Why God in any Majro Religion would desire Post-Humanism for Humanity

Originally posted by Newjak
True except he can also exist as well, in fact he could in theory exist and not exist at the same time 😛

I would say a being without bounds is not bound by classical logic. In fact the idea of a being that can do anything itself defies classical logic, but if we are going to assume such a being exists then the fact they can defy classical logic must also be brought in and thus they defy classical logic simply by existing.

We can have a serious discussion on God based on how you define God. Are we talking biblical God? Finite God? Islamic God, are we talking about the various aspects that a limited God can not over come. What types of things could limit God. Do we believe there can exist a being that could be limitless in nature(note I said can exist not assuming one already exists)?

As for can God create a Rock even God themselves can not lift? Sure they can. They also can't cause technically an all powerful being can do anything even the act of being able to not limit themselves. They can do it and not do it all 😛

We certainly cannot have a serious discussion about your concept of God, no more than we could about an invisible green monster.

Originally posted by Omega Vision
Going by your own standards its also equally valid to say that an all powerful God is also powerless and is nothing but limited because every statement is equally true and false in this post-modernist world of yours.

We certainly cannot have a serious discussion about your concept of God, no more than we could about an invisible green monster.

It's not my concept of God, it's the concept of God if they were all powerful and all knowing.

Originally posted by Newjak
True you could say that.

It's not my concept of God, it's the concept of God if they were all powerful and all knowing.

My point was that your line of reasoning was in a practical sense useless to any kind of metaphysical discussion. Debate and argument proceed from an assumption that it's possible to be correct or incorrect, otherwise we're not in philosophy, science, or even theology but more in the realm of poetry. And if you're going to do poetry it had better be deep and pretty. uhuh

Originally posted by Digi
I have so much to say to this. So much. But I'm oddly amused by it as well. The beautiful dichotomy of bemused glee and twitching nerd rage has rendered me unable to respond.

Hey man, there was a time on this forum that 90% of my posts were in the Batman and Spider-Man sections. I do have background knowledge on it (I was a fan from age 2 to just recently at age 20). And if you look at it from a Biblical, Christian perspective, Spider-Man (and even Batman, but for different reasons) is an abomination to God.

BD reminds of the Westboro Baptists, though. I.e. "This is what God thinks, we know this for certain, and it includes damning all kinds of otherwise-moral people." [/B]

By the standards of men, there are a lot of nice people that will be damned. Mother Theresa was a wonderfully nice person, but she is not in heaven.

But in reality, none of us are "good people" or "moral people". We all sin. Whether we realize it or not, we sin every single day of our lives. And even the littlest sins are still sins and are more than enough to damn us to hell. "For there is not a just man upon earth, that doeth good, and sinneth not." (Ecclesiastes 7:20)

There is a way for our sins to be forgiven, and that is through the Lord Jesus Christ. His sacrifice on Calvary paid the debt our sins have accumulated once and for all. The stain of sin is washed away. But you have to believe that He did it for you, and that it's the only thing necessary for salvation (you can't earn it yourself). You have to believe He is who He says He is, and yield to His Lordship over your life. Do these things, and I can guarantee to you that you will live forever in heaven.

If you don't do those things, you won't get saved and you will, unfortunately, end up in hell and ultimately the lake of fire (two separate places) for eternity. That's not a fate I would wish on my worst enemies. I don't want anyone, including you all, to go there, especially when the method of salvation is so simple!

Originally posted by Bat Dude
Hey man, there was a time on this forum that 90% of my posts were in the Batman and Spider-Man sections. I do have background knowledge on it (I was a fan from age 2 to just recently at age 20). And if you look at it from a Biblical, Christian perspective, Spider-Man (and even Batman, but for different reasons) is an abomination to God.

By the standards of men, there are a lot of nice people that will be damned. Mother Theresa was a wonderfully nice person, but she is not in heaven.

But in reality, none of us are "good people" or "moral people". We all sin. Whether we realize it or not, we sin every single day of our lives. And even the littlest sins are still sins and are more than enough to damn us to hell. "For there is not a just man upon earth, that doeth good, and sinneth not." (Ecclesiastes 7:20)

There is a way for our sins to be forgiven, and that is through the Lord Jesus Christ. His sacrifice on Calvary paid the debt our sins have accumulated once and for all. The stain of sin is washed away. But you have to believe that He did it for you, and that it's the only thing necessary for salvation (you can't earn it yourself). You have to believe He is who He says He is, and yield to His Lordship over your life. Do these things, and I can guarantee to you that you will live forever in heaven.

