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.
Yeah, not tracking the meme, but we can articulate paradoxes with things like the Christian god, which basically just pitches their own lore against itself.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epicurean_paradox
While obviously unsatisfying the resolution to the Epicurean paradox is that evil serves a good purpose that is unknown to us but known to God.
Like a child screaming when a cut is disinfected by a parent. The pain is incomprehensible to a small child. So we too are "small spiritual children", and the grotesque pain of the world serves as some sort of refining process that is incomprehensible to us.
Or so the thinking goes..
Disagree - that implies God is all knowing and all good, but not all powerful. If he was all powerful, he wouldn't need to resort to using evil at all, even it's just a tool to accomplish good.
If he was all three, the child wouldn't be cut in the first place.
That very much depends on what "good" is
We can't come to the debate with our Western humanist ideas as assumptions as that's very much begging the question. We are bound to conclude god is a contradiction if we start with a value hierarchy that's independent of god. Because that is, out the gate, inconsistent with what god even claims to be.
"god" is not just a cosmic dictator in a temporal position of great power (and therefore judged the way we judge a boss). The theological claim is that god defines reality itself. And must therefore necessarily be at the root of value hierarchies. "Goodness" in that view really is defined as "gods will and purposes" and nothing else. As to take any other view first necessitates conceiving of an existence independent of god, which necessarily involves setting oneself up as an independent judge of values and sets one on a course to conclude what one has assumed.
Hypothetically then, if one enters into that "god" reality, then the concept that evil is used to achieve the greatest good (and this is not capricious or wasteful but rather ideal) becomes consistent.
As you say, one can conceive that infinite power would surely find a way to avoid pain, but that assumes that pain does not, in some way, achieve the goodness of god's greater will
And that is Epicurus' assumption- that the greatest good is achieved in minimising pain. Whereas the theological view is that there may be something integral and fundamental in reality itself (that is, god's being) wherein the suffering of pain is necessary in order for us to achieve the greatest end according to god's purposes. Be that transformed into a "child of god" or made more similar to god or have one's soul "refined" in some sense ready for a future existence.
That's a solid assumption though: the claims that define 'god' come from the religion, not from the supposed being itself; it isn't necessary to speculate at the possibility of some theological grand plan that isn't established by the religion's own lore. Choosing to unnecessarily make someone suffer / experience pain is pretty core to the concept of evil. If it's integral to reality or some shit, then the being that made that reality either doesn't care (not all good) or it's unable to whip up an alternative (not all powerful). Every single attempt to explain away the Epicurian paradox just moves the goalposts from the point currently in the spotlight in a way that opens up one of the other two.
You have again assumed that care for the individual trumps anything else and then tried to add 'god' to that worldwide and then concluded with the contradiction that you assumed in the first place
The god of Abrahamic religions does not care about individuals above all else and never says that it does. It cares about its own glory because it is the only uncorrupted being. As a part of magnifying that glory it "loves" the world, but that is very much on its own terms and definitions.
Pain is presented as a necessary consequence of god being good and - crucially - god is the only possible source of the definition of "good" (in that worldview), everything else, your own independent common sense included, is corrupted
All this causes an inward revulsion obviously, I'm just trying to present the alternative train of thought as clearly as possible
Does god not have the power to care for both?
You're doing the goalpost thing.
I'm not sure how that's moving goalposts. The two issues seem fundamentally connected.
I don't think it's an issue of capability, god is supposed to be capable of all things, pain free world included. It's a question more of will.
God could have willed the world another way, or not at all, and still have been completely satisfied. But he has chosen this way because it's his will and god tells us it's good. If he regards his will as good, why would he change it to another?
That's what I mean by moving the goalposts. You just shifted it to support all-knowing and all-powerful by unchecking all-good. If god could have willed our world another way and chose not to, he created and continues to facilitate evil, and is thus malevolent.
I understand what you're saying, but respectively I didn't uncheck the "all good" box. I pointed out that there are two definitions of "good" in play and so the statement "god is all good" is meaningless without further inspection.
If we use god's definition of good then the "all good" remains checked because god gets to define goodness itself and whether or not he wants pain to be necessary to achieve good.
On the other hand if we use our sense of good, then the question is begged because it establishes a hierarchy of values that does not have god at the top and then concludes god is a contradiction. But this is inevitable from our assumptions that there is such a thing as an infinite moral authority yet there is also our moral authority which is better.
In short, I think the Epicurean statement is a pithy way of saying god fails our human standards (which is true, by the way). But then religion doesn't claim god follows our human standards in the first place, so it all seems a bit pedestrian.
