BTW, how do you know that the universe is contingent? Many objects in the universe are contingent, but how does that prove that the universe or the multiverse taken as a whole is contingent? Where would be the logical contradiction in assuming that the universe is necessary?
What is “the universe” besides the collection of things that make it up?
The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Take for example, the human body. Each part has its own function, but it is not merely putting a brain in a head and a heart in the chest of a skeleton. Just putting together the various parts of the human body would not give you a human being. It is profitable to study the concept of synergy, which is the interaction of multiple elements in a system to produce an effect different from or greater than the sum of their individual parts. Synergy occurs all the time in many different areas. Take for example pest synergy. Pest synergy occurs when the introduction of parasite A may cause 10% fatalities, and also the introduction of parasite B may cause a 10% loss. In some cases, when both parasite A and B are present losses are significantly greater than 20%. Another case would be two politicians. If each is able to gather one million votes on his own, but together the two were able to appeal to 2.5 million voters, their synergy would have produced 500,000 more votes than had they each worked independently.
The Catholic encyclopedia, in the article on free will, states that a free volition is “a causeless volition”. This article has Ecclesiastical approbation. Nihil Obstat. September 1, 1909. Remy Lafort, Censor. Imprimatur. +John M. Farley, Archbishop of New York. So it appears that free volition is causeless according to Roman Catholic teaching and therefore there are some things that are causeless.newadvent.org/cathen/06259a.htm
You claimed it’s a “fact that [Thomasic philosophy] has been under relentless attack …] since the early 1700s at least” and called me ignorant for not knowing about this.
This is very confused. One can only ask what Thomas would have needed to say to prevent you making this claim, and why classifying it as not scientific is so important to you anyway.
What’s with the capitalization of metaphysics? Reified? Exulted? Idolized? Should I bow before it or something?
What are you on about - you think Jesus is talking metaphysics there? Do you believe Jesus is a Thomist then?
What it is with you and this royal we business??? Do you mean you and your family? You and your parrot? You and your bust of Thomas?Let not your heart be troubled, we like you and appreciate your feisty (name removed by moderator)ut.
Your conclusion is dubious to say the least.
Perhaps there’s a universe in which Maier wrote Beitrag zur unerbittlichen Angriff von Thomas, and Anscombe responded with In support Of Maier’s contribution to the relentless attack on Thomas.
Ignoring facts is never a good idea.
That can’t work unless you first define unchanged as meaning no change occurring over an invariant interval, which you must then define and justify. One millisecond? One day? 13.4 billion years?
It isn’t prejudice to know right from wrong. That’s the opposite of prejudice.Nope. For example in some nuclei, neutrons do not decay, whereas free neutrons decay in minutes. Everything depends on everything else, everything is interwoven. Metaphysically, without everything being how it is, nothing would be as it is.
The word obfusticate means to render indistinct or dim.
A fruit cake for a fruit cake?I’m going to buy one for myself, one of those fruit cakes made by the Trappists.
Run to the hills! For we are undone! We are all doomed, doomed I tells yer.
Your argument (post #679) depends on the 2nd law of thermodynamics yet here you are denying the 1st law of thermodynamics. How come, and where do you propose the energy went?
No, that’s completely wrong. The heat death hypothesis (and I’ll repeat it’s only an hypothesis) is that the universe will eventually reach thermodynamic equilibrium, i.e. temperature differences will even out and so processes that exploit them such as life will no longer be possible. Everything would still exist, it would just be uninteresting.
Causes are a subset of all possible explanations. That is why, when you asked me what a cause is, I replied that a cause provides a necessary or sufficient explanation. A cause relates directly to physical reality. Free will also is explanatory but it isn’t necessarily explanatory in the same way that a cause is. Causation may serve to explain, or at least help to explain events in the physical world, but does not where reason is involved. Free will explains rational events. We don’t fully understand free will and how it works any more than we fully understand causation.
Doesn’t meta usually mean a level of abstraction?
Is this a la David Bohm? I only know that at a pop level, is he worth a read?
This sounds a bit like Paul Davies (not as I’ve read much of him). I think a problem is that the kind of person who is attracted to this territory tends to change their religion with their socks, in what I’d call New Age Pick ‘n’ Mix.
You don’t do things by halves then. You’ll have achieved your ambition when, and only when, you can explain why i is as real as 1 in Euler’s Identity.
I’m with you on algorithms. My favorite is the binary search, which for instance finds an item amongst 1000 by only doing 10 look-ups.
.Linus,
Now you are hitting the nail on the head. Even Newton acknowledged that there had to be a cause for the initial motion and for any change in velocity or direction. However, his theory could never be tested because there is no perfect vacuum, so there is no constant velocity. Besides the fact that even in the most empty areas of outer space there exists ( it is extimated by a number of scientists ) at least one hydrogen atom per cubic centimeter, which over the long haul would mitigate against constant velocity and one can hardly imagine any location in outer space where there were not significant " forces " of gravity at work. William a Wallace brings all this up in From a Realist Point of View, 1979 edition. ( just got mine, out of print now, took me three weeks to locate a copy for sale).
I believe although we are on different paths, we are moving towards the same goal. I understand from the feedback in this forum and other venues that what I am proposing is very difficult to comprehend, especially since, because it is the nature of an internet forum, my ideas have been presented in what might be called a “talking point” style, a bit here a bit there. All I am looking for is understanding rather than acceptance of my thesis. I blame myself for not being more coherent.
