Catholic view of Presuppositional Apologetics?

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Methinks you should read the great Catholic philosophers. The serpent is the most subtle of creatures and seeks, by tiny little missteps, to lead you astray.
 
Wesrock said:
All he is saying here is that a “lawful universe,” which we have, can be demonstrated to require a creator.
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What if our universe is optimal? Our universe become the only possibility if it is optimal. It then does not need a sustainer.
 
STT said:
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Wesrock:
All he is saying here is that a “lawful universe,” which we have, can be demonstrated to require a creator.
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What if our universe is optimal? Our universe become the only possibility if it is optimal. It then does not need a sustainer.
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Why? What do you even mean by optimal? Where does this idea come from?

Anyway, this topic is about whether presuppositionalism is consistent with Catholic beliefs. The topic doesnt claim to be a challenge or a demonstration. That said, I’m not the OP, so he can take this where he wants to go.
 
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I actually think it would be better for us to stop now, here in Italy it’s late and I have to go to sleep, tomorrow I’ll go to school. We can talk about it later in another topic.
 
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Optimal means the most favorable. Our universe is the only possibility if it is optimal compared to others. But then something which is optimal does not need sustainer since its nature arises from being optimal.
 
LeonardDeNoblac said:
Could you be more specific?
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Think of different universes with different laws of nature. We say that a universe is optimal when a quantity is minimal in it. What quantity? Energy for example. The behavior of such a system, what we call laws of nature, is rooted in this principle, energy must be minimum.
 
STT said:
But then something which is optimal does not need sustainer since its nature arises from being optimal.
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Why? It honestly sounds like an arbitrary definition you just made up. It just begs the question against the cosmological arguments which shows any universe would require a creator and conserved. Where does the idea of this special case come from?

[Edit]: Or to state it another way, if one were a Platonist, an Aristotlean, a Neo-Platonist, an Augustinian, a Thomist, a Rationalist, or from Jewish or Islamic schools… there’s no premise in any of their cosmological arguments in which the special case you describe would just exist in itself without the need of a creator. In fact, their arguments would show there could be no such case.
 
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Wesrock said:
Why? It honestly sounds like an arbitrary definition you just made up. It just begs the question against the cosmological arguments which shows any universe would require a creator and conserved. Where does the idea of this special case come from?
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This is not my invention. There are two things which should be discussed here: 1) What optimal is? and 2) How something can comes out of nothing.
  1. In physics the trajectory for an particle is something specific. The trajectory is optimal solution of an action. Action describes the behavior of our reality (you cannot have a reality without a behavior. This behavior could be chaotic or lawful). This specific action is an element set of all actions. We are living in one of them because life was possible under such lawful reality. So things are simple. Any reality has behavior or properties. Something without any behavior or properties is nothing.
  2. In physics it is possible to have something out of nothing. Think of the case that gravitation energy (it is negative) exactly cancels the energy required for creation of particles (it is positive). Therefore, the energy of our universe which is a property our universe is zero. This applies to other properties. So we in average have nothing. Now, the question is: Is it possible to have process nothing to something which in average is zero? Yes, if nothing is unstable. It is also possible if both nothing and something which in average zero are logically possible (in another word if it is indifferent to have one of them).
 
STT said:
In physics the trajectory for an particle is something specific. The trajectory is optimal solution of an action. Action describes the behavior of our reality (you cannot have a reality without a behavior. This behavior could be chaotic or lawful). This specific action is an element set of all actions. We are living in one of them because life was possible under such lawful reality. So things are simple. Any reality has behavior or properties. Something without any behavior or properties is nothing.
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How would this prove that the universe can substain itself?
STT said:
In physics it is possible to have something out of nothing. Think of the case that gravitation energy (it is negative) exactly cancels the energy required for creation of particles (it is positive). Therefore, the energy of our universe which is a property our universe is zero. This applies to other properties. So we in average have nothing. Now, the question is: Is it possible to have process nothing to something which in average is zero? Yes, if nothing is unstable. It is also possible if both nothing and something which in average zero are logically possible (in another word if it is indifferent to have one of them).
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That’s not “having something out of nothing”. In an isolated physical system like the universe, energy is only transferred, not created nor destroyed, because of the law of conservation of energy.
 
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