Omniscient & omnipotent?

Hapsburg said:
Those aren't mutually exclusive.
Now, taken together they are mutually exclusive with omnibenevolence.

That's (one of the reasons) why I don't believe the gods are all-loving, or even necessarily all-powerful and all-knowing.
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Zeus is still King of the Gods to this day. Lost his crown for a while.
 
fess said:
If God is omniscient, he will know that a particular thing will happen at a particular time in the future. If that is true, he will be powerless to change it. If he changes it, and it doesn't happen, he was not omniscient
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First of all, is God saying in the Bible that he is both?

Secondly, why cannot God choose not to know something if he wishes?
 
It doesn't take a genius to realize that all religion is a big joke.

If a superpowerful God existed then this world would have much much better place to live in. We could actually be living in an interplanetary transhumanist utopia by now.

For starters there would be no poverty and people wouldn't die young because a superpowerful God could make sure that bad things such as poverty, hunger, depression and diseases just will never happen to people.
 
pluto2 said:
If a superpowerful God existed then this world would have much much better place to live in. We could actually be living in an interplanetary transhumanist utopia by now.
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How does that follow?

Do you assume "super powerful" and "micro managing" are synonymous?

I am super powerful from the PoV of the moths butterflies in my garden, does that mean they do not fear death and instead all live a life of luxury?
 
Interesting that an all-powerful God could create or destroy a universe, stop time or reverse it, maybe make it loop.

Such a God allows the anthropic version of knowledge to explore certain hypothetical domains, a parallel world, running backwards.

But if an all-powerful being can play with time or the universe, why would it bother letting this one exist?
 
Laser Eyes said:
First of all, is God saying in the Bible that he is both?
Secondly, why cannot God choose not to know something if he wishes?
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Because God, in any form, cannot refuse knowing something for which it is causally responsible.
That is why Gods are presumed to be omniscient and omnipotent......:rolleyes:
 
An omnipotent being could choose to remember how they created a universe, or not. They could decide whether to have any memory at all, if they choose a universe they know all about when creating it, then forgetting about it. Since they know for the necessary amount of time what it will do, they know they don't need to know anything else.

But if you introduce the question of whether the being wants to be able to change things, then it will need to have a memory, or it will need the knowledge of those things it wants to change, and when it will.

So it seems that giving an omnipotent being omniscient knowledge is the only way to resolve the paradox of change, or of changeable futures for this being. Therefore there is no change, or something.

It's a physics joke. What do you get when you give an omnipotent creator omniscience? A universe and change.
 
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Laser Eyes said:
Secondly, why cannot God choose not to know something if he wishes?
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Self induced amnesia? Neat

So can this self induced amnesia be set to be selective? Can it be set to cancel and normal memory restored?

Bummer if induce yourself to forget and the fogetness extends to the "Who am I?” stage

:)
 
Michael 345 said:
Bummer if induce yourself to forget and the forgetfulness extends to the "Who am I?” stage
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Divine Alzheimer's disease? Is there a doctor in the house?

There is a saying that the "hardest thing to do is to forgive yourself" for the mistakes you made.
If that is true, how could God live with itself "knowing" all the terrible things it is responsible for?
 
An omnipotent being decides to create a universe. How did it decide? It must know something about the universe it will make. The knowledge it has is theoretical.

So why, after the creation event, would such a being need to change anything this universe will become? Why doesn't it know something might need to be corrected, it made a mistake? Wouldn't that be obvious before the universe is created, so it wouldn't make any mistakes? But it would have to be absolutely certain the universe wouldn't need any future corrections; it would need perfect, absolute knowledge of it.

If so, it follows that once created, the universe can be forgotten.
Ahem, but Landauer's theorem says that you can't erase information, only convert it into heat.
 
Another take is an omnipotent being that has no memory of what it does. The blind creator.
But the thing about creation is it implies either knowing or not knowing "what will happen", i.e. a creator that can predict. This doesn't obviously hold when the creator is only omnipotent and has no knowledge or memory.
 
arfa brane said:
Another take is an omnipotent being that has no memory of what it does. The blind creator.
But the thing about creation is it implies either knowing or not knowing "what will happen", i.e. a creator that can predict. This doesn't obviously hold when the creator is only omnipotent and has no knowledge or memory.
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But without knowledge or memory the creator is not sentient and we return to the quasi-intelligent mathematical function, which does not require memory or knowledge.....:)
 
Write4U said:
But without knowledge or memory the creator is not sentient
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So it follows there is a paradox with a creator who "knows how to create", and well enough it can forget about its creations. The paradox is right there in the word forget.
Does it still know how to create this universe or not? Could it bang out another one or two the same way?
 
That's why the omniscience-omnipotence debate isn't over.

Suppose you go with the blind creator of universes hypothesis. There must have been enough "creation freedom" for this being because it got around to creating the one we are in, among the unfathomably many other creations. There must be enough "creation stuff" around so it can do whatever the hell it likes, and time isn't a factor either, since there is no reason to assume the existence in this universe of time, is true otherwise; there is no otherwise anyway. Not for us.
 
arfa brane said:
So it follows there is a paradox with a creator who "knows how to create", and well enough it can forget about its creations. The paradox is right there in the word forget.
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Yes, but that's assuming creation is a consciously motivated act. It isn't.
Creation is a probabilistic "function" of the spacetime geometry.
Does it still know how to create this universe or not? Could it bang out another one or two the same way?
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It does not need to know how to create. Creation (evolution) is not an act but a function, a probabilistic function, a mathematical function.

Function
In mathematics, a function[note 1] is a binary relation between two sets that associates every element of the first set to exactly one element of the second set. Typical examples are functions from integers to integers, or from the real numbers to real numbers.
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Functions were originally the idealization of how a varying quantity depends on another quantity. For example, the position of a planet is a function of time.
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Historically, the concept was elaborated with the infinitesimal calculus at the end of the 17th century, and, until the 19th century, the functions that were considered were differentiable (that is, they had a high degree of regularity). The concept of a function was formalized at the end of the 19th century in terms of set theory, and this greatly enlarged the domains of application of the concept
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Function_(mathematics)

More formally;
A function is a relation that uniquely associates members of one set with members of another set. More formally, a function from
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to
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is an object
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such that every
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is uniquely associated with an object
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. A function is therefore a many-to-one (or sometimes one-to-one) relation. The set
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of values at which a function is defined is called its domain, while the set
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of values that the function can produce is called its range. Here, the set
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is called the codomain of
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..........more!
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https://mathworld.wolfram.com/Function.html
 
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Hapsburg said:
No. I believe the gods sprang, many at once, after the physical universe began.
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Yep, subjectively, gods were born with the evolution of observable mathematical "patterns" (regularities) in nature. Gods are symbolic representations of Universal "functions".

These self-evident regularities have led to the misconception of an Intelligent Designer, a "conscious intelligence".

The reality is that gods are the expressed results of universal mathematical functions.

The emergence of the Universe was a quasi-intelligent self-referential function. No motive, just "probabilistic causality"
 
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