> Because even God can't skip ahead in those calculations just because its 'deterministic'. Something actually has to do the work to do the "determining".
I think you haven't internallized what "omniscient" actually means. Your statement is probably true about non-omniscient beings but I don't see how you can make that assertion about an omniscient state. More likely I suspect that you just don't believe omniscience is possible. There has been a LOT of theological discussion of this topic, most of which I am not familiar with.
I do believe in something like "omniscience", but base it in the ubiquity of math, not the omnipotence of an alleged creator. Mathematical structure exists independent of the human mind. When we calculate the result of a calculation or prove a new theorom, we are not creating something new, but uncovering pre-existing structure. This is why such truths can be independently discovered and verified. I think this mathematic structure is the fundemental nature of reality. Every possible variation of every possible simulation exists without needing any specifc "reality" to be running that simulation inside it. (Though, for every finite simulation, there would be infinite other finite simulations that contain it.)
> Sure, but there's no objective observation that can prove God does or does not exist. If He is omniscient and omnipotent, He cannot be a dependent variable in any experiment.
If she's omniscient, then free will doesn't exist. If she's omnipotent, then she can create a rock so heavy she can't lift it… but probably can lift it.
I also notice that you didn't mention omnibenevolent.
> Any self-professed Christian who deviates from the teachings of the Bible either intentionally or out of disinterest is doing this to some degree.
Really? Any Christian who works on Sunday is "reasonably start[ing] from first principles [and] discover[ing] whether there is a Creator"?
I agree with you: we don't use the same definition of "rational".
> Even in high school it was obvious to me that "god is omniscient" is a scientific statement, not a metaphysical / religious claim.
It's a bit more complex than that. You could say "god is omniscient" is a proposition in logic but you need some axioms first. "God as defined in the Bible" might be a good start (although not too easy as Bible is self-contradictory in many places and doesn't provide a clear definition of God).
I've actually never seen my objection seriously considered by theologians. (Non-religious people of course just acknowledge it as self-evidently true.) And I've done a lot of reading on this. Nothing in the passage you quoted is new to me, and nothing in it refutes my argument. I make no assumptions about God's nature at all. I don't even require that the omniscient entity be God (though it certainly could be). I am merely pointing out that omniscience logically precludes certain things, namely, the things that are known to the omniscience to be false, and therefore logically precludes omnipotence.
> From this point of view, any being that is both omniscient and omnipotent cannot change his/her mind, if said being changes over time, this implies s/he will make decisions now based on how s/he will feel about things later, after taking her/his own evolution into account.
You see, the problem is that people think of the evolution of an omniscient deity as a strict linear progression from cause to effect, but actually it's more like a great big ball of wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey... stuff.
You can just claim that omniscience and omnipotence do not require that you can do logically impossible things. For instance, God couldn't will that 2+2=5, or that he could create something so heavy that he could not move it.
> An omnipotent god could make a universe perfect in every way... but the universe is not perfect in every way. Why not?
The obvious issue with a statement like that is that a god would have a very different perspective than yours, and it assumes that you could actually define perfect or know it when you see it.
> If he literally created the universe and all the laws of nature, couldn’t he create such a concept?
That would imply that there are two things: God, and this creation of his "the ability to can't", but since God is just "one" this entire concept can not be attributed to him.
You can read about "Negative theology" if you are really interested in this topic.
> I think this shows that the concept of omnipotence is itself logically incoherent. It’s the theological equivalent of Russell’s set of all sets that do not contain themselves.
> an omnipotent god (if one existed) would not be restricted by anything, including any human conceptions such as logic.
Logic is not constrained to human conceptions but is objectively valid. One has to keep in mind that logic is based on premises and inferences. Given the premises and inference rules, the conclusion automatically follow.
So a four sided circle cannot exist because we have defined circle to be a particular shape. A valid four sided circle would need a change in the definition of circle itself. But then we're not talking about the same thing anymore. Similarly, the same universe cannot contain both an irresistible force and an immovable object, because of the conflicting definitions of those terms.
Even an omnipotent God is constrained by logic. In a reality without logic, it'd meaningless to try to understand any aspect of reality. God can both exist and not exist at the same time. He can be both Good and Evil. Conscious beings can be both alive and dead. It is hard to see how a illogical universe can retain any meaning that we attribute to God and Creation.
That is the standard apologetic but it doesn't work. Complete knowledge of a finite domain like pong is not omniscience. Omniscience is full knowledge of everything, including the future. To know the future, you have to be able to solve the halting problem (among other challenges).
Of course we can postulate that God has (or is) an oracle for the halting problem, but that still doesn't make him omniscient, it just pushes the problem one level higher. An oracle for the halting problem can (by definition) solve the halting problem for ordinary Turing machines, but it cannot solve the halting problem for Turing machines augmented with an oracle for the halting problem for ordinary Turing machines. Such machines (let's call them meta-TMs) have their own halting problem which cannot be solved by a meta-TM. We can hypothesize a meta-oracle which solves the halting problem for meta-TMs, yielding a meta-meta-TM, and so on. But at every level there is still an unsolvable halting problem. It is not possible to close this loop for the same reason that it is not possible to enumerate the real numbers by repeated diagonalization, or to enumerate the transfinite ordinals. So in fact it is a much weaker condition that makes God impossible, namely, that omniscience is impossible. (It immediately follows that omnipotence is also impossible.) But that's a harder case to make because it requires an understanding of the halting problem.
> A small quibble, unrelated to your explanation, is that if this particular theological argument is not respected even among theologians, it does not constitute an example of arguments that "were effectively fended off hundreds or in some cases thousands of years ago by theology and apologetics".
