God - Nonsense or Mystery? Objections to the coherence of classic theism
Since my previous thread on the topic of theism was fairly well-recieved I figured it wouldn't be bad to explore the topic a bit more. This time though, rather than focusing on the evidence for the existence of God, I will focus on a different and far more serious issue – the coherence of God. That is to say, what I will be exploring here will be whether the concept of God, as concieved by classic theism (with a special focus on the 3 abrahamic faiths), makes sense or does it suffer from internal contradictions rendering the existence of such a thing not only improbable (as was the goal of the evidentialist's claims in the previous thread) but entirely impossible! (For a thing which cannot be properly concieved to make sense cannot exist, just like a notion of a square-circle.)
How may these objections to the coherence of God look? Well, the most simplest ones would be (and I'm sure you've heard some of these before) questions like „if God is all-powerful can he overpower himself“, or „if god is all-powerful and all-knowing can he change his mind without knowing it“ etc. These arguments come in many forms and are as such to be addressed in different ways (some require more effort than others), but I will do my best to cover some of the most common ones and lay out 2 distinct approaches a theist may take in answering them.
I shall do so in order to help certain people here (as I know there are some) to get a useful weapon in combating the skeptic's offense and be able to defend that which they truly believe in. I'll now begin. (The glossary is as follow.)
- Evaluating Mystery
- Adequate Mystery
- Concrete Answers
- Concluding Remarks
The most common method a theist may use to approach this challenge is to simply say that the concept of God is transcendant (beyond human understanding) and is thus unavoidably mysterious. In all this mysteriousness, one cannot really subject the concept of God to empirical analisys and thus all the charges the atheist makes are guilty of overstating their case. All bets are off, so to speak.
Now, this approach, while certainly popular in the areas of prevailing fideism, is heavily frowned upon in the intellectual circles by virtually all skeptics who see it as little more than a cop-out. As such it's heavily unpersuasive and isn't taken as a serious answer. I, however, must pause and wonder if this response is justified and evaluate just how much merit this answer to the atheist's charges actually holds. I will thus offer 2 reasons for why this response is not only acceptable but also the most accurate representation of „how things are“.
- Utter unavailability of God
The first point I wish to raise is warranted in the crucial aspect of the concept of God being discussed here. The concept of God we're discussing is, as I said, that of classical theism. Now, in case you don't know, classical theism posits that God is entirely above and separate from all „creation“ – all other being. This is contrasted with views such as pantheism in which God is equoted with the universe.
On such a view, it may be clear but I disgress, to evaluate God means to go beyond our usual state of affairs. It is to reach for transcendence. Now, one may rightly ask, just how much can be known of (and how much knowledge do we in fact hold) the state of affairs beyond what we usually percieve? The answer to that is clear, zero – null – none! Absolute lack of knowledge. In such circumstances one is reasonable to keep his judgement reserved until we can acquire some means to move beyond „the natural being“. This ofcourse is unlikely to happen at all as we are hopelessly bound to our 4-dimensional fabric of reality and space-time that we simply cannot persist beyond it. An interesting question rises here, and this is where we get to the second point.
- Inconceivability of God
We're all finite, material, 4-dimensional beings (or 3-dimensional if you'd rather not accept the block-universe view). As such, it is not merely our ontology that is helplessly shackled, but our epistemology as well! That is to say, it is not merely our being (our bodies) that are trapped in the finitude of the material universe, it is our very ability to imagine – our cognitive abilities - that are shackled as well!
I have just now mentioned that we cannot persist beyond space-time, but what exactly does this mean? How exactly can we make sense of something being before time and outside of space? Indeed we can't, for we are bound by our common intuitions (in fact many people are still stuck in the era of Newtonian Physics or even Aristotelian!) so that we simply cannot make sense of anything beyond our finite spacetime. Now, one may say „But is this not the point? All the worse for God then, as something outside of spacetime automatically cannot be coherent!“. While this may have some force on the surface, it is actually deeply problematic for it is our very universe that exists without reliance on space or time! Modern cosmology considers the universe to be all of space-time and both the space and time have had a beginning at the Big Bang! Whatever the state of affairs was before the emergence of space-time, it was beyond these 2 terms. Same goes for the idea of a multiverse which brought our time and space into being.
