From: (Anonymous)	Date: January 14th, 2003 09:45 am (UTC)		(Link)
Attributing our limited knowledge and understanding to God?

That may be true of beings who are finite, but it breaks down when you're talking about the One who is infinite and created all things. People make the same mistake when talking about the omnipotence of God. "Can God create a rock so heavy that He can't lift it?" The question is based upon an assumption that God has limitations. And, yes, I suppose there is a sense in which it is a "limitation" for God to not be able to create a rock so heavy that He can't lift. His "limitation" is only do to His exceeding power. This "limitation" pales in comparison to what He can do: He can keep making bigger rocks and yet still lift them. This process could go on without end. That's power.

The God who created what we call reality, logic and so on, is not bound by the limitations we have. The problem some people have when contemplating God is that they very frequently can't think beyond human potential or limitations. They operate under the "God must be like us and subject to the same limitations we are" misconception, to one degree or another.

	From: vexen	Date: June 11th, 2003 04:42 am (UTC)		(Link)
	Re: Attributing our limited knowledge and understanding to God?

So... tell me again how you think God could be omniscient, all I heard was "if logic disproves god, logic must be wrong!", which to me sounds more like an emotional response than an intellectual one.

From: (Anonymous)	Date: April 8th, 2003 01:31 pm (UTC)		(Link)
You don't know what it means to be omniscient

Why would an omniscient being such as God have to ask himself questions?

An omniscient being would know if it was omniscient, in fact only a truly omniscient being would know that it was omniscient. If it had any doubts, if it had to refer to external sources for verification then it would not be omniscient would it?

Now on the other hand you could try to challenge a being's claim to omniscience by asking it questions and if it failed then it's claim was a lie. However, even if a being was able to answer every question that YOU asked it is not enough to prove the being omniscient.

But the fact still remains that omniscience is not a logical impossibility, which means that God could still be omniscient. Assuming you believe that God exists (as I do).

	From: vexen	Date: April 8th, 2003 01:52 pm (UTC)		(Link)
	Re: You don't know what it means to be omniscient

Such a question-and-answer session would only reveal what the being knew. The ultimate question I pose is, "How does it know that it knows everything?"

If there is something it has missed and does not know, then it does not know everything. But, how does it know that it itself hasn't missed anything? It doesn't. It can't know. It is impossible to know that. Therefore, omniscience is impossible.

From: (Anonymous)	Date: April 28th, 2003 07:31 am (UTC)		(Link)
God is omniscient

God knows the future of what the free will creatures choose. Free will does not stop becoming free because God knows what will happen. For example, I know that my child will choose to eat chocolate cake over cauliflower. If I were to set them both before my child and turned to my wife and said, "We know which one she will choose, don't we?", this is not taking away the freedom of my child. Likewise, for God to know what a person will choose does not mean that the person has no freedom to make the choice. It simply means that God knows what the person will choose. This is necessarily so since God knows all things.

If God does not know there is evil, he is not omniscient [all-knowing]. If God knows there is evil, but cannot prevent it, he is not omnipotent [all-powerful]. If God knows there is evil and can prevent it, but desires not to, he is not omni-benevolent [all-good].
This is where your story flaws. God knows of evil, God can prevent evil, and the reason he allows evil is so that we might learn as individuals. This does not mean God does not care, or that he is not omni-benevolent. God wishes we would choose the write (CRT) To say that God desires not to prevent evil is to say that “you wouldn’t let your children learn.” For is it not true that you have to let your own children fall befor they learn to walk on there own?
If, as the Christian claims, God is all-knowing and all-powerful, we must conclude that God is not all-good.
I just proved this false. The existence of evil in the universe excludes this possibility. Therefore you are incorrect.

cjclds@hotmail.com

	From: vexen	Date: April 28th, 2003 08:07 am (UTC)		(Link)
	Re: God is omniscient

1) Child/Chocolate
Why would a child chose chocolate? Because it is in the nature of the child. Now, culture and upbringing can override that nature. The genetics of a child, and the culture and way it is brought up is all set up and created as part of an endless chain of events by God. God created the universe, set it up so that mankind would evolve with the genes that we have: these genes determine our behavior, as does our culture. These things are not free-will-chosen by us.

