The First Cause was not God.

[Alt Thinker]

The realization of self awareness would be the only thing holding people back.

Very simply put....Someone had to be First, in mind and heart.

Unexplained?.....of course.
We can ask Him how He managed the words.....I AM!....when we get there.

For now....we CAN be sure....
Someone had to be First.

Something had to be first. If there were a God, there would need to be a reason for God to exist instead of nothing. But a personal conscious volitional God raises problems. In addition to noting that our only experience of those attributes is tied strongly to pre-existing physical phenomena, we may wonder why a necessary entity should have those particular attributes. What is it about an existential imperative that requires God to exist that leads to those attributes? And what pre-existing conditions led to God creating this particular universe out of all possible ones? Or any universe at all for that matter.

If we are going to have an existential imperative – and without one God does not exist – all of the problems with a personal God can be avoided, as well as all of the problems of explaining the existence and specificity of the universe by skipping the middleman. Let the existential imperative be unconstrained (and what else could it be if it is indeed primal) and produce all non-contradictory possibilities, all possible universes. You get a nice clean shave with Occam’s Razor.

 

[Sonofason]

Something had to be first. If there were a God, there would need to be a reason for God to exist instead of nothing. But a personal conscious volitional God raises problems. In addition to noting that our only experience of those attributes is tied strongly to pre-existing physical phenomena, we may wonder why a necessary entity should have those particular attributes. What is it about an existential imperative that requires God to exist that leads to those attributes? And what pre-existing conditions led to God creating this particular universe out of all possible ones? Or any universe at all for that matter.

If we are going to have an existential imperative – and without one God does not exist – all of the problems with a personal God can be avoided, as well as all of the problems of explaining the existence and specificity of the universe by skipping the middleman. Let the existential imperative be unconstrained (and what else could it be if it is indeed primal) and produce all non-contradictory possibilities, all possible universes. You get a nice clean shave with Occam’s Razor.

Please state the problems raised by a personal conscious volitional God. I will sort them out for you.

 

[Alt Thinker]

Please state the problems raised by a personal conscious volitional God. I will sort them out for you.

For starters:

@ The only forms of consciousness and volition we know of are strongly tied to physical processes.

@ The superior being is generally taken to be timeless, furthering diminishing the link to known forms of consciousness and volition.

@ If it is not timeless it must change to create the universe at some point, contrary to the usually ascribed attribute of changelessness

@ There is no explanation of why the superior being exists or why it has its particular (quasi-human like) qualities

@ There is no explanation for why the universe is the way it is. Fine tuned for life? On the contrary, the universe is almost entirely inhospitable to life except under extraordinarily rare circumstances.

@ and of course, explaining why a necessary being has these attributes, i.e., explain from first principles what mandates these attributes

 

[Alt Thinker]

Giving the dogs their last walks of the day and going to bed. Be back tomorrow.

:sleep:

 

[Thief]

Something had to be first. If there were a God, there would need to be a reason for God to exist instead of nothing. But a personal conscious volitional God raises problems. In addition to noting that our only experience of those attributes is tied strongly to pre-existing physical phenomena, we may wonder why a necessary entity should have those particular attributes. What is it about an existential imperative that requires God to exist that leads to those attributes? And what pre-existing conditions led to God creating this particular universe out of all possible ones? Or any universe at all for that matter.

If we are going to have an existential imperative – and without one God does not exist – all of the problems with a personal God can be avoided, as well as all of the problems of explaining the existence and specificity of the universe by skipping the middleman. Let the existential imperative be unconstrained (and what else could it be if it is indeed primal) and produce all non-contradictory possibilities, all possible universes. You get a nice clean shave with Occam’s Razor.

Avoiding the problem won't make it go away.

Substance tends to remain at rest until 'Something' moves it.
Once in motion....that item tends to remain in motion.

There's a lot of motion going on overhead.
It started a long time ago.

And the problem won't go away.
If substance can be 'self' motivating....then what we call reality is a problem.

 

[Sonofason]

For starters:

@ The only forms of consciousness and volition we know of are strongly tied to physical processes.

Did Jesus embody physical processes?
The Word was with God
The Word was God
The Word became Flesh
Sounds like God has tied Himself to physical processes to me.

@ The superior being is generally taken to be timeless, furthering diminishing the link to known forms of consciousness and volition.

The fact that God is not constrained by time in no way suggests that He is incapable of existing within the constraints of time as well, as the existence of His Son proves.

