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Could I win a chess game with God?
We know that at some point a game will evolve to where some definite
ending is inevitable. "Mate in five" means that it doesn't matter
what moves you make from this point on: you will lose. We humans
have the ability to look forward and imagine all the possibilities
of the game at that point and determine the outcome.
One would imagine that an Omnipotent being could examine many more
game paths than we can. Indeed, if Omnipotent, he can examine *all*
possible game paths, and "Mate in 68" might be a perfectly reasonable
thing for him to say, regardless of our inability to comprehend.
We certainly can't calculate all the possibilities of chess. God,
being Omnipotent, certainly could. It may even be that chess is
a game that can always be won by perfect play, like tic-tac-toe.
We wouldn't know that, but let's assume for a moment that chess
is a little bit more complex, and does not have a perfect play
strategy.
But let's pretend it almost does. For our purposes, let's pretend
that it is my very first move that is critical. Let's pretend that
if I make any move *but* P-Q3, I will lose. That is, for all games that
start with any other move, there are inevitable endings that
God wins. Since he knows all of them, I'm sunk. He can play a
perfect winning game if I don't play P-Q3.
But P-Q3 gives me a chance. Sure, I've got lots of other moves I've
got to make correctly after this, and God has the advantage of knowing
which paths lead to my destruction, but, at least at that moment,
I have the potential of winning.
And God has lost his Omnipotence.
P-Q3 is my free will choice. God cannot know if I will make that move;
if he did I would not have free will. If I don't have free will, the
whole sin/punishment thing falls apart, and we can't have that. So I
have free will, and God hasn't a clue how the game will end. For
every further correct free will choice I make, he is in the same
dilemma: until I screw up and get onto a path that he automatically
wins, he does not know what will happen next. He is clueless, not
Omnipotent.
He also becomes fallible.
My free will is not merely the tossing of a coin. My decisions come
from biases, opinions, and experience. God could be aware of these
factors, but (again) he cannot be absolutely sure how each of them
will affect my decisions. If he were sure, I wouldn't have free will,
etc., so he does not know. Since he does not know, he cannot tell
how one of *his* moves will affect my next move.
Let us assume that God's proper response to my P-Q3 is P-K4. That is,
although P-Q3 has given me a temporary possibility of winning, most
of the games in which I lose continue with God moving to K4.
But it might be that this move will cause to to move my knight, which
happens to be move number three on the game path that will lead to my
winning. On the other hand, if God had played his knight, I might
have responded with P-K4, which puts me back on the path to destruction
immediately. A "wrong" move for god might lead to his winning simply
because of my human faults, biases and preconceptions.
So God can't know which of his own moves may contribute toward my
winning the game. He is fallible; he can make a mistake. The only
way that could not be true would be if he already knew what I would
decide. My free will prevents that knowledge, so he is fallible.
This is just a chess game. Although the possible combinations seem
large to us, we know they are finite. And yet a finite, human
game shows God to be both impotent and fallible.
How much more impotent and fallible must God be with regard to 5 billion
human beings, each making free will decisions that carom off each other
like billiard balls on a monstrous table? Charlie in Sacramento
decides to turn left at an intersection. Because of that, he's in
an accident. Because of that, the following week he is in the repair
shop, where he meets Sally, who is there because *she* turned right
at another intersection. Their ultimate marriage results in a child
who murders someone from Hong Kong... and so on, and so on, and so on.
God hasn't a clue what will happen. He cannot. Even if he can keep
all possible outcomes for every possible decision that every possible
("let's only have two children, not three") human can or will make,
he can't begin to know where it's going because free will exists.
And he can't interfere, either, because he cannot know the results
of his actions. Because humans have free will, some of the possible
paths that would spring from his actions could lead to great evil.
He can't tell, and he would be powerless against it. Just as his incorrect
chess move might be the best way to beat me, any action he takes
may lead to unfortunate and undesirable results.
