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Tom
Registered Member
Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 10353
| Posted 9/2/2005 4:47 PM (GMT -6) |   | Dragon Chaser: If God cannot break OUR rules of logic and know impossible things, he cannot know anything, and he is therefore short of omniscient. By definition, omniscience is the quality of having infinite knowledge.
Tom: This is not at all what “omniscience” by definition means. By definition all omniscience (all-knowing) means is “knowing all truths that exist.” And that’s not even an open theist corruption of the word ‘omniscience’; it's straight down the line orthodox. God is omniscient iff for any proposition p, if p is true, then God knows that p and does not know that not-p. So the “all” in “all-knowing” (or the “omni” in “omniscient”) doesn’t mean the number of propositions known by God is infinite. It just means that whatever truths exist, God knows “all” of them. If the actual number of truths at any given time is infinite, then yes, being omniscient would mean knowing an infinite number of truths. But there’s nothing in the word ‘omniscient’ that requires there be a infinite number of truths. There may in fact be an unfathomable but finite number of truths, in which case a being who knew them all would still be omniscient even though the number of truths is finite. But none of this means God knows what’s logically impossible to know, what’s self-contradictory. That’s meaningless. And we don’t ascribe any real power or great-making property to God when we say he can know what’s logically impossible to know…in my view that is.
But since you believe God can know self-contradictory claims, then you believe God can know your right in believing God knows self-contradictory claims and God can also know I'm right in believing he can't know such truths. But that's just silliness.
Tom
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Starkman
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Date Joined Oct 2001
Total Posts : 1747
| Posted 9/2/2005 5:32 PM (GMT -6) | | How about we say that God was going to wipe out the world, in that He knew when He created it that it could go bad...very bad, and that one of the options might have been to wipe it out if it does. However, God sees Noah and, of course, new about Noah all along. (It's not as if God went searching along and ran into Noah: "Whoa, dude. Almost ran into you there. Par-don Me! Hey, way to go on the being righteous thing, Noah, because had it not been for you I was gonna wipe the whole word out. Dude!"
So, since God knew all along that Noah existed, it makes no sense to posit the annihilation of the world and then retract it because God "found" Noah, as if we're all in luck now. What I think is going on here is that the world definitely was ripe, and then some, for destruction. And, by all tense and purposes, God could have, should have and would have wiped it out. That's the point. It was that bad. It deserved wiping out, and it greived God tremendously. Noah is not "found" in the sense of "Hey, who's this guy? Cool, I change my mind; I'm not wiping out the world." Rather, Noah is "found" as one who was all along a beautiful example of the remnant concept, those to whom God's grace is extended. But part and parcel to Noah, the remnant, will come along another world of the same nature (assuming you don't believe that the antiduluvian world had fallen angels having sex with our broads on the earth. In that case, it might be that God saved Noah not because Noah was so "righteous" as he and his family were uncontaminated...perhaps. It's one theory anway. Hey, if Noah was the ONLY righteous one that God could find—and the text doesn't say that, to the best of my knowledge—then in the antiduluvian world Noah and his crew could have been the ONLY uncontaminated folk. What's good for the goose is good for the gander).
Again, this kind of biblical use of the word "regret" is not, I do not think, meant to convey that God is a complete idiot and didn't know what He was getting into when He created the world, and that He happened to "find" Noah before He (God) breaks promises to Adam and Eve...you know, the seed thing. I mean, surely God was aware that things could go really bad after Adam fell and wasn't making promises that He knew He'd have to retract if it got really bad. Most of the retractions in scripture by God are when God has said He'd pass judgement (Nineveh, for instance) and the people repent. But in the case of Adam, it is a promise to do something DESPITE man's actions. The promise of the seed would anticipate arrival because of Adam's transgression and IN VIEW OF man's propensity to go sour. For God to retract the promise would be for Him to have not throught through the inevitable and the obvious AND to have reneged on an offer of grace, when it is for Adam's sorry butt (and ours) that He offers it in the first place. That doesn't compute, and it doesn't fit the retraction of God's promises elsewhere...that I can think of.