If you don't do those things, you won't get saved and you will, unfortunately, end up in hell and ultimately the lake of fire (two separate places) for eternity. That's not a fate I would wish on my worst enemies. I don't want anyone, including you all, to go there, especially when the method of salvation is so simple!

Originally posted by Omega Vision
On another note, couldn't you say "It" instead of "they" to be PC?

My point was that your line of reasoning was in a practical sense useless to any kind of metaphysical discussion. Debate and argument proceed from an assumption that it's possible to be correct or incorrect, otherwise we're not in philosophy, science, or even theology but more in the realm of poetry. And if you're going to do poetry it had better be deep and pretty. uhuh

What is the point of bringing up an all powerful and all knowing being only to limit them in the next sentence so they are no longer all knowing and all powerful?

And like I said before it doesn't make practical sense to me to declare something without limits then try to make a point about said entity being limited. To me it is senseless cause that being could do anything and everything by the definition of what you declared them to be.

Originally posted by Newjak
Theoretically you could use all terms how does that sound 😛

What is the point of bringing up an all powerful and all knowing being only to limit them in the next sentence so they are no longer all knowing and all powerful?

And like I said before it doesn't make practical sense to me to declare something without limits then try to make a point about said entity being limited. To me it is senseless cause that being could do anything and everything by the definition of what you declared them to be.

To sum up: I don't care if you take issue with how I define omnipotence, because at least my assessment doesn't lead to a nonsense world where nothing is true or false.

(You should note that outside of this kind of debate I'm more of your view--that truth and falsehood are hard to define and that there may not actually be logic to the universe. At least that's how I approach things in my creative work, but when we're debating I use logic because that's the language of debate.)

Originally posted by Omega Vision
Free will as defined by theologians is logically impossible if God is all knowing.

Originally posted by dadudemon
...here is how it works, logically:

We all have free-will which is the essence of Godliness. Our ability to chose, of our own accord, is what makes us have a semblance to God.

However, God is acutely aware of all potential outcomes for each and every individual. But God does NOT know exactly which of the nearly infinite paths our life's journey will take. God can get extremely close due to his wisdom and knowledge of us but he technically does not know with a 100% surety where our free will takes us along the nearly infinite amount of choices we can take.

But he is still aware of all of those paths.

Therefore, he knows all potential outcomes: still omniscience. One could argue that knowing all potential outcomes rather than just the 1 true outcome is a superior version of omniscience.

Originally posted by dadudemon

Seriously though, that might be your idea of omniscience, but to me that sounds more like "Cosmic Awareness." If God isn't certain of the outcome then he can't be said to have known it, that's just Epistemology 101.

On a sidenote, one of the most interesting kinds of limited omniscience I've seen in fiction is the Intellectus in the Dresden Files, where someone possessing this power can know anything they want, but they have to "ask" the right question (e.g. you want to know how many lizards there are in a forest, and you suddenly realize that there are 4,298 lizards and 59,245 unhatched lizard eggs), but you can't know something if you don't know to ask yourself the question/think about it. For instance if you had no idea there was a planet called Xandor in the Andromeda Galaxy you couldn't learn if it had life on it or not.

Originally posted by Omega Vision
Does it concern you that most "Christians" are going to Hell?

I should concern him more that I've been gradually turning him into a lizard person over the last several years, ensuring that he is an abomination doomed to Hell.

Originally posted by Omega Vision
From how I see it, it's not the limitation of the being but the limitation of the concept of free will. Free will as defined by theologians is logically impossible if God is all knowing.

Actually I'd argue that theologically speaking, time perception and free will are unrelated, because Angels are -supposed to be, by certain traditions- outside of time. They still choose to be good or to be bad, but it doesn't happen through a lifetime nor through an eventual redemption. So the issue about free will comes from the notion of time and is unrelated with knowleged, for human beings the future is only future because we don't know it, and in the same way, we can only experience the past and the present partially. This is pretty much our definition of ignorance regading time phenomena, which means that when we say God being all-knowing attacks the notion of freewill, we aren filtering our knowledge by the limitations of our personal temporality. The problem is not what God knows, the problem is that for us the universe only exists through ignorance -through time which is future, through future which is ignorance-.

