quagmire. In the end, we find that God having self-sovereignty over God's "initial" properties isn't even a possibility to ponder.

As this dilemma is dichotomous -- either God is a se/sovereign or not -- turns out the answer can only be "not." If a God exists, something must exist transcendentally to said God in ways that said God has no control over (if anything, at least whatever that is that allows God to have the properties that God has).


What's weird is the same sort of questions apply to reality in general.
As to the God question a lot of people are just using assumptions taken from Christian mythology which gets us nowhere for obvious reasons.

But we do know the Universe exists, energy exists and probably a multi-verse. But where did this energy come from?
It doesn't make sense to have always been around and it doesn't make sense that it came from nothing at some point?
You can anthropomorphize the whole thing and make it a god but it's not really needed.

Just blaming it on a god who "always existed" is a cop-out to how strange the mystery really is.
 

Meow Mix

Chatte Féministe
Creating the world isn't an inherent quality of G-d. G-d wasn't the Creator before He created the world. Because He created the world, we call Him the Creator, but it's not a description of His nature, it's a description of His actions.
This approach is called is connected to Divine Simplicity. G-d's existence, knowledge and power aren't distinct qualities of G-d. The way I understand it is "G-d is" and the result of that statement is that G-d has knowledge, power, etc. What are qualities for us are all just a singular expression of G-d's being [in existence]. They become differentiated in our perception of G-d's being: sometimes G-d's being causes us to perceive Him as wise and sometimes as powerful, etc.

I'm not sure that Divine Simplicity is a workable concept: existence is to be limited logically (to exist as whatever something is, and not what it is not). To be limited is to not hold some properties, which necessarily means to hold at least some properties. Plantinga addresses this rather well in a book he wrote called, "Does God Have a Nature?"

Edit: Basically, if we can answer questions about what God is not, then we have to be able to answer questions about what God *is.* But this necessarily means God has properties.
 

Meow Mix

Chatte Féministe
Well, if you begin with the beginning of things which we have been given some information about, things become simple, and the need to cause difficulties through philosophy disappear.

What has been given is that time as we know it didn't begin until God began to create. While I am using human logic to rationalize this, this is all I have.
If you take an empty reality, except for one single sphere, or cube existing in it, it can neither go up or down, left or right, travel in a line, and time doesn't pass. It cannot rotate about itself either. The reason is that it lacks points of reference outside itself. Within its own self, it may if it has parts within itself have all these things, and it might be sentient.

So, in the beginning when God was all alone in his reality, time as we know it didn't happen. God was God if he thought of it, or king, or whatever other definition you might choose. Usually when someone is a god, they have worshipers, or other beings recognizing that one as special and as god. Being God without worshipers is like being king and having no subjects - it is an empty title without anyone else around. Of course, the title may be empty, but the being is still alive and unchanged.
God has life within himself and needs no outside source to keep his life-force alive. He is self contained and has immortal life.​

We are told that time began when the one we know as God begot, created, the first thing to exist beside himself. From then on linear time began, time counted from this first creation. I don't think God told this son of his, his exact copy, that 'I am God'; rather, I think he told him, 'I am your father, your creator.'

Did God choose to be the Creator, the Almighty. Well, God chose to be the Creator, and therefore he chose to be God vis-a-vis his creations, his sons, his lower life forms. He could have chosen not to create, but didn't. By choosing to create, he also chose to be God. He didn't choose to be the Almighty, this is a quality of his being -- whether it means that he either contains all energy existing, or, he has no limit to the energies available to him. Since he can split Zero into untold amounts of positive and negative energy, . (refer to this answer of mine for explaining this sentence. Link: I Don't Believe in Gravity!). I go with unlimited energy.

I do not see a difficulty with this situation. If you think things more complex than this, please let me know.

The problem as raised in the OP doesn't amount to "God doesn't exist," it's really not all that harmful to theism. It just means that a couple intuitions about classical monotheism have to be at worst amended a little bit. You were touching on the issue when you said "He didn't choose to be the Almighty, this is a quality of his being..."

The implication is that some aspects of reality are outside even God's control; which implies that there is this transcendental set of rules (to speak really colloquially) that God isn't sovereign over. And that's okay, it doesn't damage theism.

What it does do, though, is pre-empt a few theistic arguments for the existence of God, such as the TAG (Transcendental Argument for God). It also ties in a little to Euthyphro's Dilemma.
 

Meow Mix

Chatte Féministe
Sure but that's 2 dimensional. Suppose a better friend comes along and gives a higher high five, there would be more joy in the better friend. Then the not so good friend kicks you in the shin, which reminds you the mediocre friend was not so bad. At the very least it's a more interesting party with a variety of friends.

