Why God should be infinite?

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STT said:
I didn’t say that computers can know better than us but can perform some specific task better than us.
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And are entirely contingent upon us. And are not more powerful than us.
 
RCinMT said:
computers cannot know more than the total collected knowledge of mankind.
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That is clearly false. Mankind only knew the value of pi to 2.7 trillion digits. But a computer calculated pi to many more digits, actually to 2,000,000,000,000,000 digits.
 
Tomdstone said:
That is clearly false. Mankind only knew the value of pi to 2.7 trillion digits. But a computer calculated pi to many more digits, actually to 2,000,000,000,000,000 digits.
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Mankind programmed mathematics into the computer. That a computer could carry out a calculation to several more decimal places is not an exhibition of power. If man programmed an incorrect formula or didn’t know the formula to begin with then a computer could never be used to ascertain a correct formula or come up with one in its own.
 
RCinMT said:
Mankind programmed mathematics into the computer. That a computer could carry out a calculation to several more decimal places is not an exhibition of power.
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So what? You said: “computers cannot know more than the total collected knowledge of mankind.” It is false, because computers know pi to more digits than the whole of mankind knew it up to that time. Computers gave mankind the new knowledge of the 2,000,000,000,000,000th digit. This new knowledge was totally unknown by mankind, until it was supplied by a computer.
 
Tomdstone said:
So what? You said: “computers cannot know more than the total collected knowledge of mankind.” It is false, because computers know pi to more digits than the whole of mankind knew it up to that time. Computers gave mankind the new knowledge of the 2,000,000,000,000,000th digit. This new knowledge was totally unknown by mankind, until it was supplied by a computer.
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A person could have sat and done the math if life was infinite or said person was insane. And math seems to have progressed along quite well without knowing the 10^200th digit of pi. If it was essential, somebody would have calculated it. Or developed and programmed a machine to do it, knowing it could be done.
 
RCinMT said:
A person could have sat and done the math if life was infinite or said person was insane. And math seems to have progressed along quite well without knowing the 10^200th digit of pi. If it was essential, somebody would have calculated it. Or developed and programmed a machine to do it, knowing it could be done.
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All that may be true, but what is not true is that computers cannot give us more knowledge than the present total collected knowledge of mankind. Clearly, computers can give us new knowledge, i.e., knowledge that was previously unknown to mankind.
 
Tomdstone said:
All that may be true, but what is not true is that computers cannot give us more knowledge than the present total collected knowledge of mankind. Clearly, computers can give us new knowledge, i.e., knowledge that was previously unknown to mankind.
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Computers are incapable of giving us knowledge that is unknowable to mankind. Again, your pi calculation is not something mankind could not have calculated. A computer is limited to doing what we can knowingly ask it to do. Mankind knew the formula of pi and programmed the formula into computers. Computers are not developing new formulas or theorizing physics theories, they operate within the realm of what need or can ask them to do.
 
STT said:
So I was reading about the Spinoza’s proof of God being infinite from a book. Here is the paragraph which argues the infinitness of God:

The idea is that infiniteness grants self-explanatory which is one requirement for God. I don’t understand why a finite being cannot be self-explanatory?

Any other argument about infiniteness of God is also welcome.
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When are you going to stop running from God?
 
Tomdstone said:
Cats evolved so there does not have to be a first cat but a line of life from the first living things which themselves supposedly evolved from chemical substances.
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LOL! If cats evolved from some other life form, then there very certainly was a “first cat”! You’re begging the question…

In any case, you’re still just making my case (thanks… I appreciate the help. ;)):

your kitten is a contingent being…
its parents are contingent beings…
(and so on, and so on, and so on)…
the “first living things” were contingent beings…
the “chemical substances… from which the first living things evolved” were contingent things…

Now… either there’s a “first being” which is (in philosophical terms) ‘necessary’ (in which case your string of contingent beings has a terminus and is therefore plausible); or there’s no first being… in which case your string of contingent beings is implausible. Aquinas covers this at length in one of his five demonstrations for the existence of God. 👍
 
Tomdstone said:
So what? You said: “computers cannot know more than the total collected knowledge of mankind.” It is false, because computers know pi to more digits than the whole of mankind knew it up to that time. Computers gave mankind the new knowledge of the 2,000,000,000,000,000th digit. This new knowledge was totally unknown by mankind, until it was supplied by a computer.
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Yeah, but that’s trivial. All you’re saying is that computers are good at computing (go figure! ;)), and we’ve set them to the task of computing something. That we hadn’t explicitly computed it first seems immaterial.

Now… there are things, we would guess, that computers can calculate which we can’t. Still, though, we know the algorithms (and/or heuristics) that lead to the answers. The point is that computers are effective tools… and are not knowers of knowledge (in the way that humans are), Alan Turing and his Test notwithstanding. 😉
 
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