The notion of scale and inclusion in logic threw Lord Russell for a loop
enough to make him publish a paradox. The tricky part when we think like
really really big, is not to overextend our tools, and check on each one
before we use it to ensure that it works right at that scale. As well as
stretching the borders of our thinking physically, we are working at the
ragged edge in the level of our abstraction.
I don't think our logical tools are sound enough to give any meaning to
almighty creator retroactive questions, or to almighty creator basketball
questions, such as could an almighty creator make a basketball too big for
him to swallow. These aren't meaningful to me, because the trick word
almighty has an asymptotic implication, meaning the closer you get to
its meaning the more it stretches. That is a sign you have overloaded
the semantics of that term; by trying to mean too much, it turns out not
meaning anything. That was the reason the finitist school of
mathematicians proposed banning infinity from the mathematical vocabulary,
climaxing in William Craig's proof in 1956 that math could do without it.
So I don't do almighty creator questions, and privately I find their
entertainment value limited.
Nor do I worry about whether sets can be members of sets, except to note
that such questions could benefit from Alfred Korzybski's use of bracket
tags. This makes the question of whether sets[1] can be members of sets[2]
more meaningful, than any statement which makes you wonder about whether
sets is the same word as sets, and if so is the meaning precisely identical.
We also need to look out for the trick of timelessness that logicians and
mathematicians have been trying to pull for quite a while. Right now, i
can assert and prove that every logical operation takes time, but I can
only do so because I live in the computer age. Too long was this presumed
instantaneous. Here's an example: this is the set that eats itself. Is it
any bigger than it was a minute ago? The real answer is yes, because it
has also swallowed a moment of time in the interval. If old scholars try
to convince you that something is precisely identical to what it was an
instant before, you can reject their conclusion on these grounds.
With that underbrush chopped away, we can look at the limits to the
potentcy of a deity. We ignore as ephemeral any immaterial deities which
have no contact whatsoever with the material universe. They don't mean
anything to you, and they don't mean anything to me, so we can quite
safely assume they don't exist, outside of someone's imagination. That
they don't interact means they don't interact, period. So can an infinite
immaterial deity exist? No. The statement that he does not interact with
the material world is equivalent to the statement that he does not exist.
We can define our new era at any arbitrary time we wish, but one of its
defining principles must be that from this time, we realize that
monotheism cannot be defended as a logical option of human thought.
In solemnity,
Johnny Thunderbird
In Druid Woods
http://www.nternet.com/~jthunderbird
Re: 2 Cent Rant [Pagans and Tolerance] soc.religion.paganism 981112