This is a fantastic debate. I think the point is a very deep one, which addresses the nature of the law and the nature of (and even possibility of existence of) god.
A first approximation of the nature of law is that it is in-principle possible to draft a law so that it is knowable in advance in order that a person can determine their future behaviour knowing with certain clarity whether they are in breach of it. Turns out this idea is aspirational rather than achievable. To be sure, in most cases an imperfectly complete law can be applied. Clearly grabbing a woman’s private parts in a clear case is sexual assault. But the problem exists not in the common case, but the marginal one. It is not the case that objections to the Rule at the margin (such as those raised by Pantastic) are details that can be worked out. They are deeply and unavoidably built in to the nature of law.
The experience of lawyers is that law consists not of a collection of absolute rules that need to be memorised, but of principles that contain exceptions, then exceptions to exceptions, and so on all the way down.
By way of example, a primary rule is that relevant evidence is admissible. But an exception to that is that hearsay is not admissible. But an exception to that is that confessions to police are admissible. A further exception to that is that confessions obtained after police promises are inadmissible. And a further exception to that is if the prosecution can prove that the confession would have been made independently of the promise, it is admissible again. And so on, as per the turtle principle.
A powerful informing idea emerging from this is that the law is fractal. Perhaps not in a strictly mathematical sense, but nevertheless in a way that generates a priori undecidability at the margin.
To illustrate, suppose we create a law that says No vehicles in the Park.
We can graph this by inscribing a circle onto a surface. The circle represents the boundary between legal and illegal behaviour per the vehicles rule. Those points inside the circle represents behaviours that are prohibited by the rule, and those outside the circle behaviours that are not prohibited. Close to the centre are clear cases; close to the circumference are marginal cases.
So far so good. We now focus on a particular small segment of the circle line, and ask ourselves, what about emergency vehicles? We decide we have to modify the rule at this point. On the circle to represent the proposition that emergency vehicles are an exception to the rule as originally expressed, we make a little salient in the circle that projects inside into the circle to represent that a collection of behaviours that was formerly inside the circle is now to be outside.
Looking closer at that salient, we ask ourselves, what about stolen emergency vehicles, and we decide that stolen emergency vehicles are now an exception to the exception, and so make a reverse salient within the original salient to represent that. Then we consider the case of a stolen emergency vehicle that was stolen to respond to a real emergency, and inscribe a reverse reverse salient within our increasingly tightly focused segment of the circle upon which we are focusing. Then consider the case where there was no real emergency but the person stealing the vehicle genuinely thought there was. Then the case where he genuinely thought there was a real emergency, but had no reasonable basis to believe that. And so on. Focusing on what at first appeared to be a bright line now starts to appear fuzzy. It’s like zooming in on the boundary of the Mandelbrot curve.
Consider another adjacent area of the circle segment. Do bicycles count as prohibited vehicles? We make an exception for two wheeled vehicles, and a corresponding salient in the circle. Then we realise that we have let in Harvey-Davidsons. So we alter the rule and the corresponding line segment. Then at yet another adjacent area, we consider big industrial trucks, and exceptions to that based on the need to conduct park maintenance and earth moving and, exceptions that drill down from there. And somewhere else mobility scooters, and within that, mobility scooters driven by people who are not in fact disabled, and then within that what does it mean to be disabled. And once more, exception to exception all the way down.
The thesis is that it is not possible in principle to create an a priori Rule that covers all possibilities.
And there is no brute-force solution. Suppose we decide that we will place a sticker on all the vehicles in all the world that indicate clearly whether they can or cannot come into the park. That doesn’t solve the problem of who is driving them. And it doesn’t solve the further boundary problem of: What counts as a vehicle to which we should attach a sticker in the first place. If we define vehicle very widely, as any sort of conveyance, do shoes count? And an a priori Rule still does not take account of future developments post proclamation of the Rule. Suppose after the rule is proclaimed Back to the Future hoverboards are invented. The stickers have already been distributed. What we should do with hoverboards will depend contingently on things like how inherently fast or stable or dangerous they are, something the Rule cannot have anticipated.
