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

[Neo-Scholastic]

Thread was past peak anyway

[Jehanne]

If you want to do a thread split, I am okay with that.

I want you to follow the rules in a thread you created. Why on earth would I go to the trouble of splitting the thread, just to see you derail that one as well?

I don’t give a wet fart WHAT you’re ‘ok with’.

Boru

Other moderators have split threads for me in the past. The conversation that I was having was honest and sincere, a bit off-topic, I admit, but not completely unrelated to my OP.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

I want you to follow the rules in a thread you created. Why on earth would I go to the trouble of splitting the thread, just to see you derail that one as well?

I don’t give a wet fart WHAT you’re ‘ok with’.

Boru

Other moderators have split threads for me in the past.  The conversation that I was having was honest and sincere, a bit off-topic, I admit, but not completely unrelated to my OP.

Administrator Notice
This discussion is over. One more post - from anyone - that is not directly related to the topic, and I’ll lock the fucking thing.

Boru

[Jehanne]

Thread was past peak anyway

I asked you to make your statement of faith related to my OP, and, so, I wanted to give you that opportunity, perhaps, to get things back on track here. For instance, the Nicene Creed clearly states some tangible aspects of God's activity in our World.

[Belacqua]

No, the argument is that if an omnipotent god wanted us to know it existed and have a relationship with it then we'd know and have a relationship with it.

Right. You're saying IF an omnipotent god wanted a certain thing, he would certainly do certain things. 

My response is that we don't know what an omnipotent omniscient God would do. We don't know what it would want for us, if anything. 

Also, if God is the ground of being and the form of the good and the actualization of all potentials, as Christians claim, then we DO have a relationship with it -- an extremely involved one. It's just not the kind of anthropomorphic relationship which people here seem to want. 

There are no other kinds of rationality, you either think in accordance with facts and logic or you don't.

I don't know of any other kinds of rationality. But I am a human being, and I think like a human being. It's a big universe -- who knows what things exist which humans can't begin to grasp.

Also there's the question of what the facts are. History shows that people's ideas of the facts tend to change. Naturally, we think we are the only time and place and social group in history to have the facts right. But more skeptical people keep in mind that we may be wildly wrong -- and are certainly severely limited.

  You are right, I don't think an omniscient being would have any need for reason guided by logic because it would not need a method of thinking to weed out errors, it would be incapable of errors.  If you want to know what led me away from Christianity, it was the fact that this god supposedly created us with this wonderful, capable brain and then expected us to believe in it based on faith which is nothing more than wishful thinking.  That was the contradiction that led me to start questioning my preacher who had no answer for me but to pat me on the head and tell me to go have some cookies and not think so much.

It does sound as if your personal experience of Christianity was not a persuasive one. As with all human institutions, a great deal of what we encounter is disappointing.

[Belacqua]

I think the whole "belief" thing is overstated.  I don't think it's so much if we believe He exists (demons do and that doesn't do so much for them).  It's whether you want to be like Him or not.  Loving, kind, merciful, long-suffering etc.  All the fruits of the Spirit.  We can't be truly - that's why He died.  To provide a way to pull us out of the depraved karmic debt/hole we can find ourselves in.  To give us a path to be like Him that we weren't capable of before.  I'm not going to say you can't be perfect.  Jesus said He came for the sick, not the healthy.  If you can return love for hate and exemplify all the fruits of the Spirit, then you HAVE chosen Him in spirit and in truth, whether you believe He exists or not.

Well said. 

I have often pointed out that "belief" in English has two meanings. 

1) Belief as assent to a proposition, as in "I believe the world is round." And

2) Belief as commitment to a principle, as in "I believe in equal rights for women." Obviously equal rights for women don't currently exist, but it is something we commit to. 

Many of the most exemplary Christians in history, as far as I know, held to the second kind of belief. 

Notably, Socrates says exactly the same thing in the Phaedrus. When asked if he thinks the Greek myths really happened, he answers that he leaves stuff like that to the experts. What interests him is what he can learn about himself from what the myths say.

[Objectivist]

No, the argument is that if an omnipotent god wanted us to know it existed and have a relationship with it then we'd know and have a relationship with it.

