Order, Order! Order in the Universe!

[tonyrey]

…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?

The scientific method cannot be axiomatic because it presupposes the existence of rational minds and the intelligibility of the universe, neither of which can be explained scientifically. Can science explain itself?

 

[St_Redemption]

Even when I was a pretty ardent agnostic I’ve never understood the view that mindless swirling particles could accidentily create a mind.

 

[Linusthe2nd]

Even when I was a pretty ardent agnostic I’ve never understood the view that mindless swirling particles could accidentily create a mind.

Sure stretches credulity. How anyone could accept it just blows the mind.

Linus2nd

 

[CompSciGuy]

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.

You’re kidding right? If order did not preexist before we existed, then there would be absolutely no basis whatsoever for our minds to be capable of understanding order or meaning, or for us to have minds to understand these things to begin with. You are expecting us to believe that matter without reason or rational capability just somehow spontaneously developed into rational, thinking beings. That sounds like a bit of a load, pardon my figure of speech. I see the existence of rational beings (like humans) as evidence that purpose, order and meaning are woven into the fabric of reality. The fact that we discern order, meaning and purpose in nature is only further evidence of this as far as I am concerned.

 

[St_Francis]

The concern isn’t the ability to travel to other universes. The argument some atheists use (though I don’t feel inclined to use it) goes like this: The Fine-Tuning Argument holds that it is so incredibly unlikely that our universe’s set of laws would allow life to exist that they appear to have been fine-tuned by a creator. But if Multiverse Theory is correct, there could be infinitely many universes with different sets of laws, most of which are not hospitable to life. So it isn’t remarkable at all that some universe allows for life, because the Multiverse essentially got to roll the dice infinitely many times–a few rolls were bound to work out.

First of all, there is **no **evidence for multiverses… so for that reason it’s a dumb argument. It’s like a defense lawyer arguing that the defendant *could *have an identical twin his mother didn’t know about who was the one who really killed the defendant’s wife.

Secondly, all these mathematicians should understand more about probability. Remember when people said if you had enough monkeys, Shakespeare could be typed? Well, no, because each keystroke would then define the need for the next, so the chances for the correct letter to be struck would rise considerably each keystroke.

In the same way, the multiverse idea doesn’t hold, because too many factors have to be in the same universe, and the chances of that happening are much higher than the appearance of the factors randomly among the universes.

 

[Aloysium]

. . . Remember when people said if you had enough monkeys, Shakespeare could be typed?. . . .

An experiment was conducted at a British University about twelve years ago to test the claim that an infinite number of monkeys given typewriters would create the works of Shakespeare.
A single computer was placed in a monkey enclosure and the literary output of six primates was monitored. After a month, the macaques had not done much more than use it as a lavatory, and mostly type the letter “s”. Even if there were an infinite amount of time and monkeys, there wouldn’t be enough computers resistant to this sort of use.

 

[Oreoracle]

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.

Okay, whatever that means, you would need to demonstrate it for the Fine-Tuning Argument to get off the ground. My point was only that it is a deficient argument as it stands.

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.

That depends on what you mean by “real”. It’s not so much that I assume only physical things are real but rather that I don’t see any use in defining “reality” so that non-physical entities will be there.

More to the point, when someone asserts that God exists, I’m not really sure what they mean. It’s like postulating that a ghost exists independently of the universe and interacts with tangible objects in no observable way. I’m not sure what it would mean to say that such a thing “exists”, for everything else remains unchanged whether or not it exists. It may as well just be a fantasy in my mind.

I’m happy to entertain such a nebulous notion of existence if you like, but let’s at least agree that it is nebulous.

Would you even recognize life? No, life is just as physical as non-life.

Surely you would agree that in biology we can distinguish life from non-life, and biology is ultimately just applied physics.

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.

Well, let’s test this out, shall we? I’ll pretend to be a solipsist. Now hopefully we can agree that solipsism is self-consistent, so there aren’t any problems there. Does solipsism account for my experiences? Indeed it does, for everything I experience is just a figment of my imagination. It explains everything by explaining nothing.

The reason the approach you describe is doomed to fail is that checking to see if “it accords with the way things are” requires some sort of method of inquiry, and such a method is determined by your metaphysics. So once you’ve chosen a metaphysical viewpoint, you have basically already defined everything so that the method of inquiry you use will always give you the answer you wanted.

