lets list disproofs, or proofs, of a god.

[alasdairm]

this thread has already been done here: existence of god, in particular: Arguments for the existence of God; Arguments against the existence of God.

alasdair

 

[qwe]

Firstly, a lot of gods in religions are not omnipotent, but they are still gods/God &/or the most powerful entity or entities in the all existence, but let's look at your omnipotence paradox reference.

then they are absurdly powerful aliens, not gods, even if our ancestors might have called them gods.

 

[qwe]

I'd imagine the experience of divinity or god to be the experience of "no-thing" which is also paradoxically "everything", and your perspective colors this.

i might consider that (if i knew enough to guess) "basic blissful qualia/consciousness"... but to call it god would be to confuse our language needlessly. you're saying you've had the spiritual experience; where does the deity come in again?

 

[Nagelfar]

i think a better omnipotent paradox question would be "Could God create a being more powerful than himself?" That's a pretty heavy question.
Also if God is so powerful how is he able to be rendered into paradox through simple human logic?


Is god Omniscient?
Yes. He is God. That's in his definition.
So God knows what he is going to do before he does it, yeah?
So God has to do that one thing or else he didn't know what he was going to do and therefore he doesn't know everything and is not God.
God has no free will if his existence is pre determined in that way.

Where did God come from?

It could be said that we only take actions to achieve our own sense of personal perfection.
God is already perfect, because he is God.
Why would God take any action at all? Especially since he knows exactly what is going to happen before it happens. There is no surprise in his existence.

That's a pretty shitty existence.
How long did God exist before he created the universe? What was he doing then? Thinking about creating the universe? He already knew he was going to do it and what was going to happen.

The idea of God is so ridiculous.

Perhaps the universe itself is the rock so heavy that not even God could lift it, or the being more powerful than God himself that he created to limit himself to where he should be. Is that not deism of a sort? If God is perfection; well that is not "everything" because it is not imperfection too, and how can something be 'perfection' if it is not also encompassing of everything, perfectly? Perfection requires the spanning the measure of all imperfection, infinite purity presupposes an infinite amount of infinite impurities to keep purity from being held to its own measure. Just as nonexistence couldn't remain still and not actually be a principle of stillness which would then be an existence of something, therefore contradicting itself which it must avoid or not; either way being something and not nothing: nonexistence of any principle must permeate all principles to justify its lack of any principle and keep its purity sanctified as truly not-any-thing, maybe God must likewise disinter all nonbeing so as to be himself, and that's what we are.

then they are absurdly powerful aliens, not gods, even if our ancestors might have called them gods.

That's a not very viable way of looking at things; can they not be eternal, immaterial, spirit beings that are in no way part of the natural order, while not omnipotent? The history of the concept of divinity has longer been one without the idea of omnipotence than with it. Perhaps they are omnipotent save for their mutual wills that can negate one another, I had a friend who was a Christian who believed that the devil was Gods first creation, which he created to be equally as powerful (omnipotent) as himself, and that's why we must strain to not be taken by him by our will but to align ourselves to the co-omnipotent power that is non-malignant to be "saved". Very Zoroastrian.

Why can't God be forever lasting and omniscient but not omnipotent? If he can be mistaken and omnipotent, why not the other way about?

 

[jesusmaker]

You are GOD, I am GOD we are all GOD. There is nothing that can describe it perfectly because our language is limiting. If you can think about a GOD then your mind is really the one with infinite imagination (GOD). You create your own reality and can see less biological (survival) illusions when entering altered states of conscienceness

 

[yougene]

Scholastics solved this hundreds of years ago, (and others likely prior) God cannot be his own object because God is "pure act"; therefore God does not exist as an objectification, neither materially nor abstractly; God, of course, is spiritual solely. At least the portion of God that is 'omnipotent'. Compare the "kenosis" line of Christian teleology or the Jewish belief in God as the "ain soph".

Omniscients, omnipotents, and omnipresents are not logically consistent with one another. These are taken as byproducts of God's property of completion/fullness. Godel's Incompleteness Theorem proves any logical system is able to be complete or consistent but not both. Therefore "heavy stone" thought experiments point at a boundary of human logic not to the existance or non-existance of God.

Alot if not most human conceptions have an implicit assumption of complete fullness in addition to an explicit assumption of consistency. Anthropic principle, multi-verses, universe as expression of timeless mathematical truths; these and many other all have an implicit assumption of boundless completion, don't explicitly evoke God, and are ultimately ungraspable by the logical mind without remainder.

 

[polymath]

Godel's Incompleteness Theorem proves any logical system is able to be complete or consistent but not both.

A logical system is complete if any statement in it can be proven true or false. It is consistent if its impossible to prove contradictory statements in the system.

It was my understanding that GIT only says that the system of real numbers is not both complete and consistent, but that it doesn't say anything about other systems. I might be wrong though...

Sorry if this was off-topic.

 

[yougene]

A logical system is complete if any statement in it can be proven true or false. It is consistent if its impossible to prove contradictory statements in the system.

Right. OP's thought experiment parallels Russell's Paradox.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_set
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell's_paradox

It was my understanding that GIT only says that the system of real numbers is not both complete and consistent, but that it doesn't say anything about other systems. I might be wrong though...

I think you're right BUT it generalizes to any formal system of logic.

Sorry if this was off-topic.

Not at all.

 

[ebola?]

i might consider that (if i knew enough to guess) "basic blissful qualia/consciousness"... but to call it god would be to confuse our language needlessly. you're saying you've had the spiritual experience; where does the deity come in again?

Many Xians I've talked to think of 'god' as this.

ebola

 

[ebola?]

