Tuesday, April 26, 2011
10 comments:
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Eunoia said...
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Can God create a stone so heavy that even He can't lift it? An answer of either Yes or No would seem to imply that God is not omnipotent, a defining characteristic of Gods, and thus there can be no God(s). However, the word 'heavy' implies the existence of a gravitational field and the stone not being at the centre thereof. Similarly, the word 'lift' means 'move away from the centre of the gravitational field'. Now any omnipotent God could create another universe with only that one stone in it. The centre of the stone would thus be the centre of the gravitational field, and there would be nothing else relative to which the stone could be 'lifted'. So the answer is 'Yes', and unfair(?) assumptions are made in the question merely by the choice of words :-(
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4/26/11, 2:06 PM
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Rodger the Real King of France said...
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The cartoonist is proactively an atheist.
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4/26/11, 3:07 PM
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Eunoia said...
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So am I, Roger.
But it is still necessary to make people aware of how arguments can be biased just by the choice of words used.
Rhetorics 101 ? more like 303. -
4/26/11, 3:34 PM
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DougT said...
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If the person in the cartoon is one of the biblical faiths, then he/she should not put the lord to the test. If the person is a non-believer, why would he/she be speaking to God? If he/she is Aquinas or C.S. Lewis, he/she recognizes the question as illogical. So, it must be George Carlin teasing his priest again.
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4/26/11, 4:36 PM
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Kristophr said...
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If God existed, the proper answer would be:
"Yes, I can. But then I would have to recreate everything, except people who ask that question, of course."
The cartoonists answer assumes that an omnipotent being would be physically part of a universe that has natural laws that preclude supernatural beings. -
4/26/11, 5:35 PM
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Snackeater said...
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From the website Diogenes Middle Finger: “Atheism is the belief that there was nothing and nothing happened to nothing, and nothing then magically exploded for no reason, creating everything, and then a bunch of everything magically rearranged itself for no reason whatsoever into self-replicating bits, which then turned into dinosaurs.” “Makes perfect sense, don’t it?” Couldn't'a said it better myself.
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4/26/11, 7:26 PM
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DougM said...
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Sure, it's all very well to address big, unanswerable, stupid zen questions with grand theological speak; but y'all're overlooking much simpler theological points which could answer the question. Since mankind was made in God's image (one version), that implies that God can get a hernia. Ergo, the answer is "yes." See?
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4/26/11, 8:17 PM
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Anonymous said...
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"The Babel Fish is small, yellow, leechlike, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy, absorbing all unconscious frequencies and then excreting telepathically a matrix formed from the conscious frequencies and nerve signals picked up from the speech centers of the brain; the practical upshot of which is that if you stick one in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language - the speech you hear decodes the brainwave matrix. Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindbogglingly useful could evolve purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final clinching proof of the non-existence of God.
"The argument goes something like this:
"'I refuse to prove that I exist' says God, 'for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing'. 'But', says Man, 'the Bable Fish is a dead giveaway isn't it? It proves you exist, and so therefore you don't. QED'. 'Oh dear', says God, 'I hadn't thought of that' and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic. 'Oh, that was easy' says Man, and for an encore he proves that black is white and gets killed on the next zebra crossing.
"Most leading theologians claim that this argument is a load of dingo's kidneys, but that didn't stop Oolon Colluphid making a small fortune when he used it as the central theme of his best selling book Well, That About Wraps It Up For God."
- Douglas Adams from The Hichhiker's Guide To The Galaxy
Good thing that the Babel Fish doesn't really exist except as a very crappy translation computer program.
GrinfilledCelt -
4/26/11, 11:42 PM
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OregonGuy said...
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God: "I am that stone."
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4/27/11, 1:19 PM
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Anonymous said...
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@Snackeater
Yeah, that's like, totally not what atheism means. Being an atheist simply means you do not believe in a divine being. It has nothing to do with the big bang theory or any other scientific approach of explaining the nature of our universe.
Get your facts straight. -
11/23/11, 6:37 PM
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