From: Robert Owen (rowen@technologist.com)
Date: Sun Oct 10 1999 - 16:54:04 MDT
John Clark wrote:
> Joe E. Dees <joedees@bellsouth.net> Wrote:
>
> > Such a being [God] could not simultaneously be omniscient and
> > omnipotent.
>
> I always wondered if a omnipotent being could make a rock so heavy
> he couldn't lift it.
>
> John K Clark jonkc@att.net
To John and Joe,
I believe "omnipotence" essentially implies "unlimited or infinite power"
Your question reminds me one one of Kant's "Antinomies of Pure Reason"
which was a precursor of Russell's Paradox and Goedel's conclusion that
self-referentiality must end in paradox and infinite recursion. You know,
if the universe is expanding, what is it expanding into. You need a whole
new non-Euclidean geometry for that one. So, I think the question "can
a limitless being create a limitless object leads to a Truth Table that will
rapidly self-destruct. By the way, Cantor eventually went mad, as you
will recall, from trying to specify "a limit of limits".
Now, Joe, Spinoza and others have struggled with the problem of the
determinacy of the future; maybe that's why the Deists, along with
Newton, just left it at "he made the clock, wound it up, and went away".
Its a kind of quasi-indeterminacy issue; "if you knew what was going
to happen, could you change it?", and "if you could observe the future
would your act of observation change it?". I must admit that our
remarkable ability to predict the past and to make nothing but true
statements about it depends precisely on its immutability.
Conclusion, both of you are involved in the problem of paradoxicality,
double jeopardy and "Catch 22". Evidently the only way to resolve such
issues is to construct a meta-system which places them in a soluble con-
text.
Would this exercise be worthwhile? I doubt it -- we simply have no idea
what we're talking about when we use these "omni-" terms. I used them
as theological concepts to respond to a theological statement, not
because I thought they were non-vacuous.
Bob
=======================
Robert M. Owen
Director
The Orion Institute
57 W. Morgan Street
Brevard, NC 28712-3659 USA
=======================
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