Ok but the fifth paragraph is wrong tho. It is very easy to make a set of all sets and have it contain itself. I mean that is by definition of the set of all sets as true. However, the problem is constructing the set of all sets that do not contain itself, as the question comes if the set itself is in that set. If it is, it contains itself and as such it shouldn’t, and if it is not, then the set does not contain itself which fits its own requirements and so it should. It is not that it is impossible to have this set contain itself, it is that choosing either option will not result you in a set that contains all sets that do not contain themselves
I'm glad you took the fall being pedantic on this one lol. Knew a guy who said stuff like this and discovered the hard way that it's my critical weak point. Years later, I still get annoyed when I remember he has a math degree.
I'm not making that up. Frank J. Tipler is a real theoretical physicists with a PHD and Bachelor's degree and everything who has some... Interesting ideas. Here's how he explained the resurrection of Jesus
"I am proposing that the Son and the Father singularities guided the worlds of the multiverse to concentrate the energy of the particles constituting Jesus in our universe into the Jesus of our universe. In effect, Jesus’ dead body, lying in the tomb, would have been enveloped in a sphaleron field. This field would have dematerialized Jesus’ body into neutrinos and antineutrinos in a fraction of a second after which the energy transferred to this world would have been transferred back to the other worlds from whence it came. Reversing this process (by having neutrinos and antineutrinos — almost certainly not the original neutrinos and antineutrinos dematerialized from Jesus’ body — materialize into another body) would generate Jesus’ Resurrection body."
The first one reminded me of the Great Improvisation from Forefathers series by polish post and writer Adam Mickiewicz where main character is tortured in jail has a mental breakdown lamenting that god is evil cuz he don't help him despite being right there
God is fundamentally good, he wants as much good to happen as possible. That's why he created the universe where everything is always perfectly good and everyone is happy. And allows evil to exist in the universe where one bad thing happens. And the one where two bad things happen. Etc. etc.
Then we get to our universe, which is somewhere in between the maximally good universe and the last universe which was allowed to exist: the one which is only very slightly more good than it is evil.
I’m also kinda the last one. I don’t believe humans ever committed a sin on a cosmic level until the splitting of the atom. I think the way we handled that is about as ontologically evil as we’ve gotten in a purely ‘crimes against the universe’ kinda way.
Our greatest sin against other living creatures on this planet, but I was thinking about how the atom is just this constituent of matter that was never meant to be ruptured in that way. I know all atoms will split eventually, but it should’ve been in a star or a nova or something, for humans to contort the fate of some of the smallest particles we can handle is eldritch evil and a sin against the fabric of the universe imo
I think if religion made sense to make in the current era, you'd definitely see more theology built around modern scientific phenomena and involve inventions like computers. It's like the meme about the founding fathers intending you to protect your home with a musket and not having any regulations around airplanes or whatever built into the US Constitution, if people millenia ago knew about the technology we now possess it would've been all over their theological literature.
Ironically, as technology makes distance less and less of a barrier to communication, it's way less likely for any sort of new religion to stick, so we probably won't see anything outside of a cult worshipping the big bang as the work of an artifical intelligence, but it's interesting to think about an alternate history where we got some modern technology super early but somehow never developed long-distancs communication and travel at a faster rate and see how it affected earlier human theological developments.
I see number 1 pretty often, just phrased differently. It’s not that different from “god works in mysterious ways.” The pain and suffering exist for a reason, and a good one, just one that is incomprehensible to us because we lack his perspective. Why do kids get cancer? Well certainly he has a reason for it that is beyond our comprehension.
Or they just blame it on sin in some way and kinda hand-wave away the question.
The set of all sets containing itself isn't impossible. It would not be the set of all sets if it didn't contain itself. There is no impossibility here, just infinity.
Well it is impossible in ZFC, as one of its axioms, the axiom schema of separation, states:
Given a set A and a predicate P(x) (where P(x) is a true/false statement involving x in some way), there exists a subset B such that x is in B if and only if x is in A and P(x) is true.
If the set of all sets exist, then we can use the axiom of separation with A as the set of all sets and P(x) as “x does not contain itself” to construct the set of all sets that do not contain themselves, which can not possibly exist as if it contains itself, it fails the criteria and if it does not contain itself, it also fails the criteria. And as the set of all sets that do not contain themselves do not exist, then neither must the set of all sets.
Depends on the version. The Catholicism I was raised in never put much emphasis on “God’s Plan” or anything. People could, and often would, defy God’s will. There were consequences for this, oftentimes, but it was never prevented or accounted for in some way. Sure, god punished the Pharoah and Jonah and them for defying him, but they only ever gave in by their own choice when the consequences became too severe.
So like, coercion, not predestination. Which is a weird way to get around free will, but you know. Much less important people don’t really get the divine intervention. God hasn’t decided to smite me for being queer or wearing mixed fabrics yet at least.
