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Squaring Circles and Other Nifty Tricks
12/18/2002

Arthur Silber links to an online "philosophy" game that is meant to assess one's ability to navigate the debate about God's existence consistently. One "trap" that the game lays for believers is to ask whether God can do anything and later to ask if God could make circles into squares and one plus one equal seventy-two. This seems indicative to me of the changes in emphasis and lack of imagination typical of much of this sort of thinking. Specifically, both of these examples of things that God "must be capable of" if omnipotent have too much to do with perception, definition, and semantics to be "gotchas" against believers. For example, I've sometimes wondered if our entire numeric system might be off in some (thus far) unimaginable way because constants seem so strangely unrelated.

But I've a single solution, from a broader point of view, for both of the conundrums.

The moving gif is a bit slow to be effective, but here are the flattened frames.

What you're looking at is (a quick and crude) picture of four dots in a square rotated nine times at 10 degrees each time (i.e., 36 dots). If it were moving quickly enough to appear as a circle, all you'd have to do is stop it (or rotate yourself at the same speed) for the circle to be a square. Additionally, if you had two of them, you'd have a total of 72 dots.

Posted by Justin Katz @ 12:36 PM EST

1 Comment

Quite imaginative.

Those "gotchas" are intellectual nonsense. What there asking is if God can make a contradiction which is not any material thing at all but is a concept.

Jeff miller @ 12/18/2002 05:12 PM EST