fundamental suppositions of God that are absurd

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_mikwut
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Re: fundamental suppositions of God that are absurd

Post by _mikwut »

DrW,

I don't remember discussing evolution on this thread. i don't know what part of the Standard model you believe I posted as incongruous? I had a philosophical position that something doesn't come from nothing. I am unaware of the empirical verification that it does.

regards, mikwut
All communication relies, to a noticeable extent on evoking knowledge that we cannot tell, all our knowledge of mental processes, like feelings or conscious intellectual activities, is based on a knowledge which we cannot tell.
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_Doctor CamNC4Me
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Re: fundamental suppositions of God that are absurd

Post by _Doctor CamNC4Me »

mikwut wrote:I had a philosophical position that something doesn't come from nothing. I am unaware of the empirical verification that it does.


1) Well, if you're talking about the universe popping into existence into an already pre-existing space then you already have something. in order to have space, even so-called empty space, you still have to have fundamental forces at play. The space, fundamentally, will out of necessity have energy simply to exist. How or why the universe would form out of that is getting worked out as labs at Livermore and other places are plucking away at the issues.

2) Who can say otherwise that the universe already existed, in whatever state, and the BB and its current incarnation (heh) is simply part of its life cycle?

3) Quantum mechanics, particle tunneling, fuzzy math... There is so much that we don't understand about reality, traversing dimensions, potentially multi-verses coming into and out of existence... But just because we don't understand something we shouldn't dismiss theories in favor of "God Did It", but ultimately the latter relieves you of the responsibility to figure it out... It leads to unaccountable behavior and scientific complacency.

I get that god-theory makes people feel meaningful, and gives them a sense of purpose. It's very comforting to think something very powerful is aware of you, loves you, and wants your money. I get it. I really do. But it does nothing to advance a systematic and thorough understanding of our reality... And if we ever hope, as a species, to escape our earthly confines we need to be pragmatic about our business. God-belief relieves us of this responsibility because, surprise surprise, all the good crap comes after you're dead. That's not helpful.

V/R
Doc
In the face of madness, rationality has no power - Xiao Wang, US historiographer, 2287 AD.

Every record...falsified, every book rewritten...every statue...has been renamed or torn down, every date...altered...the process is continuing...minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Ideology is always right.
_mikwut
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Re: fundamental suppositions of God that are absurd

Post by _mikwut »

Cam,

1) Well, if you're talking about the universe popping into existence into an already pre-existing space then you already have something.


My posts have been quite clear that that is not what I'm talking about. I am talking about something coming from nothing, no space no thing, nothing.

Who can say otherwise that the universe already existed, in whatever state, and the BB and its current incarnation (heh) is simply part of its life cycle?


I've beat this to death in my posts, I just refer you back to them instead of repeating myself again and again.

Quantum mechanics, particle tunneling, fuzzy math... There is so much that we don't understand about reality, traversing dimensions, potentially multi-verses coming into and out of existence... But just because we don't understand something we shouldn't dismiss theories in favor of "God Did It", but ultimately the latter relieves you of the responsibility to figure it out... It leads to unaccountable behavior and scientific complacency.


This is a perfect example of what I have argued in this thread. Do you really think I haven't heard the retort "God did it" or the cliché of scientific complacency? It isn't what theists argue. It is just supportive talk among the current unbelieving culture. I recognize the sideshow circus of young earth creationism but the association of that with all forms of theism is just ridiculous. This God did it or God of the gaps thinking is fallacious for many reasons. I will just give you a couple. It mistakes the relationship between God, the universe and science. There is no logical problem between something being intentional and something being understood scientifically. God is posited as an explanatory causation of why the world is (Aristotle's final and efficient causes) not how the world works (Aristotle's material and formal causes). Science shows us how a great deal of magic and wonder in the universe is done. We then rightly so call it science, but the mystery of the workings of the universe shouldn't be diminished just by the fact that we can understand it.

Secondly, if the base ontology of the universe isn't material but rather mind, and we don't know the answer to this, then your argument is placed upside down and it is your thought that would be hindering progress in a materialism of the gaps type way.

