h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

<,Oh yup. QQ lives here>>
Looks like an interesting board, Toxxin...

EMR, No, as I understand it, God still cannot do the logically impossible (the old stone question, you know, can God make a stone so heavy God can't lift it?). God is constrained by The Rules, which I believe are rules God made, and chose to be limited by, so that created beings can live in a world/Universe that makes logical sense...

Well presumably if God made the rules then He can break them as well.

EMR

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True, but I don't believe HeShe would do so. The rules are for our benefit, and if God broke rules willy nilly, we (I include all created beings, theoretical extraterrestrials included in that) would live in chaos.
Rather like the Courts thereof, in the Amber books of Roger Zelazny. But worse.

i dunnae think God is a heshe

Echo. You make some very interesting points. I agree that one either does or doesn't believe a proposition, even though the proposition itself might be probabilistic; eg: 'Next time, there's a one in six chance that the die I throw will show a two.'

However, I think you're almost hoist on your own petard when you say:

Surely you can't have degrees of omnipotence! Being 'all powerful', but only up to a point, I cannot allow!

I think you're a little too keen on expecting dictionary definitions to solve philosophical questions. Sure, they can help to clarify what we mean; but they're no substitute for conceptual analysis. The etymological derivation is more suspect than the way the expression is currently used.

I disagree with both you and Adelaide in that so-called 'logical' rules are made by humans. If we use a logically impossible expression (eg: an even prime number), we talk nonsense and break our own meaning rules. It is not the fault of God if He can't come up with such a number. It's ours for making such a dumb request! Hey, that wink means you were just winding me up on this one, doesn't it?

toxx

Belief can't have qualititative terms? So for example the belief that what we see in front of our owns eyes is probably real is the same as the belief that when we die we come back? How about the belief that wood shavings taken orally are addictive?

Interesting question.
Perhaps one thing can require less faith to believe than another; but if trust is involved they are both equally beliefs.

Not sure about that, though...

Atoms vibrate to form an object. Is this perhaps simplistic statement correct?
If it is correct what energy creates the vibration?

Bouncy. People just believe things or not. They don't just half believe them, as Echo correctly said. Whether all, some or no others believe the same things isn't relevant to the belief of the individual.

I'm assuming that the 'qualitative' in your message was a typo for 'quantitative'. Echo rightly said: " A belief is a belief; it doesn't come in quantitative terms.", and I agreed and added some, possibly superfluous, thoughts.

If you were to say that some beliefs/propositions/statements are more probable than others - no problem. "The next toss of the coin will be heads" is more probably true than: "The next throw of the die will be a three". However, if you were to believe this latter proposition, your belief wouldn't be any less of a belief. Dammit, it might be a die with six threes, and you the only person to know it. Still, even if it had no three, your belief in the proposition would be no less of a belief.

toxx

PS. Sorry, Echo. I guess you'd have said something similar if I hadn't jumped in.

Hello Moth,

"Atoms vibrate to form an object. Is this perhaps simplistic statement correct?
If it is correct what energy creates the vibration?"

No.

String theory (and some of its variants like M theory) suggests that vibrating multidimensional 'strings' form the fundamental particles (quarks, leptons, muons) that join together to make up the protons, electrons and neutrons that in turn build up into atoms and molecules that make up everything we experience as matter. It is not known what energy, if such a term is even relevant, causes the vibration of the strings.

The energy inherent in vibrating atoms, however, is called heat.

F

Hi, Moth. It partly depends on whether the atoms concerned are parts of a gaseous, liquid or solid object. The atoms or molecules of a gas such as air move about according to their temperature. So we're talking about heat energy being converted into kinetic energy. In a liquid, they don't move so freely; in a solid, even less so.

Where there's a solid suspended in a gas, such as a tiny dust particle in air, the moving air molecules will impact the particle, resulting in motion of the particle as a whole - a whole shedload of atoms, perhaps!

toxx

Hi Fathom. Between your answer and mine we seem to have gone from the sublime (yours) to the ridiculous (mine). I guess, between us, we've covered most of it and agreed on 'heat'.

toxx

F

So would that mean that the vibration does not happen in an ice cube for instance?

Hi Della

"The rules are for our benefit, and if God broke rules willy nilly, we (I include all created beings, theoretical extraterrestrials included in that) would live in chaos."

Aah, my dear, but we do live in chaos. Does this mean that God breaks the rules or that there is no Triple-O deity after all?

Blessings,
Matholwch /|\.

Only if it was an absolute zero (-273 centigrade) ice cube.

toxx, two is a 'logically impossible' even prime number.

I agree that the 'some degree of omnipotence' thing was hypocritical on my part. What I more or less was trying to say(and will say now) is that for my argument to work we must *assume* that God is omnipotent, a view that, I hope I can safely say, religions that believe in a God do hold. So if God is omnipotent, He/She/It has the possibility to create or destroy, to organise the universe(s) or throw it/them into chaos, and to create or break the rules. Once a rule is created, it can be broken, and if God is indeed all-powerful, He/She/It could create gravity (and thus lend some organisation to various planets), but could just as easily get rid of it all and let everything float about in the atmosphere.

Adelaide, to us humans it might seem logically impossible for, say, a stone to be randomly floating in the air without a force greater than and in opposition to gravity to hold it there, but to God it would be quite simple to allow the laws of gravity to not apply to that one object and allow it to float in the air, not acted upon by any forces. Also, it doesn't really matter whether God *would* choose to break the rules and dissolve the universe(s) into chaos -- perhaps we could agree that he has the *ability* to do so; I certainly grant that it would not seem like the brightest idea in the world, even for God.

crazyhorse, many different religions hold many different views as to the sex of God, and so I always say he/she/it it deference to others' beliefs.

toxx, I would have said what you said about the non-quantitative beliefs, had I not been at school at the time.

EMR

Just to explain further, Moth. Absolute zero = no heat = no vibration.

Matholwch, I was thinking more of the kind of chaos you'd find in the Roger Zelazny novel... something like living in a Picasso painting. A universe where earth has 1 G one day, and 14 the next, that sort of thing.
The chaos to which you refer is human made. Let's not get into free will yet, huh?