John, I provide another answer to your last comment to me:
On 03 Aug 2012, at 17:34, John Clark wrote:
On Fri, Aug 3, 2012 Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:
> Define "theology"
The study of something that does not exist.
Not so bad after, after all. In AUDA the machine "theology" can be
defined by something which is supposed to be responsible, willingly or
not, for my existence, and which I cannot prove to exist. I remeber
having already some times ago provided this definition.
Then, the logic of theology is given, at the propositional level, by
G* minus G. (if you have read my posts on those modal logics and
Solovay theorem). For example <> t (consistency, ~[]f) belongs to G*
minus G. Consistency is true for the machine, but it cannot prove it.
Yet the machine can guess it, hope it, find it or produce it as true
with some interrogation mark.
Theology is the study of the transcendent truth, which can be defined,
in a first approximation, by the non provable (by the machine) truth.
> Define "God"
The God I don't believe in is a omniscient omnipotent being who
created the universe. If you define God, as so many fans of the
word but not the idea do,
I remain astonished why atheists defend a so particular conception of
God. This confirms what I have already explained. Atheism is a variant
of christianism. They defend the same conception of God than the
Christians, as you do all the time.
Note that philosophers use often the term "God" in the general and
original sense of theology: as being, by definition, the
transcendental cause of everything.
as "a force greater than myself" then I am a devout believer because
I believe in gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong nuclear
force. I believe in bulldozers too.
But I have already told you that God is supposed to be responsible for
our existence; which is not the case for the bulldozer. But gravity
and physical force/matter could have been a more serious answer, as it
describe the perhaps primary physical world, and that can obey the
definition of God I gave, for a physicalist, and is indeed again a
common belief of christians and atheists. I am agnostic, and correct
computationalist are "atheists" with respect to such material God.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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