[ExI] samantha vs singularity debate

Damien Broderick thespike at satx.rr.com
Wed Sep 15 22:54:39 UTC 2010


On 9/15/2010 5:41 PM, Gregory Jones wrote:

> Richard Rice,... The Openness of God.  ...
> He argued in that book that god really isn't infinite, that he has a
> life, he watches and learns stuff, a little like we do only better, that
> he really can't do anything he wants.

As Norman Mailer wrote (and I borrowed this as the main epigraph of THE 
JUDAS MANDALA [1982], with pretty much the same time-looping 
god-at-the-end-of-time that Spike posits in his gedankenexperiment):

"But once I think of an imperfect God, I can begin to imagine a Being 
greater than ourselves, who nonetheless shares his instinctive logic 
with us: We as men seek to grow, so He seeks to grow; even as we each 
have a conception of being—my conception of being, my idea of how we 
should live, may triumph over yours, or yours over mine—so, in parallel, 
this God may be engaged in a similar war in the universe with other 
gods. We may even be the embodiment, the partial expression of his 
vision. If we fail, He fails too. He is imperfect in the way we are 
imperfect. He is not always as brave or extraordinary or as graceful as 
He might care to be.
	In capsule: There are times when He has to exploit us; there are times 
when we have to exploit Him; there are times when He has to drive us 
beyond our own natural depth because He needs us—those of us, at least, 
who are working for Him:
	We have yet to talk of the Devil."

Damien Broderick




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