Knowledge also includes knowledge of how to exercise power. Without the power itself, you cannot have complete knowledge of how to exercise that power. Thus, you cannot have omniscience without omnipotence.
That’s not true, knowledge of how to use power doesn’t imply access to power. God could just decide to BLOCK all of us from having the power and give us all omniscience. There’s no reason God couldn’t do that.
I do understand what You are trying to mean, John.
That nothingness, is can not be spoken of , thought about, but one thing it ca be, is to name it a nothingness. If we stop defining it, then it is like a Zen moment, a point which has vanished from consciousness, is the closest I can come to realize that kind of nothingness. But my gut level tells me that there is no such emptiness, and everything is a fullness. The emptiness is posited from the point of view of fullness, it is an abstracted consequence.
Nope. For example, as an analogy, all knowledge involving a car would also include knowledge of the experience of actually driving the car. You cannot claim to be omniscient without knowledge of actual use of the power to create. You cannot be just omniscient. To be omniscient means you must also be omnipotent and omnipresent.
Oh, good. You do understand pure nothingness. However, you are mistaken in a couple of aspects. First, of course pure nothingness is not the case, because we are here. Second, pure nothingness does not need reality in the least bit to be a viable metaphysical option. Indeed, pure nothingness is far easier to comprehend than reality and is uncaused. The real question is why isn’t pure nothingness the case? And the answer is that pure nothingness and reality form a dichotomy which contains two uncaused options which are mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive. Reality happens to be the case because pure nothingness happens not to be the case. It’s that simple.
So, the question is then what is reality? What is the jointly exhaustive but mutually exclusive counterpart to pure nothingness? Turns out it’s true everythingness, which seems somewhat close to your concept of fullness. However, true everythingness predicts a God, because a God is needed to decide what becomes real and what does not become real and that God contains “the possible” in the mind of God. However, only God is uncaused reality, and God is de facto true everythingness because God contols all reality and God is the only reality that is uncaused.
We are not talking about being a witness. We are talking about having Omniscience - knowing literally ALL THERE IS TO KNOW - including the perspective of the witness and everything the witness knows. You cannot be omniscient without knowing ALL THAT GOD KNOWS - including God’s entire perspective. God’s perspective includes the exercise of His power. You cannot know the perspective of God’s exercise of power without actually having that power. Thus, you can never be omniscient, because you cannot be God and God cannot make you God.
And a witness can know what it’s like to do everything, a witness can even know what it’s like to be possessed and to possess someone without actually having this ability… when you have a dream of being someone else, was that you who did it, or did you just memory overlap with them for a while? Do you still have the power to do it after it’s done? witnessing is passive. A witness can be very ineffectual… an analogy are those days your body and mind just feels great and you get a spring in your step, you know what it’s like to experience that, but you don’t ALWAYS feel that way… witnesses observe many different things and it’s not hard for them to imagine those states in perpetuity even though it doesn’t occur for them. Technically, witnesses aren’t responsible for a possession even if they witness someone possessing someone else, because it wasn’t their will to do it, witnesses return to their will after the witnessing and can reflect upon it, “That was cool, or that was fucked up” Just like you in a dream, can come back to yourself. Witnesses can also do this simultaneously, they can feel different things than you feel. I once had a being stick my tongue out and try to bite it off with my teeth and then it mouthed the words through the possession, “that felt great to get out of my system”, well it felt like shit to me, so obviously it wasn’t experiencing me but was still able to possess my internal states and feel good about it.
The spirit world is more complicated than you make it out to be. People can have infinite knowledge but be removed from sources of power, people can have infinite if not close to infinite power and not have much knowledge.
So, you’re proposing one can dream they are God. Or, perhaps, they can possess God? A thing that is created, such as you, cannot be the uncaused thing because your nature is not uncaused. You cannot comprehend the uncaused, because you are not the uncaused. You cannot completely comprehend the uncaused God regardless of what label you use, such as possession or dreaming.
Well… probably by definition, if there was a God proper, it wouldn’t be able to be possessed unless it wanted to be, but then it’d just send those beings to hell anyways. But someone can be a witness and not have power is my point, not have access to the means consistently or at all. They are just along for the ride so to speak.
How does one go along for the ride with the uncaused? As Aquinas might point out, “how does one comprehend ‘actus purus’ without being ‘actus purus’”? And one cannot be ‘actus purus’ unless one is God. Of course, I think ‘actus purus’ is debatable because Aquinas did not consider the possibility that God came with an infinite number of IMMATERIAL parts. But, nonetheless, it’s the same problem. How can one experience the omniscience of the uncaused, when one is caused? I don’t see it happening. Sorry.
