Order, Order! Order in the Universe!

[Bahman]

Another gem by Msgr. Charles Pope.

The order of the universe, things great and small, living and inanimate shout, " God exists, How do you think we came to be, how do you think everything moves and acts with such order and purpose? " Give it a read, very inspiring.

blog.adw.org/2015/03/order-order-in-the-universe-a-meditation-on-the-wisdom-that-creation-reflects/

Linus2nd

Seriously, that was not a gem. How you could expect that things have a meaning if you design them? I am wondering how people could make a nonsense argument about existence of God. Order exists hence we exist hence God exist! I can in fact argue oppositely, we exist hence order exist.

 

[GaryTaylor]

Seriously, that was not a gem. How you could expect that things have a meaning if you design them? I am wondering how people could make a nonsense argument about existence of God. Order exists hence we exist hence God exist! I can in fact argue oppositely, we exist hence order exist.

I’m of the conviction God would not have made the universe as it is unless He intended us to understand it. The biggest issue in understanding it is our transmission of knowledge to each other. Clear, honest simple language to keep man following and the dialogue flowing. I think it should be a universal law.

 

[Bahman]

I’m of the conviction God would not have made the universe as it is unless He intended us to understand it. The biggest issue in understanding it is our transmission of knowledge to each other. Clear, honest simple language to keep man following and the dialogue flowing. I think it should be a universal law.

That is linear way of thinking. I thought you believe in interconnected consciousness.

 

[tonyrey]

Seriously, that was not a gem. How you could expect that things have a meaning if you design them? I am wondering how people could make a nonsense argument about existence of God. Order exists hence we exist hence God exist! I can in fact argue oppositely, we exist hence order exist.

Your ability to argue presupposes order - unless your ability is chaotic - in which case your conclusions are unreliable…

 

[tonyrey]

Seriously, that was not a gem. How you could expect that things have a meaning if you design them? I am wondering how people could make a nonsense argument about existence of God. Order exists hence we exist hence God exist! I can in fact argue oppositely, we exist hence order exist.

**How **could we come into existence in a chaotic world?

 

[GaryTaylor]

That is linear way of thinking. I thought you believe in interconnected consciousness.

I doo, we need to simplify the interconnected transmission of knowledge. God wants us to know him, He intended this to be. He wants us to know Him and that we are all in this together. The together part with the interconnected conscious has been most problematic. With the help of all our new found breaks in technology in a ever more so interconnected world. I expect great strides in this area.

 

[Bahman]

**How **could we come into existence in a chaotic world?

I can answer you in a few ways:

1. The attitude that God did this and that is not a good attitude since it leaves us in state of ignorance and stop us from searching and thinking.
2. We didn’t come into existence, we have been being always and will be. We are consciousness.
3. It took us such a long time until we could adopt ourselves to the current state of existence. History can justify this.
4. Mystery of beginning, what we call God, is something we might understand someday if we keep thinking about it. At the end God is consciousness too.

 

[Oreoracle]

If morality is irrelevant there is no reason to be reasonable! Obligations would be illusions…

I didn’t say it was irrelevant to the way in which we conduct ourselves, it’s just irrelevant to the thread. Food’s awfully important too, but it’s irrelevant to the thread.

To exalt physics as the final explanation is itself a metaphysical explanation! Materialism is self-refuting…

This will probably go more smoothly if I answer your rebuttal with a question: Do you or do you not consider metaphysics to be the “final explanation”? Why don’t you need a meta-metaphysical explanation to account for it?

 

[Charlemagne_III]

What others choose to do is up to them. I expect to be ridiculed and dismissed, but in that I find no shame. The value of my life isn’t to be judged by the opinions of others.

No, but the value of your participation in this forum will be judged by others. There will be no shame in that either, unless you refuse to be judged for your thoughts, as all of us judge each other.

If you are not an atheist, what part does God or the gods play in your discovery of meaning and purpose? Apparently not a significant part since you manage to avoid mentioning them.

Or are you an agnostic? Which for all intents and purposes is to be an atheist since the agnostic has no relationship with a God he cannot know exists.

 

[Aloysium]

What I don’t want to do is to live life as if it’s something to be endured. . . .

I am sorry, but this will be probably be one of the most bizarrely funny things I will encounter today. You are either very young or very, very fortunate. There may be a time when day after day, month after month, hopefully not year after year, life will be just too hard. You may cry out to God to be taken from this misery.

Romans 9 comes to mind where it is said that God “says to Moses, ‘I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.’ It does not, therefore, depend on human desire or effort, but on God’s mercy.”

