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From: mark@uf-csg.UUCP (mark fishman [fac])
Newsgroups: net.philosophy,net.religion
Subject: Re: Logical paradoxes in the notion of omnipotence?
Message-ID: <211@uf-csg.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 10-Oct-84 22:57:42 EDT
Article-I.D.: uf-csg.211
Posted: Wed Oct 10 22:57:42 1984
Date-Received: Sun, 21-Oct-84 15:18:23 EDT
References: <213@laidbak.UUCP> <1804@ucbvax.ARPA>, <192@gargoyle.UChicago.UUCP>
Organization: Univ of Fla, Computer and Information Science
Lines: 34


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     Seems curious that no one on the SIG's ever been exposed to the most
primitive rudiments of mathematical 
logic -- which is to say, type theory.  It's an altogether trivial, primitive
and not very esoteric observation that the question, "Can an
all-powerful being create a rock HE/SHE/IT can't lift?" is semantically
ill-formed in the worst sense, and demonstrates only the cognitive 
deficiencies of the poser.  Look:  The modal form "able to" can apply only to
sentences that don't end up including,  thereby, explicit negations of the 
resultant proposition.  Russell recognized this umpteen years ago in the 
Principia.  You'd think that somebody else might have heard of this *merely 
seminal* result in the history of twentieth-sentury logic.  But then again, 
maybe not in a user population capable of taking seriously questions of 
magicness and fanciful superstition, in the first place.
     I really believe that anybody is entitled to nurture any exotic 
delusions he or she likes, provided they don't lead to his or her acting to 
crush and
maim other people (religion too often conduces to this), but why pretend
rationality is upward compatible with the silly, atmospheric fuzziness?

....innocuously yours..

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