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cho_pilo
Guest
So how can you conclude in this way?
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Spirithound
Guest
A question before I reformulate my second attempt. Why do you find it a weak argument that physical laws should only apply to the physical universe?
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Ranklyfrank
Guest
That was a good read, and accurate. But as much as I agree with and do the recommended “do’s” all that is missing a seed, or the seed in that is not yet germinated. More later.
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greylorn
Guest
I will be happy to answer that, but first need a specific argument. I’ve encountered so many, not only on CAF, but in scattered readings, that I would like to deal with an argument that appeals to you, specifically.
Even if you asked me to pick one, what good would that do? I’m likely to pick one that is easy to refute, which you are likely to find an unsatisfying choice.
Until you come back on that, I have some excellent reasons for the notion that the Three Laws of Thermodynamics might actually apply to the Creator. I detail them in my book (still closing in on that), but here is something you might consider:
I divide the laws of physics into created law and natural law (obviously using the word “natural” differently than most). The natural laws are the three mentioned, while the rest are created laws (these include the 20-odd mystery constants).
Only the created laws include time as a parameter.
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greylorn
Guest
Do you have reading comprehension skills? If so, kindly use them. Otherwise, what is the point of a reply?
Deal with my post #8 before posting more one-line non-sequiturs to me, please.
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greylorn
Guest
RF,
Although I’m unfamiliar with the lore you relate, the tales are consistent with my understanding of human beings. However, methinks that your tales are not generalizable to the entire population.
While most people are mentally bound by their perceptions (and beliefs), not all are. Not all primitives will throw up in a jeep. At least 3% of every population are intelligent individuals capable of recognizing and dealing with sensory and cognitive dissonance. The majority are captives of their senses and their programming.
Modern societies are no different in this respect from primitive ones.
Incidentally, I’ve no clue about your ham-end family. I may not be alone, but even if so, I insist upon the details. Thanks!
Oh— this will be getting somewhere that’s related to the OP, yes?
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cho_pilo
Guest
Case closed. You join the hall of fame on my ignore list. I love you. Bye.
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Spirithound
Guest
Ok, here is my argument:
- Rules are only useful within their domain. Linguistic laws are useful in working with languages, Biological laws are useful in treating plants and animals, Chemical laws are useful in working with chemicals, and so on.
- The domain of the rules of physics is the physical world.
- Therefore, physical rules are only useful in discovering the physical world.
- Conversely, if ever the physical world did not exist, the physical rules could not apply.
- Before God created the physical world, the physical world did not exist.
- Therefore, before God created the physical world, the physical rules could not apply.
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greylorn
Guest
Thank you. Your argument is excellent, not weak at all. I concede it.
However, I don’t accept it. That is because it is based upon a religious belief which I do find illogical and unacceptable: God created the universe from nothing. This belief is at the core of the science-religion conflict. In the context of both experimental and theoretical physics, it does not work.
Before I proceed, it might help you to understand where I’m coming from. Many years ago I was a very devout Catholic studying physics, which got me wondering about the relationship of the energy conservation principle to my beliefs. This was a painful, difficult conflict for me. I chose not to turn to atheism like other students with whom I discussed these conflicts, but instead found a way to reconcile my belief in God with the energy conservation principle, Over the course of several decades I’ve developed this idea further, finding interesting ramifications not immediately apparent. Fully developed, it removes all conflict between belief in God and every branch of science.
Of course, this potentially useful work did not come for free. You will not like the way I did this. That’s okay, because I did the work not for believers like yourself, but for those of conflicted belief, like I once was.
I want you to be real clear on this point. You are, presumably, content with your beliefs. You and anyone else who is content with his beliefs should skip the rest of this post, because it does not apply to you. It applies only to those who want to believe that there is more to life than a fractional century of sentience, who want to believe in creation and the continuity of consciousness, exactly like you, but cannot because their minds finds these notions too illogical or too far askew from hard science to accept. There are many such individuals, and neither science nor religion has answers acceptable to them.
With that preamble, the reconciliation between science and belief in a created universe requires this hypothesis:
The First Law of Thermodynamics applies absolutely. Energy cannot be created or destroyed by God or any physical process.
This hypothesis has these implications, among others:
- Energy has been around as long as God— neither was created.
- God used energy to construct the time-dependent laws of physics.
- God can violate the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, but not the 1st or 3rd.
(So can you.)
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lynx
Guest
There is/are no God/s.