God, as all-powerful and all-knowing, yet also the being that created the chain of cause and affect that result in us making "choices", denies us free will.

2) Theodicy
You presented a theodicy of experience as a justification for gods creation of evil. Tell me, what do you think happens to babies when they die very young? If they go to heaven, then this "experience of evil" is not necessary. Also, God could simply give us an innate knowledge of what evil is like, without us having to experience it. Thirdly, there is no logical reason why our development and learning has to involve the knowledge or experience of evil. Your theodicy does not logically stand as a reason for why evil exists unless you can show how it is logically possible for a being to /require/ experience of evil in order to develop... and, if there is such a requirement, why does god let babies and the unborn die?

	From: vexen	Date: April 28th, 2003 05:14 pm (UTC)		(Link)
	Re: God is omniscient

From: (Anonymous)	Date: December 7th, 2003 06:14 pm (UTC)		(Link)
Re: God is omniscient

Because there is sin, and therefore problems with the world. Tell me, back in The Garden of Eden, assuming that it was true, was it the society that willed Adam and Eve to eat that fruit from the garden of good and evil? No... remember... there was no society. There was no predecessor to the pair. But they wanted it. That was their free will. Were they encouraged by the snake? Yes. But was the choice still there? Absolutely. Did God know? Yes. But why would God create us as robots? Why would He send His son, Jesus Christ to die on a crucifix if He made it all happen? Does that even make sense: to create a world where ultimately it would lead to His own pain and suffering. No...it really doesn't, and if you can make it sensible...do tell me about it. ~Missy

From: (Anonymous)	Date: June 11th, 2003 03:46 am (UTC)		(Link)
omniscience

your argument is silly!
im an atheist but assuming hypothetically god is divine creator etc blah
then god caused everything and has causative knowledge of creation (read some aquinas)
then it logically follows god knows everything, because god created all there is to know.
your argument suggests there was knowledge before god, which doesnt make sense if you consider god as tri-omni being.
and why would god doubt something about god's own knowledge?

	From: vexen	Date: June 11th, 2003 04:39 am (UTC)		(Link)
	Re: omniscience

How does God know that it created the Universe? It could have been tricked by a more powerful being that it created the universe. It can be said of *any* being that it could have been fooled into thinking it is omniscient, but it cannot verify absolutely that this is true... therefore it doesn't know.

However, there is a big concession that has to be made here. (For part 1 of the argument, part 2 still stands despite the following:) All-powerful means that God can do everything that is logically possible... for example, it can't create square circles because it's logically impossible. Omniscience could also mean that God knows everything that it is possible to know. This would still provide god with enough knowledge to be effectively omnipotent[1], but still concede that some things (like attempting to verify ones own omniscience) are logically impossible to know.

[1] Unless you hold that God, who created quantum uncertainty, has built it an utterly unpredictable element into reality itself, and for example cannot (illogically) know both the precise speed and location of a particle, etc.

From: (Anonymous)	Date: June 12th, 2003 04:07 am (UTC)		(Link)
Re: omniscience

"it could have been tricked by a more powerful being that it created the universe."
"it could have been tricked" is simply, non-philosophy. by any reasonable defintion of god eg perfect, it cant get "tricked". this is somewhat symbolic of your website as a whole, where you view the god of classical theism from an overly-anthropocentric viewpoint. (read some stuff about religious language, especially about the problems of uniovcal approach to discussing god)
->god doesnt "know" (in the human understanding of "know") god is omniscient.god simply *is* omniscient, being suigeneric.

