Godel's theorem applied to God

Theology's definition of divine omniscience is that God is all-knowing, aware of all things that have happened, are happening and will happen. mjs asserts that therefore, God knows every true statement. Now, let's take the statement "God does not know this statement."

An omniscient God will know this statement. Therefore, the statement itself is false. Despite what mjs says, the fact that God knows this statement has no effect on whether or not the statement itself is true. God knows all statements, both true and false. It's not necessary for God to believe a statement is true in order to know it.

The basic assertion (mjs' definition of "knowing a statement") is false, so the argument is a fallacy. Godel's Theorem doesn't even come into play.

"Omnipotent" means the power to do anything possible.

I'll try to present the counter-argument in a coherent fashion:

An omnipotent God is touted as being able to do anything, even bend the rules as he sees fit. After all, he can do everything. If there is something God cannot do, even one concrete example, the universal statement "God can do everything" is disproven.

In light of this, the phrase "... the power to do anything possible" seems a cop-out. To the skeptic, instead of conceding that omnipotent is a word riddled with holes, omnipotent is suddenly redefined as "omnipotent minus the holes". I have never found the Bible to say "God is almighty, except he can't perform contradictions." God is, in all cases, honored as having everything within his capabilities. What's more, it is stressed that this superiority is to be accepted at face value, never to be questioned.

So we have

• a widely promoted claim, in the Bible and everywhere else, that God is the cure-all, and
• a much quieter statement (mblase) that there's more (or less?) to omnipotence than meets the eye.

Christians always point to the Bible for the final answers, but omit this finer point at large, as is is nowhere to be found there. The skeptic thinks, "If I needed other sources for this to come out, what else is being withheld?" And that way lies distrust, name-calling, shouting each other down.

So. Your skeptic will say, "Say what you mean. Out loud. Because what you say out loud is what I take you to mean." And that is why your skeptic will not accept your newly-found neutered definition of omnipotence.

I guess the gist of it all is that you cannot go up against the defining rules of the system you exist in. Not even a God can do that.

A (Christian) friend once described God as "that which is

• all-wise
• all-love
• all-powerful

For some, though, the second is simply much too anthropomorphic. They also say, "can god build something (anything, really!) that solves the halting problem?"

Or just let himself do it.

Goedel's theorem says (paraphrase): for every system of consistent axioms, you can always add another nontrivial axiom that will produce a consistent system. (Note that since the new axiom is not trivial, its truth value must have been indeterminate before)

When you look at it like that, it's not hard to see why this can't disprove the existence of God. God would know for all propositions and sets of axioms whether the proposition was true or false or indeterminate.

So the fallacy of this paradox is the false dichotomy of true and false. Sometimes, in a formal system, the system hasn't been defined well enough for there to be an answer.