Quote Originally Posted by bu villain View Post
Interesting responses...maybe as a couple followup questions:

1. Why must God be all powerful instead of just unfathomably smart and powerful, although not infinitely?
From our perspective, it kinda doesn't matter if God is reaaaallllly powerful but maybe not infinitely so, etc. It's so far outside of our potential that it's basically infinite by our standards anyhow.

Quote Originally Posted by bu villain View Post
2. Why can their only be one God and not two? (This question is only relevant if you do not feel God must be all powerful)
This is actually a good question. The Bible implies that God had an audience (of at least one) when he created the universe. There's different schools of thought on this, one of them being that God 1st created (or chose to define himself) as 3 distinct beings - Himself, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. And these 3 beings are responsible for the creation of the universe. That's why Jesus is called God's "only begotten" son. Other religions have other ideas, and a lot of them include a plurality of Godlike beings responsible for the universe's creation.

I have a developing opinion about this though. I think that God existed in the absolute in the beginning (everything = God, and there is no basis for differentiation), and He decided to redefine His existence in the relative.

Another way to say it is before creation, the totality of existence = everything = something + nothing/void = God. God then decided to take the "something" part of himself and contain or define it against (or relative to) the "nothing" - which I think is what we currently call the Big Bang. This happened on a physical and spiritual/conscious level. The latter part being the basis for cognitive life (or souls) in the universe.

It's really abstract and probably sounds a little crazy and I haven't finished fleshing that idea out, but that's where I am right now with it . This has really been an interesting conversation...