Can God....

[Emmitt2222]

God can do the impossible in some circumstances, but not in others. This sounds odd at first but once you look at it it makes sense. God can go above and beyond human logic by doing such things as existing in more than one place at a time. What God can not do is do nothing, because then he wouldn't exist and he can not go against the logic that he introduced in the first place because this would be contradictory. Because God is God, it is saying that he is infinite and perfect, but a perfect being can not in any way be self-contradictory. For this reason God can not create a square cirlce or a burrito so hot even he can not eat it.

[Wally Weeks]

I think a more appropriate question is whether or not God can resurrect a 5 month old post from the dead. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

[pokerrookie]

Good point...Boy do I feel like an a$$. Here I thought this was a hotly debated topic...but to my credit, I was not the one that brought it to the front...lol

[onehandfold]

[ QUOTE ]
I think a more appropriate question is whether or not God can resurrect a 5 month old post from the dead. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

[/ QUOTE ]

...I can't believe I read all of that without looking at the date once...

[Frequitude]

[ QUOTE ]
...I can't believe I read all of that without looking at the date once...

[/ QUOTE ]

Tell me about it. I read the whole thing (and the other one that got linked to here), got to this comment, scrolled up a bit and was like "holy crap, does that say 04?!?". Here I was thinking I had somehow missed some whale of a thread.

FWIW, my favorite point of the thread was something along the lines of "more people would believe that God could solve this sum of cubes problem than they would believe that he could create a four sided triangle." I think it was David's comment, and it may have been in the linked thread, but I'm certainly not going to go look for it!

I find it funny that people could seperate these two in the context of "Could God...". To me, this just shows how naive people can be towards something they don't understand. The triangle is something everyone is familiar with. It is something tangible (sp?) that anyone can look at and say "yep, that's a triangle". But math is something understood deeply by a very small number of people. Very few can look at the OP's equation and say "That is impossible" AND understand why.

So many people would want to answer yes to the OP simply because they don't understand tough math. If they can't definitively say it is incorrect, then it must be possible, but if they saw a 4-sided triangle (a square?) they would immediately say that it is not a triangle. To me, however, I see the OP and the 4-sided triangle as the same. Both are impossible, and I believe both would present the same challenges to God.

Now, as for whether or not God could do either of these is not for me. I believe in God, but not in organized religion. I really have no idea where I would start. I just thought the notion of these two ideas being different was quite interesting.

I think that this really gives strength to David's point that intelligent/scientific people are much more likely to question religion than the less intelligent/scientific.

-freq

[jskills]

[ QUOTE ]
come up with two positive integers such that when you cube each and add them up, you get the cube of a third integer?

[/ QUOTE ]

Nope.

The software I wrote to try can't do it, so how could anyone else?

Who is God anyway?

[asofel]

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Who is God anyway?

[/ QUOTE ]

OP, and thus the answer is obviously "I don't know, can you?"

[mosch]

Could somebody please pass the hookah?

[blingice]

Yes to the multiple choice and apple thing.
No to the microwave question.
Yes to the Cube question. [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]


Bling.

[Wally Weeks]

I wouldn't feel that bad about it. I did the same thing a couple of weeks ago with a thread about reading/studying books. Little did I know that the thread was a few months old--so much for reading! [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

As for this thread, I haven't bothered to read the debate. I'm not really sure what David's point was other than posing some sort of "can God create a stone even God can't pick up" conundrum...or something to that effect.

Can God violate Fermat's Last Theorem? I dunno, ask Andrew Wiles.

But then again, I've never really cared about religion and higher powers, etc. in my own world view. I've always found that debating religion and politics to be almost pointless, frustrating, and boring for the most part. It seems like a dog chasing it's own tail to no end, but I do admit it can be interesting from a philosophical point of view. However, most people don't argue in this sort of intellectual manner. I particularly "like" it when people combine both religion and politics together (e.g. "I voted for Bush because he is a good Christian man."). Good times.

Regards,
Wally