Could God actualy have perfect knowledge and still maintain its own concept? Knowledge of everything, all space, all time, reality, individual perceptions, your own perceptions, changes thought into knowledge. You lose the abillity to think.
Ideas?
If we say that god is a conscious being, no, it isn’t possible, just like said you he would lose the ability to think and he would end up losing its own consciousness. But we say that god is not conscious being, and it is just like a machine or mechanism, yes, in that way it would be possible.
Thats what i have been arguing with my philo TA. God cant exist as a personal being and still have perfect knowledge. Existence, in a human sense, awareness, is in contradiction with perfect knowledge and omnipotence in general.
perhaps what you say is argueable, but also think of this, if you will:
What if God was an Evolving creature or thing just like us, and as we grow, it does so as well. Perhaps it does not have all the intelligence, but has all up to the present, and can make forecasts, like predicting the weather. Perhaps God may sometimes be wrong, but, in this case, God learns from it, and corrects it’s mistakes.
What if God was comparable to humans???Isn’t it???(if it even exists)
I could try some more, if you’d like, but only remember, these are only my opinions to enlighten you with the possibilities. Kk! Fun 
Humans know far more than they hold in the forefront of their minds at any one time. For example, before you read this, were you thinking of the capital of Russia? I expect not, and yet, you know what it is. So knowing everything doesn’t mean ‘thinking of everything at once’, necessarily.
Also, if God doesn’t have knowledge of the future (say, because that sort of knowledge is impossible), then He will have plenty to think about even if He knows everything that’s possible to know.
I don’t see how awareness is in contradiction with perfect knowledge, though I’m probably not clear on how you’re using either term.
I think that God is so smart that he can think up stuff that even he doesn’t understand. Up in Maine, we call that “wicked smaht”, which is funny, 'cuz God can’t be wicked. Well, he could be wicked if he wanted to. He can do anything he wants, including preventing himself from doing anything he wants, even if he really really wants to. Cuz he can always change his mind, even if he’s really really stubborn. Cuz he can be just as stubborn as he wants - so stubborn that he can’t change his mind, even if he wants - unless he changes his mind about that.
In case there is any doubt, I am making a serious point here - not about God, of course, but about neo-scholastic theology.
fausty
ps - hey uccisore - I live in Camden (maine) in the summah. Be up there 'round Memorial day. Email me sometime and tell me where you are. I’m much nicer in person. Do you drink heavily? Everyone else in Maine does.
Thought is a survival tool, and it is used to help us get what we need.
[the ever-false] “God” is “invinsible” and “needs nothing”, therefor “he” does not “need”/“want” to think, act, etc. “He” is as-good-as inanimate matter/energy [which is what the universe is made of].
Also:
About “perfect knowledge”.
User skills and engineering can be different things.
A person can use their computer very well–even if they do not know how to build a computer, and even a computer repair man does not know how to build each part of the computer, he just sets them all up together in order.
A person could have “perfect knowledge” on how to use/interact with something, even if they did not know how to create it.
So there are different levels of understanding, and some levels of understanding are sometimes not-needed.
Nawp, faust, I’m a teetotaller, I gotta say. You’re right about the rest of us though for the most part.
I'm in the County (Aroostook), right around Presque Isle. I try to get down as far as Bangor a couple times a year, sometimes even downeast a bit, likesay Bahaba or Old Orchard. Generally a little later in the year, when the summah people have gone back home to Mass. I have no doubt that God is wicked smaht, a real cockah that one, but we might have to haggle over the details.
The main objection is that thought is not the only way in which we derive knowledge. You might then still be able to think once u have perfect knowledge. With regards to thought as the only means to aquire knowledge, I dont see any real exeptions. Of course empirical knowledge requires thought. But, synthetic knowledge, by definition, requires some assertion. Even metaphysical thought is thought none the less. I can see a priori analytical knowledge might be attained without thought, but that limits knowledge to definitions and tautologies. Now maybe divinity has a way of acquiring knowledge without thought, it is possible that knowledge is derived from divinity and so perfect knowledge would be already contained in God. But, i see a problem with perfect knowledge as a possibility. My assesment of perfect knowledge is idealistic, but hell, how much more idealistic can a conecpt like omnipotence be. Knowledge must span all time and space, and must be known continuously, as recall implies a non zero time and hence, imperfection. Knowledge cannot be simply stored and recalled, it must be ever present. This type of perfect knowledge would transcend space and time, which would require constant knowledge of both reality and the apperception of reality by every individual. The subjective thoughts of every being through all time, including his own, if he does in fact think, would be ever present in the mind of God. To him, the knowledge of my thoughts would be as real as his own. Expect that, since this knowledge has never been acquired and is in fact eternal, thought in itself is simply knowledge, even his own. If thought is already knowledge, then, to God, there is nothing but knowledge. God cannot think if he has all knowledge. Without time and space, even his own actions have already happened, in fact they are continuously happening. God can do nothing since his actions were already known to him for all eternity. He could not even contemplate this since the act of contemplation must have already been known to him since the beginning. He is reduced to a storehouse of eternal knowledge. I cant see the Judeo-Christian concept of God, being a personal entity, having all knowledge. Without perfect knowledge, the concept of God is in contradiction.
Maybe, as a mystic friend of mine once insisted, God broke himself up into little copies of himself, individual human beings, so that He could experience everything, both the good and the bad, and so He knows everything about human experience up until any point in time, yet is still learning. I always liked that thought.
