Is there a God?

[Psychic Robot]

so we're back to arguing about definitions of omniscience and omnipotence.

lol

so you disprove the existence of an omnipotent or omniscient god through logical loopholes. this only works on people who have been indoctrinated into believing that such simple descriptors completely encompass the nature of God when in reality they are convenient shorthand. so God can't microwave a burrito so hot that He can't actually eat it. good work!

so we redefine God to be omnipotent with the caveat that He has no weakness (that is, "omnipotence" refers to limitless power versus the logically paradoxical trait of literal omnipotence).

bonus points: if God is omniscient and knows everything, then He has always known exactly what He will do. and if He has always known His actions in advance, He cannot do anything other than what He knows he will do. therefore, God lacks free will. prove me wrong.

[Username17]

bonus points: if God is omniscient and knows everything, then He has always known exactly what He will do. and if He has always known His actions in advance, He cannot do anything other than what He knows he will do. therefore, God lacks free will. prove me wrong.

That one is easy enough to be stupid. If something exists outside of time, then there is no predestination because there is no "later". All actions are made essentially simultaneously on all parts of the timeline, so every action is equally "chosen" whether it is seen by linear observers as before or after another one.

The point about omniscience and omnipotence is that they are logically impossible. A religion would be on easy ground claiming that their god was "very powerful" or even "more powerful than you could possibly imagine". But that isn't the Christian apologetical claim. They claim "power without limits" - which can't even logically exist because logic defines a number of incredibly tautological limits on power.

Which is actually very different from what their own holy book claims, which is the existence of a god that actually isn't all that powerful and can literally be defeated on the field of battle by iron chariots. But the religion and the holy book have... diverged over the years. Like how Christians eat pork and rarely eat locusts.

-Username17

[RobbyPants]

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.

When I first read this, I thought it was a bit of an over generalization, but it might have more truth than I initially thought. It's hard for me to objectively evaluate what I really did and didn't believe back when I was a Christian, because I do remember having a lot or problems with it for years before I finally was willing to admit to myself that I didn't believe it. I engaged in a lot of apologetics to stave off cognitive dissonance, which worked for a while. But I honestly couldn't tell you what I really believed other than "I wanted to be right".

Similarly, I'm not sure what my wife believes. We've had discussions periodically (she's still Christian), and I never really got into the nuts and bolts of it with her when I still believed. So I don't really know what she believed in then; I just have the context of her responses to me as an atheist. I just know that she has no problem redefining her religious beliefs to make them fit in with what she wants. For example: she believes God speaks to people in different ways, so people of different religions can still get into heaven. I guess it's still strictly a No-Atheists club. Later, when talking about hell (and why an all loving God would send people there), she said she's not even sure there is a hell, and that it might have been a scare tactic. I'm not even sure she even believes the Bible is the "true" holy book, as she scraps a lot of it.

The point about omniscience and omnipotence is that they are logically impossible. A religion would be on easy ground claiming that their god was "very powerful" or even "more powerful than you could possibly imagine". But that isn't the Christian apologetical claim. They claim "power without limits" - which can't even logically exist because logic defines a number of incredibly tautological limits on power.

Just my own personal experience, but most people I talk to about it seem to have no problem shifting the goalposts and simply calling God really powerful. My wife is a big fan of handwaving true omniscience in favor of free will.

But the religion and the holy book have... diverged over the years. Like how Christians eat pork and rarely eat locusts.

Actually, the whole pork thing is because Jesus specifically said that people didn't have to worry about eating kosher anymore.

[Maxus]

But the religion and the holy book have... diverged over the years. Like how Christians eat pork and rarely eat locusts.

Actually, the whole pork thing is because Jesus specifically said that people didn't have to worry about eating kosher anymore.

Emic/etic explanations? I've always thought the kosher injunctions against pork and shrimp and shellfish were because no one had worked out how to cook them safely every time. Which meant that if you brought the dietary laws, you would likely get sick and people would say "See! He broke the law and he's being punished!"

Although it is interesting how all the Leviticus laws are backed up by a threat of horrible punishment here.

[Username17]

But the religion and the holy book have... diverged over the years. Like how Christians eat pork and rarely eat locusts.

Actually, the whole pork thing is because Jesus specifically said that people didn't have to worry about eating kosher anymore.

Not... exactly. He said that people did not have to follow the oral torah with regards to the washing of hands before a meal and that putting food into your mouth with unwashed hands would not make you unclean. He also says that he is not changing one word of the written torah.

But a lot of people take the thing about "What God has made clean cannot be made unclean by the hands of man" thing as permitting people to eat shellfish. It's a fairly tortured reading of the passage, but if you have to come up with a tortured piece of quasi-legalism to eat a cheeseburger, I understand.

