TollHouse

No, no - you're the one to have made the assertion. Where is your proof that two infinite beings cannot co-exist?

(and that idea pretty well shit-cans The Son, The Father, and The Holy Ghost, doesn't it?)

Harrumphrey

LMAO.

[deleted insult - personal attacks are unacceptable. Please confine your remarks to the ideas or the argument.]

The phrase "Greatest Possible Being" shoots itself in the foot. "Greatest" is in itself even more ambiguous a term than "infinite" and juxtaposed with "possible" becomes self-contradictory. If your god is all-powerful, then he is not restricted to possibilities. So you might better define him as the "greatest IMpossible being."

Oh, and the word "being" doesn't help you either. A "being" is defined as much by what it is as by what it isn't, by its limitations. It must BE, ergo exist. If god is "infinite" (to use what I infer is your application of the term, meaning that he is everything), then he cannot lack anything. If he is everything then he also has everything. If he has everything then he lacks nothing and cannot have wants. If he can do anything and knows everything then he cannot have choices, either. The "all-powerful" and "all-knowing" attributes become logically incompatible. Your god is paralyzed and snuffed out of being by his own self-contradiction.

Your argument is nothing new, despite what you may think. It's just the same old ontological spiel, at least as old as St. Anselm. The fatal flaw in it is to treat existence as an attribute. If you describe something as "great" or "infinite" then its existence is a given. Nothing can be great (much less infinite) if it doesn't first exist, so the argument is ass-backwards. It starts on the premise that god exists without bothering to prove that assumption, so it's a castle built on air.

If god is "infinite" does he also have infinite mass? If so then he can be disproved empirically. And the phrase "exist in reality" is just sloppy thinking. It implies that something could exist outside of reality, or perhaps you mean "exist in reality" vs. "exist in conception". Fine, but why then is "existence in reality" necessarily "greater" than "existence in conception"? I could make a case that the reverse is true. Or perhaps you were just being redundant, and simply meant "exist"?

As Bertrand Russell put it, "All ontological arguments are a case of bad grammer."

You'll have to do a little better if you want to undermine the atheist premise, which starts out by claiming that god is UNproved. We have no obligation to DISprove him, although this is easily enough done given that most theological definitions of god defeat themselves through semantics.

I also assert that the IPU is UNproved. I lack belief in the IPU for the same reason I lack belief in your god construct. There is no difference except that you are indoctrinated to "god" rather than to the IPU. It has nothing to do with ascribing the supposed omnipotent traits of your god to the IPU, simply their shared attribute of being unproved. If you have special knowledge of god's existence, please share it with us rather than trying to pretend that the burden of proof belongs to the doubters.

Prove god exists if you expect atheists to change their minds. Until then the default stance is atheism until theism becomes justified.

And in case you or anybody wants to split hairs over "atheism" vs. "agnosticism" it's simply a matter of your favorite cognate. Absence of theism vs. abscence of knowledge (about god) in this context amount to the same skeptical position.

NumberTenOx

Xian,

I have to disagree with this. Without an infinite canvas, how does the GPB even know he has infinite paint? Maybe he has just a really really big paint can, that isn't exhausted by the finite universe.

Plus, it seems that the GPB doesn't do anything with this infinite power. In a universe where the GPB doesn't do anything, there can be multiple (even an infinite number of) GPB's with infinite "potential" that never conflict because none of them do anything. Without the yardstick of conflict there is no way to tell which one is really the "GPB".

I don't believe there is such a thing as the "supernatural" universe. If you can show me where it is or how it affects us here in the "natural" universe, I can show you that it's a part of the "natural" universe.

Actually, your arguments have had some affect on my thinking. I've pretty much decided that I can't go much further on these terms: if you really believe that the concept of a GPB confers infinite qualities to that GPB, my arguments won't sway you. In that case I have to do what feels like retreat: start to argue that the concept of a GPB doesn't make it real.

I actually can get behind the idea of a GPB. Line up all the beings in the universe from tallest to smallest, and the tallest is the tallest. I can imagine taking the tallest and making it taller. I can imagine making that being taller. I can imagine all I want, but I will never conceive of an infinitely tall being. At any time there will be a TPB, but that being will be finite.

