We refer you back to your post number 274, page 14, on this thread.
oh yes you did.
God is Impossible
- Thread starter Prince_James
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oh yes you did.
What are you trying to say, that anything written with an expectation to be understood thus pretends to be an asbsolute truth, except for an evident disclaimer?
My assertion was that of a belief as opposed to a fact in terms of proof, the very point being the impossiblity of truth without proof, by definition.
My assertion was that of a belief as opposed to a fact in terms of proof, the very point being the impossiblity of truth without proof, by definition.
Sauna, I reviewed the posts and swivel's criticism of your comments seems accurate to me.
Or she should.
Since this thread is already derailed, I wanted to return to One Raven's hypothetical now that I have thought about it for a few days. My conclusion: Time exists inside of the box.
It ends up being related to one of my initial problems with the example: gravity. Even if gravity waves do not exist, and the graviton is a figment, there is still a universe outside of the box that has a distribution of mass which is constantly shifting. You have the box in your lap and you start jiggling your foot. Even though there is no matter inside of the box, we could still calculate the change in gravitational potential within the box caused by your jiggling foot. Or the moon's revolutions. Using these changes in potential, we can know that there is different states within the box, even without matter in there to demonstrate these changes in state. Therefore time exists inside of the box.
The only way around this is to put the observer inside of the box so that no information from the outside can be recorded. But that ruins the emptiness of the box, and why not give any hypothetically "massless" observer a "massless" gravity detector? In order to work around this problem, you have to cheat in one way or the other.
Oh... and IceAge... have you figured out a way to disprove my disproof of god yet? Good luck!
Copied and pasted from an older post, a logical refutation of the existence of one type of god.
Disproof of God
Preface:
If you are hoping for an easy summation, I hate to disappoint. What follows is something more complex than that. It will take some time and effort for the reader to fully understand all of the key points, and to move past the reflexive and obvious objections to understand why they do not work. I have dwelt on many of these concepts for years, and even now I often find them slippery in my grasp. I apologize that so much of the following is definitions and examples, but that is necessary. The actual proof is so simple it can be said in a sentence, but it will only make sense if you understand the difficult definition of some seemingly simple words.
Disclaimer:
This proof will not change your mind about the existence or non-existence of a higher diety. No such proof exists. Not because disproof of any given god is impossible, quite the contrary. Rather, it is because the belief in something so powerful is not budged in an instant. If you believe in a god, you do so despite an overwhelming lack of evidence, and in the face of billions of shards of data pointing to there not needing to be one. You are most likely already able to dismiss the findings of astronomy, biology, physics, chemistry, and the like. Ignoring this proof will not be any harder for you.
Likewise, if you already doubt god’s existence, you do so for very powerful and convincing reasons, and do not require further proof.
Can God be Disproven?
This proof is not intended to change people’s minds about god, but rather to show that such a proof is possible. Of course, many such a proof can be made regarding other belief systems. For instance, one could march up to the peak of Mt. Olympus and see for themselves that no Temple of Zeus exists. They could peer through a filtered telescope and notice that the sun is most certainly not a flaming chariot being pulled through the sky. They could look at seismographs and see quite clearly that the concept of Hades, and its supposed location, are flawed. Given the right claims, anything is disprovable. Years of theists saying the opposite does not make it so, just as similar convictions did not make those poor women witches, or the sun travel around the Earth.
The tricky part is the fact that a disproof requires a claim. Since religion is a personal affair, no two sets of claims about god are consistent., which is why disproof is rarely even attempted. The key, then, is to find commonalities within a religion that a large portion of the theistic system rests on. Taking these as your premises can encompass the widest portion of the system as possible.
This modularity of theistic systems is how they survive major scientific upheavals. When the Ptolmeic system is supplanted by the Copernican, the future generations of believers just modify their personal beliefs so that cosmology is thought to be unimportant to their faith. This, despite the fact that previous generations of the same faith thought that cosmology was one of the grandest testaments to their beliefs. The same has been true for evolution, the age of the Earth, and the non-historical nature of the Flood, to name a few. Nowadays, many good Christians side with scientists, but maintain their faith. That is why another discussion regarding these tired arguments will not be a part of this proof. Time and time again, the progress of human understanding pushes the gods out of their frameworks, and the adopters have to erect a smaller abode for them to reside in. I have no interest in the bricks, and wish to look at the oft-neglected foundations.
