No, a tri-omni being is logically inconsistent, and cannot exist. Other attributes (have any examples?) no doubt make the problem even worse.
You could conceive of a being with all the tri-omni attributes but the moment it is suggested that it actually uses those powers or involves itself in the real world then, yes, I agree. such a being seems logically inconsistent.
As for attributes, well, the attribute of involving itself it man’s affairs in any way is the big one (and as a subset of that all the subsequent interventions, actions and attributes, say, of a christian god, for example).
In summary,
tri-omni interventionist, theistic god? doesn’t make sense to me. I agree with your assessment.
Tri-omni deistic god who does not use those powers at all and in no-way interferes or interacts with the natural world? I can’t say it is impossible but I also cannot see any way I nor anyone else can know anything about them.
So we end up with something that is either logically inconsistent or undetectable, unknowable and unnecessary.
If God is omniscient and omnipotent, could He come up with a proof that God does not exist?
(And could He then find a flaw in that proof?)
Absolutely! Especially if God used an ontological proof!
Citation please
Sorry for the delay in responding.
Omniscience doesn’t involve actions, so there is no issue of whether an omniscient deity exercises omniscience - it has omniscience from the moment it starts to exist.
Omnipotence is about capability, not action. Say a God can push a start to the left or push a star to the right. That it cannot do both at the same time, which is logically impossible, in no way diminishes that God’s omnipotence. It can do either. I agree with those who say logical impossibilities do not diminish omnipotence, which is why the creating a taco too big to eat argument doesn’t work. The problem here is the combination of omnipotence with the other omnis
A deistic god can’t really be omnipotent since any action it takes makes it no longer a deistic god. It can be omniscient.
Doesn’t this contradict what you said about omnipotence being about capability, not action?
No, this is just about how you categorize what type of god it is. He has the capability, but if he exercises it you just have to change what you name him.
If the classification of him as deistic is somehow a law of nature (I don’t see how) then he isn’t omnipotent since doing anything would violate this law.
I think that is what I said, it certainly is what I meant. The moment any action is assigned to such a being it becomes illogical. It remains either illogical or irrelevant (because it does not interact with the world).
I’m going to disagree on the omnipotent deistic god thing, while at the same time agreeing it’s an “angels on the head of a pin” thing.
I mean, imagine an omnipotent god that creates the universe then chooses to take no further action until all life in the universe has ceased a trillion trillion years from now. For life forms like us, there is no practical difference between such a deity and one that truly will never perform any action. So it becomes purely a technicality of whether we’re defining these terms in some practical way or entirely in the abstract. And since we can cover the whole truth table for “deism” and “omnipotent” with these definitions, I don’t consider them inherently contradictory.
But again, it’s utterly inconsequential.
I’m not sure that deistic gods are illogical, but they are certainly irrelevant. I’d never considered a tri-omni (or even bi-omni) deistic god before.
An omnipotent deistic god is like a vegetarian who can eat meat, but when he does so he is no longer a vegetarian. (Using a stricter definition of vegetarian than is common here.) A deistic god can do something, but then is no longer deistic.
That’s for sure.
That bit in Ezekiel with wheels and creatures with multiple faces and moving in different directions without turning always seemed to me like it could be an attempt to describe something with more than 3 space-like dimensions, but it could just as easily be an attempt to describe something with more than 3 of the little mushrooms, or a fever dream.
Don’t eat too many of the little mushrooms. Unless it helps you visualize low-dimensional topology. Even then, it is going to take more to define a useful topological quantum field theory than specifying the number of dimensions.
FWIW I think the whole idea is nonsense anyway but it is the most I’ll concede towards any claims of “onmi-ism”. I agree that yes, all deistic gods are completely irrelevant in all cases anyway.
Pah.
There is only one necessary attribute of a Godlike being, namely omniscience. Everything else is redundant. If the entity we are considering literally knows everything, then She would know the consequences of every action, and every thought that occurs inside the head of every living entity in creation.
If She also knows the consequence of any action She might take, then there is no need for those actions to take place in ‘reality’. Indeed, She need not actually manufacture the universe at all, since She already knows how it is going to pan out. By simply being omniscient, She already knows all the possible consequences of every quantum-level event, and therefore has a perfect simulation inside Her mind of the multiplicity of possibilities the Universe can manifest. An entity with total omniscience is in possession of a perfect simulation of every possible timeline in every possible world. Even if She decides to become a hands-on, omnipotent control-freak of a God who changes the outcome of every stochastic, quantum-level event on a whim, She already knows how Her actions will affect the universe. She already knows everything; Calvinistic predestination turned up to the max. So an omniscient entity would also be omnipotent, although She would not need to actually do anything.
The one thing such an omniscient entity could not be would be omnibenevolent. She already knows the extent of the suffering that would exist in the infinite manifold of possible worlds, and this suffering would just as realistic to the sufferers as if it had been manifested in solid matter. The Omniscient God contains a perfect simulation of a real multiverse, making that multiverse itself redundant as a physical object; but a significant fraction of these possible worlds are full of pain and despair (and perhaps all of these worlds have some pain, if only in the form of regret or compassion).
So this idea is that the universe cannot, well, really exist; it can exist only in the mind of an “omniscient entity” (aka Vishnu)? This is all well-trodden ground but like Godel I wonder if we can come up with mathematical conundrums like along the lines of the Halteproblem.
Ok so I’ve just jumped out of an airplane and suddenly I am granted omniscience. I can see every possible future and in every possible future, and every possible result of every one of my actions. Unfortunately I discover that in every one of those futures no matter what actions I take take the quantum wave function will collapse into a reality where my parachute will fail to open and I will go splat in some 90 seconds. The fact that I can’t stop a child in South Sudan from dying malnutrition in the, now 85 seconds, it will take me to reach the ground has nothing to do with my omnibenevolence or lack thereof.
Or if you would prefer the many worlds interpretation of QM, then I see that in 99.9999999…2% of those worlds I go splat. Nothing I do can prevent me from going splat in the vast majority of worlds or from turning into bowl of petunias in some of the others. I may regret the death of the child (oh no not again) in the vast majority of those worlds but I am helpless to avoid their coming into being.
If you know all the possible outcomes of every possible future, you would also know the outcomes of every future in which you used a miracle to solve whatever problem you have at the moment. This means that omniscience implies omnipotence*, but does not permit omnibenevolence (unless benevolence embraces suffering as a necessary evil).
*Note that the sort of omnipotence implied by omniscience is a kind of ‘virtual’ omnipotence; you would only know what would happen in each and every possible world, but it would not be necessary for each of these possible worlds to exist in a physical, ‘concrete’ form. But from the viewpoint of an entity inside one of these possible worlds, there would be no detectable difference whether this world existed in physical form or not - the experience of such an entity would be identical either way.
But again this is making the assumption that there was a miracle that you could perform that would solve the problem. Your omniscience may just reveal that there is no solution.
And even this is granting the assumption that this entity is actually capable of any action what so ever. Perhaps he is the ultimate watcher with no ability to affect anything at all. Even if I was the ultimate fan and knew everything there is to know about the star trek universe down to the smallest atom, I still can’t prevent Tasha Yar from dying in “skin of evil”.
That would be an entity which is neither omnibenevolent or omnipotent, and would be limited in omniscience as well . If this entity doesn’t know what would happen if She had the power to change the multiverse via miracles, then She doesn’t know everything.