Re: The logic of atheism

Ben Goren <ben@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
prabbit1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

> Ben Goren <ben@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>>>> But...we /do/ exist. Which means that we have absolute proof
>>>> that, in all of existence, in all possible permutations of
>>>> whatever reality is, God never decides to retroactively pull
>>>> the plug.
>>>
>>> No, we only know it didn't happen in THIS permutation.
>
>> You miss the point. I'm saying that, not only did it not happen
>> in this permutation, ``God'' hasn't retroactively altered this
>> permutation. In no permutation has God (or any being of
>> whatever name, etc.) caused this permutation to cease to exist.
>
> There are many permutations that are possible. In some, I never
> lived. In others, I agreed with you. In others, I didn't see
> this post of yours, etc. How-ever, there's only ONE that
> actually came to be; the others were only "logically possible
> worlds" that never actualized. Same here; all we know is that
> there was not a god who decided to end all existence but that
> does not prove that a god never existed.

You're conflating a few things here.

First, you're right in that we know that there isn't any god that,
any time in the past, present, future, or ``outside of time''
ended all existence.

That means that, in an infinite space of possibilities, we know
that a ``2'' never appears. And any mathematician will tell you
that, it doesn't matter how that space of possibilities came into
being, the only way to describe ``2'' with respect to the space
is, ``impossible.''

No, YOU'RE equating something that's logically impossible and can never
happen any any possible world (a '2' appaering in the decimal expansion of
1/3) and something that we just know didn't happen in this actual world (god
ending all existence.) In one case, the thing just plain can't happen. The
laws of math prevent it. In the other, we just know that it didn't happen
but yet you have shown nothing to show that it could never have happened in
any possible world.

In THIS actual world, I had a donut for breakfast (yeah, I know it's not
good for me but it WAS good<g>.) Yesterday I did not. That doesn't mean that
in no possible world did I not have a donut yetserday (i.e. it wasn't
necessarily impossible that I had no donut. And we're ignoring any type of
possible determanism that may or may not exist here.) Now it IS necessarily
impossible that the number '2' shows up in 1/3.

It may be that ``God'' has a moral character such that
the mere though repulses him. It may be that he perpetually
procrastinates. It may be that he tried and failed, or that he
doesn't think it'd work and so doesn't bother to try. (Of course,
the real answer is that he's as real as that oversized rabbit
that'll be laying eggs on the White House lawn in a couple weeks.)

I wouldn't say that god is real myself; I'm just arguing with your supposed
proof that he/she'it's not real.

We don't need to know /why,/ given infinite opportunity to end
existence, God never does so. All we need to know is that he
never does. And because we know that he never does--again,
given infinite opportunity--we know that it's--for whatever
reason--impossible for him to do so.

No, we do NOT know that there's been infinite opportunity. Maybe 3 years
from now he decided to end it all from that point on. Thus we'd exist now
but he'd not have endless time to have ended ALL existence, future, past and
present. Yes, if existence lasts forever and has NO end, then maybe you
could claim that "what-ever is possible must happen at least once." But,
just as I could flip a coin 1,000,000,000 times and come up heads each time,
maybe god has only had 30 billion years (past and future) to decide to end
everything and just didn't do so during that time because he does a more
limited "end it all only from this point on" 18 billion years from now.

And because it's impossible for him to end existence, he can't be
omnipotent. Ask any modern theist, and they'll probably concede
that ``not omnipotent'' means ``not God.''

>> We can examine the nature of the claimed properties. If
>> they're truly impossible--like drawing a circular square in
>> Euclidean space--then we know that the property doesn't exist
>> and, therefore, the god doesn't have that property. If the
>> properties /are/ possible, then they're not supernatural, and
>> the god may exist but isn't doing anything that we couldn't,
>> given enough knowledge and access to resources. Either way,
>> even if the thing in question is real, it's not a god.
>
> No, supernatural simply means that it does not fit the laws of
> nature as we know them. How-ever, those laws are descriptive and
> not proscriptive and thus aren't something that forces things to
> be a set way.

I'm sorry, but the laws preventing somebody from drawing a
circular square /are/ proscriptive. If you don't understand that,
you need to brush up on your geometry.

No, the fact is that two different things are different and the law simply
describes your inability to make them the same and yet different at the same
time. I know my geometry. I also know WHY we can't make a square circle and
it has nothing to do with some magical prohibition against it.

>> EAC Memographer BAAWA Knight of Blasphemy ``All but God can
>> prove this sentence true.''
>
> And, as I asked, in another post, start proving it. Then prove
> that god couldn't prove it.

Actually, if you don't mind, I'll start by assuming, for the sake
of argument, that God /can/ prove that the sentence is true. After
all, the assertion is that God is omnipotent; therefore, the set
of things that start with ``God cannot'' must be empty.

But if god can make the sentence true, then he's making it so he can't make
it true. It's a simple example of self-reference, such as "This is a lie" or
the question about "who shaves the barber." Some statements, such as yours
abovbe, simply can't have a truth-value.

So. God's omnipotence demands that he can prove the sentence true;
let's say he does.

But what, exactly, does that mean? Of course, it means that
the sentence must be true--that whatever the sentence says is
truth. But the sentence says that God is incapable of proving that
the sentence is true. If the sentence is true, God never could
have proved that the sentence is true in the first place. Our
assumption that he did so must be worng; God is incapable of
proving that the sentence is true.

So, we've just proven that the sentence is true. And, in so doing,
we've proven that God is incapable of proving the sentence is
true.

Hardly makes sense to say that God is omnipotent if we can do
something in a paragraph that he can never do, eh?

> Also self-referential statements like "this statement is a lie"
> or "the barber shaves all men who don't shave themselves" have
> no truth-value and are not really propositions.

My, that's a nice boldfaced assertion you've got there. Care to
back it up?

http://people.csail.mit.edu/hammond/teaching/cs1001/PropositionLogic.html

Oh, and while you're at it--care to summarize what Kurt Godel (of
Incompleteness Theorem fame) or Alan Turing (of Halting Problem
fame) would say of your assertion?

Yes, Godel states that there will always be propositions that can't be
proven true or false within any complete system. But a proposition still has
to make a statement that can HAVE a truth value, even if it can't be proven
to be true or false. But actually there are SOME self-referential statements
that can actually have a truth-value (such as "this sentence contains five
words") so I wasn't quite correct there. But most self-referential
statements are written out like the one you had above and tend to not be
true propositions. Also see http://www.jimloy.com/logic/self.htm for more on
self-referential statements.

Cheers,

b&

--
EAC Memographer
BAAWA Knight of Blasphemy
``All but God can prove this sentence true.''

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--
Mike

-------------------------------
"Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop
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we," George W. "Shrub" Bush Aug 5, 2004
.

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