Finally, your accusations of complacency don't find practical real world examples. The very standard model of big bang cosmology was introduced to us and discovered by Georges Lemaître a Catholic Priest. He certainly carries the same or similar beliefs in a creator and intentional creation as I and so it certainly didn't lead to complacency as you claim with the very standard model we are discussing here.

my regards, mikwut

my regards, mikwut
All communication relies, to a noticeable extent on evoking knowledge that we cannot tell, all our knowledge of mental processes, like feelings or conscious intellectual activities, is based on a knowledge which we cannot tell.
-Michael Polanyi

"Why are you afraid, have you still no faith?" Mark 4:40
_Doctor CamNC4Me
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Re: fundamental suppositions of God that are absurd

Post by _Doctor CamNC4Me »

mikwut wrote:My posts have been quite clear that that is not what I'm talking about. I am talking about something coming from nothing, no space no thing, nothing.


Are you sure you're not the only one making this claim? For example, I have a hard time understanding or believing that something could materialize out of nothing. That just doesn't compute with me.

I'm open to various theories, and heck, if there were a god that was a causality I sure would like to understand the processes. Perhaps a universe is akin to a cell that divides... It gets big enough, and then splits into two... So on and so forth. I have no idea how it would happen, and I'm pretty certain we'll never know unless we could observe our continuum from the outside (so to speak).

That said, no religious philosophy has satisfactorily explained the purpose of a god-driven existence, other than Pay, Pray, and Obey... You'll get it when you're dead. Heh.

Maybe this post will offer you a different perspective:

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/gue ... m-nothing/

According to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, quantum fluctuations in the metastable false vacuum – a state absent of space, time or matter – can give rise to virtual particle pairs. Ordinarily these pairs self-annihilate almost instantly, but if these virtual particles separate immediately, they can avoid annihilation, creating a true vacuum bubble. The Wuhan team’s equations show that such a bubble has the potential to expand exponentially, causing a new universe to appear. All of this begins from quantum behavior and leads to the creation of a tremendous amount of matter and energy during the inflation stage. (Note that as stated in this paper, the metastable false vacuum has “neither matter nor space or time,” but is a form of wavefunction referred to as “quantum potential.” While most of us wouldn’t be inclined to call this “nothing,” physicists do refer to it as such.)

This description of exponential growth of a true vacuum bubble corresponds directly to the period of cosmic inflation resulting from the Big Bang. According to this proof, the bubble even stops expanding – or else it may continue to expand at a constant velocity – once it reaches a certain size. Nevertheless, this is a very different version of inflation than those proposed by Guth, Linde and others, in that it doesn’t rely on scalar fields, only quantum effects. Still, this work dovetails well with that of the BICEP2 team, both discoveries having significant implications for our understanding of the universe and our future should they stand up to further inquiry.


Do you have anything better than this:

Image
V/R
Doc
In the face of madness, rationality has no power - Xiao Wang, US historiographer, 2287 AD.

Every record...falsified, every book rewritten...every statue...has been renamed or torn down, every date...altered...the process is continuing...minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Ideology is always right.
_SteelHead
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Re: fundamental suppositions of God that are absurd

Post by _SteelHead »

The problem with the cosmological argument is that it insists that everything has a cause, but then gives god a pass. It resolves nothing. Where does god come from? In the LDS view as applied to the cosmological argument, a tactic that Robet F. Smith likes to employ, it becomes infinite buck passing with no beginning, violating the premise that everything has a cause as there is no begining there is no need for cause, and hence does not serve in the framework of the argument. In the more common view, god is uncaused, violating the premise. The argument negates itself, and yet it is forwarded as proof of god. If exceptions are allowed then the 1st premise is void.
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_Chap
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Re: fundamental suppositions of God that are absurd

Post by _Chap »

SteelHead wrote:The problem with the cosmological argument is that it insists that everything has a cause, but then gives god a pass. It resolves nothing. Where does god come from? In the LDS view as applied to the cosmological argument, a tactic that Robet F. Smith likes to employ, it becomes infinite buck passing with no beginning, violating the premise that everything has a cause as there is no begining there is no need for cause, and hence does not serve in the framework of the argument. In the more common view, god is uncaused, violating the premise. The argument negates itself, and yet it is forwarded as proof of god. If exceptions are allowed then the 1st premise is void.