The Premises:
I am primarily interested in Christianity, but the premises I use are amazingly adaptable to nearly all theistic systems. They are, simply:
1. God is a conscious, thinking being.
2. God is eternal.
3. God created the universe.
Time:
Now that I have teased you with the premises, I have to immediately back away from the proof again and get very dirty with some difficult concepts. First off, we need a near-complete understanding of Time. This may seem trivial, after all, we all use concepts of time every day. We seem so familiar with what time is. The truth of the matter, though, is that most people do not know how to define time, explain time, or even track down an adequate definition of time.
Most people, when asked to define Time, will use a circular definition. They will say that Time is a measurement of how long something takes to transpire. Or a subunit of the time it takes for the Earth to make a full rotation. Anything which uses the predicate to refer back to the subject. Even a few dictionaries make this blunder. The American Heritage Dictionary gets it mostly right, but hardly make the concept understandable. They say that time is “a nonspatial linear continuum in which events occur in an apparently irreversible succession.” Not bad. Not clear, but not bad.
Here is how I define time: Time is a measure of the change in state of a system. An example will make this more clear. Imagine a universe in which there only exists a single sphere. The sphere is not made up of constituent particles, it is a solid, it is featureless, it is perfectly round. There is nothing else in the universe, not even you, as an observer. The odd thing about this system is that there is no Time in this system. The sphere could be hurtling through the vacuum at extraordinary speeds and you would never know. It could be rotating a thousand miles an hour, and there would be no reference from which to tell. This is a system in which the state can never change. Any “moment” would be indistinguishable from any other. There would be no way to keep up with “when” things were doing something, or not doing something else. It isn’t just a fancy wording, or a game of semantics, to say that this system does not have time. That is the reality of the situation, in this system, time does not exist.
Now, add a second sphere. Now, any motion of one sphere, be it linear, orbital, revolutionary, etc… will be apparent due to the relative state of the other sphere. Now we have a system where time exists, and we can clearly see why time exists, and what time is. All it is, remember, “is a measure of the change in state of a system”. It doesn’t matter if we call units of time a particular thing, or even if we pretend that time has units. All that matters is that we have some way of talking about the state of the system as it is during the talking (present), how it was when we measured the state of the system earlier (past), and what we predict will be an upcoming state (future). We could now be able to see that one ball is getting closer to another ball. This sentence, if you look over it, includes a knowledge all the concepts here described. Change, present, past, and future.
It also bears mentioning that a system can never truly be in the exact same state as before, as far as time is concerned. This is why time travel is not possible, despite the cravings of many intelligent physicists and popular science magazines. Their confusion comes from a lifetime of playing with ‘t’ in equations, but no deep understanding of what Time denotes. Even if a system were put into a former state, with absolute perfection, it would merely be noted as the “second” occurrence of such a state. With the two spheres, let us suppose that one rotates around the other. After one full rotation, we would not say that we are back in the past, that would deny the fact that a rotation has occurred. Instead, we say that this is the beginning of a second rotation. The reason is simple, there is no guarantee that the system will progress the same way it did last time.
These are the basics. I leave out the fact that time is affected by gravity (time runs slower the greater the gravitational influence, such as being closer to the center of the Earth) and velocity. I also ignore the fact that time and space are dependent on one-another (in baseball, a pop-fly has its trajectory and time aloft intertwined to the point that a knowledge of one provides the answer to the other. They cannot be teased apart). The relativistic properties of time are also left out. All of these are fascinating, but not needed for the proof and would not alter it in either way.
Timeline:
On the left you have a god’s past infinity. To the right you have the god’s future eternity. In the center you have the moment that god created the universe. Contained in this simple image is all three of our premises. God is eternal, he is thinking (which is obvious from the fact that…), he created the universe. To the left of the creation event is an infinite number of discrete states of the god’s existence. To the right is the eternal future of god (and his creation, including our souls, but that is material outside of our simple premises, just something to keep in mind for descriptive purposes).
Infinity:
Now… we are very close to stating the proof, but first, we need to understand this new concept of infinity. Many mathematicians contend that the concept can not be visualized, which I tend to agree with. However, it is a very useful concept that has grown in power over the last century. I will not bore you with the details of how some infinities are larger than other infinities, you may delve as deep into such issues as you like. For our purposes, it is important to note that an infinite number of states are countless. They go on forever. This is a necessary feature of most deities, in that they have existed forever, avoiding the problem of the creator needing its own creator, and so on.
