Paradoxes of Omnipotence and Freedom I

Listverse has just released a list of paradoxes. They are excellent sources of philosophical discussion, but alas, when it involves religion, the paradox in question has to be resolved, or at least has its illusory contradiction laid bare. 

There are two paradoxes which may confuse the Christian. The first being the paradox of omnipotence, which is the first item on Listverse's list. The other being the paradox of freedom, not on the list.

I shall try to touch on them at length.

Of omnipotence:

A classical problem:

Can God create a rock so heavy He can't lift it?

Answering yes or no would imply incapability of either creating or lifting the stone, and assuming omnipotence is the "capability to do all things", this is a paradox.

As Utahraptor said here, this can be generalised like thus:

If you can do anything, then you can do things that prevent you from doing other things, and therefore, you can't do anything.

In simpler terms: if you have the powers to do everything, you would have the power to strip yourself of all powers included, then you don't have any power. Clearly, this has to mean that there is a fundamental error in our notion of omnipotence, because if we follow the logic of the paradox, omnipotence itself may lead to impotence.

Omnipotence, then, has to be redefined so as the definition is such that it excludes contradictions to itself, unlike our definition above. In turn, we have to narrow down the list of the powers of the omnipotent. This may sound absurd if we relate back that the omnipotent Being is God. This has to mean that God has limitations of what He can do.

Fair enough, but it is even absurder if you don't limit on what God can do, for instance: God can sin. Well, no, of course not. Does that mean God is not all-powerful? Quite the opposite. 

God cannot sin. If we generalise this, we can say: God cannot contradict himself. That would solve the rock problem. The answer is a simple 'no', simply because God cannot contradict himself.

Thus, the source of the paradox is on the inherently contradictory definition of omnipotence itself. The definition cannot be all-encompassing, because some powers would contradict others.

Paradox of freedom, in due course.

Lexical Order

If you have shelved your thermodynamics at the back of your mind, go retrieve it. Done?

Δ_fH^O 

According to the order of appearance: change, formation, enthalpy, standard. 

But lo and behold, you are supposed to read that as: standard enthalpy change of formation. How can that be?

This is because English language adopts lexical order which does not really follow natural thinking process. First off, languages can be divided into two according to the lexical order: modifier-modified and modified-modifier. English belongs to the former, since the modifier precedes the modified. Consider the phrase:

beautiful girl

girl is the noun, the modified, while beautiful is an adjective, so it is an attribute, a modifier.

In Swahili, the same phrase would be (courtesy of Google Translate):

msichana mzuri (literally, girl beautiful, preserving the lexical order)

Note that now the modified precedes the modifier.

As English speakers we probably do not realise how unnatural is the English lexical order. If you think about it, the main idea must be the modified, while modifiers are just attributes. If we are talking about a 'beautiful girl', we are talking about a girl, not a beautiful.

Our mind is usually concerned with the bigger picture first, i.e. the modified; while details, the modifiers, can be filled later. Is there evidence that this is the natural way of thinking? We write symbols that way. Again, look at the same symbol of  'standard enthalpy of formation':

Δ_fH^O 

Note that the modified is change. The main modifier is enthalpy. Thus it is a change -- what kind of change? Enthalpy change. 

Other modifiers, formation and standard, appear as subscript or superscript. f subscript is appended after change because formation specifies the type of change. (Digressing a little bit: This is the new IUPAC convention. Last time, the f subscript used to be placed after the thermodynamic state function. This is not very accurate since, as mentioned, formation is the attribute of change rather than that of enthalpy. IUPAC actually pays attention to proper lexical order!). Nought superscript is more like the modifier to the whole thing, like thus: (Δ_fH)^O . 

