Thread: A Higher Power
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Old 06.27.2006, 07:51 PM   #18
qprogeny79
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i love this stuff, so i'll give a real reply.

i think there's an even more damning problem with omnipotence than what you mention, inhuman, which is that if god is truly omnipotent he can suspend the laws of logic, which are, of course, inviolable. even if you grant that god created physical laws, god could not have created the laws of logic, for they hold in every possible world. there could be worlds in which acceleration due to gravity is 2 m/s^2, or in which i am a starving african kid with aids, but there can't be a world full of married bachelors or in which the proposition "if it's raining, it's cloudy" is true but "if it's not cloudy, it's not raining" isn't. so god can't be omnipotent in the full sense of the term. (some philosophers of religion retort that god is omnipotent only within the bounds of logic, but i maintain that this is a cop-out.)

referring to your big bang problem, there are quite a few scientists who assert that the notion of "before the big bang" is incoherent, because time, being a measure of motion, began with the beginning of motion -- i.e., the big bang. (as a side note, this observation, if true, would have disastrous consequences for aristotle's argument for the existence of god, in which he derives the unmoved mover from the eternality of time and motion.) the only artificial aspect of time is the way we measure it; we could easily have measured it in "plashungas" and "qawurks" instead of minutes and seconds. however, the existence of time as a measure of motion is not affected by this; time is a measure of real physical phenomena. it's the same with math. we use the concepts of number and the operations we perform thereon as tools of understanding of real phenomena (e.g., what happens when you put more apples into a basket containing a certain quantity of apples). math is a series of concepts we use, just like any other concepts, to integrate like things and differentiate distinct things; we use the concept "two," for instance, to isolate those instances of objects or ideas that occur in pairs from other objects and ideas. the "two" isn't out there in a museum or anything -- that is, it's not metaphysically real, but it is still epistemologically real (i had an abstract algebra book that lamented the designation of the number i as "imaginary" for this very reason).

you're going to laugh, but you may want to pick up a copy of rand's introduction to objectivist epistemology. it's this whole theory of concept formation and how to apply it to problems more or less like the ones you're asking. it's a bit dry at times (at least by ayn's somewhat, er, colorful standards), but it has a lot to say about the ontological status of things like time and math.
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