this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2024
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The existence of a god is something that can't be disproven. You can always find gaps in knowledge and explain the gap by saying a god / multiple gods did that. As gaps narrow with more knowledge, you can always just say that the holy books were just a metaphor in this one case, but the rest of it is literally true.
It gets even more complicated when you run into people who refuse to believe in any science, or anything outside their own personal experience.
Personally, I believe the Earth is a sphere. I've been to Australia, Europe, Africa, Asia and North America. The time the flights took and the routes the in-flight maps showed make sense for a spherical earth. So did the scenes visible out the windows, and the day/night cycle. The mere existence of time zones and seasons strongly suggests the Earth is a rotating sphere tilted slightly off vertical. But, it could be that I'm living in a Truman Show world, where everything is a lie designed to make me believe something that isn't true. I haven't personally done all the math, all the experiments, etc. to prove the Earth is a sphere. And, if this were a Truman Show world, the producers of the show could mess with my experiments anyhow.
For someone who doesn't want to believe, there's really nothing you can do to make them believe. The world really relies on trust and believing Occam's Razor.
If we assume that god, by definition, must be omniscient, there is actually a way to disprove the possibility with the following paradox:
This sentence is not known to be true by any omniscient being.
There are also more traditional arguments like the problem of evil
@science_memes
Why must that be true by definition? Many of the Greek gods were clearly not omniscient, because the stories about them all involve intrigues and hiding things from each-other.
Also, you can't disprove a god's existence by making a logic puzzle that's hard for you to puzzle out. Just because it's a toughie for you doesn't mean that it disproves the existence of gods.
That isn't even a particularly difficult logic puzzle.
Self-referential paradoxes are at the heart of limitative results in mathematical logic on what is provable, so it seems plausible a similar self-referential statement rules out omniscience.
Greek gods are gods in a different sense than the monotheistic conception of god that is omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent. Sure, so the argument I give only applies to the latter sense.
@science_memes
That's not a paradox though, it's a silly logic puzzle that isn't hard to solve. It doesn't prove or disprove anything about omniscience or gods.
It is a paradox if you believe there are omniscient beings. If there are no omniscient beings, there is no paradox. The sentence is either true or false. If the sentence is true, we have an omniscient being that lacks knowledge about a true statement. Contradiction. If it is false, there is an omniscient being that knows it to be true. This means that the statement is true, but the statement itself says that no omniscient being knows it to be true. Contradiction.
@science_memes
It's not a paradox, it's a dumb logic puzzle. It's no different than saying something nonsensical like "This sentence contains 2 words".
No, if it is false, then it is simply wrong. A wrong sentence doesn't imply something else is right, it's just wrong.
"This sentence contains 2 words" is a sensible sentence. It has 5 words, so what the sentence says is false.
The self-reference in the sentence is similar to that of the Liar's paradox. Cousins of that paradox have been used to prove major limitative results in mathematical logic such as
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarski%27s_undefinability_theorem
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gödel%27s_incompleteness_theorems
In usual logic, a false sentence implies every sentence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Material_conditional
Also, if sentence P is false, then "P is false" is true
@science_memes
"J Lou has stopped beating their spouse."
If this sentence is true, it means you used to beat your spouse. If it is false, it means that you currently beat your spouse. Therefore, it proves that you are married and at some point in time you beat your spouse.
That sentence has a presupposition. The sentence I used can be fully formalized in a logic with predicates for knowledge of an entity and truth
@science_memes
Also has a presupposition.
I'm sure the official line would be that God is also ineffable to man. "omniscience" as some human has expressed it in whatever flawed language it is probably a flawed translation from ineffable divine meaning.
Where is the evidence that god is actually "omniscient" or caims to be in the way that this proof interprets the term? It seems like hearsay to me.
But irrespective of what this god-thing may or may not have said about itself to whom, I don't see how the statement does more than show that "'omniscience' is a poorly defined/illogical term". Or maybe, "People who use the word 'omniscience' to describe the extent of knowledge are not expressing themselves clearly or accurately".
This should not be all that surprising as most humans - as I understand them - rarely need to communicate clearly about infinites - so those that do should probably not use English and choose a more apposite language. Maybe hebrew or watever languages these supposed prophets might have used has better terminology.
I suspect Moses might have flunked maths.
Man I don't know if I'll ever get over seeing Mastodon toots on Lemmy and all of the other wild cross-fediverse fun the Fediverse enables
I didn't notice until you said something. Wild.
I don't understand how this disproves the existence of an omniscient being. What if I said "This sentence is not known to be true by any logical being." Is my existence disproven now?
Being logical doesn't imply knowing every true sentence.
Also, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knower_paradox
@science_memes
Logical meaning having the ability to follow logical rules to determine whether or not any statement is true or false. I've followed that train of logic and determined that the sentence you provided is neither true nor false. I've determined that it is paradoxical. Why would an omniscient being be unable to know that this is a paradox?
Theists roll their eyes at that, because nobody really thinks their god is omniscient or omnipotent. They may say so, either to deceive the nonbelievers, or out of ignorance of what omnimax really means, but every religion I can think of has had a fallible god, sometimes very fallible. There are the notoriously arrogant Greek gods, the stupidly belligerant Norse gods, the Jewish/Christian god foiled by iron chariots, and deceptive serpents, even Buddhists with their infallible smug asshole of a god have as a saying "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him."
Fact of the matter is no god is omni-anything, since that would prove they don't exist, and cannot be believed. Gods don't have to be omniscient. They only have to be way more knowledgable and aware than anyone else. They don't have to be all powerful, only way more powerful than anything mere mortals could muster. So saying "Aha! But your god can't possibly be all powerful, because then he could make a stone that he couldn't lift! Checkmate, theists!" falls flat, in the face of (outside of boasting) doctrine basically saying that their god makes mistakes and can't do everything.
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