If you have absorbed the lesson of what TIME denotes, you will be able to understand an interesting feature of infinity that directly impacts the proof: Infinite time does not correspond to a measure of elapsed units of time so much as it describes an infinite number of states in a system. This means that it is pointless to say that a god sat around, immobile and unthinking for an infinite number of “years”, and then just ~POP~ decided to create the universe. As we saw with the concept of time, and unthinking and immobile god is a singular state, time does not exist in such a system, not because man invented this, it is because that is what time is. If god’s first action was the creation of the universe, then god’s existence can not be said to be eternal.
And that is the key here. Remember our premises. God is stated, by most theistic systems, to be eternal. This is the way that religions get around our incorrect notions of causality in order to form a cosmological synthesis, a creation story. But… as we are about to see… it doesn’t work. You can’t have it all.
Proof:
If you look at the timeline, you can see the disproof of god for yourself. You see, we commonly make the mistake of looking at the Creation moment, and imagining an infinite number of states-of-being stretching off to the left, back to god’s “earliest” moments, and off into infinity. However, the fallacy here is that the arrow of time does not flow this way, which is why we normally do not see the paradox. We are making an easy mistake of approaching the past from the present. We see the creation of the universe around us, so we know that it happened, so we start our visualization from there. When we do this, we do not see the paradox.
The paradox, and refutation of god based on our premises is seen if we instead place ourselves at one of god’s “earliest” states. (I put “earliest” in parenthesis because it is an aid to understanding, I am fully aware that such a concept makes no sense when speaking of infinities). From ANY of these “earliest” states-of-being, a god would need to then progress through an INFINITE NUMBER OF SUBSEQUENT STATES BEFORE REACHING THE CREATION EVENT. (when I all-cap, it is always for stress, never for loudness). It can’t happen. And you can’t whisk it away with the “lord works in mysterious ways” cop-out. For a god to be eternal, it occupied an infinite number of states before it created the universe. From any “early”, theoretical state, the god could not get to the creation point.
The only way to resolve this crisis is to remove one of the three premises, but let’s see what problems each solution creates.
Solutions:
If god is not eternal, there is no problem. God comes into being, goes through some number of states, creates the universe, and continues to exist forever. There is no problem here because we are not saying what god will do AFTER he exists forever (again, the paradox practically screams at you in this direction, doesn’t it?). Here’s the rub: What caused god to just pop into being? If things as complex as a god can pop into being, why not the universe, instead? If something created god, then the paradox moves to that deity, and you have resolved nothing. The eternal-ness of a god is thus evident, and you can see why it is picked as one of the three premises.
If god is not thinking, there is no problem. In this case, god can be thought of as the natural state of an eternal void, or an eternal fabric of energy or matter. This escapes the paradox because it removes the creation event altogether. Here you can see how closely tied together the creation event and god’s consciousness are. (For years, I thought that the two could be combined, and that the premise of god being a conscious being wasn’t even needed, and that the paradox could rest on just two premises. This is logically true, but the premise of god’s conscious really aids in the understanding of the proof.) Why does the creation event get removed if god is not thinking? Because there is no outside causality from which to get everything around us. If it is a random occurrence, it is random within some framework, which should all be thought of as a consistent set. What this means is that the creation of our universe could have come from a random (read: non-thinking) event, but that just means that our universe is a subset of something larger. And besides, without a conscious deity, you do not have a religion. It would be like saying that this disproof of god is not accurate because god does not exist. Quite circular, and the reason that I find this premise necessary. In order to prove there is a problem with the concept of a god, we have to first assume that there IS one. It is a built-in premise that I just like to state explicitly.
If god did not create the universe, there is no problem. This is the most interesting solution by far. Oddly, there can be a universe, and a god within it, but there can not be any causality between the two. If god and the universe are both eternal, they can both have gone through an infinite number of discrete states leading up to the present. This comes from work done with infinities of the same size by Georg Cantor. For every state of the universe, you could have a one-to-one correspondence with a state-of-being for a god. What you can not have is a god, with no universe, going through an infinite number of states in order to get to the creation of a universe. The thing about this resolution is that it is the only one that truly saves the concept of an eternal, thinking deity. But it does so by denying that it had anything to do with the creation of the universe, so what have you saved? Something that is not necessary for the operating of the universe, so just as imaginary as a pink, flying, elephant.