@ If it is not timeless it must change to create the universe at some point, contrary to the usually ascribed attribute of changelessness

This point is redundant, and I've already addressed it above.

@ There is no explanation of why the superior being exists or why it has its particular (quasi-human like) qualities

When something exists eternally, it is foolish to ask why. It is the nature of God to exist eternally. I don't see any scientists asking why matter/energy cannot be created or destroyed. They suggest it exists eternally. Tell me why.

@ There is no explanation for why the universe is the way it is. Fine tuned for life? On the contrary, the universe is almost entirely inhospitable to life except under extraordinarily rare circumstances.

This is not a problem for God. That fact that you don't understand the universe is not a constraint upon God. Nor is it a problem for His eternal existence.

@ and of course, explaining why a necessary being has these attributes, i.e., explain from first principles what mandates these attributes

It is God's nature to have the attributes He has. Perhaps you should be more specific about which attributes you are having a problem with. I'm not sure I can give you a better answer however. I have no reason to question the nature of God. He is what He is, and I accept that.

 

[Thief]

Did Jesus embody physical processes?
The Word was with God
The Word was God
The Word became Flesh
Sounds like God has tied Himself to physical processes to me.

[ /QUOTE]

Indeed!
And what is Man that God is mindful of him?

Embodiment of spirit is a slippery slope around here.
I don't rule it out.
But I think it's more to self realization when it the moment comes.

More like....sons of God are not born....they are made.

 

[LegionOnomaMoi]

The discussion began with Cantor’s Paradox, that the collection of all sets is not itself a set.

If we use wolfram's encyclopedic mathematics reference as you did, we find that Cantor's paradox is defined as follows:
"The set of all sets is its own power set. Therefore, the cardinal number of the set of all sets must be bigger than itself." (source)

However, if we go to Wikipedia, as is typical when it comes to technical nuances in academic fields we can do better:
"While Cantor is usually credited with first identifying this property of cardinal sets, some mathematicians award this distinction to Bertrand Russell, who defined a similar theorem in 1899 or 1901." (source)

However, to actually understand what's going on need to realize that the notion of a universal set which was paradoxical wasn't from Cantor but Russell:
"[Cantor's] argument, when applied to Russell’s universal set as well, generates what is called Cantor’s paradox"
Hinkis, A. (2013). Proofs of the Cantor-Bernstein Theorem: A Mathematical Excursion (Science Networks. Historical Studies, Vol. 45). Birkhäuser.

For Russell's work on the subject, see here.

So linked is Russell's work with Cantor's paradox that some, such as Doets, "go so far as to claim that Russell's paradox is Cantor's paradox" (Anellis, I. H. (1991). "The First Russell Paradox" in T. Drucker (Ed.) Perspectives on the History of Mathematical Logic (pp. 33-46). Birkhäuser. The important point is that Cantor's paradox, whatever one's views on whether it actually is his, doesn't state "that the collection of all sets is not itself a set". Rather, it is essential to understand that the paradox stems from Russell's "applying Cantor's proof to the universal set U, and that Cantor's "proof" concerned the existence of a largest cardinal. (from Myrvold's "Pierce on Cantor's Paradox and the Continuum").

These are some other ways that demonstrate the bounds of logic

Yes. "If you're hungry, there's food on the table" is a far simpler one, but the utter failure of ~60 years of generative grammar to develop a computational model capable of actually generating "grammar" (or grammatically correct speech/language) is a far more devastating extension.

Other difficulties are posed by quantum mechanics, as the logic of QM (and most formulations from von Neumann onward of quantum logic) violate one or both (and arguably necessarily both) of perhaps the most central components of classical (Aristotelian) logic: the excluded middle and the law of non-contradiction. Unlike Fuzzy logic or other many-valued logics, which can potentially be written off as epistemic rather than ontological in nature, "quantum logic" is the basis for perhaps the most successful scientific theory of all time.

And I was unaware that Gödel’s undecidability and incompleteness theorems and that the validity of the Axiom of Choice and the Continuum Hypothesis cannot be determined in any Set Theory we presently have were “blatantly obvious”.

This is what I said was blatantly obvious:

Gödel and others have shown that there are limitations to the use of logic

Even if we use the term colloquially, it is clearly limited. One cannot derive Shakespeare's works or rely on algorithms to generate De Gas' creations.

