God, as conceived by classical theologians, is supposed to be omnipotent. Of course the usual question is whether He can make a rock heavier than He can lift, but that's a silly question because it mixes up two definitions of omnipotence. There's Aquinas' conception which says "God can do anything which is logically possible" (ie. no, He cannot make a rock heavier than He can lift, but that doesn't mean He's not omnipotent), and there's Descartes' conception which says God can do the logically impossible (ie. yes, He can make a rock heavier than He can lift, and He can lift it).

My question sidesteps that issue. Clearly jumping is logically possible, otherwise we wouldn't have bunnies. So by either definition of "omnipotence" God should be able to do it. However, the proposition "God jumped" is clearly nonsensical. Unless you have an anthropomorphised god, like the Greeks, anything you can imagine jumping is not your God.


The point of this example is to make you see how you cannot define something by its actions or abilities. If I ask you what "God" means to you and you tell me "God created the world" or "God is all-powerful" that tells me nothing whatsoever about God. Every definition we have of "God" is based on verbs, when a meaningful description should be based on adjectives. Therefore the word "God" is meaningless.*


tl;dr
Can God jump?
That question doesn't make sense.
It doesn't make sense because we don't have an object to apply the action "jumping" to.
"God" has only ever been defined by what he does or what he can do (eg. "omnipotent"), but that is no description at all.
Therefore people don't know what the word "God" means.


Update: The first two people seem to have said something along the lines of God taking a temporary physical form, so I want to respond to that here. Sure, you can describe the situation where "a man-shaped object materialised, jumped, and then vanished," but if that's all your God is then I'm pretty sure Zeus could beat him in a fight. Hell, your God only existed for a few seconds! My point is, no one would accept that description of God as being the object of their belief. And if you say "God is the thing which took the form of a jumping man," that's just another description based on what God has done rather than what God is.



*I know I've brought this conclusion to debate three times before, but my argument is slightly different this time and I think it's in terms everyone should be able to understand.
And I'm aware of two possible lines of attack on my argument as stated so there's definitely room for debate here. Although one of those ways is a cunning trap.

I believe that God would be some sort of Astral Being, existing in time, but not locked in it, and with great power coming from the birth of the Universe. Basically, he/she/it is like "The Q" race in the Star Trek series: Voyager, but far, far older, and with far greater intelligence. Make sense?

I think God is an omnipotent being. He can be like a man, a woman, or just a light like the sun. I think he can jump he just wanted to assume a human form, but I might be wrong. He could be just a blob or something.

Quote from GrimmtheReaper

I believe that God would be some sort of Astral Being, existing in time, but not locked in it, and with great power coming from the birth of the Universe. Basically, he/she/it is like "The Q" race in the Star Trek series: Voyager, but far, far older, and with far greater intelligence. Make sense?

It answers this problem, I grant you. There's probably some debate to be had about the fine details, but I don't think this is the thread for that. I'll just say that I don't think many people share your belief, which isn't necessarily a bad thing but it means that your belief wasn't really the target of this argument.

Quote from Triss

I think God can do anything. So yes, he can jump if he wanted to. He also can fuck himself with tentacles.

Are you actually able to conceive of the situation you are describing, or are you just stringing words together with the prefix "He can"? Can He also airgbkavnd;kjandv;andkjbv;nik?

Quote from Zed

It answers this problem, I grant you. There's probably some debate to be had about the fine details, but I don't think this is the thread for that. I'll just say that I don't think many people share your belief, which isn't necessarily a bad thing but it means that your belief wasn't really the target of this argument.

Oh, you meant it like that. Let me rephrase it.

Sorry, I got ninja'd. I think lots of people believe what you said, but I don't think it's a coherent belief.

Quote from Triss

I think God is an omnipotent being. He can be like a man, a woman, or just a light like the sun. I think he can jump he just wanted to assume a human form, but I might be wrong. He could be just a blob or something.

The problem comes when you try to talk about the non-physical parts. So you can describe a human materialising out of nowhere, jumping, and then dematerialising again afterwards. Is that all God is? Just a man who only existed for a few seconds, performed one simple act, and then vanished? If so then awesome, but I think a lot of people would want to say God is more than that, and I want to challenge them to describe what that "more" is.

I think this point also applies to GrimmtheReaper's crazy thing.

1. God doesn't exist (or at least we have no reason to assume it exists, unless you're an idiot), therefore it's somewhat meaningless to even debate this.

2. If there were an omnipotent God, I am sure he could do whatever he wanted. Otherwise he wouldn't be omnipotent. If he wanted to subject himself to the laws of gravity, give himself a temporary physical body and start jumping away, then he could.

Quote from Zed

Sorry, I got ninja'd. I think lots of people believe what you said, but I don't think it's a coherent belief.