So this brings us back to my solipsism. I assume that everything else is just a product of my imagination, so the only possible method of inquiry that could arise from this is to answer every question in the same fashion: No matter what physical data you present to me, it will never contradict my view because I’ve already assumed it isn’t real.

Presumably you don’t agree with solipsism, so I reiterate what I said before. If you’re already biased in favor of a method of inquiry, such as the scientific method, why not just jump to that rather than contrive a metaphysics to get the method you want? Why not cut out the middle man?

Why seek explanations for anything or do any abstraction at all, scientific or otherwise?

This all hinges on what counts as an “explanation”. Metaphysical explanations do not, for example, give us predictive power as scientific explanations do. They certainly aren’t parsimonious. They needn’t be falsifiable. (My solipsism is unfalsifiable, after all.) The list goes on. I don’t think they are the sort of explanations that would really advance our understanding beyond coating everything in jargon.

First of all, there is **no **evidence for multiverses… so for that reason it’s a dumb argument.

I didn’t say it was a good argument.

Remember when people said if you had enough monkeys, Shakespeare could be typed? Well, no, because each keystroke would then define the need for the next, so the chances for the correct letter to be struck would rise considerably each keystroke.

I think you misunderstand the argument, and your statement of the result isn’t quite correct. I can prove something analogous to the correct result: If I flip a coin as many times as I like, the probability that I will get a sequence of 100 tails in a row approaches 1 as the number of flips approaches infinity. Each coin flip is independent, so the probability that any sequence will occur is the product of the probabilities that each individual flip occurs. Each flip has probability 1/2 of being tails, so the probability of all 100 flips in a sequence being tails is (1/2)^100.

The probability that the sequence will not be what we want is then 1-(1/2)^100, which is of course between 0 and 1. Since I am flipping coins forever, we will cut up this infinite sequence of flips into “trials”, which are sequences 100 flips long. Each trial is independent of the others, so we multiply probabilities as before. The probability that the first x trials will not give us what we want is (1-(1/2)^100)^x. We take the limit of this as x approaches infinity since I am flipping coins forever. Since a number between 0 and 1 is being raised to higher and higher powers, it approaches 0 as x approaches infinity. Thus the probability that all trials will fail to give such a sequence approaches 0, therefore the probability that some trial will eventually be the desired sequence approaches 1.

Notice that 100 wasn’t special, as we could have required the sequence of tails to be as long as you wish and the result would hold. And it wasn’t shown that such a sequence would occur, only that the probability of its occurrence converges to 1. They are subtly different.

 

[St_Francis]

Okay, whatever that means, you would need to demonstrate it for the Fine-Tuning Argument to get off the ground. My point was only that it is a deficient argument as it stands.

That depends on what you mean by “real”. It’s not so much that I assume only physical things are real but rather that I don’t see any use in defining “reality” so that non-physical entities will be there.

More to the point, when someone asserts that God exists, I’m not really sure what they mean. It’s like postulating that a ghost exists independently of the universe and interacts with tangible objects in no observable way. I’m not sure what it would mean to say that such a thing “exists”, for everything else remains unchanged whether or not it exists. It may as well just be a fantasy in my mind.

I’m happy to entertain such a nebulous notion of existence if you like, but let’s at least agree that it is nebulous.

Surely you would agree that in biology we can distinguish life from non-life, and biology is ultimately just applied physics.

Well, let’s test this out, shall we? I’ll pretend to be a solipsist. Now hopefully we can agree that solipsism is self-consistent, so there aren’t any problems there. Does solipsism account for my experiences? Indeed it does, for everything I experience is just a figment of my imagination. It explains everything by explaining nothing.

The reason the approach you describe is doomed to fail is that checking to see if “it accords with the way things are” requires some sort of method of inquiry, and such a method is determined by your metaphysics. So once you’ve chosen a metaphysical viewpoint, you have basically already defined everything so that the method of inquiry you use will always give you the answer you wanted.

So this brings us back to my solipsism. I assume that everything else is just a product of my imagination, so the only possible method of inquiry that could arise from this is to answer every question in the same fashion: No matter what physical data you present to me, it will never contradict my view because I’ve already assumed it isn’t real.

Presumably you don’t agree with solipsism, so I reiterate what I said before. If you’re already biased in favor of a method of inquiry, such as the scientific method, why not just jump to that rather than contrive a metaphysics to get the method you want? Why not cut out the middle man?

