As Leslie Haddow very kindly summarised my Braziers talk (C97/6) I have felt no urgency about putting pen to paper (or finger to wordprocessor) but perhaps some belated comment might be useful. As to the talk itself, one improvement that has occurred to me is to make the axes of the ‘Argand diagram’ Ignorance and Impotence so that the position of the Omnipotent / Omniscient God really is at what any mathematician would recognise as the origin (0,0).
I do not accept your (ie. my, Ed) / St.Augustine’s argument (C97/8) for a God who has power ‘outside time’. As I understand it power is always ‘inside time’ as it involves a causal connection between the exercise of power and its consequences. Power ‘outside time’ appears to me just another way of referring to knowledge.
The fact that the argument has moved on a stage is, in however modest a fashion, progress. I am aware that for some people an omnipotent / omniscient God is a meaningful concept, although (as you may have gathered) it means nothing to me. If we had merely asserted our respective positions there could be no dialogue and so no progress. Therefore, like Euclid and the question of whether there is a highest possible prime number, I entered into dialogue by assuming my opponent’s position and seeking to prove a contradiction. Perhaps an approach to your (again, ‘my’, Ed) question whether it is rational to be religious might be to ask first whether there is sufficient common ground to enable believers and non-believers to enter into dialogue.
Malcolm Burn
Malcolm : Power, in the physical sense, is the rate of doing work, so can only be exercised within time. Maybe I’m referring to the potential to exercise power. When we refer to someone’s power, we normally mean the potential to exercise power in the future (maybe exemplified by past instances of that exercise). God can be viewed as outside of time, but with the possibility of entering time in order to effect his will. This is probably what the Apostle Paul is on about in Philippians when he refers to the divine kenosis (self-emptying) as of the incarnate Jesus. Personally, I don’t think the ‘logical impossibility’ argument has much going for it in this case.
My view is that believers and non-believers can be brought into dialogue in the manner you refer to, in that both share, at least as much as a random selection of individuals would, a common understanding of the world as normally experienced. The area of discomfort between this world and the specifically religious world, including any anomalies, needs to be explained by the believers, just as the rationale for the rejection of possibly uncomfortable data by the non-believers needs to be justified.
Theo