That’s a good observation. It’s not the “very idea” of impossibility, of course, that’s problematic, but ungrounded and brittle renderings of the idea that are incompatible with our natural knowledge. The more we learn, particularly in QM, the more we understand that our primitive notions of “impossible” are really indeed quite primitive. Think if “something coming from nothing” as impossible; could be true, but we wouldn’t have a way to know if it’s false. If everything in this universe held to rigid rules of causality, uniformity and isotropy, conserving energy and matter, etc., but the universe itself was somehow “something from nothing”, how would be able to tell?
Or just say “dogma trumps experience”. Reality is what it is, and if there is one basic learning from physics in the last one hundred years, it is that reality doesn’t care a whit about our neat little conceptual boxes, or our precious intuitions. To hold to the neat little boxes is just to distance oneself from understanding the real world around us. It is intelligible and we do make headway, albeit with long, hard effort sometimes, but our intuitions and traditions are primitive, unworkable, mistaken on a great many points as we discover models that work in exquisitely precise ways.
I think you have that backwards (and note I skipped over the temptation to address the idea of theists complaining about other blurring the distinction between real/unreal!); as soon as we adopt a rigorous, objective model for truth, we have a criterion which is practical, clear, and demonstrative. No such razor is available to the theist, who can’t define “exist” or “true” in objective terms. What is under assault are the casual and primitive ideas we inherit from biology and the psychology it has endowed us with. We can appreciate its utility in terms of getting us here, but much of our intuition is bound up in a fuzzy kind of voodoo fetish, that we are only beginning to find ways to check, overturn and calibrate with objective and systematic analysis.
Well, it’s seductive. Every Catholic is also an empiricist to some substantial degree, whether they admit it or not. When am oncoming car swerves into their lane, they move to get out of the way, and avoid collision, because they have grounds for understanding that oncoming car to be a real thing and a real threat. That model of truth, which is all I’m standing on here, is used everyday, all the time, by Catholics and everyone else. The more you look at it, the more it becomes clear the gap between performative knowledge and merely claimed knowledge, or religious faith or whatever you want to call it.
Are you saying here that there is such a thing as impossibility.
Sure. As best we can tell, it’s impossible to create or destroy matter/energy. If there’s something attested to universally in our tests and observations – and I’m not talking folk wisdom here or “common sense”, but instrumental, objective testing and experience, systematically developed – it’s that such is impossible.
You are being inconsistent. You are turning a scientific statement in to a metaphysical absolute. In other-words, you are correct only if physical reality is absolute. You have no epistemological authority to turn a physical law in to an absolute.
That is precisely why He is God and can do anything. Thanks for that nice comment. If it wasn’t for God you would have nothing to talk about.
Which is admirably honest. I have to say, it is the gross misrepresentation of concepts such as ‘fact’ and ‘possibility’ that most rile me about science, atheism, and the common element that links the 2 in popular terms, scientism
I would say that a Catholic (or any religious person) is an empiricist who rejects the limitations of scientific empiricism, which is ultimately just the limitations of what can be quantified in physical terms according to our abilities to do so. Concepts such as ‘nothing’ are not so mysterious. Absence is a recognizable concept. Absolute is a recognizable concept. Absolute absence is easily conceivable.
TS:
Well, you call it “potatoes” and I call it “potatoes.” Substantial coming-to-be is not simply matter and energy merely getting moved around. There are substantive changes taking place in those phenomena. Conversion of matter to different forms, etc. The best you can say is that the atoms are essentially similar.
I guess my question would be, “What substantive happening took place at t=0?” From absolute nothingness, which is not a substance, nor a container, nor a vacuum, to a speck of super-high intensity energy, and seconds later, the material “seeds” of matter.
Interesting. You have been strangely quiet during discussions concerning virtual particles.
And physics does? C’mon, TS!
(I, hopefully, have a case of wonderful Cabernet coming to exist within the next few days!)
We still don’t.
TS, God is not the substrate. “Creation” is the beginning of something where there was nothing before. There is/was no substrate of any kind whatsoever. That’s the True Catholic conception of Creation. God did not create out of a substrate.
