I think you may be onto something with this analogy. Although He/She/It/They can manipulate things in this universe at will, God is not part of this physical universe. God moving a rock is more like a programmer manipulating bytes than a sim lifting the rock.
This is assuming God exists, of course.
What would it mean if God wasn’t bound to logic? That God could exist and not exist at the same time?
That’s incoherent, and thereby meaningless.
If God is infinite how does he prorate vacation days and where does he go to get away from it all?
Well, he wouldn’t do this anyway. He’d have his holy Admin do it for him…
Just because there are aspects of God that we can never understand does not make him completely meaningless.
Yeah, I remember the first time I read about “Intelligent Design” in Skeptical Inquirer. I thought, well, it has a certain absurd logic to it. Then I observed a few people passing by and thought, too bad it doesn’t describe people.
Maybe they meant to say “Humorous Design”. Do these same people ever discuss the notion of planned obsolescence?
-VM
You’re right. It takes an organized religion thousands of years to render God completely meaningless. Compared to something like the Catholic Church, these guys are just tilting at windmills.
-VM
Thanks man, now what am I going to tell my wife (she was sleeping…)? 
Sorry for the hijack.
My friends and I saw Him do that once. By the time He was done, it was clear that a better question would have been, “Can God make a mess so huge even He can’t clean it?” We couldn’t get out of there fast enough, believe you me, and if I never see God Flemble again it’ll be too soon. Yeesh.
-P
I’m sorry, I don’t quite get what you mean by this.
Yeah. I don’t subscribe to the view, but we haven’t (and can’t have) proved logic consistent, I don’t think, so it might not be. Or maybe God just introduced a flaw into our brains preventing them being logical when thinking about God. Either way, it would mean that we couldn’t apply logic to God (or possibly, anything else) successfully. Personally, I’m inclined to assume logic works or I’d spend all day in a heap gibbering unable to know what effect an action will have, but some people believe it’s possible that logic doesn’t apply to god.
I have now OFFICIALLY whooshed Diogenes the Cynic.
“Go Dijon, go Dijon, it’s yer birthday, it’s yer birthday, I’M SO PRETTAY!!!”
Heh-heh-heh-hack-cough-wheeze…
Sorry for the double post, but I just found this.
Might I do you the honor of featuring this in my sig (not saying that being in MY sig is an honor…I’m just sucking up)?
Well, what are the aspects of God that we do understand and how do we know they are aspects of God? How do we know God could hold those attributes especially if logic is gone?
I was summing up three paradox’s (?). Such as, God is said to be immaterial-right? If that’s so, then how does an immaterial entity act on the material? How could something immaterial possess any omnimax abilities?
Also, how does something eternal act on the temporal? To put it another way, when does the eternal act on the temporal? Where does this being reside, since we no of nothing that is not temporal.
And finally, how does something whose essence is good (which supposedly gets rid of Eurythropo’s dilemma) and perfect create/allow evil to exist?
The point of logic is that it’s axiomatic and has to be consistent. If it’s not then nothing would make sense. Frankly, I can’t even imagine what it would be like if logic was any different. It necessarily has to be what it is.
If this is so, then how would it be ‘just’ to condemn someone for using a brain that God has intentionally made faulty in the most important area? Throughout the rest of the person’s life, his brain operates normally, so he has no reason to doubt it when applying it to higher concepts-yet when he does, God inserts faulty wiring, thereby interfering with free will and in some religions damning the guy to hell.
If we can’t apply logic to the God concept then we can’t say anything meaningful about God at all-how could we? So the God concept becomes meaningless.
Some people do just that, but it’s not a rational position. Keep in mind, I’m not saying it’s ‘wrong’, because after all, everything I know (or think I know) could ultimately be wrong.
I’m not entirely sure about that. It seems to me that belief in God has largely sustained itself by means of personal revelation and/or assumptions derived from the supposed revelations of others (in the form of scriptures, for example). And logic is used by believers in an attempt to explain these revelations rather than serving as a substitute for them, so that even if the logic fails it does not change their belief in the overall concept of a God, a concept which is not meaningless insofar as they’ve experienced it even if they can’t fully explain it.
I suppose the believer would liken his understanding of God to that of a baby’s understanding of his parent; they are sure of the presense of something benign and worthy of trust, but they can’t necessarily explain the how and why of its actions or being.
