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Originally Posted by qprogeny79
i was going to respond to that but i thought i had gone on long enough.
ok, there are two possiblities: either god (assuming he exists, for the sake of argument alone) can suspend the laws of logic or he can't. if he can't (as i argue), he's not really omnipotent. now let's explore the possiblity that he can. if he can, then what happens to our knowledge? the foundation upon which all our knowledge is based is the laws of logic. if these, of all things, are merely contingent facts subject to reversal by arbitrary divine whim, all our knowledge would be on shaky grounds; we would, in essence, have to append every proposition with "assuming god doesn't get a bug up his ass and decide to change logic."
but i think there's an even stronger rebuttal to your claim, which is that statements like that are not so much defenses of god as dismissals of rational inquiry. if you take god out of the field of reason by asserting that he is impervious to it, the only other way to "prove" his existence is through your own arbitrary feelings -- which are in fact not proofs at all, because emotions are not tools of cognition.
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I'll answer the stronger rebuttal first. Knowledge of God is of a different order. It requires a belief in the "substance of things which are not seen," or "faith." By faith, I don't mean "believing what the priest tells you anyway, in spite of the fact that your intellect tells you something else is true." This is a lazy attitude. I'm not talking about dogma, I'm talking about the willingness to have an experience.
This kind of knowledge, which is called "gnosis," can only be achieved by interior means, and not through epistemological, "subject/object" inquiry. Science and reason describe the attributes of the physical world, but do not penetrate its essence. The conundrum for the materialists is that they never experience God because they are asking the wrong questions and using the wrong methods.
The question of whether or not he can suspend logic is irrelevant, because if he could, how would we know whether or not he could?