Jonah and the Whale.. a question.

God can pretty much do whatever he wants, right? Isn't that a kind of solipcism?

If they were inconsistent with his nature, why would he want to do them? Why would he want to do those things?What I meant was, God can do anything in the universe he chooses to, right? Regardless of the physical constraints in the universe?If that's so, how is that not solipcism? How can we know if anything is true about the universe if God can alter things at will?

You're right about the first part, but the second part doesn't necessarily follow. I don't believe that solpicism necessitates the lack of objective reality, only that we cannot percieve it. Ah, but if that external power can re-arrange reality at his whim, with no restrictions, then there's no way to have reliable knowledge about that reality. Ergo, if an external, arbitrary power is the ultimate determiner of reality, then your knowledge about reality is restricted in the same way it is under solipcism; theism is an inherently solipcist position.Suppose that the entire world had been created last tuesday, and we all have fake memories before that, thanks to God. If you can't tell the difference, how is that not solipcism?

Right, exactly, that's solipcism. Just because we don't know everything doesn't mean we know nothing. We can still come to conclusions that explain what we observe; we can still generate models that predict observations we will make. Solipcism doesn't mean we can't know anything; it just means that the maps we make are not the territory, that knowledge about observations of the universe should not be confused with knowledge about the universe. Maybe you are, but you're programmed to feel hungry and weak by the machines. What are hunger and weakness if not signals from your body; signals that could be counterfeited? And have you ever actually known, I mean personally known like you grew up with them, anybody who's actually died of starvation? I sure haven't.

Pretty much. I think it's as equally fallacious to suggest that we "define our own reality" as it is to suggest that we can know we're accurately perceiving reality. Both of those positions make the same mistake of overstating what we can know about reality.