A New Proof for the Existence of God

[inocente]

The concepts of Act and potency are metaphysical concepts, the updated Philosophy of Science and Nature can be found here

I care naught for your amazon.com. Aristotle first uses the concepts in the physics, only later in the metaphysics. This was some time before amazon.com. It remains that once you separate them from any physical role then they cannot apply to the OP.

That review is funny; it’s critique is that “it’s not Humean enough”, whilst Mumford (and others, in so many places) directly refute the Humean notion of causation through the book. You may want to find a better review.

This is a problem with philosophers, who to choose, who to choose. The reviewer is Luke Fenton-Glynn, D.Phil. Oxford, currently at UCL. Seems like he might known a thing or two. I only glanced at his review but noticed one of his other observations was Mumford forgot about a little thing called relativity. That would seem to be another showstopper.

What is your critique about perception? The one where you postulate that the Universe could be a “brute fact”? That is; without cause or explanation. Brute facts cause us to fall into an awkward epistemic and metaphysical position; because brute facts are not just a concept of epistemic weakness, but an ontological reality. As the universe then would not be “caused by nothing” as nihilo nihil fit. The universe would simply be. This is inexplicable, and completely unintelligible. Appears to throw doubt onto the reliability of our sensory and rational powers.

Perception = experience. We only observe that effect follows cause from past history, which doesn’t include seeing other universes. It doesn’t mean that the universe might not have a cause, it means that the conjecture that the universe was caused to exist can neither be proved nor disproved with our current state of knowledge. Yes, this is very inconvenient, but truth isn’t about convenience.

It’s worth repeating Lemaître’s observation that God never makes an explicit appearance in science. This would imply that should the universe have a cause, and if we ever find out what it is, then God would be hidden there too, if God is consistent.

 

[inocente]

Experiencing Jesus is not a logical proof for the existence of God?

Only those who have the experience will see the proof.

So the only way to prove to others the proof is there is to urge them to experience it.

As Pascal did, by urging the willing suspension of disbelief.

I wouldn’t say that experiencing Jesus is a logical proof that God exists, since someone might say they experience the flying spaghetti monster and claim that is a logical proof of its noodly appendages.

We are led to faith by experience. But we’re not in that situation with arguments for the existence of God. You can’t give me the experience of the Eucharist by arguing about it. You can’t even give me the experience of vanilla ice cream by an argument for its existence.

PS: No! Not Pascal! Not again!

 

[Charlemagne_III]

To summarize, I’m trying to say that it may be that the universe only appears to have laws because we attempt to understand it, and we can only understand something if it obeys laws.

But we do understand some things because they obey the laws. They don’t appear to obey, they obey. If I step off the top of a building, it isn’t that it only appears I may fall. I will fall!

Legislated laws are no different in that respect. Legislated laws don’t just appear to be laws. They are laws, and whoever disobeys them will be subject to the consequences.

We can’t get around laws. If we could dismiss laws as laws, there would be no alternative but chaos.

The apparent theoretical conflict in laws (relativity versus quantum physics) cannot be an actual conflict in nature. Einstein was convinced of this. His take was that we simply do not understand how to reconcile the two systems of physics. After all, it may well be that the human mind is following a law of its own; that is, a physical law that says you are wired to understand so much, but not more.

 

[Charlemagne_III]

I wouldn’t say that experiencing Jesus is a logical proof that God exists, since someone might say they experience the flying spaghetti monster and claim that is a logical proof of its noodly appendages.

Well, of course there are lunatics and cynics everywhere.

Yes! Yes! Pascal again!

 

[Tomdstone]

There is suffering because God is punishing humanity. No one is innocent.

In the case of a newborn sick and suffering child, what did the newborn baby do to merit terrible suffering?

 

[Tomdstone]

Why is somebody dying or suffering illogical? Are we not just a collection of atoms, a particular expression of energy that eventually disperses according to your world view? You would have to believe in the objective value of humanity to even begin to think of suffering as being some how illogical or logical. As soon as you admit to an objective standard of value, and not just your preference for pizza without the olives, you have to admit to the existence of God and assume that God has logical reasons for allowing suffering to exist.

I fail to see the objective standard underlying your rebuttal.

Please see post #15.

 

[Tomdstone]

The universe is defined as all matter, energy and space-time. Given the Big Bang was the initial moment of the universe, (energy, matter and space-time) how could matter create itself if it didn’t exist prior to itself? In fact, there was no “prior” space-time in which matter could have resided to create itself.

Could you have a Big Collapse and then the Big Bang, cycling ad infinitum?

 

[Tomdstone]

The conclusion was not *intended *to be panpsychism or solipsism, but I can see how you could be left to that conclusion. It’s intent is the universe is the result of a divine mind, that of God.

God is a spiritual, immaterial Being. But is the mind purely spiritual or does it depend on matter? It seems that the human mind does depend on the material brain and that the brain affects the soul of man.

 

[Tomdstone]

That being said, math itself is not hindered by reality’s constraints at all.

