Omniscience: Containing all knowledge, past present and future.
A Personal God: A god capable of reacting and interacting with some or all of existence.
The relationship between omnipotence and omniscience:
First of all, allow me to clerify that we are speaking of actual omnipotence when we use the word to describe god and that therefor omniscience is nessisary to utilize that power. One cannot effect something willingly if one does not know of it’s existence… ect. Likewise one cannot purposefully (as opposed to accidental) create an effect one does not know about, therfor the future events are as knowable as the present and past ones, to an omnipotent being… which incidentally brings about hard determinism given the existence of actual omnipotence.
The impossibility of reactive and/or interactive qualities given omnipotence and omniscience.
Reaction requires that one be unaware of something or other, so that once introduced to the unknown information it might invoke a reaction apropriate to one’s personality that would otherwise not have taken place.
Interaction requires that there be an exchange between the involved parties. It could be in the form of anything from ideas to matter/energy.
From here it should be quite obvious why neither reaction nor interaction can be possible with a being who is both omnipotent and omniscient. For there can be no lack of knowledge, so that an addition might invoke any difference… nor can anything be added to the being in a process of exchange.
I thought about presenting this with symbols and formal logic… but thought to myself that it would be a wasted effort, as it’s quite a lot of work to do… and i’m not sure if enough of the members here are familiar with formal logic much less symbolic logic.
So lets do this in the form of simple conversation… and have the logic machine monitor in the background for those of us familar with it’s workings.
I think this should be enough to get the conversation started if there is any interrest…
Your argument will have to address free will - what you’re describing so far is a world in which all there is God and inert matter. I don’t see anything problematic with a god that interacts in the way you describe with matter, so long as it has a different sort of relationship with other persons. The implication of what you’re writing so far is that a god can’t be considered personal unless there are other persons for it to react to. I think that makes sense- but since there are other persons, I don’t think the argument is yet relevant to our world or common theology.
Hard determinism quite frankly excludes Free Will…
besides… for free will to make a difference in the argument God would need to be limited in his knowledge of the beings with “free will”… in order for them to be capable of providing god with information that he/she/it did not have, to invoke a reaction. Interaction would also be possible in this instence… but we would be forced to conclude that God is not omniscient and therfor not omnipotent either… since he cannot intentionaly wield any power over that which he does not know exists…
That is why I am for soft determinism-compatabilism.My emotional problelms cause me to seek help in the form of therapy and medecine.They caused a change in my causes for the better.We try to get criminals to change behaviour through punishment -causal change. =D>
Well, Mad Man, you’re going to run into a lot of views on free will - those who say it doesn’t exist, those who say it is exists as a real limitation to Omni-qualities, and those who say it exists as compatible with those qualities. All three positions are actively argued.
Oh i’m sure you’re right about that one… But unfortunatly logic is unforgiving. So long as my definitions stand as accepted it is logically impossible for a personal, omnipotent, omniscient god to exist.
But If someone, for example, were to contest my definition of omniscience and state that one need not contain ALL knowledge… perhaps future knowledge is not nessisary for omniscience. We could deal with the implications of that understanding as well… I am not trying to force people to play along with my definitions on this thread… I’m only trying to place the focus on the logical implications… which I feel are often neglected in debates and discussions.
"This summer… He’s back! and he’s pissed! You won’t see him coming… you won’t know he’s there… but all of a sudden… " lightningbolt strikes a senator “Your dead!”
Sorry, you’d have to resort to the dreaded Formal Logic for me to accept that. I’m pretty sure your argument is inductive, not deductive.
Well, a clever person wouldn’t word it that way. What they’d say is that there’s no such thing as ‘future knowledge’, or at least ‘future knowledge of a free being’s actions’. In that way, “Uccisore will eat pizza tomorrow” is literally neither true nor false, and as such, cannot be known. So, you can still say “God knows everything”.
Oh sure, I certainly respect that and agree with your aims, if not your conclusions. What I’m doing is giving you examples of thoughts on God that your argument won’t necessarily apply to. It’s very difficult to construct an argument that is both deductively sound, and broad enough to capture all the different thoughts on ‘God’ out there, even the strictly Christian ones. I think you’d be best to limit the argument in certain ways, like “Assuming there is no free will”, and then reserve justifying those premises for some other argument.
