And now, after nine posts, the thesis:  If we are careful, there is much to be gained from the analogy of God as the author of creation.

I have drawn out this one attribute (omnipotence) via this one argument (the KCA) so that I would not have to draw out the introduction of the analogy.  Let’s see how that plays…

Let us consider an author, one just starting to write a book.  Let’s say you are the author, for the time being.

You are writing a love story, set in pre-Industrial America.  An upper class woman and a working class inventor, he working on a prototype for a steam engine.  They have a rendezvous in his shop, a secret appointment, and things start to get, um, steamy…

(Nice pun at the end there, you).

All of the evocative details aside, do you not have power, say, to have a giraffe walk through the shop during the middle of a long kiss?  Can’t you send stars crashing into each other in the rhythm of their heavy breathing?  Can’t you cut away the rest of the planet, so that they exist, in this shop on a small island of earth, with a 360 degree backdrop of the Universe?

We’re not talking about believability here (though we will eventually).  All I’m asking you is, what can’t you do?

Let’s ask one of the traditional riddles about God and omnipotence.  Can God make a stone so large that He can’t lift it?

Now, briefly, the implication is that if He CAN’T make that stone, then there’s something He can’t do; and if He can make it, but CAN’T lift it, there again is something He can’t do.  Thus, the dilemma is supposed to make absurd (and incoherent) the idea of omnipotence.  Therefore, there is no God, or else He is not omnipotent.

But what do we mean by “omnipotent”?  And how to answer this riddle in light of the present analogy?