Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Week Two

Reflect on the concept of power in religious thinking. What does omnipotence mean? What power can be attributed to created beings, what power can be attributed to divine beings, and what evidence is there for the division you posit? What problems arise, if any, from this understanding? Then explain how process thought seeks to redefine the concept of power, and the religious implications -- whether desirable or undesirable -- of this redefinition.

God as omnipotence means that God is all-powerful and that he can do anything that he likes. Traditionally, God is also thought as omnibenecolent and omniscient . The problem, one runs into is that if God is all-powerful and all-knowing than the existence of evil becomes an issue because either God created evil or God does not have enough power to fix the problem of evil or God is evil himself.

The idea of free will is interesting with a God who is all-powerful and with humans with free will because if humans have free will and God's influence on free will is limited and if it is not limited to, in humans do not have free will so there's a problem with this idea as well.

Process theology offers an idea that God is all-powerful and all knowing that he knows all possibilities of the future. And God influences our free will but does not predetermine our choices. This idea of God knowing the possibilities and not and not the future solves the problem of evil. Because it allows humans to have free will and God to be all knowing because he only knows the possibilities which are the only logical things to know. So in some complicated way that I don't fully understand the solves the problem of evil but it changes the traditional idea of an all-powerful God. I feel like it all goes back to this idea that reality is only reality when it is actual things so the future is not reality because the future is not yet actual so God knows only the possibilities of the future and not the future itself.

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