If you insist… I will… but you better be sure to give me an apropriate amount of attention if I were to do so. It is truly allot of effort to note down a sinple notion like omnipotence in symbolic logic… and i would hate to do so only to have it “skimmed through” or worse… ignored…
Also… I don’t see how you could consider my argument as inductive… nor the need for any kind of induction here… since we are dealing with absolute definitions which will only serve in a deductive argument.
Surely we could spend an eternity going through how one COULD propose God works. I would prefur to deal with your own understanding when speaking to you rather than deal with 4 different propositions at once.
As for what you present here… I will deal with this later on… As i need to present in words (for now) how the logic machine works.
I am not actually dealing with any kind of religion in perticular here… Only the notions of omniscience and omnipotence existing simultaniously within a personal being. I don’t feel the need to restrict myself to a certain understanding since there are only 3 elements to define.
What constitutes being “A personal being”
What is included in Omnipotence
What is contained in Omniscience
If these three definitions could be done without resulting in a conflict… then my case is closed.
Now… Let’s get into some more detail… as it seems you want to see some more meat on my argument.
Since i defined “A personal being” as a being able to react or interact with something or all things… Free will is a good point to bring up. However my definitions of omniscience and omnipotence exclude free will entirely… but more importantly to the argument the definitions exlude free will as being able to serve as an “unknown” for god to react to. as well as exclude it as a creative force capable of provoiding god with something new in a process of exchange that constitutes interaction.
A great logical tool, when dealing with definitions that have vast implications like what we’re dealing with here, is to devide the points of interrest (such as free will, future events, ect) as much as possible… in this case i’d like to call the catagories the “Field(s) of Effect”. (FE for short). Omniscience and Omnipotence have certain FE depending on definition. For example, If were to operate with the notion that the future is unknowable we would exclude future events from Omniscience’s FE. and do the “math” anew with this new definition.
I tried to shed a little light on the relationship between omniscience and omnipotence by pointing out that without knowledge of x, one cannot purposefully influence x. which is formally written down as:
Omnipotence → Omniscience
Which means that any FE in which god is omnipotent… he is also omniscient. If god can purposefully create a future (that is to say… have the future turn out exactly as he wishes) he must also have all knowledge of that future. If his omnipotence extends to the future, his omniscience must as well. But since we’re operating with the notion that the future is unknowable… God cannot influence the future purposefully… He may take actions in the present that effect the future… but the exact effects would be unknown to him. In that regard he would be like the rest of us. What could cause this “unknowable future” effect? Free will of course…
Now for the element of Free will… Free will in this system MUST reprisents something “non-mechanical” in order to have any influence on the argument. Meaning that if the principle of causality were to apply to “free will” it would not account for the unknowability of the future… Since knowledge of the past combined with the principle of causality leads to knowledge of the future. Formally noted down as:
X is a subject to Causlity^Knowledge of X’s past and present → Knowledge of X’s future.
From this we can conclude that Free Will must be indipendent of the principle of causality (at least partially)… As such it is, what i’d like to call, a “chaotic element”. This chaotic element is then nessisarily an FE not belonging to omnipotence nor omniscience. Also… this FE would have to exist as an “accidental creation” since none of god’s FEs touch on it. It would be entirely seperate from God. In which case the “chaotic element” would be the only creative power in it’s FE. Reducing god’s infuence on existence below the point of “all powerful” and creating a basis for a creative force outside of him.
Though this understanding might be internally consistent… it reduces god to being a very very powerful creature who is neither omniscient nor omnipotent in the present past or future (by any conventional understanding of what omniscience or omnipotence implies.)… furthermore… he is not the only creative force in existence.
Although I’m not well versed in logic, I will just throw this in there…
Anybody who rejects omniscience including future knowledge must also reject prophecy in all its forms…if God doesn’t know the future, neither do people who are supposedly receiving information about the future from a higher power.