I don’t believe that is true. That is an unwarranted assumption with nothing to back it up. Take for example, the parallel postulate in Euclidean geometry. That exists because of our perception of the real world as Euclidean. However, later on, it was found that there are spherical and hyperbolic possibilities in reality and Euclidean geometry was expanded to include these possibilities. Further, relativity theory resulted in further developments in mathematical theory. All of these developments were confirmed by constraints and observations in the real world.

 

[Tomdstone]

If we changed our mathematics, reality would remain unscathed, but the manner in which we describe it would change. .

If you changed your mathematics and said that 1+1=3, you would be wrong. You can’t change mathematics to be an inconsistent science and be credible at the same time.

 

[Tomdstone]

We’ve already had to demote the deterministic laws of Relativity to the probabilistic laws of quantum mechanics, for example.

that is only if you accept the Copenhagen interpretation of QM, which Einstein did not. Probabilistic formulations may indicate a lack of knowledge about all the variables involved, such as for example, if you toss a die, what is the probability it will come up a 3? You may say 1/6, but if you knew all the variables involved, you would know exactly what number would come up.

 

[Charlemagne_III]

In the case of a newborn sick and suffering child, what did the newborn baby do to merit terrible suffering?

Some abortionist will doubtless tell you the child is sick and suffering because the mother wouldn’t let him kill it in her womb.

What does any of us do to merit terrible suffering?

 

[Charlemagne_III]

Could you have a Big Collapse and then the Big Bang, cycling ad infinitum?

You could. Do you have the proof or is this just wishful thinking? Anything but God to explain Creation.

 

[Tomdstone]

You could. Do you have the proof or is this just wishful thinking? Anything but God to explain Creation.

I don’t have any proof. It is speculation as to what could have happened before the BB. There is evidence for the BB, but still no one really knows or has proof as to what happened in the first millisecond of the BB. If there is a multiverse, which is another speculation, the BB could have resulted from something occurring there and ending up in the universe we see today. The assumption has been that the BB is the beginning of the universe, but I don’t see where that has been proven conclusively?

 

[Tomdstone]

1. Thought only comes from a mind.

Do animals have either thoughts or a mind? Experiments with monkeys and apes appear to show that they have both.

 

[Charlemagne_III]

The assumption has been that the BB is the beginning of the universe, but I don’t see where that has been proven conclusively?

It hasn’t been proven conclusively, but it has been proven provisionally.

Time begins with the Big Bang. Time cannot be located before that.

 

[Charlemagne_III]

Do animals have either thoughts or a mind? Experiments with monkeys and apes appear to show that they have both.

Their brains have neurons, just as ours do. They have consciousness and memory.

They lack the ability to do physics or metaphysics.

The soul is a spiritual substance that informs the body. When we die, the soul departs the body. There is no getting it back. If it were merely a part of the body, it might be captured just as it escapes and returned to the body. But it cannot be captured. Death is permanent. The soul has fled the body. When that happens, all the neurons that were in the brain finally die. So it is just human consciousness that dies, not the soul.

Animals have no consciousness of metaphysics, so it is doubtful they have souls that survive, or even feel the need to survive.

 

[Peter_Plato]

Could you have a Big Collapse and then the Big Bang, cycling ad infinitum?

Not according to the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin (BGV) Theorem which states that “any universe, which has, on average, a rate of expansion greater 0 that system had to have a finite beginning.”

There are four possible exceptions to a finite universe, but the conditions for the exceptions to obtain are untenable.

sententias.org/2013/04/26/exceptions-to-a-finite-universe/#more-4701

According to Alexander Vilenkin…

We discuss three candidate scenarios which seem to allow the possibility that the universe could have existed forever with no initial singularity: eternal inflation, cyclic evolution, and the emergent universe. The first two of these scenarios are geodesically incomplete to the past, and thus cannot describe a universe without a beginning. The third, although it is stable with respect to classical perturbations, can collapse quantum mechanically, and therefore cannot have an eternal past.

arxiv.org/abs/1204.4658

 

[Peter_Plato]

God is a spiritual, immaterial Being. But is the mind purely spiritual or does it depend on matter? It seems that the human mind does depend on the material brain and that the brain affects the soul of man.

The “material brain” is a concept which is mind dependent - so it appears that “matter” depends upon mind to be meaningful in any explanation, argument or proof. Matter is posited within a presumed metaphysic in order to make a claim that the human mind depends upon a material brain. Only a mind would “know” this so a mind is presumed in order to even make a claim that a mind depends on a material brain.

 

[Peter_Plato]

This is a most clever play on words but fails miserably as Jesus never gave us any of the thousand and one purported logical proofs for the existence of God. The guy instead believes by experiencing Jesus.

John did not write “For God so loved the world that he gave us logical arguments for His existence, so that everyone who believes them may not perish but may have eternal life.

I take it you presume that to know something requires something like a convincing “proof.” I doubt that is a sustainable presumption.

Jesus is clearly implying that we can have certainty of knowledge in an immediate sense of apprehending the truth without the need of a mediating “argument.” That is quite different than your claim Paul means we rely purely on faith (without knowledge.)

Logical arguments may support or depict what is known or thought to be true, but logical arguments rarely “create” the truth in anything like a fundamental way.