Originally posted by Omega Vision
Looks like we've got a Roderick Chisholm here.

Seriously though, that might be your idea of omniscience, but to me that sounds more like "Cosmic Awareness." If God isn't certain of the outcome then he can't be said to have known it, that's just Epistemology 101.

If God is aware of all possible outcomes, that is omniscience. In fact, it is superior to knowing just one of the nearly infinite outcomes. We don't know if all other potential paths cease to exist when we make a decision: it could be possible that all exist. But from our perspective, all those possible outcomes are just one continuous experience and all those possible outcomes collapse into our own subjective experience.

My version of omniscience>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>your version of omniscience.

In fact, my version is so much better that it is nearly infinitely better in regards to the amount of information known. 🙂

Originally posted by Omega Vision
On a sidenote, one of the most interesting kinds of limited omniscience I've seen in fiction is the Intellectus in the Dresden Files, where someone possessing this power can know anything they want, but they have to "ask" the right question (e.g. you want to know how many lizards there are in a forest, and you suddenly realize that there are 4,298 lizards and 59,245 unhatched lizard eggs), but you can't know something if you don't know to ask yourself the question/think about it. For instance if you had no idea there was a planet called Xandor in the Andromeda Galaxy you couldn't learn if it had life on it or not.

That is called Inherent Omniscience...which I think I got from comic books, actually.

Actually, the sounds remarkably close to some Mormon Theology. The Urim and Thummim is supposed to be used similarly and how Joseph Smith claimed to have translated the Book of Mormon.

Originally posted by Omega Vision
From how I see it, it's not the limitation of the being but the limitation of the concept of free will. Free will as defined by theologians is logically impossible if God is all knowing. If you want to dispense with logic, that's fine, but know that most self-respecting theologians and apologists throughout history haven't, and even when they had terrible arguments like Aquinas and Augustine they still on paper respected the rules of logic. You can look at it three ways: (1) free will does not exist because God is all knowing/all powerful (2) free will exists because God is not all knowing/all powerful or (3) (your stance) God is everything and nothing, thus free will exists but then it also doesn't.

To sum up: I don't care if you take issue with how I define omnipotence, because at least my assessment doesn't lead to a nonsense world where nothing is true or false.

(You should note that outside of this kind of debate I'm more of your view--that truth and falsehood are hard to define and that there may not actually be logic to the universe. At least that's how I approach things in my creative work, but when we're debating I use logic because that's the language of debate.)

Like I said the idea of an all powerful all knowing being to me is itself illogical based on the definition of such a being being able to know and do everything it/they/her/him/nothing desires/undesires to do/do not 😛

Originally posted by Omega Vision
From how I see it, it's not the limitation of the being but the limitation of the concept of free will. Free will as defined by theologians is logically impossible if God is all knowing.

Take God out of the equation for a second. We can't presume to know His qualities anyway, even if he were to exist.

But free will as defined by most religions is impossible if the universe adheres to physical laws. Period. I see that as the bigger hurdle, not in proving what God is or isn't like and playing a logic game from there.

Because as soon as you say "if God is this..." you're conceding a point that theists have literally no evidence for, empirical or logical. It's easily refutable without appealing to the unknown, so it's much better to stay there.

Originally posted by Bat Dude
Hey man, there was a time on this forum that 90% of my posts were in the Batman and Spider-Man sections. I do have background knowledge on it (I was a fan from age 2 to just recently at age 20). And if you look at it from a Biblical, Christian perspective, Spider-Man (and even Batman, but for different reasons) is an abomination to God.

If you look at it from your Biblical, Christian perspective. Don't pretend to speak for any kind of majority.

You've managed to accurately pinpoint why I hate dogmatic morality though. It creates negativity where none exists. People or acts with no ill intent and no negative outcome are labeled as sins simply to match a prescribed document, or rather, one sect's subjective interpretation of that document.

But I've had that debate on much more nuanced, controversial topics where the line is trickier to pinpoint. You're just blindly hateful, so the example is more stark.

Originally posted by Digi
Take God out of the equation for a second. We can't presume to know His qualities anyway, even if he were to exist.

