Fair enough. Thank you.

 Oh and Battar-as far as number 1. goes perhaps it is better to say "it
is not possible to prove or disprove the existance of God with the resources
available at the present time. Obviously if the judgement day really does come
the existance of God will be proven. Likewise if science in some unimaginable manner
proves that it knows everything about the material and there is nothing immaterial then it
will be disproven.  But at the present time it is not possible.

 Actually, the understood idea of the modern nation-state, with delineated borders, accepting certain representative mechanisms that allows for a large concern for the domestic pressures, that prevents conquering ambition. Before the Jews there only existed empires and tribes (this includes feudalism).Pharoah and his thousands of slaves that built pyramids, that viewed him/herself as divinities were examples of th empires being the major civilizations of history.

The political order of the nation-state has only existed for 400-500 yrs. England being the first of this day to evolve into such thinking (though it took them many more years to let go of their empire), not surprisingly a lot of the culture/philosopher of the day based much of their political thought on the bible. Terming themsleves "the new israelites", the opening of Hobbs unabridges Leviathan, has two of its opening chapters on the Bible, quoting it.

The Jews like always were far more advanced then its predecessary, creating a confederate of tribes and a national king, with a national religious figure, the high preist. The san hedrin had its foot in both the moral enactment of the king and the ritual purview of the high preist. This were domestic institutions that gave rise to representative govt. more atuned to the needs of its citizens and less inclined for conquest and national aggrandizement. The Jews from the very beginning had borders, language, internal law, instituions, traditions that kept them loyal to the domestic needs of it populations, much is the advantages you see in tribalism. But it also had universal beliefs that encompassed the behaviors and actions of the entire mankind, this giving it the universeality found and attractive within empires.

The opening two political orders described in the bible is both. the empire we see in the building of the tower of babel. Man completely united, but only trying to make themselves like God. and then we see the political order of tribalism of noah's day, which we see is symbolized by rampant injustice and corruption. The nation-state excepts the complexity of life realizing that there must be attention payed both to the values and loyalty men pay to the familiar as it the appeal to tribalism, but standing for certain abstractions and beliefs that transcend the familiar this being the progress found in the universals that empire stands for that attracts so many adherents which thus it gives it the power to subdue so much. That is why the first & 2nd Jewish commonwealths are agrueably the first nation-states in human history.

1. Actually, yes to that specific question-if you believe in the Incarnation. God can incarnate Himself and then as a human not be able to lift a rock. As I believe He would have more important things in mind fordoing such a thing, such an answer, reply 1. is pilpul but it is amuseing pilpul.

2. Philosophically speaking it is generally said that omnipotence means the ability to do any given thing, not to will a contradiction. That would be the ability to do "any two things".
This explanation is by the way, a part of the conventional explanation of The Problem of Evil.

3. Yes it is quite true that it is impossible to disprove the existence of Zeus or Odin as well. I have always been aware of it and never had any more problem with that then you have with the fact that you have to prove the existance of the universe to prove the validity of the Scientific Method. You must always start with premises and premises are ultimatly immune to logic as such which is why hyperrationality is self-defeating.

Once upon a time I was asked to devise a test for the existence of an extra universal object that could influence the internal workings of this universe. I thought about it for a few days and decided that the best way to determine if such a thing was possible was to apply information theory as a function of a bounded field and see what conditions had to be present for an external extra-universal object to influence this universe.

What I determined for test criteria was that Human beings would have to directly observe three conditions at the same time.
 
One-there would have to be a gross measurable violation of causality-in this case the arrow of time would have to be physically flipped in the presence of Human beings inn such a fashion that the Human beings could not help but be aware.
Two-a sea of virtual particles would have to exist that flick into and out of our range of observation so that we would see them as ephemerals, showing up as the Casimir Effect for example. You would need vacuum energy as a plausible information transfer mechanism from outside our spacetime into it.
Three-at least one factor of spacetime should make absolutely no mathematical sense and should resist all Human efforts to mathematically describe it as a possibility. This used to be the gravitational influence, but now that we have the possible inflation force to mirror it restoring a symmetry of sorts, and in addition we have a series of super-string theories that make small curled dimensional descriptors for the gravitational influence as a possibility.

