The monotheistic all powerful one.
why do we park on a driveway and drive on a parkway?
Jokes aside, I have baked my bacon and it works really well for preparing an awful lot of bacon very quickly.
Once you do that, you have bacon that you can quickly microwave and slap on a sandwich, plus you can easily collect all of the grease for making gravies or general cooking purposes if you so desire.
I’d go so far as to say baking is superior- it never reaches temp to make the oil pop and makes a mess inside the oven, and you’re only limited on how much bacon you can cook by how many cookie sheets you own (and maybe how much bacon you have stored away in the freezer 😁). Great point on the grease, easy to collect afterwards! Makes great rice!
A driveway is named because it was originally a circle that you could use to drive right up to the house. Think old mansions in movies.
Parkways had separated lanes with shrubberies and plants on between and around, basically parks with a road through them.
A driveway that is straight and ends in a garage isn’t really a driveway. Separated lanes with no plants or parks isn’t really a parkway. But the names both stuck around.
Could god microwave a burrito so hot even he couldn’t eat it?
All of the “is infinite power so powerful that it could overpower its own power” type questions just annoy me.
Is infinite power so powerful it can do something that it can’t do?
Yes it can. And then it can do that anyway. Otherwise it wouldn’t be infinite.
Could god create an “is infinite power so powerful that it could overpower its own power” type question that you wouldn’t find annoying?
The Unexpected Hanging Paradox: A man is sentenced to death, but the judge decides to have a little fun with it. The man will be killed at noon on a day of the judge’s choosing in the next week, from Monday to Friday. The only stipulation is that the man will not expect it when he’s called to be killed.
The man does some quick logic in his head. If Friday is the last day he could be killed, then if he makes it to Friday without dying, he knows he must die on that day. And since that wouldn’t be a surprise, he cannot be killed on Friday.
He then extends the logic. Since he can’t be killed on Friday, the last day he can be killed is on Thursday. Thus, all the prior logic regarding Friday applies, and he cannot be killed on Thursday either. This then extends to Wednesday, then Tuesday, and then Monday. At the end, he grins with the knowledge that, through logic, he knows he cannot be killed on any of the days, and will therefore not be killed.
Therefore, the man is astonished when he’s called to be killed on Wednesday.
How does the judge determine whether the condemned man is “expecting it”?
Regardless of when he’s called, he could simply state that he was expecting to be called, and therefore the hanging would be called off.
Its a bad paradox because it pivots on something that cannot be properly defined.
Cannot be properly defined? “Expecting it” means “regarding it likely to happen”, according to the dictionary. He regarded it as impossible to happen, so he was not expecting it. His own logic disproving the event (him being surprised) allowed the event to happen (he was surprised).
Why does the paradox suffer if he lies about the solution? The paradox has already played out, and anything after that is just set dressing.
Just off the top of my head, maybe the judge has a camera set to gauge his reaction to the knock on the door? Or maybe he goes into denial and tries to explain his logic, thus proving the paradox? Or maybe the judge doesn’t actually care as much as he said, but trusts the logic to hold out and make for a funny story?
You provide three flawed ways of measuring expectation; that’s the issue in a nutshell.
Its not a true paradox as the whole gambit rests on a changeable emotion, not logic.
The prisoner could wake up each morning and simply say “I expect to die today”. How would the judge determine the truth? It would be impossible.
If someone punches you in the face after saying “knock knock”, it doesn’t make it a knock knock joke, and nor is this a paradox.
Not a paradox but Roko’s Basilisk is a fun one
Roku’s basilisk just doesn’t make sense to me because any semi-competent AI would be able to tell that it is not punishing the people that failed to help create it it’s just wasting energy punishing a simulacrum.
We are not going to suddenly be teleported into a future of torment. If the AI had the ability to pluck people out of the past it should have no reason to waste it on torture porn.
Then AI already exists and you have no memory or recollection of either helping to create it or accidentally contributing to its non-creation and therefore you being tormented by the AI would serve no moral purpose.
Any torture you would be experiencing in that simulation would simply be that the AI desires to torture, and you happen to be one of its victims.
Roko’s basilisk would still not be in play
God clearly can’t exist because an omnipotent, omniscient, and just God is a paradox already. Omnipotence and omniscience means that God, if they exist, would have full control of every moment of the universe (even if they only “acted” initially). Some (I’d argue nearly all) people suffer for reasons out of their control. Only deserved suffering is just. Since undeserved suffering exists then God cannot exist (at least omniscient, omnipotent, and just - as we understand those terms). God could be an omniscient, omnipotent asshole or sadist… God could be omniscient and just (aka the martyr God who knows of all suffering but is powerless to prevent it)… or God could be omnipotent and just (aka the naive God who you could liken to a developer running around desperately trying to spot patch problems and just making things worse).
