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CCC comments on Is Spirituality Irrational? - Less Wrong
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Comments (429)
It would have, yes!
...probably wouldn't have survived long enough to be usable in modern video players, though. I don't think there's many physical media that can manage a few thousand years in the desert, short of a miracle.
Well, the argument goes that "God could do X and Y and Z, and no other force could prevent God from doing X and Y and Z, because omnipotence. Yet I observe that X and Y and Z are not, in fact, done. Assuming that my observations are not in error, this means that X and Y and Z were not done; I know that the only reason why God might not do X and Y and Z is by choosing not to, since no force can stop God. Therefore, God must have chosen not to do X and Y and Z."
So it's not really prediction as much as it is observation (and fitting those observations into existing ideas about reality).
The desert is actually quite good at preserving all manner of things. But this is neither here nor there. If God had wanted a video of the parting of the Red Sea so survive to modern times He could surely have arranged it because, well, that's kind of what it means to be omnipotent.
No, it really is prediction: God will never again reveal Himself unambiguously the way he once did. He will forever be the god of the gaps, hiding in the fringes of statistical distributions and the private subjective experiences of believers.
For a mere mortal you seem to be very sure of what God will or will not ever do.
I am indeed quite confident in my prediction that God will never again make the sun stand still. I'm a little surprised that anyone here on LW would find this remarkable.
On the basis of what? (no, I'm not asking you to quote me the appropriate chapter and verse)
There is an old theological debate about constraints on God. Is He really omnipotent, literally, or there are things He is unable to do? I don't think this debate has a satisfactory resolution.
Why are you surprised about finding this attitude on LW?
Um... physics?
Really? If you are willing to seriously entertain the possibility that the answer could be "no", why is that not a satisfactory resolution? It seems to me to be consistent with all the data.
I guess I'm surprised to find religious people here. Pleasantly surprised, but surprised nonetheless. I've never understood how anyone can maintain faith in the face of rational scrutiny. Maybe someone here will be able explain it to me.
God is not constrained by physics, is He?
Which data?
I am not religious.
One obvious answer is reliance on personal experience.
I'm pretty sure He is.
Oh my goodness, where to begin? How about here.
I didn't say you were.
That's usually a mistake.
Hmm. I don't see how else to make sense of the exchange you and Lumifer have just had. Let me follow the steps backward, and you can tell me what I've got wrong. (Unless all you mean is that you only implied Lumifer is religious by saying things that don't make sense on other assumptions, and didn't explicitly say he is. In which case I agree but I'm not sure why it's relevant: Lumifer's denial of religiosity is just as relevant if you merely implied its contrary as if you explicitly stated it.)
I can't figure out any explanation of the conversation you and Lumifer have just had that doesn't involve you (mis)identifying Lumifer as a religious person.
What am I missing?
My surprise at finding religious people on LW was not specifically a reaction to anything Lumifer said, it was more general than that. I guess my surprise was triggered more by something ChristianKi said in another branch of this discussion than anything Lumifer said. But this has become a very long and branchy discussion so it's very likely that any attempt on my part to reconstruct my past mental states will have some errors.
I tentatively concluded that Lumifer was religious because that seemed like the most charitable interpretation of his remarks to that point. When he told me he wasn't, I update my Bayesian posteriors and concluded that he's probably a troll. But I didn't want to say so because my Bayesian estimate on the possibility that he might have something worthwhile to teach me is not yet indistinguishable from zero. But it's getting damn close.
"But it's not true!"
That would run contrary to omnipotence.
Indeed it would.
When you say "God is constrainted by physics", what do you mean by the word "God"? The God of Abraham, being omnipotent, doesn't seem to be.
Not sure, what a link to Wikipedia on theodicy is doing here.
As to not relying on personal experience, well, it calls to mind "Who are you going to believe, me or your own lying eyes?" X-)
OK, I'm getting a little confused about what point you're trying to make. Most of the time when people talk about what God can and cannot do it's because they believe God is real. But you said you're not religious, so you don't believe God is real. So what does it even mean for a non-real God to be omnipotent?
The reason I'm confident that God is constrained by the laws of physics is that I believe that God is a fictional character. That doesn't mean God doesn't exist, it means that He exists in a different ontological category than people who believe in God think He's in. Fictional characters are subject to the laws of physics insofar as they can only do things that their authors can describe, and so they are subject to the limitations of computability theory. God cannot tell us the value of Chaitin's Omega to more precision than we ourselves can compute it.
Fictional characters can have effects in the real world. People alter their behavior because of things that fictional characters are reported to have said. But those kinds of effects are still limited by the laws of physics, and generally do not extend to making radical changes in the angular velocity of a planet, hence my confident prediction.