Can God make a weight he cannot lift?
How can we expect God to do what we ask of him if we ourselves do not understand what we mean by ‘a weight that cannot be lifted’?
JJ
There are better examples of this kind of problem.
Like, could God break the law of non-contradiction, ie. make something that is both completely white and black.
Can God make 2+2=5? a liberal conservative? a soft hard thing? a ninja pirate?
Either theists believe that God must conform to logical laws, or not.
If the answer is not, then he would be literally stupid and the Divine Will would be meaningless to rational creatures.
My favorite form of this question is “Could an omnipotent God microwave a burrito so hot that He Himself could not eat it?” 
I think I understand pretty well what is meant by “a weight that cannot be lifted.” Let’s phrase it like this: could God override the System and make light shine out of a black hole? Or lift any object therefrom? My conception of an omnipotent creator god is one who has “backdoor access” to the entire universe and can thus teleport objects, shut down localized subroutines like gravity or electromagnetism, and do all manner of other, incredibly arcane stuff. If there is a creator god, I think He could have no other form than this one, which may be likened to that of Root Admin for All Creation - which begs the question, what is the nature of the “outside world” and what relation does our universe really have to it? One may recall the classic film “Tron” in which the sentient programs that inhabit the computer system have an incredible feeling of awe toward the near-mythical Being they call “the User.”
I realize I have done little to answer the original question. Basically where I’m going with this is that when we ask these kinds of questions, essentially all we’re doing is dicking around with our language and logic. The “real world” does not always conform to such symbol systems, and expecting to get a meaningful answer to these kinds of questions requires you to step outside of the question itself as I have done here.
You missed my argument. I argued that what we ask of God first needs to make sense to us. None of your examples make sense to us. So, my argument/question again is - how can we ask God to accomplish something if we do not present what it is he must accomplish?
JJ
Like the previous poster, your examples fail to address my argument. Look at these three examples-
- In your experience, is there a weight that cannot be lifted? Anywhere?How, where? and would it be a ‘weight’
- In your experience, what is 2+2 = 5? Do you understand this summation? Are you sure?
- In your experience, can you ‘shut down’ electromagnetism irrespective of the laws that you say demand electromagnetism? If you answer ‘yes’ then what is it you are trying to represent? for it whatever it is, it isn’t electromagnetism.
JJ
and you missed my reply.
You (and I in fact) are of the belief that God would be bound by logic, because if he wasnt, then he would be stupid.
This is however not an uncontroversial view. If you intend to prove something, you’re going to have to try harder.
Shouldnt this be in the religion board in any case?
“Weight” is, in my understanding, a property of the mass of an object that denotes how difficult it is to physically separate that object from a much larger and more massive object - thus an object with a weight of a hundred kilograms on Earth would have a weight of two hundred sixty-five kilograms “on” Jupiter. Lifting a weight is a matter of applying upward force - the human race cannot now lift a mountain, thus that is a weight that cannot now be lifted; this does not mean that we do not understand the concept of lifting that weight. I hesitate to claim the existence of “a weight that cannot be lifted” since even though we cannot lift it now, there is no reason to suspect that we will never be able to do so. As Arthur C. Clarke wrote, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
“2+2=5” is a bad example of Godly omnipotence. Making two and two equal five is not a matter of divine will or unearthly power, but rather of changing the rules of the abstract symbol system we’re using. In other words, it’s just wanking about with marks on a piece of paper. If “2” really means “two”, then “2+2” will always be equivalent to “4”. It is easy to make “2+2” equal to “5” by changing either the meanings of the terms or the meanings of the operation “+”.
No, I cannot “shut down” anything irrespective of those laws. I never claimed to be able to. My basic argument was that for a God to be truly omnipotent, would require the “laws” of physics to be little more to Him than alterable parameters and algorithms such as those we program into a computer. This is mere analogy, perhaps there is a better one, but this was the analogy that seemed best to me. If God is as subject to the laws of physics as we are, how do we separate Him from any other creature, albeit extraordinarily long-lived, clever, and powerful? I refer again to Clarke.
It occurs to me now that perhaps you are arguing that we are simply too small-minded to be able to imagine any of these things. If this is the case, I will be unable to convince you otherwise, since nothing I can write here about my imagination and what I think I am imagining will be immediately accessible to you as it is to me. Please let me know if this is the case so I may concede you your propositions as relate to you, and keep mine as relate to me.
What is the weight of a rock in the absence of gravity?
No. This should NOT be in the religious board, and you know it shouldn’t. I will remind you why:
The philosophy of art belongs in philosophy, the philosophy of mathematics belongs in philosophy, the philosophy of religion belongs in philosophy… So what philosphy belongs here? A philosophy of nothing?
My post was not of religious interest, and I have no interest in it from the point of view of religion. The argument in my post centred on meaning in concept and language. You have singularly failed to address it. And was I trying to prove something using logic? What?
JJ
No. This should NOT be in the religious board, and you know it shouldn’t. I will remind you why:
The philosophy of art belongs in philosophy, the philosophy of mathematics belongs in philosophy, the philosophy of religion belongs in philosophy… So what philosphy belongs here? A philosophy of nothing?