Yup, certainly, but let's note something about mikwut's 'causes':

mikwut wrote:God is posited as an explanatory causation of why the world is (Aristotle's final and efficient causes) not how the world works (Aristotle's material and formal causes).


Mikwut is applying to modern cosmology the concepts of the 'four causes' as set out by the ancient Greek thinker Aristotle (384-322 BCE). Once we lived in a world where citing Aristotle would have been a final knock-down blow to any counter-argument. But although Aristotle was a very bright guy, he evolved his views on the basis of the world he knew then, including the technology and science of his own day over two millennia ago. He tells us explicitly that knowledge is to be gained by the empirical study of the world around us, and only after we have done that can we hope to rise to more general principles. His 'causes' are clearly mostly based on the kind of technical and natural processes he was able to study in ancient Greece:


A change or movement's material cause is the aspect of the change or movement which is determined by the material which the moving or changing things are made of. For a table, that might be wood; for a statue, that might be bronze or marble.
A change or movement's formal cause is a change or movement caused by the arrangement, shape or appearance of the thing changing or moving. Aristotle says for example that the ratio 2:1, and number in general, is the cause of the octave.
A change or movement's efficient or moving cause consists of things apart from the thing being changed or moved, which interact so as to be an agency of the change or movement. For example, the efficient cause of a table is a carpenter, or a person working as one, and according to Aristotle the efficient cause of a boy is a father.
An event's final cause is the aim or purpose being served by it. That for the sake of which a thing is what it is. For a seed, it might be an adult plant. For a sailboat, it might be sailing. For a ball at the top of a ramp, it might be coming to rest at the bottom.


Scientists (at least the ones I have known) just don't think like that any more. Starting from the base he had to work from, Aristotle achieved great things. But can anybody believe he would have produced the same analysis of causation if he had had experience of the world of modern physics? It does not seem very likely.

So I don't think it is a very helpful idea to try to apply Aristotle to the big bang, as mikwut does. The ideas involved are more or less incommensurable.

[Edited for typo]
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Re: fundamental suppositions of God that are absurd

Post by _DrW »

Mikwut seems to have somehow recast this thread about Fundamental Suppositions of God that are Absurd, highlighting the stark contrasts between science and religion, to a thread that focuses on the competition between science and philosophy, with mikwut making his stand in defense of the latter.

Other contributors to the thread have railed against what might be called the "Imperialism of Science" as it seems to slowly but steadily crowd out, or supersede, philosophy, metaphysics, religion (certainly), and perhaps even traditional psychology to some extent. And I can certainly appreciate where they are coming from. The question is whether this process is some kind of artificial scientific hegemony, or a natural and beneficial evolution in human thought and the human approach to relating to the natural world.

Below is an excerpt from an article by Joseph Rowlands. It seems to be fairly balanced on the subject of science vs. philosophy and the author makes some good points. This is not to say I agree with all that is stated here - I don't. I tend to line up more with Chap, SteelHead, and the other scientists / rationalists who have posted here on these issues.

The excerpt is posted more as a peace offering to the religionists and philosophers who have contributed to the thread and no doubt see me, and perhaps a few others here, as scientistic hard-asses.
Joseph Rowlands wrote:Philosophy vs. Science

The historical relationship between science and philosophy has not been a friendly one. Philosophers like to start with their conclusions, and work to prove them. When it came to trying to figure out what the world was like, philosophers tended to argue about what the world should be like. Science was born as a rejection of this method. Its goal was to figure out what the world was really all about, and its primary tool was actual experimentation.

We've all seen philosophy at its worst. Philosophers are often completely disconnected from reality and, more recently, don't care. Rationalism, the view that only deductive knowledge is really reliable, is commonplace. Philosophers often expound their ideas from armchairs and ivory towers, where the facts of reality don't concern them.