Starkman
My teacher used to say that whenever he read Scripture, he would always ask the question, "What does this have to say about the character of God?" Working off his thinking, as I read Scripture, I have come to ask, "What does this have to say about the heart and passion of God's desire for relationship for us? | | Back to Top | | |
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Tom
Registered Member
Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 10353
| Posted 9/2/2005 6:31 PM (GMT -6) | | Dragon Chaser: Look at what number 1 says, and then tell me Webster is not an authoritative source.
Tom: Webster is not an all-authoritative, infinitely-authoritative source. If he thinks omniscience entails an infinite number of truths, he's wrong. It doesn't. His number (2) however, is right on. It's exactly the defintion I argued for.
Dragon Chaser: What I say must be silly because, unlike you I was not there with God when he laid the foundation of the earth.
Tom: Have we met? Do we know each other? Hmm.
By silliness I don't mean you're a silly person. I mean the CLAIM that omniscience entails believing self-contradictory truth claims is 'logically' silly. It's meaningless and empty, or silly, to say God knows that my given name is Tom and also knows that my given name is not Tom. These are contradictory statements. Are you sure you want to say that unless God believes in contradictory statements that he can't know ANYTHING? The fact that God laid the foundations of the earth doesn't mean he has to believe in logical contradictions.
Tom
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Dragon Chaser
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Date Joined Sep 2004
Total Posts : 70
| Posted 9/2/2005 7:14 PM (GMT -6) | | TOM: God is omniscient iff for any proposition p, if p is true, then God knows that p and does not know that not-p.
Tom,
To me this is silly, using liner logic to explain the nature of God when truth is often too abstract or unwieldy when applied to statements about the world, let alone the true nature of God.
In mathematical logic, linear logic is a type of substructural logic that denies the structural rules of weakening and contraction. The interpretation is of hypotheses as resources: every hypothesis must be consumed exactly once in a proof. This differs from usual logics such as classical or intuitionistic logic where the governing judgement is of truth, which may be freely used as many times as necessary. To give an example, from propositions A and A ⊃ B one may conclude A ∧ B as follows:
1. Modus ponens (or implication elimination) on the assumptions A and A ⊃ B to conclude B.
2. Conjunction of the assumption A and (1) to conclude A ∧ B.
This is often symbolically represented as a sequent: A, A ⊃ B ⊢ B. Both lines in the above proof "consume" the fact that A is true; this "freeness" of truth is usually what is desired in formal mathematics.
However, truth is often too abstract or unwieldy when applied to statements about the world. For example, suppose I have a quart of milk from which I can make a pound of butter. If I decide to make butter out of all of my milk, I cannot then conclude that I have both milk and butter! Yet, the logical schema outlined above lets me conclude that milk, milk ⊃ butter ⊢ milk ∧ butter (here, milk stands for the proposition "I have a quart of milk", etc.). The failure of ordinary logic to accurately model this activity is due to the nature of milk, butter, and resources in general: the quantity of resources is not a free fact to be used or disposed at will, like truth, but rather must be carefully accounted in every "state change". The accurate statement about my butter making activity is:
From a quart of milk and a process to convert a quart of milk into a pound of butter, I obtain a pound of butter.
In linear logic this is written: milk, milk ⊸ butter ⊩ butter, using different connectives (⊸ instead of ⊃) and a different notion of logical entailment.
Linear logic was proposed by the French mathematician Jean-Yves Girard in 1987.
Tom: Webster is not an all-authoritative, infinitely-authoritative source. If he thinks omniscience entails an infinite number of truths, he's wrong. It doesn't. His number (2) however, is right on. It's exactly the defintion I argued for.
So if Webster were misguided in his definition of Omniscience, would it be Aristotle and Peano who compiled the true definition first?
Post Edited (Dragon Chaser) : 9/2/2005 8:31:12 PM (GMT-5) | | Back to Top | | |
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Similitude
Registered Member
Date Joined Apr 2004
Total Posts : 4968
| Posted 9/3/2005 9:25 AM (GMT -6) | | | Tom: Jeff's concern with morbidity in God was blasted to kingdom come a year ago.
