I am very uneducated on this subject. Is God, the omnimax God as commonly defined by mainstream Christianity, physically possible? If so, how exactly would it be possible for such a being to exist? If not, how exactly is it impossible?
In addition, after recently reading Stephen Hawking’s claim that because of gravity, God as a creator is unnecessary, can anyone explain exactly what he means by that?
Given the nature of the subject I think it’s better off in Great Debates than GQ. Thanks in advance.
It’s logically impossible as well as physically impossible. As is often pointed out,the Problem of Evil by itself rules out the omnimax god, and omnipotence instantly runs into the “can he make a rock he can’t lift” paradox. The basic concepts involved don’t hold up.
As for the “physical possible” side, omnipotence breaks literally every physical law there is by definition. Omniscience also requires ignoring both the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and the speed of light limit, for starters.
Science, by definition, does not address the supernatural. The Christian God is, by definition, supernatural. Therefore, science has nothing to say about the Christian God. For that, you need faith, not science.
Hawking is saying that the amount of energy in the universe balances out to be zero, therefore it is not valid to claim that something can not be created out of nothing because it clearly was. The science behind why it balances to zero is beyond my scope.
I disagree; science can and has addressed the supernatural. The problem is the answer always is “there’s no such thing”, and that’s not the answer most people want to hear. There’s no logical reason to think that science couldn’t analyze gods, if there was actually anything to study. But there isn’t, so science doesn’t.
No. Science has addressed the allegedly supernatural. If something were really supernatural, science wouldn’t be able to explain it. If it could, the phenomenon would be natural.
True, but you never actually know that. IOW, you do the experiments, you collect data, you try to make models.
Perhaps the phenomenon may resist all attempts to model it – in which case it may be supernatural, or it may be that we just haven’t defined a usable model yet.
However, for alleged phenomena like god, there are no data to collect and no experiment that has shown that the phenomenon even exists.
Contrary to popular understanding, there is no a priori reason why science must ignore the existence of, say, ghosts. If data could be collected and the data was sufficient to eliminate simpler theories, then their existence would be generally accepted and a great deal of research and theory would go into the attempt to explain them.
I see no reason to look at that definition of “supernatural” as anything other than an argument used by people trying to defend religion from people pointing out how it’s always proven wrong whenever it tries to make an actual verifiable claim. I really doubt that if someone started summoning demons or throwing lightning via “supernatural powers” that people would stop calling them supernatural just because science actually verified it was happening and came up with an explanation.
He basically means that since you could, possibly have a physical law that allows a space-time inflation the fall back position of “God did it” isn’t really necessary and simply gets moved further back to what caused the physical law in the first place.
I don’t really get why there’s all this attention about a “God of the gaps” statement.
What Der Trihs said: if an omnimax god existed, certain things would be true. These things are not true, therefore there cannot be an omnimax god.
But it is literally impossible for anything to be “supernatural” according to this definition. It is as useful a definition as having a word meaning “square circle”.
Does it interact with the universe? If so, we can study it and the rules that define its behaviour (i.e. science). If not, claiming it exists is nothing more than mental masturbation on the level of solipsism.
FWIW, in my observation, omnimax isn’t a very important concept in mainstream Christianity. (BTW, I’m an atheist.) It was a big deal with medievil Scholastics, but not so much for modern Christians. Also, IMHO, the much ballyhooed incoherence of omnimax is greatly overstated. I mean, isn’t it enough that God (if he exists) is really, really powerful? Whether he holds our souls in his hands is the question. Not whether he can make a rock too heavy for himself to lift.
Omnipotence limited to what is logically possible is still omnipotence, so rocks too heavy to lift aren’t really a problem.
What science does is to hypothesize explanations for observed things in a way that the explanation can predict what we see in the future. We don’t actually have any observations of god or anything supernatural, so wondering if science can explain the supernatural is premature. It’s the same as wondering if science can explain Mars and Venus switching places. If they ever do, then we can worry about it.
What we do see, especially natural evil (floods and earthquakes killing people) pretty much zaps omnibenevolence, unless you start by assuming it and then explaining any contradictory evidence as just benevolence we can’t understand. I think that omnipotence and omniscience are mutually contradictory (if you know you are going to do something then you can’t not do it, and if you have freedom not to do something at the last minute then you can’t know you are going to do it) but some people don’t get it.
So, because of the lack of evidence, science isn’t really involved, and we can reject the omnimax god based on logic alone.
