Religion
In reply to the discussion: What if God's existence were proven without doubt? Good or bad? [View all]gcomeau
(5,764 posts)But the point is that has nothing to do with a question of power. That's a matter of the definition of the words being used in the question. Logically contradictory things can't happen. Asking if God can do something logically contradictory is the same as asking if God can do something that can't be done. Well no, otherwise it isn't something that can't be done. That has nothing to do with any kind of power requirement necessary to do it though.
So it isn't relevant to whether the entity in question is "all powerful". It's just wordplay. There are far better arguments against God than playing with sentence structure to force a specific answer. (The problem of evil certainly being one of them... yes, they can't claim God is responsible for the existence of the entire universe and wields absolute authority over it then say he only takes the blame for the good parts...)
"If you assert that he CAN, then you've utterly abandoned Reason."
Unfortunately I have, on many occasions, been explicitly told by Christian apologists that God is beyond the laws of logic and thus immune to any claim of logical contradiction. The abandonment of reason comes easily to people who view ignoring or rejecting evidence as a virtuous sign of the strength of their faith. Which of course is a primary reason Christianity (and other religions) instruct their adherents that "faith is a virtue". It's a defense mechanism against reason.
As for 'my idea'... it's just a re-statement of the general principles underpinning the Scientific method, mainly the requirement for methodological naturalism as that is necessary to fulfill the falsifiability criteria for any hypotheses subjected to testing. Nobody can run an experiment based on the assumption that their results may be getting undetectably magically tampered with by Loki the Trickster God because he thinks it's a really funny joke to make humans think there's a Higgs Boson or something after all. If we were going to accept that as a legitimate potential explanation for anything science might as well just pack it in and go home now.