Let me clarify again that I’m not referring to ‘God’. I’m as atheist as anyone, and only interested in your statement about omniscience and omnipotence being logically impossible. I think, particularly the way you’ve spoken about terms, that there is no logical impossibility to omniscience + omnipotence.
I’m having trouble appreciating the distinction, but I don’t think it matters. Let’s call it a determined universe instead. Do you agree that any universe in which an omniscient being has perfect knowledge of the future will be a fully determined universe? If it is a fully determined universe, then omnipotence(per your definition) cannot include the power to change the course of events, because, as you said, omnipotence does not extend to things that are logically impossible. And violating your premise is how you arrive at logical impossibility. If it is not a fully determined universe, then omniscience cannot extend to the future. In either scenario, it is not logically impossible for a being to be both omnipotent and omniscient, and thus it should be possible for an omnipotent being to give itself omniscience.
These versions of omnipotence/omniscience may be weak sauce, but they are the only possible ones, given your definitions. They are, however, possible.
These points are all valid, but orthogonal to mine.
It would seem to me that a Supreme Being who needs to change it’s mind wasn’t sure of what he is doing in the first place, which was not thought out very well, and too much like a human and not supreme.
Of course, the omnidilemma could be resolved through long-division. There might have been a deinitio ultrabeing that created the universe and precipitated deacta superbeings which are quasi-local and trans-omni. jehovallah could be the deacto responsible for this right here creation rather than the whole of the universe, and thus might not be omnimax in the true sense but omnilocal, which would be indistinguishable from omnimax from our perspective. The text of the bible could easily accommodate such a deity.
Of course, then comes the issue of “worship”. I personally have some difficulty understanding the logic of Og-worship: it is just another entity going about its business, why should we worship it? Do we worship airplane pilots or city comptrollers or mill foremen? If prayer and worship have not been conclusively shown to have an effect, why bother? Just let Og do its job.
Understood. We’ve both been theoretical here. There is no problem with Greek type gods who are limited, for instance, only the Western style god. But we always have the problem of getting the theists to nail down the definition of the God they believe in.
Try this - in a deterministic universe you can predict the roll in advance based on its inputs, in a determined universe you can predict the future, if you have that power.
The limitation of logical possibility applies within that power alone. Omniscience by itself has no problems, and the problems of omnipotence, like stones that can’t be lifted, involve only power, and thus can be excluded. My problem is when you combine powers.
Maybe looking at omnibenevolence will make this clearer. There is clearly no problem with omnibenevolence by itself. (Not our universe, but a possible one.) There is no problem with omnipotence by itself. But don’t you agree that combining these is impossible, since it forces God to do only those things consistent with the best possible world?
Right, but this kind of omniscience is not that of the typically defined Christian god. We atheists shouldn’t define gods for them.
I’m not sure what this has to do with what I wrote, but in what other area of human endeavor is a belief being turned into a fact considered bad? A scientist may believe in a certain result. If the experiment succeeds, and she gets the result she believed in, does she say “oh crap, there went that belief!”
Religionists only say this because, I think, deep down in their hearts they know their beliefs are unsupportable. After all, the God of the Torah was pretty evident.
I’d suspect the religious would dispute that they believe in spite of fact, and say instead that they believe in the absence of facts. Now they may do this by rejecting things that you and I consider facts, like creationists reject the age of the earth.
Not proven but demonstrated to a high degree of confidence. And moving to truth doesn’t mean you give up belief. If you believe Carson City is capital of Nevada, then look it up and see you are right, you see that your belief is true but you don’t say that you no longer believe Carson City is the capital. Unless you are making a point about the certainty of this, that is.