"quotations"

[sear]

And omniscience means "knows everything" and there is no "unless something he doesn't know happens" exception.

Defining omniscience as an unalterable future has debatable validity / utility.
I appreciate Dawkins' insight, & I'm glad you've disclosed it here. And while I may accept it as Dawkins seems to present it, my reservation is
the premise is omniscient AND omnipotent.
CERTAINLY that requires some accommodation of definitions / capabilities.
But my inclination about a hypothetical about a hypothetical is to not veto the premise, although I have zero problem with making the reservation/s clear before proceeding.
Mutually exclusive? Let's go with yes. BUT
if the premise is both, that's the premise.

I don't know enough about Dawkins to be certain. Benefit of doubt,
Dawkins may have been attempting a broader point here which I enthusiastically if not vehemently endorse.

And if I'm reading these tea leaves correctly, that doesn't undermine God, it indicts religion.
If that approximates where we are here, I appreciate the insights.

On Topology:
Not sure if this qualifies, but a ~few years ago some stock market traders contended with the reality that:
- trades are made by computer.
- $Millions can we made or lost in a few seconds, depending on the speed with which the trading algorithm is executed.

Knowing this some enterprising investors located their computer as physically close to the stock market's computer as they could,
so that their communication cable was shorter, thus quicker than all the others.
Reportedly
though this imparted only a tiny fraction of a second advantage, it was enough to enable them to sell high, immediately before
a specific stock value plummeted.
The report I reviewed on this indicated this is legal.

Not sure if that's topology or not.

 

[Shiftless2]

Defining omniscience as an unalterable future has debatable validity / utility.
I appreciate Dawkins' insight, & I'm glad you've disclosed it here. And while I may accept it as Dawkins seems to present it, my reservation is
the premise is omniscient AND omnipotent.
CERTAINLY that requires some accommodation of definitions / capabilities.

Hardly - that's like saying John is taller than Steve unless there's some reason we need it to be the other way around.

 

[sear]

I'm sensitive to the adversity of attempting to teach Einstein's Special Relativity to a blacksmith's anvil.
I apologize for seeming the blacksmith's anvil here.

Hardly - that's like saying John is taller than Steve unless there's some reason we need it to be the other way around.

I just checked both AHD & Websters. Neither "unless" nor "immutable" appear in either dictionary definition of "omniscient". Implicit? Perhaps. Explicit? Clearly not, in either of these two dictionaries. Thus no decisive validity claim for either side.
I don't fault your logic, or Dawkins'.

Dawkins' counterpoint may not make much sense without the context of the point Dawkins assails by acknowledging the contradiction, & the controversy.

Some may prefer to simply dismiss, ignore any hypothetical that combines omniscience with omnipotence.
There's an even more fundamental basis for such dismissal.
There is for example the absolute absence of any evidence for any supernatural anything.
A little on Dawkins here -



Myth-makers have deliberately exploded their own myths, thus gifts under the tree exceeding the bore of the chimney they ostensibly transited, not to mention the obese delivery man.
This suggests a concealed benevolence within a sinister conspiracy, the myth that deliberately undermines itself.
That's not an endorsement of the wholesale deception of an entire class, the most vulnerable among us, our children.
This intrinsic deliberate impossible detail we find in many common myths integrates its own refutation. *

Regarding "omnipotent", one of the few "dirty" jokes my pappy ever told me:

Doctor, when I got morning "wood" I used to be able to bend it. Now I can't. Am I getting stronger, or weaker?"

- thanks Dad -
So which is it Mr. Hypothetical? Omniscient? Or omnipotent? Both?
If you'll pardon the glass half-full perspective, these myths serve to educate the culture, displace gullibility with s a v v y . Imperfect, surely.
There are subjective and objective arguments for whether it's a net gain, unresolved after millennia.
But humans are predisposed to mythopoeism. Joy Browne PhD calls it "magical thinking".

Hardly - that's like saying John is taller than Steve unless there's some reason we need it to be the other way around.

Indeed, somewhat like the premise: omniscient, AND omnipotent.
We can acknowledge the intrinsic contradiction. Can we prohibit posing such hypothetical?
I don't fault Dawkins.
But absolutizing his point precludes a hypothetical about a hypothetical, despite explicit wording, "omniscient AND omnipotent".

The Dawkins standard of omniscience invokes the infinite.
Is that any less a mental stretch?
There's a paradox that may exclude the positive number line that's not linear but circular.
In linguistics, a word that means everything doesn't mean anything. Meaning, paradoxically, it doesn't mean nothing until it means everything.

For what it's worth, Dr. Italo Benin said define means "to limit the meaning of". Raises an eyebrow on infinite knowledge.

* We're created in god's own image and likeness. Yet god began the 6 day creation suspended in a void that lacked light, and air, etc.
That would kill a human. Did Genesis' authors understand that?
Is that an inadvertent blunder of the myth-maker?
Or is it Genesis' example of the Santa / chimney stipulation, in the Jehovah case establishing vivid notice in chapter one, "the beginning": allegory?