🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1993Jan20.160010.2048@panix.com> 
jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb) writes:

>In <1993Jan20.030131.19565@husc3.harvard.edu>
>zeleny@husc10.harvard.edu (Mikhail Zeleny) writes:

MZ:
>>Now, let us
>>consider an {\it apposite God}, one who is commited to helping exactly
>>those who do {\it not} help themselves.  We bear in mind that, unlike
>>Russell's barber, who is free to shrug off as impossible his duty to
>>shave those, and only those, who do not shave themselves, the
>>perfection of God requires that he actually do everything he is
>>commited to do.  Then is our God under obligation to help Himself?

JK:
>Is this a demonstration that a being that would make such a commitment
>would not be a perfect being and therefore would not be God?

Yes, in the same sense that Russell's Paradox is a demonstration that
any theory that contains an analogue of Frege's Axiom V, is _ipso facto_
not a consistent theory, and therefore is not useful as a foundation of
mathematics.  The point of my example, however, is that any God would be
unable to make such a commitment, and so would necessarily fall short of
omnipotence or perfection, just as He would fall short of omniscience in
virtue of the Montague-Kaplan paradox.

cordially,
mikhail zeleny@husc.harvard.edu
"Le cul des femmes est monotone comme l'esprit des hommes."