“Magical gods” in the conventional supernatural sense generally don’t exist in any universes, insofar as a lot of the properties conventionally ascribed to them are logically impossible or ill-defined, but entities we’d recognize as gods of various sorts do in fact exist in a wide variety of mathematically-describable universes. Whether all mathematically-describable universes have the same ontological status as this one is an open question, to the extent that that question makes sense.
(Some would disagree with referring to any such beings as “gods”, e.g. Damien Broderick who said “Gods are ontologically distinct from creatures, or they’re not worth the paper they’re written on”, but this is a semantic argument and I’m not sure how important it is. As long as we’re clear that it’s probably possible to coherently describe a wide variety of godlike beings but that none of them will have properties like omniscience, omnipotence, etc. in the strongest forms theologians have come up with.)
Thanks, that makes more sense to me. I didn’t think qualities like omnipotence and such could actually be realized. Any way you can give me an idea of what these godlike entities look like though? You indicate they aren’t actually “magical” per se—so they would have to be subject to whatever laws of physics reign in their world, no? I take it we must talking about superintelligent AIs or alien simulators or something weird like that?
Why, we could come up with abstract universes where the Magical Gods have exactly the powers and understanding of what’s going on befitting Magical Gods. I wasn’t thinking of normal and mundane things like superintelligent AIs or alien simulators. Take Thor, for example: he doesn’t need to obey Maxwell’s equations or believe himself to be someone other than a hummer-wielding god of lightning and thunder.
Maybe I’m just confused by your use of the term “magical”. I am imagining magic as some kind of inexplicable, contracausal force—so for example, if Thor wanted to magically heal someone he would just will the person’s wounds to disappear and, voila, without any physical process acting on the wounds to make them heal up, they just disappear. But surely that’s not possible, right?
“Magical gods” in the conventional supernatural sense generally don’t exist in any universes, insofar as a lot of the properties conventionally ascribed to them are logically impossible or ill-defined, but entities we’d recognize as gods of various sorts do in fact exist in a wide variety of mathematically-describable universes. Whether all mathematically-describable universes have the same ontological status as this one is an open question, to the extent that that question makes sense.
(Some would disagree with referring to any such beings as “gods”, e.g. Damien Broderick who said “Gods are ontologically distinct from creatures, or they’re not worth the paper they’re written on”, but this is a semantic argument and I’m not sure how important it is. As long as we’re clear that it’s probably possible to coherently describe a wide variety of godlike beings but that none of them will have properties like omniscience, omnipotence, etc. in the strongest forms theologians have come up with.)
Thanks, that makes more sense to me. I didn’t think qualities like omnipotence and such could actually be realized. Any way you can give me an idea of what these godlike entities look like though? You indicate they aren’t actually “magical” per se—so they would have to be subject to whatever laws of physics reign in their world, no? I take it we must talking about superintelligent AIs or alien simulators or something weird like that?
Yes.
Why, we could come up with abstract universes where the Magical Gods have exactly the powers and understanding of what’s going on befitting Magical Gods. I wasn’t thinking of normal and mundane things like superintelligent AIs or alien simulators. Take Thor, for example: he doesn’t need to obey Maxwell’s equations or believe himself to be someone other than a hummer-wielding god of lightning and thunder.
Maybe I’m just confused by your use of the term “magical”. I am imagining magic as some kind of inexplicable, contracausal force—so for example, if Thor wanted to magically heal someone he would just will the person’s wounds to disappear and, voila, without any physical process acting on the wounds to make them heal up, they just disappear. But surely that’s not possible, right?
Your imagining what’s hypothetically-anticipated to happen is the kind of lawful process that magical worlds obey by stipulation.