I've got multiple answers to the problem of evil depending on how much I want to believe in Christianity.
The simplest answer is atheism: there's no god, the universe sucks and it's our job to fix it if we don't like it because nobody else is coming to save us.
The scholarly answer is that the God that is described by the Bible doesn't give a shit about anyone's suffering, he demands our undying loyalty at Hell-point and if we accept his rule then we deserve it for eternity. The universe may not even be his creation, depending on how much you've studied the Word.
The apologetic answer is that God isn't Omni-anything. He's the most powerful and wise being that exists, maybe, but he's not perfect. The universe was created with the objective of producing separate minds that he would get along with well enough to spend eternity with. It's an impressive feat of cosmo-neering but the project is still going very poorly, and the last attempt to course-correct went south, badly. If He's still watching, it's mostly in morbid fascination, or studying the process to figure out what went wrong.
I've taken "history of theology" lectures for the past three years, and most of the history Christianity is just basically this in the language of the time, and whenever someone reaches a different interpretation/answer, there is war/crusade/heretic purge over it. Repeat for about 1900 years.
My personal hunch is that the universe is meant to evolve new lifeforms. The problem with this is a region based upon such a god would have a really fucky morality.
3rd one is basically the Islamic view on free will. Allah judges humanity because humanity has free will (like the jinn but not like the angels which are automatons) but Allah also has ultimate knowledge of every possible permutation of every action to infinity, which is how Allah is supposed to be able to judge people perfectly.
Ok but the fifth paragraph is wrong tho. It is very easy to make a set of all sets and have it contain itself. I mean that is by definition of the set of all sets as true. However, the problem is constructing the set of all sets that do not contain itself, as the question comes if the set itself is in that set. If it is, it contains itself and as such it shouldn’t, and if it is not, then the set does not contain itself which fits its own requirements and so it should. It is not that it is impossible to have this set contain itself, it is that choosing either option will not result you in a set that contains all sets that do not contain themselves
I'm glad you took the fall being pedantic on this one lol. Knew a guy who said stuff like this and discovered the hard way that it's my critical weak point. Years later, I still get annoyed when I remember he has a math degree.
In ZFC the set of all sets also does not exist.
However, some theories do allow it.
https://www.geocities.ws/theophysics/tipler-omega-point-and-christianity.html
I'm not making that up. Frank J. Tipler is a real theoretical physicists with a PHD and Bachelor's degree and everything who has some... Interesting ideas. Here's how he explained the resurrection of Jesus
"I am proposing that the Son and the Father singularities guided the worlds of the multiverse to concentrate the energy of the particles constituting Jesus in our universe into the Jesus of our universe. In effect, Jesus’ dead body, lying in the tomb, would have been enveloped in a sphaleron field. This field would have dematerialized Jesus’ body into neutrinos and antineutrinos in a fraction of a second after which the energy transferred to this world would have been transferred back to the other worlds from whence it came. Reversing this process (by having neutrinos and antineutrinos — almost certainly not the original neutrinos and antineutrinos dematerialized from Jesus’ body — materialize into another body) would generate Jesus’ Resurrection body."
"Theoretical physicist", huh? Well, honestly, i don't believe this physicist is real. He can't be.
https://preview.redd.it/34wccab64dbg1.jpeg?width=480&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=f2ea27d941d82bbec16ffe21ca85f9d3cdfff345
(he's a massive crackpot who likes to dress up his pseudoscience in esoteric physics language to make it sound credible)
I want what he's having
The first one reminded me of the Great Improvisation from Forefathers series by polish post and writer Adam Mickiewicz where main character is tortured in jail has a mental breakdown lamenting that god is evil cuz he don't help him despite being right there
He got mad that God doesn't want to give him the power to rule over souls just because he is a poet and is ready to condemn himself to hell about it
Also it's just really funny to me to translate the title, it just sounds somewhat silly in english
Yeah I like the English title a lot
Then of course there is also this one:
God is fundamentally good, he wants as much good to happen as possible. That's why he created the universe where everything is always perfectly good and everyone is happy. And allows evil to exist in the universe where one bad thing happens. And the one where two bad things happen. Etc. etc.
Then we get to our universe, which is somewhere in between the maximally good universe and the last universe which was allowed to exist: the one which is only very slightly more good than it is evil.
And then, just for fun, made a universe where only bad things happen
It didn't last long
Isn’t that just Hell?
Do I spy another fan of Unsong?
You spy correctly!
I’m also kinda the last one. I don’t believe humans ever committed a sin on a cosmic level until the splitting of the atom. I think the way we handled that is about as ontologically evil as we’ve gotten in a purely ‘crimes against the universe’ kinda way.
