Is God Perfect?

[TomOfSweden]

Is that necessarily so? Is there always a consequence? If so, is it always "equal and opposite"?

I think that by being good to someone, he is simply favouring that person above others

There's a couple of logical problems here. If God is love and loves everybody, (possibly equally as much) he wouldn't favour one person above another. Ever... Humans are social creatures. Our status and happiness is relative to our peers. If God is favouring one over an other he is being cruel to those who don't get the extra help, isn't he?

The second problem is financial. Let's say you're a baker or a fishmonger in Jerusalem ca AD 33 and a no good hippie turns up, magically conjures up bread and fish and distributes it for free. What happens to your sales? What if you're dependent on your sales to feed your family? The economy is very delicately balanced, if God does anything to effect the financial market, no matter how minute, there will always be a loser somewhere.

Of course he could simply be focused on saving people from having accidents which would save them from losses that nobody counted on, which will probably have a very slight impact. But that brings us to the next problem. If he loves all of us and is omnipotent, why would any of us ever have any accidents? He's omnipotent! It wouldn't cost him anything. It would be no effort on Gods side. He's beyond time itself. He could be at every point in time and place at all times. If anybody has an accident it must be because it is in Gods plan. It is what he wants. In a universe with a omnipotent being, everything that happens, happens because that is what God actively lets happen. It is what God wants, if that is even the correct term for it.

One solution could be deism. God never does anything. He started time and movement with one big bang and then went back to doing what he'd been doing prior to creating time, (how's that for logical conundrum?). This way God could still be good but understanding the implications of the impact of his own meddling he does nothing.

Yeah... this is pretty ranty. But this is the land of the hypothetical spirals of limitless imagination.

(and that he probably wants something in return, such as worship).

Why would an omnipotent being want to be worshipped? What could he/it possibly gain from that? He has everything. He's omnipotent! Why would an omnipotent being want anything at all? What needs could the desires of an omnipotent being possibly fulfil? Aristotle travelled down this philosophical road a long time ago and you'll be hard pressed to argue against him.

The God theory is only simple if you anthropomorphise God, but that would in turn would imply that God isn't omnipotent. So that's out of the question. There is no way God can have human emotions and still be omnipotent. The unmoved mover is philosophically a very complicated solution to the origins of the Universe. But in this area science really doesn't have any better explanation so it's a bit premature to rule out the possibility of there being no unmoved mover at all. As far as science is concerned it's just as a likely, (or unlikely) theory as any other.

I'm not making any claims that my understanding of the logical implications of the Christian theory of God is complete. Many much more intelligent men, (and women) than me have explored this much more fully. I'm sure there's a whole host of things I haven't thought of. But for Christianity the sad fact is that nobody has yet been able to tie up the bag. Nobody has been able to present a complete hypothetical model for how a universe with a Christian God will work. We're still in the fact finding stage. And God doesn't seem to be in a hurry to help us out in solving this problem.