>>47512>The question then arises, can God create a thing he cannot lift? My hunch is ,He/She/It/ They *could*, but that would be the pretty much the same as winking out of existence, and taking the universe with them. (Since God can't be subordinate to anything else, not even logic, in a medieval, and after, view.
Not necessarily in Bronze/Iron Age view, though.
In the Caananite Ba'al cycle, the creator god, El, when the fighting starts is indisposed with a dodgy liver. Or as you point out
>Epicurus decides that an all-powerful and all-good God is impossible, yet still pertains to a belief in limited and finite Daimons.I say *could* because otherwise the God would be subordinate to the rules of logic. Because in theory they're the origin of the rules of logic, they haven't. If that makes any sense?( I feel as I'm butting up against the limits of my understanding of medieval theology myself here.)
>they can only be some kind of disembodied mind.>This is an even stranger assertion, since how can a mind create anything except what is mental?Because in an Aristotlean view everything in physical existence is made up of two things: Form, and Matter. A sugar cube and a dice have the same form, but different matter. But matter is never found on it's own, it always takes some Form or another. Matter and Form are different things, but are never found on their own, separately. The only time this is not true is when they are indeed purely mental, when they are concepts in the mind. So if there is a prior cause of the physical universe that must be there , a mind.
We can think about 3 dimensional squares ,cubes, we can also think about Matter in itself.
Why must there must there be a non physical, but mental, cause, of the physical universe?
Because if it is a physical cause, something else must have brought it into existence, so it's not a first cause.
So it's a bit of a head fuck. But the alternative makes less sense. There must be a first cause ,otherwise the causes are stretching back into infinity,which is really the same as saying there is no cause.
>if matter is made of energy, is the mind equally substantial? The theory of magic and sorcery must presuppose the sPost too long. Click here to view the full text.