Category: Ralph Haulk

Questeruk in the “comments” section says there is no way to have a rational discussion with me since I keep “changing the rules”.

I’ve never stated there were any rules. If there were rules we could define, then quite obviously we could define God. We could eliminate all confusion, prove there is a God, and what God expects to the degree we could eliminate all competition among so-called christian religions.

If there is a set of rules, there would also be a system of algorithms, a set of decision procedures, by which we could somehow represent God. But as I stated earlier, if there are such definitions, they can be translated into language, and if translated into language, they can be programmed into a computer, such that a computer could represent all necessary rules and definitions of God.

That in itself creates a contradiction, since if we could do that, we could contain “God” in a creation of our own minds, which means that God would be less than ourselves, not to mention the fact that it would be a form of idolatry, which is condemned by the second commandment.

I pointed out earlier that William James stated, if God is all knowing, then we are not free, since God would know in advance who would accept or reject him.

We can argue this back and forth an infinity of ways, and what will be the result? Exactly what you see today, over 38,000 versions of christianity and growing. Is there such a decision procedure by which we can identify in amny special way with God?

If we could, we would not see obvious evidence to the contrary. The very attempt to supply definitions or “rules” in ANY sense, will lead to an infinity of undecidable propositions about God, in full accordance with Godel’s theorem.

All you have to do to prove me wrong is to demonstrate that there IS such a process by which we can make such definitions, which are demonstrated as truth to all.

Simple premise, simple logic. No “rules changing”, nothing as been stated in any way contradictory to the physical evidence we see around us.

What is the conclusion of this? “If any man says to you, Lo, here is Christ, or there, believe it not”.

Have I told you a “way to Christ”? No, because it is impossible. Therefore, have I told you the truth? YES! I have.

Let’s balance this with a statement by Ayn Rand, whom “Ex-Android” admires, as do I:

“Nature allows no vacuum. Empty men’s soul–and the space is yours to fill. I don’t see why you should look so shocked… this is the oldest one of all. Look back at history. Look at any great system of ethics, from the Orient up. Didn’t they all preach the sacrifice of personal joy? Under all the complications of verbiage, haven’t they all had a single leitmotif: sacrifice, renunciation, denial? Haven’t you been able to catch the theme song, ‘Give up, give up, give up, give up’?….Every system of ethics that preached sacrifice grew into a world power and ruled millions of men”.

What do religions, ALL religions, teach? That we should “give our heart and souls to the “Lord”. If you wish to serve God, we are told, you should join a church, follow the rules, sacrifice our individuality to the collective of a church.

But what about government? SAME THING.

Now, I have been accused of applying Paul’s teachings of Romans 8:29-30 as “dogmatic truth”. Let’s assume you are right, that I am asserting that statement dogmatically(which basically I would have to, in light of any proof to the opposite conclusion).

What are the results of such “dogmatic assertion”? It would mean that no human being would have the ability to define God, to organize in the name of God, or to claim authority in God’s name. Why? because if God already knows who his children are to be, there is no thing whatever we can do, by any method, to change the outcome.

So, if I accept this as a “dogmatic belief”, then I have automatically concluded that no person can ever claim authority over me as a representative of God. In other words, there exists no “vacuum”, in the words of Ayn Rand, above, by which any man can claim my allegiance because of my ignorance.

So, let’s throw out Paul’ statement in Romans 8:29-30. God doesn’t know everything. Salvation is dependent on our free will decisions, of which God cannot know the outcome. Which one of those “free will” decisions will lead us to “salvation”?

All of them? Not according to Jesus in Matthew 24. it is possible to be deceived, and we are told we should not be deceived. So, we are back to the same question again: which one of the religions of Christ are we to accept in order to escape deception?

Which one? Define it. Show me. You can’t, at least not to the extent that you can show any connection to God, or if there is a God, or if anything you do can alter your destiny in any way.

So, we’re right back to the “dogmatic belief”, regarding Romans 8:29-30, which tells us exactly the same thing we see around us by direct physical evidence!

