If God must be omniscient, God doesn't exist
this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2024
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For the record, I don't believe an omniscient being exists.
But omniscience isn't disproven by describing a paradox. The paradox is observable and definable, and therefore knowable. This doesn't disprove God any more than an Escher painting disproves architects.
Exactly. Omnipotence does not actually include the ability to do impossible things, contrary to popular definitions. It means to have unlimited power, which could be used to do anything that’s possible to do.
Like, imagine if you had access to infinite electricity. You could do godlike things with that, even create black holes. But you still couldn’t create paradoxes.
The thought of that is pretty hostile to religious definitions of God, however.
Well put, I really like this thought and never came across it before.
Yeah, maybe said another way, no matter how much energy you control, you still can’t make 1+1 equal to 3. You could convince a high percentage of people that it’s true, and smite anyone who says otherwise. But deep down, paradoxes are beyond even God.
So think of the laws of physics as the rules in a video game. You can jump X feet, you can throw 2 fireballs at a time. The developer is generally bound by those rules, but he can also modify the source code whenever he sees fit. If he wants to push an update that allows him, and only him, to jump X+1 feet, nothing is stopping him.
Right, but 1+1 still cannot equal to 3 in that video game. You could do all kinds of horrible tricks to make it seem so, but they are just that - tricks.
Paradoxes are by definition impossible, even in a modified version of physics.
When you modify the rules to make the impossible possible, it ceases to be a paradox
I guess I didn’t explain very well. Basically there are some things which are still impossible even if you change the rules. This remains true even beyond full control of the properties of the universe.
This all interests me very much. In the analogy of the game developer, they are still bound by the rules of the computer system and the universe it runs in and potentially the programming language it is written in. Also, skill.
Taking that into the analogy, a God who is omniscient by our standards but limited by the capabilities of something outside of our understanding is honestly a more reasonable explanation to me than most conceptions about free will or whatever.