Gödel’s 1937 paper linked the two together, showing that they are compatible with the axioms of ZF. Cohen’s 1963 paper also linked them, showing that they are independent of the axioms of ZF. It is not difficult to see that they are intertwined.

"Kurt Gödel proved in 1938 that the General Continuum Hypothesis and the Axiom of Choice are consistent with the usual (Zermelo-Fraenkel) axioms of set theory. Twenty-five years later, Paul Cohen established that the negations of the Continuum Hypothesis and the Axiom of Choice are also consistent with these axioms. Taken together, these results tell us that the Continuum Hypothesis and the Axiom of Choice are independent of the Zermelo-Fraenkel axioms."
(source; emphasis added; italics in original).

Gödel and Cohen proved opposite things, which is why we know the continuum hypothesis is undecidable. The link between the AC & GCH is "set theory", and it is not difficult to see that anything relating to set theory is intertwined with other things relating to set theory. This is in no way the same as stating:

Both of the latter turn out to be the same problem.

The generalized continuum hypothesis (CH) is that the cardinality of every infinite set is a Cantor Aleph with each successive Aleph being the powerset of the previous Aleph.

"The generalized continuum hypothesis is the proposition that for no infinite cardinal a is there a cardinal b such that

."
Potter, M. (2004). Set Theory and its Philosophy: A Critical Introduction. OUP.
You'll recognize the final term above as equivalent to the expression of the power set of any set a. As a corollary of Sierpinski's 1924 proof, we get:

This corollary is the logical equivalent of the generalized continuum hypothesis, but the proof whence the corollary comes shows that the GCH entails the AC, not that the two are the same. Also, as Cohen showed that on the assumption that both the continuum hypothesis and the axiom of choice are false, ZF is consistent, the distinctions between both the AC & (G)CH and these together and the ZF axioms are extremely important. Hence ZF vs. ZFC.

Determining whether CH is the case requires AC.

It is impossible to determine whether "CH" is the case. Hence "undecidable".

Cantor’s statement that “a set is the form of a possible thought” still holds.

1) Ignoring the translation and modal construal in German, the above expresses a modal proposition which can't be expressed in ZF, ZFC, or any "classical" logic. It requires modal logic.
2) Nothing about the above "still holds". Sets aren't defined this way and Cantor's set theory was abandoned for a reason.

But it is not possible to coherently think the concept because it contains a contradiction.

1) There is no empirical, mathematical, or any other basis for asserting that we can't coherently "think [a] concept" if it is paradoxical. It is far more likely for formal/mathematical conclusions to be paradoxical to "thought" than it is formal paradoxes be inconceivable.
2) Paradoxes abound in formal systems, including logics (see the bit about quantum logic above). It is because of our ability to coherently conceive of that which is paradoxical that we were able to develop modern cosmology, quantum mechanics, particle physics, etc.
3) Were we incapable of thinking coherently about contradictory propositions than we could kiss mathematics and logic goodbye. Proof by contradiction requires us to coherently think of contradictory "concepts" or statements in order to realize that we have demonstrated some theorem or similar result to be true by showing that it contradicts another. Only by first "thinking" the proof in such a way that we can simultaneously conceive of it as coherent and as entailing contradictions can it be a proof.

Cantor’s Absolute is not a thinkable thought.

If you wish to examine what cognition involves and what we can or can't "think", mathematics isn't the place to go. Check out research in the cognitive sciences.

The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao.

Prove it.

By applying a genuinely coherent, definite attribute we do indeed define a set. If something leads to a contradiction, such as Cantor’s paradox or Russell’s antinomy, it is not coherent in any genuine sense.

The above asserts that a set is a set. The 'genuinely coherent, definite attribute" part is extraneous and misleading. The attribute "not a set" is necessarily as definite, coherent, etc., is "is a set". Hence, we can define a set as "not a set" were we to use your definition. The issue is vastly more nuanced.

It is a semantic construct

The reason for words like "formal", "mathematical", etc., is to indicate that we are working within a system which is entirely syntactical. Logic, set theory, etc., are designed to lack semantics. Hence the practice derivations in any intro or advanced mathematical/symbolic logic textbook that don't bother trying to give meaning to the symbols. One of the most important goals of mathematics since the early modern period has been the reduction of mathematical "objects" to meaningless symbols that we manipulate within some system. This is why calculus, linear algebra, statistics, etc., can be used in quantum field theory and sociology: the notations, systems, and other formal aspects of mathematical subjects are given semantic content through application. The philosophy of mathematics is another matter, but it is also irrelevant here as we aren't even dealing with whether mathematical objects are solely epistemological or are ontological.