It is interesting to play with these resolutions to notice how any two can be true, but not all three, and the natural conclusions arrived at in each situation. I contend that most modern religions rely, on a very basic level, on the synthesis of these three premises. And it is obvious why they can not all be true at the same time. This proof is just as simple as the paradox of god not making a rock so heavy he can’t lift it, but not as easy to get around because it deals with his existence, his eternalness, and his ability to create the universe around us. The reason that this proof takes some explaining, and requires some effort from the reader, is because the concepts within it are more difficult to grasp that the weight, and lifting, of a rock.
Final Note:
There are very common complaints registered by theists when they first encounter this proof, and I have, over the years, heard them all I suppose. I thought about listing them, and providing the fallacy of each, but this is long-winded enough, and I would rather go through that process anew, but in writing this time. For that reason I welcome all replies, no matter how reactionary and poorly reasoned they may be.
I want to congratulate you on a very well thought out argument. If I had not myself spent many hours meditating on the subject, I might have been convinced by it, or at the least, shaken by it. As it is, I see a few flaws in your argument, and disagree with your conclusion. Don't get me wrong, your logic is solid. Given that all those premises which you used in your argument are true, then your conclusion does appear to flow naturally. Yet, I disagree with your conclusion. The reason for this is that I believe you have left certain critical terms left undefined, or vaguely defined. Moreover, I find your treatment of infinities lacking, and this is a very important part of your argument.
Therefore, I will explain where I think you went wrong, and hopefully by the end of this post you will understand why I cannot accept your conclusion that what you have presented is truly a disproof of God.
Infinities
I would like to begin this discussion by delving into a deeper understanding of the infinite. You touched upon some treatments of infinites as being larger or smaller than others, but said that this was not relevant to the argument. It seems you are correct, but there are other aspects of the infinite which you did not talk about or even touch on which are vitally important to this discussion.
The aspects to which I refer belong to a division of infinity types. This division is between potential infinities and actual infinities, as talked about by Aristotle.
Potential Infinite
Understanding potential infinites should come easy to anyone who has studied any calculus. It has to do with the limit function. That is, a function may approach a limit infinitely without ever reaching the limit. For example, you might have (and I believe you have used this example) a number approaching zero. Let us say we are moving from 1 to 0 so that for each interval in the approach we divide the current number in half. We start at 1 and move to 0.5. We move from 0.5 to 0.25. We move from 0.25 to 0.125. And so on. The thing about this progression into smaller quantities toward zero is that the function is infinite. No matter how small the number gets, it will never be equal to zero. This is a potential infinite. While the existing sequence may progress toward zero infinitely, it only does this potentially. It is an incomplete set, ever moving toward an unreachable limit. I hope this is clear, but it may not be fully clear until it is contrasted with the meaning of an actual infinite.
Actual Infinite
An actual infinite, unlike the potential infinite, is a complete set. If we are to take the same example, an actual infinite encompasses the full infinite set of divided numbers between 1 and 0. Moreover, it includes 1 and 0 in the set, otherwise it could be said that the infinite sequence of decimals stretches toward zero without actually reaching it, which is no different than the potential infinite. Moreover, if that is the case, then there will always be one number closer to zero than the current. The thing about actual infinities is that they cannot be made, they can only exist if they have always existed. That is, no potential infinite can ever become an actual infinite. Likewise, an actual infinite can never be reduced to a potential infinite.
Actual infinites are more difficult to grasp than potential infinites, and I'm sure my meager example hasn't done it justice. If it hasn't sunk in, try to think of this: there can be an infinite number of progressive divisions between 1 and 0. To begin the set, we start with 1. Next we divide and get 0.5. Our set is now {1, 0.5}. We divide again and get 0.25. Our set is now {1, 0.5, 0.25}. The set may grow to an infinite size. If the set does not include zero, then it is a limited set (ie, there is a limit it progresses toward but never reaches). If the set includes 0, then the set also contains the infinite series of decimal places. It might look something like this {1, 0.5, 0.25, ... ad infinitum, 0}. It is difficult to grasp, but that is because everything we know of is limited, and only potentially infinite.
