Edward Feser has a blog post up that is highly relevant to much of the debate that takes place here at The Skeptical Zone between theists and non-theists.
Lazy shouts of “unfalisfiability!” against theological claims just ignore all this complexity — the distinctions that have to be drawn between empirical claims on the one hand and claims of mathematics, logic, and metaphysics on the other; between extremely general empirical claims and more specific ones; between philosophy of nature (which studies the philosophical presuppositions of natural science) and natural science itself; and between the testing of a thesis and the testing of the auxiliary assumptions we generally take for granted but conjoin with the thesis when drawing predictions from it.
So, falsificationism is a rather feeble instrument to wield against theology. And in fact, atheist philosophers have known this for decades, even if New Atheist combox commandos are still catching up.
But he might eliminate all men. Or maybe just leave 5 (you know…in case he wants to play Settlers of Cattan with someone other than his sex slaves…)
Yeah, but Bubbette the Lottery Fanatic might (and likely would) eliminate all those who don’t play. Why wouldn’t she? She can just recreate them if she regrets the instance ‘poof’.
Sure, but how are my actions regular? Am I popping the Virtual Toddler into the backseats of bad drivers everyday? No. So how are you defining regularity?
I didn’t say a capricious omnipotent couldn’t, by caprice, be regular.
I said that omnipotence implies the ability to be capricious, and to cover the history and tracks of caprice. Lesser beings cannot detect the history of caprice unless the omnipotent being capriciously chooses to leave the evidence.
How could you possibly predict any action of an entity that could do literally anything? What constrains such an entity? What even narrows down his or her options?
Here’s the thing – while my example might be just the actions of a full-of-himself day dreamer and merely sets a one-day temper tantrum, it’s just a part of one day. How do you know what Bubba or Bubbette are going to do the next day? Or the day after that. What happens when Bubba gets bored with his sex slaves or Bubbette gets bored with all her stuff? Are their next actions predictable or regular? I kind of doubt it.
How do you know an omnipotent being hasn’t altered your memory? Or isn’t controlling it moment to moment?
Well, I just wouldn’t do that.
Glen Davidson
RoyLT,
You seem to be interpreting entailments as restrictions, but they are not.
I like okra. My liking of okra has various entailments:
a) I tend to choose okra over competing vegetables when ordering food;
b) I buy okra at the supermarket;
c) at my house, you’ll often find okra slime on the dishes waiting to be washed;
…and so on.
The fact that my okraphilia has entailments does not mean that my vegetable-buying power is restricted, or that my freedom is somehow curtailed. I could shift my allegiance to rutabaga tomorrow if I chose.
How is it any different for an omnipotent being?
petrushka, Robin,
Yes, an omnipotent being could behave completely randomly, in which case the only entailment would be a lack of other entailments.
But petrushka’s statement concerned all possible omnipotent beings:
That’s simply not true. An omnipotent being has the option of behaving with regularity. If he couldn’t do that, he wouldn’t be omnipotent.
As I mentioned earlier, I’m still struggling a bit with that distinction. Thanks for the okra analogy. That actually helped a bit.
I’m guessing that was accidental, but omniscience is not what we are talking about.
Even given your okra-affinity, if you became omnipotent why wouldn’t you just make everything taste like okra? Is the entailment still intact in this case?
I guess the only difficulty I’m having with your point is not understanding what you mean by regularity.
What is regular for an omnipotent being?
An entailment is a logical consequence or a necessary and inevitable outcome. So an entailment of hitting a baseball is not simply a baseball flying through the air, but some kind of mark on the ball from whatever you hit the ball with. An entailment of a lightning strike is a blackened area and objects moved or shattered.
Certainly any action an omnipotent being makes within a material framework would have material entailments (unless said omnipotent being decided to remove/erase the entailments).
keiths:
RoyLT:
Yes. I’ve corrected the original.
Liking okra is a bit different from wanting everything to taste like okra.
But if I were omnipotent, I certainly wouldn’t eliminate okra from the world (barring some other good reason for doing so, despite liking it). So if I become omnipotent five minutes from now, an entailment is that okra is unlikely to disappear.
We’re pretty deep in the rabbit-hole here, but I’m not sure I agree.
First, with absolute power you could make everything taste like okra right now, then make everything taste like glazed donuts 5 minutes from now, ad infinitum. I don’t see how the entailment coming from your likes and dislikes survives the transition into omnipotence, assuming that you are aware of the limitlessness of your new power.
Second, I’m feeling more and more like this type of entailment only works when applied to a being who has non-omnipotent experiences to relate to. Assuming that omnipotence was possible, is it really safe to assume that there is a subset of omnipotent beings which just fell into the gig?
Robin,
In this context it really boils down to discernible non-randomness.
In the Robin-becomes-omnipotent world, all else being equal, people who use their cell phones while driving will tend to fare worse than people who don’t. That doesn’t mean that you’ll spend every hour of every day persecuting them — it’s just that your preference will be evident when we look at the big picture.
