If God must be omniscient, God doesn’t exist
For the record, I don’t believe an omniscient being exists.
But omniscience isn’t disproven by describing a paradox. The paradox is observable and definable, and therefore knowable. This doesn’t disprove God any more than an Escher painting disproves architects.
Yeah, not tracking the meme, but we can articulate paradoxes with things like the Christian god, which basically just pitches their own lore against itself.
While obviously unsatisfying the resolution to the Epicurean paradox is that evil serves a good purpose that is unknown to us but known to God.
Like a child screaming when a cut is disinfected by a parent. The pain is incomprehensible to a small child. So we too are “small spiritual children”, and the grotesque pain of the world serves as some sort of refining process that is incomprehensible to us.
Or so the thinking goes…
Disagree - that implies God is all knowing and all good, but not all powerful. If he was all powerful, he wouldn’t need to resort to using evil at all, even it’s just a tool to accomplish good.
If he was all three, the child wouldn’t be cut in the first place.
Exactly. Omnipotence does not actually include the ability to do impossible things, contrary to popular definitions. It means to have unlimited power, which could be used to do anything that’s possible to do.
Like, imagine if you had access to infinite electricity. You could do godlike things with that, even create black holes. But you still couldn’t create paradoxes.
The thought of that is pretty hostile to religious definitions of God, however.
So think of the laws of physics as the rules in a video game. You can jump X feet, you can throw 2 fireballs at a time. The developer is generally bound by those rules, but he can also modify the source code whenever he sees fit. If he wants to push an update that allows him, and only him, to jump X+1 feet, nothing is stopping him.
Right, but 1+1 still cannot equal to 3 in that video game. You could do all kinds of horrible tricks to make it seem so, but they are just that - tricks.
Paradoxes are by definition impossible, even in a modified version of physics.
Paradoxes do however undermine concepts of omnipotence or omniscience. Absolutes do not hold. And religion runs around squirting absolutes out of its ass everywhere.
I don’t disagree with your criticism of religion, but semantic absolutes are like mathematical infinity, you can approximate the concept, but standard logic fails when discussing the actual thing. It’s the inverse of dividing by zero, because a set that includes everything necessarily divides everything else into nothing.
Consider the infinite hotel. You work at the desk in a hotel with infinite rooms. There’s always room for more guests. But then an infinite bus pulls up with infinite guests. Good luck they came to you, because you’re the only hotel that has room for everyone. Infinite hotel, infinite rooms, you’re just about to turn on the No Vacancy sign when a second infinite bus pulls up. They have another infinite group of guests. Shit, you’re already full, right? Nope, all you need to do is have the group from bus 1 stay in the even numbered rooms, and bus 2 stays in the odd number rooms. Easy peasy.
The thing is, infinity exists. We know it exists. The hotel does not exist, but just because it doesn’t exist does not mean it cannot exist. Time is infinite. Consider a hypothetical bacteria that reproduces every second, simultaneously dying and creating a new bacteria. If you were to number them forever, you would never run out of numbers nor would you run out of bacteria. But if you had a second one in a second petri dish, you could number them with even numbers in one dish and odd numbers in the other. You would never run out of numbers, but you’d have twice as many infinite bacteria.
Now take the paradox of the unliftable boulder. Could an omnipotent creator make a boulder so large that the omnipotent mover could not move it? Yes. First, the omnipotent creator makes the boulder, because there is nothing they cannot make. Then, the omnipotent mover moves the boulder, because there is nothing they cannot move.
Religion is a tool, a crutch used by people uncomfortable with uncertainty. There are things we don’t know, things we can’t know, and things we’ll never know. Faith allows a person to pretend they know all three.
I like the creativity in some of your examples, but I think I missed your point about infinity. Okay, it exists. Hotels, bacteria, got it. How does infinity play into the topic here?
The statement is only generates a contradiction if there is an omniscient being. If there are no omniscient beings, it is consistent.
The idea is that it is impossible for a being to both know and not know something. Knowable is not the same as known to a particular being
This statement is false
I’ve heard theists argue that presenting god with paradoxes, like asking him to make a square circle, does not nullify or place limits on him. But damn it’s such a losing rhetorical position, even if it sounds reasonable, it shows what shaky ground the entire bogus enterprise of religion is based on. “My god is omnipotent! Except for… you know… things!” If they were just a little mor imaginative they could use an argument about extra dimensions to show how god can create square circles.
Any reasonably powerful god could make a non-Euclidean spacetime in which the points equidistant from a central point also form 4 straight line segments of equal length that meet at right angles.
I also think the classic rock so heavy it can’t be lifted fails, for the same reason that an omnipotent god could clearly commit suicide, if it wanted to (and once it did, it would no longer have the capability to perform other actions).
The omniscience thing is harder, because of things like incompleteness theorem, but I don’t think I can really describe what it means to know everything in the first place. “Able to provide a true, and comprehensive answer to any question for which a true, and comprehensive answer is possible” doesn’t seem to give any contradictions, but as you mention has the feel of dancing around all the hard issues.
This is just a bad argument, if an omniscient being did exist, then it would know the statement was false, I’m sure this was supposed to be a logic loop, but it isn’t one.
The statement being false implies that it is true, which is why this statement is contradictory if there are any omniscient beings
Stupid shit like that is why the Churchers don’t take us seriously.