So, it seems we have quite an interesting god, here. Impotent, fallible,
and limited. He can't be the ultimate judge of good and evil because
he can't even tell if his own actions are good or evil, never mind
ours. He can't be much of anything, in fact.
Hardly what the Christians sell, is it?
Mon Apr 23 07:32:39 2007 anonymous
This article was written by someone who knows very little about Christianity
and even less about chess.
Chess is a man-made game. DNA is a God-Made game. Circular logic, you assume
White has a forced win, therefore God needs to find a way for you to lose
since the human could force a win. We dont know that. We dont even know
if Black has a forced draw. Chess is played in three dimensions -material,
time, and space. Humans however, represent a charactor who exists outside
all three of these chess dimensions, and the point of chess is, no chess
piece lands on a square by his own doing. The Human intercedes through all
three dimensions of chess and places the Knight on KQB3, the Knight is on
KQB3 not because the knight chose too, but because the Human figure decided
thats where he belongs. What you fail to understand in the Game of DNA,
is God exists outside all 4 of our dimensions of life, and we are but the
pawns and pieces, going where God wants us to go. Furthermore, in God's
game of DNA, God doesn't play against anybody. Therefore he can't lose.
Humans all too often attempt to play God in there own lives, just as if
some chess piece deluded itself that it would be better at playing the role
Human than of piece. Free will means you are free to choose. Since God can
see every possible chess game that there can ever possibly be, as the game
unfolds in the present, God has already seen it in the past. I know once
P-K4, P-K5, P-KB4 starts, I am watching a game I have already seen in the
past, and know where its going to lead. In fact everything in the opening
for an experienced chess player is a "repeat". God knows every possible
concieveable butterfly flaps its wings, creates a strom in Ohio scenerio
in the past. You fail to understand the unfathamable powers of God and you
overestimate your own feeble understanding. You have free will, God has
perfect knowledge. Therefore if you played a game of chess with God, God
would win unless you too had perfect knowledge, and if he gave you that,
you could either force a win, or force a draw depending on what that perfect
knowledge of chess tells you, either way God is not standing on the sidelines
biting his fingernails wondering whats going on.
Mon Apr 23 10:17:00 2007 TonyLawrence
Can't read well, can you?
We DO know that there are forced win positions. I'm merely moving backwards
to explore how you GET to such positions. To make it easier for you, imagine
one move prior to "mate in five". If you make the wrong move, then it is
a forced win. Roll that on back to the beginning of the game and you have
what is posited here.
You say "we are but the pawns and pieces, going where God wants us to go".
That would mean no free will, That's typical godsoaked confusion..
And then you babble on playing the "repeat" card: your godthing is
omniscient because he sees it all, past, present and future. Again, that
nulls free will: you THINK you have free wil, but in fact its all played
and done.
Look: I understand you need this. Nevertheless, none of it hangs together
and cannot be reality: there are no gods, period.
Tue Apr 24 18:32:29 2007 anonymous
Again,
We do not "know" if white has a forced win after the first move, therfore
getting to this potential *god-mate in 47* as early as move 2 is a meaningless
question. Its like saying would you be perturbed if you were not born. Black
could have a forced draw no matter what white does, and to get into your
forced win, Black (God), not White (human) would have to make a mistake.
If white does have a forced win, its from move one. Your saying that if
you make any move other then P-Q3 on the first move in your never never
peter pan pretend chess land, white loses to God. Your positing theory is
that inspite of the fact that white has an - advantage - in "time", Black,
being played by God, has a forced win if white does not make the one single
"saving" move of P-Q3! This would mean that white is trying to save himself
from black on the opening move! No chess theorist agrees with this shaky
foundation. And then from this leaky bucket ,your conjecturing about free
will, God, and Christianity,
String theory tells us there are multiple dimensions in the universe beyond
our 4. The only way to bring together the 4 forces of the universe into
a single theory is to have more than 4 dimensions in the universe. We have
no idea as to the limit to which the extra-dimensionality power of God exists
to solve your so-called contradictions. I can say a triangle "cannot" be
a circle in 2 dimensions but can equally say a triangle "can" be a circle
in 3 dimensions of space. You have to except an incompleteness of "facts"
and you have to accept that no mathematical "truths" exist for which an
absolute proof can be developed. None. There are no set of axioms that are
provable completly. So the bottom line is, given the many perhaps even infintely
more dimesions in the universe, infinitely more resolutions can be offered
fantastically better than mine to preserve free will while acknowledging
God's absolute control.