 

[Alt Thinker]

Avoiding the problem won't make it go away.

Substance tends to remain at rest until 'Something' moves it.
Once in motion....that item tends to remain in motion.

There's a lot of motion going on overhead.
It started a long time ago.

And the problem won't go away.
If substance can be 'self' motivating....then what we call reality is a problem.

Something is responsible for existence and the nature of reality. Why does it have to be a supernatural person that happens to bear a suspicious resemblance to a human? Why should such a supernatural entity exist? If the universe requires explanation, then so does God. If an existential imperative is invoked, why cannot it lead to all possible universes? This explains why the universe exists and is the way it is (a place where there can be an observer to ask such questions). And it avoids the difficulties I listed upstream from here concerning a personal God.

Please address what I am actually saying and not just provide the usual canned answers to some other questions.

 

[Alt Thinker]

@ The only forms of consciousness and volition we know of are strongly tied to physical processes.

Did Jesus embody physical processes?
The Word was with God
The Word was God
The Word became Flesh
Sounds like God has tied Himself to physical processes to me.

So an immaterial God with no capability for consciousness or volition somehow decided to send himself into a physical form in a universe he somehow previously decided to create despite not yet having consciousness or volition…sorry I don’t get it.

Alt: @ The superior being is generally taken to be timeless, furthering diminishing the link to known forms of consciousness and volition.

Son: The fact that God is not constrained by time in no way suggests that He is incapable of existing within the constraints of time as well, as the existence of His Son proves.

So in order to have the time-linked capabilities of consciousness and volition, God decided…wait a minute…

Alt: @ If it is not timeless it must change to create the universe at some point, contrary to the usually ascribed attribute of changelessness

Son: This point is redundant, and I've already addressed it above.

So in order to…nope, been there, done that.

Alt: @ There is no explanation of why the superior being exists or why it has its particular (quasi-human like) qualities

Son: When something exists eternally, it is foolish to ask why. It is the nature of God to exist eternally. I don't see any scientists asking why matter/energy cannot be created or destroyed. They suggest it exists eternally. Tell me why.

Not the case. It is very well established that the universe we observe had a beginning in time. That is, if we trace the world-line of some bit of matter-energy backward in time through whatever changes it underwent, we would reach a point where there is no longer a preceding world-line. (We must be careful to avoid the error of an absolute time.) Scientists do wonder about this. Some conjecture a quantum fluctuation, like a gigantic virtual particle. Others conjecture an eternal sea of universes from which this sprang. The First Law of Thermodynamics (modern mass-energy version) is an observation that presumes the existence of the universe.

As I previously said, the existence and specific nature of the universe (or eternal sea of universes or whatever) requires a metaphysical answer. I believe I have provided one that avoids the difficulties of the usual theistic answer. To say that it is in the nature of God to exist eternally assumes the existence of God. Why should God exist at all in order to have a nature? And why should that nature be so suspiciously human-like?

Alt: @ There is no explanation for why the universe is the way it is. Fine tuned for life? On the contrary, the universe is almost entirely inhospitable to life except under extraordinarily rare circumstances.

Son: This is not a problem for God. That fact that you don't understand the universe is not a constraint upon God. Nor is it a problem for His eternal existence.

In other words you cannot answer the question. But note that if God did in fact create the universe, his intent has virtually nothing to do with us as we are such an insignificant part of that creation. We are just a minor side effect. It may not be a problem for God but it is a major problem for Western religions.

Alt: @ and of course, explaining why a necessary being has these attributes, i.e., explain from first principles what mandates these attributes

Son: It is God's nature to have the attributes He has. Perhaps you should be more specific about which attributes you are having a problem with. I'm not sure I can give you a better answer however. I have no reason to question the nature of God. He is what He is, and I accept that.

Aristotle said that things fall because it is in their nature to fall. Smoke rises because it is in its nature to rise. This was justified by a physical cosmology that turned out to be utterly wrong. ‘In the nature’ is not a reasonable answer.

The attributes claimed for God are those I gave above: having human-like consciousness and volition despite being nonmaterial and timeless; having a reason for creating a universe of a rather exotic nature that only incidentally contains humans; for that matter existing at all. Why should God have these attributes? Why should God exist at all?