You can have a variety of friends in a world where physical suffering doesn't exist. You can still have free agency. You can decide who to hang out with that day -- or who to hang out with at all. Whether you want to go watch a movie or play a game. Whether you want to study something new and interesting, or share what you've studied. Physical suffering isn't necessary to exist to have free agency. It's not necessary to exist to have challenges to overcome, either.
 

Meow Mix

Chatte Féministe
Meow Mix,
What your post is: the term is called Doping Out. This means that when a person, any person tries to reason within his own mind, something other that what the Bible says, you run up against the problem of Egocentric Predicament, Epistemological Predicament. This means that any person who tries to Dope Out anything is stymied because we know so very little. The smartest men today use around 5% of the original brain power we had when first created.
This is what everyone needs to believe; God, whose Personal, Proper Name is Jehovah, in English, is Absolute in all His Qualities, attributes. Since God has always existed, He has always been Allpowerful, omnipotent, Allknowing, Omniscient, so He never had to name Himself God, He has always been what He is today. His name actually means, He causes to become., and I am what I am, Exodus 3:23-15, 6:2,3.
Since God’s mind so so much greater than men’s, how can you expect to be able to reason on anything about Him, and come up with anything different than what the Boble says, without it being a Dope Out? Isaiah 55:8,9, Job 37:5, 26:14, Job 36:4, 37:16, 40:2-9. Proverbs 2:2-12, 1Corinthians 2:9,10, 3:18,19, Proverbs 3:5-7.

I'm not sure what you're saying here. What I took away from it is "if you think outside of what's sanctioned by the Bible, then your thinking will go bad?" ...is that what you're saying?
 

Meow Mix

Chatte Féministe
Ah, some one who has actually thought about God, the concept. First I'd like to say that we aren't talking about God (whatever that is) but humanities awareness and understanding of what God should be in order to be God.
So to answer, my thought of God is, it is aware of itself but unconcerned, all things come forth from it but it is none of them, its like everything comes out of nothing. So the argument hinges on whether or not God chose to be God, my simple answer is no, we anointed it as God. Now if you were to follow Jesus's line of reasoning that God is where we come from therefore our parent, so we are all sons and daughters of this concept and heirs to the throne why is it that we do not think of ourselves as God.

When I ask "did God choose to be God," I'm not asking if God chose to have a title. The question can (and maybe should) be rephrased, "could God have ultimately chosen God's properties?"
 

Meow Mix

Chatte Féministe
It is only a conundrum if you need it to be so for some reason.
The truth is not necessarily so.

I don't see any problem with God not having chosen the most basic properties and tendencies of all things -or himself -which could also be called "the truth" -upon which are based all other truths as things become more complex.

If God has a most basic nature he did not choose, what is wrong with that?

If something can be controlled -then that thing must have inherent properties.

The tricky part is that though the most basic nature of all things can never change -which allows for both absolute spiritual truth and stability of creation, inherent to that most basic nature is (at least the development of) self-awareness and self-determination.
It did not determine that it would develop to the point of self-aware self-determination, but that would not matter once it did.

In other words, it is and/or becomes a self -is a simple then complex self - before it can determine its own future knowingly -but still based on the most basic truths.

If God/everything was a most-simple self with most-basic self-awareness (interaction itself) -and developed "naturally/by its own basic nature" into a complex self with complex self-awareness and complete knowledge of itself, and then was able to control the future states of itself/all things.... What is wrong with that?

Ironically, the things which God decided to do are essentially "no-brainers". Though they required a mind to first exist (some things do and some things do not -though a mind must be preceded by that which allows it and causes it to develop ), they were also perfectly logical -and the best logical choices. The most basic decisions were essentially inevitable -creating environment and others like himself and otherwise -the universe and all therein -but the joy of creation is in the details which are not of great importance to anything except enjoyment.

The debate between creation"ism" and evolution would have us choose one or the other, but evolution -in its most broad sense -and creation are essentially both aspects of the same overall reality.

There is nothing wrong with the notion that some things were beyond God's control (such as which properties God had). It doesn't harm theism or belief in God in any way. It only forces us to amend a few common intuitions we have (about aseity and sovereignty as relating to God). Small things are important sometimes because larger things are built off of them.

One significant thing the argument does is it precludes the use of some arguments for the existence of God such as the TAG (Transcendental Argument for God). That doesn't mean God doesn't exist, just that a few arguments are undercut by the paradox given in the OP.
 
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