From: Dan Hook (guldann@ix.netcom.com)
Date: Tue Mar 11 1997 - 15:27:47 MST
----------
> From: John K Clark <johnkc@well.com>
> To: extropians@lucifer.com
> Subject: Help with "proof" for non-existence of God
> Date: Tuesday, March 11, 1997 1:13 AM
> Suppose God was made up of an infinite number of the old Z80 computer
chips
I still use one of those on a regular basis. Of course, it's in my
calculator, but hey, that's where I do my best programming anyway.
> and, of course, a operating system so they could work together. You could
> assign 10 chips to analyze and predict what one chip could do, if that
didn't
> do the job make it a thousand chips or a million, if that still wasn't
enough
> assign an infinite number of chips, remember the definition of an
infinite
> set is that you can make a one to one correspondence with a proper subset
of
> it. Strange things happen in the arithmetic of infinities, each chip
without
> exception could have an infinite number of chips packing an infinite
amount
> of computing power making predictions about what that one finite chip
would
> do, and you would still have an infinite number of chips to do other
things,
> like figuring out what would happen next in the universe.
If this was the case then, as you said, God would have no free will. The
universe in general has no free will either. Therefore, God and the
universe would be synomous. Besides, if I could convince a theist that God
had no free will, that would probably be close enough to make the jump to
non existence.
Of course, if the universe is infinite than it would be possible to have
multiple omnipotent and omniscent beings. Then they could fight it out.
Wait a second... 8)
> I think a better strategy is to ask the theists if God is omnipotent, if
they
> say yes ask them if he can make a rock so heavy he can't lift it. Then
ask
> them if good and evil are independent of God. If they say yes then God
has
> nothing to with morality, except He is supposed to act that way, just
like
> everybody else. If they say no then the statement "God is good" is a
vacuous
> tautology.
I'm not exactly sure where the connection between these two things are. I
have tried the rock one and mostly I just get people to roll there eyes.
They have encountered that one enough so that it loses meaning.
Dan Hook
guldann@ix.netcom.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 14:44:15 MST