Not really, Gödel proved such formalisations are either contradictory or incomplete. Just another argument against omni-anything.
Who on Earth is Antony Flew and who cares? What’s a “leading atheist” anyway? He surely never led me, in fact I have never heard of that guy, until Christians started to talk about him for his conversion to - what?- non-atheism. He does not believe in your God now either, so it tells me, there is just another guy out there, who believes in something divine.
Sorry, no need to get emotional.
You figure? I’d give the nod to Bertrand Russel, myself.
I’m not too concerned by it. He makes some good points; I’m not sure I agree with them, but it bears thinking about.
I used the word “intelligence” primarily due to the limitations of our vocabulary. Super-intelligence might be a better way to put it, but even that doesn’t really do the concept justice. I would strongly suspect that any being capable of constructing an entire universe as an act of conscious planning would possess mental capacity so far in excess of our own that to view its mind in any way similar to ours would be akin to comparing our thought process to an ant’s.
As has been noted, there are really no hard numbers on how unlikely or unlikely a life-supporting star is. But given that there seem to be at least three places just in this solar system alone that could support life (Earth, Mars, and Europa), we do seem to be finding that life might not be as rare as we suspected.
I find this incredibly difficult to believe. And we’re not just talking a size issue. Consider what we now know of the lifespan of the universe. If you consider the length of time from the beginning to now as a single 24-hour day day, then out of that day the human race has existed for less than a hundred thousandth of a second.
Given that NASA announced a few months back that they strongly suspect there’s life on Mars, and consider it a good possibility that life could survive on Europa (whether it actually does so or not is, of course, a different story), the conditions necessary for life don’t seem quite so impossibly rare as they once did.
Again, for the slow, worded differently. If God knows I will decide A, do I have the liberty to decide B instead? If yes, God is not omniscient, otherwise he had known I decided B. If no, I am not free to decide anything else than A. Get it?
In one sense yes, you are the ultimate cause of that decision - but it is better stated that you are ultimately responsible for that decision being made. In another sense, you did not create the situation which allows for a decision to be made, and therefore you are not the ultimate cause of having a decision to make. God is responsible for all that was created - including you and your free will - which allowed you to have any decision to make and therefore He would be seen as the ultimate cause even though you are still responsible for the actual decision per se. Put that in your pipe and smoke it for a bit
!I’m not suggesting that such a being would have no concern for its handiwork; merely that the idea that we are central to said handiwork, or that the being in question would in any way resemble us or our motivations, strikes me as ludicrous.
Christianity posits that the entire universe, in all its majesty and awe, was created for us. I find the idea that the vast, nigh-infinite expanses of space and time were created for a species clinging to the surface of a single infinitessimally tiny speck of rock spinning around the outer edges of a bog-standard galaxy not substantially different from any of the mind-boggling multitude of galaxies – a species which in fact did not exist for 99.9999(ad infinitum)% of said universe’s existence – to be rather difficult to swallow.
It would make the idea that the universe was created just for us a lot easier to swallow, I’ll say that. If the universe is only a few thousand years old and just consists of the Earth and some sky decorations, the way the early Christians (and for that matter, nearly everyone else) believed, it’s much easier to make the leap that these things must have been created for us – the only intelligent species that has inhabitted the only world since the beginning of everything.
Just out of curiosity, how does a being which is perfect in every way, and totally moral in all its actions, resemble any human you know?
For me this confirms the entire Judeo-Christian conception of creation and God. The bible states clearly we are made in Gods image and we are the pinnacle of creation as the only creature in his image. The universe (Latin root=single spoken sentence…God said “Let there be”. That’ll preach!) was created as a vast, nearly limitless space with stars and heavenly bodies so numerous they could not be counted and points to his greatness. The infinitesimally tiny speck-ness of earth makes you realize the importance of Earths creation, and specifically the creation of man. As a species that should make us feel special, in awe and gratitude for the Creator, and mindful that the Creator gets to make the rules.
Having problems with the idea that the Creator of the universe would not make us central to his creation is not based on any rigorous approach to the subject, its simply your bias based on your worldview. Why wouldn’t he? Because the universe is so vast? Maybe the size of creation is supposed to show the greatness of God, the uniqueness of our planet and species, and that as opposed to the man-hating Humanists and materialist-Atheists, mankind is something special with something to strive for. Heck, if he can create something so vast as to be unimaginable, think of the fact that you have 70 trillion interdependent cells yet scientists cannot even create a single celled organism in the lab! Then reconcile that with the belief that we are here because of a lot of time and blind chance!
With good reason. SIDENOTE: Decisions we make are electrochemical reactions in our brains, thus they can (theoretically) be described using physics.Thank you for bearing with me -
You have a sense pf sarcasm. I like that.
Now to what I have piped of the stuff you stuffed in my pipe.
I do that. But please note, omniscience and free will are not mutually exclusive, if the one who is omniscient is just a non involved, outside observer. Even that is not entirely true, if he would be applicable to quantum physics (I explain later), but you will deny that anyway. But Christianity claims God is very much involved, more than that, He has created anything, and that combination of creation and foreknowledge of how this creation will develop, doesn’t allow for free will.
Actually, that is exactly the case, knowledge does produce causality, shown with so-called “entangled photons”. See grad.physics.sunysb.edu/~amarch/.
So, basically you say people are responsible for things they did not cause?
Point one: a god who is bound by Linear Time CAN NOT be omniscient of the final outcome of future events. At best, that particular god’s omniscience can be the total knowledge of all possible parallel universes, i.e., knowing the all the potential decisions of all of the people, the potential outcomes of all those decisions, and all the new potential decisions and new potential outcomes that arise from the present and future decisions. Such a god is omniscient ONLY of potential outcomes, and being bound by Linear Time he is not in conflict with human Free Will.
