tellhimfred.com

Yesterday I was reading through some links and found a link to a wikipedia article on unsolved problems in different academic disciplines. My favorites:

Sorites Paradox:
This is also called the “heap paradox”, and asks how we define a “thing.” The example given in the wikipedia article:

Is a bale of hay still a bale of hay if you remove one straw? If so, is it still a bale of hay if you remove another straw? If you continue this way, you will eventually deplete the entire bale of hay, and the question is: at what point is it no longer a bale of hay?

The knee-jerk answer to this seems to be “Well, how do we define a bale of hay?” Is it by weight? So, if you take out a straw and the bale no longer weighs as much as our agreed upon definition of a bale of hay, then, it is no longer a bale of hay. Well, not so fast. Because even if you said that a bale of hay is 1000 pounds, removing a single straw isn’t going to change the weight enough to matter. And if you were really anal about it and defined the weight to the .0000000 of an ounce, you could still remove, say, an atom, and that weight would be undetectable.

It also doesn’t address the problem of addition. Let’s say that a bird is sitting ontop of the bale of hay. Is it still a bale of hay? Or does the fact that a bird is now on it change it into something else entirely? Sounds kind of stupid, but if you are changing the definition based on subtracting a part, you have to change the definition when adding something, right?

The Problem Of Evil
This is the logical problem of justifying the existence of evil in the world with the existence of an omnipotent, omnibenevolent god. Here’s the logic, again from Wikipedia:

   1. God exists. (premise)
2. God is omnipotent. (premise - or true by definition of the word ‘God’)
3. God is all-benevolent. (premise - or true by definition)
4. All-benevolent beings are opposed to all evil. (premise - or true by definition)
5. All-benevolent beings who can eliminate evil will do so immediately when they become aware of it. (premise)
6. God is opposed to all evil. (conclusion from 3 and 4)
7. God can eliminate evil completely and immediately. (conclusion from 2)
1. Whatever the end result of suffering is, God can bring it about by ways which do not include suffering. (conclusion from 2)
2. God has no reason not to eliminate evil. (conclusion from 7.1)
3. God has no reason not to act immediately. (conclusion from 5)
8. God will eliminate evil completely and immediately. (conclusion from 6, 7.2 and 7.3)
9. Evil exists, has existed, and probably will always exist. (premise)
10. Items 8 and 9 are contradictory; therefore, one or more of the premises is false: either God does not exist, or he is not both omnipotent and all-benevolent or there is a reason why He does not act immediately.

There are several arguments against this, of course. For example:
* Good and evil are products of free will. (premise)
* Thus, there can be no good nor evil without free will.
* Thus, to remove evil would be to remove free will, which would also remove all good.
* Thus, to remove all evil is to remove all good, which is evil, so therefore, free will is necessary and is a divine manifestation of God.

I love these.

Anybody have other examples?