(April 18, 2015 at 10:01 pm)noctalla Wrote: A thought experiment consisting of two scenarios and follow up questions:
Scenario A: In this scenario, we have an apparently omniscient Being. As far as the Being is aware, it knows and understands everything that there is to know and understand. It is also the case, in this scenario, that the being happens to be correct that it knows and understands everything there is to know and understand.
Scenario B: This scenario is identical to the first in, insofar as we have an apparently omniscient Being that appears to know and understand everything there is to know and understand. The only difference is, that in this scenario, the being is wrong.
Question: How could an omniscient Being determine which of the two scenarios it was actually in?
The OP problem and probably nontrivial. The SEP (Stanford Plato) definition for omniscience was that the Being knows every true proposition. If, for each falsehood, there is a corresponding true proposition asserting it is false, then the Being knows the truth value of every proposition as well. However, that leaves out the possibility of propositions that do not have a truth value. Now let Q be the proposition that the Being can determine whether it is in Scenario A or B, regardless of how it does so. Does Q have a truth value?
I tend to think there are big problems with absolute omniscience or omnipotence. It's a big leap from Apollo knowing a hell of lot and having power to throw lightning bolts to the "omni" stuff. These ideas weren't part of the "original package" of religious belief even for the Christian deity, but introduced much later by thinkers like Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. That's despite the "fall of every sparrow" and "number of hairs on your head" bible ditties. Knowing those two and similar things isn't knowing everything. The good/evil issues like babies that shrivel up are a separate problem, the "problem of evil," related to omnibenevolence, I think.
- (BTW Also unsure if 0.999999... = 1 is ever claimed. I thought it was that the sequence S = {0.9, 0.99, 0.999, ... } has a least upper bound, namely 1. But none of the individual sequence members are equal to 1, they're all less than 1, and the object 0.999999.... may not exist. I dunno, I'm hardly pluripotent much less omni.
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