[cardguy]

Anyone answer this?

Does God have the power to overcome the laws of logic?

So - could God make 1 + 1 = 3?

Or could God make a 4-sided triangle?

If we imagine that even God has to respect the laws of logic then does that make God an agnostic?

Let me explain my reasoning.

As fellow Red Pillers - I am sure we are all aware of the film 'The Matrix'.

As such - we are all familar with the idea that even though we are maybe 99.99999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999​99999% sure we are not living in a Matrix. There is still a 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000​00000001% chance that we could be.

It is an old idea - dating back to Descartes - that everything we think we know is wrong. And that we could be trapped unaware in some kind of phantom world where our sensory inputs are manipulated by a higher power.

Anyway - when considering such thought experiments - it makes one relaise that it is logically impossible to ever be 100% certain that you can be sure about anything. No matter how certain you are of something (like the fact that you are sat in a room reading this on a computer) - there is a tiny tiny tiny chance it could all be an illusion. And you could - for example - be a disembodied brain lying in a vat with false sensory inputs being fed into it.

So - with the idea accepted that it is logically impossible to be 100% certain of anything does that mean even God himself (if he existed) would have to accept there is a tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny chance thet what he thinks he knows is incorrect. And his position as God could possibly be a decpetion which he has fallen for?

Is there anyway for God to be 100% certain that he Himself really was God? I don't see how this is possible if we accept that even God has to respect the laws of logic.

So - if even God has (technically speaking) doubts about his own existence - does that make God an Agnostic?



And if God doesn't have to respect the laws of logic (since he is THAT all-powerful!) does that mean logically inconsistent statements would apply to God. For example does that mean God exists and doesn't exist at the same time? Or some other weird ass logically inconsistent statement we could think up?

[Roadrunner]

[Mage]

You better ask this question to God not us.

But speculatively God certainly has some things impossible to him. Therefore he has a nature. Some say God has a loving and mercyful nature, some say God is cruel, while others say that it is just a force that makes the laws in nature absolute. But God sure has a permanent and unchanging nature that limits him otherwise he would be Chaos. So probably God is the highest law of nature that there is. Or maybe there is no God or God has no nature, which makes him equiavalent to Chaos which is equivalent of there being no God.

In Christian theology God cannot do evil for instance. To me the Kaballah makes most sense of all teachings about God and it teaches that God is unchanging and impersonal. Only we change and trough to our own changes we perceive God (if we perceive any providence at all) as changing and having it's own changing disposition against us, while really only we are tcahnging our disposition against him. Similary how the fire is a blessing if we usit to warm ourselves or a horror if we burn ourselves.

So trying to bribe God with prayers or tears or giving to charity is an effor in futility. Only way we can get something from him is by changing ourselves, not by trying to change his will towards us.

[StarcraftGG]

Yep, answered already approximately 2500 years ago.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lewis-rich...69189.html

[le prince perdu]

Who said that creation doesn't have to respect the laws of logic?

The laws of logic and creation are but the same thing.

[Malekhit]

Let me answer with this video called "Science saved my soul"

and we all should know that 1=0.99..... therefore 1+1 = 1.98.....

[polymath]

Malekhit you might want to check your math there.

2=1.9999999999999999 repeating

2!=1.98 repeating

[soup]

I am god, and I say yes.

Don't ask me why.

[xsplat]

Start with a meaningless question and you'll get meaningless answers. Garbage in, garbage out.

Is the Great Spaghetti Monster confined by logic? Ummm, there is no Great Spaghetti Monster except in our imagination.

[Ziltoid]

What can God do?
He can help people rectify their subjective narcissistic survival instincts with their objective meaninglessness in the universe and ultimately their mortality.

“When it occurs to a man that nature does not regard him as important, and that she feels she would not maim the universe by disposing of him, he at first wishes to throw bricks at the temple, and he hates deeply the fact that there are no bricks and no temples.” - Stephen Crane, The Open Boat

Some people can handle the truth; for those who can't, religion is the opiate.
Stay calm and keep working, there's a big theme park in the sky afterwards!

[hoops330]

How much weed did you smoke before posting that one?