It's not surprising science would want to distance itself from philosophy. It becomes even more personal for the scientist when he's told that he must conform to preconceived views of the world. It started with Galileo having to renounce his scientific views on astronomy, but continued through the ages. Countless other scientists have had to hide their views on topics like evolution, the age of the earth and the existence of glaciers, with a range of punishments from the inquisition and burning at the stake to losing their jobs or financing. Philosophy, often in the form of religion, does not seek the truth. It seeks believers, and the truth is an enemy.

So science has good reasons to be wary of philosophy. Given the history and the nature of most philosophies, it's tempting to reject the whole field as being worthless. That would be a mistake because it's based on a faulty understanding of what philosophy is. And when you reject something based on a false understanding of it, you're likely to fall straight into the false dichotomy.

The philosophers who caused all the problems didn't care about facts or evidence. They had their theories, and refused to second-guess them, let alone test them against reality. Given the philosophers' strong bias towards ignoring the contrary evidence because they were wedded to a theory, it's natural that scientists would try to discard this tradition.

The problem is that many scientists sought to escape from the clutches of rationalizing philosophy by jumping into Empiricism, the philosophy that rejects theoretical knowledge and only accepts direct sensory evidence. As Rand said, philosophy is inescapable. You don't have a choice about having one. If you try to reject philosophy, you're just enslaving yourself to your implicit philosophy.

So in rejecting a system of theory without fact, scientists moved towards a system of fact without theory. This was done by having a simple litmus test for science. The experiment was the ultimate arbiter of the truth. Obviously few, if any, would dare try to practice the new system consistently. There have to be theories. There has to be analysis of the facts.
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_KevinSim
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Re: fundamental suppositions of God that are absurd

Post by _KevinSim »

Themis wrote:Why should they believe someones brand of God when there is no evidence for it, and many problems with things like the Bible?

You can't blame the Bible on God. When did God ever say the Bible was an accurate source of information on God or the universe? But the reason to believe in God is not because there is evidence that God is there, but rather to get guidance in your life. If you need guidance in your life (and I think everybody does), then I say believe God will give you that guidance, whether there's evidence that God actually exists or not.

Themis wrote:I am not sure why God would want people to believe this or that without good evidence. Faith in it would be just the blind and gullible kind.

The blind and gullible believe everything people tell them. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about getting from God a kernel of truth one can use as a certain foundation for one's personal theology. There's nothing blind or gullible in that.
KevinSim

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_Bazooka
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Re: fundamental suppositions of God that are absurd

Post by _Bazooka »

KevinSim wrote:You can't blame the Bible on God. When did God ever say the Bible was an accurate source of information on God or the universe? But the reason to believe in God is not because there is evidence that God is there, but rather to get guidance in your life. If you need guidance in your life (and I think everybody does), then I say believe God will give you that guidance, whether there's evidence that God actually exists or not.


Holy crap Batman, that's one of the most ridiculous posts I've ever seen.

"If you need guidance in your life seek it from someone who may not exist and who's advice cannot be reasonably identify as coming from them."

In fact, you're saying seek and follow God's advice even if He doesn't exist!
Ree Dick You Luss!

The blind and gullible believe everything people tell them. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about getting from God a kernel of truth one can use as a certain foundation for one's personal theology. There's nothing blind or gullible in that.


How does one reasonably identify that what one believes is a kernel of truth is in fact a real kernel of truth given by God and that one isn't being blind and gullible by simply following sensations that were self generated?

See here:
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=36400
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_SteelHead
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Re: fundamental suppositions of God that are absurd

Post by _SteelHead »

You get a "kernel of truth" telling you one thing. Some other person asking the exact same question gets an answer diametrically opposed to yours. Is the problem with the methodology? Is one answer from god and not the other? Is either? Is there any way to validate that the answer comes from god? Is there any way to even validate the existence of this divine guide?

The world wants to know.......

Just because you have been taught that guidance is coming from an external source does not make it so. One would posit that guidance from god would not conflict itself. It does, continually. What does this mean about the validity of the methodology?
It is better to be a warrior in a garden, than a gardener at war.

Some of us, on the other hand, actually prefer a religion that includes some type of correlation with reality.
~Bill Hamblin
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