Because the uncaused can cause the uncaused… you think only the caused can reproduce itself, make copies of itself. The uncaused doesn’t even need to cause anything to make a copy of itself, it just needs to let it be. We’re dealing with mindbending concepts here anyhow. What makes you think there’s only one uncaused being anyways? I’ve heard you arguments before, but they really don’t address that simple point. You said another uncaused being could undo all of gods work, but we all know they neither this being nor god can destroy existence, so obviously, they can’t really undo the fundamental, no matter who they are.
The uncaused by definition cannot be caused. Therefore, the uncaused cannot cause the uncaused. Pretty simple logic there.
However, the uncaused can cause the caused, i.e. the material, the material is not uncaused.
As for God making another God, that’s impossible. God cannot cause the uncaused, and therefore cannot create another God.
God is the only uncaused thing. God is existence, reality or whatever you want to call it. God cannot destroy reality because God is reality. God cannot destroy Himself, because God is uncaused and the uncaused cannot be destroyed because being uncaused, there is nothing that can cause it to be destroyed otherwise it wouldn’t be uncaused.
Now, if by “existence” you are referring to MATERIAL EXISTENCE, then that’s a different story. Material existence is caused, and therefore can be destroyed by that which causes material reality. God causes material reality, and therefore, God can destroy material reality.
This is all pretty simple logic by the way. No tricks. Simple stuff once you get the basic understanding down.
There are no “fundamentals” besides God. Everything else is subject to God’s will. Two Gods could destroy each other’s work and therefore neither would be God.
But you’re assuming two very major things here. First that there can’t be multiple uncaused things, and second that the uncaused can cause the caused rather than them being eternally separate, and unable to interact with each other.
First point. The eternally uncaused must be the cause of the caused, because otherwise the materially caused would have no cause but we know the materially caused is caused through a chain of causation. This in a nutshell is Aquinas’ first mover argument and the basis of “actus purus”.
Second point. I am only asserting that there can be only one uncaused God and nothing else may be uncaused, because only one uncaused thing is allowed in order for that one uncaused thing not to have its work interfered with. However, it is debatable in my opinion as to whether God comes with an infinite number of uncaused immaterial parts. Aquinas would say God does not have any moving parts at all. However, Aquinas did not discuss the possibility of uncaused infinite immaterial parts coming with God as opposed to material moving parts.
You are aware that “The uncaused caused the caused” is just like saying, “The caused caused the uncaused.” The uncaused cannot cause because it is uncaused.
That’s completely wrong. The uncaused can indeed cause the caused. This is Aquinas’ first mover argument. Going backward in a chain of causation one must eventually reach a cause that is uncaused. Hence, the uncaused is the first mover or first thing that sets the chain of causation going.
So, no, I don’t agree with you at all that the uncaused cannot cause. But, my disagreement with you really shouldn’t be surprising to you because I have tried my best to show you why infinite causal chains are impossible because such a chain cannot define the necessary FIRST ORDER and because infinity cannot distinguish itself.
Try as you might, I am not about to believe that infinite causal chains with no beginning are anything but utterly IMPOSSIBLE.
James and i discussed this in another thread. And don’t use arguments from authority in the form of names. Every cause IS an effect. So you have to also say that there was a first effect, perhaps that even preceded the cause. And also, you just kinda blew off my point that there could be an infinite number of things which have no cause whatsoever, not just one. Maybe every universe has it’s own uncaused mover, assuming your theory is even correct. So that there could be an infinite number of uncaused movers. I personally think you have too narrow of a mind to work this problem, unable to think outside the box of, say, Aquinas, since Aquinas billions of people have been born, some of them with spatial IQ’s much higher than his, there is no evidence that Aquinas was a cosmic law formulator, just that he argued points, as a probably smarter than average person.
And to make this a bit more concise, I’m going to paraphrase Lev in saying that these are baseless and foundationless claims… for all you know, the unmoved mover could have been exactly 54 beings who all agreed with each other, it could have been 1112 beings… there’s no reason to hop to the conclusion that there is only one unmoved mover to all of this. And even if you could make that argument, there is no reason to conclude that there is only one unmoved mover in the cosmos… maybe all the unmoved movers live in their own world and chill out together talking about their universes together.