(April 10, 2014 at 11:46 am)MindForgedManacle Wrote:(April 10, 2014 at 10:45 am)Heywood Wrote: How does God even know if He is God? If God is all powerful then He could create a lessor being and then trick that lessor being into believing it was god. God knows this and has to wonder...."Am I the true God or a lessor being tricked by the true God?". God can never really know if He is God or not and must base His belief that He is God on an assertion, axiom, or assumption....what ever you want to call it.
No man, no religion, and no god can ever be free from the need for assertions.
Isn't that basically what I was saying? :p
(April 10, 2014 at 11:13 am)tor Wrote: That's a nice assertion you got there.
He/she is right.
My take is that you are both describing the same objection to Sye's argumentation. Same idea, different words.
May I offer a third, very similar take:
Sye's argument is:
1) You may be wrong. Such is a universal human condition. Admit it.
2) My position is different than yours because I am informed by an all knowing, all powerful deity who says I am right. The deity has imposed this knowledge forcefully on me and says he isn't lying so I must BE right.
My objection is, that though Sye may be forced to believe by this deity, there is no way for the deity to know that it is all knowing and therefore no way for Sye to know if he was forced by the deity accurately or not. The same objection can be repeated up through the chain of meta-gods. This corresponds to the recursion which, as MFM states (more formally and correctly than I will ever,) never terminates.
So how, exactly, does God know that She's NOT a brain in a vat? 