I would spend less time on what Christian sell, and more time on what "you"
sell. Lets see, that Laws of thermo break down at the precise moment the
universe was created, and at this critical point quantum mechanics broke
down a little because even though quantum mechanics is a time dependent
physics, we need to use a quantum event to explain the creation of time.
And then some 6 billion years later a primordial soup gave birth to the
first living cell and then after that Darwinian theory comes into play,
meaning, frankly, there was really nothing that Hitler did that was wrong
because survival of the fittest has no room for an inferior race of humans
and on and on and on and on. To paraphrase your own life's thematic book
called, "A bief history of - Life." what role therfore for thought, none,
for there is nothing for thought to do!
And as far as this religion is based on a house of dollars card. I never
saw the Church of agnosticism or the church of athiesm help anybody! In
fact, I can argue that every evil deed that has ever been done in the history
of humanity, those person or persons when they did it, were never worried
about the eternal damnation of their soul.
Tue Apr 24 19:10:49 2007 TonyLawrence
Clueless..
You have no idea, do you? You don't understand, but you babble on..
I don't argue with people like you.
Wed Apr 25 12:17:07 2007 BigDumbDinosaur
And as far as this religion is based on a house of dollars card. I
never
saw the Church of agnosticism or the church of athiesm help anybody!
I
fall into one of those two categories and I help out people all the time.
The difference between me and those superstitious souls who do it under
the guise of religion is that I help out because I *want to*, not because
of any fear of a hell or whatever.
As for the money angle, organized religion
is all about the money. I recall a comment that Lenny Bruce once
made about preachers, which was to the effect that any preacher who owned
more than one suit was a common hustler as long as someone in the world
had no suit. Al and Jesse, are you two charlatans listening?
Wed Apr 25 15:46:32 2007 anonymous
Tony, I have forgotten more about chess than you will ever know. So, just
don't use chess as an atheistic proof text to prove God does not exist and
you will be taking a step in the right direction. You can believe God does
not exist or that we all came from yellow poco dotted chickens, and I really
don't care, but at some point you need to offer some "positive" evidence
to support your point.
Reti, the great hypermodern chess player, said the reason he liked the
struggle of chess more than the science of math, was that your antagonist
is ultimately -forced- to see the power and the truth of your ideas. Since
he is getting "checkmated". Just because the science of the Laws of Thermo
clearly have theistic implications, your free to ignore those ideas and
belong to the club of loophole seekers. And in spite of that, you've written
a short novelty where you defeat God and prove his non-existence in a Game
of Chess! You actually proved a negative. You don't argue when you can't.
I understand.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Who said Jesse Jackson is not a fraud! Who said that he is a true Christian?
I can simply say that the State and the Government are your organized religion.
For every -one- church frauding money with suit and tie preachers, there
are hundreds of smaller churches with living wages doing God's business
every day, but they just don't make the paper nor the headlines. But my
point still stands, I am not interested on why you do so-called "good" because
you want to, I want to know why people do so-called "evil", Again, every
evil act ever done has been done carefree without a worry that a God, will
pass a judgment on their eternal soul.
Wed Apr 25 15:51:18 2007 TonyLawrence
If you aren't smart enough to understand that this has very little to do
with chess, there's really no point in talking about it, is there?
Thu Apr 26 11:37:46 2007 TonyLawrence
I decided to move this discussion to
http://aplawrenceblogger.blogspot.com/2007/04/chess.html
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