From: L' Ermit (lhermit@hotmail.com)
Date: Sat Jan 26 2002 - 02:47:41 MST
[Hermit] After Joe Dees provided us with a brilliant set of reasons why gods
cannot have the attributes attributed to them,
[Kirk Steele cheeped] "Owieeeeeeeeeeeeeee! You hurt my widdle bwain!" -
Tweetie -Somewhere near Burlington, Wi
[Hermit] /me responds: It gets better yet. Much better.
[Hermit] Heisenberg, tells us that omniscience is not possible at the
particle level. Once one obtains complete information about a particle it
evaporates. So the simple fact that baryonic matter exists tells us that
there is no omniscient entity in our Universe. Given that so much else is
dependent on causation at the particle level, omniscience is not possible at
the macro level either - unless the Universe were frozen to absolute zero.
The Universe is not frozen. Thus there are no omniscient creatures in the
Universe.
[Hermit] Given c as a constant, and given Universal expansion initially at
near c, and apparently accelerating, any being which was omnipresent would
take an infinite amount of time to communicate between its extremities, and
would require an infinite amount of energy to do so. Given that the Universe
is neither uniformly hot nor at absolute zero, we know there is no
omnipresent being in our Universe. In addition, as all the energy would be
used in transferring information, no energy would be available to do
anything - thus omnipresence and omnipotence are mutually exclusive.
[Hermit] The processing of information necessitates storage. Storage of
information requires at least as many storage locations as the thing being
stored unless the information being stored is highly compressible.
As the Universe is comprised of particles which are truly a noise source,
the Universe is not compressible and Shannon tells us that it will require a
minimum of twice the material in the Universe to store the information
inherent in the Universe. For one instant. Thus an omniscient god would be
the Universe's largest amnesiac, unable to think from one moment to the
next. Such a being would never be able to do anything. In other words, this
is a contradiction between omniscience and omnipotence.
[Hermit] As Joe said, I could go on. The inventors of the gods were not
philosophers, and were not scientists. They were prehistoric and historic
con artists. "Wickedly good"* mememakers. Mankind has moved on more than a
bit since then in just about every possible way, while the "perfect" gods
have remained frozen in time and left far behind. It is time to recognize
that the only difference between our gods and other people's myths is
perspective. And through a telescope, they are all far enough away to look
identical. When we realize that, mankind will realize that Nietzsche's
announcement was accurate and that it is time for some new memes. A little
earlier we saw that we may already be on our way to obsolescence. Hopefully
our memes will survive us. The CoV and the people in the CoV and our
successors have the potential to help to form these replacement memes. A fun
job indeed.
Regards
Hermit
*Magic Jim's description
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