[Thomas the Rhymer]

For humans to speculate on the nature of God is like watch ants speculate on the nature of quantum physics, or like colour-blind people speculating on the nature of redness.

God is outside of our scope of cognition.

[PooHammer]

This is GOD!!!!

--->

[Abe Lincoln]

I think Occam's Razor applies here. Just adding the word 'God' in doesn't do anything. 2+2=4, the sun comes up in the east, etc. Adding something else to the equation like God or a little green demon doesn't explain anything.

You have to take as a given that everything you see around you exists. I'm comfortable with that. I can deduce that every animal has ears because 'sound' exists or has eyes because existence exists etc. It's not logically impossible to believe anything. Stop eating and you will starve .. I dare you to test it! The thing that is troubling is finding meaning without believing obviously false things. Maybe believing false things, if it makes you happy, is better than being an unpleasant 'realist' who doesn't enjoy life like it should be enjoyed. Clinging to the idea that there is a higher power that cares about 'you' is silly but then, if it makes you more productive, pleasant, determined and so on, then why not? There's a very good reason this kind of thinking developed -- survival value. Like Neitzche said, religion is the herd instinct in humans. People are inclined to group up and agree with each other and that develops into religions (including the chai latte-sipping crowd who are as religious as any Christian).

Deep thoughts for a Friday night

[xsplat]

(06-01-2013 12:31 AM)Thomas the Rhymer Wrote:  

For humans to speculate on the nature of God is like watch ants speculate on the nature of quantum physics, or like colour-blind people speculating on the nature of redness.

God is outside of our scope of cognition.

Which is 99.999% the same thing as saying that there is no god. There is no nameable god. There is no god that fits into our linguistic narrative. There is no concept of god that can ever be accurate. There is no such "thing" as god.

Whatever god may be, it is not and can not be what we think, imagine, and we can not even give him a domain of unknowing within which to contain him.

Outside our scope of cognition is more than just agnosticism - it means that for all practical and reasonable purposes and for all purposes of communication he is outside of our ability to think or communicate about - he does not exist in any linguistic way. As we equate our linguistic mind with understanding of reality, without linquistic reality there is basically no reality to god.

[TheKantian]

(05-31-2013 10:26 AM)cardguy Wrote:  

Does God have the power to overcome the laws of logic?

Which laws of logic? For instance, people take "logic" to be classical logic, i.e. propositional logic and predicate logic, to be the only logical systems, but that's not correct. There are other non-classical logics where certain "laws" are not held. For example, intuitionistic logic does not have the law of the excluded middle, i.e. P v ~P. This actually does affect mathematics and from this there is a non-classical mathematics. It's not as popular but it exists.

Another example is a contradiction in classical logic is that if you have P and ~P then by the inference rules of classical logic you can actually derive any well formed formula. However, in paraconsistent logic a contradiction does not necessarily lead to any well formed formula being derived.

(05-31-2013 10:26 AM)cardguy Wrote:  

Or could God make a 4-sided triangle?

A triangle is definitional, so by definition there cannot exist a four sided triangle.

As for the rest the standard assumptions of God are usually omniscience, omnibenevolent, and omnipotent. I would suspect the rebuttal to the question of 'Does God Know He is God?' would be, well yes, he's omniscient and thus all knowing. BUT...philosophy of religion and the whole God debate is not my area of interest, so that's my best guess.

[Goldin Boy]

Well assuming that the Christian God is real. He could never be wrong. If he created the world he could make 1+1=3. Why? Omnipotence. It's like playing a game of basketball and I decided to make all you three point shots -2 points instead b/c you're winning. If God created everything, that includes logic and our capacity to grasp it lol.

I don't think there's a God. Like Soup, srsly, I think I'm my personal God. I control my own life trajectory and answer to no one and to me that is God-like.

[Jeans]

I majored in philosophy in college...if i recall the, 'can god break the rules of logic' question was an issue of debate amongst those who gave a shit about the question, but the vast majority of people came down on the side that he could not. You can't be a bachelor and also be married, you can't have a 4 sided triangle.

I am pretty sure just about every theologian would, however, agree with the claim that god can have 100% certainty about all states of affairs past, present and future. unless, maybe, you believed in god, but agreed with j.l. mackie that the problem of evil makes it logically impossible for there to be entity both all knowing, and all good, and all powerful. you could take the view that god is all good and all powerful, but not all knowing. that would be a weird view though.

