Khuutra said:
Highway, God doesn't need to be infinite or to always have existed in order to have shaped the universe - see my last post. There's precedence for this stuff throughout many, many different mythologies. You're thinking of God as He must be to fit your worldview, when that isn't what God is about at all.
This next part is for everyone.
Now, as to why God can create somthing greater than himself: he already did.
The first thing that needs to be understood here is that most people's imagining of God (an invisible, omnipresent man in the skky who knows everything at once and can create or uncreate reality at will) is not in keeping with the original intent of the Jewish concept of Yahweh.
Dig this: in Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 alone, God was neither omniscient nor omnipotent. He did not know that Adam and Eve had eatn of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge until he discovered that they were hiding from him: God actulaly had to deduce that they had eaten from the tree, and that was only after calling out to them so that they'd stop hiding from him, because people are almost impossible to find when they hide in Eden, apparently.
The only question is when God created somethign greater than himself, and the answer is that he already did that in man.
When Jacob wrestled with God in Genesis 32 (and this is the generally accepted interpretation if you know your Jewish texts, or so I am told) it was shown that God was literally unable to overpower Jacob, and that when he saw this he crippled Jacob in the hip, and even then could not overpower him. When the Sun rose and Jacob still had not been cast down, Jacob demanded two things: a blessing and the name of the being that he had just finished grappling with. To the former he was belssed with Israel, but the latter was refused him because no man can know or hear the name of God.
What this means is immensely important, and was explained to me by a Jewish friend.
The most literal and consistent interpretation of this passage is that God wasn ot wrestlign with Jacob's physical form but the force of Jacob's will, which in the end he was unable to overpower. He crippled Jacob's body to remind him always of humanity's frailty, but because Jacob showed his will as unbreakable to God he was blessed and given a name for his land.
The point here is that man's will is firstly absolute and secondly sacrosanct, the highest form to which man can aspire. We are all supposed to wrestle with God, to question God and His teachings and everything about Him, arriving at truth through our own paths as an exercise of our wills. To accept God blindly is itself a rejection of the greatest and most powerful of his blessings, and an immense insult to God - most people think of Abraham sacrificing his son as being a great honor to God, but this is not so. Abraham spent mos of his life arguing with God, convincing him (more than once) to spare thel ives of people in spite of their inequities, and this is a part of why God loved him so much. it is only the, when he surrendered his will and was willing to sacrifice his son, that God stopped speaking to him. That's an important point that needs to be brought up: Abraham was one of the Biblical figures who used to walk around with God and chat with him about humanity, and that was taken away from him when he ceased to exercise his will.
So, yes. God can make such a rock. You're that rock.
More, God does not know everything all at once, (this is a fairly recent idea) God is not omnipotent, (this an almost exclusively Christian idea, I think) and God can be both reasoned with and overcome by the will of man.
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