Here are some definitions of some critical terms that many of us have been using frequently, and perhaps misusing. They have been taken from popular and readily available dictionaries without alteration. All have multiple definitions depending on context of use; I have selected those choices that seem relevant to our debate.

Faith: A conviction of the truth of certain doctrines of religion especially when this is not based on reason.

Reason: To think logically or draw logical conclusions from facts or premises

Rational: Having or exercising the ability to reason.

Irrational: Inconsistent with reason or logic; illogical; absurd.

Epistemology: The theory of knowledge especially the critical study of its validity, methods and scope.

The arguments between theists and atheists seem less about whether a god exists or not but more about how we determine what constitutes knowledge. The argument becomes essentially one of Epistemology.

The theist claims that there are two acceptable methods for establishing knowledge, one known as faith and the other known as reason.

When something can be shown to be knowledge by way of reason, and is generally accepted, then faith is no longer required. Many theists have tried very hard to find proof or irrefutable evidence that a god exists, and hence be able to use reason as a basis for their knowledge. Clearly reason is accepted by theists as the preferred method or is seen as a superior method for the establishment of knowledge.

But what is the alternative? That knowledge gained by faith is an inferior form of knowledge? But this is nonsense. Any claim that something is genuine knowledge is either true or false, there is no gray area. It follows then that if knowledge by reason is accepted by all as a valid method then any claims to knowledge using faith cannot be accepted as true.

If something is believed based on faith then it cannot also be based on reason; from the above text – faith is not needed if reason can be used, and faith is only used where reason fails. It follows then that faith and reason are opposites. There is no reconciliation or common ground. Faith is belief without, or in spite of reason.

Returning to the above definitions it can be clearly seen that theists are irrational because they can only use faith as the basis for their claimed knowledge of a god.

Any claim that something is genuine knowledge is either true or false, there is no gray area.


I would like to counter that with the example of Schrödingers cat.
In quantummechanics it is possible for a system to be in two states at the same time. This is not only true for the subatomic world but can also be in the macroscopic world that we live in.
Suppose we put a cat in a box, in the box is also a radioactive atom and a detector. When the detector detects decay of the atom, it sends a signal to a mechanism that releases poisonous cyonide which in turn kills the cat. The only thing that quantummechanics allows us to know is the halflife of the atom, this is the time it takes for 50% of a collection of radioactive atoms to decay. In the case of a single atom it tells us after how much time there has been a 50% chance that the atom has decayed. That is all, we don't know when a single atom decays and consequently we don't know if the animal is alive or not, it is both.
So the claim "the cat is dead" has as much truth value as the claim "the cat is alive". So this is as grey as it could be...



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"If I have been able to see further, it was only because I stood on the shoulders of giants."
Isaac Newton

Plato,

I think that is a case where we have inadequate information to form a correct conclusion.

Consider the case of tossing a coin. There is a claim that it is chance whether the coin will fall heads or tails. But this is simply lack of information. If we were able to accurately measure the angle at which the coin left the hand, the air resistance, breeze direction, etc. then we would be able to accurately predict how the coin would fall.

On ninth of October 1972, mathematician Dr Jeff Hamilton was giving a lecture on probability theory at Warwick University (UK) and wanted to show his students the effect of chance by tossing a coin.
He took a 2p coin out of his pocket and tossed it high in the air. When it landed it spun round rapidly, before slowly coming to a rest...on its edge.
According to Dr Hamilton this was witnessed by around 40 students.
Ironic huh?

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Oh my God it's the funky shit!!!

I only really wanted to chime in on probability here.

In a sophomore (HS) biology class, we were flipping quarters to determine genetic probabilities. The first set, of 25 flips, my friend and I were obliged to report 24 tails, 1 head, which actually seems less impressive to me than the string of 17 heads-flips in a row.

As a side note, I now hate probability. But that's for many reasons. ;)

thanx,
Tiassa :cool:

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We are unutterably alone, essentially, especially in the things most intimate and important to us. (Ranier Maria Rilke)

Even with these curiosities it should still be possible given the appropriate methods of measurement to be able to predict the final outcome, even the state of landing on an edge. It may not always be easy.

