> I've always thought overly rigourous studies of a wholly transcendant being's "omnipotence" and "omnicience" to be a little bit silly. We have this very human tendency to think of God in terms of human power and understanding multiplied by some incredibly large number, and for some reason which I never understood, philosophy and theology holds that divine power is subject to the same qualitative (ie logical) limits as human power, though it has no quantitative limits on what it can logically do.

What makes you say that? To my understanding, theology does not apply any such limitations to God. What the limitation is applied to is the human side of the equation - that is to say, it isn't that God cannot make a rock so heavy that he can't lift it, but, rather, that you've asked the wrong question; that particular question doesn't *mean* anything. This is, again, not a failure on God's part; one may as well ask "can God replete a sequitur of Montana with gorgonzola umbrella?" The questions have the same logical value, even though, granted, the former is more intelligible.

> I've never understood why the rules of logic, along with the bounds of time and space, are not simply thought of as a creation of God that he can disregard at will. I don't even see a compelling reason why a transcendant God would have to obey the principle of non-contradiction.
> (For those who don't know, the principle of non-contradiction, which pretty much needs to hold for a logician to be able to make sense of anything says a statement and its negation cannot both at the same time be true, eg I cannot be sitting in this chair at the same instant I am not sitting in this chair) I therefore see no reason why God can't suffer or be suprised. Maybe through faith or reason we may decide that we don't think he *will* do these things, but that doesn't mean that he is unable to; it simply means he doesn't want to.

I don't really see a problem with anything you've said here. Yes, it is necessarily within God's power to *be* surprised. The question is generally, rather than that, "is it within man's power to surprise God?" (I won't presume to answer that question, either). God does *not* have to obey any logical principles, but man does. We cannot ask illogical questions about God just because God Himself does not have to obey the rules of logic.

Dar "For if that greater than which cannot be thought can be thought of as not existing, then that greater than which cannot be thought is not that greater than which cannot be thought, which does not make sense" ien