Concepts may be actually infinite, except that we can only speak of them in conceptual terms. The number line, for example. It is not an actually existing thing, but a concept, a principle which we may draw upon and make use of in limited fashion to illustrate the working mechanisms of the world about us, but it is a complete set, that is also infinite. It is an actual infinite.
This important things to note about these two infinity types is that one is an aspect of the finite, it progresses, it is incomplete, it is sequenced. The other is truly infinite, it does not progress, but simply is at once, it is complete, it is not sequenced, but simultaneous (though, since it does have internal order and consistency, it can be spoken of in terms of sequence, but only when speaking of a segment of it, rather than the whole). Grasp this, if you need to reread again, grasp this. You may do some exploration online for these concepts if you need a better explanation, just google search the terms. However, let us continue.
Terms
There are a couple of terms which I think you didn't have well defined, that deserve a better understanding. Plus, I would also like to alter your definition of time ever so slightly.
The first is Thought. One of the attributes of God is that He is a thinking being. Of course, this is important since in order to willfully create a universe, He would have had to think about it first. So, let us attempt to understand thought a little better. Thought processes, though having many divisions, can be talked about in two types, as primarily divided between the two hemispheres of the brain. These two types are logic and intuition. The difference between these two types can be broken down ultimately as sequenced thought as opposed to holistic thought. Both types consider the known premises, and produce a conclusion, except that intuition does this process near simultaneously, and is therefore much faster than logic. Logic considers each known premise in progressive sequence before computing a conclusion. The advantage of logic over intuition is that logic is more precise and more likely to produce a more accurate conclusion. However, it is understandably much slower. It takes more time.
The second term I would like to talk about is Eternal. Speaking in terms of historical theology (rather than common use), there has always been a distinction between temporality and eternality. Temporality is whatever is relegated to time. Eternality, therefore, is whatever is not relegated to time. How can we understand this? Since we know that time is an aspect of change (or at least comes part and parcel with change), then we can understand that whatever is not relegated to time is therefore unchanging, and is either non-existent or existing as a single point, where no other points of reference exist. Whatever is eternal, then, is either non-existent, or exists as a single point, where no other points of reference exist. Since eternality is applied to existing things, let us say that the eternal is that which exists at a single point, where no other points of reference exist. Before I apply this to God, there are other things which need to be talked about.
Finally, I would like to alter your definition of time to, "a measure of the change in state of a progressive system."
So, how does all of this provide a different conclusion than that God cannot exist? Let's get to that.
Historical theology asserts that the primary nature of God is intelligence, that He is a thinking being. His Free Will necessarily proceeds from His Intelligence, just as our free will proceeds from our intelligence (as opposed to non-free will proceeding from non-intelligence). It is therefore pertinent to consider whether God's thought-form is a logical proceeding, or an intuitive understanding. Since most descriptions of God talk about a complete, holistic being (ie, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, etc), it seems coherent to say that God's thought-type is an intuitive understanding. However, though this might be said to be true, it may also be said that His thoughts are entirely coherent and segments of that thought can be broken down into logical proceeding.
With this in mind, we can now discuss the meaning of God's existence with respect to time, and the universe. The main disproof you offer is that God could not have existed an infinite amount of time prior to creation else He could not have created. The reason has to do with the meaning of the creation as a limit which an infinite progression can never reach. This makes sense when we think about the infinite progression as just that, a progression. This is a quality, you remember, of a potential infinite. This suggests that the temporal sequence is an incomplete set. This is perfectly valid, since a temporal sequence is by default incomplete, as being a sequence and progression of moments, as being a potential infinite.
So, if we are to assume that God created the universe, and that God never had a beginning, then we must conclude that God is not temporal, but eternal (in the sense that I defined). This makes sense, since one of the qualities of God as defined in your disproof is that God is eternal. This suggests that God exists at a single point, with no other points of reference. This seems to confuse things further, so let's try to put some sense into this.
Temporality implies change, as has been said, and eternality therefore implies immutability. There exists only two possibilities when we're talking about the unchanging. These are: 1.) A non-existing thing (for all existing things undergo constant and unfailing change), or 2.) an infinitely fast thing. Since 1.) clearly doesn't say alot, 2. seems more correct if we're talking about an existing immutable thing.
