Sunday, April 03, 2011

Apparently my last response was too powerful for "please convince me" and they felt the need to delete it

     Here is the thread. I shall try to recompose the thoughts of my response as best I can.

     "I hope you really don’t think that a reasonably intelligent person, let alone a perfect one, would be unable to see what is at play. Just because words can be strung together does not prevent the sentence from being incoherent."
     That's true enough. I can string words together like "rook sea shape fat penguin" and it won't mean anything. But the statement I proposed does not suffer from that problem. It has a clear meaning.
     "A statement that is contradictory, incoherent or circular simply proves that reason is operating."
     My statement is not contradictory nor is it incoherent. And it is not really meaningful for a statement to be circular.
     "Your Rubik’s cube example does not help your argument."
     The Rubik's cube itself is only a backdrop. The point was that a particular text was meaningful and useful to me, but "meaningless" to someone else. Individual limitation may prevent someone from seeing the meaning. I highlighted a specific example to prevent a claim of an empty assertion.
     "Saying that 'God truly knows that this statement is not true but therefore true' is not something we dwell on because we can’t solve it."
     But, of course, I never said anything like that. I said that if he does not believe it to be true then it is true but he doesn't know it. You see, I am not introducing a contradiction. I am exposing one. I said at the beginning that omniscience was inherently inconsistent. And, if you remove the assumption of omniscience, all the contradictions go away. The contradictions only come into play when you modify my statement to claim that your god cannot have made an error. The statement is a simple one about the set of beliefs of a proposed being. Either the statement is among those beliefs and is thus false, or it is not there and is true. Either way, there is a truth that your god does not know.

     Ultimately, credit must go to Kurt Gödel. He was the one who proved that any sufficiently advanced system must have statements that it can express but cannot resolve or be an inconsistent system. You cannot have a collection of all and only true statements, because for any given collection <X>, the statement "This statement is not part of collection <X>." is reasonable, but the collection will be wrong about it.


UPDATE:

     My response is back. Perhaps it was just hidden so that someone checking would give up before it was restored. I'm just guessing, of course.

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