Different reasons for different folks, but i’ll tell some of mine. When I want to know if something exists, I seek proof of its existence, not proof that it does not exist. Proving a universal negative is impossible, and not a useful metric for if something exists anyways. Scientifically, you should be ambiguous in your search. However, the existence of God is a huge claim, one which is not supported really by anything other than ancient texts afaik. For a test to have scientific merit it must include, but is not limited to, repeatability and a clear interpretation of the results. No test for God can possibly seek to achieve this. If through my own life experiences and observations I experienced God in some fashion this would help me to believe, but i’ve never experienced such a phenomenon, even at Catholic mass. As such with no proof of God I do not believe, I have a lack of faith.
Through my education in engineering and biological sciences I understood God to not be supported by scientific method, which is fine because religion is based on faith not fact. This only leaves logical rationalization (such as first order logic) or through an interpersonal relationship to God transcending knowledge (faith). I have never had a personal relationship with God transcending knowledge. Logically, one cannot disprove God, but on the same hand no one can universally disprove unicorns or flying-spaghetti-monsters either. The claim of God is large, and nothing I know supports it, so I do not believe.
People say many things. Some of the things they say is wise, others not so much. People are fallible. I try my best to only take what I feel is worth taking from an individual.
I’m actually having a PM discussion similar to this on the topic of lying. If I don’t believe I don’t believe. It’s not worth lying to myself.
It’s not an easy things for skeptics to believe, even if we wanted to. There is no switch in your brain that makes you believe in God. Would you say a better alternative is to falsely accept a religion out of fear of pain or the reward of heaven (which is infinite contentedness not happiness)?
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greylorn
Guest
Lynx,
I was going to let this one go until getting to your penultimate paragraph, about not lying to yourself— an excellent policy IMO, but often difficult to detect while one is doing exactly that. So that you can have a sense of where I’m coming from, I disbelieve in the same God in Whom you disbelieve. However, I find the customary beliefs of atheists to be unacceptable explanations for the beginnings of things.
Given your engineering and biology education, I’ll bet that you believe in some style of Darwinian evolution as well as in Big Bang theory. If not, this reply is irrelevant and you should skip it.
It is a simple matter to calculate the probability that a small, 900 base-pair human gene could have come into existence by the random addition of nucleotides. The number is rather small, 1.4 x 10exp-542. This single number is many orders of magnitude smaller than the customary standard for probabilistic impossibility. That’s one gene in one critter out of many millions of species. That number alone is enough to disprove Darwinism.
Were you to expand the math into a realistic number, you’d multiply that ridiculously tiny exponent by 23,000, the approximate number of genes in the human body. You would also include the fact that the largest human gene contains about 1500 base pairs, and that the average size is 1200, magnifying the improbability.
If you are a typical Darwinist, you’ll blow off these numbers, or wrap them with invalidating verbiage, proving that for you, Darwinism is a belief rather than proven science. This would also show that your talk about demanding evidence is just talk, as seems to me to be true for most atheists.
Then, we might move on to the Big Bang. If you believe in it, you’ll want to explain exactly what went bang. I’ll bet that it’s not something that you can see any better than you can see God.
Whatever it might have been cannot be a “singularity,” because singularities exist only in the realm of mathematics. If you ever divided by zero or used the tangent of 90 degrees on an engineering exam, you’ll have gotten an F, and if you make a habit of it you’ll never engineer anything that works, because physical singularities do not exist in the real world.
After you’ve explained what went bang, you’ll need to explain what caused it to become unstable. That will get you a Nobel prize. It’s not been done, and I do not believe that it ever will be.
Incidentally, the God in which neither of us believes is a singularity. That is one of the problems with the concept, and provides a valid reason for disbelief. But doesn’t it seem illogical to replace one singularity with another?
Perhaps you’d consider converting to agnosticism?
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cho_pilo
Guest
Actually, we often do not believe in things because we first have evidence that they exist. We often believe in things for numerous circumstantial reasons (such as hearsay), or because we simply desire them to be true (such completing an course - there is no evidence that you in particular will complete a course you’ve taken, but you take it anyway and put in a lot of work).
Suppose you are now in London and desire to go to New York.
There is no evidence that you will arrive there.
By the logic of “evidence first, then belief”, you should never hop on that plane to NY.
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lynx
Guest
It is a difficult thing to think about. If i’m delusional how would I know
? But then again, i’m cat so, mreow…Ok.
Darwinism seeks to explain the phenomenon of evolution. As with many things from man it is flawed, but it’s the information that best adequately describes this phenomenon, and we should learn it, and definitely challenge it. The same goes for Big Bang theory, which evolves all the time.
