Godly Motivations

[mordant]

Actually, it does. One can experience some things hundreds of times before all the novelty is gone, but it will eventually be gone, due to hedonic tone and simple familiarity.

If god is without limits then there's literally nothing new for him to experience. He encompasses all possible knowledge and experience.

This really gets at the incoherence of god concepts. A god is not anything but a very powerful denizen of the natural world if it is not ominipotent and omnipresent and so forth. Yet if he is those things he becomes a logical self-contradiction. He cannot be omnipotent and omniscient and omnipresent and also experience love, desire, disappointment, jealousy, hatred, etc ... all of which are ascribed to the gods at some point or other.

For us humans, experiencing something hundreds of times in quick succession perhaps does drain the novelty. Luckily for us, the memory of the experience begins to fade not only in the absence of the direct experience but also in the attempt to recollect it. In other words, you might get tired of pizza after eating it for a month straight, but wait a couple weeks and you'll be back to wanting to experience the pizza again.

That may not apply to God if we assume His memory doesn't fade. In such a case I would simply argue that the memory of an experience is not a replacement for the experience itself; as such there will always be incentive to have the experience. The God without limits things seems like a caricature to me. I'm not even sure I understand what you mean by encompassing all experience, or how something like omnipotence inhibits the experience of love.

I never said that "without limits" is either a coherent or real concept; it is simply the god concept that many theists have. Omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, omnibenvolent, etc. Their god is fabulized enough so that it can't just be a glorified version of themselves. And yet ... of course, it still is. It is basically what they WISH they could be ... non-contingent, non-dependent, and not lacking for sufficient knowledge and confidence and potency.

So that is the concept I critique.

Whether forgetfulness and limited attention are enough to compensate indefinitely for familiarity, humanity has not had the opportunity to live that out and determine for sure. It's why, if I were offered some low to no cost, no side effect pill that would confer biological immortality on me, i'd take it. Because it's nice to have options. I am just dubious that I will want to have new experiences forever. But it is certain that the short, mean, nasty existence we live amidst nature, red in tooth and claw, is not enough to be sure. I'd like to find out as much as the next person. I'm just unconvinced it would have infinite value.