RE: Is God a logical contradiction?
September 10, 2019 at 11:17 am
(This post was last modified: September 10, 2019 at 11:31 am by Tom Fearnley.)
(September 10, 2019 at 6:32 am)Belaqua Wrote:(September 10, 2019 at 6:04 am)Tom Fearnley Wrote: There can be nothing prior to God and God is made of nothing.
That's what they say.
Quote:But nothing just means something meaningless.
Well, I think that the word "nothing" has a meaning. Am I wrong?
Quote:I can't see how he can't be made of anything at all, if that's what you mean by nothing.
If you want to posit a God that is made of something you could, I guess. It might be interesting to imagine something new and then argue why we should call it God. It would be entirely different from the God of Christianity.
This is the key point they talk about when they cite the difference between, say, Zeus and the Christian God. Zeus is a contingent being with limited extension. If he stopped existing, the universe could still exist. The God of the theists, on the other hand is non-contingent, non-material, non-extended, etc.
Quote:Our entire experience of science is that something always comes from something.
Science works so well because it doesn't try to do metaphysics.
Theistic metaphysics agrees that all contingent somethings come from somethings.
What does the word nothing mean? I always thought it was meaningless: It can't be seen, imagined or hasn't been measured hence meaningless.
Yes but non-material (immaterial) just means "nothing/something meaningless" or made of non-matter (things like energy and thoughts.) If you say it means neither I'd ask you what it means and I'm confident I wouldn't get a coherent answer: You might say something like immaterial means "spirit" but then I'd ask you to define spirit and we would go in circles I'd bet.
If theistic metaphysics says something comes from something then God isn't nothing as in made of nothing at all. And as nothing is a meaningless word "made of nothing" is a meaningless sentence. Unless we're talking about nothing meaning "something we have no understanding of".