[Roadrunner]

Assume there is no god and work from there. If you find evidence to the contrary then and only then should you believe there is a god. The burden of proof lies on the side that is affirming existence.

[cardguy]

Omnipotence creates it own paradoxes as well:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omnipotence_paradox

[Goldin Boy]

(06-01-2013 08:36 PM)cardguy Wrote:  

Omnipotence creates it own paradoxes as well:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omnipotence_paradox

Interesting but allow me to retort. Assuming there's a God, he can do anything(hence omnipotence). He can't make a rock that he couldn't lift as he just continually make himself strong enough to carry it.

Going back to my basketball example, I'm changing the rules as the game it's being played as God could do. If such a being does exist, he's beyond the reach of our logic, which is why this is a paradox.

[cardguy]

Here is something else I don't understand.

Why is monotheism so important to all the believers of the world's major relgions?

I am an atheist. But let's imagine there was a God.

Well - what if instead of one God there were two? To me that would be no big deal. Whatever weird and wonderful process which enable God to come into being - could just as eaisly apply to two Gods who came into being at the same time.

Having two Gods is fundamentally no stranger than just having one God. Yet all the religious people I know react in horror to the very idea.

Just wondering why this is such a big deal for religious people? There doesn't seem to be any philosophical reason as to why it should be of concern.

[Sherman]

Atheism believes in materialism which basically says that everything is material (or energy) and there is nothing else beyond that. That also means that your brain is material and fully explained as a biological machine and there is nothing beyond neurons passing electrical energy. The implication of this is that the subjective you who thinks and feels is not real. Materialists say that your thoughts and feelings are an epiphenomenon. But for most people, the most real thing to them is their thoughts and their feelings. It's our personal experience. But atheism say that it is not real, but just an illusion. In other words, in the materialistic world view, you don't even exist. A stone is more real then you are. You are an epiphenomenon. Do you buy that? Do you think a philosophy that can't explain our own existence and take it seriously is deficient? After all, the goal of philosophy is to explain everything.

[cardguy]

I agree with a recent article in Slate magazine

Too many Atheists are ducking the biggest question of all.

Why is there something instead of nothing?

http://www.slate.com/articles/life/the_s...festo.html

Still - it is interesting to note that the total energy content of the universe is thought to be exactly zero.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-energy_universe

The idea which was used up in the big bang to create all the matter we see in the universe - is slowly being paid back in the from of gravity (which is in effect negative energy).

So - the Big Bang is like a massive bank loan which will take 40 billion years to pay back.

[Mage]

(06-01-2013 10:05 PM)cardguy Wrote:  

Here is something else I don't understand.

Why is monotheism so important to all the believers of the world's major relgions?

I am an atheist. But let's imagine there was a God.

Well - what if instead of one God there were two? To me that would be no big deal. Whatever weird and wonderful process which enable God to come into being - could just as eaisly apply to two Gods who came into being at the same time.

Having two Gods is fundamentally no stranger than just having one God. Yet all the religious people I know react in horror to the very idea.

Just wondering why this is such a big deal for religious people? There doesn't seem to be any philosophical reason as to why it should be of concern.

This is easy.

The state or the government consists of many people, but you use these words to speak in single tense. Out of conceniance you say "government" not "governors"

The same is with God. Nobody knows from how many persons/forces God consists, we just use a word that we can to speak in single tense.

This is the philosophical answer, but this is not the reason religions zealosly claim that there is only one God. The old pagan religions that were divided between pantheons of gods had constant inner struggles form different pollitical forces trying to prove that one god is superior to others for political reasons. Also you could be a freethinker and stop sacraficing to the great politicized Gods and adopt some minor diety from the pantheon as your personal guardian. So monotheism gave greater central authority to the religious priest class who acted as voices of the single god. This also contributed to monotheistic religions growing larger and conquering the more divided polytheistic ones.


But don't tell any of those reasons to a fanatically religious person! They will only accept the answer that this is so because Bible/Quran is telling so. (altraugh there is the plural (Gods) used in Bible, a christian has trained himself to not see such weird things in Bible)