It goes further than that, since God is assumed to be THE origin, it forcibly stems from an axiomatic stance where every definition, every quality or value should come from God to be a "real" definition. And the limitation here isn't a limitation of God, it's a limitation for language itself.

Originally posted by Digi
Take God out of the equation for a second. We can't presume to know His qualities anyway, even if he were to exist.

But free will as defined by most religions is impossible if the universe adheres to physical laws. Period. I see that as the bigger hurdle, not in proving what God is or isn't like and playing a logic game from there.

Because as soon as you say "if God is this..." you're conceding a point that theists have literally no evidence for, empirical or logical. It's easily refutable without appealing to the unknown, so it's much better to stay there.

If you look at it from [b]your Biblical, Christian perspective. Don't pretend to speak for any kind of majority.

You've managed to accurately pinpoint why I hate dogmatic morality though. It creates negativity where none exists. People or acts with no ill intent and no negative outcome are labeled as sins simply to match a prescribed document, or rather, one sect's subjective interpretation of that document.

But I've had that debate on much more nuanced, controversial topics where the line is trickier to pinpoint. You're just blindly hateful, so the example is more stark. [/B]

I do agree with most of what you are saying although I don't necessarily follow the us vs them angle of it 😛

Heh. Fair enough. It's not a vs. mentality though. I've just seen a lot of religious debates, and for some reason the theists are routinely allowed to assume certain ideas or properties to either the universe or the divine without a serious challenge. So it's not antagonism, it's just holding everyone accountable.

That's what free will comes down to though. Literally every time you make a decision, a miracle has to occur that circumvents or transcends the laws of physics in order for religious free will to exist. Such blatant and omnipresent phenomena would either be readily apparent to testing, or create irreconcilable contradictions in our understanding of the universe's physical laws. We have exactly zero evidence of either of those.

It's also egotistical. We're made of the same stuff as the rest of the universe. And our brains, while more sophisticated, are scarcely different in form and function than numerous other animals. The onus is on advocates of free will to show how humans and humans alone are able to defy universal laws. Appeals to a soul only push the question further out into more unknowns.

Quantum theorists have tried, to no avail. And it makes sense, since uncertainty is an inherent trait of quantum mechanics. But even if quantum effects happened in the brain (they don't as far as we know), they're still too tiny to have any affect on practical decisions that we associate with free will. And classical physics certainly doesn't allow for this type of ambiguity.

Free will as it exists colloquially in society isn't taken seriously outside of religious circles, and any explanations of how we are non-causal beings are incoherent to me.

...and we don't even have to reference the Big Guy. 😊

Originally posted by Bentley
It goes further than that, since God is assumed to be THE origin, it forcibly stems from an axiomatic stance where every definition, every quality or value should come from God to be a "real" definition. And the limitation here isn't a limitation of God, it's a limitation for language itself.

That's entirely not where I was taking my post. But ok.

Originally posted by dadudemon
But God does NOT know

Originally posted by Omega Vision
Seriously though, that might be your idea of omniscience, but to me that sounds more like "Cosmic Awareness."

Originally posted by dadudemon
If God is aware of all possible outcomes, that is omniscience. In fact, it is superior to knowing just one of the nearly infinite outcomes. We don't know if all other potential paths cease to exist when we make a decision: it could be possible that all exist. But from our perspective, all those possible outcomes are just one continuous experience and all those possible outcomes collapse into our own subjective experience.

My version of omniscience>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>your version of omniscience.

In fact, my version is so much better that it is nearly infinitely better in regards to the amount of information known. 🙂

To paraphrase Saul Kripke's objection to Lewis's Modal Realism: "No one would care to know if they were the possible president, they'd rather know if they were to be the actual president."

Originally posted by Omega Vision
Knowledge of possible outcomes is not knowledge of the actual outcome. A God who knows all the possible outcomes but not the actual outcomes is not only not omniscient, that God isn't even truly clairvoyant. This model of God is more akin to an incredibly powerful computer that can create infinite projections that are all feasible and equally possible but none of which are--by your own admission--certain predictions. In fact, to take it further, you might not even be able to say that this God "knows" these possible outcomes if they're all only "can happen" and none of them are "will happen."

Its significantly worse than that. The computer would at least have some concept of what is likely or probable and thus could make some kind of decisions based on that, God cannot even have a concept of likelihood within endangering free will. Dadude's concept of God is identical to a being that knows nothing.