That is pure non-sense. True nothingness cannot become unstable as there is nothing that can become unstable, or stable. It’s nothing but a play on words to try to confuse.
Again, TS, God is not a substrate. God’s reality is the absolute antithesis of “substrate” to humans.
See, I’d say the exact same thing about the scientism that says what you just quoted.
But, you still have one substantial problem, the Bible and all of its 2,000+ pages, and multiplicity of authors, and events and relations, etc.
Touchstone:
But that may not be enough for you.
OK, thanks. I still don’t have a good bead on what “scientism” means, and near as I can tell, its usage is “relies on science more than I think warranted”. And by that measure, I’m probably a… “scientismist”(???) around here. Others have said if I don’t think science can answer all of life’s questions, I don’t qualify, and I certainly don’t hold to that idea, so who knows? It’s a word that is just finding its feet as an epithet (or maybe just a benign adjective).
“Nothing” is an exceedingly mysterious concept, and quite possibly the trickiest concept I could suggest if you are looking for deep mystery. “Absence” of course, has to borrow its semantics from a “something”. Doesn’t help to use baroque terms, either – “privation” has the same problem. If “nothing” obtains, there is no absence, as that would imply a something to be absent from.
No. I understand this to be a meme of sorts in some circles, but as of today, it’s only the Higgs Boson which remains “undiscovered”. Fermions and neutrinos are empirically supported, for example – an electron is an sub-atomic particle, a type of fermion, and you’re well aware of the empirical evidence for electrons, at least, right?
No, it can’t, which really is a good way to bring this back to the topic of the thread. To the extent that something like the Higgs Boson is “inferred”, it’s a quantitative inference, values that emerge from the math models that don’t have a name, until given one as a placeholder, a “theoretical particle”. The story of the neutrino, it’s original conjecture, and the struggle for the evidence that makes it a fact of nature, is fascinating.
I claim it’s the reverse – that the man on the street is typically quite unaware and unappreciative of the depth and robustness of the hard evidence and empirical strength of the theories maintained in modern physics. That’s something we can do an evidential review on, if needed, and I think it will be a lopsided argument if so. One of the reasons I like to hang out at this forum is because here I find lots of sensible thinkers who really just are not aware even at a basic level how science works, how strong it is in terms of hard-core evidence, and how strongly it militates agains the “folk wisdom” mentality of much of organized religion, Catholicism being no exception, if a damn sight better at grasping the issues than the Protestant community.
I can’t think of what you might mean by a “catastrophically disproven theory”. Newton’s physics was wrong, but not catastrophically so, by any means, and even “wrong” is harsh terminology; Newton was good as far as it went, but was simplistic, incomplete. You could, and still can, fly your spaceship to the moon and land it there relying on Newton rather than Einstein.And science has an amazing ability to disclaim responsibility, rather than more honestly waving it’s hands around, until it can come up with a less catastrophically disproven theory to cover up for the last disaster it came up with… and call it progress!
OK, great! Let’s just start with one such example, and take a look. What was the latest “coming to be” you witnessed?
Energy and matter are completely conserved. The building blocks remain precisely what they were prior to any reconfiguration. This is testimony of physics, that nothing is created, or destroyed. Me just see different structures and pattens made out of all the stuff that does exist. Do you suppose that a child with box of Lego’s has made something “come to be” in a physical sense? He’s rearranged the building blocks, to be sure, and in forms that may be alternately more or less like a dinosaur or a car in shape, but he is just shuffling blocks around.
We don’t know what t=0 was “like”, and here, we are bewitched by our language, to use a term Wittgenstein might have applied here. We don’t have “absolute nothingness” in evidence (!), or by inference, even (at least in the “perfect nothing” sense – physicist use “nothing” in a different sense than theologians do). We have a container in the first quantum beyond t=0, and depending on how you define “container” in your model, we hav it directly. We have geometric and time scales below the Planck layer, so the classical/macroscopic rules are off.
Didn’t see it. Link?
