[danuker]

> How would one go about establishing via a purely deductive argument that a deer’s suffering a slow and painful death because of a forest fire, or a child’s undergo lingering suffering and eventual death due to cancer, is not logically necessary either to achieve a greater good or to avoid a greater evil?

Gods can't make a square circle, even if they're omnipotent? They could rewrite our brains to just make the words mean the same. Logic problem solved.

The more complex a situation, the more opportunity for this supposed omnipotent being.

[pmoriarty]

"Gods can't make a square circle, even if they're omnipotent?"

I'm not really seeing what this has to do with what you quoted about the existence of suffering.

Still, to go on that tangent about God being unable to make a square circle...

God's omnipotence (ie. being all-powerful) means they can do anything... even things that might appear contradictory to the puny human intellect.

And what seems contradictory to the puny human intellect and the entire universe being such that squares aren't circles are themselves supposedly due to God's will.. which could be otherwise.

So we could very well live in a world of square circles if God wished it so.

It might not make sense to us, but God is not limited to only doing what makes sense to us.

[smeej]

The flaw here isn't in God's omnipotence. It's in the nonsensical question formulation.

I can make up whatever words I want and put them in a syntactically correct structure, but that doesn't mean the sentence means anything.

"Can God tell a true lie?"

No, of course not, not because God isn't omnipotent, but because it's a nonsense question. There can no more be true lies than four-sided triangles or objects that are immovable in the face of an irresistible force.

The flaw is in the question.

[pmoriarty]

Claiming that a question is nonsensical doesn't make it so.

Such questions are meaningful to the people that ask them. Someone who asks "can God make a square circle?" is unlikely to consider it to be equivalent to asking "gjqrio jtioajfs dklfjl?" (ie. a sentence made of words which really are meaningless)

You can claim that these questions are meaningless, but then you have to prove why.. and there's been no such proof, just an assertion.

Maybe you intended a proof by definition? That is to say that you want to maintain that any question that involves a contradiction is meaningless by definition? Well, that's an assumption, and the person you're speaking with doesn't have to grant that assumption or agree to that definition.

[smeej]

Setting aside that I've never once actually heard those questions asked in good faith, if someone were to ask them in good faith, pointing out that they themselves have created an unanswerable question by placing words together that don't make sense is easy.

What makes a lie a lie? Its untrueness. So if you replace the untrueness with trueness, do you still have a lie? No. Your own usage of those words is incompatible.

What makes a triangle a triangle? Having exactly 3 angles in an enclosed figure, and, therefore, three sides. So if you added a fourth angle, would you still have a triangle? No. Your own usage of those words is incompatible.

The law of noncontradiction does not restrict God. It comes from God. It is a characteristic of God.

[pmoriarty]

"The law of noncontradiction does not restrict God. It comes from God. It is a characteristic of God."

Does it come from God and is it a characteristic of God?

I'd be curious to hear how you know this.

I would agree, however, that an omnipotent god (if one existed) would not be restricted by anything, including any human conceptions such as logic.

[sdht0]

> an omnipotent god (if one existed) would not be restricted by anything, including any human conceptions such as logic.

Logic is not constrained to human conceptions but is objectively valid. One has to keep in mind that logic is based on premises and inferences. Given the premises and inference rules, the conclusion automatically follow.

So a four sided circle cannot exist because we have defined circle to be a particular shape. A valid four sided circle would need a change in the definition of circle itself. But then we're not talking about the same thing anymore. Similarly, the same universe cannot contain both an irresistible force and an immovable object, because of the conflicting definitions of those terms.

Even an omnipotent God is constrained by logic. In a reality without logic, it'd meaningless to try to understand any aspect of reality. God can both exist and not exist at the same time. He can be both Good and Evil. Conscious beings can be both alive and dead. It is hard to see how a illogical universe can retain any meaning that we attribute to God and Creation.

[throwaway210222]

> The law of noncontradiction does not restrict God. It comes from God. It is a characteristic of God.

And that sentence works equally well with two gods, nine gods, and even 400 million gods, of which 200 million have since died.

Stop making up stuff.