Is God a logical contradiction?

[Objectivist]

When I learned how to think in terms of essentials, it was really an eye-opening experience.  Actually, it was life-changing.  Read An Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology.  It will amaze you.  Leonard Peikoff's essay on the analytic-synthetic dichotomy at the end of the book is worth the price of the book alone, all by itself. I think it will help you immensely in your studies in the hard sciences.  I know that I find it much easier to learn new things now.  I wish I had a better grasp of physics, astrophysics and quantum mechanics. Currently, my area of interest is time, like what is it? But alas, I'm so limited in the amount of time I have to study time.  

I found a digital copy of the book and was able to read the first chapter. The part that resonated the most was her explanation of measurement being man-centered; that we understand the universe by viewing it in relation to ourselves. This is what we observe in the brain, for example, with mirror neurons. Our brains use our bodies to form the building blocks with which it understands the actions of others. When it sees someone do something it runs a simulation, it embodies the perception as if it were the one doing it, and its thus able to comprehend it.

Canonical neurons are similar to mirror neurons, except that they activate when you see objects your body can interact with. For example, one set of neurons will activate when you grab something with your whole hand, and also when you see objects than can be grabbed with your whole hand like a ball, or a rock, but not when it sees objects that needs to be finely gasped like a pencil.

That's fascinating.  What about smells?  Do different neurons fire when we smell something pleasant like a slice of Pizza vs. when we smell something rotten or unpleasant like mold, or something else that would be bad for us?

I think you'll also find her ideas about the similarities of concept formation and math interesting.  Both bring a vast amount of data into the range that our senses can deal with.  Think about the vast amount of observations and information contained in E = MC squared.  We translate vast distances into units we can understand such as the foot or yard measure.  The length of the foot or the length of a step is something we can deal with.  a light year is not, until we reduce it to a smaller unit of measurement that we can relate to.  I also find the whole section about the Crow epistemology fascinating.  It turns out Crows can keep track of up to 3 units.  A unit is a member of a group of similar things.  We with our big brains can keep track of 7 or 8.  But consider the concept "man".  It includes every man that has ever lived, will ever live and that lives now.  but we can turn this vast quantity of units into a single unit, the concept "man".  Think about numbers.  If I were to write IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII.  At a glance you can't tell how many I's there are but if I write 37 you can.  That's because I've reduced 37 units into two.  What if I were to write down 150,125, 437 Now we're up to 9 units and you have to pause a little, you can't read it at a glance but imagine you had to stop and count all those units if I were to write out that many I's in a row.  It would take weeks or months to count them all.  That's the power of concepts.  They bring the whole universe down to a level our senses can deal with.  We can land a space probe on a comet millions of Kilometers away because of our ability to form concepts.  She wanted to do more work on the relationship between math and concept formation, said there was a lot more to discover but sadly she died before she could do it.  

Think of the LIGO experiment.  Our senses can't detect gravity waves from two neutron stars colliding in another galaxy but because of our ability to conceptualize, we can build a detector that can and can put that into a form of a readout on a screen that is within the range of our senses.  Astonishing!