Having said all that though, it languages do have ways to reverse lexical order. English uses 'of' to place modifier after the modified:

girl of unworldy beauty

While Japanese uses the familiar 'no' (の), which performs very similar functions to 'of'. This though, one must admit, is kind of unwieldy. The rendering of our symbol if the order of appearance is to be followed would be:

Change (of formation) of enthalpy, in standard conditions

There is an alternative argument to the 'unnatural' argument, which is to say that the modifier-modified languages put more importance, then, in the details rather than the big picture. Language and culture are intertwined, as I wrote quite lengthily before. Language is the frame on which thoughts are built upon, so its structure will influence the product of thoughts, i.e. culture, in some ways. We can extrapolate, say, that users of modified-modifier languages are more individualistic than they are socialistic, because they are more concerned with details. This conclusion is, of course, far-fetched. However, you may be surprised that there is actually correlation of sorts: A lot of Western languages are actually modifier-modified and the Western culture tends to be more individualistic. 

But then again, as I pointed out before, you have to be aware that indeed language influences culture, but the other way is also true; the two are intricately intertwined. Like nature and nurture. Ouroboros-like.

Metaphorical-to-Literal Transcendence

And what the heck is that, you might ask. It just sounds fancy but it is actually very simple.

To appreciate this literary technique fully, however, one needs to understand the technicalities of metaphor first.

So, what is a metaphor? A good start is the TEDTalk titled Metaphorically Speaking by James Geary:

I would like to modify a bit:

Geary talked about

X=Y (equal)

Let us change it to

X//Y (parallel)

instead.

So for "Juliet is the sun":

Instead of Juliet=sun, we have Juliet//sun. The importance of which will be clear later.

In my working definition here, a metaphor draws a parallel from the literal plane to the metaphorical plane.

"Juliet is the sun"

"The sun" is on the literal plane. Juliet is on the metaphorical plane, having all the sunny qualities Shakespeare intended for her to have. Maybe she is warm, but nothing to do with temperature. Maybe she is radiant, but nothing to with how many lux she emits.

When we draw parallels, it is important to recognise that nothing is ever equal to something except itself.

So X can never be equal to Y, but there are some aspects of Y that in X we can find similarities to. Juliet is warm, yes, radiant, yes, ball of nuclear fusion,... wait a minute. There are only so many that you can draw parallels, but never all aspects exhaustive.

On the other hand, how many parallels one can possibly draw attests to the genius of the metaphorist. Wikipedia offers Shakespeare's As You Like It passage as a fine example of extended metaphor. I couldn't agree more:

All the world's a stage

And all the men and women merely players;

They have their exits and their entrances,

And one man in his time plays many parts,

His acts being seven ages. -- Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act II, Scene 7

Breaking down:

World//stage, men and women//actors, birth//entrance, death//exit, profession//role, periods of life//acts

This is the power of extended metaphor, to amaze by the many parallels and somehow all of them are coherent, unified in a certain manner or theme.

Now, there is a reason to segregate the two planes and keep them separate. Simply because it can get quite confusing otherwise. But of course rules are meant to be broken right?

Don't judge a book by its cover. But a car is not a book.
-- Seen outside a car showroom

Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.
-- Groucho Marx

These are what I call metaphorical-to-literal transcendence. It simply means that the metaphorical has been transcended to the literal. 

Let's dissect the first one first: car//book, outer appearance of a car//book cover

So far so good. The metaphor is implied through the cliché and the context that the writing is on a banner outside a car showroom. The second sentence then promptly destroys the parallel and transcends the car from metaphorical to literal plane. A car is not a book. Of course! They exist in different planes in the first place. The ruination of the metaphor is a clever ploy, since it forces one's mind to consider the literal car, not simply a generalised consumable that is not to be judged by its outer appearance alone.

Second one -- easier to use equality model of metaphor here: outside of a dog=other than a dog, inside of a dog=dog innards

It is quite clear that the first sentence, 'outside' is meant metaphorically, but in the second 'inside', defying the logical pattern, is meant literally.

Bottom line, what does this literary technique serve?

It should be noted that the obfuscation of metaphorical and literal planes is, as I mentioned, exception rather than the rule, so it has the novelty, defiance-tinged kind of impact, but it has to be used sparingly.

