Is God ignorant of his own ignorance? (Or atleast was he?)

God is supposedly a being who at one time was the only being in existence. That makes him qualify for the trope Ignorant of Their Own Ignorance because he was King Of Point Land literally at that time. Gnosticism postulates that he is ignorant to this very day. What your opinion on this topic?

edited 13th Oct '10 11:33:51 AM by secretist

As with any topic on unprovable philosophical assertions, it's meaningless. You can assign God any attributes you please, and if you think it'll make a fun discussion, you're welcome to try it, but it bears no relationship to anything in reality.

God is a block of Martian cheese. Discuss. It's about that meaningful.

Now I suppose you could make this a debate about Gnosticism, which ... well, have fun.

At least with people disagreeing over the the type of omnipotence God has you could at least debate this while still keeping true to Biblical canon to some extend.

Though it is a can of worms with no easy answer.

How true to Biblical canon, though? A literal reading of the Old Testament would be self-contradictory on this issue.

Biblical canon works equally well with the "God is right" and "God is wrong" hypotheses, since in the latter case, biblical canon is simply wrong due to God's ignorance.

Ow.

Oddly enough, Fighteer has a point. Humans aren't really capable of comprehending an absolute. We can say something like "God is perfect" or "God is omniscient" but the fact is we have no idea what that really means. You don't have to be an atheist to see that debates about the true nature of an absolute being have no meaningful content.

Sorry, silver, but I honestly don't see how that's hard to understand.

It's not hard to understand. It's just that you've contradicted yourself to avoid a contradiction.

Would it help if revised to "the existence of God-sponsored biblical canon"?

Yes, that works better.

^^ So even if God exists, he asks us to take his word on his word?

Pointless topic, since these philosophical assertions are essentially unprovable.

edited 14th Oct '10 8:28:21 AM by Mapi

^ Philosophers argue about unprovable points all the time.

It's kind of the entire point!

'God' is a purely abstract concept, thus it is impossible to objectively define it.

^ I don't know if I could list in how many ways this post fails forever... This Is Wrong In So Many Ways... Let me mention two of them:

• You Fail Religious Studies Forever: God is not an abstract concept, he's a character, with a history and personality. You are confusing him with the Prime Mover or the Supreme Being.

• You Fail Logic Forever: Saying that purely abstract concepts are impossible to define is contrarty to the definition of "abstract concept". A straight line is an entirely abtract concept, yet it is quite easy to unambiguously define. Same for a point. The point of defining a concept properly being "making it impossible to confuse with any other", not "associating with empirical experience".

EDIT: sorry for the tone of the post, but you caught me in one of my worst evenings in the entire year.

edited 22nd Oct '10 12:53:40 PM by RawPower

It’s not that difficult to understand. If God is not so much God, and instead a sufficiently advanced alien, then any given scripture may well be a lie, but not necessarily a total falsehood created entirely by human beings.

The question in this train of thought would be “does this ‘god’ know it’s not really omniscient and is it completely delusional about its own power, or was it self consciously lying from the beginning for its own purposes?” After all, when you begin working with nigh omniscient beings, instead of merely conscious ones, it’s hard to argue that they should be judged by the exact same moral standards that we humans are.

“God moves in mysterious ways” is sort of a copout in any attempt at discussion, but there is some merit to it.

How about OT/NT/Qran God being as powerful as he could imagine one could be. buth hadn't thought of all the implications properly?

^^^It's okay, Raw, I'm used to much worse things. Sorry about what happened, whatever that is.

Anyway, there are too many individual theories on what God is, so we couldn't qualify God as anything but an abstract concept, especially with the lack of the possibility to gain empirical evidence. I may, for example, think of God as a Lawful Blue Eldritch Abomination, but who, or what, can guarantee that it is right? Maybe it's best not to think about such thinks at all. Oh, and let's stay on topic and not bring up another Rationalism vs Empiricism debate.

edited 23rd Oct '10 5:05:37 AM by MilosStefanovic

We can argue about God by first clarifying which definition we are using.

Of course, from an empirical point of view, as of today those that are falsable have been proven to be false, those that aren't are meaningless.

EDIT: CORRECTED FOR IMPLICIT MEANING BEING AMBIGUOUS

edited 25th Oct '10 5:14:03 AM by RawPower

So what you're saying is, you're an atheist.

No, I'm saying if you want to be empirical about it, that's the outcome that we have to this day. We have already discussed the possibility for irrefutable empirical evidence in favour of God existing in accordance with one of His classical definitions (at least in terms of Raw Power) appearing today.

Only for certain limited definitions of meaningless.

Of course. But which would these be?