Can God create a rock so heavy he can't lift it?

[bascule]

I would answer that, we don't understand God, so he could be 4 and 6 ft, and 0 ft and a million feet, and anything else all simultaneously, and non-simultaneously and blah blah blah.

 

This is the typical sort of nonsense answer that we get to these questions. Certain properties conflict and cannot occur simultaneously, and when conflicting properties regarding an entity which is alleged to have them arise, the answer is simply that God is capable of having conflicting properties, and if you can't accept that, then that's simply a limitation of human reasoning. Great. But you're still contradicting yourself. I guess God is a big contradiction.

 

There's something more to the "Can God create a rock so heavy he can't lift it?" question. It involves an interesting form of self-referentiality.

 

I've been reading more Hofstadter, and he broached a similar question:

 

What is "the smallest number that can only be expressed in a minumum of thirty syllables"?

 

For example, the number "777,777" can be represented as "Seven hundred seventy seven thousand, seven hundred seventy seven" or "Six sevens" or "One thousand one times seven hundred seventy seven" etc. "Six sevens", while perhaps ambiguous, is only three syllables, comprared to the unwieldy 20 syllable definition.

 

The problem with "the smallest number that can only be expressed in a minumum of thirty syllables" is that it has an odd self-referentiality problem. Indeed, the statement describes the number in question, but in a mere 23 syllables. Thus such a number cannot exist: it defines itself in such a way that it breaks its own definition.

 

The same goes for the OP

[ecoli]

This is the typical sort of nonsense answer that we get to these questions.

Certain properties conflict and cannot occur simultaneously, and when conflicting properties regarding an entity which is alleged to have them arise, the answer is simply that God is capable of having conflicting properties, and if you can't accept that, then that's simply a limitation of human reasoning. Great. But you're still contradicting yourself. I guess God is a big contradiction.

 

I can't really give an answer that I haven't already said...

 

This is a text that first introduced me to understanding God, according to the Jewish tradition.

http://www.torah.org/learning/basics/nutshell/introduction.html

 

I'll quote the important part

It is impossible to define God in any meaningful way. Here's why:

We live in a world of startling and astonishing beauty. A wondrous three-D world of height, length and width. Far more than mathematical concepts, these three dimensions are the bricks and mortar of our environment and are inseparably linked to the existence of physical matter as well as space. Now suppose for a moment that we lived in a slightly less awesome two-D world, a world lacking height, for instance. I'd like you to actually try that as an imaginative exercise: before reading any further, take a couple of minutes, close your eyes, and try to imagine what your world would look like if it was heightless.

As my kids would say, "That's totally weird." In the heightless world you imagined, everything was probably very flat—flat people, flat tugboats, even flat elephants. You see, a heightless world is one in which there is no height at all, not even a seventy-second of an inch. So in a truly two-dimensional heightless world, while objects could be long and wide, they would have to be so flat that a grain of sand would tower over them, and in truth, they'd be even flatter than that. Now do you know what my kids mean when they say, "That's totally weird"?

I'd like to take this exercise a little further. Imagine that you are now removing the dimension of length from your already heightless world. Good. Next try removing depth. Good. Now try to imagine squeezing an elephant into your dimensionless world. Tricky isn't it? But wait, it gets even weirder.

You are now imagining a nondimensional world, a world that can't possibly contain anything, because by removing all three dimensions you have not only eliminated all matter, you have also eliminated space. So even if you imagined a super-squished elephant, there would be nowhere to put him. Believe it or not there is still something else you can remove from this world. I know that it looks awfully empty already, but I want you to get rid of just one more little thing. I want you to get rid of time itself. This means that even if you could find your elephant, you couldn't do anything with him because doing always takes time (even a trillionth of a second), and there is no time.

You are now getting a sense of why the Jewish understanding of God is that He is unfathomable and why discussing what He is in any meaningful way is absurd. You see, God created the dimensions of height, length, and width; He created space and matter, and He also created time. This means that whatever God is—His being—the nature of His existence, is one that is totally independent of time, space, dimension, and matter. If He created the three-dimensional world of space and matter, then His existence is not confined or defined by these creations because His existence predates theirs. The same is true with time. He existed before time existed and therefore His existence is in no way bound or affected by time.

God is absolutely independent of everything that comprises the reality in which we live. We, being stuck as we are in a time-bound, three-dimensional existence, have no way of conceiving of a reality that could exist independent of all these attributes. So, if you had a hard time conceiving of a dimensionless elephant, you will never be able to grasp what God is.

But don't worry, neither is anybody else.

[Realitycheck]

I think I could tackle defining God, if one exists. Of course, the discussion has run rampant about religion and philosophy, so I feel at home putting in my two cents, once and for all. I have always been somewhat of a pagan, though I don't really understand how it became associated with magic or hedonism, but that is besides the point. I really feel that God needs to be quantifiable in order for His existence to be justified.

 

If there was a supercomputer that watched over our lives, it would most certainly have to be the sun, but it would have to interact with the earth for it to work. When we raise our finger, is the interaction between the brain and the finger actually realtime? No, the brain sends a signal, the finger sends a response

 

The Jews believe that they have a job to do, in service to God, at least those who still practice. The Christians believe that they have free will. The Moslems believe that everything in life is predestined. I tend to go with the middle, but on occasion, it is somewhat arguable that God seems to raise his finger, for one reason or another, if you are a believer in the first place. That's the only way that you could get anywhere near accepting such a crazy notion.

 

Of course, I highly doubt that God sitting in his blast furnace would want to even try controlling anything and everything. He has to send these photons to the earth, signalling for something to happen, maybe a hurricane, or an election, or forcing a politician to do something that he wouldn't normally do. Maybe it all happens through the electromagnetic spectrum, who could know? Either way, why even try to control anything and everything when He can establish laws to make everything turn out reasonably close to the way He wants and all He has to do is delegate authority, indirectly even. After all, mankind has only lived in the Age of the Law for an extremely short time in the grand scheme of things.

 

Now I am digressing. The moral of the story is, maybe God doesn't want to lift his Rock since he can make everybody else do it.

[YT2095]

God could create something and Promise NOT to lift it.

 

problem Solved

[Sayonara]

The rest of the thread so far has not convinced me to change my answer, personally

[ecoli]

The rest of the thread so far has not convinced me to change my answer, personally

 

Then again, if anyone was trying to do that, this thread would be closed.

[the tree]

j/k, i'm under 21, and would never consume alcohol illegally

I'm actually crying for you.

Then again, if anyone was trying to do that, this thread would be closed.

Can't we close it on the account of this type of drink-inducing speculation belongs on the the other forums?

[Sayonara]

Yes.

 

This is neither pseudoscience, nor is it the kind of speculation this subforum is intended to attract.