From: ingles@cclittle.engin.umich.edu (Ray Ingles)
Subject: Re: The "God Does Not Exist" Proof
Date: Sun, 12 Apr 92 19:18:18 EDT
Organization: University of Michigan Engineering, Ann Arbor
Distribution: world,local


In article <1992Apr7.132628.1@ulkyvx.louisville.edu>, pralmo01@ulkyvx.louisville.edu writes:
> In article <6APR199219330862@milori.ccit.arizona.edu>, lippard@milori.ccit.arizona.edu (James J. Lippard) writes:
> > In article <1992Apr6.154504.1@ulkyvx.louisville.edu>, pralmo01@ulkyvx.louisville.edu writes...
> >>In article <5APR199214474472@skyblu.ccit.arizona.edu>, lippard@skyblu.ccit.arizona.edu (James J. Lippard) writes:
> >>> Because God supposedly has divine foreknowledge, he knows what actions
> >>> each of his creations will freely choose to perform throughout their
> >>> lifetimes.  He may therefore choose not to create any of those which
> >>> will choose to perform evil acts.
> >> 
> >>First of all:
> >>I do not believe divine foreknowledge necessarily extends to all possible
> >>universes, but only to those which actually exist.

 Remember this, I'll refer back to it later.

> > This is a denial of omniscience.
> 
> That depends on your definition of omniscience.  If O. means:  God can know 
> anything, then yes this is a denial of O.  If you mean (as I mean)
> God can know everything which can be known, then no, this has certainly not
> been shown to be a denial of omniscience, since knowing what uncreated beings
> who are supposed to have free-will will in fact do appears to me to be 
> logically impossible.

 No, something can have free will and you can still know what
that something will do. All you need is an observer not part
of time.

>  Similarly, it does not in fact appear to me that it
> is possible for God to know how a given *autonomous* universe will evolve
> *exactly*
> physically since this appears to be denied by both QM and modern dynamics. 
> 
> Am omniscience which knows things which can't be know by definition cannot
> be a property of any real creature.

 Yes, but you haven't demonstrated that divine forknowledge
is impossible.

> > 
> >>Secondly:
> >>To say that God 'imagines' human beings and then aborts them based on the
> >>trouble they would probably cause is certainly not a vision of a good God.
> >>I seems to me that such actions would be so unloving and unjust as to be 
> >>incompatible with a good God.  It would seem that it is impossible for a 
> >>perfectly  good
> >>God to abort persons on the basis of foreknowledge.  It follows that God
> >>does not do this. (An assumption I make is that life is itself a great good.)
> > 
> > Merely imagined beings do not exist.  To fail to create them harms no
> > one, and it is misleading to speak of "abort[ing] them."  Further, if
> > God's decision is based on his foreknowledge, there is no question of
> > "trouble they would probably cause"--God knows that they *would* in
> > fact cause trouble.
> 
> Although no harm is done to already existing things, is it fair to say 
> that denying you or I
> existence based on our forecast sins is the work of a loving God?

 But God's 'forecasts' would be 100% accurate. Is it moral to
allow someone to kill someone else if you *know* that they are
going to do it?

> Remember, although the being in question has yet to be created, there
> *is* a being in question.  It is the loss of a great good which makes that
> scenario unpalatable.

 I'm imagining a pink frog. Given time, and luck, and skill, I might
be able to genetically engineer one. Is my choosing not to do this
equivalent to murder?

> That is certainly not the God of Christianity.
> 
> To put it another way:  If I sit on my butt and don't do any harm, is that
> good?  Maybe not, if a greater good would be the result of my doing 
> something.
> 
> It is interesting to note that we seem to be arguing about a 
> 'Maxwell's Demon' view of God, sitting at the entrance to existence,
> turing on existence for 'good souls' and truning off existence for
> 'bad souls'.  Instead of raising the temperature, God raises the
> 'goodness' of the universe.  Can anyone out there tell me what physics 
> did with Maxwell's demon???

 No, 'turning off existence' is a bad way to phrase it. If I
kill you now, that's 'turning off existence.' If I interrupt a
man and woman making love, I may prevent someone from being
born, but that isn't murder.
 And Maxwell's Demon is not possible based on information theory
and thermodynamics, neither of which apply to morality. Unless
you are willing to give us a "thermodynamics of morality," your
analogy is too weak to be useful.

