And God said, Let there be light: and there was light

If we are talking about God that is in any way comparable to the Judeo-Christian God, he almost by definition has experience and memory.

He has lived since the beginning of time and is omniscient. So unless we're going to hypothesize God as has the galactic equivalent of Alzheimer's, he possesses both those traits.

The God of the Bible clearly has emotions, loving some people and behaviors while hating others.

I don't think there's any necessity for an omniscient, omnipotent God to have emotions, however. Or at least, anything necessarily akin to human emotions.

I also think emotion is not a necessary condition to have a personality. Nor are need or imperfection for that matter.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/personality

For someone who has no emotions, a personality would simply be the physical, mental and social characteristics of the individual.

Yes, I can imagine a lot of things that are humbug that wouldn't work in our world.

The warp core is consistent in it's own universe, but falls apart in ours.

It's fine for Trek, but tough nuts for us.


You can make-believe up a million ways God makes sense in Bible-land, but what no theist has yet done, is demonstrate that the real world is in fact, Bible-land.

Debatable. Being able to instantly gratify all of your needs does not necessarily mean you don't have needs to start with.

Here's where your argument breaks down. That is an unwarranted, unprovable assumption. Would not a being with all its needs perpetually met at least feel satisfaction? Hence, an emotion, hence, other emotions are at least possible, hence, your argument goes poofie.

See above. You're making a wild unsupported assumption here as well, and since we have no example of an emotionless sentience to study, this point is also made of unicorn farts. Your logic is faulty, Dickynoo.

A "loving", God that allows tsunamis, the holocaust, child rape, and Dancing With The Stars.

The notion of God being one entity yet three parts is illogical, unless you can say 1=3.

I'd imagine most of the other arguments about God being illogical really boil down to "God doesn't act as I would expect God to" or "God doesn't do what I would do if I had God-powers."

For instance, I would not have created as convoluted a mechanism for salvation as killing part of myself and resurrecting myself in an era where there was little direct documentation of this.

I would do one thing so miraculous and so obvious that people couldn't explain it away by just simple science and giving people a more informed choice as to whether or not they want to believe.

Case in point.

There's something unsettling, obviously, in evil things existing despite an all-powerful and compassionate God.

But it's not inherently illogical.

God may have decided, for whatever reason, to allow humans to have the maximum amount of free will, only intervening when He decides situations get too far.

God may have decided those evil things are ways in which people's natures get tested, or to serve as examples to others.

If I were God, none of those things would happen. But that those things happen isn't inherently incompatible with the concept of an omniscient, omnipotent being who loves.

Not if your omniscience allowed you to anticipate your needs ahead of time, and head them off so they never happened.
Indeed, he could skip through the middle steps of even time-warping his needs to the point he wouldn't have them.

Why?
You need the property of time for that, and God is allegedly beyond time.

We have people with brain injuries.
People who've lost their basic core emotions are pretty bland.
Not the sort of dynamic individuals who throw fireballs at goat herders.

...if he had the traits that theists lay out for him.

Agreed, on all of that.

Agreed, though with the caveat that his emotions may be of a very different nature from our own, and the Biblical terms may well be anthropomorphisms, used for our sake.

With the final qualifier, I agree. From a psychological point of view, emotions are how we react to that which we experience, as opposed to cognition which does not include any subjective element. Not only is it possible but it is even very likely that God's "emotions" are of an entirely different nature from our own. Nevertheless, he reacts to that which exists, he can say "This is good" and "This is not." That capacity obviously fills the same role as emotions do to us, though that does not in any way imply that they are of exactly the same nature as our emotions. Still, as far as the psychological role they play in making up personality, it is appropriate to refer to them as "emotions."

I do, if "emotion" is defined as "the capacity to react to something in a positive or negative way." Without that, I don't see how you can speak of personality. (I am using "personality" here in the sence of "personhood," the state of being someone as opposed to being merely something.)

That only demonstrates how one particular concept of God (yours) is a logical contradiction. I am asking you to demonstrate how the very concept of God is a logical contradiction.

Not illogical, but only difficult to understand. But pretty much a moot point, since I do not think of Father, Son and Holy Spirit as three "parts" of God.

