Nothing.
Not really, but sorta.
Consider everything you know as a percentage of all that there is to be known. In this sense I know 0% of everything. I will never know more than 0% of everything that can possibly be known. I'll never even know 1% of pi. Maybe I'm looking too far into nothing, but I still find it a bit alarming.
Many people spend their lives, or at least a good portion of their lives seeking knowledge of one sort or another. I'm not going to say it's in vain, because knowledge is powerful and important, but does anyone ever succeed in this quest? No matter what you learn, you always yearn for more. No one is or ever should be satisfied with what they know.
Now think about a supposed all-knowing god. All-knowing. What does that mean? Such a god must have infinite knowledge, literally. There is no bound on what can be known. Going back to pi - it never ends - proof enough that an omniscient being would have a literal infinite amount of knowledge. What's the 1,000,000,000th digit of pi? He (or she) would respond immediately, without the need to think about it, he would just know. Or would he answer before I even asked aloud? He knows everything after all, even what I think.
Does he know the next sentence I'm about to type, even when I don't? This brings me to another point. Would an omniscient god know everything that is known now, or everything that is known ever? What I mean is, does this god know things before they happen? If I'm going to fall down the stairs on my way out of work, does he know this in advance? If not, then by acquiring such knowledge he is adding to the knowledge that he possesses (I know, infinity + 1 is still infinity), and if he knows more now than he did before, was he really omniscient before?
If this god is all-knowing, and he created me, then why aren't I perfect, why do I make mistakes? If I set out to make something, I would certainly make it perfect if I had the ability to do so. People say "in a perfect world..." Well if this god created this world, why isn't it perfect?
I tend to go too far with things like this, and it's getting moot, so I'll stop here. No moral here, but plenty to be learned ;-)
4 comments:
Thanks for letting me know you didn't supply a moral because I would've scoured (my new favorite word) the blog searching for one.
Thanks for the shout out to the 0% of Pi.
That's why Christians believe in Fate; God knows all before it happens because he made it.
He crafted the perfect you. We've been there before.
This is actually an idea that your other comment sparked in my head. Christians do believe in fate, but than again they also believe in free will. SO really it is like some big paradox.
I think when people start bringing god into things, it just complicates them. And I think that since this god should be perfect but yet this world is not perfect, things do not fall into place and people wonder why and start to question faith and such. People get stuck with bad luck and do bad things and have bad things happen to them. Why is life not perfect when it is supposedly made by a perfect being...but I may be the wrong person to debate how much god plays in out lives because I'm an aethist...
Joe: You're welcome for the shout out, gotta love Pi.
I don't know why I didn't think of the perfect me thing. I even thought about the "perfect oval" without needing to be a circle, but apparently I couldn't imagine a perfect me not being perfect haha.
Need fate be capitalized?
Kristen: I think Christians and their beliefs in free will/fate depend on what type of Christianity you actually are, though I'm sure there are some who believe in both. Branching off of what Joe said, this could be a perfect world without everything being perfect, but I don't know why a god would do some of the things he's done. I guess that's why he's omniscient and I'm not. Lastly, you spelled atheist wrong.
Thanks for the input though, both of you.
oh spelling seems to be a huge pet peeve to you and since I can't spell for my life I find it amusing that no matter how many time you correct me, I shall always spell things wrong, usually the same things over and over again...)
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