Goodbye Jesus mythology, which is absolutely worthless without prophecy to Christian theology.
Don’t you know a good philosopher isn’t respected until he’s dead, or very nearly so? ") Besides, I’m not arguing with you, I’m investigating your argument to see if we can’t make it stronger. An argument with rigorous definitions can still be inductive, it depends more on the relationship between the terms than the terms themselves.
Well, right- which is why you’d want to limit your argument to some form or another, as broad as you can get away with, I suppose.
Right, but you’re not going to win any awards for beating me in an argument. It should stand alone. Let me take a look though, and see what we got.
I think you’re right about that being the key to the argument, but I don’t know that you’re right about your definitions eliminating the possibility of free will. Consider it chronologically. First, you have an Omnipotent and Omniscient God. I don’t see anything making it impossible for Him to at some point create beings with free will (being omnipotent and all). You could argue that once He did so, the presence of those beings limits his Omni-status to some degree, but isn’t that largely semantic? Couldn’t a believer still make all the usual claims about miracles and Judgment and Creating the Universe, even if you insisted that they come up with some other term for God’s level of power and knowledge?
You seem to be arguing that God would be unable to create beings with free will. I don’t understand why that would be the case, considering He has free will Himself. As far as God being the only creative force, I think that’s always been debatable. Humans are to some degree creative depending on how you take the word. Seems to me that Free Will and Creativity are linked.
True enough… though in this instence. It is most definatly a deductive form of reasoning. Since I take the defined terms and deduce the implication. I do not add or subtract from the definitions… they are in this process considered absolutes.
Deduction is to extract information already contained within the premiss. And that is exactly what is being done with the defined terms in my argument.
It is limited to any understanding of god which includes him being a personal being as well as omniscient and omnipotent.
What I meant by that was that each definition of omniscience or omnipotence must be delt with seperately… and that I would apritiate if I were able to present my case for any definition proposed prior to moving on to another. So that we would not confuse the definitions we are currently dealing with.
I’m not looking to “beat you”… That’s funny though
But as for it’s ability to stand alone… I agree… however a nessisary condition is that I be able to account for all the different aporaches one might take to refuting the argument. Hence posting here and allowing it to be tested.
If it turns out that it can withstand whatever assult you and the other members here can muster against it… I’ll consider writting it down in a more formal fashion.
Not at all… I am not trying to show anything other than the inconsistencies. God might very well be able to create free will. He won’t however be omniscient nor omnipotent if he can do so.
As for the effects of this understanding of god… Aside from the theological ramifications of accepting this perticular notion of god, such as the mentioned issue of prophecies. There would be many many problems to overcome after such an admission.
I will mention one such problem, that I find perticularly difficult to overcome.
The chaotic element which allows for free will… would by all acounts fall into the catagory of “random chance”. Since as it’s core “the chaotic element” must remain UNKNOWABLE it cannot operate in any logical fashion. There can be no mechanics involved… just pure chaotic chance. The interresting thing about this is that it does not allow for “choice” as such… since “freedom of choice” is only possible if it is determined by pure chance rather than a delibirated mechanical process which could be predictable… and thus knowable, therefor not “free”. Claiming that God created such a thing without containing the knowledge of HOW to do so… is a serious problem. If this were to be the case… Well there is no mechanics to speak of… no principle contained within god is simulated or replicated… it is something entirely seperate from him. So either one must relinquish the principle that states “something cannot come from nothing” (which in itself would bring about a mess of problems)… or agree that this chaos element is a seperate eternal, not to mention, creative agent existing alongside with god (Which actully would begin to resemble some of the older religions of the world for which other refutations would be apropriate.)
Another possibility is to maintain that since god himslf has free will… this “chaotic element” exists as part of him… but that would create equally problematic issues. Such as god’s actions and choices. His choices would need to be as random as ours. To some extent controlled by his personality… but with an apropriate element of “random chance”. Making all of the holy texts ever written, suspect and subject to change (if god should change his mind). the notion of judgement and such would be a matter of chance and to put it humoresly… be determined by “God’s mood that day”
There are many many more examples of problems that arise from allowing god to fail the “omniscient and omnipotent” test. which if you wish we could get into in more detail…
As you’ve defined the terms, maybe so. But even given that your argument works, it still has to be relevant. If a theist can completely accept your argument, and still reasonably believe in a God that created and sustains the Universe, created us, did all the particular things listed in their religion and so on, I’m not sure what you’ve accomplished. They’ll just call God “Almighty” instead of “Omnipotent” when you’re in earshot, and that will be the end of it.
