Words, Pictures, Logic, Ethics, and Not Being God

God is omniscient according to some religions. An omniscient being is one who knows all there is to know. This essay is about not being omniscient (thus, "not being God" in the title). Because people are not omniscient, we have to use logic to figure out things we cannot directly know or observe, and we have to use communication to let each other know what we believe and why we believe it, since we cannot look directly into each others' minds.

Presumably omniscient beings know everything somehow directly, the same way we know our own names or that we are standing up or that it is raining when we are outside in it - they don't have to sit down and figure them out; they just know everything. If, for example, we ask God what day of the week June 15, 3208 will be, God already knows that and will just be able to tell you. He won't have to make any calculations or look anything up in an almanac or a calendar that is for "the future" by our standards of time. If we ask God how long it will take to fill up a swimming pool of a certain size if there are two pipes putting water in at certain rates and one pipe allowing water to go out at a lesser rate, God won't have to get out his algebra formulas; He will just tell you. If God sits on a jury, we would not really need to present Him with any evidence; He already knows whether the person did it or not; He does not have to base His conclusion on what is presented in court; and whatever verdict He hands down will be beyond the shadow of a doubt -- for Him, at least. If we need a poem about some subject, God can just whip one out for you; He won't need to sit down and think about what to compose or how best to say it. He will already know.

But people do not have that luxury of certain knowledge about every topic, knowledge which is always immediately available. Ask most people a question that needs to be solved by calculus and they will not know the answer; they will not be able to figure out the answer; and they likely will not even know how to go about trying to figure out the answer. Ask them to multiply two fairly large numbers together and they will be able to do it, but they will either need pencil and paper or they will need some sort of calculator. They will not just immediately know the answer.

The point of mathematical calculations and the point of logical deductions and reasoning are to figure out what you do not immediately know from the knowledge that you do have -- where such knowledge is possible. Not all knowledge is derived knowledge, nor is it derivable. If you do not know what baseball player won the batting title in the American League in 1939 or who had the most hits in 1911, it will not help much to think about it, though if you know about the history of baseball, you might be able to narrow the possible field down to a number that includes the right name.

The idea of deduction is to derive the knowledge sought, when it is able to be derived at all. This is not always easy. There are two different aspects to this because there is a difference between being able to discover any given solution on your own and being able to follow it once it is given by someone else. Discovering it takes some luck and imagination and inventiveness, as well as logical understanding. But being able to understand it only requires logical ability. It is the importance of logical understanding for being ethical that I wish to discuss in this essay.

First let me give some objective problems to exemplify some points:

A logic problem: Three people are standing in a line, one behind the other, such that the last person can see both of the two people in front of him, the middle person can see only the one person in front of him, and the first person can see no one else. From a pile of five hats - - three of them white and two of them black - - which each person knows about, you place a hat on each person's head. None of them can see their own hats, but the last person can see each hat on the other two, and the middle person can see the one hat of the person in front of him. The last person in the line is asked what color hat he is wearing and he says, truthfully, he does not know. The middle person is then asked, after hearing all this, what color hat he has on, and he also truthfully says he does not know. The woman in the front then is asked what color hat she has on, and even though she cannot see any of the hats, she says she knows what color hat she has on. How does she know, and what color hat is it?

Math problem #1: Imagine there is a smooth ball the size of the earth, 24,000 miles around, and you tied a ribbon tight around the equator of the ball, then spliced in one additional yard of ribbon (36 inches) of ribbon, so there was a small loop at one point on the surface of the ball. Then imagine that you smooth out the loop so that the slack in the ribbon is spread evenly over the whole 24,000 mile surface. Will the ribbon be very far off the ground? About how high off the ground do you think it will be?

Math problem #2: To qualify for an automobile race on a particular one-mile oval track, drivers must do two laps, averaging 60 mph. On his first lap one driver has an engine problem that holds his speed down to 30 mph for that lap. How fast must he do the second lap in order to average 60 mph for the both of them?

In the logic problem with the hats, deduction is required to know how the first person in line knows what color hat she is wearing, and, if you cannot see the hats, deduction is also required to know what color hat she is wearing. However, deduction is not required to know what color hat she has on if you can look at her, as the two behind her can do. The two people behind her know what color hat she is wearing without making any deduction. They do not need to make a deduction because they can see what color hat she has on. They know directly. She, however, cannot see and cannot know directly, so if she is to know at all, it must be from making a deduction. She has to use logic or reasoning to know. In this particular problem there is sufficient information to be able to draw the correct conclusion. In real life there is not always sufficient information to be able to know that which you cannot observe directly.

The solution to the hat problem is this: if the two front people were both wearing black hats, the person in the back would know his hat was white because there were only two black hats in the pile. Since he does not know what color his hat is, both of those first two hats then cannot be black. That means either both are white or one is white and the other black. If the front one were black, the middle person would see that and, knowing that both his and the front person's