Actually if you really do math, e is far more common than pi. It is also non-repeating. As is the square root of 2.
However, if you think this stuff means God made the universe, do you think he made it for us? There is an awful lot of empty space out there. Not to mention that we are kind of late to the game. Maybe he made the universe for someone else, and we just popped up accidentally. It fits the facts better than a human-centric God.
Maybe if Mrs. God ever convinces him to clean up, we’re in deep doo-doo.
Mathematically, however, I see God more as the square root of -1. Useful, but imaginary.
While irrational numbers sound funny, they do exist. i is more interesting, since it demonstrates that we can talk about and analyze unreal things. One argument for God, which I will express poorly, is that since we conceive of God as the greatest, and things which exist are greater than things which don’t, God must exist. But being able to express God or i does not at all mean that they exist, no matter what characteristics we assign them.
Some say use of God improves your health, lets you live longer, does your dishes. i is vital in defining all sorts of stuff. But utility of the concept does not imply existence in either case.
Or, existing outside/above and separate from the real number line.
In case it needs to be said, within the context of mathematics, words like “irrational” and “real” and “imaginary” are technical terms, chosen for historical reasons, and should not be interpreted to mean that the ordinary English connotations apply to those numbers in a physical or metaphysical way.
That’s basically the argument known as Anselm’s Ontological Argument, which anyone who is interested is invited to google. I still haven’t decided whether it’s anything more than semantic mumbo-jumbo, but I do like the sort-of-inverse that says that if what you conceive of as God is not the greatest, it’s not the real God.
I think Niel Degrasse Tyson summed it up quite nicely,
“I don’t even mind… I don’t even care if someone wants to say* ‘you don’t understand that, God did it’*. What would bother me, is if you were so content in that answer, that you no longer had the curiosity to learn how it happened”.
Which I’ve heard answered by counterarguments like “Unicorns are the most perfect animal that can exist, existing is more perfect than not existing, therefore unicorns must exist.” Which they don’t.
The ontological proof is a silly one frankly. No matter how perfect or great something is supposed to be, that is no guarantor of its existence. And there’s no reason to assume that such a being if it existed would resemble at all what people mean when they say “God”. Especially since “perfect” and “greatest” are undefined.
It’s a good thing that Christians are very selective in what teachings they say they follow. He shines in a few areas, but for every little good can be found in his teachings, there is an equal or probably greater amount of nonsense that no good man or woman can truly follow or should.
God is not real? Thank you, I think we are done here.
Rational, yes. But there is mapping from real numbers to the logical world as we know it. If not for the mathematical inelegance of the real world, you could even experimentally find pi to any desired precision. But though you can perform any number of mathematical operations involving the imaginary number, its existence is inherently self-contradictory, as many of us would say the tri-omni god is.
And if you can prove that the greatest does not exist, you also prove that God under this definition does not exist.
Here’s the real problem. The proof assume that there is an ordering on all characteristics, so that you can say that an entity with a set of characteristics C1 is greater than an entity with set of characteristics C2.
An omniscient entity is greater than an almost omniscient one, and an omnipotent entity is greater than an almost omnipotent one. And entity with both is greater than an entity with neither.
But say having both characteristics is logically contradictory. And say we have entity E1 with omnipotence and entity E2 with omniscience. Who is greater? We have a partial ordering here. Neither can be god. God must be the entity with both, but that is logically contradictory, therefore God must not exist.
Now we can talk about something useful, like the greatest ice cream flavor.
“rational” and “irrational” in mathematics derives from the word “ratio”, which is taken to mean integer fraction. In a, ahem, real sense, pi is a rational number in that it is defined in terms of a ratio. To suggest that its decimal representation (or binary, or base-20, or any digital representation) has some arcane significance is pure woo.
Why do you say this? It’s certainly not self-contradictory, just contradictory to the axioms of the real number system. But imaginary numbers do indeed exist.
Likewise, I wonder if you or other atheists are thinking of God in a way that you think is self-contradictory but in fact only contradictory to some of the other axioms you’re using to think of existence. Maybe God is beyond your axioms.
A God which gives me a million dollars is more perfect than one which doesn’t. God hasn’t given me a million dollars. Therefore, God is less than perfect.
For $500,000 I’ll make up a category of “periperfect” and write a Bible chapter to show it.
That’s a good question. I guess I have issues with Christians who claim to do a thing, but don’t really do that thing. You know, like claim they follow the teachings of Jesus, like you just did, but within a few sentences reveal they don’t really follow said teachings, like you just did.
I have a number of theories as to why Christians do that, but I was curious how you justify it in your own words. So how do you?
I already know that about you. You’ve told us that dozens of times. Your issues, however, were not actually my concern. Forgive me for not phrasing more carefully.
I meant, what does it have to do with this thread?
I assure you I have used i (j if you are an electrical engineer) plenty in school. By exist I mean map into real world things.
The (perfectly valid) argument against the “can god make a weight too heavy for him to lift” thing is that omnipotence does not require to be able to do logically impossible things. If you think God can then this argument becomes valid.
We can talk of four sided triangles. Escher could draw impossible things. That does not mean they have real existence.