I have thus presented 2 arguments for why the mystery response is not only a reasonable one, but also the most accurate description of „the way things are“. There are, however, limits to just how far the account of mistery can take us. While we are perfectly justified in holding such a view, it wouldn't be very convincing to many as the skeptics will simply not accept mistery as a reason to accept the coherence of theism and would at best stay agnostic on it (albeit they would have to drop these charges in order to keep some integrity). To increase the persuasiveness of the theist's case, one would be better to have some concrete answers to the charges that are being layed out in front of him.
As such, the mystery argument would be used as an efficient „belief-stabilizer“ while the concrete answers would be their to solidify the coherence of the faith one holds. I will thus for the rest of this essay focus solely on these alternative accounts. Those who are confident in resting their faith solely on mistery need not bother with the rest of this post, for things are going to get a bit technical.
Now you may pause and wonder „“With all the mysteriousness that is inherent to the concept of classic theism, just how can one avoid falling into mystery?“, and it is a perfectly justified question, for I have just spent a good chuck of this post on explaining why God is too supreme for our mortal minds to handle so just how can I posit a concrete explanation without contradicting everything I have just said? The answer to this question lies in the goal I'm trying to achieve. Before I can explain this goal, I'd first have to shed some light for those who don't understand the nature of this discussion to it's full extent.
In a nutshell, what the atheist is trying to do is demonstrate how the concept of God is absurd for it leads to absurd consequences. For example, if God is all-powerful than the atheist would argue God should be able to make a rock too heavy for him to lift, but if he can do that then there would be something he couldn't do (lift the rock) – thus God isn't all-powerful. (Or alternatively, the notion of omnipotence is itself incoherent.)
To be incoherent, the concept must suffer from a logical contradiction (exactly what we see described above). So how can we answer this without breaking the fundamental veil of mystery inherent to the concept of God?
Well, the key here isn't to demonstrate „how God works“, instead it is to simply posit one possible scenario in which these contradictions wouldn't arise – as a contemporary cosmologist (and a vocal atheist!) Sean Carroll would say: „You build a model.“ So, listening to Carroll's words, that's exactly what I'm going to do, we'll build up a model which explains how these inherent attributes (for example omnipotence) can work without clashing with each other (or themselves).
If we are successful in building a non-contradictory model, then we would demonstrate that the concept isn't in fact inherently contradictory, but what lies in the heart of the problem is the lack of understanding of the concept as posed by the atheist side! (Put simply, once we show a concept can work without contradiction, the notion of the concept being inherently contradictory evaporates.)
- Single property objections
There are 2 kinds of coherence objections to the concept of God. The first one I'll look at is the family of objections which focus on a single aspect of God (such as his omnipotence or omniscience) and charge it with incoherence, thus rendering every concept which relies on it ultimatively incoherent as well. It is in this family of arguments that the examples of „a stone too heavy to lift“ belong. Instead of going through each and every of these alleged contradictions, I will simply provide a brief analisys of what they all have in common and why they fail.
(If certain skeptics here think they have an objection inadequatelly addressed here they're free to lay it out and I will deal with it specifically.)
The problems will be analysed on the concept of omnipotence because the stone argument is by far the most common one used so it should be easier to understand. The crucial flaw in these types of objections (and especially this one) lies in their misunderstanding of the concept of omnipotence. To elaborate, omnipotence here is improperly asserted as the ability to perform certain tasks (even more so blatantly physical ones). While this may be a plausible notion of omnipotence for some theistic conceptions of God, I find an alternate meaning to be mandatory in order to properly describe omnipotence in the context of classic theism and, even more specifically, the 3 abrahamic religions.
What could this alternate meaning be? Well, as the all-time classic essay „Maximal Power“ says, omnipotence should be understood as the ability to actualise certain states of affairs. Understood this way, we have a perfectly legitimate way out of the skeptic's scheme. I'll return to the example in which the atheist lays out the objection that „If God is all powerful He should be able to overpower Himself“, now what is actually being said here? The being with the ability to actualize all states of affairs should be able to actualize more than all states of affairs. The absurdity should be apparent, for how can a being actualise more than all states of affairs? What is being insisted here, I think this should be apparent by now, isn't actually a task to be performed (so even if we went by the atheist's original conception of omnipotence there would be no problem) instead it is meaningless gibberish – a logical impossibility.