Anyways, I’m not sure I even accept a view of God not knowing the future, I’m still up in the air about it. I’m just putting it out there because it’s something I have supported in the past, open theists believe it, and they are pretty influential these days.
Yeah, I've seen arguments to that effect before, and I think they take a presumption of materialism without realizing it. That is, you're saying that if free will isn't mechanical (determined) then it must be completely non-causative (chaotic) because mechanical causation is the only kind you're allowing for. But if you do [i]that,[/i] then it's kind of circular the way you eliminate the sense of free will, since free will [i]just is[/i] an alleged sort of non-mechanical causation. Somebody coming from another perspective would have no problem saying that free will is neither predictable nor chaotic- it's a product of reasoning just as it appears to be, which involves a sort of 'taking things into account' where those things have a special kind of [i]influence[/i] over decisions, but do not necessitate them. If a parallel is needed to avoid accusations of special pleading, one could point to the way strange way evidence 'suggests' a conclusion in an inductive argument, without ever [i]entailing[/i] it as in the case of deduction.
If God has free will, and the process of free will is directly tied to reason, then I don’t see how you could argue that the creation of free beings is entirely separate from God. Again, it seems like you’re relying on a premise that non-mechanical systems aren’t systems at all, which even if you believe, is a unproductive assumptionto make when talking about things like spirits creating universes ex nihilo.
Well, if you start providing a string of examples to lend weight to a particular conclusion, then you’re definitely in the realm of induction. To keep to a deductive argument, pick your best possible example and turn it into a matter of logical necessity.
Well keep in mind that the relevance of my argument differs depending on which religion (and then sect within that religion) it is presented towards… I’m sure calvinists, as an example, would find this argument perticularly unacceptable, given their heavy relience on the logic of god. Many Muslims would simply be unable to grant that god was anything less than omnipotent as defined above… ect. It is all relative.
Personally I have had a few too many arguments in which the implications of what was stated about god were simply not understood by the theist.
If anything I wish to map the logical relationships between what we ascribe god and what we believe exists or doesn’t exist.
What people accept and what makes logical sense are two very different things. Some of those same people who would one minut claim that the future is unknowable would in their next breath claim to believe in the prophecies made in the bible. It’s impossible to reconcile. yet somehow they believe it anyway.
My argument is not meant to make the notion of god impossible… far from it. I personally believe that the universe is an omniscient and omnipotent “thing”… in some sense a “god”. Though, I do not anthropomorphize it in any way.
You sidestep the problem. This is were the error lies “a sort of ‘taking things into account’ where those things have a special kind of influence over decisions, but do not necessitate them.” What then is the deciding force in what influences actually sway you? it is humanly impossible to present a reasonable case for this sort of notion of free will… because it is irrational… we cannot fathom it… The only way to describe something devoid of logic is “random”. that is the word you need to describe it… there is no escaping it… Lest we step into the realm of “intution and mystic voodoo” in which case no rational discussion is possible… once logic is ignored the conversation becomes unintelligible anyway.
I believe i’ve delt with your “free will” argument above.
The only reason god serves as an explination for the existence of… everything else. Is because we firmly believe that 0+0=0. therfor SOMETHING must have been there… something capable of creating. Now either this something created randomly (with absolutely no sense of prupose) or it created purposfully in which case it had to be aware of what it was creating. the knowledge had to exist prior to the creation. if god created “randomly” then “randomness” had to exist for god to rely on it. ect… there are consiquences to either scenario.
as for the value of the argument…
If nothing else… a god who created randomly would come off as rather absentminded.
What i’m striving to show is that “free will” and randomness are tightly connected.
