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Old 07-04-2009, 07:33 PM
Mad Hatter Canada Mad Hatter is offline
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Join Date: May 2004
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Re: Preordinance and Punishment

Quote:
Originally Posted by mmmmm_PIE View Post
What about a robot chef, who feeds information (including salmonella content) into a simple program which outputs a "serve/don't serve" order the robot necessarily follows? Is the robot to be held responsible for any food poisoning? Surely the fault is with the programmer! But what if variables in the code were dictated by the result of some truly random quantum event? Is the universe at large now to blame?

From an omniscient POV all reasoning - even God's - reduces to a computer program. If that program, or at least some of its elements, came into being (or "eternally existed") without some previous cause then they are, by definition, random values. Where do God's responsibilities diverge from the robot's?
Then that wouldn't be God, that would be Mother Nature. I'm talking about the Christian doctrine, and I don't know any Christian who honestly thinks God's works are random or deterministic, or that God's consciousness is made up entirely of neurons.
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