> > 
> >>Thirdly:
> >> 
> >>Without perfect foreknowledge of uncreated universes (something I do not accept
> >>as a necessary characteristic of God)  it is impossible to tell what 
> >>will happen in an
> >>autonomous environment due to non-linearities in certain features of 
> >>reality (not even considering free beings).  This is a clear result
> >>of modern dynamics.  The mechanical universe of Leibniz is dead, killed by
> >>a non-linear oscillator.  It is therefore somewhat rediculous to me to 
> >>hear people argue that God must have had the means to stop certain 
> >>individual evil things from occuring, simply be refusing to create 
> >>those universes.  God may be able to run simulations of the universe,
> >>but he can't tell which simulations will correspond to which actual universe.
> > 
> > Why should God's omniscience be limited to the physically possible?
> > 
> 
> I am not talking about 'physical impossibilites' I mean (here and
> everywhere) impossible for God=logically impossible.  Modern dynamics
> says that many systems (perhaps most) have later states which cannot
> *in principal* be predicted exatcly from earlier states, even for God.

 This is not true. I've noticed that you seemed not to know a
lot about QM in other threads, now it seems that you do not
understand nonlinear dynamics ("Chaos") well either.
 What ND says is, for certain classes of systems, the future
output of the system is sensitive to the initial conditions.
A very small change in the initial conditions will lead to a
vast change in the final output.
 So, if there is any uncertainty in the data you have, that
uncertainty will increase rapidly as time goes on, and eventually
the predictions you make from that data will not match the
actual output.
 E.g. for certain parameters, a driven pendulum will do very
strange things. Given an initial value of speed, direction,
drive strength, etc., I can predict its future behavior as
far as I want. But a very slightly different set of initial
conditions (perhaps differing by only one part in a million
in just one variable) will rapidly diverge from the first
system and eventually will be completely different.
 The better you know the initial conditions, the longer your
predicitions will remain valid. If you do not know the
initial conditions to infinite accuracy, the system will
sooner or later diverge from your predictions.

 [Example: Take a number between 0 and 1. Double it. Throw
out any part of the result that is more than one. Repeat.
 For 1/3, the sequence you get is:
 1/3, 2/3, 4/3, 1/3, 2/3, 4/3, 1/3, 2/3...
 For .333, you get:
 .333, .666, 1.332, .332, .664, 1.328, .328, .656, 1.312, 
.312, .624, 1.248...
 As you can see, the two systems, initially close together,
rapidly diverge. After about 20 steps, they look nothing alike.]

 But God could know the states to infinite precision. And hence,
be able to predict the fate of a nonlinear system like this
precisely.

> Furthermore,
> QM predicts that at least some outcomes much occur according to probability
> distributions.  It is impossible, even for God, to predict what the a priori
> unpredictable will do.

 Not necessarily. If God is not bounded in time, (i.e. if It could
see the past, present, and future equally well, if God were
more of a four-dimensional than three-dimensional entity) God could
know what something would do before it did it.
 This is assuming God isn't the one "rolling the dice," choosing
what things will do. I.e. the 'probability distribution' we see
for an electron might just be the range of choices God typically
makes for what an electron will do. Since you, in another thread,
said that you thinK God might run the physical laws instead of the
universe handling that task, it seems you'd have to *insist* on
this interpretation.

> >>As I said before, I don't accept the proposition that God must have
> >>divine foreknowledge of uncreated universes.  God can only know 
> >>everything which can possibly be known.  I don't see how it is possible
> >>to know what a universe will do before it exists, unless the universe is
> >>of a very restricted type (far and away simpler than our own).

 Or, as I said, if God knows the initial conditions of the universe
in question to infinite precision. I'm assuming God can do the
requisite math in Its head. If not, it can invent a computer to
do it and simulate the universe "off line" first, perhaps tweaking
the i.c.'s until a satisfactory one is found.

> > "Possibly" = what is logically possible, not just physically possible.
> > 
> I agree, as I say above.

 And as I said, none of your objections make perfect divine
foreknowledge logically impossible.

[deletions]

> > Jim Lippard

> See ya,
> Joe Deasy
--

Sincerely,

Ray Ingles                  || The above opinions are probably
                            || not those of the University of
ingles@caen.engin.umich.edu || Michigan. Yet.
Newsgroups: alt.atheism