Along the lines of any CD left in your glove box for any length of time turns into a Queen CD…
At any time of the day or night somewhere on cable TV they
are showing the movie “Groundhog Day” starring Bill Murray and Andy McDowell…
Did Bill Murray hear or read Peter van Inwagen’s lecture on
God and omnipotence?
Van Inwagen suggested that there could be more than one
god. God is traditionally thought of (by
theists) as being omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent. What if there was a second god, who was all
three of these, only he couldn’t do everything instantaneously. He could perform any feat only it would take
him longer than God.
Bill Murray says to Andy McDowell, “Well maybe the *real*
God uses tricks, you know? Maybe he's not omnipotent. He's just been around so
long he knows everything?”[1]
I would have thought that Murray had listened to van Inwagen’s
lecture I had heard in Oxford in, though he wasn’t there. I didn’t have the audacity to object to van
Inwagen’s lecture, but I was one of those who was convinced that this sort of
analytic philosophy was incapable of discussing God seriously. Murray, on the other hand, or his script
writers seem to have thought of this idea earlier. “Groundhog Day” came out in 1993. Van Inwagen gave his lecture in Oxford at the
British Society for Philosophy of Religion conference in 2007. It’s possible that van Inwagen had written
about schmod earlier. It seems he
mentioned him in an article which was incorporated in an anthology of his
articles in 1995.[2]
Probably what all this proves is that some philosophy major
found a job as a screen writer in California… It’s better than “Do you want
fries with that?”
[1]
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107048/quotes
Accessed 13 Feb 2013
[2] Peter van Inwagen, God Knowledge
& and Mystery: Essays in Philosophical Theology, Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press,1995
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