This all hinges on what counts as an “explanation”. Metaphysical explanations do not, for example, give us predictive power as scientific explanations do. They certainly aren’t parsimonious. They needn’t be falsifiable. (My solipsism is unfalsifiable, after all.) The list goes on. I don’t think they are the sort of explanations that would really advance our understanding beyond coating everything in jargon.

I didn’t say it was a good argument.

I think you misunderstand the argument, and your statement of the result isn’t quite correct. I can prove something analogous to the correct result: If I flip a coin as many times as I like, the probability that I will get a sequence of 100 tails in a row approaches 1 as the number of flips approaches infinity. Each coin flip is independent, so the probability that any sequence will occur is the product of the probabilities that each individual flip occurs. Each flip has probability 1/2 of being tails, so the probability of all 100 flips in a sequence being tails is (1/2)^100.

The probability that the sequence will not be what we want is then 1-(1/2)^100, which is of course between 0 and 1. Since I am flipping coins forever, we will cut up this infinite sequence of flips into “trials”, which are sequences 100 flips long. Each trial is independent of the others, so we multiply probabilities as before. The probability that the first x trials will not give us what we want is (1-(1/2)^100)^x. We take the limit of this as x approaches infinity since I am flipping coins forever. Since a number between 0 and 1 is being raised to higher and higher powers, it approaches 0 as x approaches infinity. Thus the probability that all trials will fail to give such a sequence approaches 0, therefore the probability that some trial will eventually be the desired sequence approaches 1.

Notice that 100 wasn’t special, as we could have required the sequence of tails to be as long as you wish and the result would hold. And it wasn’t shown that such a sequence would occur, only that the probability of its occurrence converges to 1. They are subtly different.

You are changing the probability as it goes on, but in actuality, it doesn’t change. It remains the same no matter how long you go on.

 

[Oreoracle]

You are changing the probability as it goes on, but in actuality, it doesn’t change. It remains the same no matter how long you go on.

The probabilities involved in each flip remain the same, but the probabilities involved when considering a whole sequence change as the length of the sequence changes. If that weren’t the case, then you’d be just as likely to flip tails once in one attempt as you would to flip tails once in ten attempts. Clearly the latter is easier, and it would be easier still if we had 100 attempts to flip a single tails, and easier than that if we had 1000 attempts, and so forth. That is the gist of the result I proved.

The reason the result seems so counterintuitive is that typing a play randomly is much less likely than getting tails for a coin flip, but the principle is the same. As the number of attempts you have to work with increases, the probability of succeeding converges to 1. Hence, given enough time (attempts), monkeys typing randomly will almost surely (with probability 1) type a Shakespearean play no matter how vanishingly unlikely it is to do so in a single attempt.

 

[St_Francis]

The probabilities involved in each flip remain the same, but the probabilities involved when considering a whole sequence change as the length of the sequence changes. If that weren’t the case, then you’d be just as likely to flip tails once in one attempt as you would to flip tails once in ten attempts. Clearly the latter is easier, and it would be easier still if we had 100 attempts to flip a single tails, and easier than that if we had 1000 attempts, and so forth. That is the gist of the result I proved.

The reason the result seems so counterintuitive is that typing a play randomly is much less likely than getting tails for a coin flip, but the principle is the same. As the number of attempts you have to work with increases, the probability of succeeding converges to 1. Hence, given enough time (attempts), monkeys typing randomly will almost surely (with probability 1) type a Shakespearean play no matter how vanishingly unlikely it is to do so in a single attempt.

I have to say I disagree, even tho I know you are probably a PhD in Math or something I sorta-kinda see what you are saying, in that if you flipped the coin 10 times, how likely would it be that you’d get a run of 10 tails? Low. But if you flipped it 100 times, you’d be more likely to, and if you flipped it 1000 times, even more likely. So I see *that. *

But at the same time, it’s like there are two sets of odds. There’s the inherent unlikelihood of getting the run, but the increase of likelihood of its occurring over the number of times you flip. So the likelihood of its happening remains the same in an individual sense, while the possiblity increases because of the increase in number of flips.

I don’t think I’m expressing that very well. I guess it has something ti do with the odds of its happening when you consider it could happen at any time. Like the likelihood of winning the lottery is very low (the one with a lot of money–I think there’s a higher chance of being hit by lightning?) So, *within *the 1000 flips, you are more likely to get a run of 10 tails, but it could happen at any time. Your odds don’t increase towards the end. <<<< That’s what I want to say.