Redefining 'good' to whatever it is you speculate may be cooking in Zeus's noggin isn't going to dodge the Epicurian paradox, it just changes it to god can't be all three of 1) all-powerful, 2) all-knowing, 3) all-whatever-the-fuck-word-god-chooses-to-use-to-label-the-concept-of-the-thing-we-call-'good'.
That's like arguing that the thing you're looking at right now isn't a screen, because maybe god calls it a chipmunk instead.
This isn't about labels, but the substance of the thing itself
god can be "all good" if the definition is different to the one you or Epicurus is using.
To restate what I said above, all Epicurus is really saying is "god can't be all powerful, all knowing and fully good according to Epicurus' definition of good."
For the Epicurean paradox to work one has to assume that his definition of good is both correct and universal. That's all I'm pointing out.
I'm not trying to needlessly spilt hairs; abrahamic religions are quite up front that god's idea of goodness is different to 'human goodness'.
So whether or not the statement makes sense depends entirely on whose concept of goodness you assume at the outset.
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.
Are you claiming architects are real?
You really expect me to believe that some aRcHiTeCt designed your house? Were you there?
Paradoxes do however undermine concepts of omnipotence or omniscience. Absolutes do not hold. And religion runs around squirting absolutes out of its ass everywhere.
I don't disagree with your criticism of religion, but semantic absolutes are like mathematical infinity, you can approximate the concept, but standard logic fails when discussing the actual thing. It's the inverse of dividing by zero, because a set that includes everything necessarily divides everything else into nothing.
Consider the infinite hotel. You work at the desk in a hotel with infinite rooms. There's always room for more guests. But then an infinite bus pulls up with infinite guests. Good luck they came to you, because you're the only hotel that has room for everyone. Infinite hotel, infinite rooms, you're just about to turn on the No Vacancy sign when a second infinite bus pulls up. They have another infinite group of guests. Shit, you're already full, right? Nope, all you need to do is have the group from bus 1 stay in the even numbered rooms, and bus 2 stays in the odd number rooms. Easy peasy.
The thing is, infinity exists. We know it exists. The hotel does not exist, but just because it doesn't exist does not mean it cannot exist. Time is infinite. Consider a hypothetical bacteria that reproduces every second, simultaneously dying and creating a new bacteria. If you were to number them forever, you would never run out of numbers nor would you run out of bacteria. But if you had a second one in a second petri dish, you could number them with even numbers in one dish and odd numbers in the other. You would never run out of numbers, but you'd have twice as many infinite bacteria.
Now take the paradox of the unliftable boulder. Could an omnipotent creator make a boulder so large that the omnipotent mover could not move it? Yes. First, the omnipotent creator makes the boulder, because there is nothing they cannot make. Then, the omnipotent mover moves the boulder, because there is nothing they cannot move.
Religion is a tool, a crutch used by people uncomfortable with uncertainty. There are things we don't know, things we can't know, and things we'll never know. Faith allows a person to pretend they know all three.
I like the creativity in some of your examples, but I think I missed your point about infinity. Okay, it exists. Hotels, bacteria, got it. How does infinity play into the topic here?
Infinity is a mathematical absolute. It can be bounded conceptually, but the set of numbers is unlimited. Absolute power can by bounded conceptually (omniscience is knowing everything, omnipresence is being everywhere always) but the power is unlimited within those bounds. You can think of those as infinite knowledge, or infinite presence. Infinity breaks traditional logic the same way it breaks basic math.
So just as
infinity + 1 = infinity
{all known things by an omniscient being} + some new unknown = {all known things by an omniscient being}
Now, if you wanted to disprove something, the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient creator is inconsistent with the concept of free will. At the moment of creation, the being would be fully and solely responsible for all things that have happened, are happening now, and will ever happen. I don't like the idea that we can all absolve ourselves of guilt or responsibility by claiming "God's plan" and the just wank on while other people suffer unimaginable horror. Believing in God is an abdication of your place in the world, even if your faith guides you to do good works.
The statement is only generates a contradiction if there is an omniscient being. If there are no omniscient beings, it is consistent.
The idea is that it is impossible for a being to both know and not know something. Knowable is not the same as known to a particular being
@atheistmemes
If there is an omniscient being, the statement is known. It's internal inconsistency doesn't make it unknowable. Omniscience isn't bound by strict semantic logic.
Like, I couldn't disprove you exist by saying "You don't know this statement is true."