Philosophy
A student and playground regular is working on a senior thesis with me about natural language uses of utterances referring to the infinite. He's got an interesting puzzle that I figured I'd throw out there for everyone to play with.
There are two types of transfinite numbers -- cardinals and ordinals. A cardinal number is an amount. I have five bananas. An ordinal number is the rank of something. Stan Musial's jersey was not saying he had 6 of anything, but that if you lined up everyone in order according to what was on the back of the jersey, he would be 6th in line. Of course, that would mean he played for the St. Louis Ordinals, not the St. Louis Cardinals.
If we consider the three classic properties attributed to God -- omniscience, omnipotence, and omnibenevolence -- which notion of the infinite is implicit in each?
With omniscience, the idea of being all-knowing implies that God knows every fact, that we could take all of the facts, number them, come up with an infinite number and attribute knowledge of all of them to God. It appears to be a cardinality claim.
With omnipotence, on the other hand, it is not saying that God could do everything on an infinitely long list of actions, but rather that being all powerful means that no matter how powerful you are, God is always more powerful than that. God in front of you in the power line-up. It seems to be an ordinal notion.
But what about omnibenevolence? What does it mean to be all good or all loving? Is it that if you listed out everything, God would love everything on the list? Or if you listed every possible action, God would always do the right one? Or is it that no matter how much you love a thing, God always loves everything more? there doesn't seem to be a quantity of anything to count, but there also doesn't seem to be a scale here to make God the holder of the ultimate degree. What does it mean to say that God is infinitely good or all loving?
- God And Stuff
A couple of God questions this week. kzndr asks, "Are any of the classical arguments for the existence of God actually any good?"No. The interesting one, though, is Anselm's argument that a perfect being must exist because existence is a perfection...
- Are There Really No Two Snowflakes That Are Alike?
It is a common cliché that no two snowflakes are alike. Of course, for every cliché in one direction there is another in the opposite direction. Consider the infinite number of monkeys typing on an infinite number of typewriters, eventually they will...
- Comedism And Evil
Brothers , Sisters, and Transgendered Comedists Everywhere: For those who are new to the Playground, weekends are for the weekly Comedist sermons. For an introduction to Comedism, the new religion; passages from The Comedist Manifesto, our holy book;...
- Anthony Quinton On Spinoza & Leibniz
Once Descartes set the agenda and got modern philosophy started, the greatest thinkers of Europe divided into roughly two camps: the empiricists, like Locke, Berkeley and Hume, who argued that substantive knowledge about the world comes exclusively from...
- An Infinite Universe?
If the universe is infinite now it has always been infinite. This is the opinion of many astronomers today as can be concluded from the following series of interviews, but the opinions differ much more than I had expected. Many astronomers do not have...
Philosophy
God's Infinite Properties
A student and playground regular is working on a senior thesis with me about natural language uses of utterances referring to the infinite. He's got an interesting puzzle that I figured I'd throw out there for everyone to play with.
There are two types of transfinite numbers -- cardinals and ordinals. A cardinal number is an amount. I have five bananas. An ordinal number is the rank of something. Stan Musial's jersey was not saying he had 6 of anything, but that if you lined up everyone in order according to what was on the back of the jersey, he would be 6th in line. Of course, that would mean he played for the St. Louis Ordinals, not the St. Louis Cardinals.
If we consider the three classic properties attributed to God -- omniscience, omnipotence, and omnibenevolence -- which notion of the infinite is implicit in each?
With omniscience, the idea of being all-knowing implies that God knows every fact, that we could take all of the facts, number them, come up with an infinite number and attribute knowledge of all of them to God. It appears to be a cardinality claim.
With omnipotence, on the other hand, it is not saying that God could do everything on an infinitely long list of actions, but rather that being all powerful means that no matter how powerful you are, God is always more powerful than that. God in front of you in the power line-up. It seems to be an ordinal notion.
But what about omnibenevolence? What does it mean to be all good or all loving? Is it that if you listed out everything, God would love everything on the list? Or if you listed every possible action, God would always do the right one? Or is it that no matter how much you love a thing, God always loves everything more? there doesn't seem to be a quantity of anything to count, but there also doesn't seem to be a scale here to make God the holder of the ultimate degree. What does it mean to say that God is infinitely good or all loving?
- God And Stuff
A couple of God questions this week. kzndr asks, "Are any of the classical arguments for the existence of God actually any good?"No. The interesting one, though, is Anselm's argument that a perfect being must exist because existence is a perfection...
- Are There Really No Two Snowflakes That Are Alike?
It is a common cliché that no two snowflakes are alike. Of course, for every cliché in one direction there is another in the opposite direction. Consider the infinite number of monkeys typing on an infinite number of typewriters, eventually they will...
- Comedism And Evil
Brothers , Sisters, and Transgendered Comedists Everywhere: For those who are new to the Playground, weekends are for the weekly Comedist sermons. For an introduction to Comedism, the new religion; passages from The Comedist Manifesto, our holy book;...
- Anthony Quinton On Spinoza & Leibniz
Once Descartes set the agenda and got modern philosophy started, the greatest thinkers of Europe divided into roughly two camps: the empiricists, like Locke, Berkeley and Hume, who argued that substantive knowledge about the world comes exclusively from...
- An Infinite Universe?
If the universe is infinite now it has always been infinite. This is the opinion of many astronomers today as can be concluded from the following series of interviews, but the opinions differ much more than I had expected. Many astronomers do not have...