Jeff: First, it need not be a CONCERN with morbidity. For a CONCERN with morbidity surely does presuppose a knowledge OF morbidity. It might be that it never entered God's mind that there would be necrophilacs for the same reason it never entered mine, until someone told me about them. Men are inventors of evil things. But to invent such evil ideas, they must desensitize to even be able to associate otherwise incongruous elements of thought.
Now IF this is the first of many creations that harbored these kinds of desensitizable and corruptible beings, and God had seen it all before, I would think my argument would be severely weakened. But how could we even know that, or that there has even been ONE other created universe, for that matter?
By the time Noah came around, the damage was done. That's why God may have ACCEPTED the possibility that the same degree of evil thoughts and actions could occur again (just like I accept that there will continue to be necrophiliacs in the world NOW that I know that there are such cases of desensitized being). But He introduces new institutions to deal with it.
There is ONE other view that could explain the verse differently, but it still entails a KIND of ignorance. It may be saying that God FELT a kind of FEELING that He could not have fully anticipated until He had the experience, and that the EXPERIENCE of the FEELING was so traumatic that it caused God to regret the project (at least temporarily). In other words, He knew WHAT might happen, but did not completely know HOW He would FEEL about it until the event occurred. This, too, would imply that analogous experiences had not occurred in previous universes. This would be a synthesis of the MERE emotion interpretation with a bit of REAL repentance grounded in SOME kind of ignorance.
One thing's for sure. The philosophical argument for openness IS the easiest to understand. That's why I have always argued that the philosophical argument should be BROUGHT to the text until the text clearly contradicts it--for the same reasons we BRING to the text all other philosophically sound notions like free-will, time, space, etc. Then, you deal with the contradictions when you find them. I have found no necessary contradictions, YET.
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One Love
Registered Member
Date Joined Jan 2003
Total Posts : 13888
| Posted 9/3/2005 9:33 AM (GMT -6) | | Tom:
But I honestly don't think God determined to bring the creation-project to a final end in response to the evil of Gen. 6.1-5 and then changed his mind when he discovered Noah and saw hope for humanity.
I got that. But would you get that SPECIFICALLY from Gen 6? What I mean is this: if a person had NO PRIOR exposure to this text or Judeo-Christian thought and you were to read Genesis from the beginning and get to Gen 6, would this person conclude that in the story, God was not REALLY thinking about ending the human project at that point? Hmmm...
*********************
Tom:
I'm laying out all the occurences of nicham in the OT and comparing them. There are several different praticles used after the verb nicham (ki, al, 'al, mi) that introduce different shades of meaning. I've think there's a way to take 6.6. 'literally' (as opposed to anthropomorphically, or figurativec) that leaves God foreknowing all possibilities but really feeling grief from having created.
Hey, work it out. When you come up with your findings, let me know. And you know me, man. It's BETTER be substantive. But I know you. It will be. 
To all heresy-hunters and general lames...
"I'm connected nationwide, but from the South...
Respect game, and keep my name outcha mouth!"
--adapted from T.I. From P$C's "I'm a King"
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One Love
Registered Member
Date Joined Jan 2003
Total Posts : 13888
| Posted 9/3/2005 9:38 AM (GMT -6) | | Yo. Where is Humphrey Bogart here? I KNOW he'd have some good stuff to say on the whole Gen 6:6 thing?
To all heresy-hunters and general lames...
"I'm connected nationwide, but from the South...
Respect game, and keep my name outcha mouth!"
--adapted from T.I. From P$C's "I'm a King"
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One Love
Registered Member
Date Joined Jan 2003
Total Posts : 13888
| Posted 9/3/2005 9:52 AM (GMT -6) | | The God of "I know the other stuff messed up, but I know THIS one will work for sure"
Heh.
To all heresy-hunters and general lames...
"I'm connected nationwide, but from the South...
Respect game, and keep my name outcha mouth!"
--adapted from T.I. From P$C's "I'm a King"
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One Love
Registered Member
Date Joined Jan 2003
Total Posts : 13888
| Posted 9/3/2005 10:10 AM (GMT -6) | | JEE:
I think if we keep in mind that moral AGENTS truly have the ability to do otherwise, the apparently quite optimistic approach God has taken in giving mankind second chance after second chance to get a "do over" does not seem so unreasonable.