So what do I mean by an infinitely fast thing? Here I am referring to motion, which in Aristotle's discussions is the initiator of change (hence his argument for an unmoved mover). Change is the movement from potentiality to actuality. Thus, when we're talking about infinite change, we're talking about infinite progressions from potentialities to actualities. Yet, change is change, and time is a measurement of change. So, even if we're talking about infinite change, we're still talking about a progressive sequence, a potential infinite. So, if we're talking about an infinitely fast thing, do we understand it in terms of a potential infinite of infinite change, an extremely fast progressive sequence? Or, can we understand it in terms of actual infinity?
We know an actual infinite is a complete set. If we're going to talk about infinite speed in such terms, then we can speak about it as a simultaneous, immediate event. So, if we're attempting to reduce the, say, processing time of a computer to 0, we could progressively make it slower and slower infinitely, but there would always be time-elapse, it would never take t=0 to process something, no matter how fast the processing speed. However, an actual infinite is a complete set, and as such includes the limit in the set. It is literally a simultaneous event. If a being is actually infinite in speed, then it would literally traverse all time instantaneously. It would undergo all change at once, and thus be perfectly and completely actualized (since change is the move from potentiality to actuality) and this makes sense since God is said to be pure Act (actuality), and in fact, this was Aristotle's conception of God, that He is pure actuality. Such a being, infinitely fast, is also immutable.
An actually infinite being is immutable, it extends across all points of space, and all points of time, immediately, thus 'omnipresent' (present in every place, present in every time). An actually infinite being performs all its thoughts and all its actions simultaneously, thus being omniscient and omnipotent (omnipotent also because such a being is also fully and perfectly actualized, and being fully actualized can actualize any potential, which is what a power is, the capacity to actualize a potential).
Thus, we can say that such a being could have existed an infinitely prior to creation, and infinitely after creation, without change. Moreover, that such a being could interact with all created things, but in a simultaneous way, across all time, and across all space, at once, both initially and reactionary, since such reaction is nothing more than part of the full actualization that is part of the simultaneous nature of an actual infinite.
The problem of your argument doesn't lie in your logic. Your logic is fine. It is merely that you were missing premises. The premises you were missing concerned the nature of infinities. I am aware that I may not be the most clear in this post. I try, but it is always so difficult to talk about the infinite.
I hope, however, that you understand that your disproof is actually not a disproof, as there lies in the realm of possibility an explanation for those issues you raised.
As a side note, Aristotle also conceived a 'pure potentiality' which he called primordial matter. Interestingly enough, it might be conceived that pure potentiality is also unmoving and unchanging unto itself. So, while it is non-existent, it is a possible actuality. Energy seems to be an actualizing force, and energy moves faster than matter. This seems to correlate with the idea that primordial matter is completely unmoving, and pure actuality is infinitely fast..... perhaps primordial matter isn't unmoving, but rather infinitely slow... a thought.
How is this possibly relevant?
The infinity in question, that since the beginning of time and toward the end of time is clearly enough the potential infinity, not the actual infinity.
Precisely.
Whatever infinity is temporal, relegated to time, toward its beginning and end, is clearly the potential infinity. Swivel's argument mainly concerned before the universe. You say, "beginning of time," and this is understood as pertaining to creation. Before the creation then was not time, but eternity, an 'at-once-ment,' I suppose you could call it. That is the relevance.
So, in short, your argument is therefore that God created time.
What then did she do before that?
Yes, since time is merely a measurement of change, and before the creation, there was no change.
Contemplated Himself.
What a lot of fun that must have been then, to contemplate that which never changed.
Is that what heaven is like?
Did you even read my post? Everything is at once for the actually infinite being. Contemplation of Himself is simultaneous with His creation, with His union with created things, etc. Moreover, it isn't the contemplation of that which never changed, it is the contemplation of that whose infinite change is simultaneous, infinitely fast.
This only works assuming that a BBT took place, however since I follow the school of BBT never happened, time is infinite to the past, as it will be to the future of the universe. The big bang theory is not a proven theory, and it's breaking apart at the seems. Time therefore never had a begining, it just has always been, our galaxy perhaps had a begining, our sun formed in some time, but the universe is lot older than predicted by BBT theoriest!.
http://www.bigbangneverhappened.org/
http://space.newscientist.com/article/mg19025493.200-study-proves-big-bang-never-happened.html
God can't posses free will, for this would contradict omniscient, an all knowing being can't change his mind the minute he does this, would contradict omniscient atribute.