 

[Alt Thinker]

Legion:

Have responsibilities today. Will be back when I can.

I am having fun with this, how about you?

 

[Call_of_the_Wild]

Sooo...is that the Witness's god Jehovah? Or the god of the Westboro Baptist Church? Or the Calvanist god? You gotta be a little more specific because your description fall into all three.

It can't be the Witnesse's god Jehovah, since they don't believe in the Trinity doctrine and I specifically said that I believe in the Trinitarian view of God. So besides the fact that you are wrong in that regard, it is irrelevant anyway, since it is that particular concept of God that I defend and believe...so which denomination it may fall under is irrelevant.

 

[Runewolf1973]

...and I specifically said that I believe in the Trinitarian view of God.

Interesting fantasy.

 

[averageJOE]

It can't be the Witnesse's god Jehovah, since they don't believe in the Trinity doctrine and I specifically said that I believe in the Trinitarian view of God. So besides the fact that you are wrong in that regard, it is irrelevant anyway, since it is that particular concept of God that I defend and believe...so which denomination it may fall under is irrelevant.

In other words: MY god concept.

 

[Call_of_the_Wild]

Interesting fantasy.

Abiogenesis and macroevolution is also an interesting fantasy.

 

[9-10ths_Penguin]

It can't be the Witnesse's god Jehovah, since they don't believe in the Trinity doctrine and I specifically said that I believe in the Trinitarian view of God. So besides the fact that you are wrong in that regard, it is irrelevant anyway, since it is that particular concept of God that I defend and believe...so which denomination it may fall under is irrelevant.

BTW: since you're a Trinitarian who likes the Ontological Argument, you may be interested in a thread I started recently:

http://www.religiousforums.com/foru...ment-incompatible-trinitarian-monotheism.html

 

[Runewolf1973]

Abiogenesis and macroevolution is also an interesting fantasy.

I don't entirely buy into the abiogenesis thing. The thing is, abiogenesis is the idea that living, animate matter somehow formed/emerged out of non-living, inanimate matter. This idea postulates that "dead" matter can become "alive". That to me does sounds like fantasy...like alchemy or turning water into wine. I have my own hypothesis...

Matter is neither living, nor is it non-living. It is neither animate, nor is it inanimate. Matter is just matter. It is interactive and it changes form. Evolution is a process of change over long periods of time where simple interactions and simple adaptations combine in ways to produce more complex forms of interaction and more complex adaptations. There is nothing magical about it. Things change over time, it is a fact. Evolution is just another form of change. It cannot be disputed, it is fact.

Matter is animated by the Fundamental Forces. Given enough time and the right conditions that matter may become even more animated. It is those highly animated forms we call life.


---

 

[idav]

Trinity sounds like a deity with multiple personality disorder.

 

[Alt Thinker]

…

So linked is Russell's work with Cantor's paradox that some, such as Doets, "go so far as to claim that Russell's paradox is Cantor's paradox" (Anellis, I. H. (1991). "The First Russell Paradox" in T. Drucker (Ed.) Perspectives on the History of Mathematical Logic (pp. 33-46). Birkhäuser. The important point is that Cantor's paradox, whatever one's views on whether it actually is his, doesn't state "that the collection of all sets is not itself a set". Rather, it is essential to understand that the paradox stems from Russell's "applying Cantor's proof to the universal set U, and that Cantor's "proof" concerned the existence of a largest cardinal. (from Myrvold's "Pierce on Cantor's Paradox and the Continuum").

I was referring specifically to the violation of Cantor’s Theorem implied by the idea of a Universal Set (the set of all sets). Because of my original audience – not a professional mathematician - I was not going into abstruse territory like the difference between a set and its cardinality or the axiom of comprehension and the difficulty it poses for getting a close shave. In short, I said and meant “the set of all sets cannot exist”.

Alt: These are some other ways that demonstrate the bounds of logic

Legion: Yes. "If you're hungry, there's food on the table" is a far simpler one, but the utter failure of ~60 years of generative grammar to develop a computational model capable of actually generating "grammar" (or grammatically correct speech/language) is a far more devastating extension.

