RE: Is God a logical contradiction?
July 30, 2019 at 2:58 pm
(This post was last modified: July 30, 2019 at 3:59 pm by Anomalocaris.)
(July 30, 2019 at 5:49 am)Tom Fearnley Wrote: Anomalocaris: You've summarized things so I can understand *most* of what you're saying. But our second definition of immaterial meaning non-matter was a charitable one which we shouldn't really use. I think if we go with the original definition that is actually used by Christian apologists like William Lane Craig we can see that words like "immaterial", "soul" and "spirit" are meaningless, hence a "meaningless/nothing intelligence" is, perhaps, a contradiction for how can an intelligence be meaningless when we have a good understanding of the word intelligence? How can intelligence come from nothing?
Belaqua: Thanks for the rather unusual explanation.
Agreed that intelligence as we normally conceive of it probably requires a mechanism, whose scope and complexity likely correlates to magnitude of the intelligence, and to the extent of the intelligence's ability to actuate things based on its intelligence. So All-powerful would imply a vastly complex mechanism, and all-knowing requires an vast information storage and processing.
To suggest otherwise without giving suggestion of how the otherwise would function is to propose airy phantasms without any attempt to allow the fantasy to be constrained by any reality. So it is pure make belief and not a serious proposal.
The mechanism, if postulated to exist, would nonetheless be overwhelmingly unlike to exist for no cause. So a reasonably cogent argument for its existence must also contain some cogent postulate for the process of its formation.
