Dear cyberfriends,
Here's a new proof of God's non-existence from a "real" atheist.
ffrf.org/fttoday/1997/august97/barker.html
I reply to this proof that I see no problem with limiting divine omniscience, provided this limit does not hinder his knowledge of the world. If God does not know what he will do in 1000 years, it’s ok. If God does not know what is going on currently in the world, we have a problem.
Have you actually tried to read literature on this ? Have you read other opinions on what god is , why he cannot intervene?
Perhaps you aint interested , nonetheless , to make the statement " we have a problem" you would have to understand gods mind a little more than I suspect you already do. This is not an atheist v theist thing , its about you having the correct background knowledge.
Sam-- I reply to this proof that I see no problem with limiting divine omniscience, provided this limit does not hinder his knowledge of the world.
I see a problem with limiting what is “omni”. Perhaps we should drop that attribute from God. Perhaps we should say:“He knows a bunch but not everything there is to know.”
As you want.
No, I disagree: we can’t deny God’s omniscience just because he does not know what is IMPOSSIBLE TO KNOW. God knows all that is possible to know, just as he can make all that can exist, but not square circles.
The outcome of a future choice is something as impossible to know as a square circle is impossible to make. Therefore, it does not remove any perfection from God: no one has to do what is beyond the possible.
I said:"I see a problem with limiting what is “omni”. Perhaps we should drop that attribute from God. Perhaps we should say:“He knows a bunch but not everything there is to know.”
No, I disagree: we can’t deny God’s omniscience just because he does not know what is IMPOSSIBLE TO KNOW. God knows all that is possible to know, just as he can make all that can exist, but not square circles.
O- Is it possible to turn water into wine? Is it possible to walk on water? Is God limited by laws of nature, physics, or the axioms of and concepts of mathematics and geometry? If God cannot create a square circle, then it is not God who is “God” but our Reason that is truly God and that dictates to this demigod you call “God” what she or it can create. “Thou shalt create whatever makes sense to me”.
The fact of the matter is that for God nothing, NOTHING, NOTHING, NOTHING CAN BE IMPOSSIBLE TO KNOW. As Creator he remains a mystery only to himself and an incredible, for I can’t believe it, angnst might cause Him to wonder about who is He, or What He is and Why is He instead of not being–questions that of course plage the human psyche. Inwardly I can understand a mystery to God about Himself, if He even has a “self”, but outwardly, which is all there is but Him; all which He created; nothing could be alien or obscured. He has all the cards. He set the planets on the most prescise courses and traced the incredible complexity of the human eye. He tells the orbs to spin and divides a living cell countlessly.
It is therefore impossible to revive the dead–except to God. It is impossible to turn H2O into fermented grape juice–except to God. It is impossible to walk on water–except for God. By impossible I mean that it cannot be rationally explained by us-- just like the square circle. If we are going to set limits at what is conceptually correct then are we dealing with experience anymore or possible experience at least? It is absurd for a geometrist to think of square circle, just like it is an stupidity for a chemist to hear of water turning to wine in a bottle, and a idiotic notion for a physicist of a man walking on water.
Yet that which is omni in God and which trancends the laws He set for the universe and which, as evidence in miracles, never could impose on His pleasure, His will, that is what makes God God. The moment you foist upon God the restrictions set by our comprehension, then our comprehension sets the limits to God, dictates to God and is God itself.
But, every miracle that is recorded is a miracle by virtue of it’s impossibility, not it’s possibility. To get back to what you have said and put my theory in practice, you had said:
“God knows all that is possible to know, just as he can make all that can exist, but not square circles.”
If this is true then no miracle would have happened, and if so then Jesus, even if he lived, would not have been born to a virgin and more importanly, would not have risen, but rest still in some yet to be found crypt, rotted and hollow. Where is your faith for then? For the possible alone?
The outcome of a future choice is something as impossible to know as a square circle is impossible to make. Therefore, it does not remove any perfection from God: no one has to do what is beyond the possible.
O- My God! God has really hit rock bottom here. I read in my Bible of Moses. How strange now it all seems. There, God knew and imposed Pharaoh’s choice: “I’ll harden his heart”. Why did God send Moses in? Because God hoped that Pharaoh would make the right choice? No. God, His maker, knew the heart of Pharaoh and knew, for his heart was made hard by his maker, that he would not accept the offer. Moses goes in because God wished to show his wonders to His chosen people. For his pleasure God is quite prepared to trampled the creature’s valued freewill.
But if it is not as such, then God is not God, but Choice is God’s true God. I suggest C.S Lewis’ interpretation: Our freewill is a privation God makes upon His own omniscence which He can suspend as easily as he undertook.
More than anything a good theology, in my view should begin by way of the first commandment: Thou shall have no other gods before Me.