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The nessesity of god being omnipotent and omniscient is often made clear in the religions that ascribe him the qualities. For example, in chrstianity I would say that there is ample need for omniscience as I defined it originally. But understandings of what god is, is as varied as the people on earth… My purpose is to clerify the logical implications and relations of the attributes commonly ascribed to god so it becomes more like an index of which combinations of belief go together and which don’t. A good example of this would be the connection between “omniscience includes future events”, “prophecies” and “Free will”. Hopefully it’s apparent that one cannot have both free will and prophecies at the same time. It would be logically inconsistent.
How screwed would god be if the virgin mother had been killed by her hosband, prior to giving birth? I mean… he might not have believed that she was made pregnant by a ghost and assumed she had an affair… free will… would have screwed it all up… maybe it even failed the first few times… How many hosbands killed the virgin mother before god finally came to Marry, who was a good lier…?
If god does not know what we people will do… then he’s likely to get reactions he did not expect. Such as joe killing marry… Not many believers will submit to that notion of god.
Anyway… i’m a bit tired atm… sorry if the quality of my reply was lacking… I hope this pathetic attempt at humor made up for it…
I disagree that prophecy falls apart if there is no future knowledge, especially since no time frame is given (aside from groups like the 7th Day Adventists). If I say that tomorrow Ucci will eat pizza . . . well, I have no way of knowing whether that is true or not. But that isn’t what most of the prophecies are – since Jesus is God in a very literal sense, the prophecies are more akin to me promising my boss I’ll come in on the weekend. Sure, I might get roaring drunk tonight and not go into work tomorrow, but there is a working relationship between my boss and I about my work attendance. So, when I say that I’ll be in on the weekend, he trusts that I will be. And that is the point of faith – (mutual?) trust.
Then it tosses free will out the window, because God would have to line the circumstances up for them to become true. And with most prophecies, they are unlikely occurrences. It wouldn’t be very miraculous if somebody had a prophecy about something that was inevitably going to occur anyways.
So either God knows the future, or he’s playing with others’ free will to make the future.
Not to mention their insistence on predestination (no real free will), which has problems in addition to the ones you describe here.
Well, the problem is that it’s not irreconcilable, because you can’t make deductive conclusions about the actions of free beings very easily at all. That’s why I wasn’t bothering with Dorky’s point when he raised it. Maybe when God makes a prophecy, He’s willing to intercede in the world especially to make it come true, or maybe there are aspects of the future that are easier to guess at than others, or maybe a million different things. Trying to argue from a being’s general description of powers to what they are are capable of doing is a particular situation is fruitless. You may as well try to argue deductively that based on my familial obligations and the amount in my bank account, it is ‘logically impossible’ for me to wind up in Ohio by this time tomorrow. Of course that’s not true. The Problem of Evil has the same problem- trying to make deductive conclusions about what a person is allowed or capable of doing isn’t going to work.
By nature, there isn't 'a deciding force' beyond the will or it would just be another kind of determinism. That's what I'm saying here- you're demanding free will to define itself in terms of determinism, which isn't relevant. It's in your wording 'what influences actually sway you'. You're phrasing it such that the person is a passive element being acted upon by forces, one of which (or some combination) dominates. That's back to the determinism paradigm again, and has no place in analyzing a contrary view.
The example I gave was induction. It’s not random, and it’s also not logical.
1.) I have seen 1,000,000 black crows.
2.) I have seen no crows of any other color.
3.) The next crow I see will be black.
That’s a very illogical argument, it’s patently fallacious. But the conclusion isn’t at all random with respect to the premises, I’m sure we can agree on that, right? The way in which we ‘take into account’ 1 and 2 to arrive at 3 despite no logical necessity (and despite the fact that 3 could be wrong) I think mirrors the way the will works. Not exactly, but close enough to set a precedent.
I’m not so sure the prophecies are all that outlandish, really. From what I understand of them, some dictator will rise up and from there God will start whupping some butt. Now, I’m no sage, but I don’t think that suggesting that a totalitarian dictator will arise again in the future takes any special powers. Which one? Well, can’t God make that call when the time comes?