Cris,

I'm with you. However, you must realize that with such a determinist position, we are forced to conclude that there is no such thing as free will or indeed any kind of self-determination. Even every single letter I've typed in making up this post was directly dictated by the state of the universe. Absolute determinism is just another way of saying that fate is absolute. Not many people are comfortable with that kind of a worldview. Not sure why I pointed this out, since it's sort of the end of that particular discussion even before it began -- but if I didn't point it out, I'm sure someone else eventually would have.

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I am; therefore I think.

Boris,

If indeed everything is predetermined wouldn't traveling to the future become all that much easier, I mean there would be a place to go. I brought this up because I have also read in another string that you believe past and future to be illusions, and non existant. Wouldn't a predetrmined future suggest that somewhere there must be a memory of whats to come and hence someone or something has already experienced it.

Also with the flipping of the coin being predictable if all parameters a known. Isn't that system of "events" nonlinear and therefore impossible for us to determine absolultley. What is your oponion of chaos theory?

P.S. Sorry about the diversion people :)

[This message has been edited by Rambler (edited April 18, 2000).]

Cris,

I'm afraid the hope for any hidden variables is a mood one since they will never be known because of the very nature of the beest.
The only way we can substract information from a system is by some form of interaction. The way quantum mechanics is set up is that merly the observation (this is the interaction that enables to extract information) already distorts the system enough to alter it's state. There is no way that any time in the future we will find a way to get around this because this is as fundamental as gravity itself !
Therefor I and Niels Bohr with me, claim that nature is fundamentally indeterministic, there is no way we will ever get 100% accurate information about everything and this has nothing to do with the accuracy of our measuring devices (who after all will always be finite) but with nature itself !
On a more personel note, if find this kind of universe the only one worth to live in and filosofically satisfying. This is the only one that is reconcilable with the macroscopic observation that there is such a thing is free will and as chance. Saying these things are fictions makes your own theory incompatible with human experience and creates a rift between "life as you lead" and "life as it is explained".
What good is a theory if it doesn't explain or incorporate the very basic notion that life is uncertain ? This question led Heidegger to claim that science didn't know what it was talking about and made him turn away from it. Heidegger was one of the greatest philosophers of this century.

What I'm trying to say is that if life and human thinking is all about shades of grey, than this is so in every aspect. Nothing escapes it.

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"If I have been able to see further, it was only because I stood on the shoulders of giants."
Isaac Newton

I’ve never tried the faith/reason argument before and am not sure how it will conclude, that was the attraction. My intention was to explore whether faith could ever be considered as a valid method for introducing acceptable knowledge. I believe it cannot but theists must have arguments to support their otherwise untenable position.

So far this discussion has taken a slightly different path, which although unexpected is nonetheless very thought provoking. This means I’ll have to think some more. In the meantime if you have any other ideas on Faith versus Reason then please don’t feel timid…

I certainly had not intended to take a deterministic position, in fact I had not considered that. My view was simply "cause and effect", but I can see how that could lead to a pure deterministic chain. I don't believe that is realistic but I'm not sure why - must think some more.


[This message has been edited by Cris (edited April 19, 2000).]

Rambler,

Plato said it: even though everything must ultimately have cause and effect, we may never know all the factors and variables involved, nor indeed may we ever develop tractable computational models that tackle reality at the deepest level possible. However, just because we don't know about it doesn't mean that it isn't happening -- here I disagree with Plato, and Bohr to boot; reality exists regardless of observation, and is similarly deterministic regardless of what we do or do not know.

Determinism does not imply apriori existence of the future or some fixed existence of the past. It merely means that if you somehow gained an omniscient perspective on the universe and were aware of every single variable (which is, of course, severely impossible), you could then sequentially predict future states of the universe with 100% precision. That doesn't mean that those states already exist; it merely means that they will come to pass following an appropriate number of sequential state updates.

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I am; therefore I think.

Boris,

here we come again to our old discussion, is it one year ago (?), time sure flies...

