If God is outside of time, can God know what time it is now? Furthermore, there may be an opportunity to use God’s standing outside of time to launch an argument that God is the creator of time. Could there be a being that is outside time? That God cannot know future free action is no more of a mark against God’s being omniscient than God’s inability to make square circles is a mark against God’s being omnipotent. Furthermore, we normally know things by knowing their genus and species, yet God is unique and so cannot be known in that way. It believes that all things are possible and that nothing is beyond the control of those who operate in the faith of God. Cause of mind control email. The “Darwin fish” takes religiou­s iconography, splices it with science textbook illustrations and makes a statement on the fundamental divide between creationism and evolution. Santa figure in Peru takes center stage in Christmas celebrations, advertising and traditions.

Finally, while the great monotheistic traditions provide a portrait of the Divine as supremely different from the creation, there is also an insistence on God’s proximity or immanence. Theories spelling out why and how the cosmos belongs to God have been prominent in all three monotheistic traditions. Here are only some of the ways in which philosophers have articulated what it means to call God good. A common version of theistic voluntarism is the claim that for something to be good or right simply means that God approves of permits it and for something to be bad or wrong means that God disapproves or forbids it. To say an act is right entails a commitment to holding that if there were an ideal observer, it would approve of the act; to claim an act is wrong entails the thesis that if there were an ideal observer, it would disapprove of it. If true, it does not follow that there is an ideal observer, but if it is true and moral judgments are coherent, then the idea of an ideal observer is coherent. According to this theory, moral judgments can be analyzed in terms of how an ideal observer would judge matters.

All known world religions address the nature of good and evil and commend ways of achieving human well-being, whether this be thought of in terms of salvation, liberation, deliverance, enlightenment, tranquility, or an egoless state of Nirvana. The theory receives some support from the fact that most moral disputes can be analyzed in terms of different parties challenging each other to be impartial, to get their empirical facts straight, and to be more sensitive-for example, by realizing what it feels like to be disadvantaged. In some forms of Hinduism, for example, Brahman has been extolled as possessing a sort of moral transcendence, and some Christian theologians and philosophers have likewise insisted that God is only a moral agent in a highly qualified sense, if at all (Davies 1993). To call God good is, for them, very different from calling a human being good. However, Protestant churches of various denominations have developed considerably in the popular sectors over the past 30 years. But this only works if there is no necessity of eternity analogous to the necessity of the past.

A different problem arises with respect to eternity and omniscience. Debates over the problem of evil (if God is indeed omnipotent and perfectly good, why is there evil?) have poignancy precisely because one side challenges this chief judgment about God’s goodness. This problem was advanced by Nelson Pike (1970); Stump and Kretzmann 1981 have replied that the simultaneity involved in God’s eternal knowledge is not transitive). The crucial moves in arguments that the cosmos and its contents belong to their Creator have been to guard against the idea that human parents would then “own” their children (they do not, because parents are not radical creators like God), and the idea that Divine ownership would permit anything, thus construing human duties owed to God as the duties of a slave to a master (a view to which not all theists have objected). It should be noted that in addition to attention to the classical divine attributes discussed in this section, there has also been philosophical work on divine simplicity, immutability, impassibility, omnipresence, God’s freedom, divine necessity, sovereignty, God’s relationship with abstract objects, Christian teachings about the Trinity, the incarnation, atonement, the sacraments, and more. It appears that in calling God or in particular God’s will “good” the religious believer is saying more than “God wills what God wills”.