Throughout the course of my life i have been oscillating away and towards the belief in God.When i was a small child i accepted what i was told as fact when i was around 10 years old i became an atheist a few years latter i began to ignore the things that lead me away from belief due to personal reasons afterwards the contradictions that were present at first began to resurface and gave me a deep resentment against all things that had something to do with God.
The basic group of ideas that made life hard were the following : the idea of infinte punishment for a finite number of sins that i see as the ultimate evil , the idea of the failure of God due to the rebellion of Satan , the idea of God creating the material universe and everything in it and last the idea that God has infinite power and knowledge and is perfect.
The hell dilemma and the Satan dilemma and even the perfection dilemma were solved by reading your explanations mostly among other things i understood that biblical perfection was different from the mundane version of perfection and so i came to understand the fact that God is perfect but not in the way certain people exagerate .
The rest of your explanations speak for themselves and i will not argue with you about those they are correct.
Still two more things bother me as listed above and so wondering about one and another it came to my mind that that nowhere in any of the biblical verses that i read have i encountered the notion of infinite power .Sure i mean it does say that 'with the Lord all things are possible" but i don't think that this means that you can defy logic and do otherwise impossible things i think that when it says so in the bible it actually means that all possible things that can be done can be done such as the idea that a complex math conjecture can be solved it is possible but for certain people and maybe only with help from God you could do it.
That is fine with me.If there are any claims indicating that all logic is essentially garbage for God and that there is literally nothing that is beyond his power please show me a demonstration and to conclude this i add the idea you said that God does not change and that he is also subjected to the law of cause and effect and cannot make the illusion of "free will" a reality and change His mind for no reason.
And here are few of the arguments that lead me against the omnipotence idea.From Wikipedia of course:
* The omnipotence paradox suggests that the concept of an omnipotent entity is logically contradictory, from considering a question like: "Can God create a rock so big that he cannot lift it?" or "If God is all powerful, could God create a being more powerful than itself?".
* Another argument suggests that there is a contradiction between God being omniscient and omnipotent, basically asking "how can an all-knowing being change its mind?" See the article on omniscience for details.
o The atheist-existentialist argument for the non-existence of a perfect sentient being states that if existence precedes essence, it follows from the meaning of the term sentient that a sentient being cannot be complete or perfect. It is touched upon by Jean-Paul Sartre in Being and Nothingness. Sartre's phrasing is that God would be a pour-soi [a being-for-itself; a consciousness] who is also an en-soi [a being-in-itself; a thing]: which is a contradiction in terms. The argument is echoed thus in Salman Rushdie's novel Grimus: "That which is complete is also dead."
o The "no reason" argument tries to show that an omnipotent or perfect being would not have any reason to act in any way, specifically creating the universe, because it would have no desires since the very concept of desire is subjectively human. As the universe exists, there is a contradiction, and therefore, an omnipotent god cannot exist. This argument is espoused by Scott Adams in the book God's Debris.
Anyway this is more of a game of philosophy that really has nothing to do with the bible.
Moving on to the part about the material universe i personally believe that the whole of God's creation is exclusively spiritual and non material.You said that the reference to heaven , earth , the waters , fire and so on are spiritual why can not the same deduction be applied to Genesis the majority of the things you mention to be symbolic are also found in the first book of the bible so to me Genesis classifies perfectly as a book of symbols just like Revelation.
One thing i would like to insist upon is the idea that on the forth day when it was said that God created the light(s) of heaven it is said that he also created all stars this is really annoying i will not go into the science department and i suggest you do the same i have seen enough senseless butchering of facts by creationst pseudeoscience etc.What i would like to insist upon is that many people are unaware of the idea that on numerous occasions stars are identified as angels especially in Revelation where it says that the devil drags a third of the stars behind it's tail i think it is pretty clear that in this case stars are referred to as angels and i think the same thing can be said about Genesis.
To conclude my train of thought i say clearly if the reference to the creation of stars is symbolic and in reality it refers to that of angels and many other parts of Genesis are also symbolic why can't the whole book especially the first chapter be also an account of the formation of the spiritual realm ..
Now i ask of you if i am wrong prove me wrong if i am right kindly decrypt the rest of the first chapter of the bible for everyone so we may come to the understanding of all this...
P.S. Excuse any spelling mistakes i made this in a rush
Dear Alexander: First, your email is entirely too long. I receive tens of thousands of emails, and it is not possible for me to spend tens of thousands of hours or tens of thousands of days answering them. To answer your email in detail with take weeks. Suffice it to say, that God DOES NOT "change His mind," and all Scriptures used to support such an idea are not being understood properly. And how in the world (universe?) does the creation of the Universe prove that their CANNOT BE A GOD. "Can God create a rock so large and heavy that he cannot lift it?" is not a logical, sane, or rational question. It is nothing but the foolishness of men. One might just as foolishly suggest that since God "CANNOT lie," that He therefore also "CANNOT tell the truth." What a crock.
God be with you,
Ray