The only difference is that Paul eliminates such necessity of choice from the start, and we have to arrive at the same conclusion by two thousand years of experience, and a scammer called HWA.

Can you define God? If you can, then God can be reduced to a concept that is defined and known by humans, making “God” the creation of man, and not the other way around.

What “rules” have I changed? What free will choice do you have that places you any closer to God by your definitions than any other religion? What can you show, in any sense at all, that would make your “free will” belief any different from the thousands of other ‘free will” beliefs?

You can’t! it can’t be done! If you can show me otherwise, we can legitimately rule the world, right here, right now!

It is said that there can be no rational discussion regarding God. Exactly! That is now proven mathematically! God cannot be reduced to any rational, finite, logical conclusion, simply because the very attempt to define God would have to include an infinity of ideas, none of which can be established as truth!

There is no rational discussion of God. It does not exist,

cannot exist, and any attempt to do so will result in exactly what we see today: over 38,000 versions of “truth”.

Therefore, what Ayn rand said, what Jesus said, what Paul said, all boil down to the very same conclusion: if any man says to you “here is Christ(or God) or there, BELIEVE IT NOT”.

It is just that simple! It cannot be any simpler! So, how does this relate to government in regard to central banking systems and laws of men, as James pointed out in “comments”?

Both church and state, religion and government, are the collective creations of men, nothing more, nothing less. Ayn Rand calls them “Attila and the Witch Doctor” and the bible refers to them as the “beast and false prophet”. Is there truly any difference in these two terms? Attila was a power hungry government “beast”. A “false prophet” is nothing more than a ‘witch doctor’ who tries to convince us that we need to obey, obey, obey.

What did Ayn Rand say? Don’t follow them. What did Jesus say? Don’t follow them. What did Paul say? It does no good to follow them, since God already knows his children anyway. No choice can alter your destiny in that regard(Romans 9:16-22).

All of them amount to the same conclusions! What is that conclusion? You are free from all men or persons who would try to enslave you for any collective reason.

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I read a very good book many years ago, published in 1979, I think. It won the Pulitzer prize, and it was concerned with Godel’s theorem, entitled “Godel, Escher, Bach”.

I had to read it several times before I grasped the basic ideas, But the author, Douglas Hofstadter, also wrote a book a bit simpler, called “I Am A Strange Loop”. A pretty good read.

In “Godel, Escher, Bach”, Hofstadter would introduce his ideas with a conversation, in Lewis Carrol fashion, between Achilles and the Tortoise. The conversations were based loosely around Zeno’s paradox.

At one point, Achilles was trying to use logic to convince the Tortoise that Achilles’ conclusions simply could not be denied if the tortoise accepted logic as the ultimate arbiter of truth.

The Tortoise, like most humans, said that he was very reasonable, and would never accept a conclusion that was illogical. Achilles just knew the argument as won.

Achilles began, “If I show that A is true, and B follows from A, then we must also conclude that C is also true as a conclusion following from the premises of A and B”.

“Of course” said the Tortoise, “It’s obvious that this should be the case”.

“Then you agree?”

“In principle”.

“What do you mean, ‘In principle’?”

“I mean that if A is true, and B is true, the we would conclude that C s true as a premise following from A and B”.

“That’s what I said”

“Yes” said the Tortoise, “But if A is true, and B is true, and C follows logically as a premise resulting from A and B, then we would conclude that this is summed up in premise D”.

“What?”

“You see, if A, B, and C are true, we would establish this as premise D, which simply states the fact of the truth of A,B,and C”.

“Okay” said Achilles, “I’ll accept that. But then surely you must accept D as the final statement of truth”.

“Not at all” said the Tortoise, “If D is the statement of truth summing up A,B.and C, then certainly we would establish this as a subset of premise E, which states that if A,B, C, and D are true, then E”.

Achilles smelled a rat. “But surely there would be a stopping point. Let’s say that Z is the statement that sums up the truth of A through Y. Surely you then have to accept that Z is the truth?”