I find this deterministic view philosophically very unsatisfying. It denies the very notion of responsibility for ones actions and I find it a very depressing on my future to know that everything I will do or ever think of is implied on this very instand. What is the meaning of originallity ? Why would I even bother doing anything ? Any search for a meaning for this universe becomes useless because there is none. So why would I even bother searching ?
Guilt doesn't exist anymore because the murderer simply did it because it was programmed that way. It doens't matter if we help the people in Ethiopia with food or not. The notion of helping loses it's meaning because if you help someone it is not because you are a nice person, it is simply because you couldn't do any other thing, if we don't help, same reason. Love doesn't exist ! It is a figment of our imagination since the feelings we have for the people who are close to each other are the only possible ones we can have, we have no choise what so ever.
On the bright side, we don't have to worry about the future anymore because actually we can't do a thing about it. Actually a universe like this might as well not be there, it wouldn't make any difference.

I choose to dismiss such a philosophy and allow some indeterminism in the game. Not to much, otherwise we would live in utter chaos and life would also be impossible, just enough. This little indeterminism that quantummechanics allows us, adds the nescessary salt to the dish. If I have to give up the notion that everything is ultimatly knowledgeble then I gladly comply. For I do not want to live in a universe that runs like a machine, I might as well kill myself but then again even this ultimate act looses its meaning like everything else...

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"If I have been able to see further, it was only because I stood on the shoulders of giants."
Isaac Newton

Boris~

Do I take this to mean that you believe there is no such thing as "random"?

To all –

Let’s suppose, sometime in the far future, that we were able to measure nearly every existing variable precisely so that we could accurately predict future events. I say nearly because I think there must be a variable that we can never measure. Something like Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle would need to apply?

So I see the scenario something like this: For near events when measurements are easier then predictability has a greater probability of being defined. There will come a time when two events, that are mutually exclusive (e.g. going right or going left) have an equal probability of occurring. Only an uncertainty variable or a randomness factor would determine the outcome. If we can show that such a variable exists then we can show that absolute predictability is impossible, and hence show that the universe is not deterministic.

A poor example is that of playing the game of chess. I can only see so many moves ahead until I reach a point where weighing the probability between different paths makes it impossible to predict the best choice.

I guess it could be claimed that if the binary choice is predictable then we can predict each of the two possible paths. This would then lead to a possible infinite binary tree of possible outcomes, and isn't that the same as not being deterministic?

I too agree that a deterministic universe is very unappealing. The same feeling applies to those religions who claim an omniscient god – there would be essentially no free will.


[This message has been edited by Cris (edited April 21, 2000).]

As I research more into determinism it would seem fairly clear that I am indeed a determinist. It would also appear that free will seems very doubtful. More later. It is interesting that I have not hit this before. My debates before this forum were all with groups of Christians - and this topic never arose - curious!

Cris,

I'm glad I have opened your eyes...

You know, determinism is also very much a factor in Calvinism and its derivatives. They claim that only a select group is predestined to go to heaven and no matter what you do in this life can change that.
Makes you wonder why they even bother try and be an honest christian...

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"If I have been able to see further, it was only because I stood on the shoulders of giants."
Isaac Newton

Thanks Plato, and Boris,

It looks like I've used determinism instinctively for some time without realising it, but instincts aren't particularly reliable or consistent. Nice to have things seem clearer.

I haven't resolved my position on the 'Free Will' issue yet. Some determinists say there is no such thing, and others say it is possible. As with many things, I'll choose one approach and try it on for size for a while.

"I haven't resolved my position on the 'Free Will' issue yet."

Doesn't attempting to resolve your position on free will assume its existence? Without free will, could YOU actually RESOLVE your dilemna?


If the answer to my 2nd question is no, then your philosophy would seem to contradict our everyday experiences and reality. This doesn't give it much credibility and IMO it should be sent into the furnaces.

Vinnie

Praise Jesus!!!

[This message has been edited by ilgwamh (edited April 26, 2000).]

There are some primates that when presented with a large mirror will perceive the reflected image as another primate, and potentially hostile, and may well attempt to fight the perceived intruder. The animal is unable to distinguish between a perception and reality.

If determinism is real and all our actions are completely determined by our past history, then free will is simply a perception, a delusion, like the reflected image to the primate. How could you tell the difference between true free will and the perception of free will?

