Descartes' conclusion on God was right. His premises were...

Surreptitious, infinity of oranges could mean one orange on an infinite number of planets, your example was omnipresent oranges.

Certainly real,

You’re not using paradox correctly, you have only used proof through contradiction, to which it must be established whether the premises are correct.

Answer me this, an argument you did avoid, I can address all of your replies, but I want your answer to this.

God has never known what it’s like to not know someone’s middle name. Every being besides god, which is probably infinite in number, has known what it’s like to not know someone’s middle name.

This means that there are an infinite number of subjective states that god, by definition, has no access to.

This is the same as the liver argument.

Your replies are circular, and these facts make them false.

Platonic forms explain existence better with the facts, than god .

That makes no sense since perfection by definition has to be free of all imperfection no matter how tiny
How much imperfection can perfection have before it becomes imperfect ? Logically it can be any at all

Temporal infinity can have either a beginning with no end or no beginning with an end
And it can of course be infinite in both directions though this is not actually necessary

I mentioned omnibenevolence but he ignored it because it is not compatible with omnipotence
A perfect being can conceivably be one or the other but not both as they contradict each other

But omnipresent in what? All-existing in what? If you say something exists everywhere, then you have to define what “where” is, and so something else must exist first (ie spacetime fabric, aether, xyz coordinates).

I see what you’re saying and it’s sensible, but sometimes I wonder. I mean, we have quantum superposition where one thing exists in two positions, which is absurd; we have quantum tunneling where one thing travels through another thing; Michio Kaku gives his phd students the absurd problem of calculating the probability that they will vanish and reappear on the planet Mars viewtopic.php?f=4&t=193940

It seems as if the designation of logical impossibility is not sufficient to relegate something to truly being impossible. Heat can also flow from the cold to the hot, but as a matter of odds, it practically never does.

Existence in this case would be a concept rather than a thing. And we still need to define what omnipresent means outside of the spacetime construct.

What I mean is the universe is trying to figure itself out and it can’t because an object cannot be subject to itself. One point cannot inspect itself and infinities result from trying, like the infinite regression seen from pointing a camera at its own monitor.

Yes that’s true from within the construct of language and logic, but the nonconceptual is the set of things that are not conceptualized, which would (presumably) include absurdities. I’m not saying absurdities exist or are possible, I’m just not sure that they aren’t… because ultimately, at least one absurdity has to be or we wouldn’t be here.

That was me, the other S-man :slight_smile:

We can’t have infinite planets if there is room for one more planet. To say there are infinite planets means infinity has been realized/actualized and that could only happen when infinity found a boundary (the extents of the universe) which would make it impossible to add one more.

I was listening to Bart Erhman the other day where he was describing the argument that the Father God could not have created the Jesus God because that which is perfect cannot change or it would either have not been perfect before the change or it would not be perfect after the change and therefore the Jesus God would have to have been eternal. Kinda clever. I don’t remember his rebuttal to it :frowning:

I disagree. I don’t think a timeline can have a start and no end. First of all, what started it and why should the starting point be an arbitrary demarcation in causality? Second, there would never be a point in time where we could say it is infinite because we’d have to wait for the end to do so, but the end never comes. However if time had no beginning, then it would always be infinite and infinite time cannot end lest it have a boundary and therefore not be infinite. Eternity can’t have a beginning.

What the human mind deems absurd or logically impossible is not absolutely reliable. The Universe is under no obligation to make sense to us. There will always be gaps in our knowledge and some of those gaps will contain things that are initially at least beyond comprehension. That though is a problem for us not the Universe
If something exists it should be acknowledged. Understanding will probably take longer but our natural curiosity does not mean we have a right to know and we can
not always be certain anyway

What does omnibenevolence mean? Good and bad are relative and codependent. Good cannot exist without bad and love cannot exist without hate. The being that loves must also hate that which threatens what he loves.

What does omnipotence mean? How can something have all the power? Can he be both big/strong and small/nimble at the same time? Every advantage is also a disadvantage in other contexts and there is no way to be all-powerful.

Both of those concepts are not possible unless absurdities are possible.

