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Author Topic:   A God Equation
Dr Adequate
Member (Idle past 311 days)
Posts: 16113
Joined: 07-20-2006


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Message 17 of 27 (694708)
03-27-2013 1:06 PM
Reply to: Message 15 by Phat
03-27-2013 12:31 PM


God And The Rock
Well, the traditional answer (and in my view the correct one) to the paradox of God and the rock is that the omnipotence of God means that he can bring about any state of affairs not that he can make any sentence true. For example, according to the old joke, even God himself cannot make "two hills without a valley between them" --- if they had no valley between them, they'd be one hill. But this is not really a limit on his omnipotence, because the phrase "two hills without a valley between them" does not describe even a conceivable state of affairs.

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Replies to this message:
 Message 25 by Ossat, posted 03-31-2013 6:25 PM Dr Adequate has replied

  
Dr Adequate
Member (Idle past 311 days)
Posts: 16113
Joined: 07-20-2006


Message 26 of 27 (694990)
03-31-2013 10:09 PM
Reply to: Message 25 by Ossat
03-31-2013 6:25 PM


Re: God And The Rock
I do think God is even able to make "two hills without a valley between them", without them becoming just one hill. I don't know what that would be like, but I do know for God everything is possible.
Quite so, he's meant to be omnipotent. But I didn't say there were things he couldn't do: rather, there are sentences which, being meaningless, would never describe anything that he did.

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 Message 27 by Ossat, posted 04-01-2013 12:33 AM Dr Adequate has not replied

  
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