In his attempt to fight the reflected image suppose the primate wandered to the side and perhaps behind the mirror. Would his new confused discovery and perhaps natural curiosity lead him to realize that the perceived intruder was not entirely real? When he returns to the front of the mirror I suspect that the adrenaline rush and emotions would return – but perhaps not so strong. He has become partly aware of a new phenomenon that would moderate and change his attitude and actions.

Now consider several scenarios that could confront us. (1) Determinism is real and we are completely unaware of it and we continue to believe that the actions we take are because of our own unreal free will. (2) Determinism is false and free will is true, and we accept free will naturally. (3) Determinism is real and we are completely aware of it with the full realization that free will is a delusion.

There would be no difference in our behavior with regards to (1) and (2) however (3) presents a new realization that could radically affect our actions and attitudes. I’m currently attempting to evaluate and quantify these different actions and attitudes in myself so I will delay in giving specific examples for the moment. But there is a 4th scenario that suggests that determinism and free will are completely compatible and that a person can act freely if his desires are the cause of his actions. I’m less convinced of this approach, but the jury is still out.

Concerning Christianity specifically there seems to be a paradox between an omniscient God and free will. If a god is aware of all future actions (omniscience) then all our choices are already predetermined. Whatever choice we think we make freely is already known. What does this say for a god who has created a number of individuals knowing with complete certainty that they are doomed to suffer eternal damnation in hell?

More later.

Hey Chris, I don't think there really is a paradox between free will and God. Knowing the future does not mean it is predestined as in the predestination that you are referring to. God knows all the choices I will make WITH my free will because He can see the future. Knowing where my free will chioces lead me is not predestination. Its your own free will that predestines you, not God actually predestining you.

"What does this say for a god who has created a number of individuals knowing with complete certainty that they are doomed to suffer eternal damnation in hell?"

From a deterministic philosphy it doesn't seem to say much. Suffering, in my view, is reduced to just molecules hitting nerve endings and stuff and this causes a process to occur that we label pain. Not a bad process or a good process. Just a process. I guess pain can also be emotional as well. So we just have more processes that are labeled pain. Pain is obviously real, just bang your thumb with a hammer if you don't believe me ;) Most would say that pain is bad. Well from a deterministic philosophy I don't think you can make that statement unless of course you redefine the word "bad."

From a Christian worldview, I'd say, the logical thing to do is to get saved. I choose not to argue with God and choos not to attempt to cut off the branch of the tree I am sitting on. Its hard to reason against the source of your reason.

It also says God didn't want robots. He wanted a real world, not a toy world, with real consequences, real emotion, true love, happyness etc. In our everyday experiences, in order for these things to be true, they must have their counterpart.

C.S. Lewis 'Mere Christianity' page 52
"Christians, then, believe that an evil power has made himself for the present the Prince of this World. And, of course, that raises problems. Is this state of affairs in accordance with God's will or not? If it is, He is a strange God, you will say: and if it is not, how can anything happen contrary to the will of a being with absolute power?

But anyone who has been in authority knows how a thing can be in accordance with your will in one way and not in another. It may be quite sensible for a mother to say to the children, "I'm not going to go and make you tidy the schoolroom every night. You've got to learn to keep it tidy on your own." Then she goes up one night and finds the Teddy bear and the ink and the French Grammar all lying in the grate. That is against her will. She would prefer the children to be tidy. But on the other hand, it is her will which has left the children free to be untidy. The same thing arises in any regiment, or trade union, or school. You make a thing voluntary and then half the people do not do it. That is not what you willed, but your will made it possible."

C.S. Lewis 'Mere Christianity' page 53
"Of course God knew what would happen if they used their freedom the wrong way: apparently He thought it worth the risk. Perhaps we feel inclined to disagree with Him. But there is a difficulty about disagreeing with God. He is the source from which all your reasoning power comes: you could not be right and He wrong any more than a stream can rise higher than its own source. When you are arguing against Him you are arguing against the very power that makes you able to argue at all: it is like cutting off the branch you are sitting on. If God thinks this state of war in the universe is a price worth paying for free will--that is, for making a live world in which creatures can do real good or harm and something of real importance can happen, instead of a toy world which only moves when He pulls the strings--then we make take it it is worth paying."

Btw, would you mind taking a stab at your own question? Seeings how you subscribe to a deterministic worldview you have more experience in that category than me. You could probably answer your own question from your own perspective much better than me, being an outsider who is just window shopping.