And no way on the monkeys. Do you realize how much the odds increase with each keystroke!

 

[balto]

Okay, whatever that means, you would need to demonstrate it for the Fine-Tuning Argument to get off the ground. My point was only that it is a deficient argument as it stands.

And I believe I agreed with you on that. BTW, I’m not really sure why the notion of something acting for its own benefit would be difficult for you to understand. It is a rather basic concept and an obvious distinction between living and non-living things.

That depends on what you mean by “real”. It’s not so much that I assume only physical things are real but rather that I don’t see any use in defining “reality” so that non-physical entities will be there.

More to the point, when someone asserts that God exists, I’m not really sure what they mean. It’s like postulating that a ghost exists independently of the universe and interacts with tangible objects in no observable way. I’m not sure what it would mean to say that such a thing “exists”, for everything else remains unchanged whether or not it exists. It may as well just be a fantasy in my mind.

I’m happy to entertain such a nebulous notion of existence if you like, but let’s at least agree that it is nebulous.

Well sure, that conception of God would be nebulous. However, considering you have been a poster on this forum for about six years and have generally posted thoughtful and reasonable things in the past, I have a hard time believing that you really think that people around here are committed to defending the obvious strawman you have presented here. If you need clarification on something, then ask for it.

Surely you would agree that in biology we can distinguish life from non-life, and biology is ultimately just applied physics.

I’d be interested in hearing how biology is “ultimately just applied physics” since it is not at all obvious that this is the case, especially since attempts to reduce biology to physics have been unfruitful. Yes, biologists don’t have difficulty drawing a distinction between life and non-life for the general reason I’ve already given: properties like metabolism, homeostasis, adaptability to the environment, etc are all instances of natural self-perfection.

Well, let’s test this out, shall we? I’ll pretend to be a solipsist. Now hopefully we can agree that solipsism is self-consistent, so there aren’t any problems there. Does solipsism account for my experiences? Indeed it does, for everything I experience is just a figment of my imagination. It explains everything by explaining nothing.

The reason the approach you describe is doomed to fail is that checking to see if “it accords with the way things are” requires some sort of method of inquiry, and such a method is determined by your metaphysics. So once you’ve chosen a metaphysical viewpoint, you have basically already defined everything so that the method of inquiry you use will always give you the answer you wanted.

So this brings us back to my solipsism. I assume that everything else is just a product of my imagination, so the only possible method of inquiry that could arise from this is to answer every question in the same fashion: No matter what physical data you present to me, it will never contradict my view because I’ve already assumed it isn’t real.

If you want to be a solipsist, then don’t claim any real knowledge about anything, even that solipsism is true (since that claim would depend on having real knowledge about objective reality at least as far as solipsism being objectively true). If you’re fine with not explaining anything, then by all means be a solipsist.

I don’t know why the fact that people disagree and may stubbornly insist that they are correct in the face of arguments to the contrary should count against the method of inquiry. People adhere to scientific theories because they believe that they are correct, and may or may not revise their views in face of evidence/arguments to the contrary that depends somewhat on their psychology. Is science “doomed to failure” then? It’s unclear to me why scientific inquiry should get a pass over other methods of inquiry when the distinction drawn between them seems to evaporate upon further analysis.

This all hinges on what counts as an “explanation”. Metaphysical explanations do not, for example, give us predictive power as scientific explanations do. They certainly aren’t parsimonious. They needn’t be falsifiable. (My solipsism is unfalsifiable, after all.) The list goes on. I don’t think they are the sort of explanations that would really advance our understanding beyond coating everything in jargon.

A question may help to clarify things: why is science predictive?

 

[Linusthe2nd]

An experiment was conducted at a British University about twelve years ago to test the claim that an infinite number of monkeys given typewriters would create the works of Shakespeare.
A single computer was placed in a monkey enclosure and the literary output of six primates was monitored. After a month, the macaques had not done much more than use it as a lavatory, and mostly type the letter “s”. Even if there were an infinite amount of time and monkeys, there wouldn’t be enough computers resistant to this sort of use.

Linus2nd

 

[Oreoracle]

BTW, I’m not really sure why the notion of something acting for its own benefit would be difficult for you to understand. It is a rather basic concept and an obvious distinction between living and non-living things.

