I know something God doesn't know!

[Mr Skeptic]

So I was looking at Godel's Incompleteness Theorems a while back, and I realized that the same should apply to people as well. So then the Godel sentence for God would be,

"God cannot prove that this statement is true" or, if you prefer, "God does not know that this statement is true"

 

If you think about it, those statements are true, but only so long as God does not know/prove them. But if He does, then God has a contradiction (ie God would be mistaken).

 

Of course, the same goes for you and me. For example,

"I do not know that this statement is true"

 

I'm not sure what exactly to make of that. I realize that it must be true so long as I don't know that, but it seems strange. Maybe I'm just confused

 

(This topic could be moved to philosophy if people would rather talk about the implications for normal people vs for an "Omniscient" God)

[immortal]

I realized that the same should apply to people as well. So then the Godel sentence for God would be,

"God cannot prove that this statement is true" or, if you prefer, "God does not know that this statement is true"

 

If you think about it, those statements are true, but only so long as God does not know/prove them. But if He does, then God has a contradiction (ie God would be mistaken).

 

Of course, the same goes for you and me. For example,

"I do not know that this statement is true"

 

I'm not sure what exactly to make of that. I realize that it must be true so long as I don't know that, but it seems strange. Maybe I'm just confused

 

 

Well yes these self referential statements are quite weird and it can get on to your head if you continue to think on that. But the best part is that we get the fruit in the form of solution for thinking hard on it.

 

The thing which interested me was this statement "I do not know that this statement is true". Now let assume G = "I do not know that G is true". Now if i know that G is true then the statement "I do not know that G is true" is false. So IF I know that G is true then I know that G is false so I really don't know that G is true. So the statement "I do not know that this statement is true" is true and Hence "I know that G is true". I think the same thing applies to God.

 

"We know something that God already knows".

 

A similar discussion is going on in another forum so interested members can follow to this link.My link

Edited October 31, 2010 by immortal

[lemur]

So the possibility of logical paradoxes proves the impossibility of an omniscient being? Is that logical? If knowing the truth value of a paradox is impossible, then wouldn't knowing that be included as part of omniscience?

[Mr Skeptic]

The catch with these self-referential statements is that anyone else can easily see the statement must be true. The person mentioned in the statement knows that everyone else knows it is true, but that he himself can't because then it would be false.

[Fuzzwood]

Who? The flying spaghetti monster?

[ydoaPs]

I used this in a thread on FaceBook, and the result was, imo, hilarious. Instead of modifying their simplistic lay definition of omniscience, they decided to deny 'human logic' and claim that God uses a different logic that we do not have access to. On the surface, this seems like a cop-out. A little thought, however, reveals it to be a gift to their debate opponents.

 

If the Bible if the word of God, we have the revealed message, but not the relation of the statements. That makes the validity of any interpretation of vague statements impossible to verify. There's thousands of differing denominations and it is impossible to viably reason our way to which has the correct interpretation. How do we determine which church to attend?

 

If God abides by an unknown alternate logic, then any reasoning about God cannot be determined to be valid. This means that all interpretive theology and all philosophy of religion are tossed out the window. Thanks facebook guys!