and then you postulate "a more powerful being"...which is simply moving the goalposts...
1) if god is id quo nihil maius cogitari posset, by definition, there cannot be a more powerful being, and your argument falls apart.
2) this is a somewhat academic point in light of 1) but hypothetically, if there was a "more powerful being", then THIS being would have causative knowledge of all of its creation, and therefore this would be what we call god and thus er...be omniscient because there's nothing else to know.
"but what if that being got tricked too?"
"and the one that tricked that one got tricked too?"
"and the one that tricked..."etc...
wherever you end up, your "chief tricker" will be the divine creator
and please dont make any silly claims about an infinite number of trickers...theres always going to be the one at the top.
like an infinite number of railway carriages cannot go anywhere without an engine (mackie)

and finally...i like your site-interesting religion youve got going there. but do you subscribe to an anti-realist or realist concept of truth?

	From: vexen	Date: June 12th, 2003 04:37 am (UTC)		(Link)
	Re: omniscience

My website is aimed at organized religious belief, and I am discussing the belief in god... my arguments are in particular NON-anthropocentric, and I use the errors of homocentricity as part of the reasoning against common beliefs in god.

In our belief of "God" as infallible, we neglect to think of the problems I have highlighted. The goalposts then do move, to the "trickster", the next being up... but the point is delivered that many of our beliefs in "god" need to be questioned in this fashion.

1) The argument is that an all-powerful being is internally inconsistent. And... I don't know any latin, though I'm guessing from the context that it was actually superfluous to the sentence.

2) This infinite regression of maybes means that with any particular notion of god, it is impossible to state with certainty that it is the most powerful, omniscient being that deserves to be called "supreme".

I am not anti-realist, and am a mostly ordinary atheist, materialist and naturalist. Which I guess means I'm a realist.

Would a solipsist be an example of an anti-realist? - or a quantum physics no-reality mystic?

From: (Anonymous)	Date: June 15th, 2003 05:08 am (UTC)		(Link)
Re: omniscience

re-read:
1) "If a God was to sit down and ponder the problem of epistemology and wonder whether it does not everything or not, it would realize that it has no way to verify that this is true."
and 2) " my arguments are in particular NON-anthropocentric, and I use the errors of homocentricity as part of the reasoning against common beliefs in god."
this is contradictory to a comical extent. you're claiming that a god would "sit down" and "ponder the problem of epistemology" (...just like any human would...) and then claiming that your arguments are "NON-anthropocentric". how else are we meant to understand how god should "sit down...etc"? please explain, clearly, how the thomian understanding of god (ie roman catholic philosophical position) would do this, considering it is, by definition, timeless and spaceless.
you're "using the errors of homocentricity as part of the reasoning against the common beliefs in god", and then committing the same fallacy!
and you still haven't answered 1) and 2) properly; you're still understanding an all-powerful being as just like any other being that you've come across (hence anthropocentric error) rather than a perfect god which is the source of all knowledge. if god is, by definition, the source of all knowledge, then a priori, there is nothing more to be known. and therefore, by definition, it can't get "tricked" (again, you're understanding the idea god as potentially being deceived in a human fashion), because it is, to repeat, the source of all knowledge.
and 2) misses the point; whatever you decided is at the top is still god -the infinite chain is irrelevant; anyway, it's purely academic, because your argument about "being tricked" is anthropocentric nonsense.you're still understanding "god" as a regular human being, just up in the sky somewhere.
and being an anti-realist or a realist in a theological sense doesn't correspond to whether you're atheist/theist/whatever, or how "realistic"/pessimistic/optimistic you are; it's how you understand the concept of "truth". here's a snippet from someones essay i copied from some essay site:

"However, there is an uncertainty as to what concept of truth religious language should ascribe to. In The Puzzle of God, Peter Vardy identifies what he considers to be a key debate within contemporary philosophy of religion. This is labelled the “realist /anti-realist” debate, in which the two opposing lines of thought are divided by their respective visions of reality.