If you ever get the chance, you should try and watch this episode of futurama hxxp://www.futurama-stream.com/season-6/episode-9-a-clockwork-origin#video
If there were some evidence or experience that I had I would consider it. The existence of a God, as religion sees it, is a huge claim to make, and I just don’t see the support for it.
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lynx
Guest
Even with a plane to New York there is something that lets me know I might get there. Things like the plane, the pilots, the engineering crew servicing the plane, seeing the plane land, seeing the flight this and other similar planes have made, there is proof to reasonably say that i’ll make it to NY if I board this plane. Then again I could board that plane and crash in WI. Few things in life are absolute, and if we needed concrete evidence for every action we took we’d be almost nowhere. This doesn’t mean you can discount it completely. God is a large claim, and i’m waiting for the proof.
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cho_pilo
Guest
More (e.g. perhaps it is not possible to cross the Atlantic at all and the people who claim to have gone there are lying).
A Londoner has only second- or third-hand evidence of New York’s existence and second- or third-hand evidence of the possibility of arriving there.
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lynx
Guest
You work with what evidence you have. Is it reasonable to assume a company would charter a flight it could not make? Would a pilot put their life in danger by agreeing to make the flight? People might lie, in fact, if you don’t know anything about aviation the whole thing can be akin to magic to you. In the end, you work with the evidence, anecdotal or scientific, you have and do your best to support or refute the claims of your beliefs.
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greylorn
Guest
I’ve not watched cartoons since 4th grade, except to observe a few in passing and be reminded that they are pretty stupid. Don’t read comic books either.
There are times for and sources of entertainment, and others for gathering information. Except for Atlas Shrugged and The Soul of Anna Klane, these are usually different time and separate sources.
You seem to have missed every point entirely. You might read my post again. You might even address the questions I put to you, instead of blowing them off.
If you can’t do that, why are you posting on a philosophy thread? There must be some internet blogs which discuss the deep insights in TV cartoons.
If you are female, fess up. Or if you have a Ritalin prescription. Or anything to explain your brief attention span and inability to engage a serious philosophical argument while pretending otherwise. If it would make a difference, I can write more slowly.
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lynx
Guest
Gotcha, your mediums are wise and insightful, mine are childish and stupid.
You asked, I answered. I don’t buy your God as a singularity concept.
I thought you might enjoy it, I didn’t know that cartoons killed your mother or something. A little levity is not a bad thing.
Well done on insulting a broad range of people while at the same time appearing overtly naive and foolish. I can tell you’ve worked hard on this response
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Ranklyfrank
Guest
Yes, it will, or actually has in a way on another thread. Sorry for not being as direct as one, including me, might like, but I claim my human foibles in addition to being able to sometimes string words in a semblance of intelligence. I know where I’m going, but this is not a usual route for me. I’m fine if interest is lost, but I will make the attempt anyway.
But first to your comments:
I agree, Greylorn that they are not generalized in degree, but I contend that they are in kind A lot of this is due to hard wired aspects of behavior, and a lot of it is hidden simply by consensus “reality.” And yet you are right that there is a wee percentage that are free. E.g. while most people measurable habituate when presented with viewing an object, their brain waves indicate that they progressively give it less importance each time it is seen. And yet an accomplished Zen monk was measured to have a fresh response at each viewing, and yet he knew it was the “same” object. It can be surmised that ordinary folk juts shove things i their thinker and insulate, while some few are simply present in awareness.
I’m simply attempting to show that while we are all can think, the vast majority of us do it about well enough to not break a leg going to the corner 7-11 and back. And that we accomplish that task according to the needs of our specific environment. And we do that in a way that has been assumed to be THE way for no other reason than that we learned it to be so and because we did and it mostly works it must be right. That was the point of the story of the ham:
A husband walks into the kitchen on a day that the family is gathered for a feast, maybe Easter. He sees his wife prepping the ham for the oven and notices that she cuts the ends off and then puts it in the pan. He ask why. She says “Well, that’s how you do it.” He asks why and is told “I learned it that way from Mom and have always done it that way.” He asks why her Mom did it that way, and she says “I don’t know; it’s what she taught me; go ask her–she’s in the living room”. So he goes and asks his mother in law about the the ham. She tells him that she always did ti that way; it was the way her mother taught her. She looks over at her mother and asks her, “isn’t it so, Mamma?” Her Mamma, a woman who still has her accent from the old country says “Yes; if you remember we only had one pot that was too small for the ham so we cut it up to make it fit.” Lots of laughing, mystery solved. The wife to this still cuts the ends off the ham as her daughter is helping.