Which has been said before on this thread: why does the concept of a GPB mean that being is infinite? Wishing a thing so doesn't make it true.

There is an interesting analog in science. Is there an infinite amount of knowledge to be learned? When we find the "Theory of Everything" will we know all there is to know about how the universe is put together? Is it possible to fully know everything about physical reality?

I'd say yes. I'd say that the ladder looks infinite while you're climbing it, but suddenly you get to the top. Your GPB looks infinite, but he's not.

Another example. Science says that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. Can your GPB travel faster than light? You would say yes, I can imagine a being that can travel faster than a being that travels at the speed of light, so it can. I would say no, that's it, game over, you can't go faster than light no matter how hard you try.

Stopping here before I submit the LPP (Longest Possible Post).

xian

due to ad-hominem remarks, all arguments are summarily dismissed and fully ignored. I do not entertain ad-hominem responses, I just don't have time.

xian

what is infinite, except that which is limitless? Under the assumption that the natural universe is all that exists...period then any power that has full control over the universe would be limitless. In this sense, how could you not call it infinite?
Saying "no limit to its power" does not lose any l meaning if that power can manipulate all that exists...or do you disagree?

as the guy above you incorrectly accused, I am not proposing an ontological argument for the existence of God. I am merely saying that if God as the GPB were to exist, then by definition he could not be an IPU. That is all I am saying, nothing more.


I hope you continue to respond, i enjoy this dialogue.

Harrumphrey

You appear to have nothing but time. What you lack is a sound principle on which to found an argument.

HRG

Wrong. Where does it say that a moral being is greater than an immoral being ? The relationship "greater than" on the set of all conceivable beings is extremely vague. You haven't even demonstrated that it is a linear order. Is Bach greater than Beethoven ? And why is moral>immoral ?

Of course, since you haven't provided an existence and uniqueness proof, "Greatest Possible Being" may be as meaningless as "most divisible natural number".

It could very well be that:

... two beings A and B are conceivable such that none is greater than the other;

... for any conceivable being C, there is a conceivable being D such that D is greater than C.

1) would vitiate uniqueness, 2) would vitiate existence. A good argument for 2) has been made using Cantor's Power Set Theorem, IIRC.

Based on the discussion so far, I suggest that you take Set Theory and Order Relations 101.

Only if every ordered set had a greatest element - which is obviously false.
Si tacuisses, philosophus mansisses ....

HRG.

HRG

Easy. They can coexist like the even and the odd numbers. Both are infinite. Or you might think of the inside and outside of the unit sphere in Hilbert space: both are infinite as well. Further examples on request.

"Infinite" doesn't mean "encompassing everything", and the latter is logically inconsistent to boot (antinomy of Burali-Forti).

HRG.

Howay the Toon

Or Bad spelling possibly


Xian. Can you tell us what your definition of an ad-hominem fallacy is. You appear to think that any slight or insult or mildly derogatory remark is an ad-hominem. It is not. Its only an ad-hominem fallacy if the derogatory comment is an explicit or implicit premise of an argument.

"You have stated an untruth so you are a big fat liar" Not an ad-hominem although perhaps not terribly polite.

"You are a big fat liar so I don't believe you" could be an ad-hominem fallacy.

Theli

No. That power would just be shown to have power over this universe, there is no reason to assume that it has any additional power.
And another thing, as someone else may have mentioned before on this thread.
Just because you define X as possessing certain attributes, doesn't mean that X actually has them.
I mean... just because I define my car as a Porsche, doesn't make it into one. Unfortunally. And me defining myself as having the ability to fly doesn't give me that ability either.
It is possible for 2 beings to be the greatest possible and co-exist, because greatness is in the eye of the beholder.
One person might find his god to be the greatest, and the other might find his god to be the greatest.
The only way for them to argue their point to each other is to see who can come up with the most powerfull superlative.
But in the end, what no theist ever manages to do (and most of the time don't even try) is proving that their god actually does deserve all that praise.

In the end, god is fictional. Just like any other imaginary being he is what you want him to be.