-Username17

[Orion]

While Jesus may not have explicitly said cheeseburgers were on the menu, God does say so pretty explicitly in Acts.

[Chamomile]

Can someone please explain to me why just because people can be predicted means they have no free will to act at all? There are several people I know well enough to predict a lot of their responses with pretty good accuracy. There is one person I knew well enough to predict her responses with accuracy so high it actually surprised me when she convinced me to test it. But none of these people acted as they did because I determined their actions in advance, or because their actions were determined in advance and I was privvy to the script.

Am I missing something?

[Kaelik]

Free will is an incoherent concept. So what the fuck hell do you mean "not have free will" because the answer depends on the definition, and the most common definition of free will is "EEERRRRR????? Oh shit, I have to define words before I use them, fuck this!"

[Psychic Robot]

That one is easy enough to be stupid. If something exists outside of time, then there is no predestination because there is no "later". All actions are made essentially simultaneously on all parts of the timeline, so every action is equally "chosen" whether it is seen by linear observers as before or after another one.

and with that you have nicely disproved the omniscience paradox of free will.

Can someone please explain to me why just because people can be predicted means they have no free will to act at all? There are several people I know well enough to predict a lot of their responses with pretty good accuracy. There is one person I knew well enough to predict her responses with accuracy so high it actually surprised me when she convinced me to test it. But none of these people acted as they did because I determined their actions in advance, or because their actions were determined in advance and I was privvy to the script.

Am I missing something?

predictions don't. knowing, in theory, does. but as frank explained above, it doesn't.

[DSMatticus]

and with that you have nicely disproved the omniscience paradox of free will.

That was dumb. Not as in, 'that was slightly wrong,' as in 'this entire conversation is over your head.'

Let's cover the two cases:
1) God is not outside of time.
2) God is omniscient.
3) Blah blah blah, god knows what you're going to do, ergo what you're doing must be predestined, no free will.

1) God is outside of time.
2) God is omniscient.
3) To god, every event has the appearance of being simultaneous. At the same moment you are born, you die. And that happened at the same time he created the universe.
4) The fact that he saw you are born and die simultaneously means that nothing you do inbetween can affect your death. Because there literally is no between.
5) Blah blah blah, god knows what you're going to do, ergo what you're doing must be predestined, no free will.

Whether or not god is a entity that exists in traditional time is irrelevant; because we exist in traditional time and omniscience makes predictious about us. If it has a 100% accuracy rate when making predictions about us, we are necessarily deterministic. If we are deterministic, the course of our lives has been predetermined from since the universe began.

Can someone please explain to me why just because people can be predicted means they have no free will to act at all? There are several people I know well enough to predict a lot of their responses with pretty good accuracy. There is one person I knew well enough to predict her responses with accuracy so high it actually surprised me when she convinced me to test it. But none of these people acted as they did because I determined their actions in advance, or because their actions were determined in advance and I was privvy to the script.

Am I missing something?

predictions don't. knowing, in theory, does. but as frank explained above, it doesn't.

I can't actually find who said this. I want to respond, though.

Prediction is not causation, but prediction implies determination; if you can predict things with true 100% accuracy, the system is 100% deterministic. If the system is deterministic, then there can be no room for "free will," except the free will to choose to do all the things you were going to do anyway since the moment the universe began.

If god can make predictions about the universe with true 100% accuracy, then every choice every person would ever take was decided at the moment he created the universe. The events of our lives were predetermined before we existed.

[Chamomile]

Free will is an incoherent concept.

Okay, whatever. That means that free will is no impediment to the existence of an omniscient being, because it doesn't exist in the first place. Moving on.

There are questions I could ask of certain people and be absolutely guaranteed to receive a certain, specific answer, which I can predict in advance, yet I have not determined that answer for them.

Thus:

1) God is not outside of time.
2) God is omniscient.
3) Blah blah blah, god knows what you're going to do, ergo what you're doing must be predestined, no free will.

3 does not follow from 1 and 2 alone. You'd first need to explain the difference (besides scale) between my being able to predict answers to trivial questions and being able to predict more important and complicated decisions, on up to being able to predict everything about everyone just by knowing them really absurdly well.

But, naturally, you aren't going to do that, and that isn't even a function of whether or not you can. You're just going to whine about how you think I'm wrong while completely ignoring my actual point, so I'm going to go ahead and ignore your response altogether, being that you've proven entirely incapable of differentiating between someone who is genuinely curious about the issue and someone who is defending the opposite argument.