On a personal note, that He took my sight that I might see, and brought me to death, that I might know life, are blessings He bestowed onto me. One endures much, truly living each moment, our connection with God, to its fullest, surrendering it to Him, our Father.

 

[Bahman]

…Romans 9 comes to mind where it is said that God “says to Moses, ‘I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.’ It does not, therefore, depend on human desire or effort, but on God’s mercy.” …

How about God’s divine justice?

 

[tonyrey]

I didn’t say it was irrelevant to the way in which we conduct ourselves, it’s just irrelevant to the thread. Food’s awfully important too, but it’s irrelevant to the thread.

Is it irrelevant to be reasonable?

This will probably go more smoothly if I answer your rebuttal with a question: Do you or do you not consider metaphysics to be the “final explanation”? Why don’t you need a meta-metaphysical explanation to account for it?

Metaphysics is not a “final explanation” but a category of different** interpretations of reality **which, if they are realistic, do not claim to have the last word.

All your questions and statements presuppose that we are rational beings - which is evidence that order is a fundamental aspect of reality. If things were predominantly chaotic it would be impossible for rational beings to exist, let alone explain or understand anything…

 

[balto]

The “atheist answer” depends on what you mean by “order”. If by order you are referring to the laws of physics, I would argue that the laws of physics don’t need to be caused to exist; their existence is a consequence of the existence of the material universe.

For an analogy, let’s say I have a set S of numbers, containing only 2,4, and 6. It is a “law” that all elements of S are even. Note that the law is determined solely by the elements of S. It comes with the package, and needn’t be caused apart from stipulating the existence of S.

Incidentally I think that you are actually on to something incredibly profound here, although I don’t think you would draw the same conclusions from it that I would. It seems to commit you to the view that reality is intrinsically ordered to some end by its very nature, at least at some level of reality. In other words, some things behave they way they do because of what their nature is. So it seems to be bringing formal causality back into the picture.

Denying this seems to lead to having to stipulate that all the order we experience is really coming from our own minds, which means that we don’t really have any knowledge of external reality at all but only knowledge of the way our minds happen to work. The recent bout of solipsism on this forum is probably just a symptom of following modernity’s ideas about the nature of reality to their natural conclusions.

This whole notion of the behavior of matter being “caused” by something external to it like a law of nature is admittedly a little strange, so it’s good that these issues are bringing renewed interest to some previous metaphysical theses like formal causality.

 

[balto]

Imagine someone taking a fistful of sand, tossing it into the wind, and after observing the resulting mess, exclaiming, “Look at how improbable it is that these grains of sand would fall on the ground in this exact configuration! How do you explain that?” You would think that person was loony. Of course we think of life as being more special than sand, but that’s because we are alive; anthropocentrism at its finest.

But this is just begging the question against the OP who is claiming that something like life really is different in-kind from non-life. You’re assuming that everything is really just an accidental arrangement of fundamental particles (or whatever it turns out to be), but that assumption is highly suspect, especially given how prolific our knowledge of higher levels of reality has become. Claiming that we are alive so “of course we think life is special” is an instance of the genetic fallacy. Maybe we do say that life is special because we are living things, but so what? That doesn’t mean that life really isn’t different in kind from non-life.

 

[balto]

Unfortunately for the** theist**, there is no material; evidence, and never will be, that other **gods **have always existed, continue to exist, or will forever come into existence.

/

You could say that, but I think it would serve to show that you are misunderstanding the nature of the claims that the theist is making by assuming that the word “God” refers to some kind of “super-angel” if you will. The theist is not claiming that there is an extra being in the natural order that caused the universe to spring up one day. That’s the claim the atheist is making by inventing an infinity of universes and multiverses. It seems that the hypothetical atheist being considered in this thread is guilty of violating the principle of parsimony to the nth degree. How does postulating an infinite number of universes explain anything? Then you’d have to explain why the multiverse is of such-and-such a nature so as to infallibly produce an infinite number of universes, so you really just kicked the problem up one level and have failed to solve any problem.

 

[balto]

This will probably go more smoothly if I answer your rebuttal with a question: Do you or do you not consider metaphysics to be the “final explanation”? Why don’t you need a meta-metaphysical explanation to account for it?

You’ve posted something like this in the past, so I think it is important to clarify what we generally mean by the word “metaphysics.” It is the study of being as being. What does it mean to say that “something is” or “something exists?” That’s the question metaphysics answers. There’s no need to have a “meta-metaphysical explanation” of anything, whatever that would mean, because you wouldn’t be talking about anything having to do with existence.

 

[Oreoracle]

It seems to commit you to the view that reality is intrinsically ordered to some end by its very nature, at least at some level of reality. In other words, some things behave they way they do because of what their nature is. So it seems to be bringing formal causality back into the picture.