All that is to say that things get passed on even though they may no longer have a use or the meaning has changed, or the original meaning was different. Religions are in that category. Whether there is or isn’t a God, there is a tendency for the form of a way to be passed on while the original meaning may have been different even if the present use of the form has other meaning, close or not, because so much of it is interpretive. And here I won’t go into the scholarship demonstrating the bowdlerization of history in regards to the Church, but any simple research can reveal that it exists.
But science is different. It is very teleological in its approach. It makes mistakes and even goes awry, eg phlogiston, but unlike the Cardinal who refused to look through Galileo’s telescope because he knew it didn’t work, science as a body corrects itself. It can do so because it has the quantifiability of matter to keep it straight. Religion has tradition and a dash of reason thrown in here and there, especially as rationalization for belief.
So while science as a whole deals with hard evidence and the nature of Nature keeps it honest, religion is interpretive and relies on “revelation” as an interpretive guide. But it has no hard evidence of what it offers, only emotional appeal and rationalization for an ultimately immeasurable premise if it relies on Scripture and tradition.
(continued)
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Ranklyfrank
Guest
(continued)
I’m saying that science can take care of itself in terms of accuracy regarding exteriors. And since the Enlightenment it has served to help separate out the “I” and “we” interior of things from the “it” and “its” that used before that to be very much muddled together. But it has given us a monological approach that has gutted the world of its soul. And religion has become formalized as well and imo lost what was its original impetus, how that happened being another story.
My theory is pretty simple, as is my practice. Like everyone else, I make assumptions. My assumptions are that whatever it is called, be it Soul, “created in the image and likeness of…” or commonality of ancestry on either “religious” or anthropological grounds, we are, generally speaking, schematically very very similar. In other words, we can point and say “That’s a human, like me.” And we can say that even by saying “That’s a human less than me because their (insert objectification) is different than mine.” So I’m thinking that we’re all from the same mold in a fundamental way, regardless of the particulars of our learned and acquired differences.
So based on that my tendency regarding things “spiritual” is to go with Universals and dismiss parochialisms. About the first thing to go in that regard would be socializations, including formal religions. Not the idea of God, mind you, but the dramatizations surrounding the idea of Deity. Next, since God is Unknown and Invisible, or that there is an Unknown and Invisible we seek to explain, I look at the component of myself that is most like that. That would be my mind. Specifically it would be that fact that regardless of what I am aware of, or we are aware of, I and we are aware. So we can abstract awareness as a principle of the human condition and abstract thoughts as objects, though they are “internal.” Thoughts and the senses are the objects of awareness. Even the sense of “me” and “my” are found to be the objects of awareness upon honest reflection.
Now when I was younger, and very very religious and praying a lot, specifically to know and be close to God, I had an experience that changed my life. I had an experience rather beyond words which demonstrated to me that “I” am before, or under, or the ground of, or whatever, relative to awareness. In other words, there is a state we can where it is experimentally known that “I am” before the perception of “me” relative to “it(s).” In other words, the perception of being a “discreet” person relative to a world is a construct supported by a state that is totally devoid of any contents and is equal to Identity and Meaning. You or anyone can name that state whatever you wish.
The Significance, for me, of that state is that it means that all of us are in Essence derived from or dependent upon this Absolute State I abstract as Undifferentiated Consciousness per se. So since it is our common Root, despite our particular differences in the state in which we experience time and space and each other as discernible differences, I can base my morality on that Identity, knowing that what appears as “another” is in Essence identical to my Self. Not to “me” as an object of my own awareness, but to that “I” whose supremacy my ego usurped and gave that name to itself. How could it not do that, given that our ordinary state is in the subject/object mode and not devoid of the mental construct that would allow us to perceive Identity as Such.
But here’s where it gets interesting. this State, which is Universally available and is the reason since time immemorial for the dictum to “Know Thyself” is also identifiable by anyone experiencing it as the Source of inspiration. It is that because That State is identical with Good. It is as well the Source and Reason for the Great Commandment and the forms of the Golden Rule and the Law of Reciprocity. But how do you talk about that which is Self in the Highest sense to the vast number of people who have not experienced it for themselves???
The classic way to do that is to use a familiar model, that of the family hierarchy, with it’s all powerful head as either the Disciplinarian, the Protector, or the Provider. And thus, since the Source is the Same and localities are multitudinous and varied both in environment and mental predilections, we get the differences in the parochialisms of religions. And since biologically we are mostly hypnotized into our ways by 7yo, and the mind is hard wired to be “right” almost no matter what, we tend to kill each other over inconsequential differences instead of looking to where the Root of religion IS.
