About paraconsistent logic
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At a glance, this kind of logic seems to be a pragmatic system to reason about complex systems that might not be consistent. Essentially, you cut off some of your options to prevent the system from degenerating completely, so that you can still infer useful things about it. All in all, though, this is a red herring. Logic - any type of logic - is a way to reason about the world, it has nothing to do with what the world is. "Or" in a system of logic might have a slightly different meaning than "or" in another system, but that only means they are two different concepts. Neither is the "right" or - when you say "or", you mean one or the other, and you just need to make sure that others know which.
To say that God is "omnipotent" can mean several things:
1) That God can do any possible action,
in the space of actions.
2) That any proposition of the form "God can do X" is true.
1) is
not equivalent to 2), because some propositions of the form "God can do X" are unintelligible and thus do not map to the space of actions at all. Conversely, it might not be possible to describe some possible actions, even though God can do them. Evidently, 1) is the most sensible definition of "omnipotence" and 2) is just nonsense, but many people get utterly confused between the two, leading them to think God can do something and its opposite. But that's a purely semantic confusion.
About the origins of the universe
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I sense some confusion here between "void" and "nothing". They are not the same thing. No laws of physics proscribe that something can come out of nothing, because that's unintelligible. Nothing is nothing. Nothing is not time, it is not space, it doesn't stretch, it cannot be said to exist, it cannot obtain, its only use is to palliate to deficiencies inherent to structured language. A void, on the other hand, is an empty space - a void is
something.
The laws of physics describe the evolution of the universe from a state to another (or relationships between points in spacetime). It so happens that as we know them they will not make a state of void evolve to a state of matter. But "before the universe", there is no void, there is "nothing", and that's fundamentally different: it is a boundary, it is a hard limit. If you drop a rock in an aquarium, it will make water ripples, and when the ripples meet the edges, they will bounce back. The physical boundary of the universe or the beginning of time are a bit like the edges of an aquarium in that sense, and since we've never seen these edges, we can't tell what physics are like over there.
To everyone here: don't let your intuition mislead you - "nothing" is a very, very difficult concept to wrap one's mind around, and the only way most people know to interpret "nothing" is to equate it to a void. But a void is an empty
space, and a
space is
something! "Nothing" is a lack of everything, including space, so it doesn't even make any sense to say that it is "empty". We have never observed an "edge" between space and non-space, nor between time and non-time, so any intuitions we might have regarding these are completely useless. If you have a programming background, imagine a linked list of five elements. Well, what's after the fifth element is "nothing" - it is not an infinite sequence of NULL elements, it's just nothing, there is no place you could step into, there is no interaction between the last element and a hypothetical element after it. It's a hard edge and most programs will in fact
behave differently when they encounter it. Same goes for what's before the first element of the list. it is not zero, it is not NULL, it is nothing. And there too, special rules might be needed.
I agree bad shit happens, and often times it happens to the wrong people (Haiti)
But that doesn't disprove/prove that there is God. I do not know God's reasoning I am not God. If you want me to justify why everything happens in the world I cannot do it. I do not know God's reasoning and to expect someone to explain every detail of God's plan to you seems childish and stupid.
Look that's enough. "God's plan" is a cop out and it's a shitty one at that. You can very well have faith in your brother and lend him a grand so that he can open his own business, but after ten years of never getting your money back and never seeing any evidence that he has a business at all, to still believe that your brother has some grand plan to pay you back and do what he told you he was going to do, well, it's not faith anymore. It is stupidity.
If God does not exist, this world makes sense. If he sits on his ass doing nothing, and does not really care about our well being either way, this world makes sense. If he's an ass, this world still makes sense. If he is omnipotent/scient/benevolent, this world
doesn't make any sense. Magical thinking has its limits. At some point you've got to go for theories that actually make sense, or you might as well believe in a God that's pure evil and reverse all your arguments to justify the presence of happiness.
Dragontamer said:
What if starving to death was not "true pain" in the context of the afterlife? What are days, weeks, months or years of torture compared to the eternal fires of Hell?
Okay so as if suffering down here wasn't bad enough, now it has to be
worse? You're practically making my point here.
You can't win this argument. If you wish to disprove the existence of the supernatural, then you must accept the possibilities of supernatural suffering. God would think of pain and punishment on the supernatural scale, and not on the human scale.
Look this is just incoherent. As far as I understand it, God controls the supernatural, and he controls whether we get there or not. He
makes the damn scale. You provide no justification for why supernatural suffering has to be worse than human suffering, let alone why it should even exist or why any human should be subject to it. No justification for why human suffering would be
midway between mild happiness and the horrors of hell, which is inconvenient without even being formative.