But if anyone else wants to plug the gap in the logic, I'm listening.

1) God is outside of time.
2) God is omniscient.
3) To god, every event has the appearance of being simultaneous. At the same moment you are born, you die. And that happened at the same time he created the universe.
4) The fact that he saw you are born and die simultaneously means that nothing you do inbetween can affect your death. Because there literally is no between.
5) Blah blah blah, god knows what you're going to do, ergo what you're doing must be predestined, no free will.

4 is nonsense. You are not born at the same moment that you die, premise 1 simply posits that God can observe both of them simultaneously. The in between still exists, just like there is in fact a gap between Florida and Texas even if it's possible to get high enough as to observe both of them at the same time, and theoretically possible to observe all things in them with perfect accuracy at the same time.

[DSMatticus]

Okay, whatever. That means that free will is no impediment to the existence of an omniscient being, because it doesn't exist in the first place. Moving on.

The judeochristian religion posits the existence of both, which is why the contradiction exists. Omniscience itself isn't a logical contradiction (though some people have said as much; I have no idea why). But the idea "you can know everything in advance with perfect accuracy" and "the future is undetermined" are completely incompatible. Those both cannot be true.

which I can predict in advance, yet I have not determined that answer for them.

No, you haven't. That's completely correct, but that's because that's not the actual argument. If god can make predictions about our future with 100% accuracy, then our lives are deterministic. If our lives are deterministic, there can be no "free will." (You can define free will as something trivial and meaningless here to get around that, but it's not a satisfying answer because you're basically saying buttons have the free will to move when pushed.)

Omniscience -> determinism, determinism -> ~free will. It's not that you decide things by predicting them. The fact that you can predict them implies they are already decided, because if they weren't you wouldn't be able to predict them with 100% accuracy.

3 does not follow from 1 and 2 alone. You'd first need to explain the difference (besides scale) between my being able to predict answers to trivial questions and being able to predict more important and complicated decisions, on up to being able to predict everything about everyone just by knowing them really absurdly well.

No, I don't. If you ever reach the point where you can make 100% accurate (truly 100% accurate, mind you) predictions about something, that reveals that the underlying mechanics of that thing are deterministic. Omniscient entities can, by definition, make 100% accurate predictions about everything. That implies that everything is deterministic. Once you have everything is deterministic, free will becomes incompatible with the universe. As above.

4 is nonsense. You are not born at the same moment that you die, premise 1 simply posits that God can observe both of them simultaneously.

You are mixing perspectives here. Time is linear to you, so when you are born, to you your death has not happened. However, to god time is non-linear, and when you are born your death simultaneously happens. Which means that when god made the decision to create the universe, he had perfect information about your life and he knew the inevitable outcome.

The problem here is that god interacts with the universe; the two aren't disjoint entities. If god takes action on the universe at some linear time moment X yet during that moment of action is simultaneously aware of every moment after X, then every moment after X is deterministic. If you propose an omniscient god who exists outside of time and literally does nothing to the universe, then free will can hold.

A god who exists but doesn't do anything ever at all is logically consistent with pretty much anything. But that's nobody's god.

P.S.

being that you've proven entirely incapable of differentiating between someone who is genuinely curious about the issue and someone who is defending the opposite argument.

I apologize for responding politely and informatively first time around. Next time I'll make sure to tell you you're a stupid dickhead a few times while I'm explaining to you why you're wrong.

[Dr_Noface]

Having a deity sounds fucking exhausting. Why don't people drop the whole god thing and just champion a cause or philosophy?

Unrestricted domain choice, people.

[Josh_Kablack]

I simply cannot reconcile that any being worthy of worship would create such a poorly-designed world. You don't even need to disprove "all-good," or "all-knowing," or "all-powerful" when the criteria of minimal competence has not been met.

That depends on how you define competence

[Quantumboost]

Having a deity sounds fucking exhausting. Why don't people drop the whole god thing and just champion a cause or philosophy?

Because the in-group that they want to be a part of holds that a God of a particular type exists. Humans go to all sorts of lengths of self-deception to "belong" on an instinctual level. I'm told that many humans actually find that to be less exhausting than dealing with the social defiance and ostracization, and also less exhausting than lying only to other people.

That usually causes an affective spiral a.k.a. "circle jerk". And religions are one of the oldest persistent, superhuge social groups with philosophical requirements on Earth.

Oh, and also, normal people are crazy. Can't forget the crazy part.

That depends on how you define competence

Shit, I need to get me some bioware squid eyes now. Or genengineer 'em into a kid. Wonder when they'll be able to do optic nerve hookups...

