Thomas Metcalf

Originally posted by 7thangel :

Yeah, I think he could. You're right that he couldn't create another perfect being, I think, because a created being can't be perfect. But I still don't see the problem with creating another omnipotent being, especially if they both, say, decided never to try to counteract each other's powers.

bd-from-kg

Thomas Metcalf

Sorry for the delay. I'm getting into a very busy time a the moment and won't have much time for this for the next 2 to 3 weeks.

Rationality

Recall that the premise of this argument is that being able to act irrationally doesn’t count as “power”. If you don’t buy that, the argument’s a bust anyway. But I think that it’s a very reasonable idea. The reason that omnipotence is counted as a “perfection” is that an omnipotent being would be more effective than a non-omnipotent one. But what does this really mean? Effective at what? Why, in getting what he wants, of course. But what if he would want something different if he had more knowledge and understanding; does “effectiveness” mean getting what he now wants or getting what he would want under those conditions? I think the latter is clearly the more desirable (dare I say powerful) form of effectiveness.

Now when you talk about making oneself enjoy something that one would not otherwise enjoy, I don’t see why that would be rational – unless, of course, it fulfilled some other desire. It seems to me that having an ultimate or final end of being able to enjoy someone else’s suffering is clearly irrational.

As for not experiencing someone else’s pain, you must keep in mind that having a complete empathetic understanding of someone else’s pain isn’t the same for God as it would be for a human. For a human, to “feel her pain” would necessarily mean experiencing the suffering as well (although it would have a somewhat different quality, since we would understand it to me only prospective pain, and in any case that it isn’t our own pain). But it seems clear to me that a maximally perfect being cannot suffer, since suffering would be an imperfection. (Indeed, it seems highly implausible to me that such a being could experience any emotion.) Nevertheless, God knows perfectly “what it’s like to be Betty in pain”. He knows fully, intimately, and in complete detail how she suffers, or will suffer, or would suffer. What this argument says is that under these circumstances it would be irrational to cause her to suffer gratuitously, or to put it another way, for Betty’s suffering to be a final or ultimate end. This strikes me as eminently reasonable. Apparently it doesn’t strike you as being so. I don’t know how this kind of disagreement could be resolved.

Freedom

Yes, there are lots of ways to define a SOA consisting basically of someone doing something so that God is logically precluded from bringing it about unless He’s the “someone” doing it. The question is whether this disqualifies him from being omnipotent. If it does, the fact that he can’t do certain things means that he’s not omnipotent. It seems to me that you’re basically saying that there’s no substitute for God’s actually being able to do something Himself, so if there’s anything He can’t do Himself He’s not omnipotent. As I commented before, this is just a rejection of the concept of S-omnipotence.

The key idea (or at least A key idea) of S-omnipotence, as I understand it, is that God is omnipotent if He can bring about any state of affairs whose description does not include a specification of any of the individuals involved. Thus “God does A” is not allowed, but “X does A” is. What you’re doing is twisting the definitions of “bring about” and “does” in a way that is transparently designed to logically preclude any Y from “bringing about” “X does A” unless Y is X. Thus the SOA is not “brought about” in the required way (according to your definitions) unless Y is X, and if we understand “does” to mean “does freely”, and understand this to mean that no one but X can have any causal role in bringing about X’s doing of A, then again no one but X can bring about “X does A”. This pretty much wipes out the distinction between S-omnipotence and T-omnipotence. But clearly F & F did not have in mind a concept that is indistinguishable from T-omnipotence, so the only possible interpretation is that you reject S-omnipotence as a concept. As you put it, God’s bringing about “X does A” (where X isn’t God) inherently involves “using someone else”, namely X, to get A done.

Omnipotence and Maximal Perfection

Not so. He can being about “X is created ex nihilo for the second time by creating X ex nihilo, then doing it again. All actions reduce the what one is “capable” of in this sense, simply be fixing the past.

The question that I raised before is whether “learning” is properly considered an act at all, or whether it’s a description whose applicability to a given act depends not only on the act but on the prior “state of things”. To qualify as omnipotent a being should only have to be able (at most) to take any specified action; he should not have to be able to change the prior state of things so as to make a given description (that implicitly requires this prior state to have certain properties) apply to the act.

Metaphysical Possibility

All clear as mud. I’m afraid that I’m never going to “get” this concept.

Sorry, this is all unintelligible to me. (Of course I admit that it would have to be intelligible for the Ontological Argument to make sense. But then I’ve never been able to make sense of the Ontological Argument either.)

A square circle is perhaps a poor example; the non-Pythagorean right triangle that I mentioned in my last post is a better one. There are actually lots of such examples. I’m not even sure how exceptional it is to have false beliefs about what one can conceive. A century ago almost everyone would have said that they could not conceive of a single indivisible particle being in infinitely many places at once and forming an interference pattern with itself. Or of matter and energy being the same thing. Or of space and time being interchangeable.

The Power to Choose

I think you’re right about this.

Not at this time, and I don’t have time just now to work on it further. If I come up with something I’ll get back to you.

Thomas Metcalf

Originally posted by bd-from-kg :

Understood. Thanks for all the valuable discussion.

Rationality

I think I'm going to end up denying that the ability to be irrational isn't a genuine power. I might want to be irrational sometimes -- especially if I were irrational, I would. If someone held a gun to my head and said "Be irrational or I'll kill you," I would certainly want to be irrational. And so a person who can be rational or irrational, to me, is more powerful than a person who can only be rational. Maybe not as effective, but I think that's something different. A person who can choose not to be effective seems more powerful than a person who can't choose not to be effective. This may just be a clash of intuitions.

Freedom

But I think I can remain consistent with S-omnipotence and yet keep the position that there are soas God just can't bring about if he's omniscient. Yes, maybe my motivation, at bottom, is that I think a person is more powerful if she can do things without relying on someone else to do them for her. But I think I've converted this into a problem for S-omnipotence, simply by phrasing the soas so that the bringer-about can't be relying on someone else.

Exactly. I'm saying S-omnipotence is no help over T-omnipotence, at all.

Omnipotence and Maximal Perfection

I'm not sure anyone will be able principledly to deny that learning is both an act and a description of some situation. Sometimes, the act of "some person learns" happens. It's happening throughout the room I'm in right now. And the ability to make it happen more often seems as if it would be a genuine power.

Metaphysical Possibility

Okay. Do you understand why logical possibility is epistemically available to us? Do you understand what it would mean, then, to say that metaphysical possibility isn't? Maybe something is just impossible, even though it's logically consistent. I admit that I have no reason to think that metaphysical and logical possibility diverge, but I admit the... uh... possibility.

And I'd say they were right. Now we can conceive of such things. They couldn't before. Their brains weren't trained correctly. What you've shown is that conceptual and physical possibility diverge sometimes, not that conceptual and apparent conceptual possibility diverge sometimes.

The Power to Choose

It would be really helpful, whenever you get the chance. I'm thinking of writing a paper that expands a lot on the one currently under discussion, and more definitions would be extremely helpful.