Thursday, November 30, 2006

limit of sets and ontological proof of God

I'm not sure, Aaron. Occam's Razor would dictate against assuming you know what God wants. That does sound grandly presumptious of you. If you knew what God wanted and God was all-powerful (ie, was able to carry out the things you knew about), then you should be able to predict what will happen tomorrow. But you don't.

(You could say God knows that you know what he wants AND is maliciously subverting his own desires in order to thwart your predictions. But really, you are multiplying assumptions even more at this point.)

Hence, *you* do not know what God wants and do not know why God would want something less perfect than himself to exist and your argument just reduces to the standard problem of evil of problem. It's still a problem, for sure, but it's not particularly a novel disproof of God.

All these definition (ontological) proofs always sound like Cauchy limits and calculus to me. "When dealing with infinitimals or infinites, there are different rules." Which is true. One can't add to aleph-sub-zeros together in the same way one adds 2 and 2. So in a similar way, rules of human intentionality or control don't really apply to God who is both infinite (beyond natural numbers) and infinitesimal (between real ones).

Personally I have a very bland, Darwinian explanation for the existence of most suffering. As far as evil - I'm undecided if it exists. I've seen some bad shit: suffering where no one gains. Not even the sadists. A below-zero game. I can see why some posit the existence of another agent to account for the graft.

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