Is "omniscient" incoherent?
Posted on: June 15, 2007 - 11:03am
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Is "omniscient" incoherent?
I have the opinion that there are things that are fundmentally unkowable. A large part of this position is based on things like The Uncertainty Principle, Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, and Turing's Halting Problem. A good overview to the Halting Problem is here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem
My question is this - is it fair to say that if it is impossible to create a general algorithm that always halts, is this the same as saying it is something that can't be known? And if there are things that can't be known, is omnicient a broken concept?
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I have always felt omniscience, omnipotent and omnibenevolent were all incoherent terms. There are too many logical problems with each one for them to be valid concepts.
I don't think that the halting problem serves as a counter example.
It declares that there can't exist an algorithm that will take a function determine whether it halts. However, knowledge doesn't necessarily need to come through such an algorithm.
I think omniscience is almost possible. Or at least something close to omniscience. To know all the various laws of physics, to map the entire universe and charter every star system, may be a possibility for a collective group, not for an individual, if such knowledge is logged in some kind of encyclopedia. However knowing things as what did every living being in the universe have for lunch today is impossible for any being or group of beings.
To have a total understanding of the way the universe works is perhaps possible. To know everything is not.
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Weird. I came upon this conclusion (that omniscience is incoherent) this morning in the shower. Further, I believe omnipotence and omnibenevolence are also incoherent. I realize you don't say your god is omnibenevolent, but you have to admit that a lot of people do. In the following, we have to assume that one of the attributes that are not the main point of the paragraph are possible. Here is why they are incoherent, to me:
If god were omnipotent, then he can do anything. If he can do anything, he can choose not to be omniscient. But, by definition, god is omniscient. Therefore, he either can choose not to be and doesn't or he cannot choose not to be. How can we tell what he's going to do? We can't. I don't believe there is any way an outside observer can determine which a god would be without possibly being wrong. I don't even think we can apply probabilities to it because we have conflicting evidences from the Bible, and I'm sure similar evidence exists in other holy books as well. Hence, we cannot apply the attribute of omnipotence; we can only guess and hope that we're right.
If god were omniscient, then god could choose to be stupid because he knows what stupidity is. That's contradictory, but since it is possible, we can't apply to him the attribute of omniscience. That's incoherent without much explanation.
If god were omnibenevolent, then god cannot be evil ever. While I could disprove this from the Bible by contradiction (In fact, wavefreak, you are the one who pointed out that god lies to someone in 2 Thessalonians 9-11, I believe), I can disprove it by the definitions already given. If he cannot be evil, then there is no difference between that and not being omnipotent. You might say, "He COULD choose to be evil, he just doesn't." But I would come back with, "How can you possibly know? You cannot know. Therefore, you cannot apply this attribute to god."
All of these come down to a very simple and straight-forward analogy (many of them, in fact). Let's say god is red. Since god could be green, can we apply to him the color of red? No. Many men wouldn't be able to tell the difference (color blindness), but that doesn't mean that either color can be applied.
What do you all think? I may try to make this into an essay for the site.
Edit: Addendum.
I was talking with my wife about this this morning and she doesn't like the "proof" I've offered. I tend to agree with her reasoning here because I realized I didn't explain myself well enough. The point of the above is not to show that god is NOT omnipotent or omniscient or omnibenevolent; the point of the above is to show that applying those attributes to god is faulty. Since we have no evidence that any of them is true, it is wrong to say that they are indeed true. Hence, we must necessarily be agnostic towards these attributes application to god.
"Jesus -- the other white Moses" - Me.
I have trobule with omnibenevolence as an idea in general. Saying god does no evil presumes an understanding of the motivations driving a deity's behavior. What people usually *mean* is that god does nothing that *they* consider evil. In other words, we project our ideas of evil upon god and expect its actions to comply with our expectations. But this seems to vastly overstate our place in the universe. I think that god would do what is best for all that exists. If that means irradicating humanity, then sucks to be us. Considering our ability to ruin things (each other, the environment, etc), god could at some point be compelled to wipe us out for the good of the universe.
It might seem evil to us, but existence may be better off for it.
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There will always be evil because it is impossible to eliminate it.
If I classified everything into an hierarchy of 'evil to righteous' with 100% being the most evil and I eliminated all things from 100% to 51% evil, the 50% evil thing (neither evil or righteous) would then become the 100% evil thing.
If I continue to do this until there is only 2 things left in the universe there would still be evil.
Clearly omnibenevolence is incoherent.
People who think there is something they refer to as god don't ask enough questions.
This argument is correct if your classifaction scheme is sound. But it could be that evil and good are not in the same class. Cats and dogs are not in the same class. Rank them by size and you still have two classes, ranked in the same manner, but still different.
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Similarly 'black' and 'white' are of the class 'color'
'Cats' and 'dogs' are of the class 'Mammalia'
People who think there is something they refer to as god don't ask enough questions.
Even though two things share a class, it does not follow that they are identical in all respects. Cats and dogs are both mammals but are definately different in substantial enough ways that they are also in mutually exclusive groups. Which one is more mammalian than the other? You can't rank the super-class of mammel in any meaningful way that allows you to still differentiate between cat and dog.
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Omnibenevolence is still incoherent.
People who think there is something they refer to as god don't ask enough questions.
It is not an analogy. It is an explicit example of how classification works. It is possible to have a meta-class 'moral actions' that contains two mutually exclusive sub-classes, morally good and morally evil. It is also possible to create a classification system where each moral action contains both morally good and morally evil elements.
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And what is Omnibenevolence?
People who think there is something they refer to as god don't ask enough questions.
Omnibenevolence is irrelevant.
Your claim was that evil would always exist and you backed up that claim by using a classification scheme that puts evil and good in the same class. I point pointed out that your claim was correct only within that classification scheme.
If you read my earlier posts, I already stated that omnibenevolence was problematic.
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Omnibenevolence means all good.
It is impossible to define good without alluding to a derivative of bad.
Evil is a meaningless term without alluding to a derivative of righteous.
Righteous means morally good.
Unless you think everything in the universe is either evil or righteous there are many varying degrees of evilness-righteousness which I organized from 100% evil to 0% evil. If all these things are reduced to two things, one is evil and the other is righteous. So unless there is only one thing * in the universe, Omnibenevolence is incoherent.
*edit - or everything is equally evil
People who think there is something they refer to as god don't ask enough questions.
I just got to a part in the book Atheism: A Case Against God by George H. Smith where he argues that all "omni" attributive claims are necessarily incoherent. I think I can reword it simply here:
Suppose we have an attribute A. If god is omni-A, then god cannot be not-omni-A. But if god is not-omni-A, then god is limited.
But what if god could be not-omni-A; he just chooses not to be?
We would have no way of knowing that god could actually be not-omni-A. In fact, if we thought god could be not-omni-A, then we would not apply the attribute of omni-A to god.
This is easiest to show by analogy. Say we have an object that we consider to have free will with respect to what type of sandwich it wants to eat today. But every time you ask it what type of sandwich it wants, it says PB&J. Do we really know that it has free will? No. We can, at best, make a guess that it might have free will, but even that is a stretch.
And I don't think it's an inductive fallacy to say that it doesn't have free will regarding sandwich-eating. It is simply looking at the data as given and trying to come to a reasonable conclusion regarding it.
I agree with Smith here that "omni" anything is incoherent. Either that, or god doesn't have free will. Take your pick.
"Jesus -- the other white Moses" - Me.