Now, one may jump and say: „Ah, but should your God not be able to do the impossible? Isn't everything possible for God as your scripture comments?“
To answer this, we need to distinguish between 2 types of possibilities:
- logical possibility
- metaphysical possibility
Logical possibility means something that is coherent, a non-contradictory proposition. It proposes an analytic truth. Metaphysical possibility on the other hand refers to a relative concept, a state of affairs that is actualisable in certain circumstances. To make the distinction clearer, logically impossible things are those things that are logically contradictory, like a notion of a square circle. It is an analytic truth that a circle cannot be square for the two hold conceptually different properties. Should we disagree with this, the concepts would get violated and all discourse would lose it's meaning. Put simply, for something to be logically impossible it must be so absurd that it cannot even be properly concieved (like a triangle whose sum is more than 180°).
Unlike logical possibilities, metaphysical impossibility reffers to something that can be meaningfully concieved (something that isn't contradictory per se) but is non-the less impossible to actualise in a given set of rules. For example, it may be logically possible for a car to suddenly turn to a bunch of marshmallows, but it isn't metaphysically possible because the laws of nature don't allow that.
Now, the concept of omnipotence, as I argue, is only extended to actualising possible states of affairs (in the context of metaphysical mpossibility). Logical impossibilities cannot even be properly concieved and as such they don't really represent metaphysical possibilities. It is thus a conceptual truth that such notions don't present any state of affairs at all, but are mere gibberish.
- Multiple properties objections
Unlike the single property objections, multiple properties objections try to demostrate the logical impossibility of God due to holding attributes that seemingly cannot coexist. These types of objections include „if God is all-loving he cannot be the most just and as such these 2 are mutually exclusive terms so any concept which infers their coexistence spirals into incoherence“. It doesn't matter to those who raise these objections whether or not the individual attributes are coherent or not, instead what matters is that a specific combination of these attributes cannot coexist (just how something can be cold or hot but it cannot be both cold and hot at the same time).
Now, while these objections don't necessarily fall on the account of misunderstanding the specific properties invoked (as for example, being merciful would indeed be a suspnension of justice which a perfectly just being cannot allow), they do however fail for a different reason – not seeing the whole picture. While perfect goodnes (mercy, love, copassion) is bound to get in the way of perfect justice (objective rationale) it is only so if the being is separate from the law. The Judeo-Christian account of God, however, is goodness himself. He isn't a subject of some external moral or legal law that would make him compromise his integrity, rather He in His essence is goodness incarnate and as such every act he does would as per concept be good (even acts we would normally percieve as evil) and being just, his justice would flow from his essential goodness thus making everything He does both wholly just and wholly good as they would all come wholly from His essence.
Arguments such as these tend to have a theologically inappropriate understanding of God's nature and isolate 2 or more properties while leaving the fundamental one that binds them together. It is in this sense that most of the objections of this sort fail. So, when a skeptic comes charging at you with these objections make sure you've got a proper understanding of the nature of God as only your ignorance can cause your downfall.
Naturally, since these matters are a subject of heated debate among different religions (and even among members of the same religion) the answer to these objections which invoke a contradiction between multiple properties will differ from one theistic teaching to another. Theists as such enjoy a great amount of freedom in reconciling the concept of God with logical possibility but at the same time one approach may not be interesting to a theist who has a different understanding of God. For example, a solution just provided to the objection of divine goodness and justice which rests on the Divine Command Theory (everything God does is good per se) will not be accepted by a theist who holds that God is in fact a non-flexible standard for morals to which He himself is (willingly or necessarily) subjected.
This, however, is of no help to the atheist for mere existence of one coherent framework completely destroys his case. The more different frameworks, the merrier for this variety offers a swift backup in case that one conception of God somehow fails.
With this, I believe I have given you an adequate overview of how to answer these types of objections. Ofcourse, the amount of literature on the coherence of God is enormous and going over everything even in a minimalistic manner would take far more time and space than I have here. I believe, however, that the basic outline for how to approach these challenges has been adequately presented. Mystery arguments are properly defended and provide efficient defense of one's views, while constructing logically possible explanations is possible (and has been done) for all supposed contradictions. I do wish to say one more thing on this whole topic and that is, even if the atheist was to succeed in refuting a certain conception of God, would that render theistic belief in general absurd? No, not at all! In fact, all it would accomplish is that the theist would make a more coherent conception of God (which is granted by great ambiguity in regards to the scriptures). So, in a way, claims like these are not mere hydrances but useful tools in order for us to have a better understanding of God!
