Comment on Eat lead
merc@sh.itjust.works 1 month agoThe existence of a god is something that can’t be disproven. You can always find gaps in knowledge and explain the gap by saying a god / multiple gods did that. As gaps narrow with more knowledge, you can always just say that the holy books were just a metaphor in this one case, but the rest of it is literally true.
It gets even more complicated when you run into people who refuse to believe in any science, or anything outside their own personal experience.
Personally, I believe the Earth is a sphere. I’ve been to Australia, Europe, Africa, Asia and North America. The time the flights took and the routes the in-flight maps showed make sense for a spherical earth. So did the scenes visible out the windows, and the day/night cycle. The mere existence of time zones and seasons strongly suggests the Earth is a rotating sphere tilted slightly off vertical. But, it could be that I’m living in a Truman Show world, where everything is a lie designed to make me believe something that isn’t true. I haven’t personally done all the math, all the experiments, etc. to prove the Earth is a sphere. And, if this were a Truman Show world, the producers of the show could mess with my experiments anyhow.
For someone who doesn’t want to believe, there’s really nothing you can do to make them believe. The world really relies on trust and believing Occam’s Razor.
jlou@mastodon.social 1 month ago
If we assume that god, by definition, must be omniscient, there is actually a way to disprove the possibility with the following paradox:
This sentence is not known to be true by any omniscient being.
There are also more traditional arguments like the problem of evil
@science_memes
merc@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
Why must that be true by definition? Many of the Greek gods were clearly not omniscient, because the stories about them all involve intrigues and hiding things from each-other.
Also, you can’t disprove a god’s existence by making a logic puzzle that’s hard for you to puzzle out. Just because it’s a toughie for you doesn’t mean that it disproves the existence of gods.
That isn’t even a particularly difficult logic puzzle.
jlou@mastodon.social 1 month ago
Self-referential paradoxes are at the heart of limitative results in mathematical logic on what is provable, so it seems plausible a similar self-referential statement rules out omniscience.
Greek gods are gods in a different sense than the monotheistic conception of god that is omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent. Sure, so the argument I give only applies to the latter sense.
@science_memes
merc@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
That’s not a paradox though, it’s a silly logic puzzle that isn’t hard to solve. It doesn’t prove or disprove anything about omniscience or gods.
Trainguyrom@reddthat.com 1 month ago
Man I don’t know if I’ll ever get over seeing Mastodon toots on Lemmy and all of the other wild cross-fediverse fun the Fediverse enables
howrar@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
I don’t understand how this disproves the existence of an omniscient being. What if I said “This sentence is not known to be true by any logical being.” Is my existence disproven now?
jlou@mastodon.social 1 month ago
Being logical doesn't imply knowing every true sentence.
Also, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knower_paradox
@science_memes
howrar@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
Logical meaning having the ability to follow logical roles to determine whether or not any statement is true or false. I’ve followed that train or logic and determined that the sentence you provided is neither true nor false. I’ve determined that it is paradoxical. Why would an omniscient being be unable to know that this is a paradox?