Following on to the sub-thread here, initiated by Recovering Irrationalist, about whether mathematical existence may be all there is, and that we live in it.
What does that say about the title of the post, Beyond the Reach of God?
Wouldn’t it imply that there are those who are indeed beyond God’s reach, since even God Himself cannot change the nature of mathematics? That is, God does not really have any control over the multiverse; it exists in an invariant form independent of God’s existence.
However we can also argue that there are worlds within the multiverse where something like God exists and does have control, as well as worlds where there is no such entity. (This requires understanding “control” as being compatible with the deterministic nature of the mathematical multiverse.) The question then arises as to which kind of world within the multiverse we inhabit. Are we beyond the reach of God?
A case can be made that this kind of question is poorly posed, because entities with brain structures identical to our own inhabit many places in the multiverse, hence we have to view our experiences as being a sort of superposition of all those instances. So we should ask, what fraction of our copies exist in universes controlled by a God-like entity, versus what fraction exist in universes without any such controller? At this point the traditional arguments come into play about how likely the universe we see about us is likely to be compatible with the ability and motivations of a God-like entity, whether such an entity would allow injustice and evil to exist, etc.
Following on to the sub-thread here, initiated by Recovering Irrationalist, about whether mathematical existence may be all there is, and that we live in it.
What does that say about the title of the post, Beyond the Reach of God?
Wouldn’t it imply that there are those who are indeed beyond God’s reach, since even God Himself cannot change the nature of mathematics? That is, God does not really have any control over the multiverse; it exists in an invariant form independent of God’s existence.
However we can also argue that there are worlds within the multiverse where something like God exists and does have control, as well as worlds where there is no such entity. (This requires understanding “control” as being compatible with the deterministic nature of the mathematical multiverse.) The question then arises as to which kind of world within the multiverse we inhabit. Are we beyond the reach of God?
A case can be made that this kind of question is poorly posed, because entities with brain structures identical to our own inhabit many places in the multiverse, hence we have to view our experiences as being a sort of superposition of all those instances. So we should ask, what fraction of our copies exist in universes controlled by a God-like entity, versus what fraction exist in universes without any such controller? At this point the traditional arguments come into play about how likely the universe we see about us is likely to be compatible with the ability and motivations of a God-like entity, whether such an entity would allow injustice and evil to exist, etc.