But even if he did break himsef up into individual human beings, memories are lost once each life time is over, anyways, so “God” didn’t learn his lesson and humanity is still stupid, stupid enough to make up the idea of God wanting to experience mundane and stupid cycles of lower life forms for billions of years so he committed suicide, to satisfy theistic premises and his own hunger for un-needed and pointless stimulation of a brain that he just blew up during a big bang?
No, no more rubbish please.
I’d say that God has perfect knowledge of everything. In order to understand one single item of knowledge one would need to compare it to every other (possible or actual) item of knowledge (as well as every item of non-knowledge). This much we got from the Ancient Greeks though to my knowledge Aristotle never actually sorted this one out because back then they didn’t have what we now term the Many Worlds Theory.
Of course we cannot prove Many Worlds Theory to be correct (or incorrect, for that matter) but it does give us a sketch for what it might be like to see the universe from God’s perspective.
Dan
Where did you get the notion that memory is lost with each life time? Of course humanity experiences the world through the metaphysical instrument, namely causation, space, and time, but does that shed any light on reality? It is only our perception of lineation through time that gives us the impression of existence in the first place. I would dare not say our memory is gone upon death, nor that it is created upon birth. (or at least initiated) God may experience reality in an entirely different fashion. Personaly i dont find evidence to support a belief in god, but I think Wizard was alluding to a more pansychic outlook, more acurately pantheistic. Far from any conventional conception of God (by conventional i mean judeo christian.)
Ah, silly me. Brain damage and memory loss, why why? And then when a person does die, the brain decays and rots.
Light? Is this “light” being shed by means of the sun, or a delusion of one mind?
So when I destroy my harddrive, the information was still there before and after?
Yeah, would you even say the word “God” if some old crack pot didn’t lie and make it up then teach it to you? A new spin on an old lie still wont work. Infinite people say their own thing about God, because God is their own creation and each time they create it in their mind it is unique and compatable with their desire for it’s “making sense” to them.
Lol!..I guess the idea that God “feels” the world through the experiences of individual human beings requires a belief that the human mind is more than just the result of nueroelectrical impulses centered in a physical material brain. Without that position then such a an assertion would, of course, seem ridiculous. However, each of us are composed of billions of cells which are very much independent entities, each carrying out thier primary functions, yet still are part of some greater biological organism. When a cell dies, much of its “memory” remains with us, being passed on to other cells during replication. It is very much a part of biological growth and even a general principle of evolution. I don’t see why, even using widely held scientific principles, such an idea seems impossible. There are those who believe each human being consitutes a microscopic cell of some great transcendent and metaphysical entity we may call Man, existing on some higher dimension of space and time. They believe that, just like cells, we are programmed, coordinated and driven by “external forces” manifest as governments, commerce and society. An interesting theory, I think. But, once again, one must be open-minded about such things. Besides, life is much more interesting when we consider such possibilities, don’t you think?.
Oh, and Dan (by the way, my name is Dan as well), I can see that you have a distaste for any ideas based on the existence of God. My concept of God, I should say, is nothing like any simplistic ideas proposed by most orthodox religions. And I cannot say for sure that I believe God exists. And, moreover, I cannot say I believe in the possibility of any “personal” relationship with God at all, unless our own consciousness is somehow a small spark of the greater consciousness we call God. It is quite possible, if God exists, He is nothing at all like most religious people would like him to be, and he may be very much like us in many respects, and totally unaware of our existence. I can say that I do believe that there must be some kind of “consciousness” behind the existence of all things, if only because I believe that 0 (nothing) + 0 (nothing) will always equal 0 (nothing) unless some consciousness adds something to the equation. And I am speaking here of all existence in space and time prior to this existence. God may simply be Consciousness.
What my friend suggested is: What if there are no rules for the outer, unknown world we have no knowledge of? Everything we say-everything written here is from our own human perspective and human laws. We created the “laws” of physics; we created the “laws” of time and space. If there is a supreme being like god (which I DO believe in) then maybe he has no “laws” or “rules” to follow. He just is the way he is. Nothing we can say can contradict this. It could be wrong; It could be right. But we do not know-we will NEVER know-the truth behind this matter. It can only be an unexplored figment of our philosophical dreams…
Dan
Please forgive my use of common metaphors. You are obviously a materialist, possibly eliminative materialist, and would probably rather have such common metaphors as pain and happiness translated into C-fibers and synapses. I know it sounds crazy to speak of a metaphysical reality from your point of view, but untill you monists can figure out how a physical organism can develop singular awareness and become conscious of that singularity, your still gonna have the dualists jumping on your back. (Srry about that last metaphor, my bad.)
And yes your right, i would never use the word god if i had not learned that it was a synonymous with “greatest concievable being.” I was not arguing that my mental or physical body still held knowledge after my death. But just think about it from this perspective; one of the fundamental aspects of the concept of God is perfect knowledge. If he exists or not is irrelevant since this argument is only addressing a concept. In my previous post I defined perfect knowledge and explained why a personal entity could never have this power. Now imagine this metaphorical knowledge box containing the knowledge of everything, for all time and space, available continuisly. If the mind was to decipher this box into something it could understand, something that fell into the categories of space, time, and causality, it would become our current perception of the universe. God has never existed, we have just given reality in and of itself, the ding an sich, the name “God” and made its charecteristics personal. God is nothing more than a metaphor, and the world is nothing more than representation.
SIATD- We agree that God has perfect knowledge, it seems. What do you think about certain areas of alleged knowledge that are controversial? Do you think there are facts about future states of affairs (other than counterfactuals, I mean), and that it’s possible to know them? Do you think it’s possible to know the future actions of free beings, if there are any such things as free beings?