Since my previous thread on the topic of theism was fairly well-recieved I figured it wouldn't be bad to explore the topic a bit more. This time though, rather than focusing on the evidence for the existence of God, I will focus on a different and far more serious issue – the coherence of God. That is to say, what I will be exploring here will be whether the concept of God, as concieved by classic theism (with a special focus on the 3 abrahamic faiths), makes sense or does it suffer from internal contradictions rendering the existence of such a thing not only improbable (as was the goal of the evidentialist's claims in the previous thread) but entirely impossible! (For a thing which cannot be properly concieved to make sense cannot exist, just like a notion of a square-circle.)
How may these objections to the coherence of God look? Well, the most simplest ones would be (and I'm sure you've heard some of these before) questions like „if God is all-powerful can he overpower himself“, or „if god is all-powerful and all-knowing can he change his mind without knowing it“ etc. These arguments come in many forms and are as such to be addressed in different ways (some require more effort than others), but I will do my best to cover some of the most common ones and lay out 2 distinct approaches a theist may take in answering them.
I shall do so in order to help certain people here (as I know there are some) to get a useful weapon in combating the skeptic's offense and be able to defend that which they truly believe in. I'll now begin. (The glossary is as follow.)
- Evaluating Mystery
- Adequate Mystery
- Concrete Answers
- Concluding Remarks
Evaluating Mystery
The most common method a theist may use to approach this challenge is to simply say that the concept of God is transcendant (beyond human understanding) and is thus unavoidably mysterious. In all this mysteriousness, one cannot really subject the concept of God to empirical analisys and thus all the charges the atheist makes are guilty of overstating their case. All bets are off, so to speak.
Now, this approach, while certainly popular in the areas of prevailing fideism, is heavily frowned upon in the intellectual circles by virtually all skeptics who see it as little more than a cop-out. As such it's heavily unpersuasive and isn't taken as a serious answer. I, however, must pause and wonder if this response is justified and evaluate just how much merit this answer to the atheist's charges actually holds. I will thus offer 2 reasons for why this response is not only acceptable but also the most accurate representation of „how things are“.
- Utter unavailability of God
The first point I wish to raise is warranted in the crucial aspect of the concept of God being discussed here. The concept of God we're discussing is, as I said, that of classical theism. Now, in case you don't know, classical theism posits that God is entirely above and separate from all „creation“ – all other being. This is contrasted with views such as pantheism in which God is equoted with the universe.
On such a view, it may be clear but I disgress, to evaluate God means to go beyond our usual state of affairs. It is to reach for transcendence. Now, one may rightly ask, just how much can be known of (and how much knowledge do we in fact hold) the state of affairs beyond what we usually percieve? The answer to that is clear, zero – null – none! Absolute lack of knowledge. In such circumstances one is reasonable to keep his judgement reserved until we can acquire some means to move beyond „the natural being“. This ofcourse is unlikely to happen at all as we are hopelessly bound to our 4-dimensional fabric of reality and space-time that we simply cannot persist beyond it. An interesting question rises here, and this is where we get to the second point.
- Inconceivability of God
We're all finite, material, 4-dimensional beings (or 3-dimensional if you'd rather not accept the block-universe view). As such, it is not merely our ontology that is helplessly shackled, but our epistemology as well! That is to say, it is not merely our being (our bodies) that are trapped in the finitude of the material universe, it is our very ability to imagine – our cognitive abilities - that are shackled as well!
I have just now mentioned that we cannot persist beyond space-time, but what exactly does this mean? How exactly can we make sense of something being before time and outside of space? Indeed we can't, for we are bound by our common intuitions (in fact many people are still stuck in the era of Newtonian Physics or even Aristotelian!) so that we simply cannot make sense of anything beyond our finite spacetime. Now, one may say „But is this not the point? All the worse for God then, as something outside of spacetime automatically cannot be coherent!“. While this may have some force on the surface, it is actually deeply problematic for it is our very universe that exists without reliance on space or time! Modern cosmology considers the universe to be all of space-time and both the space and time have had a beginning at the Big Bang! Whatever the state of affairs was before the emergence of space-time, it was beyond these 2 terms. Same goes for the idea of a multiverse which brought our time and space into being.
