(March 14, 2021 at 9:19 pm)Belacqua Wrote:(March 14, 2021 at 7:47 pm)Seax Wrote: I'm not sure I understand.
It seems to me that people who assume a pantheistic God would think like people aren't yet taking the "pan" part of the definition seriously enough.
A pantheistic God, if I'm understanding right, includes everything in the universe, and is coterminous with the universe. This is different from the standard Catholic God, who includes everything in the universe... plus infinity.
So if God includes everything in the universe, it doesn't think about objects in the same way that people do.
For example, if a person knows something, there are two separate items: the knower and the known. If I know your phone number, that's two things. I could forget your phone number, but it would still exist independently from me.
God, on the other hand, includes the phone number and everything else within himself. He can't be separated from it. This is what "omniscient" means -- that everything known or knowable is a part of God. If God doesn't know something, it doesn't exist.
So I think it would work the same way for thinking. There is not (1) a thinker and (2) an object of thought. If I'm thinking about the revocation of the edict of Nantes, that's two things: me and the historical event. But a pantheistic or Catholic God includes that and every other historical event within itself. Forgetting, or thinking wrongly, etc., is not possible. So that's fundamentally different from the way people think, I think.
I noticed that you said “it doesn't think about objects in the same way that people do.”. I guess this means that it thinks about objects in his own way.
In your example of a person and a phone number, a person is just a machine. It has a processor and some memory cells. He can store the phone number in his memory cells or he can delete the phone number.
What does a god do? Does he memorize the location of every object, every atom, every subatomic particle, every photon? That is going to require a large amount of memory.
If he is going to also memorize all activity, all events into the past, then that might require an infinite amount of memory.
Also, how do you avoid recursion? If this god is in this universe, he also has to keep a copy of himself in his memory cells as well, which means duplicating himself entirely in his own brain. He has to memorize how each memory cell, how they operate, their states, everything. This is going to require an infinite amount of memory since recursion leads to infinity.
It seems to me that christians and pantheists have not addressed the memory requirement problem.