God, the Father, Almighty
- or just -
God, the Almighty Fiction?
Part I

Before we explore how Christianity's god has evolved over the millenia, let's consider a simple statement to test the concept of an Almighty Being for whom nothing, not even the termination of its own existence, is impossible:

THIS STATEMENT IS IMPOSSIBLE.

Clearly, the sentence exists, yet it tells us it cannot be. The challenge, then, for the Almighty Being ("AB") is to make the statement true, i.e. impossible. Those with a religious apologetic in mind might beg the question by arguing that of course AB can make it true—He's God! They could slip in a small change to make some other statement true, or weasel their way out by claiming that He wouldn't waste time trying. But the real question is could S/He succeed in making this one true? Well, if AB did succeed, then there would be no such statement. Hence, AB must fail, for a non-existent proposition is neither true nor not true. Recall that the challenge was to make the statement true. For fun, try the same test on yourself with this next one.

THIS STATEMENT IS NOT TRUE.¹

What of the related power of omniscience? Could our AB make certain truths unknowable to Himself and still be almighty? If no, then He is not almighty. If yes, then He would sacrifice both omnipotence and omniscience since He wouldn't know the truth in question or have a means of reacquiring it. Once you have conceded these points, you are fairly well committed to rejecting belief in an Almighty Being or a Dominus Iesus2. Likewise, you would reject Matthew 19:26 in which Jesus is quoted as saying, "For human beings this is impossible, but for God all things are possible." Such talk is known in legal circles as puffing, a frequent tactic both of marketers and of sweatshops promising new hires with "unlimited earning potential."

If our wondrous world can be explained
only as the creation of God,
then what a wondrous god He must be.

The English astronomer and mathematician John D. Barrow has argued that there could not even be an Omniscient Being which, although not almighty, knows all that is true. His argument (not explained here) is not entirely convincing, but he offers a startling principle about the nature of knowledge: "All that can be known is all that can be known, not all that is true."³ The idea is that there must always be at least one true statement which no being can ever know. In a moment we will see if this conclusion can be supported another way. However, if "Big O," as Barrow puts it, can't be almighty, there certainly is room to doubt the possibility of omniscience in whatever form it might take: human, machine, alien or supernatural.

In 1930 and 1931, Kurt Gödel, a young German-speaking mathematician from Brno, Czechoslovakia, once part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, published two curious papers. They described what have since become known as Gödel's Completeness Theorem and Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem. (These are sometimes referred to as Gödel's First and Second Incompleteness Theorems.) In short, Gödel proved that

"mathematics is open-ended. There can never be a final, best system of mathematics. Every axiom-system for mathematics will eventually run into certain simple problems that it cannot solve at all."⁴

Rudy Rucker states that there can never be what he calls a Universal Truth Machine⁵ capable of setting forth a complete set of axioms for mathematical truth. The roadblock is not technology but the nature of mathematics itself. According to the Incompleteness Theorem, if a formal system T is "(i) finitely describable, (ii) consistent, and (iii) strong enough to prove the basic facts about whole-number arithmetic," then T cannot even prove its own consistency. To state "T is consistent" means that for no statement written according to the rules of T can T prove the statement both true and not true. Thanks to Gödel, we now know that any such formal system of knowledge is and must remain fundamentally incomplete—the quest for new mathamatical truths can go on and on ad infinitum. His mathematician employment protection theorem does not bode well for the credibility of Big O, however.

Let's close with fair warning to the careless. It does not follow from anything above that the entire Bible is false or of no value. Recall the experience of MCI WorldCom, Enron and Arthur Andersen, the defunct accounting firm, and then read Sirach 31:6: "Many have been ensnared by gold, though destruction lay before their eyes." Likewise, it doesn't follow that "there is no truth" or that "everyone's opinion is valid." Can both I and Leftie relativists be correct when I say that most of their beliefs are nonsense? Lastly, it doesn't follow that secularism is the only alternative to worshipping gods—or even a rational one. Instead, through self-discipline and diligent study each of us might learn interesting and heretofore unimagined truths about the nature of the cosmos and our place within it. For instance, you might come to believe, as have Gödel and others, that the isolated sense of self you experience is a sort of an illusion of your consciousness, at which point you should have rejected the circular logic of Descartes' joke, cogito ergo sum—a flawed argument even if from the mouth of AB or Big O.

If the Almighty and All-Knowing cannot be,
then why call it God?

1. See also the Liar's Paradox in Paul's Letter to Titus 1:12-13: "One of them, a prophet of their own, once said, 'Cretans have always been liars, vicious beasts, and lazy gluttons.' That testimony is true." Jourdain's paradox is fun, too: "The second part of this sentence is true, and the first part of this sentence is false." Can AB resolve the paradox without prohibiting statements that refer indirectly to themselves as each half does?
2. Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Dominus Iesus: On the Unicity and Salvific Universality of Jesus Christ and the Church. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Prefect, and Tarcisio Bertone, S.D.B., Archbishop Emeritus of Vercelli, Secretary, August 6, 2000. In §6 it reads, "Therefore, the theory of the limited, incomplete, or imperfect character of the revelation of Jesus Christ, which would be complementary to that found in other religions, is contrary to the Church's faith." Furthermore, in §8, "Holy Mother Church...accepts as sacred and canonical the books of the Old and New Testaments, whole and entire, with all their parts, on the grounds that, written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit..., they have God as their author." Dominus Iesus is Latin for "Lord Jesus."
3. John D. Barrow, Impossibility: The Limits of Science and the Science of Limits, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 11. Barrow is Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University.
4. Rudy Rucker, Infinity and the Mind: The Science and Philosophy of the Infinite, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 157-8, 161. Rucker recently retired as Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at San Jose State University. Incidentally, Gödel, a close friend of A. Einstein, published a paper in the late 1940s showing that the past and the future exist statically and that time does not really pass. He even showed that travelling into one's past is logically possible, if not technologically practical. Gödel also tried to write a proof for the existence of God—but failed.
5. In 1936, before there were computers, Alan Turing contemplated the limits of calculating machines. His hypothetical device was later called a "Turing machine" and the problem of whether or not a particular computer calculation was solvable in a finite amout of time the "halting problem". There are other insoluble problems in mathematics and geometry such as expressing pi (p) as a rational number (in flat, not curved, space) or trisecting an angle with ruler and compass. Pierre Wantzel proved the impossibility of the latter in 1837. As with Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, the problem is one of intrinsic impossibility, not our lack of wits or technology.

Continue to Part II.