So for that reason the “Holy Book” which one is most emotionally and experientially invested in becomes THE Holy Book to the exclusion of others until they achieve or are gifted by that Insight which allows the true value of any of them to come forth as Meaning. And that is why truly Holy men and women can extract Love from squiggles of ink on paper, or now, from dancing electrons.
Likewise, from this standpoint, the manifest is seen as having Meaning as Self expression. Since it is ans stems from a Unified Whole, the “ghost in the machine” is no longer the elephant in the room, but the agency of exploration of what it, from a far larger perspective, is doing.
I’m saying that science can take care of itself in terms of accuracy regarding exteriors. And since the Enlightenment it has served to help separate out the “I” and “we” interior of things from the “it” and “its” that used before that to be very much muddled together. But it has given us a monological approach that has gutted the world of its soul. And religion has become formalized as well and imo lost what was its original impetus, how that happened being another story.
My theory is pretty simple, as is my practice. Like everyone else, I make assumptions. My assumptions are that whatever it is called, be it Soul, “created in the image and likeness of…” or commonality of ancestry on either “religious” or anthropological grounds, we are, generally speaking, schematically very very similar. In other words, we can point and say “That’s a human, like me.” And we can say that even by saying “That’s a human less than me because their (insert objectification) is different than mine.” So I’m thinking that we’re all from the same mold in a fundamental way, regardless of the particulars of our learned and acquired differences.
So based on that my tendency regarding things “spiritual” is to go with Universals and dismiss parochialisms. About the first thing to go in that regard would be socializations, including formal religions. Not the idea of God, mind you, but the dramatizations surrounding the idea of Deity. Next, since God is Unknown and Invisible, or that there is an Unknown and Invisible we seek to explain, I look at the component of myself that is most like that. That would be my mind. Specifically it would be that fact that regardless of what I am aware of, or we are aware of, I and we are aware. So we can abstract awareness as a principle of the human condition and abstract thoughts as objects, though they are “internal.” Thoughts and the senses are the objects of awareness. Even the sense of “me” and “my” are found to be the objects of awareness upon honest reflection.
Now when I was younger, and very very religious and praying a lot, specifically to know and be close to God, I had an experience that changed my life. I had an experience rather beyond words which demonstrated to me that “I” am before, or under, or the ground of, or whatever, relative to awareness. In other words, there is a state we can where it is experimentally known that “I am” before the perception of “me” relative to “it(s).” In other words, the perception of being a “discreet” person relative to a world is a construct supported by a state that is totally devoid of any contents and is equal to Identity and Meaning. You or anyone can name that state whatever you wish.
The Significance, for me, of that state is that it means that all of us are in Essence derived from or dependent upon this Absolute State I abstract as Undifferentiated Consciousness per se. So since it is our common Root, despite our particular differences in the state in which we experience time and space and each other as discernible differences, I can base my morality on that Identity, knowing that what appears as “another” is in Essence identical to my Self. Not to “me” as an object of my own awareness, but to that “I” whose supremacy my ego usurped and gave that name to itself. How could it not do that, given that our ordinary state is in the subject/object mode and not devoid of the mental construct that would allow us to perceive Identity as Such.
But here’s where it gets interesting. this State, which is Universally available and is the reason since time immemorial for the dictum to “Know Thyself” is also identifiable by anyone experiencing it as the Source of inspiration. It is that because That State is identical with Good. It is as well the Source and Reason for the Great Commandment and the forms of the Golden Rule and the Law of Reciprocity. But how do you talk about that which is Self in the Highest sense to the vast number of people who have not experienced it for themselves???
The classic way to do that is to use a familiar model, that of the family hierarchy, with it’s all powerful head as either the Disciplinarian, the Protector, or the Provider. And thus, since the Source is the Same and localities are multitudinous and varied both in environment and mental predilections, we get the differences in the parochialisms of religions. And since biologically we are mostly hypnotized into our ways by 7yo, and the mind is hard wired to be “right” almost no matter what, we tend to kill each other over inconsequential differences instead of looking to where the Root of religion IS.
So for that reason the “Holy Book” which one is most emotionally and experientially invested in becomes THE Holy Book to the exclusion of others until they achieve or are gifted by that Insight which allows the true value of any of them to come forth as Meaning. And that is why truly Holy men and women can extract Love from squiggles of ink on paper, or now, from dancing electrons.
Likewise, from this standpoint, the manifest is seen as having Meaning as Self expression. Since it is ans stems from a Unified Whole, the “ghost in the machine” is no longer the elephant in the room, but the agency of exploration of what it, from a far larger perspective, is doing.
- Status