Adequate Mystery
I have thus presented 2 arguments for why the mystery response is not only a reasonable one, but also the most accurate description of „the way things are“. There are, however, limits to just how far the account of mistery can take us. While we are perfectly justified in holding such a view, it wouldn't be very convincing to many as the skeptics will simply not accept mistery as a reason to accept the coherence of theism and would at best stay agnostic on it (albeit they would have to drop these charges in order to keep some integrity). To increase the persuasiveness of the theist's case, one would be better to have some concrete answers to the charges that are being layed out in front of him.
As such, the mystery argument would be used as an efficient „belief-stabilizer“ while the concrete answers would be their to solidify the coherence of the faith one holds. I will thus for the rest of this essay focus solely on these alternative accounts. Those who are confident in resting their faith solely on mistery need not bother with the rest of this post, for things are going to get a bit technical.
Concrete Answers
Now you may pause and wonder „“With all the mysteriousness that is inherent to the concept of classic theism, just how can one avoid falling into mystery?“, and it is a perfectly justified question, for I have just spent a good chuck of this post on explaining why God is too supreme for our mortal minds to handle so just how can I posit a concrete explanation without contradicting everything I have just said? The answer to this question lies in the goal I'm trying to achieve. Before I can explain this goal, I'd first have to shed some light for those who don't understand the nature of this discussion to it's full extent.
In a nutshell, what the atheist is trying to do is demonstrate how the concept of God is absurd for it leads to absurd consequences. For example, if God is all-powerful than the atheist would argue God should be able to make a rock too heavy for him to lift, but if he can do that then there would be something he couldn't do (lift the rock) – thus God isn't all-powerful. (Or alternatively, the notion of omnipotence is itself incoherent.)
To be incoherent, the concept must suffer from a logical contradiction (exactly what we see described above). So how can we answer this without breaking the fundamental veil of mystery inherent to the concept of God?
Well, the key here isn't to demonstrate „how God works“, instead it is to simply posit one possible scenario in which these contradictions wouldn't arise – as a contemporary cosmologist (and a vocal atheist!) Sean Carroll would say: „You build a model.“ So, listening to Carroll's words, that's exactly what I'm going to do, we'll build up a model which explains how these inherent attributes (for example omnipotence) can work without clashing with each other (or themselves).
If we are successful in building a non-contradictory model, then we would demonstrate that the concept isn't in fact inherently contradictory, but what lies in the heart of the problem is the lack of understanding of the concept as posed by the atheist side! (Put simply, once we show a concept can work without contradiction, the notion of the concept being inherently contradictory evaporates.)
- Single property objections
There are 2 kinds of coherence objections to the concept of God. The first one I'll look at is the family of objections which focus on a single aspect of God (such as his omnipotence or omniscience) and charge it with incoherence, thus rendering every concept which relies on it ultimatively incoherent as well. It is in this family of arguments that the examples of „a stone too heavy to lift“ belong. Instead of going through each and every of these alleged contradictions, I will simply provide a brief analisys of what they all have in common and why they fail.
(If certain skeptics here think they have an objection inadequatelly addressed here they're free to lay it out and I will deal with it specifically.)
The problems will be analysed on the concept of omnipotence because the stone argument is by far the most common one used so it should be easier to understand. The crucial flaw in these types of objections (and especially this one) lies in their misunderstanding of the concept of omnipotence. To elaborate, omnipotence here is improperly asserted as the ability to perform certain tasks (even more so blatantly physical ones). While this may be a plausible notion of omnipotence for some theistic conceptions of God, I find an alternate meaning to be mandatory in order to properly describe omnipotence in the context of classic theism and, even more specifically, the 3 abrahamic religions.
What could this alternate meaning be? Well, as the all-time classic essay „Maximal Power“ says, omnipotence should be understood as the ability to actualise certain states of affairs. Understood this way, we have a perfectly legitimate way out of the skeptic's scheme. I'll return to the example in which the atheist lays out the objection that „If God is all powerful He should be able to overpower Himself“, now what is actually being said here? The being with the ability to actualize all states of affairs should be able to actualize more than all states of affairs. The absurdity should be apparent, for how can a being actualise more than all states of affairs? What is being insisted here, I think this should be apparent by now, isn't actually a task to be performed (so even if we went by the atheist's original conception of omnipotence there would be no problem) instead it is meaningless gibberish – a logical impossibility.