I’m not so sure. What exactly is a benefit? It seems like a subjective notion. For example, how would you argue against the idea that remaining motionless may be beneficial to a rock?

Well sure, that conception of God would be nebulous.

Actually that’s quite an admission and I’m glad you are honest enough to make it. Many Christians I’ve dealt with in the past have not made that concession.

However, considering you have been a poster on this forum for about six years and have generally posted thoughtful and reasonable things in the past, I have a hard time believing that you really think that people around here are committed to defending the obvious strawman you have presented here.

I should have been clearer. Sometimes thinking ahead can be perceived as not being thoughtful. Most Christians indeed believe that God intervenes to some extent in the universe’s affairs and would not conceive of a god that leaves everything to its own devices like a deist god. But it seems to me that the concession you’ve made is quite serious nonetheless.

Although God may intervene in our affairs, I ask whether he must intervene. To be clear, I know that you’ll say he occupies everything or something to that effect due to his omnipresence. What I’m asking is whether he must interfere in a way that is empirically observable. If he needn’t intervene, then suppose he refrains from intervention altogether. Surely he would still exist after choosing to yield, so we have the same problem as before: God “exists” in some nebulous sense in spite of not interacting with anything in a tangible way. If yes, then God is now at least partially vulnerable to the scientific method. That is, if God must intervene, and we can predict how he must intervene, then we can test experimentally whether or not the intervention occurs.

In my experience, most Christians would rather their God be nebulous than falsifiable, so I assume the former possibility will be chosen by default.

I’d be interested in hearing how biology is “ultimately just applied physics” since it is not at all obvious that this is the case, especially since attempts to reduce biology to physics have been unfruitful.

Some progress toward reduction has been made, but you’re right that it isn’t generally helpful to frame biology problems as if they were physics problems. An analogy is in order: Would you agree that the study of group behavior, a big part of sociology, is ultimately reducible to psychology? Sure, it’s convenient to think of groups as autonomous entities in their own right, but at the end of the day, understanding each person’s mind completely would suffice to understand the group’s dynamics.

Biology is similar. Yes, it’s helpful to think of things at the level of an organism or a cell, but it’s ultimately all just atoms and energy, and understanding those completely would, in principle, suffice to answer every biological question. The reason we don’t do this is because having a thorough atom-by-atom account of the universe just isn’t feasible. We don’t have the equipment nor the computational ability to do that.

If you’re fine with not explaining anything, then by all means be a solipsist.

But as I’ve told you, it explains everything!

You seem to think that there is metaphysics on one hand, and some kind of universally agreed upon, taken for granted criteria for explanations on the other. That is not the case. What counts as explanatory depends on your metaphysical presuppositions. This is why I suggested we cut out the middle man. You clearly already have criteria for explanations in mind, so why contrive a metaphysics just to get the result you’d be happy to assume anyway?

A question may help to clarify things: why is science predictive?

That’s like asking why triangles have 3 sides. Science is predictive because it must be to qualify as science. Science is predictive because we oust any attempt to explain phenomena that will fail to be predictive from science.

 

[balto]

I’m not so sure. What exactly is a benefit? It seems like a subjective notion. For example, how would you argue against the idea that remaining motionless may be beneficial to a rock?

But a rock is not a living thing so it does not by its nature seek its own perfection. Whether a rock is in motion or not is an accidental property in any event since it is not essential to being a rock one way or the other. It’s different with a living organism. If an animal stops metabolizing, it is either dead or will be shortly. In any case, it is no longer living if it ceases to seek its self-perfection by nature. Metabolism (and that’s only one example, there are others) obviously benefits the organism by keeping it alive.

Actually that’s quite an admission and I’m glad you are honest enough to make it. Many Christians I’ve dealt with in the past have not made that concession.

It doesn’t surprise me that most modern Christians see God as some kind of essentially anthropomorphic super-person since that has been my own experience. However, my research into these matters over the past few years has led me to believe that most pre-modern theologians would have agreed that the idea of God you presented is seriously deficient. I don’t doubt that a lot of modern Christians have real faith and are much more holy than I’ll ever be, but their intellectual presentation of God has never really been satisfying to me.

I should have been clearer. Sometimes thinking ahead can be perceived as not being thoughtful. Most Christians indeed believe that God intervenes to some extent in the universe’s affairs and would not conceive of a god that leaves everything to its own devices like a deist god. But it seems to me that the concession you’ve made is quite serious nonetheless.