Vinnie

Jesus is Lord.



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Fred Hoyle (British astrophysicist): "A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question."

Vinnie,

I like your tone, thanks, I'll get back to this as soon as I can.

Plato,

Sorry for holding off on the reply; I've been a bit preoccupied and mostly away from the computer this past week. So, you want to discuss philosophical merits of determinism. Well, why not? :D


It denies the very notion of responsibility for ones actions and I find it a very depressing on my future to know that everything I will do or ever think of is implied on this very instand.


Or... perhaps "denies" is a bit too strong of a word here. Consider: if you <u>know</u> that your actions will result in consequences, then you are still responsible. For example, consider the case of crime and punishment. True, you could say that crimes are all pre-programmed anyway, so what's the point of punishing them? On the other hand, you must observe that the punishment was just as pre-programmed as the crime. Similarly, if your actions are said to be predestined, then you cannot abstain from similarly defining your responsibility for those actions to be predestined (as the knowledge of responsibility is merely a state within your cognitive machine.) In fact, the very evolution of our civilization with all of its rules and knowledge must be viewed as predestined from a determinist standpoint, and therefore your day-to-day actions, despite being deterministic, are nevertheless not devoid of meaning in the context of the rest of the universe at the current instant.

You can think of the universe as a gigantic computer simulation that is in the process of carrying out a gargantuan computation. There is no way of knowing if this computation has an ultimate purpose outside of its mere existence, and there is no way to know if this computation will result in some coherent output, or when it might run to completion. However, you can rest in relative comfort that you are indeed part of the process, so that if there is meaning in reality at large, then it must follow that there is meaning in your life. Conversely, if there is no meaning to the universe, then it's pointless to worry about it. Either way, there's nothing here that should be depressing, at least rationally speaking. Meanwhile, in either case, you are here, and life goes on. Regardless of the true nature of your ultimate existence, your only choices include: a) continuing your existence, or b) ending it. As a rational creature, you should be sticking with the option a) (even though the "rationality" and the "choice" are illusory in this context; it's probably more correct to say that given your biological and cultural background, as a particular entity you are most likely to pick a over b.)


What is the meaning of originallity ?


The meaning is largely still the same. Originality might imply a new configuration assuming existence that has not existed previously. This is from a global point of view. On the other hand, you might apply it in particular to human artifacts; in this case it is a new thing coming into existence that is directly associated with a certain other configuration which we at the moment refer to as a human being.


Why would I even bother doing anything ?


Strictly speaking, because you really have no choice. You are literally <u>driven</u> to do whatever it is you are doing at any particular moment. You have no choice in the matter. Even if you "decide" to do nothing in defiance, that very act of idleness is an active behavior. You don't "bother" doing anything, you simply do it. Whatever reasons you might perceive driving your actions, may or may not be the true underlying cause. What is important, is that there is a particular cognitive state represented in your brain at any particular instant, also with very particular sensory feedback coming in at that same instant -- and the result is some behavioral output and a shift to the succeeding cognitive state at the next instant.

Notice, however, that even aside from (or in spite of, depending on your preferred frame of reference) deterministic reality, your behavior is rather narrowed by the particular cognitive machinery that has evolved in our species, as well as by the environment within which your particular machinery develops. For example, you are not likely to go and kill yourself, or to go on a school shooting rampage. So even though you might say that there is no point in a fully mechanical existence, you would not be entirely correct -- because your very own existence and ongoing behavior are products of a long (stretching at least all the way to the Big Bang) preceding computational chain that has given (and is giving) you definition.


Any search for a meaning for this universe becomes useless because there is none. So why would I even bother searching ?


