How did Adam and Eve learn to speak?

Hi @vjtorley,
My first response is to note that most of your objections are not directly relevant to the topic of the Deceptive God Objection and de novo creation (DNC) of A&E; in fact they are more to do with the coherence of the concept of DNC itself. (And I think your concerns, if true, would have bearing on God’s creation of the whole universe, not just A&E.) The only relevant part is that you seem to think that in order for God to realize neurological structure S_E, God needs to implant false memories to some degree, perhaps because of your view that meaning is tied to causal history. As I noted in my original post, this is disproven by the Kyle and Amato cases: even if God had to assume a “false” causal history in order to decide which meanings and nuances Adam and Eve would understand with regards to words, he did not have to implant false memories. His actions would be similar to creating Adam and Eve with adult human bodies and a choice of a certain ethnic complexion (and maybe a bellybutton).

My second response is more directly to your claims about DNC. First, I think Wolfram’s Principle of Computational Equivalence is not a universally accepted principle. Most materialists would regard the complete laws of physics (once we discover them) as in principle sufficient to predict the behavior of all things in the universe, given some initial conditions.[1] For those who are not materialists (such as Aristotelians :wink:, but also in general - @structureoftruth seems to hold this view), the Principle would in fact be evidence of the inability of the mathematics to capture everything about reality. Thus, instead of concluding that mathematics or physics limits God’s ability to create, we would say that this only shows our fundamental inability to exhaustively understand reality which only God can do.

This ties broadly into your argument against arbitrary choices by God; I do agree with Matthew that we cannot really know whether the choices are arbitrary, given the existence of chaotic behavior and the notion that creation is made to reflect God’s glory: we don’t have exhaustive knowledge of God’s glory, so we have no idea what features of creation are necessary to reflect that, nor whether two different configurations are equally as good in realizing this, such that choosing one of them becomes an arbitrary choice by God.

I also note that your observation that there is an infinity of ways of learning the word “melodious” seems to show that the way of learning is unimportant compared to the final meaning, such that for God to choose any one of them for A&E is inconsequential to whether he is deceiving anyone with that choice. Now, if there were infinite ways of understanding the word “melodious” we would ask the question of how did God pick one way, and I think the answer is that God picked whichever was the most useful to realize his eschatological purposes, including for Adam and Eve to be in a relationship with him.

Finally, to your question about whether Jesus’ multiplication of the loaves and fishes violates the Conservation of Energy: I honestly do not know for sure - my default response is that it does, and that is not a problem. I think you have a misunderstanding of Noether’s theorem; all it says in this case is that time translation invariance implies conservation of energy. Thus, Jesus violating conservation of energy would imply that the universe violates time translation invariance. That’s not an issue for me, as this is a miracle and the amount of violation is quite small (a few thousand loaves and fishes) compared to the amount of matter in the universe. Also, it is entirely possible that Jesus teleported those breads and loaves from somewhere else; I think these are details which are not very meaningful to speculate on.

Notes
[1] @PdotdQ has reminded us that there are problems with this view even in the case of classical physics, such as the space invaders problem and Norton’s dome.

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