I’m not sure I would use that terminology. In my opinion, it doesn’t simplify the ideas at hand. In particular, I don’t see how “this object behaves as it does because of what its nature is” is any clearer than “this object behaves as it does because of what it is”. “Nature” is just a filler word that creates the illusion of depth.

Denying this seems to lead to having to stipulate that all the order we experience is really coming from our own minds, which means that we don’t really have any knowledge of external reality at all but only knowledge of the way our minds happen to work.

But I didn’t use the word “order”, nor am I inclined to. It’s always struck me as a normative term. You have to have some notion of how things “should be” for order to be well-defined. I suppose you could require that things should be as they are and infer from this that the universe is ordered, but that’s just tautological.

By all means, correct me if you mean something different by it. But “order” in its everyday use is normative, e.g., my room is ordered if my possessions are arranged in some prescribed way, perhaps in a way that I subjectively deem to be organized. If I take my room to be organized as it is, it is automatically ordered. So “order” isn’t a very helpful notion because it tells you more about my preferences than the actual arrangement of objects. I would prefer to cut out the middle man and just describe the arrangement of objects directly.

But this is just begging the question against the OP who is claiming that something like life really is different in-kind from non-life.

I was addressing the Fine-Tuning Argument specifically, which argues that life is special simply because its prerequisites are improbable. Clearly we need more than that for something to be special, as the sand argument illustrates.

You’re assuming that everything is really just an accidental arrangement of fundamental particles (or whatever it turns out to be), but that assumption is highly suspect, especially given how prolific our knowledge of higher levels of reality has become.

I’m not assuming anything. I’m saying that the Fine-Tuning Argument needs life to be special to get off the ground, and it hasn’t demonstrated such a thing. The onus is on those advancing the argument to show that life requires a metaphysical explanation.

Claiming that we are alive so “of course we think life is special” is an instance of the genetic fallacy. Maybe we do say that life is special because we are living things, but so what? That doesn’t mean that life really isn’t different in kind from non-life.

The genetic fallacy does not apply to explanations. I was explaining why people believe life is special, I was not attempting to infer that it is not special. It could be special, but this hasn’t been demonstrated.

You’ve posted something like this in the past, so I think it is important to clarify what we generally mean by the word “metaphysics.” It is the study of being as being. What does it mean to say that “something is” or “something exists?” That’s the question metaphysics answers. There’s no need to have a “meta-metaphysical explanation” of anything, whatever that would mean, because you wouldn’t be talking about anything having to do with existence.

I’ve heard multiple definitions of “metaphysics”. Typically when you affix “meta-” to a discipline, it refers to the study of the discipline itself. Metalogic is the study of logic, metaethics is the study of ethics, etc. Metaphysics addresses (supposedly) why physics “works” as well as it does, why the universe conforms to physical laws in the first place, etc. So in this sense it is the study of physics. But then you need an explanation for the “laws” of metaphysics, i.e., you need a meta-metaphysics.

Now you could take the laws of metaphysics you subscribe to as axiomatic, but then why not just take the scientific method as axiomatic (or whatever foundation of physics you like) and be done with it? The question is what greater understanding is actually gained by adding another level of abstraction?

 

[balto]

I’m not sure I would use that terminology. In my opinion, it doesn’t simplify the ideas at hand. In particular, I don’t see how “this object behaves as it does because of what its nature is” is any clearer than “this object behaves as it does because of what it is”. “Nature” is just a filler word that creates the illusion of depth.

Those two statements are equivalent. The bottom line is that either the things with which we interact in our day-to-day experiences have objective existence and behave in certain objective ways independent of any subjective human knowledge, or they do not. If they do, then intelligibility is a real part of the universe, which is all the OP needs to make his point. The order is already out there for us to discover. If it’s not “out there”, then we invent all of it and have no real knowledge of anything outside of our own minds. The only way we have any real knowledge of anything is that we recognize the intelligibility that is really a part of the universe. If the universe is nothing but pure chaos, then there’s nothing to know about it. That’s the point I was trying to make.

But I didn’t use the word “order”, nor am I inclined to. It’s always struck me as a normative term. You have to have some notion of how things “should be” for order to be well-defined. I suppose you could require that things should be as they are and infer from this that the universe is ordered, but that’s just tautological.

By all means, correct me if you mean something different by it. But “order” in its everyday use is normative, e.g., my room is ordered if my possessions are arranged in some prescribed way, perhaps in a way that I subjectively deem to be organized. If I take my room to be organized as it is, it is automatically ordered. So “order” isn’t a very helpful notion because it tells you more about my preferences than the actual arrangement of objects. I would prefer to cut out the middle man and just describe the arrangement of objects directly.

