Is there a God?

[fbmf]

The Straight Dope adopts a very un-Straight Dope like stance. Though now that I think about it, there was that article about how Santa could theoretically exist.

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/rea ... here-a-god

Game On,
fbmf

[Kaelik]

Luckily for me, clearly God exists, because I already decided that if you accept that a computer is God, this computer exists.

I HAVE SOLVED THE GREATEST PROBLEM EVER, AND I DEFINITELY DIDN'T JUST REDEFINE THE QUESTION INTO MEANINGLESSNESS!

Also, the part where everyone just sort of assumes that because many things in the universe are contingent, therefore everything in the universe is contingent, still wrong centuries later.

[Josh_Kablack]

There are several. See Elvis, Nepalese Kumari, Dead dogs at the bottom of a well, etc.

However, it is multiple shades of impossible for any of them to possess the characteristics commonly ascribed by western theism.

Can an Omnipotent god make a rock so big he cannot lift?
Either way, they are not all-powerful

Can an Omniscient god know uncertainty?
Either way, they are not all-knowing

Can an Omnibenevolent god blah blah blah evil blah limited human understanding blah blah?
Either way, you're sucked into a vortex of theology and academic masturbation over an entity who already faces two paradoxes of existence before you even got there.

[RobbyPants]

Also, the part where everyone just sort of assumes that because many things in the universe are contingent, therefore everything in the universe is contingent, still wrong centuries later.

For some reason, people love the first cause argument.

Can an Omnipotent god make a rock so big he cannot lift?
Either way, they are not all-powerful

Can an Omniscient god know uncertainty?
Either way, they are not all-knowing

Can an Omnibenevolent god blah blah blah evil blah limited human understanding blah blah?
Either way, you're sucked into a vortex of theology and academic masturbation over an entity who already faces two paradoxes of existence before you even got there.

I think most people tend to short change one of the three facets to make it make sense to them. The most common I've seen is Omniscience. That comic is probably the best representation I've seen of Theodicy so far.

[Daiba]

Kaelik is right. A number of arguments, First Cause included, use the following scheme:

• 1)Define god as something trivial.
  2)Prove the existence of this trivial god.
  3)Assert the existence of a non-trivial god.
  4)Plug ears and laugh at the atheists!

It's too bad that having a trivial definition of god (god is this dinner plate, god is a mythological figure in various religions, god is the big bang, god is the concept of virtue) makes you an atheist.

[JigokuBosatsu]

I think the problem is that people want to use a single, limited personal definition of God to back up their arguments about a general unlimited God.

[Gnosticism Is A Hoot]

-Double post, oops-

[Gnosticism Is A Hoot]

Fry lays it down.

That is all.

[Kaelik]

Also, the part where everyone just sort of assumes that because many things in the universe are contingent, therefore everything in the universe is contingent, still wrong centuries later.

For some reason, people love the first cause argument.

Yeah I know. Probably the most common argument. But as I said, still based on a faulty premise.

[DSMatticus]

Can an Omniscient god know uncertainty?
Either way, they are not all-knowing

This doesn't really make sense. I think you have a really weird definition of omniscience, or it's a play on words. What does it mean to know uncertainty? Uncertainty isn't a unit of information. You're doing this weird thing where you count abstract representations of related but non-concrete information as knowable things. I.e., can an omniscient god know turtle? Can an omniscient god know spoon?

There's an omniscience paradox that arises when you introduce free will, though, obviously, and there's the problem of evil. Those completely hold. (The stone one is a little sketchy. There are more rigorous definitions of omnipotence that avoid it that are still very omnipotent-y.)

The problem with first cause arguments is that they never manage to pick up any godly traits. So even if you grant a first cause argument, the ultimate conclusion is "ergo, there was a first cause." Not, "ergo, there was a first cause and it was GOOOOOOOOOOOOOD."

[Josh_Kablack]

Okay, you're here, so you probably play D&D. That means you roll dice all the fucking time.

Now as a human, before you roll dice, you do not know what the outcome will be. You might have a probabilistic understand of potential outcomes, but you do not know which number will come up.

As an omniscient being, you know what the outcome of the dice roll will be, because you are omniscient and therefore know everything. That means that as an omniscient being you do not know what the experience of being a human rolling a die with an uncertain outcome is - except that's impossible because you are omniscient and must know everything. So if you are omniscient and know the outcome, you cannot be omniscient because you can't know experiencially what it is to not know the outcome beforehand. Conversely if you are omniscient and don't know the outcome beforehand, you know what it's like to be uncertain about an outcome, but you don't know the outcome so you cannot be omniscient. That's a paradox.

Like all of these Paradoxes, it has been debated extensively be philosophers and theologians, and I could go on about how "a being who exists in non-linear time" or an "omni-temporal being" can get around it, and then I can counter that by arguing how the entire study of probability itself cannot make sense to an omniscient being regardless of temporal ordering and then I can counter that by arguing that it's theoretically possible to have enough data about the forces and materials involved to perfectly predict the flight paths and spin of dice and perfectly predict their outcome from mechanical data and basic physics, but then I can counter that by arguing about radioactive particles and whether atomic decay is random, psuedo-random or stochiastic and so on and so forth.