Although God may intervene in our affairs, I ask whether he must intervene. To be clear, I know that you’ll say he occupies everything or something to that effect due to his omnipresence. What I’m asking is whether he must interfere in a way that is empirically observable. If he needn’t intervene, then suppose he refrains from intervention altogether. Surely he would still exist after choosing to yield, so we have the same problem as before: God “exists” in some nebulous sense in spite of not interacting with anything in a tangible way. If yes, then God is now at least partially vulnerable to the scientific method. That is, if God must intervene, and we can predict how he must intervene, then we can test experimentally whether or not the intervention occurs.

Well no, the classical conception of God presents God not even as a being, one being of a particular type among many other beings, but self-subsistent being itself. It flows from the fact that everything in our ordinary experience does not exist by necessity and is dependent on something else for its continual existence. God is concluded as He who has existence through His own nature and does not dependent on anything else for existence, which arguably entails things like omnipotency, omniscience, immutability, timelessness, etc. So I wouldn’t even agree that it is possible for God to “intervene” in the universe since the universe is ultimately dependent on God at every moment to continue to be real, so God is not really ever wholly independent from it. It would be like saying that my cells are intervening in my ability to be human, which is nonsense because my cells are part of what makes me actually be a human so they never really exist independent from me. Anyway, I’m not attempting to give a strong defense of any of these things, but I hope you’ll agree that this is much different than proposing that yet another particular being happens to exist in all reality that should be added to our ontology, as moderns generally claim. Understanding why order exists objectively in creation depends on having some understanding of God presented above. If He’s essentially the deistic architect god, then yes, order is completely accidental whether or not He intervenes.

Some progress toward reduction has been made, but you’re right that it isn’t generally helpful to frame biology problems as if they were physics problems. An analogy is in order: Would you agree that the study of group behavior, a big part of sociology, is ultimately reducible to psychology? Sure, it’s convenient to think of groups as autonomous entities in their own right, but at the end of the day, understanding each person’s mind completely would suffice to understand the group’s dynamics.

Well sure, but whether biology is just a collection of physical (and I am not using this word as a synonym for “material”) things is one of the things that is being disputed. Yes, there are collections that are reducible to individual members, but I don’t think that biology is one of them. See below.

Biology is similar. Yes, it’s helpful to think of things at the level of an organism or a cell, but it’s ultimately all just atoms and energy, and understanding those completely would, in principle, suffice to answer every biological question. The reason we don’t do this is because having a thorough atom-by-atom account of the universe just isn’t feasible. We don’t have the equipment nor the computational ability to do that.

Sure, you could describe the physical properties of any given biological system, but you wouldn’t adequately be describing it unless you already organize all of it into a biological system. So that biological telos is always at the back of your mind. It seems like you haven’t completely reduced biology to physics if you always have to assume the higher-level organization in any simulation. Anyway, if you don’t accept that maybe at least you can see what the difficulty is.

 

[Linusthe2nd]

I don’t think my statements presuppose we are rational beings. They are just mirroring the statement before it using the same thought pattern.

And if they were presupposing such…that still isn’t evidence that order is a fundamental aspect of reality. Why would you think that?
Why, the whole history of religion and various holy scriptures show and predict thousands of years of chaos and imperfection that will one day soon lead to an apparent doomsday!

I can’t give you the details on how our minds originated, since I am not a biologist et al.
But I can say that just because we have them, it doesn’t automatically mean there is a god.

Also, it seems pretty natural for the mind to understand itself. So technically, i think we would not call this a “miracle”.

.

So you want some iron clad proof, something that cannot be denied. Let’s look at that. What would you consider iron clad proof? I would venture to guess that you cannot come up with one. Let’s assume you lived in the time of Jesus and you witnessed all the things he did, raising the dead, casting out devils, healing the sick, reading minds and souls, walking on water, calming storms. Would you have believed then? And if God told you that he created all that you see ( which he did in the Old Testament ), would that be enough?

The point is he has created you to " read the signs " and he isn’t going to do more than that, because he knows if you will not accept those, you would not accept anything he said, even though he were standing right here talking to you. And one of the signs he created was the obvious order of his creation, both in the heavens and in the nano world of the small. The response you gave above was illogical.

Linus2nd

 

[balto]

But as I’ve told you, it explains everything!

Well no, I think you were right the first time by saying it explains nothing. It explains everything by explaining everything away.