Other difficulties are posed by quantum mechanics, as the logic of QM (and most formulations from von Neumann onward of quantum logic) violate one or both (and arguably necessarily both) of perhaps the most central components of classical (Aristotelian) logic: the excluded middle and the law of non-contradiction. Unlike Fuzzy logic or other many-valued logics, which can potentially be written off as epistemic rather than ontological in nature, "quantum logic" is the basis for perhaps the most successful scientific theory of all time.

It is not quantum logic that is responsible for the success but quantum mathematics. Until a ‘measurement’ (a much misunderstood term) is made, a quantum does not have a value classifiable as classical. It is wave spread over a (possibly abstract) space. The measurement connects with some small portion of the wave and a quasi-classical value is assumed. (This is a large over-simplification but so what?) It is not that the quantum has multiple values before measurement. It is that the wave may be intercepted at various places. Why the wave function collapses upon measurement and how it always avoids collapsing at more than one place even if multiple measurement points are possible are part of the mystery. Complicating – and confusing - the situation is that in many cases the possible detectable values are quantized, often binary. This is what leads to the misleading ‘heads or tails’ analogies, which do not work that way in QM.

But most experimental physicists and engineers working in the field do not worry about quantum logic. They take Bohr’s advice and “just do the math’. Theoretical physicists are usually so deep into other things that they are beyond worrying about quantum logic.

Legion: This is what I said was blatantly obvious:

Alt: Gödel and others have shown that there are limitations to the use of logic

Even if we use the term colloquially, it is clearly limited. One cannot derive Shakespeare's works or rely on algorithms to generate De Gas' creations.

What I meant was that logic has been found to be limited in unexpected ways, in support of which I gave several examples. Nobody ever expected logic to produce anything like Hamlet. But Hilbert expected some things that turned out to be impossible, although in the fin de siècle era it seemed intuitively obvious that they were attainable.

Legion:
"Kurt Gödel proved in 1938 that the General Continuum Hypothesis and the Axiom of Choice are consistent with the usual (Zermelo-Fraenkel) axioms of set theory. Twenty-five years later, Paul Cohen established that the negations of the Continuum Hypothesis and the Axiom of Choice are also consistent with these axioms. Taken together, these results tell us that the Continuum Hypothesis and the Axiom of Choice are independent of the Zermelo-Fraenkel axioms."
(source; emphasis added; italics in original).

Gödel and Cohen proved opposite things, which is why we know the continuum hypothesis is undecidable. The link between the AC & GCH is "set theory", and it is not difficult to see that anything relating to set theory is intertwined with other things relating to set theory. This is in no way the same as stating:

Alt: Both of the latter turn out to be the same problem.

"The generalized continuum hypothesis is the proposition that for no infinite cardinal a is there a cardinal b such that

."
Potter, M. (2004). Set Theory and its Philosophy: A Critical Introduction. OUP.
You'll recognize the final term above as equivalent to the expression of the power set of any set a. As a corollary of Sierpinski's 1924 proof, we get:

This corollary is the logical equivalent of the generalized continuum hypothesis, but the proof whence the corollary comes shows that the GCH entails the AC, not that the two are the same. Also, as Cohen showed that on the assumption that both the continuum hypothesis and the axiom of choice are false, ZF is consistent, the distinctions between both the AC & (G)CH and these together and the ZF axioms are extremely important. Hence ZF vs. ZFC.

AC and GCH are intimately intertwined. The two were not dealt with together in these two papers by coincidence. AC was invented to address GCH. GCH does not merely entail AC, GCH requires AC. They feed each other. The two cannot be separated. This is why they are linked in those two papers, not because they both just happen to be part of set theory.

It is impossible to determine whether "CH" is the case. Hence "undecidable".

It is impossible in ZF. If there were a more advanced form of set theory, it might not be undecidable. If this were the case, proving one would automatically prove the other. They go hand in hand.

Alt: Cantor’s statement that “a set is the form of a possible thought” still holds.

Legion:
1) Ignoring the translation and modal construal in German, the above expresses a modal proposition which can't be expressed in ZF, ZFC, or any "classical" logic. It requires modal logic.
2) Nothing about the above "still holds". Sets aren't defined this way and Cantor's set theory was abandoned for a reason.

It does not require modal logic. It merely requires stepping outside and thinking about logic. Which is what my original post was all about - that logic does not cover everything about the world. More on that below.

Alt: But it is not possible to coherently think the concept because it contains a contradiction.

