Teach the Controversy: Question Belief!
The Nature of a Perfect God and His Creation
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Friday, July 30, 1999
September 2004
Contradictory and Incoherent
Christians use God to explain some mystery or other, usually “mysteries” of their own incoherent religion—the resurrection, religious experience, morality, the origin of the universe, nature. God is a mystery they do not include, they take it for granted, but quite apart from how one mystery explains another one, the proposed explanation must be coherent. The qualities attributed to God are incoherent and cannot be simultaneously true. If a God correctly foresees events—and how can a perfect being not foresee things correctly?—then they must be predetermined, but if humanity is responsible for them through their free will, then events cannot be predetermined. These attributes are contradictory, and so incoherent.
God cannot be omniscient. Some Christians now are beginning to think that the attributes God has traditionally had cannot be reconciled and God’s nature needs revising. So much then for His constancy! If God is eternal, time must not exist for Him. If God is eternally perfect, change is impossible for Him. God is therefore a static entity, immoveable and immutable because to move or to change requires time and implies imperfection. That is why the evil god, Satan, is properly identified with time. Time causes corruption and ultimately death, so Satan is time, and, for death to be defeated, time—Satan—must be defeated first.
Nothing in God’s timeless world can work, because work requires time. Nothing can operate because all operations require changes to happen. God cannot think, because thought requires changes in the thinker. So, a timeless God cannot think into being time, and the changing world that accompanies it. Nor could a perfect entity. To be perfect everything for the perfect being must be fulfilled, and so there could be nothing that would cause anything else to be brought into being. If God is perfect, then He can have had no desires, because desiring something proves He is incomplete and therefore imperfect. A perfect God could not, therefore, have ever decided to create nature. God cannot have felt lonely and wanted to create a temporal world full of playthings called men because it implies he was never perfect in the first place, and having introduced evil into the world He had created, he proved it.
In the ninth century AD, Ohrmazddadan, a Zoroastrian theologian wrote:
It is explicitly revealed that there are two original principles, no others. Furthermore, good cannot arise from evil, nor evil from good. Thus, it should be understood that something completely perfect in terms of goodness cannot produce evil. If it could then it is not perfect, because when something is defined as perfect there is no place for anything else. When there is no place for anything else, nothing else can arise from it. Since God is perfect in terms of goodness and wisdom, evil and ignorance cannot arise from God. If it were possible then God would not be perfect, and if God were not perfect and good it would not be possible to praise him as the righteous creator.
God Himself must have had within Him, as part of His being, the creation of time. So, if time is evil as the cause of all change and therefore corruption and death, God cannot have been perfect, ever. He contained evil in His very being. Even so, there is no way the perfect static timeless God could will time to begin. It must have been a purely random event like atomic radiation. God or no God, creation just happened!