Well okay, you’re probably right that most common understandings of order are normative. But that’s not what I am talking about. See the above. It has nothing to do with the way multiple objects are arranged by happenstance but the way things are in themselves.

I was addressing the Fine-Tuning Argument specifically, which argues that life is special simply because its prerequisites are improbable. Clearly we need more than that for something to be special, as the sand argument illustrates.

It’s not a matter of probabilities. This is the reason why I think you would have a strong case to make against the fine tuning argument. It predicates way too many qualities of God in the same way that we would ascribe them to human activities. Humans design things by arranging material things into accidental arrangements for some subjective purpose, but when God presumably “designs” things He makes them intrinsically intelligible in themselves by causing them to exist. Yes, we do need something more than improbability to make life special. Fortunately we have that: the activities of living things are specifically directed towards their own perfection and inorganic things are not.

I’m not assuming anything. I’m saying that the Fine-Tuning Argument needs life to be special to get off the ground, and it hasn’t demonstrated such a thing. The onus is on those advancing the argument to show that life requires a metaphysical explanation.

Yes, you are making a massive assumption. You’re assuming that reality is “nothing but” fundamental particles and that physics gives an exhaustive description of reality, at least that’s what I think you believe, although I am happy to be corrected if I have misrepresented you. Assuming that’s true, you’d be committed to some kind of physicalist metaphysics. Let’s pretend that “physics is all you can see.” Would you even recognize life? No, life is just as physical as non-life. But the problem is you haven’t explained life but simply ignored it by concentrating only on physics.

So I think the onus is on you to prove that almost everything in our ordinary experience, including things like life for instance, is really an illusion.

 

[balto]

I’ve heard multiple definitions of “metaphysics”. Typically when you affix “meta-” to a discipline, it refers to the study of the discipline itself. Metalogic is the study of logic, metaethics is the study of ethics, etc. Metaphysics addresses (supposedly) why physics “works” as well as it does, why the universe conforms to physical laws in the first place, etc. So in this sense it is the study of physics. But then you need an explanation for the “laws” of metaphysics, i.e., you need a meta-metaphysics.

It is true that the term “metaphysics” is probably a bad one since it appears to give it some kind of special relation to physics when there is in fact none that I can see. I think it is just a historical name since Aristotle wrote a manuscript called the “Metaphysics.” But no, metaphysics is not there simply to justify physics… There’s nothing beyond metaphysics since it would have to be beyond being, which refers to nothing at all. So it seems that “meta-metaphysics” doesn’t refer to anything real and is devoid of content.

Now you could take the laws of metaphysics you subscribe to as axiomatic, but then why not just take the scientific method as axiomatic (or whatever foundation of physics you like) and be done with it? The question is what greater understanding is actually gained by adding another level of abstraction?

There’s no reason to take any metaphysical laws as axiomatic except for things like the law of non-contradiction, the law of identity, etc. You propose a metaphysical framework, ensure that is does not entail any contradictions, and then see if it accords with the way things actually are. Physics does not purport to explain why things exist or what it means for things to exist. If you want to draw a line there and claim physics is a brute fact, you’re going to have a hard time justifying drawing the line there since it seems entirely arbitrary. Why don’t we just claim that everything is a brute fact and be done with it? Why seek explanations for anything or do any abstraction at all, scientific or otherwise?

 

[tonyrey]

Not just that but…there is tons of DIS-order in our universe, too.
I mean…the Catholic catechism even talks about some of the infamous “disordered” things in our universe.
There is probably as much in disarray --in our bodies, in nature, in everything–as there is that seems orderly.
And it would make sense that the things that are not so ordered die off. So what we are left with are the more orderly things…along the way.

Your statements presuppose that we are rational beings - which is evidence that order is a fundamental aspect of reality. If things were predominantly chaotic it would be impossible for rational beings to exist, let alone explain or understand anything…

I don’t understand how the seeming order of some things in the universe is enough for some people to automatically think there is a god.
First of all, there can be other reasons for the order (which many scientists have pointed out)

And,
If “order” is enough for a person to believe there is a god…wouldn’t then the “disorder” in front of us also be enough to make that same person believe there is not a god?
It would be the same pattern of thinking:

I see order = there is a god
i see disorder = there isn’t a god…

The ability to distinguish order from disorder presupposes a rational mind - unless you are a materialist. How did that mind originate? Is a biological machine capable of understanding itself - or anything else? If so precisely how does it perform that miracle?