Alternatively, by omnipotent maybe the scriptures are just hyping them up - “God is so fucking buff - this one time they lifted up this rock that was like this big. Fucking amazing.”
As you said, that does depend entirely on God having those properties, exactly as you define them.
Alternatively, if definitive property is “universal consciousness”, then God clearly must exist. Either consciousness is an emergent property of sufficiently complex systems, in which case the entire universe is obviously more complex than the human nervous system and consciousness should certainly emerge within it; or, consciousness is some external field, like gravity or electromagnetism, that complex systems can channel. Either way, the existence of your own consciousness implies a universal one.
I don’t think your alternative proposal makes sense, at least not to me. An emergent property being present in one complex system doesn’t imply that it must be present in all complex systems.
What does imply it’s presence, then? The emergence of comparable effects is implied by isomorphic complexities. If you can’t define the foundational structure which implies emergence, you can only fall back on a probabilistic approach.
Unless you can define exactly what structure it is that belies the emergence of consciousness, you must acknowledge that the comparative complexity of a more complex system is undoubtedly probabilistically suggestive of at least comparable, if not far more complex, emergent behavior.
The proposition that consciousness is emergent, but only at a very specific and narrow band of complexity, falls quickly to Occam’s razor. It’s logically and probabilistically ridiculous.
Ah, the Epicurean Trilemma. This was my answer too. Weirdly attributed to a guy from before monotheism was the predominant belief.
Alternatively, by omnipotent maybe the scriptures are just hyping them up
The scriptures don’t use that word, and it’s notable because the Old Testament didn’t believe that to be the case, either. Early Israelites were henotheistic. They believed other gods might exist (hence the need for “thou shalt have no other gods before me”), but only worshipped the one. When multiple gods exist, it is by definition necessary that they cannot be omnipotent.
It’s pretty clear that he is not meant to be omnibenevolent either. The god of the Tanakh is wrathful. Christians later reinterpreted him as omnibenevolent, but this was clearly not the authors’ intent. I believe Jewish scholars still don’t think he’s omnibenevolent today.
Religious scholars have come up with a number of other proposed solutions to the trilemma. Ones involving free will are quite popular, though not the only ones. I have yet to find any argument that is remotely convincing, however. Saying “free will” just means god either cannot or chooses not to enable people to have a form of free will that does not involve them desiring to do evil. It also ignores the very many evils not created by human action. Child cancer, earthquakes, drought-induced famine (today humans have the technological ability to solve this last one and might simply choose not to, but historically it has been an insurmountable problem not caused by human free will).
I recommend you read “Religion of the Apostles” by Stephen De Young. He explains the common misconceptions of the early Israelite beliefs. The “Gods” are lesser divine beings that were meant to protect the 70 tribes after the Tower of Babel fell. The deities rebelled against God and led the nations astray and were worshipped. The tribe of Israel worshipped the God of “Most high” which is the one true God above all divine beings. So they aren’t henotheistic because there is only one God. The term “Gods” was used because they were divine beings but they were created whereas God the Father is not. Everything proceeds from him.
A great podcast that explains evil and suffering is “Whole Counsel of God” with the same guy. In short, suffering is unavoidable because man falls from Eden after sinning and the consequence of sin is death. Making death the consequence is a mercy because man can become sanctified during his life and through death re-enter the kingdom of God. Consequently suffering draws people closer to God than anything else.
I’m not a theologian and wrote this on my phone but that’s my quick recap. The book is way more thorough of course.
I haven’t read the book, but I did some reading about it, and it seems like it’s come against some significant criticism for being poor academics and its author criticised for presenting his own one academic idea as a fact.
So while it’s certainly interesting to hear his theory from your summary of it, and to learn that there are competing theories out there, I don’t think it’s going to change my understanding of where scholars more broadly stand on it. The fact that I can’t really find anyone talking about de Young’s interpretation of early Israelite monolatry (which I’ve just realised is possibly a more accurate term than henotheism, though the lines between the two are blurred) concerns me from that perspective. Which is not to say that’s it’s necessarily wrong. It especially could have been a phase they went through on the way from monolatry to Second Temple Judaism’s monotheism.
But in general I’m very wary of non-academic books presenting grand theories that cannot be well backed-up by academic sources, even when by an author with academic credentials. Reminds me too much of Guns, Germs, and Steel.