Legion:
1) There is no empirical, mathematical, or any other basis for asserting that we can't coherently "think [a] concept" if it is paradoxical. It is far more likely for formal/mathematical conclusions to be paradoxical to "thought" than it is formal paradoxes be inconceivable.
2) Paradoxes abound in formal systems, including logics (see the bit about quantum logic above). It is because of our ability to coherently conceive of that which is paradoxical that we were able to develop modern cosmology, quantum mechanics, particle physics, etc.
3) Were we incapable of thinking coherently about contradictory propositions than we could kiss mathematics and logic goodbye. Proof by contradiction requires us to coherently think of contradictory "concepts" or statements in order to realize that we have demonstrated some theorem or similar result to be true by showing that it contradicts another. Only by first "thinking" the proof in such a way that we can simultaneously conceive of it as coherent and as entailing contradictions can it be a proof.



If you wish to examine what cognition involves and what we can or can't "think", mathematics isn't the place to go. Check out research in the cognitive sciences.

The basic problem here is that you are confusing formalism with thought. One can think about the sentence “Red things are not red” but one cannot really think that red things are not red. And concerning quantum ‘logic’, see my response above. No one is able to conceptualize quantum logic. Nobody even uses it. The “just do the math”. Even the theoreticians simply assume QM mathematics as the basis. And thinking about two contradictory propositions is not the same as coherently thinking a contradiction.

This is as much as I have time for. More to come when I can.

 

[Sonofason]

So an immaterial God with no capability for consciousness or volition somehow decided to send himself into a physical form in a universe he somehow previously decided to create despite not yet having consciousness or volition…sorry I don’t get it.

You do not know whether or not that which is spirit is capable of consciousness or volition. For goodness sake, you don't even know if spirits exist.

So in order to have the time-linked capabilities of consciousness and volition, God decided…wait a minute…

You have not determined that time does not exist without this particular universe. All we can say is that before this universe existed, this universe did not exist.

Sonofason had written:

When something exists eternally, it is foolish to ask why. It is the nature of God to exist eternally. I don't see any scientists asking why matter/energy cannot be created or destroyed. They suggest it exists eternally. Tell me why.

Alt Thinker responds:

Not the case. It is very well established that the universe we observe had a beginning in time. That is, if we trace the world-line of some bit of matter-energy backward in time through whatever changes it underwent, we would reach a point where there is no longer a preceding world-line. (We must be careful to avoid the error of an absolute time.) Scientists do wonder about this. Some conjecture a quantum fluctuation, like a gigantic virtual particle. Others conjecture an eternal sea of universes from which this sprang. The First Law of Thermodynamics (modern mass-energy version) is an observation that presumes the existence of the universe.

As I previously said, the existence and specific nature of the universe (or eternal sea of universes or whatever) requires a metaphysical answer. I believe I have provided one that avoids the difficulties of the usual theistic answer. To say that it is in the nature of God to exist eternally assumes the existence of God. Why should God exist at all in order to have a nature? And why should that nature be so suspiciously human-like?

Seems like your making my point for me.

In other words you cannot answer the question. But note that if God did in fact create the universe, his intent has virtually nothing to do with us as we are such an insignificant part of that creation. We are just a minor side effect. It may not be a problem for God but it is a major problem for Western religions.

You have no idea whether or not there is a multitude of life out there in the cosmos.

And even if there wasn't, so what? What does this have to do with anything?

Aristotle said that things fall because it is in their nature to fall. Smoke rises because it is in its nature to rise. This was justified by a physical cosmology that turned out to be utterly wrong. ‘In the nature’ is not a reasonable answer.

The fact is that it is the nature of things to fall when they are acted upon by gravitational forces. The answer Aristotle gave was true. It's wonderful that you would like a more detailed explanation. I don't know my exact age. I am nearly 51 years old. I can narrow that down to the month, even the hour. But I don't know what second of the day I was born, or the nano second. With a lack of greater understanding, there is nothing wrong with accepting the truth that you know. Things fall, it is in their nature to fall.

Now why don't you tell me how gravity works. Is it not in the nature of matter to possess gravitational forces? Well explain how this force works. Why are there gravitational forces? Why do gravitational forces exist?

The attributes claimed for God are those I gave above: having human-like consciousness and volition despite being nonmaterial and timeless; having a reason for creating a universe of a rather exotic nature that only incidentally contains humans; for that matter existing at all. Why should God have these attributes? Why should God exist at all?

Why shouldn't God have these attributes?
Why shouldn't God exist?