Eugene won the thread.
Also, the incompleteness theorem applies to any system sufficiently robust to allow derivation of arithmetic.

ebola

 

[yougene]

Eugene won the thread.

Thanks Prof.

Also, the incompleteness theorem applies to any system sufficiently robust to allow derivation of arithmetic.

Good point. Can OP's thought experiment be framed in an insufficiently robust system? I believe any insufficiently robust system would be considered "trivial" but not sure. At the least ordinality is required for all major mystical ontologies due to being arranged as cumulative hierarchies.

 

[A Blind Guy]

Is there anything your child could do that would make you banish them to an eternity of pain and suffering?
If yes, there is something wrong with you.
If no, does that make you more forgiving than God?
Does that mean you have a higher sense of morality than God?

Someone would argue that God operates outside of normal human morals which I find repulsive. I believe in the idea of a universal morality system.
Morality is a derivative of logic and reason of which all sentient/intelligent beings are capable, and so we know what is right and wrong because we are able to think about it.

The problem of free will/evil is another big one. If God knows what we're going to do before we do it, that is giving us an illusion of free will.
Someone would argue that God lets us choose for ourselves because allowing us to have free will is the lesser of two evils (the other being to control us and not allow us to do evil actions). That's crap, though, because there definitely exists evil and suffering which an omnipotent, omniscient God could put an end to that would have no effect on our free will. Things like catastrophe, cancer, scholiosis, Lou Gehrig's Disease, etc. Things completely outside of our ability to control that should not exist if God truly loved us.

Then someone would say that we have all of those horrors because our world is covered in sin. So why did God create us with the ability to do sin? Like murderous intent, parasitism, lying, etc. He could have made a lot better children than us.

Also God put the apple in the garden of eden knowing that Eve was going to eat that apple which would give humans original sin. Then he destroyed the population of the planet a few times, and decided to send his son (who is also himself and his grandson) down to Earth on a suicide mission to rid the world of the sin he originally condemned us to.

that makes sense.

 

[alasdairm]

psyduck nailed it in post #2.

you can't attempt to resolve these things with reason or logic because the are, by their nature, non-rational.

alasdair

 

[A Blind Guy]

and that's supposed to make me a believer.

"Oh no man it's not supposed to make any sense at all. Do you want to read this book?"

No, sir. I do not want to read your book. I do not want to have a part of that whatsoever.
Why would you believe in something that does not make... any fucking sense at all. That is not SUPPOSED to make sense?
That... doesn't make sense either.

Whoever this God character is, he's kind of an asshole. I also think it's hilarious that he is this all powerful being but he is still able to have petty emotions like jealousy and anger. If he is so far above us, why is he such a douchebag?

 

[A Blind Guy]

Sorry to DP.

Let's not forget that Christianity was created as a system to perpetuate itself.

We are not supposed to fully understand it, so when things don't make sense it's "all just part of the plan".
If you do not believe in this you go to Hell, if you believe in this you go to Heaven.
God's definition renders him unfalsifiable.
All other religions/competing ideas are being fed into people by the devil.
Questioning the existence of God is the only unforgivable sin.
You must spread God's word to those who have not heard it in order to save them from eternal damnation.

It's like a fucking mind virus. Inception in it's sickest form.

 

[panic in paradise]

A Blind Guy


God has emotions and gender??
the book makes no sense?

you have strong ideas already, enough to cast discredit in a public venue, yet, you havent touched the texts?



i say, life in general makes less sense then any book -;-) how could the substance of the creation of everything be written in simple words? it takes imagination and insight to approach with an open mind, and allow ones self to bend the boundaries of how they think, and then bend even further the expectations and ideas of others - so that an individual may be able to hear these words on their own terms.

it absolutely isnt the timid stale book i was always shown, and had described to me...and im in to some weird shit.
the cliche; people take it far too literally - is a massively, horrifically true point.


i do not believe God cares about cussing, that is hilarious...BUT, to use words to degrade or harm each other, which i need some tuning on, are the Dirty Words being missed here, the words that actually matter at the end of the day to some - you know like forcing the word of others onto those who do not want to be bothered with it; fair enough! that being said, the slaughters carried out in the name of Christ, do not have anything to do with anything in that book: the morals, lessons, examples our sick emotional minds come up with...
that makes me try and coil, there needs to be a historical reevaluation of religion+spirituality and how they are, and have been incorporated into politics - seems if they were, quite literally, implemented for what is being taught -- the population would be 1/10th of what it is or more, and the grass maybe wouldnt be any more green, but there would be a lot more of it.


i think, in fractional part ~ hehe.



Peace Pace & Passion

 

[alasdairm]

and that's supposed to make me a believer.

not at all. who's trying to make you a believer? you're picking out inconsistencies or 'errors' in these ideas and sarcastically exclaiming that they make no sense. of course they make no sense! their nature - their inherent character - is nonsensical.

alasdair

 

[panic in paradise]

their nature - their inherent character - is nonsensical.

alasdair

hehe

whos nature?
human nature??
;-)

if so dont trust it - no man is your friend...

 

[A Blind Guy]

Yeah let's argue against God through the Bible, lol.

Again, the argument from holy books is the most circular logic conceivable, and as some lady put it in her "37 proofs of the existence of God", (which I will link to later in this post) only the most arrogant provincialism would allow a person to think the texts of their clan are any more correct than the books of someone else.

http://www.randomhouse.com/pantheon/authors/goldstein/36 Arguments.pdf

The logic in there is awesome.

EDIT: Oh, there I go again with the logic. How dare I bring that up in this discussion.

 

[alasdairm]

hehe

whos nature?
human nature??
;-)

if so dont trust it - no man is your friend...

nature as in character or essence not nature as in birds, trees, etc.



alasdair