These points are similar to those made by Pantastic above, although I think they go further - they indicate the in-principle impossibility of any a priori Rule being capable of covering all possibilities.
Indeed the picture Pantastic paints of the inevitable need for ongoing intervention actually represents the evolution of the actual process of the law to the present point in history. The common law created broad rules that aspired to universality, but the process was sufficiently flexible for the common law to adapt the rules when corner cases emerged. And they always emerged. In the entire history of human kind, there is not the slightest indication that we are any closer to creating a Code of law that is so complete that it is essentially self-executing without the need for an ongoing judicial process that exists later in time than the code to interpret and adapt and apply it.
In the modern era, the legislature passes laws that are the best attempt at foreseeing all ends that can be done. Courts then adapt and apply the rules going forward in time. There is a self-correcting feedback loop built into the system, such that if, as again is inevitable, it turns out that the court’s interpretation is not consistent with the legislature’s intentions, the legislature can act to correct or some other in-principle action can be engaged to correct the courts.
So much for the inherent nature of law and its fundamental problem with a priori decidability.
Now - enter god into the picture. The OP is not clear whether he drafts the law that the supernatural enforcer enforces or whether he gives guidelines and god works out the details in each case according to some algorithm attached to the OP’s general guideliines. If the former, the above analysis indicates that the process will fail. If the latter, then the OP has god’s power, but not his omniscience. His imperfection of expression of guidelines will necessarily infect the Rule when it comes to the inevitable boundary cases. God will essentially have limited himself by outsourcing defining the initial state to the imperfect OP. The inherent problem is the undecidability a priori of the appropriate boundary conditions imperfectly generated by the OP.
Essentially, the problem becomes one of the class - Can god do impossible things? Can he create a weight even he can’t lift? Can he make pi equal 3? Can he make the set of all sets that don’t contain themselves, contain itself? Can god violate Godel’s incompleteness theorem?
There are plenty of things physics says are impossible. FTL travel. for example. Can god violate that? It is superficially easy to imagine god scooching the Mars expedition across the distance from Earth in a couple of seconds. The problem is that in order to do so, he also has to deal with the consequences. Scooching in this universe will give the spaceship infinite mass, the consequences of which god will have to damp. Indeed, the proscription of FTL travel is so deeply embedded into the universe that it is not clear that god can do enough damping and still leave the universe coherent.
The are also plenty of things that are undecidable. The position and velocity of subatomic particles cannot both be known simultaneously, and this is not just a matter of inadequate measurement or just inventing a cooler machine. This undecidability is built into the rules of the universe. One can imagine god knowing these things from a naive perspective, just as one can imagine god making pi equal 3. Just not in a way that allows this universe retain coherence.
The standard theist responses to this are:
- In God there is no inconsistency
- God would not want to do such a thing as create a weight he couldn’t lift or the equivalent.
- God’s power is beyond human capacity to understand
- Don’t put god to the test.
The answers to this are:
- A handwave that seeks to simply naively redefine its way out of the problem without realising the problem is a definitional one in the first place.
- An attempt to avoid the problem that resolves to saying that god is bound not by an absence of power to undertake inconsistgent things, but an absence of will. This is just shifting the problem to a different realm, not a solution.
- A thought stopping slogan
- An in terrorem thought stopping slogan.
I appreciate this debate is not about anyone’s religious beliefs or whether god exists (although it tangentially engages that issue). But engaging god in the process has consequences that must be addressed.
A final point. It is always possible to shit on any hypothetical and say it is impossible so attempt scoffingly to dismiss the OP. This is rightly derided as boring and trivial. I emphasise I am not doing that. The fact that the OP has deep coherency problems means that any implementation of it will be imperfect unless there is a process of continual intervention, according to principles that are incoherent. If the outcome of the OP will inevitably be imperfect, that is inconsistent with the involvement of god. Further, inevitable imperfection necessarily implies that some outcomes will be unjust, in a way that the magnitude of which is unknowable in advance. And that is why the OP is unacceptable on its merits - unpredicatable unjust outcomes are subtly but deeply built into the idea.