Now, one may jump and say: „Ah, but should your God not be able to do the impossible? Isn't everything possible for God as your scripture comments?“
To answer this, we need to distinguish between 2 types of possibilities:
- logical possibility
- metaphysical possibility
Logical possibility means something that is coherent, a non-contradictory proposition. It proposes an analytic truth. Metaphysical possibility on the other hand refers to a relative concept, a state of affairs that is actualisable in certain circumstances. To make the distinction clearer, logically impossible things are those things that are logically contradictory, like a notion of a square circle. It is an analytic truth that a circle cannot be square for the two hold conceptually different properties. Should we disagree with this, the concepts would get violated and all discourse would lose it's meaning. Put simply, for something to be logically impossible it must be so absurd that it cannot even be properly concieved (like a triangle whose sum is more than 180°).
Unlike logical possibilities, metaphysical impossibility reffers to something that can be meaningfully concieved (something that isn't contradictory per se) but is non-the less impossible to actualise in a given set of rules. For example, it may be logically possible for a car to suddenly turn to a bunch of marshmallows, but it isn't metaphysically possible because the laws of nature don't allow that.
Now, the concept of omnipotence, as I argue, is only extended to actualising possible states of affairs (in the context of metaphysical mpossibility). Logical impossibilities cannot even be properly concieved and as such they don't really represent metaphysical possibilities. It is thus a conceptual truth that such notions don't present any state of affairs at all, but are mere gibberish.
- Multiple properties objections
Unlike the single property objections, multiple properties objections try to demostrate the logical impossibility of God due to holding attributes that seemingly cannot coexist. These types of objections include „if God is all-loving he cannot be the most just and as such these 2 are mutually exclusive terms so any concept which infers their coexistence spirals into incoherence“. It doesn't matter to those who raise these objections whether or not the individual attributes are coherent or not, instead what matters is that a specific combination of these attributes cannot coexist (just how something can be cold or hot but it cannot be both cold and hot at the same time).
Now, while these objections don't necessarily fall on the account of misunderstanding the specific properties invoked (as for example, being merciful would indeed be a suspnension of justice which a perfectly just being cannot allow), they do however fail for a different reason – not seeing the whole picture. While perfect goodnes (mercy, love, copassion) is bound to get in the way of perfect justice (objective rationale) it is only so if the being is separate from the law. The Judeo-Christian account of God, however, is goodness himself. He isn't a subject of some external moral or legal law that would make him compromise his integrity, rather He in His essence is goodness incarnate and as such every act he does would as per concept be good (even acts we would normally percieve as evil) and being just, his justice would flow from his essential goodness thus making everything He does both wholly just and wholly good as they would all come wholly from His essence.
Arguments such as these tend to have a theologically inappropriate understanding of God's nature and isolate 2 or more properties while leaving the fundamental one that binds them together. It is in this sense that most of the objections of this sort fail. So, when a skeptic comes charging at you with these objections make sure you've got a proper understanding of the nature of God as only your ignorance can cause your downfall.
Naturally, since these matters are a subject of heated debate among different religions (and even among members of the same religion) the answer to these objections which invoke a contradiction between multiple properties will differ from one theistic teaching to another. Theists as such enjoy a great amount of freedom in reconciling the concept of God with logical possibility but at the same time one approach may not be interesting to a theist who has a different understanding of God. For example, a solution just provided to the objection of divine goodness and justice which rests on the Divine Command Theory (everything God does is good per se) will not be accepted by a theist who holds that God is in fact a non-flexible standard for morals to which He himself is (willingly or necessarily) subjected.
This, however, is of no help to the atheist for mere existence of one coherent framework completely destroys his case. The more different frameworks, the merrier for this variety offers a swift backup in case that one conception of God somehow fails.
Conclusion
With this, I believe I have given you an adequate overview of how to answer these types of objections. Ofcourse, the amount of literature on the coherence of God is enormous and going over everything even in a minimalistic manner would take far more time and space than I have here. I believe, however, that the basic outline for how to approach these challenges has been adequately presented. Mystery arguments are properly defended and provide efficient defense of one's views, while constructing logically possible explanations is possible (and has been done) for all supposed contradictions. I do wish to say one more thing on this whole topic and that is, even if the atheist was to succeed in refuting a certain conception of God, would that render theistic belief in general absurd? No, not at all! In fact, all it would accomplish is that the theist would make a more coherent conception of God (which is granted by great ambiguity in regards to the scriptures). So, in a way, claims like these are not mere hydrances but useful tools in order for us to have a better understanding of God!
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