[CatharzGodfoot]

That's a false paradox, Josh. Knowing experientially is not a requirement for the (admittedly dumb) idea of "omniscience". The omniscient being simply knows. We don't have to know how.

[Maj]

It's too bad that having a trivial definition of god (god is this dinner plate, god is a mythological figure in various religions, god is the big bang, god is the concept of virtue) makes you an atheist.

[snarky]

With this statement, don't you realize that the monotheists have won?

By defining any other version of God as "trivial," and explaining the believers away as "atheists," you are implicitly acknowledging that the only real God is OOO. Congrats... You just fell for the First Commandment.

[/snarky]

[Kaelik]

Yeah Josh, that's not really a thing.

There is nothing logically impossible about God knowing the outcome of the dice, and also knowing what it feels like to not know the dice.

Sure, he's never experienced the feeling himself, and that's how we know what it feels like, but he also never saw the dice result, and that's the only way we know the dice result.

He already knows the dice result because of magic, so why can't he know how it feels to be in a situation he is not in through magic.

If you don't accept that an omniscient God can know what it feels like to be in a situation he is not in, then why don't you say "God does not know what it feels like to die." Or "God does not know what it feels like to wear a pink shirt (as a homophobic guy)."

Those are also things God has never and can't experience, but must still know if he is omniscient.

It's too bad that having a trivial definition of god (god is this dinner plate, god is a mythological figure in various religions, god is the big bang, god is the concept of virtue) makes you an atheist.

[snarky]

With this statement, don't you realize that the monotheists have won?

By defining any other version of God as "trivial," and explaining the believers away as "atheists," you are implicitly acknowledging that the only real God is OOO. Congrats... You just fell for the First Commandment.

[/snarky]

Maj Stop being upset about how you are an atheist. It's not something to throw a shit fit over.

Zeus is totally a God, he just also doesn't exist.

But the universe isn't.

[DSMatticus]

As an omniscient being, you know what the outcome of the dice roll will be, because you are omniscient and therefore know everything. That means that as an omniscient being you do not know what the experience of being a human rolling a die with an uncertain outcome is - except that's impossible because you are omniscient and must know everything.

Experiencing an event and information about an event are two separate things. But it's also trivial to establish that you can model experiencing an event through the information about the event, and god knows all information. So an omniscient god has every bit of information there is to have about uncertainty, including what information represents the experience of uncertainty you and I might feel. But he will never personally experience uncertainty. But the assertion isn't that god is omni-experiencing, it's that he's omniscient, so who cares?

The best way to think about omniscience is: "Given any solvable question, an omniscient god can provide the correct answer." What question would you ask concerning experience that is solvable yet he would not know the answer? You can't ask him "what does uncertainty feel like?" Because he can say: "Assuming you mean what does uncertainty feel like for human beings in general (your question wasn't quite specific enough), then it feels like BLAH and STUFF." Or something similar. If you ask him, "what would it feel like for you if you could feel uncertainty?" he can either give you an actual answer ("I made man after my image, so I would respond to uncertainty by making poor decisions because I am bad at probability") or say, "that's undefined, the initial premise 'if I could feel uncertainty' is a logical paradox and the question is unsolvable."

[angelfromanotherpin]

Can an Omnipotent god make a rock so big he cannot lift?
Either way, they are not all-powerful

That's a failure of imagination. With omnipotence, it is by definition possible to transcend the straitjacket of logical consistency. The rock simply gets to be immovable and easily juggle-able at the same time. The same goes with knowing ignorance and allowing free will.

The difficulty actually goes the other way: once omnipotence is part of the picture, the theist argument ceases to be falsifiable at all - and is thus meaningless.

The worst part of that argument is that if God really is all-powerful and all-good, then we really do live in the best of all possible worlds and all the stomach-churning suffering of human history is a necessary part of that. That's grotesque. The idea that the Nazis and the Inquisition were not terrible mistakes but literally the best we could do is appalling. A universe where the Christian God exists is worse than a universe where he does not.

[Psychic Robot]

my face when this argument is getting thrown around like it's something new and original:

Can an Omnipotent god make a rock so big he cannot lift?
Either way, they are not all-powerful

so let's say God can't do that. oh well he's not omnipotent. what's your point? in fact there are verses in the Bible corroborating that God cannot lie. HOLY SHIT MIND BLOWN

[Gx1080]

Old discussion of this shit:

http://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=51615& ... start=2725

(Spoilers: Atheists lost)

[Count Arioch the 28th]

I think there might be entities of great power and wisdom in the universe that perhaps we cannot perceive directly, but I don't think any of them are like the Abramaic deity. I think that the likelihood of a mish-mash of a roman mystery cult and semitic mythology would be the one, true way is very low.

[Kaelik]

Old discussion of this shit:

http://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=51615& ... start=2725

(Spoilers: Atheists lost)

Spoilers: Only you and PR think that. So it's really just like every single argument on the internet.