Tendencies are still regularities. If they weren’t, we couldn’t make predictions like the following:
I just realized how stupid that sentence sounds, but I can’t think of a better way of conveying it 🙂
RoyLT,
I’m not claiming that the entailments won’t change when I transition into omnipotence — quite the opposite. I’m just insisting that there can still be entailments despite my omnipotence.
A safe bet is that in the keiths-becomes-omnipotent world, okra will not be banished forever.
I’m not getting why you think that. What is it about omnipotence that would make preferences impossible? Why would having a preference require a being to have previous non-omnipotent experience?
Remember, we are talking about all logically possible omnipotent beings here, not actual ones. I don’t think there are any of the latter, and I suspect that you don’t, either.
And you would be correct…emphatically:-)
I’m going to have to think through that a bit more, but I concede that I can’t see a way to logically exclude them.
Utter bullshit. ETA: The bullshit quote seems to be attributed to Robin rather than to keiths.
I am not attempting to describe the nature of any particular being.
I’m simply saying that omnipotence includes the ability to do anything, including manipulate space and time, or to manipulate your mind and your memories.
Given omnipotence, nothing can be derived.
Obviously, the real question is whether or not Omnipotence could make a hot sauce so spicy that it couldn’t drink it.
IOW, all powers that we know are in fact limited, hence what sense does it make to discuss a Being with infinite powers? We don’t know anything about limitless powers or infinite beings.
Glen Davidson
petrushka,
Your statement was categorical:
And I responded:
Do you have a counterargument?
Explain how one knows whether an omnipotent being has exercised the option to produce regularity.
Doesn’t “entailment” imply necessity? If regularity is the result of caprice, how does a lesser being know?
petrushka,
That’s a separate question. Inferring the existence or action of a being from an entailment is different from deriving an entailment from the existence or action of a being.
Do you have a counterargument in support of your statement?
That’s my point, you get into logical conundrums that get no one anywhere. Can God be limited by regularity? If so, God is limited. If not, God is limited by not being able to choose to be limited.
It’s fun until someone’s eye gets poked out.
Glen Davidson
I apologize. I actually didn’t see this comment until a moment ago.
Does the generalization “All non-deceptive entities acting within a material framework have material entailments” hold up to scrutiny? I can’t think of any exceptions, but as we have seen, that is no guarantee of anything.
Glen:
An omnipotent god can’t be constrained by regularity, but he can choose to behave in a regular fashion. (I almost wrote “he can choose to be regular”, but that has gastrointestinal implications.)
Now, if you ask where the choice comes from, I would say that it comes from the omnipotent god’s nature. If I am elevated to omnipotent godhood, I am unlikely to banish okra forever. Why? Because it is part of my nature that I like okra.
If you see that as being a limitation — that is, if you see me as being limited by my okraphilia — then you are a believer in libertarian free will, which is an incoherent concept.
ETA: Let me rephrase my sloppy statement. I should have said “then you believe that the only kind of free will that an omnipotent being could have is libertarian free will, which is an incoherent concept.”
I ask an awkward question
At what point does persistent silence to a repeated simple and straight forward question constitute a concession of defeat?
Glen,
It makes perfect sense, because that’s part of how knowledge progresses. We craft hypotheses before we know they’re true, we determine their entailments, and then we test those entailments against observation.
Having no known examples of omnipotent beings to study doesn’t prevent us from thinking hypothetically about them. If we had to have known examples of entities before we could ask “what if” questions about them, the Higgs boson would never have been discovered.
I will repeat the awkward question(s):
First awkward question :
Acts 9:29-30 I said that Paul had to run outta town to save his sorry ass!
Acts 9: 31 I also said that the local Jesus-followers were in the meantime getting along just fine with their neighbors.
Clearly Paul was saying something to piss-off the locals whereas Peter’s/James’ crowd was not. Where am I wrong? Please correct my error if indeed I made an error.
Otherwise, one can only conclude that Paul’s version of the new religion indeed was different than the Jerusalem Church’s version.
My second awkward question:
Paul clearly wrote his letter to the Galatians AFTER the presumed Jerusalem Conference. Why then did not Paul simply refer to the agreed outcome of that Council and be done with it once and for all in his letter to the Galations!?
Would not the most reasonable explanation be that far too much has been ascribed by orthodoxy to that presumed Conference?
My Third awkward question:
Did theologically motivated alterations of the text really occur and are we in a position to detect some of them (if not all)?
For example, are we able to identify passages that clearly did not occur in the original manuscripts?
for example: 1 John 5:7
TomMueller,
Never, and that’s a problem.
Too often commenters lapse into silence instead of straightforwardly acknowledging that they can’t answer a question or that they don’t have a counterargument against someone’s claim.
Interesting – I hope you are incorrect on this one. I will give Mung the benefit of a doubt and wait… for a while, that is.
Otherwise, I shall accept his tacit concession of defeat.