Physics makes no such claim. I’ve had a chance to read parts of the Hawking book now, and so am much more confident than I was last week in what I was saying on his part, but any “multiverse” or “cosmic landscape” is at most and forever an extapolation into a domain we can’t ever test, experience or know. It’s based on coherent and performative physics and math models from this universe, but that may or may not apply beyond our universe. We don’t know. Physics is resolutely silent on the matter, in a way religion is manifestly not. For Catholics, for cryinoutloud, it’s a matter of dogma!
Heh, OK, well if so, it came from nothing!
Well, even if so, the conceit remains. If we are prudent with our beliefs and ideas, we disavow such claims (and huge theological foundations come crashing down, while physics just carries on).
Well, as I keep saying, meaningful language is impossible to come by on this question. The Catholic “nihilo” is not a “perfect nothing”, on their own terms; there was God, and God is not a “perfect nothing” in their view. From God… the universe. Whether “substrate” as the description of God there fits or not is of no consequence. God is the causal prior, and pre-extant (or meta-extant). There is no “perfect nothing” if God is non-imaginary.
I’ve been going out of my way to make the pertinent
I have no idea what “antithesis of substrate” would even mean. This is very problematic language, and belies the tenuous connection of the language used to any real concepts we may have to ground it in. God is referred to in Catholic theology (Aquinas?) as the “ground of all being”. If the universe “be”, its being is ground in God, “substrate” being the thing that another thing grows from, or comes out of.
Well, think about that next time you drive a car, or take some medicine, or use a computer. It’s manifestly NOT superfluous when you partake of its fruit. One doesn’t need God to explain the origins of the species, or for a coherent speculative model for universe orgination. One does need to rely on science and its claims and epistemology to trust one’s well being to the actions of the medicine, or the mechanics of the car taking you to the pharmacy to get said medicine. You’d get by practically far farther without needing any notions of God than you would without any notions of science.
And the Quran, don’t forget that! And the Book of Mormon has some really beautiful and stirring parts to it, as well, and there’s the Bhagavad Gita, if we want something a little more settled and older than the Bible. And then there’s… you get the idea.
-TS
The terms get tricky here, but so long as we understand something like “mediated” or “indirect” as the relationship between mind and extra-mind through the senses, OK. Transcendental Idealism. All we have direct access to is phenomena (Kantian sense – ‘mental sensations’).Touchstone:
“By reason and experience, God cannot have done what he is thought to have done. It’s impossible by those measures, and we would understand that any “net energy/matter” that exists at all must be eternal, uncreated, undestroyable (this is important to note now that we understand our universe to be a “zero-energy” universe, making that a bit of a moot point for us). All knowledge about the extramental world is tentative, but that’s a good example of a real impossibility.”
Let me ask you:
In somewhat the same mode of thinking—
I wonder how Kant would responded to that above paragraph, since a good portion of his philosophy rested on the assumption that the principle of causality could not applied outside of experience—since that was the case, the questions of “speculative metaphysics” could not be answered—in other words, the “extramental world” (in your words). Therefore, the human mind could only concern itself with things which it COULD answer, like Science, which would be “firmly grounded in the laws of mind” (that last bit came from Wikipedia)
From what I’ve UNDERSTOOD of Kant, the “extramental world” was “closed off” perpetually to the human mind (If I’ve misstated Kant’s position, please somebody correct me.)
Can’t, and faith or religious belief cannot help you.
Sure. Per Popper (he’s a player in the history of this question), we understand our knowledge to be positive knowledge to some (still tentative) degree because it is performative and has passed some practical tests for falsification. That is, knowledge is eliminative, and therefore tentative, always; what we know is that which cannot be knocked down as false and which has some path by which we understand it may have been knocked down as false, if it were in fact, false. That is why we might rightly describe our knowledge as “not demonstrably false” or even “demonstrably not false” (if you get the distinction, there), in lieu of saying it is “true”.
I start from “I don’t know” for things that are not known by necessity (e.g. something exists), and “tentative” is far out from there as we can get. See above regarding perfomance in predictions, etc. and liability to falsification.
