OT: Jibjab, Politics, the Big Bang and more!

[Zapmeister]

Originally posted by Arryn:
An external oberver cannot observe the quantum state of a particle without altering it. Only the particles "know" their state.

Yes, but that's only because we have to observe particles by operating on them in a physical way, such as arranging a collision with another particle.

As the creator of the physical Universe, I think we can safely assume that God has non-physical powers at His disposal, and so is free of the Heisenberg constraint (which He imposed in the first place).

And although the volume of information involved with being omniscient is staggering, there's no real limit on God's capacity to know stuff either. So I can't see that there's a metaphysical problem although, as I said before, it may cause problems with the consistency of Christian belief.

Regarding omnipotence, people always try to debunk it by pointing out that no being, no matter how powerful, can perform a logical contradiction or paradox. I think that's just linguistic trickery. We need to use the word "omnipotent" in the same way as the people ascribing that property to God, and I think those people probably meant that He could perform any logically valid physical (or spiritual, I suppose) operation.

Which would kind of make sense if He made everything in the first place.