The atoms we split do that anyway we just made it happen in the most chaotic way possible
I’ve heard it said that humanity’s greatest moral sin is factory farming.
I can’t say i disagree.
Our greatest sin against other living creatures on this planet, but I was thinking about how the atom is just this constituent of matter that was never meant to be ruptured in that way. I know all atoms will split eventually, but it should’ve been in a star or a nova or something, for humans to contort the fate of some of the smallest particles we can handle is eldritch evil and a sin against the fabric of the universe imo
I think if religion made sense to make in the current era, you'd definitely see more theology built around modern scientific phenomena and involve inventions like computers. It's like the meme about the founding fathers intending you to protect your home with a musket and not having any regulations around airplanes or whatever built into the US Constitution, if people millenia ago knew about the technology we now possess it would've been all over their theological literature.
Ironically, as technology makes distance less and less of a barrier to communication, it's way less likely for any sort of new religion to stick, so we probably won't see anything outside of a cult worshipping the big bang as the work of an artifical intelligence, but it's interesting to think about an alternate history where we got some modern technology super early but somehow never developed long-distancs communication and travel at a faster rate and see how it affected earlier human theological developments.
r/northernlion ass post
I see number 1 pretty often, just phrased differently. It’s not that different from “god works in mysterious ways.” The pain and suffering exist for a reason, and a good one, just one that is incomprehensible to us because we lack his perspective. Why do kids get cancer? Well certainly he has a reason for it that is beyond our comprehension.
Or they just blame it on sin in some way and kinda hand-wave away the question.
The set of all sets containing itself isn't impossible. It would not be the set of all sets if it didn't contain itself. There is no impossibility here, just infinity.
Well it is impossible in ZFC, as one of its axioms, the axiom schema of separation, states:
Given a set A and a predicate P(x) (where P(x) is a true/false statement involving x in some way), there exists a subset B such that x is in B if and only if x is in A and P(x) is true.
If the set of all sets exist, then we can use the axiom of separation with A as the set of all sets and P(x) as “x does not contain itself” to construct the set of all sets that do not contain themselves, which can not possibly exist as if it contains itself, it fails the criteria and if it does not contain itself, it also fails the criteria. And as the set of all sets that do not contain themselves do not exist, then neither must the set of all sets.
Isn't the third one Christianity
Depends on the version. The Catholicism I was raised in never put much emphasis on “God’s Plan” or anything. People could, and often would, defy God’s will. There were consequences for this, oftentimes, but it was never prevented or accounted for in some way. Sure, god punished the Pharoah and Jonah and them for defying him, but they only ever gave in by their own choice when the consequences became too severe.
So like, coercion, not predestination. Which is a weird way to get around free will, but you know. Much less important people don’t really get the divine intervention. God hasn’t decided to smite me for being queer or wearing mixed fabrics yet at least.
Adding "faster than light travel is one of the only few actual sins" to my sci-fi setting
I've got multiple answers to the problem of evil depending on how much I want to believe in Christianity.
The simplest answer is atheism: there's no god, the universe sucks and it's our job to fix it if we don't like it because nobody else is coming to save us.
The scholarly answer is that the God that is described by the Bible doesn't give a shit about anyone's suffering, he demands our undying loyalty at Hell-point and if we accept his rule then we deserve it for eternity. The universe may not even be his creation, depending on how much you've studied the Word.
The apologetic answer is that God isn't Omni-anything. He's the most powerful and wise being that exists, maybe, but he's not perfect. The universe was created with the objective of producing separate minds that he would get along with well enough to spend eternity with. It's an impressive feat of cosmo-neering but the project is still going very poorly, and the last attempt to course-correct went south, badly. If He's still watching, it's mostly in morbid fascination, or studying the process to figure out what went wrong.
I saw the post that the 6th paragraph is referencing
I've taken "history of theology" lectures for the past three years, and most of the history Christianity is just basically this in the language of the time, and whenever someone reaches a different interpretation/answer, there is war/crusade/heretic purge over it. Repeat for about 1900 years.
My ADHD brain cannot read this with all the random capitalization. God, sure. But Good and Evil? Neutron Stars? Why??
I actually kinda believe in 1 and 5.
My personal hunch is that the universe is meant to evolve new lifeforms. The problem with this is a region based upon such a god would have a really fucky morality.
Re:Creators led me to believing the first one by making me imagine God as a writer
No 2: Missile Gap by Charles Stross
That last hashtag: dang, didn't know Greg Egan cribbed the idea from Tipler!
The Planck Dive by Greg Egan
3rd one is basically the Islamic view on free will. Allah judges humanity because humanity has free will (like the jinn but not like the angels which are automatons) but Allah also has ultimate knowledge of every possible permutation of every action to infinity, which is how Allah is supposed to be able to judge people perfectly.
God made humans the stewards of the earth. God won't fix anything because that's our fucking job.