It’s functional. I can deploy my understanding, for example, of electronics, to create a circuit board of my design. If my understanding of physics, electronics and logic is correct, it will do what I anticipate (so long as I execute well on its design/manufacture). If it fails to do so, I have non-functionality. If it succeeds, I have produced functionality – even if it’s “all an illusion”, it’s still functional! And that is the basis of “value” for knowledge. It’s effectual, and has utility.
That kind of response is really just fine with me. As you can imagine, I’m the “black sheep” in my circles, the odd atheist in a see of theists of various stripes. I have little to no gripe with believers who understand the nature of their belief – something like what you have expressed here.I’m satisifed with measly “faith,” and “belief,” or even “because I WANT it like that!”
Just by induction, of course. It’s an idea that has broad and consistent evidential support. It might be wrong – we are always tentative – but given what’s before us, it’s the only judgment that fits the facts economically. That is, if the world were such that the energy/matter could not be destroyed, no how, no way, never, it would look and act just like this world. It might be that “matter is created in this ad-hoc case”, or some such, but that’s an ad-hoc deviation from the parsimonious answer, a capricious adjustment we have no warrant for outside of our caprice.
I think we may be disagreeing at the “universe border”, though. If you are thinking there is some “metaversal law” (across all universes and contexts) that matter/energy is impossible to destroy, I’d say “could be!”, but that would only be allowing for logical possibilities. We don’t have any basis for projecting consistency of our experience inside this universe to contexts outside of it. That’s been my mantra all along here, so I won’t press that farther here.I agree with you—but just wanted to know how YOU arrived at this conclusion/justified it.
As I said, in another reply thread, you see substantial coming-to-be as simply the juxtaposition of existing matter. I see it as that, in a way, but, primarily I see it as the formation of new structures - while keeping matter at zero… A child coming to be is new in every sense of that word. When what was a child grows old, it shrivels and dies. If nothing substantial was going on, there would be no initial coming to be and no death. Just move matter around.
Of course, that the nature of the universe, at the quantum level. And, as building blocks, God, it would seem, would want such an order.
Why the need for coming to be and growing old?
An unfounded assertion on your part.
Scientists have a great deal to say about what t=0 was like, so, that’s not quite true. You might call it conjecture, and you might be right. But, it’s a lot to say nonetheless. The concept of perfect nothingness is sufficient enough for us to have this conversation and to know full well what we’re talking about.
Although I haven’t read his book, when I do get it, I’ll bet he is talking about in such a way that he confuses the slight differences in meanings.
I love those terms, “solid math-based answers.” As if math can answer all the ultimate questions without a gap of the math god.
Venturing in where I likely am well over my head here…BUT…
This is defining and is of great consequence, in my opinion.
Not if you will accept that there just might be that which is not matter. In the same way that you say we can’t possibly know what absolute nothingness is, we can’t possibly know what pure spirit is either.
No; that’s your definition. God is not “substrate.” Creation is not causal in the sense that the four causes are causal. The closest I can describe “creation,” and it’s language-imperfect, is that it is similar to magic, except without the behind-the-scenes trickery. IOW, real magic, or, at least, pure inexpressibility.
Sure you can. We’ve been talking about it now, and you’ve been defining it, for the past 2 or 3 posts.
Again, I disagree.
The problem with all of the aforementioned is that the creations of God, while durationally finite, still outlast the mechanics of the car, or the computer, or the space rocket, or the microwave oven.
I’m not as much of those books was either derived from the Holy Scriptures, or gave to the Holy Scriptures some of its substance. The Hebrew tradition, I guess, handed down orally, may well have preceded all other holy books. It is also interesting that the confluence of holy books and historical occurrences seemed to all expand during the same period on Earth. Then stop.
You know you can’t dismiss it quite so frivolously. Too much about it is still too chilling, in the widest sense of that word.
Strictly speaking, the concept of “person” was developed in Christian theology to explain the Trinity - as a single divine substance in relationship with 3 persons.
The term “talking snakes” is commonly used as a term of ridicule and trivialization of the Bible.