[Gx1080]

[Grek]

@DSM: I know people from the Gaming Den has trouble with reading any post that isn't an acerbic pool of vitrol calling their mothers cock sucking whores, but I already made a post about free will vs. determinism. Since you seem to have agreed with it back them, but are advocating the exact opposite now, I can only assume you don't actually read what other people write.

"free will" is a bad concept. The "free" part translates to ~deterministic and the "will" part translates to ~random. The logic tree goes like this:

1. F -> ~random & ~~random; by definition of "free will"
2. F -> ~random & random; removing double negation,
3. ~random & random -> ~F; by principle of noncontradiction.

So if "free will" means anything at all, either the "free" part is consistant with determinism, or the "will" part is consistant with pure randomness. I'm going to assume that you're smart enough to figure out why "someone who does something purely at random with no correspondence to the outside world" is not what we mean by "has free will", and let you work out the rest from there.

[Orion]

Rorschach was a Christian. Your argument is invalid.

[Quantumboost]

"free will" is a bad concept. The "free" part translates to ~deterministic and the "will" part translates to ~random.

Flaw with this argument (false dichotomy): You can have a RNG hooked up to a deterministic decision-making process that uses the RNG for part of its decision-making. If that RNG is a source of true randomness (i.e. not the pseudorandom iterators used in most software RNGs) that matches both the "free" and the "will" parts - different parts of the algorithm, but they're both still there.

Disclaimer: I don't believe free will actually exists or is sufficiently coherent to be a useful concept, but the above argument doesn't have anything to do with it.

[Kaelik]

I don't know what's funnier, the part where GX thinks it's mean of the mean atheists to shove themselves into a thread called "Is there a God?" made by a possible atheist on a message board composed mostly of atheists, or the part where he thinks the statement "Doesn't the fact that you reference God make you believe in him?" is actually persuasive.

I of course assume he means "mean" instead of "make" because I'm being generous, but it's still hilarious either way.

[Grek]

It's not a dichotomy at all. If you claim, as DSM does, that anyone who's decision making is deterministic does not have "free" will, then you're also saying that the "free" part means "not deterministic". Since that would imply a contradiction, you shouldn't claim that anymore once you notice the contradiction. Free will has to at least allow for some degree of non-determinism if it doesn't allow for determinism, and it has to allow for some degree of determinism if it doesn't allow for non-determinism. It can have both deterministic and non-deterministic aspects, but it has to allow for a minimum of at least one.

[DSMatticus]

Grek, I seriously don't get your point. Let me start off by saying free will is a stupid concept and does not actually exist in any meaningful way. But this has nothing to do with the discussion being had. That discussion is specifically concerning omniscience and free will, and the argument looks vaguely like this:
1) Assume omniscience and free will.
2) Free will (whatever definiton we give it) implies you can affect the outcome of your life.
3) Full determinism implies the outcome of your life is determined before you even exist.
4) If the outcome of your life is decided before you even exist, you cannot affect it.
5) Free will and full determinism are a contradiction.
6) Omniscience implies full determinism.
7) Free will and omniscience are a contradiction.

If your point is that "free will is a stupid concept to begin with," yes. Free will isn't just inconsistent with omniscience, any definition people would actually like to use is pretty much inconsistent with itself and/or reality. But this is a discussion specifically about theology, and Judeochristian religions specifically assert both omniscience and free will, and that leads to an obvious and easily established contradiction. The fact that free will is a contradiction itself is less obvious, and it's one way of attacking theology, but it's not very compelling because SOUL or something stupid.

If your point is that, "DSM's definition of free will is dumb," yes. All definitions of free will are dumb, because free will is not a thing that exists. If you have a definition of free will that makes any sense at all and doesn't have these problems, fire it off. For example, "free will is the act of choosing to do the things that fulfill the deterministic predictions" is an example of free will that doesn't have this problem. It also ascribes free will to thinks like rocks, lightswitches, and computers, so who cares?

So... yeah. I've gotta say again; what's your point here?

[Psychic Robot]

That was dumb.

I've learned that when you say something like this, you're about to post something really retarded. You have not failed to disappoint.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

I probably said this before but I'll say it again:

Anyone who gets me a job that pays 75% of the local median income for the area and gets me a regular mating partner (one really good one is preferable, but I'll accept multiples of a lesser quality as a substitute) gets to convert me to their religion. Which pretty much rules out any of the abramaic religions because they teach that one should do what the guy in charge says without question or reward...

[DSMatticus]

I've learned that when you say something like this, you're about to post something really retarded.

That'd be more insulting if, any of the times you'd said it, you could follow it with a response that isn't ass. Or any response at all. If you just want to troll, do us both a favor and shut up.