Here, you have hit the nail exactly on the head. Almost all arguments about the logic of God are of that nature.

As for what you or I or someone else "would have done" if we were God, that is extremely difficult to say. Since there is an infinite amount of knowledge that I do not have, it is extremely unlikely that if I had that infinite knowledge, my choice of what I would do would not be modified.

Which is why arguments based on "God isn't logical, because I wouldn't do it that way if I was God" are laughably weak from a logical point of view.

Who created God?

It always boils down to the same thing, Async. Finite mortal minds trying and failing to apprehend the infinite, and then declaring that because they don't/can't understand it, it must not exist.

No worse than falling back on those "finite mortal minds" as the excuse for treating something that cannot be proven as an extablished fact.

Well, then either you're claiming to possess superhuman abilities in being able to comprehend the infinite, in which case, I must ask you to demonstrate them, or, you've got no grounds to make the God claim to begin with, except your own emotional desires for it to be so.

Just because one CAN do something, even WANTS/NEEDS to do that thing, doesn't mean he DOES do that thing.

Perhaps an omnipotent, needs-anticipating God prefers to let things unfold in a particular way rather than satisfying his needs earlier or making sure he never has them in the first place.

Assuming God is beyond time, what makes you think he needs the property of time to be satisfied?

The rules of what humans want, need or experience do not necessarily work the same way for God, and even if they generally did, God can bend them as he wishes.

People who have lost their core emotions through injury or defect<>God.

As Async suggested, there are a few possibilities (assuming God exists in some form):

1. God could have essentially the same emotions as humans do.

2. God doesn't have any emotions but humans incorrectly or poetically ascribed emotions to him in the same way I'm tempted to describe this blizzard as angry.

3. God has emotions, but they are infinitely more complex than human emotions.

I would personally believe in 3, which makes sense to me as God is obviously much more complex than humans.

People can't figure out the emotions of other people all that well, often times, even when they are right there giving off all sorts of conscious and unconscious signals. I'd imagine almost all of us have had a fight with a parent, a co-worker, a significant other or someone over the inability to either perceive or understand what the other was feeling.

A lot of times, people can't figure out their own emotions.

The notion of trying to be able to perfectly condense and understand a Supreme Being's emotions is, viewed in that light, some combination of arrogant, futile and foolish.

I don't think that's how "emotion" is defined, or how it should be defined.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/emotion

Lots of things have the ability to react to something in a positive or negative way: amoebas, computer programs, chemicals. But I at least would not say any of those things are capable of "emotion."

If I ask Rick (or Dan) "Can you rape a child?" one presumes the answer would be that it is physically possible, but it would violate there nature to do so therefore they "can't"

Nope, no superhuman abilities required. Just the ability to recognize that I don't have superhuman abilities and can't know everything. Therefore, by definition, there are things I don't know and by extension things I can't know.

Can you, for example, hold a perfect down-to-the-quark level model of even a simple object in your mind? Say, a baseball? And yet there that thing is, existing despite your inability to have perfect knowledge of it. It seems, then, that your engineer-level knowledge (eh, good enough, it works) of it is enough to get by with.

So plugging the hole with magic-stories is a-okay?

if it's a pointless point, why did you initiate it?

Why are you trying to have a theological discussion with Damn Leech or Dickynoo? Do you think all the sudden they're going to go "Shit! I hadn't thought of that!" and convert to Christianity? They're just poking you with a stick so they can look down at you for being an inferior superstitious rube.

See post 233.

Is that what I do? I thought I just believed in a Creator, something transcendent and beyond my understanding. Can you prove there isn't such a thing? No? So aren't your claims also just magic-stories?

How on earth do you figure that not believeing in the supernatural constitutes resort to magic stories?

The lack of actual logic in Dicky's arguments, as has been pointed out, seems to leave little other than his own belief. In other words, magic stories.

Can you supply a reason, other than emotional investment in a story, to suppose this hypothesis?

Theism makes the claim, it needs to prove it.

Otherwise, I'd be just as right in demanding you disprove dancing sandwiches.

I've made this point before, pay attention.

Display it.
You'll failed to do so thus far.

Incorrect. I pointed it out explicitly in post #213. You just don't want to acknowledge it.