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Point 1. If God exists then magic exists. Point 2. If magic exists then the laws of reality are meaningless Point 3. If the laws of reality are meaningless then nothing can be proven. Conclusion 1. Therefore all proofs must assume that God does not exist.
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Dec 16, 2014 08:34
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 17:48 |
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Fair enough, either way. To my mind that wording comes across as a little strong, but it effectively means the same thing in this context. Also, I forgot my corollary. It follows so directly from Conclusion 1 that it hardly bears mentioning, but I find that it drives home the point: Conclusion 2: Therefore the properties of any alleged god cannot be known. In short, while one cannot disprove the unknowable, it is clear that if a god exists then we can know nothing about our world, or about that god, or whether or not there are more gods. At that point, the idea of asserting God with a capital G (i.e. the Christian/Jewish/Islamic deity), much less asserting a specific religious tenet (Catholicism, Protestantism, Mormonism, Sunni, Shia, etc.) is patently incredible. Back in antiquity when people didn't know much about their world, and broadly accepted the concepts of polytheism and magic, such religious assertions made a lot more sense. But after thousands of years, wherein scientific understanding flowered rather than imminent apocalypse, and the large majority of religious beliefs were discarded without divine incident, those claims ring far more hollow. They no longer fit with the world that we live in. Kaal fucked around with this message at 20:34 on Dec 16, 2014 |
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Dec 16, 2014 19:25
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Ernest Hemingway posted:Definitions for 'God', 'magic, and 'the laws of reality' are needed in order to give this fair treatment, but I think I have a few challenges without them: A being who simply has extraordinary qualities is not God. Humans have extraordinary qualities compared to ants, but we are not gods. A god that merely functions normally is no god at all, and it certainly is not the Abrahamic God. quote:- It is impossible, even for an all powerful God, to break 'the rules of reality'. e.g. No being, however powerful, could create a world where a thing exists and simultaneously doesn't exist. Then such a god is not omnipotent by definition, and therefore not the Abrahamic god. Tangentially, we create worlds where things exist and yet simultaneously don't all the time. We call them video games. quote:-Magic, even if it granted the wielder unimaginable and absurd causal powers (e.g. snapping one's fingers and creating a galaxy), would not contradict or break the rules of reality. It would break (or merely complicate) the 'rules' of science - but science deals with causality and causality is not a law of reality. Science deals with the laws of reality. Causality is a fundamental law of our reality. Magic is a violation of causality and therefore a violation of both science and the laws of reality. These are not contradictions. quote:A magical God then, would simply be an additional causal agent in the universe, albeit an unpredictable one. She could be as active as she wanted, but you could rest assured that 1 and 1 would still equal 2, all bachelors would remain unmarried, and any other formal proof would still hold. I think that you again are falling into a trap of your own devising. You are presupposing a deity of your own creation, and your own limitations. A magical deity, whether they are the Abrahamic God or not, would certainly be capable of bringing into question fundamental proofs like 1 + 1 = 2, or that all bachelors are unmarried. In the Bible, Jesus uses five loaves of bread and two fish to feed a multitude - this is a clear violation of mathematical certitude. Also in the Bible, the virgin Mary gives birth to a child, which is a clear violation of a definitional quality. Indeed it is clear that no proof can truly be safe when magic can effect fundamental changes at any time. I suppose what I'm basically saying is that while one can consider a being that is not magical and violates no laws of reality, but at that point they are no longer a deity and are certainly dissimilar from what this thread is about. Dahn posted:What if reality is limited by the things we are capable of perceiving/measuring. If our entire reality was represented by a line, and that line existed inside a sphere. We only have a concept of the line, our "observer" (the you that is you) is limited to the line. We can only affect or observe the portion of sphere that intersects the line. Something that exists in the sphere and could interact with, and affect everything in the sphere (which includes our line) would seem very God like and limitless, even if it were simply limited to the sphere. It's pretty much impossible to prove or disprove the existence of extremely advanced aliens who exist in a sixth dimension and are capable of acting acausally in our own reality without our notice (i.e. Interstellar). But I can tell you that if those aliens existed then we know nothing about our reality, and nothing can be certain. And I can say that those aliens do not resemble the Abrahamic God, nor any of the religious deities asserted throughout history. Kaal fucked around with this message at 15:30 on Dec 17, 2014 |
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Dec 17, 2014 09:58
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Ernest Hemingway posted:In the meantime I will claim that broadly speaking, we can say an omnipotent being is "a being that can do anything". I don't find it overly controversial to interpret the phrase to mean "A being that can do anything that can be done", however it is unintelligible to interpret it as meaning "A being that can do anything including those things that can't be done" e.g. Could God trisect an arbitrary angle with a straight edge and a compass? No, because it is impossible to do so, and it is nonsensical to state otherwise. This doesn't serve as a limit on her omnipotence, it only establishes that power functions in the realm of logical possibility. That's all great, but the non-magical, non-omnipotent, logic-abiding, being that you are talking about is not a god. And she certainly is not the Abrahamic God. To put it shortly, God does not pull levers. quote:Furthermore, the examples you've provided do not violate the laws that you allege they do, i.e. Christ's never ending bread basket makes no scientific sense, but is still perfectly logical. Him having one loaf in one moment, then two in the next moment, then five in the next, etc. is fundamentally different from proving that 1+1=5. I think that your biblical knowledge might be failing you there. In the miracle of the five loaves and fish, Jesus lands his boat at Bethsaida and sees that a crowd of 5,000 men, as well as women and children, have gathered to wait for him. He has only five loaves of bread and two fish, but he looks up to heaven and then breaks apart the loaves and hands the pieces out into the crowd, and when all is said and done everyone is full and there's food leftover. One should remember that the story was created before multiplication, which is why the story is written in such an illogical manner, but it's clearly a case of 5 + 2 = 5,000+.
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Dec 17, 2014 20:08
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