You seem to think that there is metaphysics on one hand, and some kind of universally agreed upon, taken for granted criteria for explanations on the other. That is not the case. What counts as explanatory depends on your metaphysical presuppositions. This is why I suggested we cut out the middle man. You clearly already have criteria for explanations in mind, so why contrive a metaphysics just to get the result you’d be happy to assume anyway?

I think we are operating under different definitions of metaphysics. Metaphysics is certainly informed by empirical considerations (or should be anyway), but it is not experimental. I think you are probably taking “empirical” and “experimental” to be synonyms and then concluding that since metaphysics is not experimental it is therefore not empirical in any way and is completely divorced from our ordinary sensory experiences. It need not be, and only seems to be that way due to the moderns arbitrarily deciding that either complete rationalism or complete empiricism are the only two epistemological options.

That’s like asking why triangles have 3 sides. Science is predictive because it must be to qualify as science. Science is predictive because we oust any attempt to explain phenomena that will fail to be predictive from science.

Maybe I should have been more specific . Okay, science works because reality is predictable. But why should reality be predictable?

BTW, thank you for your gracious reply . I have enjoyed our conversations in the past and am happy to see that this can continue. After posting my response yesterday I was a little worried that I may have come off as a bit too brash (which wasn’t my intention) and I apologize if I gave offense.

 

[balto]

So you want some iron clad proof, something that cannot be denied. Let’s look at that. What would you consider iron clad proof? I would venture to guess that you cannot come up with one. Let’s assume you lived in the time of Jesus and you witnessed all the things he did, raising the dead, casting out devils, healing the sick, reading minds and souls, walking on water, calming storms. Would you have believed then? And if God told you that he created all that you see ( which he did in the Old Testament ), would that be enough?

The point is he has created you to " read the signs " and he isn’t going to do more than that, because he knows if you will not accept those, you would not accept anything he said, even though he were standing right here talking to you. And one of the signs he created was the obvious order of his creation, both in the heavens and in the nano world of the small. The response you gave above was illogical.

Linus2nd

You mentioned that the order of creation is “obvious.” For some reason this is shocking to the modern mind but it really is obvious once you stop and think about it. The only reason why we have any knowledge of anything at all is because we recognize order in the universe. In Scholastic terms, it is the identification and abstraction of the forms in things. There’s literally nothing to know about chaos. We cannot even really identify chaos since that would be tantamount to saying “chaos has this ordered nature.” It really is quite obvious that the universe is not pure chaos, which is enough to say that the universe is objectively ordered and designed even if only on a minimalistic level.

 

[Bahman]

You mentioned that the order of creation is “obvious.” For some reason this is shocking to the modern mind but it really is obvious once you stop and think about it. The only reason why we have any knowledge of anything at all is because we recognize order in the universe. In Scholastic terms, it is the identification and abstraction of the forms in things. There’s literally nothing to know about chaos. We cannot even really identify chaos since that would be tantamount to saying “chaos has this ordered nature.” ** It really is quite obvious that the universe is not pure chaos, which is enough to say that the universe is objectively ordered and designed even if only on a minimalistic level.**

That is not really an argument. Assuming that state of creation must be in chaos in absence of a creator. In fact one can assume that the state of universe is the state of order primary and this leads to more complexity which is the result consciousness acting on underling states.

 

[Oreoracle]

But a rock is not a living thing so it does not by its nature seek its own perfection.

Hold on a second. You were saying before that we could differentiate life from non-life by recognizing beneficial behavior. Now it seems you’re saying that we differentiate beneficial behavior from “accidental properties” by checking to see if the object is alive.

It can’t be both, because that would be circular.

Whether a rock is in motion or not is an accidental property in any event since it is not essential to being a rock one way or the other.

The problem with “essence” and “accident” is that you can always finagle with the terminology a smidge and completely change the evaluation. This is a silly example, but I think it will suffice: You are right that it isn’t necessary for the rock to be motionless in order to be a rock, but if I were using the rock as, say, a paperweight, immobility would be essential. So by prescribing a different purpose for the rock, I have created an essential property out of thin air.

I think the problem here is that objects do not have inherent purposes, we merely assign purposes and judge what is beneficial, essential, etc., relative to that purpose.

I don’t doubt that a lot of modern Christians have real faith and are much more holy than I’ll ever be, but their intellectual presentation of God has never really been satisfying to me.

