Talk:Incompatible-properties argument

message: The final paragraph is similarly obscure:
Another pair is simplicity and omniscience. God's memory alone vastly exceeds the terabytes in our computers, and bits (or bytes) are the fundamental mathematical units of information. Information is not "ineffable" and cannot be reduced to something simpler. Furthermore, God must live forever and therefore must have a deterministic processing unit or infinite error correction mechanisms. The simplest implementation is deterministic and quite unconscious, seemingly incompatible with an intelligent being.
# There is no suggestion that God must be simple.
# It is not clear that human memory, much less God's memory, can be rendered, in its entirety, in bit units.
# Omniscience does not necessarily mean "possessing all information".
# "God must live forever" should be "one property of God is that He is eternal" or something like that, and neither statements leads to the conclusion that He must possess a deterministic processing unit or infinite error correction mechanisms.  It is not clear that the human mind, much less the mind of God, operates in such a way as to be comparable to a "deterministic processing unit" or, as most of the world referrs to them, "a computer".
# Re: the last sentence.  The simplest implementation of what?  Why should the simplest implementation be the actual implementation?  Where did consciousness enter the picture?
:Simplicity is an oft-claimed attribute of God.  Without it, the origin of God even more wildly improbable because the most probable state is maximum entropy.  Thus it is essential to the God conjecture.
::I have been studying comparitive religion and theology for a long time and have never come across that one.  Of course, that doesn't mean that it isn't often claimed that simplicity is an attribute of God, but I find it questionable.
:All information can be rendered in bits.  Information can be stored indfinitely compactly in the absence of uncertainly, but retrieval becomes more difficult.  What else does omniscience mean?  No mechanism can operate forever unless it is deterministic or can correct random errors.
::A bit is the (I'm pulling this out of my memory as I don't have much reference material at my current location) amount of information in a system having two equally probably states, correct?  Information theory and the bit unit are necessarily linked to probability theory.  Can it actually be correct to suggest that there is such a thing as a probablity or improbablity in the mind of an omniscient being?  Wouldn't the only properties of such a mind be what in fact is?  What I mean to get at here (and I'm tired, so bear with me) is that Shannon defined information as something that can only exist when there is uncertainty.  If God were in fact omniscient there would be no uncertainty and therefore no information, in a sense.
:::Information has several meanings, one of which is the (log of) the number of bits required to represent a string or, more generally, a set of facts.  Omniscience would require an enormous database.
:Simplest implemantation of the God database.  Any God that could exist in any possible world could be a simple as possible, but no simpler (to paraphrase Einstein).  No cosmic consciousness if God is simple.
::A database can't create a universe, interact, become incarnate, die and be resurrected, etc.  Therefore, God must be more complex.
:::The Abrahamic God never died and thus was not resurrected.  As I said, It would require minimally a deterministic processing unit.
SethMahoney
:Fairandbalanced 05:21, 10 Oct 2003 (UTC)
thread_title: Bits

message: It is standard practice in the field of Philosophy to present the strongest or most popular oppositional views to the one being presented, this is also required by WP:NPOV.  This article is biased in that it doesn't discuss other arguments at all and "The text and manner of writing can insinuate that one viewpoint is more correct than another."
This section states: "However, the result' is that a "good" God is incompatible with some possible worlds, thus incapable of creating them without losing the property of being a totally different God."  This indicates that philosophers all agree with this and the debate is concluded.  This article is both biased and unreferenced.  --Kraftlos (talk) 21:20, 6 July 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: NPOV-Dispute Evil vs. good and omnipotence 

message: Congratulations, you just proved that the universe doesn't exist. Time is an intrinsic part of the universe, just like galaxies and oatmeal. It is not separable. It was not just space that was created in the big bang, but time as well (actually, I think I read somewhere that the symmetry-breaking event which created a "time" dimension happened sometime "after" the big bang, except that until it happened the was no "after", which is really confusing so I'll just set it aside).
This brings me to my point, which is that there is no "prior" for our universe. Whatever process caused our universe to come into existence did not do it in our time line. It may or may not have taken place in some other time line.
Obviously this contradicts our normal intuitive understanding of creation, but the big bang was like that. Very very weird. --Specrat (talk) 06:24, 6 September 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Creation requires a creator that existed, by definition, prior to the thing created."