Well, to give a different example - in the midst of discussing Aquinas' proofs, he advances the claim that omniscience and omnipotence are logically incompatible. There is a long history in Jewish, Christian and Islamic philosophy of debating closely related questions. The 10th century Rabbi Saadia Gaon, the 12th century Islamic philosopher Ibn Rushd (Averroes), and Aquinas himself all discussed paradoxes of omnipotence (the classic "can God create a stone heavier than he can lift?") – the resolution of which generally turns on precisely how "omnipotence" is defined. There is similarly a long history in all three religions of intellectual debate over the relationship between divine omniscience, the nature of time and God's relationship to it, and human free will (if God perfectly knows the future, does that mean the future is predetermined? if the future is predetermined, how can humans have free will?) – topics discussed by ancient Christian philosophers and theologians such as Boethius (6th century) and Augustine (5th century), the Jewish philosopher Maimonides (aka Rambam, 12th/13th century), the 7th–10th century disputes in Islamic theology over predestination (qadr) versus free will.
Obviously this lengthy history of debate, stretching back many centuries, even 1500 years, has a lot of relevance to Dawkins' claim of a contradiction – and, as usual, Dawkins appears utterly ignorant of all of it. His argument seems to be basically that he knows what "omnipotent" and "omniscient" mean (he may have consulted a dictionary), and obviously by his definitions they contradict each other – zero interest in whether his definitions of them agree with those of philosophers and theologians who've examined these issues before – and then he cites a poem which expresses the same view. So I think that is a good example of what you are looking for in your quibble – although the plural in "thousands of years ago" is possibly somewhat of an exaggeration. I'm not sure if anyone ever answered Dawkins precise objection (although I wouldn't rule it out), but closely related objections have been discussed many times before.
>the implications of an omnipotent, omniscient being
There is nothing in the premise or conclusion about omnipotent or omniscient. Just "most powerful". If there is nothing which is omnipotent then the most powerful being is not omnipotent.
said another way: while I can (sort of) imagine omnipotentence, it does not follow that there is an omnipotent being in the same way. That is to say, there is necessarily a most powerful object in existence but there is not necessarily an omnipotent object in existence.
Indeed we can infer no attributes of this most powerful object except its power: we may just be talking about the largest black hole or something.
This is still quite hinged on the assumption that there are a set of rules omnipotence must follow which is a contradiction in terms. Could you not create a simulation that had rules that didn't apply to you? Who says turing machines or halting problems even make sense at all outside our reality. Who says time has any meaning outside our reality?
> God isn't constrained by formal logic constraints -- in fact God created logic and can break it at will (e.g. by being two contradicting things at once).
> And if any good thing came of it, why not just omnipotence that thing into existence and skip the hard stuff?
I have an answer for you. The tl;dr is that it’s not about the result, but read on.
So the outcome isn’t the reason. How do I know? Time isn’t a thing for God - he can skip to the end. God can have any state he desires, in an instant. Yet he is here through us.
But why? We’ll answer this from two sides, first: why not? You’re infinite and can have literally everything, everywhere, all at once, in fact, you don’t even know what sensations are, so what else are you going to do? Think about that for a moment. You’re infinite. You’re the king with untold riches.
Bearing that context in mind: why? The answer is the same. Because you’re a single infinite being. You can literally have everything, everywhere, all at once. God isn’t good or evil. He is good and evil. So as an infinite being, what don’t you have? Limitations, form (a limitation) and friends (someone that’s not you, because you’re it - the beginning and end). So this - _is_ the why. Why God did this. So that is to say that we’re all God, experiencing limitation, form and companionship. And to keep the illusion going, God has to hide the ultimate secret truth from himself: that he is infinite, that he has everything, everywhere, all at once.
But here we are trapped on a lonely planet with finite potential in a seemingly infinite box called space. Here, we are, experiencing _this_, feeling, sensing, solitude, companionship, separation, union, pain, joy. We experience who we are, because God has temporarily forgotten his infinity.
Counterpoint: since god is omniscient, he knows perfectly what his action or inaction will cause, present and future, from the subatomic level to the edge of the universe. A being like that can't possibly pretend to give humans free will, he knows exactly what they will do, we're like "PRINT HELLO WORLD" programs to him.
Is God powerful enough to create information that even He could not predict? I think these paradoxes actually hi-light that there's something wrong with the idea of an omniscient agent, at least as we conceptualize it.
> God cannot be both omnipresent and only exist outside of time.
How so? God exists simultaneously at all the moments that exist. Time was created by God, just like the universe was.
> so clearly that God at least exists within the temporal universe.
Imagine you are writing a book, where you, as the author, are also a character. You can interact with your characters as they do things - but you can also go back and change anything you want, and you can see the ending as well.
(Keep in mind that God always maintains free will - God doesn't force any human to act in any particular way, it's always their own choice.)
That's the same as saying "through God all things are possible". Yes if you skip over the hard step of creating an omniscient, omnipotent being, then you have the problems of dealing with an omniscient, oomnipotent being.
I think you haven't internallized what "omniscient" actually means. Your statement is probably true about non-omniscient beings but I don't see how you can make that assertion about an omniscient state. More likely I suspect that you just don't believe omniscience is possible. There has been a LOT of theological discussion of this topic, most of which I am not familiar with.
I do believe in something like "omniscience", but base it in the ubiquity of math, not the omnipotence of an alleged creator. Mathematical structure exists independent of the human mind. When we calculate the result of a calculation or prove a new theorom, we are not creating something new, but uncovering pre-existing structure. This is why such truths can be independently discovered and verified. I think this mathematic structure is the fundemental nature of reality. Every possible variation of every possible simulation exists without needing any specifc "reality" to be running that simulation inside it. (Though, for every finite simulation, there would be infinite other finite simulations that contain it.)
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