     Obviously the one condition [virtual particles] we observe. We have anecdotal stories of gross violations of causality on a sytem wide scale in Human history, but nobody has concrete evidence that men walked on water or made the Earth's rotation stop for one complete cycle. Pending proof we must consider those anecdotes to be stories. With the recent collapse of most of the superstring theories in the face of experiments designed to prove their gravitational influence predictions valid, we are still stuck with the standard model of physics. So gravitation is still in play as a mathematical oddball among the four forces and we can add the inflationary influence, "we think", to the possible test conditions. 

So we have possibly two out of the three test conditions met. 

One further test to verify would be if we could detect information leaking into us from a boundary either at absolute zero, or if the information reaches us faster than light. Either one of those test conditions met and observed would be proof positive of an extra-universal influence upon this space-time.

Would that prove the existence of a god? No. But proof of that set of information leakage conditions most definitely proves that we could observe the conditions for a god's possibility for REAL
   
We would KNOW there is a forest, even if we were not in it, and we could expect to predict with absolute certainty the possibility of a tree falling, even if we were not there to observe it and even if a tree never fell.

We NOW have barely sufficient mathematics to describe this possibility once we have ex

An immutable all encompassing force, that is all truth, has shown throughout the entire bible, through the prophetic experience as described in the biblical liturgy points to a God that desires a fellowship with man, not to turn into one. I find very difficult to reconcile from the theistic/philosophical underpinning of the 1st testament that God would ever design such a relationship.

Just from the ritual perspective from the bible the tone is set in how God relates itself to man on a physical level. It is wholly untenable when one ruminates upon the idea's of man and his God discussed in the bible to assirt that man would suddenly throw away his role as the lawgiver. (law denotes an implicit relationship or fellowship man regards in man, for he either keeps them or not) When man becomes God this fellowship is no longer that, the very act of some a transcendent nature destroys fellowship and replaces with the power of the religous experience felt on the most physical level.

'The bible is not a textbook of philosophy or metaphysics, but rather the classic record of man's encounter with God" this record does not point to a God that would enjoin within man, but rather created him in order to have a relatioship and a fellowship where man is to live righteously and in a Godly path. By transposing God into  a human being this relationship ends  because God essentially becomes man, and no longer is the creater but the created.

As for whether the Bible is not a textbook of philosophy or metaphysics-that is at least partly true. Though one could equally argue that it should have something to say to all parts of human experience, directly or indirectly and therefore would speak to philosophy. However the only major Biblical character who was likely to have been a trained philosopher in the sense we speak of today was St. Paul, who seems to have been fairly fammiliar with both the Greek and the Rabbinical school. However, he is not in your Bible of course. In any case I have to use philosophy with Battar because he would not except scripture as an argument and therefore the whole debate would collapse. If I had been debating with you it would be more appropriate.
As for whether transposing God into a human being ends the relationship, it is assumed that in the Incarnation God was both creator and created at the same time just as man on more normal occasions is both animal and spirit(which fact is the reason why it is proper to honor God with a feast, as a side note).

Uh, another thread on metaphysical subjects.
Guys, I'm pretty shaken by what I heard this weekend, while innocently taking part in a nature foray with a bunch of life scientists. I can't disclose much of what it's all about, mainly because I still have to understand most of it, and because it is about not-yet-published, confidential data. The bottom line is that it looks like there's a fair chance that the world as we know it -in the spiritual-religious sense- is about to flip over, and when these researchers reach a conclusion, nothing will ever be the same, especially for atheists/secularists like Battar and myself, for Jewish fundamentalists, and for the Evangelists around here as well, who are in for a rude awakening.

In the meantime, I suggest we all accept each other's beliefs as valid, as a way to hold onto something solid as the Universe is about to rock, so to speak.
And yes, Battar, it's gonna be sound science to the last detail.