Right. You're saying IF an omnipotent god wanted a certain thing, he would certainly do certain things. 

My response is that we don't know what an omnipotent omniscient God would do. We don't know what it would want for us, if anything. 

Also, if God is the ground of being and the form of the good and the actualization of all potentials, as Christians claim, then we DO have a relationship with it -- an extremely involved one. It's just not the kind of anthropomorphic relationship which people here seem to want. 

There are no other kinds of rationality, you either think in accordance with facts and logic or you don't.

I don't know of any other kinds of rationality. But I am a human being, and I think like a human being. It's a big universe -- who knows what things exist which humans can't begin to grasp.

Also there's the question of what the facts are. History shows that people's ideas of the facts tend to change. Naturally, we think we are the only time and place and social group in history to have the facts right. But more skeptical people keep in mind that we may be wildly wrong -- and are certainly severely limited.

  You are right, I don't think an omniscient being would have any need for reason guided by logic because it would not need a method of thinking to weed out errors, it would be incapable of errors.  If you want to know what led me away from Christianity, it was the fact that this god supposedly created us with this wonderful, capable brain and then expected us to believe in it based on faith which is nothing more than wishful thinking.  That was the contradiction that led me to start questioning my preacher who had no answer for me but to pat me on the head and tell me to go have some cookies and not think so much.

It does sound as if your personal experience of Christianity was not a persuasive one. As with all human institutions, a great deal of what we encounter is disappointing.

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.

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

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.  

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. 

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.

[Objectivist]

No, the argument is that if an omnipotent god wanted us to know it existed and have a relationship with it then we'd know and have a relationship with it.  There would be no such thing as apologetics.  This debate would not exist.  If God wants a planet to break in two then a planet is going to break in two, but somehow getting us all to believe in it is out of it's depth.  A whole bunch of people believe in something that isn't real, it's imaginary, and they want others to believe it with them but they can't, for over 2000 years, present a valid and sound argument to this day.  That's all they need but they don't have it.  This god, if it were real, could just make itself known.  

There are no other kinds of rationality, you either think in accordance with facts and logic or you don't.  You are right, I don't think an omniscient being would have any need for reason guided by logic because it would not need a method of thinking to weed out errors, it would be incapable of errors.  If you want to know what led me away from Christianity, it was the fact that this god supposedly created us with this wonderful, capable brain and then expected us to believe in it based on faith which is nothing more than wishful thinking.  That was the contradiction that led me to start questioning my preacher who had no answer for me but to pat me on the head and tell me to go have some cookies and not think so much.

Most people who profess to be Objectivist are keen to notice logical fallacies. Therefore I find it surprising that your whole post to Bel is basically an argument from incredulity.

Of course, you would be right.  It wasn't an argument so much as an observation of a contradiction.  This god supposedly gave us our brain that works with facts but it says I want you to have faith.  I don't use this contradiction as an argument because I have much better and more fundamental arguments.  But yes, if that were my argument against theism, then it would be an argument from incredulity.

[The Architect Of Fate]

Right. You're saying IF an omnipotent god wanted a certain thing, he would certainly do certain things. 

My response is that we don't know what an omnipotent omniscient God would do. We don't know what it would want for us, if anything. 

Also, if God is the ground of being and the form of the good and the actualization of all potentials, as Christians claim, then we DO have a relationship with it -- an extremely involved one. It's just not the kind of anthropomorphic relationship which people here seem to want. 


I don't know of any other kinds of rationality. But I am a human being, and I think like a human being. It's a big universe -- who knows what things exist which humans can't begin to grasp.

Also there's the question of what the facts are. History shows that people's ideas of the facts tend to change. Naturally, we think we are the only time and place and social group in history to have the facts right. But more skeptical people keep in mind that we may be wildly wrong -- and are certainly severely limited.


It does sound as if your personal experience of Christianity was not a persuasive one. As with all human institutions, a great deal of what we encounter is disappointing.

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.

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

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.  

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. 

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.

Indeed the idea that any being can be the basis of reality flies in the face observation. Minds can perceive reality or at least representations of it. But creating or dictating it let alone grounding it is simply contrary to observation.

[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.