This is just simple logic, if a being is all knowing it can't posses free will, for what it knows will happen, must happen, and he knows that it will happen, there's nothing he can do to change what happens. This makes this entity non-omnipotent, cause he can't change an event, and makes him contradict omniscient to free will. For free will is a choice to make, if one knows the choice to be made, there is no free will!
http://www.bigbangneverhappened.org/
http://space.newscientist.com/article/mg19025493.200-study-proves-big-bang-never-happened.html
http://www.holoscience.com/news.php?article=knb8hx39
God can't posses free will, for this would contradict omniscient, an all knowing being can't change his mind the minute he does this, would contradict omniscient atribute.
http://www.vexen.co.uk/religion/god_has_no_free_will.html
This is just simple logic, if a being is all knowing it can't posses free will, for what it knows will happen, must happen, and he knows that it will happen, there's nothing he can do to change what happens. This makes this entity non-omnipotent, cause he can't change an event, and makes him contradict omniscient to free will. For free will is a choice to make, if one knows the choice to be made, there is no free will!
I don't hold to BBT either. I don't know how the universe was created. Positing that God created the universe doesn't mean that one holds to the BBT. Centuries of people who believed in God as Creator lived before the BBT was even conceived.
I merely hold to Aristotle's unmoved mover argument, since it makes most sense in my estimation. It makes more sense than an infinitely old, finite universe.
God can't posses free will, for this would contradict omniscient, an all knowing being can't change his mind the minute he does this, would contradict omniscient atribute.
http://www.vexen.co.uk/religion/god_has_no_free_will.html
This is just simple logic, if a being is all knowing it can't posses free will, for what it knows will happen, must happen, and he knows that it will happen, there's nothing he can do to change what happens. This makes this entity non-omnipotent, cause he can't change an event, and makes him contradict omniscient to free will. For free will is a choice to make, if one knows the choice to be made, there is no free will!
I'm not talking about precognition, which is what you're talking about. God's knowledge isn't precognitive, it's experiential. It arises from personal experience, as all knowledge does. It arises from His nature of simultaneity. The past, present and future all exist at once, as a single point of the eternal present. So, God's knowledge of the future exists now because God is experiencing the future now. It isn't precognition. Thus, it isn't like saying "God knows this, so He can't change it." It's more like, "God knows this because it's what He experienced. God knows He will (from our perspective) choose it because He is choosing it (from His perspective)." Thus, His Free Will remains intact.
Moreover, simple logic dictates that God must have free will if He has intellect, for free will proceeds from intellect. If God didn't have free will, then we could say definitively that God does not have intellect. As such, God would be nothing more than a natural force, but also as such, would not produce reason, but unreason, as an unreasoning being only produces unreason. Reason comes from reason. Reason does not come from unreason.
InsertNameHere
Registered Member
infinity
Whos to say that an infinite amount of time existed before creation? "God is eternal" only means that god will exist for an infinite amount of time from the present, not before.
Whos to say that an infinite amount of time existed before creation? "God is eternal" only means that god will exist for an infinite amount of time from the present, not before.
Any universe capable of creating a god is also capable of existing without one. The question of a god "coming into existence" implies that something must have created it. If not, it was always here. If possible for a god to always be present then it is certainly possible for a universe or universes to always be present.
The who created the god question gives rise to an infinite chain of creator-gods. We should be bumping into them everywhere we go.
Instead, the superstitious and credulous stick to their "I can conceive of it, therefore it must be true" and "how can there be a universe without a god" mumbo jumbo and therefore make up whatever qualities this alleged god should have and call them "facts."
Complete and utter nonsense. And an argument from incredulity to boot.
The who created the god question gives rise to an infinite chain of creator-gods. We should be bumping into them everywhere we go.
Instead, the superstitious and credulous stick to their "I can conceive of it, therefore it must be true" and "how can there be a universe without a god" mumbo jumbo and therefore make up whatever qualities this alleged god should have and call them "facts."
Complete and utter nonsense. And an argument from incredulity to boot.
however what you don't get with mere eternal material elements bereft of consicousness is variety
however what you don't get with mere eternal material elements bereft of consicousness is variety
And your evidence for
(a) that there is anything other than material elements is.... ?
(b) that "mere material elements bereft of consciousness" can not produce variety is.... ?
Stop spouting and support your claims.