[Dr_Noface]

Does anyone here know anything about Christianity or Islam? Is God* supposed to be interacting with us in a meaningful way?


*the name may vary?

[Username17]

Does anyone here know anything about Christianity or Islam? Is God* supposed to be interacting with us in a meaningful way?


*the name may vary?

That depends on whether you're talking about what they actually say to each other and believe or whether you're talking about the "sophisticated theology" that they trot out when trying to win arguments against atheists. In their actual theologies, their God is in fact an active participant. Not just in the personal lives of individual believers, but in the day to day workings of literally every single thing everywhere. That is what expressions like "God willing" mean. The idea that God personally fucks with absolutely everything all the time and is in fact omnipresent and omnipotent and every single thing that ever happens no matter how inconsequential or important is in fact directly caused by God. So anything that happens, or could happen in the future, happens only because it is the Will of God that such a thing happens.

Now, you may have noticed that if that were true that you're living in a Skinner Box crafted by someone who literally knows every single thing you would choose when presented with any possible set of stimuli and crafts literally every piece of stimuli you experience for the express purpose of eliciting such a response. And while such a thing is not logically impossible or anything (albeit kind of depressing to contemplate), it is logically incompatible with any meaningful amount of the "free will" that Abrahamic religions constantly wank to. And the moment some Atheist points that out, the Christians and Muslims start busting out the "sophisticated theology".

The difference between regular theology (the actual crap they actually believe) and sophisticated theology is that the sophisticated theology is created for the purpose of being hard to refute by sophisticated people. That means that God instantly stops being a giant bearded leprechaun in the sky that has real effects in the real world and would thus be in some way testable to being a "God of the Gaps". That is: God stops having any and all traits that are in any way falsifiable and the things he (or possibly "it" depending on how "sophisticated" we're getting) controls or even effects are relegated to crap that is for whatever reason currently outside the reach of observation.

So while the actual theology version of God is someone who is a giant glowing bearded White dude who is going to purge the Earth in the "very near future" and lead all of his followers into a giant zombie dance (which is why Christians and Muslims have to be buried whole, so they can be backup dancers during the giant Thriller remake in the very near future), the "sophisticated" version of God only ever did or does anything very long ago, very far away, or in a manner so subtle or tiny that it is completely indistinguishable from not existing at all.

And no, I don't actually think they believe in the sophisticated theology version of their God, because it's trivial and unworthy of worship. The actual heavenly father that they actually talk about in their actual church services would actually be worthy of worship, but since it demonstrably does not exist they are forced to get increasingly "sophisticated" during any discussion with people who ask tough questions.

-Username17

[Koumei]

Frank, does this mean that Sophisticated God's powers get more limited the more we are able to test and observe? That he could do whatever he wanted on, say, Saturn, until we built a telescope big enough to look at Saturn?

I'm trying to figure out where that fits on the Pokemon weakness chart. We already know he's Not Very Effective against Steel types (thus presumably is Psychic or Ghost).

Or does this just make him an Electron, which are known to stop working in strange ways once you look closely at them?

[Username17]

Frank, does this mean that Sophisticated God's powers get more limited the more we are able to test and observe? That he could do whatever he wanted on, say, Saturn, until we built a telescope big enough to look at Saturn?

Yes.

For an example of this in action, check out the awesome cognitive dissonance of Biologos talking about the God of the Gaps problem.

Unlike a God-of-the-gaps argument, the argument for fine-tuning uses science without divine action to reveal the impeccable precision of our Universe.5 Fine-tuning is described in terms of physical constants and the initial conditions of our universe. Fine-tuning does not try to draw attention to where science has failed, but rather emphasizes how science has revealed the intricate balance of the universe.

See? It's totally different. They are not trying to beat science to find gaps, they are arbitrarily redefining absolutely all evidence science ever discovers as being evidence for God! Thus, since no matter what naturalistic mechanisms science ever discovers, it will always be interesting, they are pretty sure that gap will never get filled in. Because it's a gap that is vaguely defined enough that the fact that it continually shrinks as science marches on is less obvious.


-Username17

[Lago PARANOIA]

1.) Why is there a distinction made between omnipotent and omniscient anyway? Doesn't omnipotence imply omniscience?

2.) What's the big deal about First Cause anyway? There are events in the universe that are (as far as we know) literally uncaused like radioactive decay.

3.) How in the fuck does a soul work anyway? If you get shot in the head and die horribly apparently your soul still has 'your' personality and identity and whatever minus brain damage but if you get shot in the head and die several years later after slowly descending down the ladder of brain damage your soul reflects you being brain damaged?

4.) Doesn't an omnipotent god necessarily imply that horrid Calvinist predestination doctrine? If you as god know that Joe Blow is going to go to hell 350 years later (because you're omnipotent and omniscient, but that kind of prediction is possible with regular human understanding so w/e) but you let nature take its course and Joe Blow goes to hell, how is that different from determining that Joe Blow will die?