And so, the believer in any case, is able to talk meaningfully about God, but only because he’s working from a base of either personal revelation or particular assumptions- in other words, faith. It’s sort of like if I were to imagine a fantasy world in which magic existed; with the assumption that magic was real I could then attempt to extrapolate how it actually works. I might be wrong about the assumption and/or the conclusions, but I would nonetheless be able to talk meaningfully about both.
So, separated from personal revelation and not using any particular assumptions, logic may not be able to say anything significant about God, and within this specific context God may even be a meaningless concept, insofar as the concept is largely undefined and so incapable of being falsified.
If the point being made then is simply that God as a concept cannot be understood by logic alone, then I agree completely, but so do most believers- as their conception of God was never based entirely on logic in the first place. To a believer, I imagine all this talk of paradoxes comes across merely as a rather prolix way of stating “God works in mysterious ways.”
The problem, of course, is that some people have experienced personal revelations (or at least think they have) and some people, myself included, have not. And so there’s always going to be an unresolvable disconnect when discussing religion.
I’m not saying it changes their beliefs, I’m saying if you throw out logic then there isn’t any meaning to the word God. Yes, the theist attributes meaning to it, by believing something they call God exists, but without logic, they can not hope to give any sort of explanation as to what they are actually talking about. That’s what I mean by the God concept is meaningless.
I don’t deny this. I don’t deny that a theist can talk meaningfully about their God, ie, “God did this, God watches over me, God…” etc, etc. What I’m saying is that the meaning of ‘God’ in those statements is meaningless and could be replaced with “Snarfle”. The point is that I’m not denying that the theist believes in this entity, I’m saying that when critically looked at, this entity is incomprehensible and meaningless because you can’t attach anything to it definitively.
Faith is fine, I have no argument with faith.
Here’s the thing, if you separate logic from God and you try to just state that something you call ‘God’ exist, without clearly defining it, then all you are doing is asserting that something that could or couldn’t exist, exists. Heck, you aren’t even really stating that something necessarily exists, because to exist you have to exist AS something and most theists say that God is immaterial and supernatural. Which begs the question that those things can and do exist.
Here’s another thing, what do you mean when you imply that something can be understood without logic? Are you implying that there is something ‘extra’ logical?
Additionally the only difference between God and a complete ‘mystery’ becomes the symbol ‘God’. So when I am asked to believe in something and someone says believe in God, what are they actually asking me to believe in? Something that could exist and not exist at the same time? Something that is impossible to exist?
Personal revelations can be explained though, without the need to step to whatever the divine would be.
Again, I’m just stating things as I understand them-although it might appear otherwise, I’m not stating authoratatively that I’m right and your wrong.
Oh come on!! If you compressed everything in the universe into a lump the size of your little toe, it would still weigh nothing. It would only have mass. If a God of some sort exists, it would know this…and so should you.
This forum needs a separate column for stupid questions!!!
What’s your take on apophatic theology, in which God is considered to transcend any descriptors we could apply to Him, and therefore is described solely in negative terms, e.g. God is not limited by time or space? Wikipedia has a good summary on it. You don’t consider it possible that there are beings that transcend our ability to comprehend them as much as we transcend a jellyfish’s comprehension, to say nothing of Him Who transcends everything else?
If God transcends anything that we could possibly say about him, then what could we say about him that’s meaningful?
Take this bit-taken from the Wikipedia:
What does this actually mean?
No I don’t, but let me be clear:
I admit the possibility that I could be wrong on a whole host of things that could turn out to effect my stance on the God question; however, as it is, I don’t see the possibility that God exists-for a number of reasons, one being ‘what is God? and what can be said about God?’.
I mean, what does it actually mean if a being exists out there that transcends my ability to comprehend it? How would it be rational to accept it’s existence? Could we even call it a ‘being’?
It’s like saying that “?” exists; well, “?” very well could exist, but since I don’t know what “?” is, nor do I know if “?” could actually exist, then what would I actually be believing in if I said “?” exists?
Suppose “?” was the essence of non-existence (whatever that may be), it was just another word for something that couldn’t possibly exist; If I didn’t know anything about “?” and chose to believe in it anyway, we could come to this sort of confusion-believing in something that couldn’t possibly exist.
Without knowing what you believe in, how do you believe in it?
Can God create God?
Can God create lift music that’s rock?
How many angels can dance on the head of a God?