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#15
02-12-2007, 01:42 AM
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Re: God and Contradictions
God as described by most theists cannot be bound by logic, since omniscience and omnipotence are incompatible. This argument is cited in The God Delusion and was new to me. The argument runs that an omniscient God will know what He is going to decide to do in the future. But if He knows that, then He can't change His mind, so He is no longer omnipotent.
The only way out is to redefine omniscience or omnipotence, thus limiting the powers of God, or to declare God outside of logic. 
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#16
02-12-2007, 01:46 AM
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Re: God and Contradictions
Let's assign God to mean "the way the universe really operates." Defining him as an all-powerful guy who can regularly break whatever rules he wants to is pretty useless, since that is not representative of the world in which we live. But it could be useful to just call the "reality" of the universe "God."
By that definition, well, he's obviously not bound by "our" reason, since that incorporates a lot of theories that haven't yet been proven wrong, and are therefore subject to future happy modification. Einstein had a pretty good solution to things with General Relativity, and then Quantum Entanglement came to play. It was always there, as is everything that the god I just defined "uses," but we had yet to discover it. To say that he isn't bound by "logic" is a little ridiculous, since the system of logic is well defined. The second he breaks it, then he's not playing in that system. If he's making 2+2=5, he's definitely no longer playing with base 10 natural numbers, so he isn't really violating anything. Well defined systems are immune to "interference" from God, since that interference would remove his rule-breaking game (assuming it's supposed to be taken as legitimate despite running contrary to the system he claimed to be operating within) from the system completely. You can get a 2+2=5 if you imagine a system of mating where 2 couples had to swap wives or something to produce a lone offspring, like a sort of Fibonacci sequence for swingers. That doesn't mean that I violated addition, just that I'm choosing to count in my sequence a different thing. God can count whatever he wants, and that set of things isn't bound by our experience. What he does isn't bound by our experience. But the important thing to remember is that he -is- bound by our universe, and how things are already set into motion. There is absolutely no evidence of someone coming by to change the rules every so often, even for an instant. Whether or not he can play outside the rules is irrelevant, since it's clear that in the last 15 billion years or so he hasn't. To introduce that possibility buys us nothing. And, well, to call everything we don't know "God" might be interesting for purposes of discussion, but attributing massive powers to break with the current state of patterns to him is a bit useless when it comes to understanding how things work. Valid experiments are repeatable, and I'm not going to fly off into space because gravity just stopped working on me for a second.
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#17
02-12-2007, 02:01 AM
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Re: God and Contradictions
[ QUOTE ]
This argument is cited in The God Delusion and was new to me.The argument runs that an omniscient God will know what He is going to decide to do in the future. But if He knows that, then He can't change His mind, so He is no longer omnipotent. [/ QUOTE ] I'm so glad there's no reason whatsover to read that book.
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#18
02-12-2007, 02:14 AM
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Re: God and Contradictions
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ] This argument is cited in The God Delusion and was new to me.The argument runs that an omniscient God will know what He is going to decide to do in the future. But if He knows that, then He can't change His mind, so He is no longer omnipotent. [/ QUOTE ] I'm so glad there's no reason whatsover to read that book. [/ QUOTE ] Don't get me wrong, I'm not a big fan of the "Logical proofs of God's non-existence" school of thought. I think I probably feel the same way you do about some of them, which is that they aren't very compelling and rely on some narrow definitions in order to be valid. But there are SOME 'disproofs' that require nearly unbelievable semantic flexibility in order to dismiss. And forcing God to obey logic opens the door for exactly these types of 'disproofs.'
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#19
02-12-2007, 02:36 AM
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Re: God and Contradictions
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ] This argument is cited in The God Delusion and was new to me.The argument runs that an omniscient God will know what He is going to decide to do in the future. But if He knows that, then He can't change His mind, so He is no longer omnipotent. [/ QUOTE ] I'm so glad there's no reason whatsover to read that book. [/ QUOTE ] You can tell that from one citation? Wow.
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#20
02-12-2007, 09:34 AM
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Re: God and Contradictions
[ QUOTE ]
I think that most theists would concede that God is bound by logic. I mean, otherwise, the concept of God is more or less meaningless. Nothing we say about him conveys any useful information if he is beyond logic. [/ QUOTE ] If God isn't beyond logic, then he's bound by it. This presents an equally compelling dilemma - if God must obey logic, then isn't logic (rather than God) the true Absolute? This also raises questions about whether God is the "real" God or the "only" God, regardless of whether he created our world (think Demiurge). Another major problem is that Christian doctrine states that God is a personal being, and while more and more Christians are recognizing the absurdity of this position and revising their beliefs, this one remains a central tenet of the dogma. To equate God with logic is to bring up many questions related to this personal element. For example, how can a person "be logic" in the first place? If logic is simply an expression of God's nature, then why does it seem so "cold and impersonal?"
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