The Black Vault

Which omni/attribute do you want to take away from God, his/her; Omnipotence, or Omniscience?

Peace be with you,

Rabboni

It couldn´t even carry a single human

I don't know. Why don't you ask Him/Her and get back to us on that.

Thats easy, space is infinate, so the boulder can be any size. The Universe has no end point, any rock will fit.

Rabboni wrote:Which omni/attribute do you want to take away from God, his/her; Omnipotence, or Omniscience?

Peace be with you,

Rabboni

The old limited power or limited knowledge dilemma. But, it doesn't work. Yes, God does have the power to create a boulder that may be too massive for Him to lift. But, He also has the knowledge to find a way to move it. Besides, only man is foolish enough to create a problem he cannot solve.

only man is foolish enough to create a problem he cannot solve.

I think its only man is foolish enough to try fooling other men, into answering stupid questions that do not have a possible answer. When you can't give them a reasonable answer, they want to tell you God doesn't exist. We have a few over in the religion forum, that make a daily mission out of it.

First, let me switch it up to remove the word God, since that word has so much baggage, and replace it with Being O, defined so as to assume that Being O (BO) is omnipotent.

What it boils down to is the apparent contradiction:
(A) BO is omnipotent
and
(B) BO is not omnipotent.

The question, if it has a strictly yes or no answer, leads to (A) and (B) being simultaneously true.

Yet the usual precepts of logic tells us that a statement and its negation can't be simultaneously true.

I believe the heart of the resolution to this apparent paradox lies in scrutinizing the assumption that the question must have a yes or no answer.

It's easy to argue that there are questions that don't have a strictly yes or no answer. There are a plethora of examples. "is __ tall?" "is __ warm?" "is __ large?" "is __ close?"
or even "is __ sentient?" and "is __ self-aware?" and "is __ intelligent?"

Pretty simple questions, none of which have a strictly yes or no answer. This little argument shows that the language we use to describe reality is a lot closer to shades of gray rather than black and white.

The first of two resolutions to the apparent paradox is that the original assumption, that the question must have a yes or no answer, is incorrect. One does not need exotic logics to deduce this. We have a tautology of the form (S1 --> (S2 and not S2)) --> not S1. S1 is the statement "the question has a strictly yes or no answer," S2 is the statement "BO is omnipotent," and the arrow stands for if/then, ie, conditional implication. Let statement 3 (S3) be the compound statement ((S1 --> (S2 and not S2)) --> not S1). By saying S3 is a tautology means that the S3 is true regardless of whether or not S1 is true or false and whether or not S2 is true or false. This can be proven through a truth table.

Note that we also can argue that (S1 --> (S2 and not S2)) is true by observing the structure of this compound statement which in English is "if the question has a strictly yes or no answer then BO is omnipotent and BO is not omnipotent."

Using modus ponens, another precept of formal logic, since (S1 --> (S2 and not S2)) is true and since S3 is a tautology, it follows that S1 is not the case. In English, it is not the case that the question has a strictly yes or no answer.

The second resolution to this apparent paradox is based on my earlier statement that the language we use to describe reality is a lot closer to shades of gray than black and white. If we relax the assumption that (A) and (B) must be strictly true or false, we can see that (A) and (B) can both have a truth value between true and false. There are many ways to view the third truth value: "maybe," "partially true and partially false," "neither true nor false," "unknown," "1/2 (if true is 1 and false is 0),"b where a, b, and c are elements of a poset with a<b<c," and perhaps others. (A) and (B) simultaneously having this third truth value is not a contradiction. This is admittedly an unsatisfying resolution to the apparent paradox since, for starters, this rationale can be applied to any paradox.

The real question is, do we pose unanswerable questions to our fellow humans because we hate them or because we are trying to strengthen them? See, nature acts exactly as I have theorized, making you challenge each other to duels, because nature does not follow the rules which humans have created for themselves. Humans believe in freedom and individual rights. Nature does not.

The question posed has a hidden implication, that one can send the rest of humanity into an infinite loop, trying to answer an unanswerable question, like a computer. Luckily nature was smart enough to create an "if (stupid_question) break;" statement.

To answer the stupid question, yes God can create a boulder he cannot move, but God is not limited to the laws of physics that we enjoy. In God's realm you can have X and Not X at the same time. God can create the immovable boulder. But then he can move it.

"Anything with a name is the creature of another."

p.s. BO is not omnipotent. He's not even potent, as a president.

Spot on CB.

CodeBlackv2 wrote: In God's realm you can have X and Not X at the same time.

This is so hard for people to grasp sometimes. No axiom is inviolate; even Aristotle doubted his own logical axiom of the excluded middle.

But..what's the difference between God's realm and other realms? Perhaps you're suggesting that locally the axioms of logic apply but globally they do not.

I would say that even in "this realm," you can have X and Not X at the same time.

Quantum mechanics may support your claim. Sub-atomic particles, like photons, can be in 2 places at the same time, not to mention that they also travel in time. But 2 particles cannot be in the same place at the same time, an interesting distinction (thank you Mr. Heisenberg).

Wow, "excluded middle" seems to be the topic of the day, and I believe it will be THE topic of the 21st century. 3 threads are now discussing it. Yes, the middle will be excluded until it is no more. Much like a cell dividing in two, so shall we. But I digress.

Rabboni: Are you familiar with the following?

"Two will lie on a bed. One will live. The other will die."

Nature/God has indeed created a boulder it cannot move. An it will soon be moved.