I agree :obscene-drinkingcheers:

We do not know if time extends infinitely into the past or not because physics breaks down at the Big Big although no cosmological model rules it out absolutely
Mathematical infinity only requires infinity at one end because while the number line extends to infinity in both directions it can begin or end at any point at all

God cannot possess even one omni because all omnis are examples of perfection and absolute perfection simply cannot exist in reality
So those who claim omnipotence / omniscience / omnibenevolence for God are therefore unaware of the logical impossibility of them

Start at 0 and extend to infinity with the positive integers
Start at 0 and extend to infinity with the negative integers
Both have a start point and both extend to infinity in different directions
It does not have to be 0 but that is the obvious place to start because it is the exact centre of the number line
There is also an infinity of numbers between every two reals on the number line no matter how close they are

Something would have to cause the big bang and therefore that’s not the beginning, but the genesis is outside of time because time is a construct existing as an artifact of space that was created at the big bang. We can’t have space without time nor time without space, but even within that construct, light observes neither time nor space and since every photon emission and reception were events that took no time, then the big bang isn’t anything that happened, except from our point of view. The construct must be finite because none of it took any time and it’s already done, but not from our point of view as beings constructed of spacetime itself.

physics.stackexchange.com/quest … a-receiver

[i]Richard Feynman’s PhD thesis was about just this topic, if I am understanding your question rightly. Here is an earlier question about Feynman’s thesis that addresses some of the fascinating issues involved with this.

At the suggestion of his thesis adviser John Wheeler, Feynman explained photon emission as a two-way interaction in which the regular photon is emitted and follows the “retarded” solutions to Maxwell’s equations. “Meanwhile” (in some rather abstract sense of the word indeed) a target atom or particle in the distant future emits its own photon, but a very special one that travels backwards in time – a type of solution to Maxwell’s equations that had been recognized since Maxwell’s time but had been ignored. These solutions were called the “advanced” solutions. This advanced photon travels back in time and “just happens” to arrive at the source at the exact instant when the regular photon is emitted, causing the emitting atom to be kicked backwards a tiny bit.

Amazingly, Wheeler and Feynman were able to write a series of papers showing that despite how mind-boggling this scenario sounded, it did not result in violations of causality, and it did provide a highly effective model of electron-photon interactions. From this start, and with some important changes, Feynman eventually produced his Feynman-diagram explanation of quantum electrodynamics, or QED. The curious time relationship continue in Feynman’s QED, where for example a positron or anti-electron simply become an ordinary electron traveling backwards in time.

Staying fully consistent with his own ideas, Feynman himself described photon interactions as always having an emission and a reception event, no matter how far apart those events occur in ordinary time. In his view, if you shone a flashlight into deep space, the photons could not even be emitted until they found their “partner” advanced photon emission events somewhere in the distant future. The proof of it is in the very slight push back on your hand that happens when you shine the light, that kick coming from the advanced photons arriving from that distant point in the future and nudging the electrons in your flashlight filament.[/i]

The universe is a closed loop where something is emitted and something is returned for energy conservation both in terms of space and in terms of time; therefore it’s not infinite. A photon can’t even be emitted until its partner is found in distant space and time.

I see what you’re saying, but I think that’s better described as a segment because all lines are infinite. Placing the origin at zero on Cartesian coordinates is really an arbitrary placement as we could have the x and y intercepts anywhere. We could start counting at zero: 0, 1, 2, 3… or we could start from -2: -2, -1, 0, 1, 2, 3… To say it has a beginning is an arbitrary segmentation because it really doesn’t have a true intrinsic beginning and neither does it have a true intrinsic ending (although the size of the universe should cap it off).

Yes I think you’re right although I’m less sure of the omnipresence because I can’t find a reason that god couldn’t exist in every place there is to exist within the construct of spacetime. Can you think of a reason that couldn’t be so?

I’m not sure what perfection means and I can only imagine it as relative, like: a short sword is perfect for close-quarters combat within buildings, but maybe not so good in the open field. Perfection is relative to a situation and not something that can exist objectively/abstractly.

Omnipresence can exists as a state as well as a being because it can also apply to the Universe
The other three omnis however are exclusively characteristics of God so they are not the same
God by nature is perfect but that is a meaningless concept because it has no actual reference

I already have the refutation of omnipresence in this thread.

If a being cannot know what it’s like to not know someone’s middle name, it’s not present in any of us.

It’s right here: viewtopic.php?p=2710106#p2710106

An omniscience disproof is an omnipresence disproof.

Certainly real will understand that

Oh I see. You differentiated an attribute of the universe from an attribute of a person (god). That might work. Spacetime exists everywhere there is spacetime and outside of spacetime, there is nowhere to exist, so spacetime is omnipresent, but spacetime isn’t god.

That makes sense. How can god know what it’s like to not know something? So that would be something he cannot know and if he could know it, then it would mean there is something else he did not know.

But how you do connect omniscience to omnipresence?

Because God has to know all subjective states of ignorance to know all that is known in existence, if god doesn’t know them all, then it demonstrates a lack of omnipresence for intelligent beings, thus, a lack of omnipresence in general, or as far as we are concerned