Within the fictional universe of the Old and New Testaments, it seems clear that God has certain preferences about the state of the world, and that for some unspecified reason God does not directly impose those preferences on the world. Instead, God created humans and gave them certain instructions which presumably reflect or are otherwise associated with God’s preferences, then let them go do what they would do, even when their doing so destroys things God values. And then every once in a while, God interferes with their doing those things, for reasons that are unclear.
None of that presupposes omnipotence in the sense that you mean it here, although admittedly many fans of the books have posited the notion that God possesses such omnipotence.
That said, I agree that the analogy is poor. Then again, all analogies will be poor. A superhumanly powerful entity doing and refraining from doing various things for undeclared and seemingly pointless and arbitrary motives is difficult to map to much of anything.
Yeah, I kind of realize that the problems of omnipotence, making rocks that one can’t lift and all that, only really became part of the religious discourse in a more mature and reflection-prone culture, the ways of which would already have felt alien to the OT’s authors.
Within the fictional universe of the Old and New Testaments, it seems clear that God has certain preferences about the state of the world, and that for some unspecified reason God does not directly impose those preferences on the world. Instead, God created humans and gave them certain instructions which presumably reflect or are otherwise associated with God’s preferences, then let them go do what they would do, even when their doing so destroys things God values. And then every once in a while, God interferes with their doing those things, for reasons that are unclear.
None of that presupposes omnipotence in the sense that you mean it here, although admittedly many fans of the books have posited the notion that God possesses such omnipotence.
That said, I agree that the analogy is poor. Then again, all analogies will be poor. A superhumanly powerful entity doing and refraining from doing various things for undeclared and seemingly pointless and arbitrary motives is difficult to map to much of anything.
Yeah, I kind of realize that the problems of omnipotence, making rocks that one can’t lift and all that, only really became part of the religious discourse in a more mature and reflection-prone culture, the ways of which would already have felt alien to the OT’s authors.