The problem comes when you try to talk about the non-physical parts. So you can describe a human materialising out of nowhere, jumping, and then dematerialising again afterwards. Is that all God is? Just a man who only existed for a few seconds, performed one simple act, and then vanished? If so then awesome, but I think a lot of people would want to say God is more than that, and I want to challenge them to describe what that "more" is.

I think this point also applies to GrimmtheReaper's crazy thing.

The simple act you say already did a huge ton of things that are today.

Relating to the real subject, God either does or does not exist. If he does, that has no answer. It can be a yes or a no. Why? Cause God's God, he can do anything he want remember? It's like, Lgolos making the chat thread. But with infinite powers.

Quote from Cronos

1. God doesn't exist (or at least we have no reason to assume it exists, unless you're an idiot), therefore it's somewhat meaningless to even debate this.

My point is to show that people's very conception of God is faulty because they fail to define the term. The reason we still have religions in the world despite the best efforts of Dawkins and co. is that deists and theists keep on changing their definitions. Philosophy has a genuine task here: to force believers to pin down their definitions so that science can actually make some headway on the issue. That is the objective of this thread.

(Also, "pointless", not "meaningless". Normally it's a small distinction, but "meaningless" is what I'm trying to prove here.)

2. If there were an omnipotent God, I am sure he could do whatever he wanted. Otherwise he wouldn't be omnipotent. If he wanted to subject himself to the laws of gravity, give himself a temporary physical body and start jumping away, then he could.

That's what the other two said, which is why I put a response to it in the OP.

Quote from Guitarii

The simple act you say already did a huge ton of things that are today.

Relating to the real subject, God either does or does not exist. If he does, that has no answer. It can be a yes or a no. Why? Cause God's God, he can do anything he want remember? It's like, Lgolos making the chat thread. But with infinite powers.

You're missing the point.

Can God flibodidybloop? That question clearly doesn't make sense because "flibodidybloop" is not a word. There isn't a yes or no answer because it isn't a real question.
The "can God jump?" question is the same. It is less obviously meaningless because each of the words appears to be real, but in this context the words don't fit. In the sentence "what happy open run" all the words are real but the sentence is meaningless because the words don't fit together that way. You can't conceive of anything which would fit that sentence. In the same way, if you try to conceive of a situation in which God jumps then you fail. To think about anything jumping you have to give it physical form, but once you imagine a physical form it is no longer God.


(At least, I assume you were missing the point and this answers you. It's really hard to know what you're saying when you directly contradict yourself from one sentence to the next)

can qualia jump?

I'm pretty sure that question fails for the same reason as yours, but I'm not really sure whether the implications are similar or not. maybe someone else can weigh in.

It's a very grey area whether or not you can actually talk about qualia. There's no real way to describe them except to say something like: "You feel this thing you're experiencing now? That's pain." You couldn't describe colour to a blind person, for example, so rather than talking about "blue" as being the actual sensation we talk about "blue" as being "the colour of the sky, however you perceive that to be". So there is at least some description there.

But it's not like people try to define qualia by what they do - they define them by perceptions. With "God" it's different, because people do try to define the object by what it does (or what it can do), and that only works if you have your own way of picking out the thing they're talking about. If we were in a room full of people sitting down with one guy standing up then you could say "Frank is the one guy who's standing up," but in that case I wouldn't be learning anything about Frank from you. I would get all of my information about Frank from observing the object which you had indicated. If we were outside the room and you told me "Frank is the one guy who's standing up now, but he'll be sitting down when we get in there" then it wouldn't tell me anything at all.

And you absolutely couldn't have someone whose only property was their ability to stand. As in, someone who literally occupied no physical time or space yet still somehow had this "standing" ability. That's just empty.

We would assume that God needs a physical body to jump; but being omnipotent, does he really need to be in a physical form? He's omnipotent. He can jump in whatever state he's in.

The thing is, we wouldn't say "God can flobbidywhatever" because that's a nonsense statement. I'm arguing that it's just as nonsensical to say "God can jump".

It's not a lack of power or ability. It's a lack of coherence.

I'm pretty convinced that if there indeed is a god he is something way beyond our comprehension, something we have never, and will never manage to describe or even conceive of. I'm also fairly sure that if such a god does exist he does not give a shit about us, we are just a tiny speck of matter in the much bigger, more interesting universe.

Quote from _Ai_

We would assume that God needs a physical body to jump; but being omnipotent, does he really need to be in a physical form? He's omnipotent. He can jump in whatever state he's in.

You're missing the point entirely. The jumping part is not really what you should be focusing on, but rather whatever would be doing the jumping.

If we're unable to conceive of it then we can't talk about it. Language is a communication of thought. If there is no thought, there should be no language.