Last thing. If you notice, I have explained metaphorical-to-literal transcendence using 'planes', which is itself a metaphor. That just means that the whole article itself is metaphorical-to-literal transcendence, no?

The first thing that dissolves in alcohol is dignity.
-- Anon

Monotheism and Causa Prima

If I am capable of grasping God objectively, I do not believe, but precisely because I cannot do this I must believe.
-- Søren Aabye Kierkegaard

When a friend ask me a while back: "Why can there be only one God?", I was taken aback a little. Sure, I am a Christian, believing in monotheism, but it had never crossed my mind why it is so. This was not ignorance but more like in my mind the inescapable conclusion is that God can only be one.

The argument I thus offered my friend was the causa prima argument: 

Look at the world as a series of causes and effects with innumerable branches. An event is preceded by a cause, which is in turn preceded by another cause, and so on. Up the branches, we inevitably have to come to a point where there is a single cause that itself is not caused. This cause, or entity if you like, is called Causa Prima, the first cause.

To me, the extrapolation until every event is reduced to singularity of cause is inevitable. Animals cannot extrapolate far enough. An old dog-and-cat joke: If a dog is taken care of, it would deem the one taking care of him the Master. If a cat is taken care of, it would deem itself the Master. 

Humans are then a little better. We see something greater than ourselves, then we extrapolate upwards to find God at the zenith of infinity. If we ever go along the way of arrogance of the cat, our rationale would tell us that a lot of things are beyond our control, therefore we ourselves cannot be gods. 

By the way, the causa prima argument provides answer to chicken-and-egg question:

A chicken originates from an egg; an egg, a chicken; and so on. Sounds awfully familiar to cause-and-effect picture? This obviously has to stop somewhere up the origination branches. Simply: God creates the first pair of chickens. If you cringe at the word 'God', fine, you can replace the causa prima as anything else that causes the first pair of chickens. Evolution from another species, for instance. You should note however, that this causa prima is not the Causa Prima. It only is as far as existence of chickens is concerned. Regarding the existence of everything, subsuming chickens, the Causa Prima can only be a Supreme Being, with intelligence and consciousness.

You may realise that our extrapolation to find God is quite feeble. We have the concept of 'infinity' but it so taxes our mind when we try to rationalise it. The picture of God is then a fuzzy one, One whose personage we can only deduce from the ramifications down the branches of cause-and-effect. Religions then, can be seen as the attempt to illuminate on the identity and motives of this fuzzy God. This definition may not apply to some religions, like Buddhism where there is no God. Again, it depends on what religion means. Some people do not classify Buddhism as religion, but merely a way of living. If you look at the world's religions, monotheistic ones are surprisingly scarce: Zoroastrianism, Islam, Judaism and Christianity. Some might even group the latter three as Abrahamic religions collectively. 

I should highlight that most religions view this attempt to uncover who God is anthropocentrally. Do good deeds, accumulate enough points to gain the entry to Salvation. In Christianity the picture is a little different: God understands that Man's picture of Him is fuzzy, so He went and revealed Himself, his personage, purposes, and ultimately His authorship of Salvation in Jesus Christ.

If you say doing good is enough for salvation, you have gone the path of arrogance of the cat. Who are we to say that our moral standard is good enough, that our 'good' is truly good? The Bible mentions several discrepancies between our own moral standard and that of God. If someone slap you in the cheek, you would be entitled to retaliate with another slap, an eye for an eye, right? No, Jesus said, give him your other cheek. You are entitled to love your friend and hate your enemy, right? No, Jesus said, love your enemy. That illustrates how Man finds himself deep in the mud of corruption, even his own moral is already corrupted; he cannot hoist himself to the higher ground. The only salvation is to reach the outstretched Hand coming down from above. 

Doing good then is not the requirement of salvation, rather it is the consequence of it.

Fuzzy?