One possible reason for lapsing into silence is that once you’ve made a point, there’s no reason to get into an endless cycle of he said she said.
Posters not directly involved in a dispute aren’t stupid. Repetition doesn’t add anything.
Okay, so we’ve seen, contra petrushka, that an omnipotent being’s existence can have entailments, as in my okra example.
Here’s his second question:
Answer: The same way we detect regularity in any phenomenon. We look for a pattern that is unlikely to be due to pure chance.
Think about statistical tests for housing or employment discrimination. There’s no reason that similar statistical tests can’t be applied to the actions of a hypothetical omnipotent being.
In fact, that’s what prayer studies aim to do. The existence of an omnipotent being who answers prayers would have entailments, and prayer studies attempt to test some of those entailments.
petrushka,
Far more often, the person lapsing into silence is doing so because he or she has made a mistake and doesn’t want to admit it, or can’t come up with a counterargument. The conversation gets stuck, or ends, because of that person’s fragile ego.
It’s an impediment to the aims of TSZ.
You are doin a MungSal, keiths.
You are quote mining. You are leaving out the important and relevant parts of my argument.
Anyone with an IQ above room temperature can understand that omnipotence implies the ability to manipulate space and time in such a way as to leave fingerprints or not, at the omnipotent one’s caprice.
Or to manipulate your memory so as to have you remember or believe anything, as the omnipotent one’s caprice.
You seem to be confusing omnipotence, which is hypothetical and fictional, with some plausible collection of powers.
ok, so? Do you think the writer of Acts was trying to cover it up?
I disagree with you Keith. You can never actually know that an omnipotent being has chosen to exhibit regularity or has chosen to give you the impression of regularity. I don’t see how anyone could ever really trust that an entailment revealed anything about an omnipotent being.
So, while one might argue that an omnipotent being’s action could have entailments, a non-omnipotent being could never assess or draw any accurate conclusions about the entity from said entailments. Effectively, any effect of any omnipotent being’s actions would be inscrutable to any non-omnipotent being.
keiths can sympathize, but questions are not arguments. I’m trying to figure out what your point is, what claim you are advancing. I have to admit I’m not all that concerned if I fail to offer a refutation of a question.
Mung,
Questions are part of the process of argument and counterargument. When you silently refuse to answer questions, you gum up the works.
If you can’t answer the questions, why not acknowledge that? And if you can answer them, why not do it?
Questions can be arguments.
petrushka,
The problem is that those “important and relevant” parts don’t support your claim.
You write:
That’s all true, but none of it supports your claim, which was:
An omnipotent being can act randomly and capriciously, but that doesn’t mean that he must act randomly and capriciously, as my okra example shows.
There can be entailments if an omnipotent being chooses to act non-randomly.
You realize, I hope, that I do not find these questions awkward.
Have you ever read the book:
The Mysterious Numbers of the Hebrew Kings
And what “victory” will you have won?
This is the problem keiths has. He thinks if he asks a question and gets no answer, or no satisfactory answer, that he has “won” the argument. That he must be correct, that his conclusion must somehow logically follow. We’re always left wondering what his conclusion was, and what it followed from, and what the argument is that he actually won.
Robin,
True, you can’t know with absolute certainty that an omnipotent being isn’t fooling you about that. But you also can’t know, with absolute certainty, that anything you believe is true. The same omnipotent being that might be fooling you about regularity might be fooling you about any particular belief of yours.
We can’t be absolutely certain of anything, but we can still make inferences that we deem to be highly probable.
I do not wish to get into a dictionary war, but this is all hypothetical, so definitions are the substance of the disagreement.
An entailment is something implied by or something that logically follows.
Nothing about what we experience or perceive would necessarily follow from the existence of an omnipotent being. We could observe regularities, but we could not be certain that our perceptions are not being tampered with.
No attributes of existence can follow or be derived from the existence of an entity that can manipulate space, time, and our own consciousness.
You abuse them. What good is asking questions if nothing follows and nothing can be concluded? Mung did not answer my question, therefore … what?
The Grand Inquisitor
One of these days I’d like to see an OP on models and entailments.
If there are no entailments of the model, what good is it?
petrushka,
Here’s what I think you’re missing. If our hypothesis is “There is an omnipotent being” — full stop — then there are no particular entailments, as you note.
But that isn’t the only possible hypothesis. “There is an omnipotent being who loves okra” is another, and so is “There is an omnipotent God whose chosen people are the Jews.”
The hypothetical existence of an omnipotent being with other specified characteristics can have entailments.
petrushka,
See my response to Robin.
OK, so? Do you ever bother to read any of my previous posts in their entirety?
On the subject, do you ever provide awkward questions a direct answer as opposed to some puerile evasion?
Instead of answering a difficult question you instead pose some other distracting question, thereby implying yet again a tacit admission of defeat?
Mung,
Stay tuned for my OP on the psychology of admitting mistakes. I discuss that scenario, and it is not true that “nothing follows and nothing can be concluded”.