Ian, are you arguing that the concept of omnipotence is incoherent, or merely (as Michael seems to have interpreted you:) that we have no reason to believe that any omnipotent entity actually exists?
If you really mean the latter, then I suspect most people here will agree with you: if one does not observe any evidence for omnipotence, and one accepts Occam’s razor (as reasonable people do), then one concludes that no omnipotent entity exists, unless and until strong evidence to the contrary comes up.
But it remains the case that the idea of omnipotence is compatible with the evidence. The religious can, without logical self-contradiction, claim that God-in-Her-Infinite-Wisdom chooses to make created objects behave in predictable ways. It’s true that one would be silly to believe this story: that would be violating Occam’s razor, “starting with imagination, and then using reality only as a test”—however you want to phrase it—but it’s not contradictory.
If you want to show that an omnipotent entity cannot exist (that P(God-exists) is closer to, say, P(1+1=9) than P(there’s-an-invisible-unicorn-following-you)), you have to do a little more work. Fortunately, it’s already been done (see Caledonian’s comment).
When I was growing up in a baptist church one of the primary arguments for all the evidence that suggests the earth is over four billion years old and that the universe is nearly fourteen billion years old, was that God made it to look that way on purpose. That is, when he said “let there be light!” he didn’t just make the stars and let the light take its course (which would take between thousands and billions of years, and some light we see now would never reach us at all), but made the stars with a past history and its light already hitting us. Same with all the geological evidence—God just made it look as though it were really old. So the universe was 6,000 years old, but it looked exactly like it would if it were 14 billion years old.
Ostensibly this was to test our faith, however, after thinking about it for a few years after I left high school I realized that if any of this were the least bit true, if God really did exist, if he really designed a universe specifically to trick people into believe he didn’t exist (it’s the only valid reason I can think of for doing it—it’s even what the preachers think, though they don’t put it that way), and thereby send whole swaths of people to hell for no reason other than they were trying to find the truth (which the Bible does admonish one to seek) then he has to be the biggest douchebag in the universe.
That’s not evidence against the position though. Really there can never be any evidence against their position—it’s theological phlogiston, but it does make it very easy to stop accepting God. Once you do that you realize that a god isn’t necessary at all, so why would you believe in one? Especially one that is such a vile, evil, spiteful creature?
Ian, are you arguing that the concept of omnipotence is incoherent, or merely (as Michael seems to have interpreted you:) that we have no reason to believe that any omnipotent entity actually exists?
If you really mean the latter, then I suspect most people here will agree with you: if one does not observe any evidence for omnipotence, and one accepts Occam’s razor (as reasonable people do), then one concludes that no omnipotent entity exists, unless and until strong evidence to the contrary comes up.
But it remains the case that the idea of omnipotence is compatible with the evidence. The religious can, without logical self-contradiction, claim that God-in-Her-Infinite-Wisdom chooses to make created objects behave in predictable ways. It’s true that one would be silly to believe this story: that would be violating Occam’s razor, “starting with imagination, and then using reality only as a test”—however you want to phrase it—but it’s not contradictory.
If you want to show that an omnipotent entity cannot exist (that P(God-exists) is closer to, say, P(1+1=9) than P(there’s-an-invisible-unicorn-following-you)), you have to do a little more work. Fortunately, it’s already been done (see Caledonian’s comment).
When I was growing up in a baptist church one of the primary arguments for all the evidence that suggests the earth is over four billion years old and that the universe is nearly fourteen billion years old, was that God made it to look that way on purpose. That is, when he said “let there be light!” he didn’t just make the stars and let the light take its course (which would take between thousands and billions of years, and some light we see now would never reach us at all), but made the stars with a past history and its light already hitting us. Same with all the geological evidence—God just made it look as though it were really old. So the universe was 6,000 years old, but it looked exactly like it would if it were 14 billion years old.
Ostensibly this was to test our faith, however, after thinking about it for a few years after I left high school I realized that if any of this were the least bit true, if God really did exist, if he really designed a universe specifically to trick people into believe he didn’t exist (it’s the only valid reason I can think of for doing it—it’s even what the preachers think, though they don’t put it that way), and thereby send whole swaths of people to hell for no reason other than they were trying to find the truth (which the Bible does admonish one to seek) then he has to be the biggest douchebag in the universe.
That’s not evidence against the position though. Really there can never be any evidence against their position—it’s theological phlogiston, but it does make it very easy to stop accepting God. Once you do that you realize that a god isn’t necessary at all, so why would you believe in one? Especially one that is such a vile, evil, spiteful creature?