From: Erik Aronesty (erik@zoneedit.com)
Date: Mon Feb 23 2004 - 16:48:27 MST
It sounds like you are describing the “universe itself”. The substrate in which reality as it is commonly known is cultures.
-----Original Message-----
From: Walter Watts <wlwatts@cox.net>
Date: Sun, 22 Feb 2004 16:44:36
To:virus@lucifer.com
Subject: Re: virus: Corollary to my prior definition of Trust and Faith
On 25 Jan 2002 at 8:16, David Hill wrote:
The classical attributes of a deity are singularity ("there can only be one")
omnicience (all-knowing), omnipotence (all-powerful), omnipresence ('(S)He's
everywhere!"), omnibeneficence (all-good), and omnisoothience (all-true). One can
immediately see that the attributes of omniscience and omnipotence cannot
simultaneously inhere in a single universe. If a deity were omniscient (knew
everything), then it would know the future and thus be powerless to change it, but if
it were omnipotent (all-powerful), then it could change the future, and therefore
could not know it for certain. It's like the simultaneous impossibility of an
irresistable force and an immoveable object; if one of these two deific properties
exists (and they are considered to be the most important two), then the other
logically cannot. Furthermore, If deity were everywhere, it could perceive nothing,
for perception requires a point of view, that is, a spatiotemporal perspective other
than that of the perceived object from which to perceive that object. Deity being
omnipresent (everywhere), there is nowhere that deity would not be, thus nothing it
could perceive. It gets even worse. Deity must be perfect; in fact, perfection is
what is broken down into all those 'omni' subcategories. thus, a perfect deity could
not even think. Thought is dynamic, that is, to think, one's thought must move
between conceptions. Now, thought could conceiveably move in three directions; from
perfect to imperfect, from imperfect to perfect, and from imperfect to imperfect
(from perfect to perfect is not an alternative, perfection being singular and
movement requiring distinguishable prior and posterior). But all of the three
possible alternatives contain either prior or posterior imperfection or both, which
are not allowably entertained in the mind of a perfect deity.
There's much, much more that I could add, but this should more than suffice to
demonstrate that asserting the existence of a deity possessing the attributes that
most consider essential to it deserving the deific appelation mires one in a miasmic
quagmire of irretrieveable contradiction, once one journeys beyond emotion-driven
faith and uses one's noggin to divine (Luvzda pun!) the nonsensical and absurd
consequences necessarily entailed.
Neil Lucock wrote:
> On Sat, 2004-02-21 at 12:52, Erik Aronesty wrote:
> > Faith is only faith in situations when something isn't known.
> Hi,
> you make an interesting point. English uses one word when we ought to
> have several to exactly define what we mean.
> Faith, when it refers to religions, might be described as "irrational
> belief in a god or supernatural process despite a lack of verifiable
> evidence".
> We might also use the word to mean "certainty of belief" in a scientific
> sense, such as faith that the sun will apprear in the East the next
> morning. This might be called a justifiable faith.
> We also have a meaning of "reliable" as in faithful.
> All of these definitions overlap to some extent, the problem is that
> persons using the word in a religious sense use it to mean a justifiable
> faith, without meeting the standard of proof required. IMHO it's nothing
> more than inaccurate thinking caused by an inability to reason
> correctly.
>
> >Assuming God is all knowing, he cannot have faith.
> Is it logically impossible for God to have faith in an improbable event
> occuring? :-)
> The idea of omniscience doesn't work.If God knows what you are going to
> do and why you are going to do it, what is the point of running Hell?
> If there is omniscience, then the amount of information gathered, per
> nano-second, would be rather large (all those sub-atomic particles and
> what they are doing is information too). God's memory would need to be
> many times larger than the number of particles in the universe in order
> to contain any useful information about the past, present and furure
> states of the universe. How is the information collected? How is it
> stored, and where? Finding out about a particle's state alters it
> (Heisenburg Uncertainty Principle). God must be able to interact with
> matter in order to monitor it, but must have a selective invisibility so
> that we can't detect him.
> To be honest, you could spend all day writing about the qualities
> needed, but you would be making an argument with so many exceptions to
> established fact that God ends up with no properties at all. A thing
> without properties does not exist (in this universe).You can justify the
> existance of Elves or UFOs with the same reasoning, but you don't
> actually get any useful information out in the end.
> regards,
> Neil
>
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