Hollow Adjectives

This bothered me too. If 'omnipotent' is defined as 'able to do things which can be done', we're all gods.

Yes, it seems these critiques are more about the validity of the concept of literal omnipotence than about beings that purport to meet that standard. The problem is that literal omnipotence is impossible, and so humans that care about related problems should probably delineate what specific powers a being labeled as "omnipotent" has, rather than remain stuck on the definitional debate.

Partly because "can" is a hollow verb.

I always understood "omnipotent" as "can set the state of the universe to anything" (like someone pausing a simulation to make some changes).

I have probably met this sort of "argument", but still haven't seen it elaborated in more detail. Let's say God can make a square circle: what does the proposition mean? I suppose that most of those people would reply along the lines "we cannot comprehend God in entirety", but then, even claiming to know that God can do those things seems unfounded. After all, the statement "God can make a square circle" is formulated inside a language whose rules are entangled with the rules of logic. Even if God works outside the logic, statements about God must obey the rules of logic, else they have no interpretation.

So, in short, God can make a stone he can't lift and then lift it. Self-consistency aside, I really like this point of view :-)

I find this horribly believable, but would be interested in good examples.

Edit: I should have scrolled down first.

These folks will cheerfully agree that they are talking about things beyond the limit of logic, or indeed of human language; that no description of God can possibly be even remotely adequate. So saying that they are contradicting themselves will largely elicit a smile and a nod.

This is because there is for some reason the idea that God is incomprehensible and/or not able to be talked about and/or not able to be talked about rationally within a large portion of religions in the world. So when someone that disagrees with them says their ideas don't make sense or are contradictory or whatever else then they know they are getting closer to a better understanding of God, as they understand it (or in this case don't understand it). Which is why they smile and nod when speaking nonsense and admitting to be speaking nonsense.

This is not the LDS position.

2 → 5 →3

Idle question: which is bigger, (3^^^3)^^^(3^^^3), or 4^^^^4? And how can you tell?

Also, a cylinder is both circular and square, depending on which 2-D view one has of it.

I interpreted that sentence as: "A hollow adjective is a descriptor used in a counterexample (counterargument?) to an argument. By its literal definition, the descriptor causes the counterexample to invalidate the argument. However, it actually doesn't invalidate the argument if you think about it."

And yes, I agree that the original sentence is completely confusing and needs be rewritten. Clearly a descriptor itself does not make an argument invalid. What is actually making the argument "self-evidently bad" needs to be explicitly stated.

Hmmm, insidious type. It should read "seems sound if you don't actually think about it." I meant to write, "A, not B," and apparently got distracted and wrote, "A, not A." And the contraction instead of possessive form of who was decidedly a typo - like I said, this is a draft. Thanks!

Suppose an omnipotent being exists in a universe, and that universe operates under some fundamental laws that among other things define what can exist vs. what is a contradiction.

Contradictions are feature of a language (or some more formal system used to describe the universe), not of the universe. What we call physical laws are regularities which allow us to compress the observed data a bit - e.g. instead of keeping a list of planet positions at each moment, it is enough to have the initial positions, velocities and few equations of motion. Absence of contradictions is not such a law. (It is easy to imagine what violation of a particular physical law would look like, but try to imagine how a contradiction would look like. What would you observe if there was a lizard on your table and simultaneously there was no lizard on your table?)

Alternatively we could ask "Can God make 1+1 add up to something other than 2?" and the answer is "Of course; even mathematicians can do this, by redefining the axioms or working in the integers (mod 2) or something." In terms of this example, then, Level 1 Power is asking "If the universe is a formal system of sorts, can God change the axioms?"

This is exactly changing the language, and very uninteresting to theologians when, as you correctly note, mere mathematicians can do it. "1+1=2" is a string in some formal system which acquires its meaning by isomorphism with real world situations. You can redefine your alphabet to exchange the symbols "2" and "4", which would make "1+1=4" true, but its meaning would be absolutely the same as the meaning of "1+1=2" before the redefinition. It has nothing to do with fundamental laws of the universe, whatever they are.

Perhaps I shall spell this out better, but the impossibility is linguistic. A cleaner example I mention is:

Where "bachelor" means "man who is not married," God could not create a married bachelor. A married bachelor is not a thing. If you break down the definitions of circle and square, you'll see that a "square circle" is not a thing. A heavy stone that has no mass (or a heavy stone that is not heavy), or a circle that is not circular, or any other number of direct contradictions seem impossible, not as limits on power, but mostly as limits on language. That's the point I'm getting at.

I think this post is right on. I think we are IN this universe with a brain to match it, with 3-d, separation of time and space appropriate to non-relativistic speeds, and so on strongly coded in.

In terms of any powerful god, she either "lives" in a much larger universe than ours, which kicks the can down the road (is there an omnipotent god who created that universe?) or she essentially comprises the entire universe. What other way to have an entity which "knows" how every particle moves at every instant other than having that entity be the universe? The most powerful, most accurate "simulation" of any system is the system itself. Obviously, the system itself can't get a wrong answer from a bad approximation somewhere, every other simulation can. I'm talking of simulations because omniscience presumably means the model god carries in her mind is complete and completely accurate. The model in god's mind is as big and complex and at least as fast as the system itself.

But be that as it may, the only way you can play the linguistic trick of saying square circles are not real so god can still be omnipotent without being able to make them, you have, it seems to me, created a higher level physics which constrains all the universes that might be created. But where can the higher level physics come from? Is it just there, in which case our god is not the creator of the UNIVERSE universe, just of a very constrained universe that follows a bunch of atheistically determined rules. The can is kicked down the road.

So if you are interested in a god-the-creator which has had no cans kicked down the road, I don't see how you can rule out ANYTHING. Things we can't concieve of are not ruled out, certainly things we can sorta concieve of like square circles and married bachelors can't be ruled out.

How could this god create a square circle? Of course, I don't know. But I'd imagine that when you saw the square circle you would know it, even if you couldn't reconcile it with everything else you see and know about circles and squares. Indeed a square circle is trivial enough, god merely has to trigger your brain beyond the traditional sensory pathways limitation.

I think for this to be meaningful I'd need to know what your working definition of "omnipotent" was.

The president makes many decisions that affect the economy.

This may be a good instance of the exact kind of thing I am objecting to. Or it may indicate that I need to refine the concept. "I make many decisions that affect the economy," is also a true statement. "In the absence of any other information" is a hole you could pilot an aircraft carrier through. This does nothing to specify what action would meet the criteria of "doing enough to fix the economy," and thus doesn't really seem at odds with my example.

The president no doubt does many things that affect health care and national health. Does it follow we should re-elect him if cancer rates are on the decline?