My post was not of religious interest, and I have no interest in it from the point of view of religion. The argument in my post centred on meaning in concept and language. You have singularly failed to address it. And was I trying to prove something using logic? What?
JJ
- Regarding ‘weight’, I wanted you to maintain your concept of it whilst at the same time imagining that this weight cannot be lifted in any circumstances. I suggested that this was not compatible with your idea of weight. How then, could we ask God to lift what we have no idea of?
- Regarding 2+2=5, you now seem to state that this is not an impossible task, if our symbolism changed. Fair enough.
- If we can imagine a God tinkering with electromagnetism in the manner you describe, then this is not the electromagnetism of our experience. If it is not the electromagnetism of our experience, how can we ask God to change ‘it’.
JJ
- Regarding ‘weight’, I wanted you to maintain your concept of it whilst at the same time imagining that this weight cannot be lifted in any circumstances. I suggested that this was not compatible with your idea of weight. How then, could we ask God to lift what we have no idea of?
- Regarding 2+2=5, you now seem to state that this is not an impossible task, if our symbolism changed. Fair enough.
- If we can imagine a God tinkering with electromagnetism in the manner you describe, then this is not the electromagnetism of our experience. If it is not the electromagnetism of our experience, how can we ask God to change ‘it’.
JJ
im geniunely sorry for the offence, but the nature of God and our expectations of such seem fairly religious to me. If that wasnt what you were arguing perhaps you should be more explicit.
2+2=5 i a darn good example. I was talking about the actual values, not the symbols. Its logically impossible no? This is what were talking about. Of course god can change things, including physics, but not stimultaneously contradictory things.
The argument that we cannot understand God is exactly my point, if God is illogical and we can never even conceive of him invalidates any claim by any church that they can know his will. We must be able to conceive of God if he is to bear any relation whatsoever to our lives. We are looking at a deist deity in other words.
Weight without gravity is always 0. You can test this if you want, drop the scales and the object you are weighing while you are reading the measurement (make sure you have tough scales though).
So certainly in zero gravity even a child can ‘lift’ a rock however large it is.
Now it sounds like we sort of agree. I do not acknowledge that any weight “cannot be lifted under any circumstances” except perhaps one that has fallen into a black hole (as I alluded to in my first response).
There is, however, a flaw in our thinking somewhere. I concur that we cannot meaningfully ask for a result which we do not understand; however, I disagree that in all of these cases, we do not understand what we are asking for. If I ask for a great weight to be moved from my path, my starting assumption is that there is in fact a weight, and that it is effectively immovable (that is, immovable for me), since I have no means by which to move it. I see no reason why I cannot meaningfully ask certain laws of physics to be suspended; I understand what I want in such a case, I want (say) no photons to reflect off of me, when normally they would, thus rendering me invisible. That I do not understand the specific means by which this would be accomplished is immaterial - all I am asking for is the result. If I understood the means, I wouldn’t be praying to God, I would be harrassing a group of scientists and engineers.
I wish to reiterate a point I made in my first reply, which is that I don’t feel we can meaningfully answer questions like this (e.g. can God make logically self-contradictory things happen) without stepping outside of the question, indeed perhaps out of logic itself. Nothing and nobody can make logically self-contradictory things happen, because logic is simply a system of made-up rules. If something “is” entirely black, there is no way it can also “be” entirely white. In the real world, almost nothing “is” [insert any adjective here] exclusively; there are differing degrees, differing parts, chaos. Asking for logically self-contradictory things to happen is totally meaningless - but I don’t think that’s what people are necessarily doing when they pray for seemingly impossible outcomes.
Can there be something larger than infinity? Yes indeed there is! and not just one thing but indeed an infinity of things larger than infinity. So if something discernible by our minds is true, but very strange and unfamiliar, how can we speak of things of things we cannot discern, even less to pass judgements?
hahahaha, I raised the same paradox. Those paradoxes are just silly, they are language games. I can not answer that question because I do not understand the mind of God.
There are actually 3 types of infinity.
- One more than any conceivable number.
- Infinitely more than any conceivable number.
- A number so great it cannot be expressed.
The guy actually went mad figuring that out.
Again, Mr. Reason, if the mind of God is fundamentally unfathomable, how can he communicate with us rational mortals, or more accurately, how can we hope to interpret such obscure communications?
Also, it is true you can push any object of any mass and it WILL move, however, it doesnt go very far, and mostly you will push yourself away. Jumping and rockets use this very principle.
Why not?
I am sure you can tell a child things or part of things which the child don’t fully appreciate or understand just yet.
A child has the same basic rational mind as an adult. However, God in this scenario has an irrational mind.
A human simply cannot grasp multiple contradictory concepts and hold them all to be true. Either, they misunderstand the concepts involved or they are also irrational.
eg. A truly insane adult tries to teach a child. In fact, the child wouldnt even be aware that the adult is trying to teach, their actions would be completely uninterpretable.