Is there any point where optimism becomes unreasonable, unwise "rose-colored-glasses" thinking? If so, what is that point?
To all heresy-hunters and general lames...
"I'm connected nationwide, but from the South...
Respect game, and keep my name outcha mouth!"
--adapted from T.I. From P$C's "I'm a King"
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One Love
Registered Member
Date Joined Jan 2003
Total Posts : 13888
| Posted 9/3/2005 10:20 AM (GMT -6) | | Let's look at this. Look at some of the decisions God makes. Now, if we believe that...
--God knows every conscious, subconscious, and unconscious belief and motivation of every human being at all times.
--God knows every event that has ever happened to every human being that exists following conception.
--God knows how all the actions of every human being affects every other human being in the past and present.
--God has ideas about the potential existence of every person before they came into existence.
I don't think that we fully understand how much predictive power this would give God. God would put our best psychologists, sociologists, and anthropologists to utter shame!
So, we are trying to say that THIS God gets utterly suprised by the actions of his PEOPLE and their behavior?
Seriously. I try to imagine myself doing an action where God would say "Meph, it never entered my mind you would do such a thing" or "Meph, you have surprised the heck out of me with that decision"
and it makes NO sense!
This God has witnessed EVERY activity of my life...most of which I wasn't even aware of. God literally knows me WAAAAY better than I could ever hope to know myself. He knows all of the unconscious beliefs that the events of my life have created in me...and all the potential ways those unconscious beliefs can interact with my conscious and subconscious beliefs. He would know WAY more than my therapist...and sometimes my therapist seems utterly PSYCHIC to me the way she can predict and explain some of my behavior!
We are free creatures but we are ALSO undeniably creatures of HABIT. And this habit formation makes our behaviors VERY predictable VERY often...if we know the right factors. And God would know ALL the factors.
I can't even give MEANING to God being utterly surprised by my behavior or choices. Can you???
To all heresy-hunters and general lames...
"I'm connected nationwide, but from the South...
Respect game, and keep my name outcha mouth!"
--adapted from T.I. From P$C's "I'm a King"
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One Love
Registered Member
Date Joined Jan 2003
Total Posts : 13888
| Posted 9/3/2005 10:26 AM (GMT -6) | | Cmon, where the heck are my social scientists at? SELAH!!!! Cmon, talk to us a little bit about TNT stuff. about how the brain works. Could you imagine the predictive and communicative ability of a being that knew EXACTLY how every human brain worked in EVERY human culture?
Would THIS being be surprised by MUCH, if ANY human behavior??
Do we REALLY understand what saying God is omniscient means???
To all heresy-hunters and general lames...
"I'm connected nationwide, but from the South...
Respect game, and keep my name outcha mouth!"
--adapted from T.I. From P$C's "I'm a King"
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One Love
Registered Member
Date Joined Jan 2003
Total Posts : 13888
| Posted 9/3/2005 10:33 AM (GMT -6) | | No, let's do an experiment.
Let's say that you and you immediate family have to make a very important decision. You have to make this decision in 4 days.
Here's the question:
How hard do you think that it would be for God to 1)understand every individual in your family, 2)understand your corporate family dynamic and 3) predict what decision you will make with accuracy?
Assuming God's omniscience, do you really believe that your family could make a decision that would just shock the pants off of God? Honestly.
To all heresy-hunters and general lames...
"I'm connected nationwide, but from the South...
Respect game, and keep my name outcha mouth!"
--adapted from T.I. From P$C's "I'm a King"
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One Love
Registered Member
Date Joined Jan 2003
Total Posts : 13888
| Posted 9/3/2005 10:52 AM (GMT -6) | | Nah. Let's keep this thought going. Does God exhaustively understand group dynamics?
Do we think that an omniscient God would be utterly surprised how any particular CITY OF PEOPLE in the United States would act COLLECTIVELY in response to Hurricane Katrina and it's aftereffects?
Would God be able to say "Wow! You people have really surprised me! I really wouldn't have thoght you people would have done what you've done!"
Hmmm...would this happen?
To all heresy-hunters and general lames...
"I'm connected nationwide, but from the South...
Respect game, and keep my name outcha mouth!"
--adapted from T.I. From P$C's "I'm a King"
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