I don’t know about that. The fundamentalists I interact with seem to believe all the separate chunks of the omnimax God (omnipotence, omniscience, omnibenevolence). They just avoid the inherent contradictions by simply not thinking about them.
I believe in a Creator because I do not believe that this Universe came into being without something creating it. Has the Universe always been here? If not, where did it come from?
Something cannot come from Nothingness.
For example, I see some old, smelly, pink vomit on the floor. I ask my roommate. Roommate said he had a big party, and some chick blew all over the floor. Now I am getting some background information. What did she drink? “Mostly Vodka.” Vodka, Blech. Comes from potatoes. Grown in the ground, from a seed of another potato plant. Nutured by a farmer and nature itself. Where did nature come from? Gravity? Or the lack thereof with that skank whore who puked chunks of pizza hut and vodka sauce on my floor.
Atheists get all pissy and talk down to me when I ask them simply, “Could it be possible that a being of some kind created the Universe?” They get on about not believing in God, and then mixing religion into the conversation. I am not talking religion, just simply, could there have been a Being or a group of Beings who did this, and decided for whatever reason to stay hidden? That Mankind, being troubled that his mortal existance is finite, seeks out God or something that can relieve the fear of death.
I learned in churches that God has always been here. From forever past. So, at some point in the past, whether it be the Creationists view of 6,000 years to Science which states 10 billion years, God was alone. Was God in a vaccum of space? Did God have anyone to speak with? Did God plan all this out beforehand? God through his sacred writings through the minds of men has made it really confusing for anyone who truly seeks acceptance from the All Powerful Being.
As always gets pointed out when that tired old argument gets trotted out, all that does is push the matter back a step to “Where did God come from?” And if you claim that god is eternal or came from nowhere or whatever, then you can just apply that to the universe and leave the Bronze Age myth out of it.
No, you are mixing religion into the conversation. They know quite well that lines like “do you believe in a being that created the universe” are virtually always just code words for a god; and the Christian god, at that. The idea that the universe is created is a religious one.
No; they’d have no place to exist and no substrate of physical laws to hold a mind together with. Mind is the result of simpler things coming together.
Is it? I mean, what is logically possible might well be equivalent to what is physically possible (and I’d say it is, actually), which at least in theory are things we can do, as well. So is then the difference between god’s omnipotence and our lack thereof merely the ease with which god accomplishes these feats? Is a technologically advanced alien race harnessing powers unknown to us to accomplish all these feats just as easily then omnipotent?
Has god always been there? If not, where did he come from?
That doesn’t really get you anywhere because even if you allow a God, then that god has to come from somewhere.
The classic cop out of religious adherents is “That is not for us to know”.
And yet it evidently has.
They are not being as clever as they think if they just dismiss the possibility of any sort of god out of hand. What you experience could be the result of a simulation being run on some hyper-computer and you are just the ghost in the machine (although, as I write this, of course, I would be the ghost in the machine (unless it’s a really, really, clever program that can have multiple ghosts)).
Similarly it could be the result of an experiment in some other vast universe - a momentary particle from their equivalent to the Large Hadron Collider.
In each of these cases you could reasonably call the people running the simulation or experiment the gods of our creation.
Of course, they could, similarly be experiments or simulations …
It’s much harder to accept the possibility of a god of the sort that earthly religions hypothesise. An omnipotent, omniscient, omnicognisent, omnipresent being. Not all of those omni’s actually make sense and you still would need to answer the question of what made that god.
I would add that positing that an entity is eternal does not, in itself, explain anything.
There’s a general assumption in these debates that a universe / god that’s been around for an infinite amount of time is less problematic that one that’s been around a finite amount of time.
From a philosophical POV I don’t think that’s true. You can still ask all the same ontological questions “How can anything exist?” and “Why does this exist, and not that?” etc.
Saying “Well, God is eternal” works well for some people because it frames god in a way that is far from our intuitions and therefore interllectual scrutiny. But it doesn’t actually explain anything either.
A philosopher (I can’t remember which one) once said that only a small minority of people can actually properly understand the question: ‘why does anything exist’. If he’s correct - and my experience with trying to discuss the matter with intelligent people who get uncomfortable when the matter is brought up, as if they can make sense of the words but don’t really get the concept, suggests he is - it would explain why otherwise apparently intelligent and rational people can fall for this ‘God is eternal and how He came into being isn’t for us to know’ shtick.