It’s good to hear that from a Christian so I know I’m not imagining it. Yes, even those I disagree with most vehemently on these forums have a far more sophisticated take on religion than the average person.

God is concluded as He who has existence through His own nature and does not dependent on anything else for existence, which arguably entails things like omnipotency, omniscience, immutability, timelessness, etc. So I wouldn’t even agree that it is possible for God to “intervene” in the universe since the universe is ultimately dependent on God at every moment to continue to be real, so God is not really ever wholly independent from it.

That’s an interesting perspective, and strictly speaking I don’t disagree with most of the above. It’s just that in order to jump from this conception of God to Christianity, you need to treat God as a sort of “superman” in some sense. I mean, I could postulate that the universe is the only necessary being, and timelessness, omnipotency, immutability, etc., would follow from this. But the universe doesn’t have opinions. It doesn’t care what humans do or try to judge our behavior. It doesn’t know anything. So in order to get to the god of which you speak, you need more than a necessary being, you need a mind; something that can discriminate, have opinions, etc. And this is the same reaction I give to Aquinas’ proofs of God. It doesn’t seem to be the same god Christians actually invoke in practice.

Well sure, but whether biology is just a collection of physical (and I am not using this word as a synonym for “material”) things is one of the things that is being disputed.

So what do you mean by “material”?

It seems like you haven’t completely reduced biology to physics if you always have to assume the higher-level organization in any simulation. Anyway, if you don’t accept that maybe at least you can see what the difficulty is.

I want to make sure I’m understanding what you’re saying first. Are you saying that, since I started with a biological problem, even translating the problem into physical terms doesn’t count as reduction? I will grant you that perhaps we wouldn’t appreciate the significance of our results if we just explained everything with physics jargon, but translation into physical terms is what I mean by “reducing to physics”. Maybe you take reduction to mean something stronger.

Metaphysics is certainly informed by empirical considerations (or should be anyway), but it is not experimental.

I guess I would need you to explain how you would make use of empirical data without experimentation before I can comment further on this. To be more specific, without assuming the scientific method, how do you decide 1) what is or is not empirical, 2) what is an acceptable method of collecting data, 3) how should the data be used to support or discredit a metaphysical claim?

But why should reality be predictable?

Probably the easiest way to explain my position on this is by asking what an unpredictable universe would look like. Would it be a universe in which people could hear colors and see sounds? Would it be a universe in which particles just teleport to different locations randomly? Would it be a universe composed entirely of gelatin?

I claim that each of those universes is in some sense predictable, because I did just that: I described how objects in the universe behaved, which naturally leads to predictions. Even a universe in which everything moves randomly would follow the laws of Brownian motion, for example. For a universe to be unpredictable, you would have to be unable to describe it, because any description will offer some predictive power.

One could ask why a universe needs to be describable, but I think the answer to that is uninteresting: We wouldn’t consider it a universe if it were beyond description, just as we don’t accept the existence of words that lack definitions.

I have enjoyed our conversations in the past and am happy to see that this can continue. After posting my response yesterday I was a little worried that I may have come off as a bit too brash (which wasn’t my intention) and I apologize if I gave offense.

It’s no problem. I sometimes come across as uncharitable, I’m sure. Anyway, I enjoy our discussions as well.

 

[tonyrey]

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…

If that were the case there would be no guarantee that our thought patterns ever correspond to reality yet the remarkable success of science is incontrovertible evidence that it usually does.

And if they were presupposing such…that still isn’t evidence that order is a fundamental aspect of reality. Why would you think that?

The very fact that the laws of nature are the basis of science is incontrovertible evidence that order is a fundamental aspect of reality. It is impossible to formulate laws about chaos.

Why, the whole history of religion and various holy scriptures show and predict thousands of years of chaos and imperfection that will one day soon lead to an apparent doomsday!

Doomsday is also predicted by science!

I can’t give you the details on how our minds originated, since I am not a biologist et al.
But I can say that just because we have them, it doesn’t automatically mean there is a god.

The most economical, intelligible and fertile explanation of rational minds is one Supreme Mind rather than an inchoate multitude of mindless particles.

Also, it seems pretty natural for the mind to understand itself. So technically, i think we would not call this a “miracle”.

Since there is no evidence that anything else in nature understands itself it seems most unnatural for the mind to do so. This conclusion is supported by the universal legal presumption that only persons usually are responsible for their behaviour.