[Serious] Could an omnipotent and omniscient god prove that he was God?

[Belacqua]

Hello and good evening, Belacqua.  I apologize because I don't know how to do the quote function on this forum.  I haven't spent much time here on this forum and I haven't learned it yet.  Plus, I'm not very good with computer stuff.  So Bear with me.

No problem at all. You're always clear about things. And I appreciate that you reply with actual reasons, rather than just insults. I'm getting a bit tired of people who just do the latter. 

I'm saying an omnipotent being gets what it wants.  There would be nothing denied to it.  

As before, I'll make a distinction between the anthropomorphic angry God, and the God of classical theology. For theologians, it's a figure of speech to say that God "wants" anything. Since he's supposed to be impassible, perfect, etc., he lacks nothing and therefore wants nothing. To say that one evening he decides he wants a pizza with dinosaur meat topping, and because he's omnipotent he can have it, would be incompatible with this view. It's not a matter of getting whatever he wants. 

When these people say "God wants you to do X" it means that doing X is in line with the Logos, or what's best for yourself and everyone. It's aimed toward the good. But it isn't a question of God wanting something the way I want a new iPad.

Then as I understand it, Thomists actually use "omnipotent" in a different, sort of technical sense. Probably you know, for the Aristotelians and Thomists, "potency" doesn't mean "ability to do." It means "unfulfilled potentiality." (As always, we might wish that the translators from the original Greek and Latin hadn't chosen words that have different meanings in modern English, but we seem to be stuck with it.) So for them, "omnipotent" means that God is that condition in which all potentialities are realized. There is nothing further to be realized by him. This is part of the argument that for any potentiality in the world to be realized, there must be something in which it is already actualized, and this is God. 

So it has nothing to do with what God can do or not do -- God does nothing. 

To your point about reason:  I don't know what else exists out there in the universe either regarding other ways of thinking but if it were fundamentally different to human reason then I don't know why we would identify it as the reason. My answer is if we discover some other type of reason then we'll deal with it then.  Until then it's just an arbitrary and useless concept. I think that reason and faith are entirely incompatible with each other and faith destroys the ability to reason since things taken on faith can not be integrated with our other knowledge.  I like Harry Binswanger's saying:  faith is an icepick to the brain.  

Of course, we can't know what a god will do because it is a completely arbitrary notion.  But I do know that if this god supposedly created us then it knows our means of knowledge is reason and it would be able to perfectly interact with our way of knowing and it would not ask for us to have faith.  

I guess what I wanted to say is that since we are limited animals, we have limited minds. We evolved for survival, not necessarily truth, and there was no reason to evolve ourselves beyond what helps us survive. 

There's a speech by Noam Chomsky somewhere on YouTube that I found enlightening a while ago. He talks about how different animals have limits on what concepts they can grasp. Apparently rats, for example, can solve surprisingly complicated math problems if they are rewarded for doing so. But it appears that no matter what is at stake, rats can't grasp the concept of prime numbers. For whatever reason, their brains just can't get it. And Chomsky makes the point that it's entirely likely that our own mammalian brains have similar limits. And by definition, we just don't know what concepts (or truths) there are hovering out there beyond the limits of what we can think. 

As for faith, I suppose it depends on how we get there. If you just decide to accept what your preacher tells you because it sounds good, I agree that this is unwise. I'd say there's another kind of faith, though, in which a person considers a principle and chooses to commit to it despite the fact that there will never be conclusive proof. If such a person is honest, he will say that he acknowledges that proof is impossible, but he chooses to live as if it is true. Depending on what he commits to, I think this can be respectable. 

So for example some people might commit to admirable goals, like eliminating poverty, despite the preponderance of evidence showing that their goal is impossible. If they choose to have faith that working toward the goal is nonetheless worthwhile, I don't see that as ice-pick-like.

As far as anything being the ground of being, I think this is nonsensical.  Existence exists.  It doesn't need grounding.  Our knowledge of it certainly does but being itself does not and metaphysically it can't have a grounding.  The fact that existence exists is absolute and the idea of there being a ground to being rests on stollen concepts.  So I reject it completely. 

You may be right. I am not educated enough on the arguments to judge. 

As far as there being disagreement on facts, we have a way to resolve these disagreements.  Your statement essentially says that we can't have knowledge because we can never have certainty that we have the facts right.  If that's the case then there's no use discussing anything.  But I know that this is not the case.  We can have certainty.  There are certain fundamental facts that we can all know and we can't be wrong about them.  These are facts that are self-evident, fundamental, conceptually irreducible, and inescapable.  They ground our knowledge in reality.  We can use them as a standard by which to judge all knowledge claims.  They represent an objective starting point for knowledge.  

Yes, my experience with Christianity has been nothing but a disappointment but that is not why I reject it.  I reject it because it isn't true.

While I think that it is very wise to remind oneself "of course I may be wrong," I agree with you that for all practical purposes there is knowledge which is not at all in dispute. 

Different types of claims admit of different levels of certainty. Like "the earth is round" is about as provable as anything could be. And of course pure logical statements, like math, are provable. Other claims, like "Rembrandt is a better painter than Norman Rockwell," can be argued for, perhaps very persuasively, but never with the kind of certainty as a simple empirical claim. Using indisputable empirical claims as a standard for claims of quality (for example) would be a mistake, I think. Some things must remain more open than others. 

As far as I can tell, metaphysical claims seldom admit to the kinds of proof that claims in physics do. These tend to remain open, and, though one side may hold sway for a time, old claims have a tendency to get reopened whether we like it or not. 

My own experience with Christianity has been unusual, I guess. I was raised entirely without it. (Even now I have never attended a church service, or entered a church unless I wanted to see the art or architecture.) I became interested in it indirectly, because I realized that to understand the art of a given age you have to understand the theology of that era. So I started out with theology books from university presses, rather than sermons from noisy preachers.