“Of course” said Tortoise, “But then we would also have to say that A1 is the statement that demonstrates the truth of A through Z, and then A2, A3, A4, until we finally arrive at the ultimate truth”.

“Which is?”

“I don’t know. How many numbers are there?”

“Infinite numbers. So if I say that infinity sums up the truth of all previous statements, we can stop there?”

“I suppose, but where does infinity stop?”

What occurred was that both Achilles and Tortoise were discussing a kind of “schematic” of truth. not the truth in terms of each statement itself, but in terms of statements that represented truth or statements about truth, as each one saw it.

This is my point in talking “about” truth. We can develop processes of organization, mechanical representations of ‘truth’, but in fact, the arguments can proceed into infinity. The system of mathematics simply cannot define truth in any limited fashion. It can go on forever….

That is the essence of Godel’s theorem. In order to find out if truth could be represented in mathematics, Godel had to develop a system in which the system of math actually referred back to itself. To do this, he had to develop a “Godel number” system in which the axioms of math( plus, minus, division, multiplication, etc) were represented as numbers themselves, so that the system was “self referencing”.

What Godel demonstrated b this was that a system of complex mathematics would produce a statement which said of itself, “I exist, but I cannot be proven within this system”.

From “outside” the system, the person could see if it was true, but the system itself simply had nothing to say about it! it was undecidable, therefore making the system incomplete.

The result was “in any consistent axiomatic formulation of number theory, there exists undecidable propositions”.

This same process may also be admitted by looking at Jeremiah 17:9 and Romans 8:7. When the human mind looks inside itself for truth, “self references”, it will come up with an infinity of possibilities as to what is true, especially in regard to God!

If we seek to organize truth about God in the form of rules and laws, that organization will have to reflect the limitations of our own minds. It will reflect also the incompleteness of our mathematical systems and our systems of logic as well.

We can’t get “there” from “here”.

That’s why, if we seek to “convert” others to a certain truth, that truth will ultimately split into an infinity of different ideas and concepts! No human mind can represent God in a complete sense, and that’s what both Paul and Jesus tells us.

Good arguments about free will and omniscience building.

When God “tested” Abraham, did he know for sure what Abraham would do?(Assuming, of course, that there was an Abraham, or God).

How about Genesis 15? God allegedly put Abraham to sleep and pointed out: “Know of a surety that thy seed shall be a stranger in a land that is not their’s, and shall serve them. And they shall afflict them four hundred years”.

This was a guarantee of something that would happen to Abraham’s children BEFORE Isaac was even born. assuming the story was true, therefore, we are forced to logically conclude that it would occur as prophesied regardless of what choice Abraham made regarding the sacrifice of Isaac on the alter.

Of course you can argue that “God is this, God is that, or god is the other…” but the fact given is this: Abraham’s descendants were to be enslaved four hundred years. Of course, this assumes that any of it ever happened, but if you’re going to argue “God” from a biblical perspective, you’re sort of stuck with what you’re given.

Of course, we can take it as a lesson similar to conclusions of Talmudic scholars: God was showing Abraham that sacrifice would not be the way of obedience or “proof testing” of faithfulness. In fact, the chief “sin” or blasphemy against God is the sacrifice of children at “Tophet“, which is to be a great place of burning.

Now, you can argue on this a million different ways, but from what we read above, we would have to conclude that whether Abraham sacrificed Isaac or not, Abraham’s descendants would be slaves in Israel four hundred years.

And while we’re arguing it, does God create evil? How about Isaiah 45:7? Or Amos 3:6?

Does “free will” mean freedom from God’s foreknowledge? From every definition available, from a purely physical view, “free will” is simply the ability to choose as we believe. There is no evidence for anything greater. Freedom is the absence of absolute knowledge.

If you want to try and define God, you will end up exactly with the situation we see today: over 38,000 estimated versions of christianity, none of which can prove the authority of their beliefs, and therefore, as Jesus said in Matthew 24;23, no reason to follow any of them.

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