Turning water into wine is not self-contradictory, therefore I see no reason why it would not be possible. On the contrary, there is a contradiction in the idea of a square circle. Therefore I see why it is impossible. Therefore God cannot do it. Call it a limitation if you want, but to my mind, it is not. God is as powerful as he can be as the creator and ruler of the world. No being can withstand God, and God can make happy whoever he wants and wretched whoever he wants, and it’s enough.
You don’t seem sensitive to the power of reason…
The principle of contradiction would not be broken if the dead rose. It would be broken if there were a square circle.
I know no miracle which breaks the principle of contradiction.
Turning water into wine is not self-contradictory, therefore I see no reason why it would not be possible. On the contrary, there is a contradiction in the idea of a square circle.
O- I don’t need to agree with you here for my argument to reach you. The point is that knowledge of a “choice”, by God is not contradictory. Look it up as determinism or as physicalism etc. It can be argued that we do make choices, while those choices are predictable and even knowable…if you are God, who created you. Omniscense is not a round square.
You don’t seem sensitive to the power of reason…
O- Not that I am insensitive to it’s power but that when specualting about God we need to recognize, by the power of reason nonetheless, that a negative theology is necessary, so to prevent us from impinging on God’s will and pleasure and His freedom of choice. My view here is along the lines of Paul, the Frankfurter, Luther, Calvin, Maimonides and Erigena.
The principle of contradiction would not be broken if the dead rose. It would be broken if there were a square circle.
O- You brought about not the principle of contradiction so much as the idea of impossible versus possible. Conceptual contradictions are impossibilities of the mind of man. Knowing the decisions one is about to make before the person knows them himself is not contradictory. Here is a piece from that article I mentioned somewhere else to you, and presents the efforts by Benjamin Libet in the 1980’s to settle the conflict between freewill and determinism.
“Libet measured brain activity during voluntary hand movements. He found that between 500 and 1,000 miliseconds before we actually move our hand there is a wave of brain activity, called “the readiness potential”. Libet set out to determine the moment, somewhere in that 500 to 1,000 milliseconds, when we make the actual conscious decision to move our hand.
Libet found that the time between the onset of the readiness potential and the moments of conscious decision making was about 300 milliseconds. If the readiness potential of the brain is initiated before we are aware of making the decision to move our hand, then it would appear that our BRAINS KNOW OUR DECISIONS BEFORE WE BECOME CONSCIOUS OF THEM.” (my enphasis at the end)
Now Who made our brains, ourselves or God? Is it Impossible then for God to be Omniscent? It is not only possible but likely and science might someday give us an echo to our mystics.
“The outcome of a future choice is something as impossible to know as a square circle is impossible to make. Therefore, it does not remove any perfection from God: no one has to do what is beyond the possible.”
O- Could it be, based on what I have quoted for you, that it is our ego that gets informed on a decision made by our brains rather than our ego making a choice and the body, or the brain really, carrying out the order given? Could it be that this is nothing but an illusion that is unavoidable by the bussiness of living? If God is not omniscent, then we might someday prove beyond doubt that the Brain certainly is.
If God is supposed to know everything of himself, Heaven, and Earth, then he has a pointless existence really, just like the paper suggests. He has no doubts, and no choices to make…
I’m an athiest, but I can see a problem with the main paper. Well a slight problem anyway. EVERYTHING seems to suggest of Earth. I mean, does God really know everything of himself? Or does God really know everything of Heaven? I just thought that the belief that God would know everything would only apply to Mankind on Earth. I just thought that his Onimpresence was local only to Earth. Where as in Heaven we begin to become immortal beings ourselves, therefore we too become more like him, and I thought to myself personally that God could not be Omnipresent in Heaven.
Basically, are words ever exact? Words written by mankind in the Bible would have some descriptive errors.
I defend philosophy not God.
Is God omniscent in Heaven, about Heaven or about Himself? I don’t know, but I do not pretend to dictate under what circumstances His existence would have meaning. If we examine too much the issue we exceed our own boundaries. We can speculate, as I did earlier, about God feeling existential angst, like Roquetin, but none of this speculation can be corroborated here on earth.
It comes down what you feel in your faith, not what you can succesfully reason. In your faith then, Is God omniscent? Do you feel that God, as YOU conceive of It, Him or She contains even Him/Her/It-self??
It’s not the place to launch a great debate on the nature of choice…
I find the main argument is this:
Firstly, omniscient does not imply knowing the future. Logically, as the future has not happened yet, it cannot be known. But rather being omniscient lies in knowing the past, the present, and everything that could or would happen if [this decision] were made. Essentially, God would be the perfect chess player because he could see the result of every move he has the choice of making.
Hence, the problem of the argument is that it assumes there is something greater than God, something that determines not only the ultimate end, but every possible step to that end. But that is simply not the case. Back with the chess game example, there are infinite ways to win a game, assuming even that God wants to win the game, afterall God still has a choice to exercise His power to the degree He sees fit.