This is what you are said originally: to: "
. She was not a philosopher. Nothing in her Mysticism or Catholic Theology disproves the First Way…First I said ( post 681 ) " Thomas did not deny that " all " things are moving. He said, it is self-evident that some things are moving. Perhaps he thought some things didn’t move. I don’t know that. But even if he might have thought that, so what. Today, thanks largely to science, we know better. However, everything also has a stable element, its nature, which remains the same throughout its life span or its term of existence as an identifiable being or substance.
Talking to you is like talking to a balky Mule.
and here) I found some more philosophical objections the other day. They are lecture notes, and from the web address they turn out to be Professor Gideon Rosen’s for one of his classes at Princeton. Enjoy.
You were responding to this ( post 724 )
How could a “truth” exist without perception?
Sorry about the response to such an old post but I just found it.
I’m amazed that I happened to reread this thread a just the right time.that isn’t quite what I mean when I talk about a universe without bounds. The term Stephen Hawking uses for the model of the universe I’ve described is “finite, but boundless”.
I have a both-and mindset. In protestantism, I used to think it’s either-or: either it’s faith or works, either the church is physical or spiritual, etc. In the same way, I’d like to think of the universe as a both-and too.
That’s the best explanation I’ve ever heard on this haha. Good job.
We know a couple of things for certain ( without appealing to Revelation ), the earth at least has a plethora of living organisms, and one of them is intelligent
.Yes, it could mean that. When I use “metascience” I am implying that there is a deeper level (the implicate level) of understanding of reality than the one science describes (the explicate level). I contend that we can only observe changing configurations of matter. All the elements that science invents to describe the resulting patterns are abstractions. True reality exists at the implicate level where there are no abstractions.
It doesn’t; motion is a precisely measured and irrefutable characteristic of “physical” reality, I merely believe motion is incremental and physics assumes it is continuous, much to the chagrin of all those that have had to deal with the infinities generated the assumption of infinite divisibility.
Dark matter and dark energy are the classic case of abstraction. Observations are made (galactic rotation, expansion of space, the flatness of space) that couldn’t be explained with the existing laws of physics, so new phenomena, dark energy and dark matter were introduced. No one can explain what they are.
I borrowed the terminology and the idea of dual (implicate and explicate) levels of reality from Bohm. I also use the same word (holonomic) that Bohm, in conjunction with Karl Pribram, used to describe brain function. I describe the dynamics of reality that God uses to create and sustain reality as the holonomic mechanism. It is similar to cellular automata in that it requires an initial configuration, algorithmic information, and an impetus to reconfigure discrete space and increment it to the next configuration. In that way it differs from Bohm’s holomovement approach. Don’t bother reading Bohm; google “holomovement” and Wikpedia will tell you all you need to know.
I’ve read most of Davies’ books. He takes a middle ground approach to the science-religion dialogue ( won a Templeton prize) and provides all of the questions in a very interesting way, but none of the answers. Here is an excerpt he wrote that is mirrored in my thesis:This sounds a bit like Paul Davies (not as I’ve read much of him). I think a problem is that the kind of person who is attracted to this territory tends to change their religion with their socks, in what I’d call New Age Pick ‘n’ Mix.
I am familiar with the proof, I don’t know why it is real. As far as math is concerned, my thesis is based on discrete space and my interest in math tends toward Kronecker who said “God created the integers, man created all else”. Consequently, my brain sputters whenever I delve into the complex plane.You don’t do things by halves then. You’ll have achieved your ambition when, and only when, you can explain why i is as real as 1 in Euler’s Identity.
I’m from the age of vacuum tubes and slide rules. Twitter transcends my needs and desires. Please explain “hashtag sad”.We are both now officially hashtag sad on Twitter.
(the Wiki links above are for anyone who isn’t as sad as us, I realize you wouldn’t need them)
Not many women were allowed into that almost exclusively male club, which may in part have something to do with Thomas saying things like “As regards the individual nature, woman is defective and misbegotten, for the active power of the male seed tends to the production of a perfect likeness in the masculine sex; while the production of a woman comes from defect in the active power” (ST I, 92, 1)This is what you are said originally: to: "
Yes, of course he thought some things don’t move, he thought the Earth stood still in the center of the universe. But “so what” you say, let’s just ignore inconvenient facts and pretend there are things which don’t change, let’s just ignore Teresa de Ávila, let’s ignore reality. To what purpose? Who gets to decide what to ignore and what not to ignore?
…] I get it now, you think St. Terese de Avila was the Saint who disproved the First Way
The misbegotten notion of “natures” is what led to statements like “As regards the individual nature, woman is defective and misbegotten”.
I don’t remember having respoded, but if you say so. Change (moving) is fundamental, lack of motion is only temporary, all things must pass.
Thanks. I’ve spent a happy couple of hours looking around at Bohm and commentators, including this outline for a theology based on Bohm (in passing, note his warning about people confusing Bohm’s implicate order with God, you might want to point that out to readers of your thesis).
I have Mind Of God somewhere, but don’t really go in for speculation. I would lay odds that the universe is not digital though, simply because it seems people always try to explain the world in terms of the latest technology and it never works out.
You’re nobody till you’ve got complex numbers in your thesis
.A hashtag is a metadata tag on Twitter. I think it is used to give a short name to a specific which is being discussed, as in #sad standing for “those guys who talk about stuff that doesn’t interest #unsad guys” and so on, but like you I’m not a fan of Twitbook and Facer.