As Beverley Clack writes in her article Introducing Anti-Realism, the arguments that attempt to establish the existence of God depend on acceptance of the claim that any meaningful concept of God must be one where God is more than simply an idea in our minds. That is, God exists, or does not exist, beyond our form of life, and therefore must be understood as in some way distinct from human life and culture. An anti-realist would disagree with this, claiming that the concept of God tells us far more about human beings than it does about the possibility of some divine Being. In an anti-realist state of affairs, any claims about God hold some truth if they are coherent within the same form of life. As Wittgenstein claimed as part of his Language Game theory, all religious statements are only true in an anti-realist sense, because they can only be held as true within a certain “game.” Realists such as Plato would disagree, claiming that absolute truths exist beyond our spatio-temporal world. This is part of his Forms theory." and then rambles on

keep up the good work mate!
tara tara

	From: vexen	Date: June 15th, 2003 07:33 am (UTC)		(Link)
	Re: omniscience

Thanks for your brief explanation of some of the terminology of position of some philosophers, I have not studied philosophy so they are useful to me.

1) As I am writing in English, to an English audience, I find that phrases such as "sit down" are appropriate, and do not imagine that an omnipresent being could either be "sit down", "stood up" or have need or want to do either.

What I am talking about is God as theorized by human beings, by organized religion, which makes claim to an omniscient god. It is not merely a human claim that beings can be tricked, it is a logical possibility that what presents itself to us as "god" merely thinks it is god, but might not be due to a more powerful being merely using god as it's puppet (for whatever reason).

In reality this would make this god not the supreme creator, just a secondary (or tertiary, etc) creator. But it would still think it was god and have enough power & intelligence to act as one. It could be prevented, however, from knowing about the more powerful being by the more powerful being.

To rephrase my "if an omniscient being were to sit down...", an omniscient being would automatically and instantly have an inherent doubt of it's own knowledge as it would know it cannot verify that it is the most powerful being, knowing that it could be controlled be an even more powerful being which hides itself.

Is that Sir Peter Vardy, head of the Vardy Foundation, by the way? The institute that runs a fundamentalist creationist school in the UK, and is on the verge of getting permission to open another? I actively encourage people not to buy his books, cars or support his organisation (or him) at all, he scares me!

From: (Anonymous)	Date: June 16th, 2003 10:47 am (UTC)		(Link)
Re: omniscience

hi there;
ok we'll agree to disagree-- i still reckon that if all knowledge stems from an infallible/perfect/whatever you wanna call it - god, then i consider that there's nothing else to be known, and then there would be no logical need for that inherent doubt. and also, i don't think that god has to be worshipped, or whatever, so theres no need for that side-swipe against organised religion. tho pisses me off too at times.
but if "god" was "tricked" (i still can't see how this would occur, a priori) what would you call the "more powerful being"? a better god? and would this be omniscient?
and peter vardy; there's two!
there's the author of lots of philosophy/theology books guy:
http://www.heythrop.ac.uk/fac/vardy.html
and then there's the evil fuck who propounds fundamentalist christianity. and cars. and should be shot.
but back to the point, im assuming it is the former whose books are used because the latter is prob more interested in cars.and money.and selling fundamentalism (maybe harsh, but i think thats fair).

	From: vexen	Date: June 16th, 2003 11:03 am (UTC)		(Link)
	Re: omniscience

There's two of them? Damn, life is complicated enough!

We can agree to disagree.

The chain of more powerful being(s) would also be gods of sorts, but it would be impossible from our (or their) point of view to declare at any particular point that "the buck stops here" (to borrow a phrase from Washington, God's most capable militants :P)

It is primarily the god of organized religion that I debate against, the god of monotheistic traditional world religions, hence most my arguments stop at the point where standard monotheism breaks, such as when we logically arrive as polytheism, open theology, an evil god, etc.

All my initial text from 1998 onwards was only geared towards fundamentalist Christianity, but recent text (2000 +) is increasingly more general... but still geared towards Islam, Christianity, Judaism and standard white light monotheism.

From: (Anonymous)	Date: December 7th, 2003 06:16 pm (UTC)		(Link)
Re: omniscience

When we say God... we mean "Ultimate Being" ~Missy