I'm not sure you could really argue that the search for meaning is useless just because the universe is deterministic. In fact, one can reason that indeed if the universe is not deterministic, then there cannot be any apriori meaning to it at all. The only way you can have meaning in the first place, is if the universe was a means to some end -- but that is a deterministic description, isn't it? On the other hand, you could suppose that the universe has no apriori meaning -- but nevertheless it has given rise to us and with us the very search for meaning. Hence, perhaps the search for meaning can be said to be the universe's current goal, and that search is being accomplished through us (or any other sentient creatures.) Of course, it is rather presumptious to claim that the goal of the entire universe can be represented by only a tiny fraction of it that gives definition to Earth and its human population to date. But on the other hand, arguably much of the rest of the universe naturally doesn't and can't care about anything, and so it is <u>us</u> who must impose a meaning on existence <u>within our own context</u>. The search for, and definition of, meaning can be viewed as merely a part of our multifaceted behavioral repertoire; you can say that the universe may never have any meaning in some absolute or abstract sense, and yet have plenty of meaning from the point of view of its human inhabitants (and what that meaning might be, is entirely up to us -- or rather, our local corner of the universe :))


I choose to dismiss such a philosophy and allow some indeterminism in the game.


Indeterminism is just another word for acausality. When you say that something is acausal, are you really saying that it had no cause -- or are you saying that the cause is not known? That is the question.

Quantum mechanics opts for mathematical efficiency, and explicitly viewing itself as merely a model, it dispenses with a search for deeper causes. However, that is not an acceptable stand. It is analogous to a stand that a creationist takes when compared to an evolutionist. Unless you are willing to look for causes, you will likely not find them. Many quantum physicists chose and still are choosing to rest on their laurels, and proclaim that their vision of reality is the ultimate mental representation. However, we've been down that particular path plenty of times before, haven't we? Statistics and the very idea of chance are tools we designed for analysing systematic behavioral biases of systems across many trials; however, they are not, and cannot be, in my view, a correct representation of the fundamental reality. They describe behavioral trends, not the fundamental causes of behavior. This is readily apparent when you look, for example, at statistical models of equipment failure rates. The failures are individually quite causal and particular; when we model their distribution with "fuzzy" statistics derived from multiple trials and generalized over the entire population, we merely describe some relevant tendencies of the system without describing its actual internal function, or its particular interactions with its particular environment over its entire particular lifetime (indeed, such a description would be impossible.) Nevertheless, you cannot deny such internal function and such detailed interactions in the macro-scale world. The only difference between the macro- and the micro- is that the latter cannot be measured by us as easily or as precisely as the former, and hence it is no longer so easy for us to intuitively discern its internal functionality. However, drawing a blanket of statistics over it and refusing to ever try to take a peak under the blanket, is not acceptable scientific conduct. Sure, the statistical treatment, which is based on empirical studies, is sufficiently representative of some relevant behavioral trends of matter and energy at the quantum scales to be directly useful in engineering, in the same way that abstract mathematical treatment of deformable lattices is useful in civil engineering. However, just as lattice abstractions never truly represent all the complexity that is happening in a real structure, so it is highly unlikely that in the particular case of quantum mechanics that the statistics and the rest of the math are referring to the fundamental nature of the observed phenomena. As a model, I have nothing against quantum mechanics; in fact I like it a lot. However, when people start promoting its abstractions as fundamental representations of reality, I have a rather strong response in the shape of "been there, done that, moving on."

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I am; therefore I think.

Boris,

I think we are getting very near to our fundamental philosophical difference. ;)


You can think of the universe as a gigantic computer simulation that is in the process of carrying out a gargantuan computation. There is no way of knowing if this computation has an ultimate purpose outside of its mere existence, and there is no way to know if this computation will result in some coherent output, or when it might run to completion.


You know through history people have always tried to get to grips with how to represent the universe. Each representation however said more about their time then the universe itself couse : let's face it the only model for the universe is the universe itself...
What we are doing is try to simplify, to idealise the complexities. The danger lies in the fact if we are going to assume that the idealisations are the fundamental things that are going on.
This is a development that has been going on since my illustrious namesake Plate developped his theories about an ideal world of ideas that sublimates the 'real' world that we can observe. This theorie is traced via Newton's equations wich are totally time-reverseble to our time with the theories of relativity and even quantummechanics.

This is however a totally nonsensical idea if you want to describe the real universe where you live in. What you are trying to do here is first observe complexity, this you can't handle so you make an abstraction of it and get some very nice and simple equations. Then you are reversing it and claiming that what you observe actually is complex because we can't observe well enough to see the real simple time-reversible (thus deterministic) processes that give rise to it.
Actually what we are doing is in advance postulating a deterministic universe, which is ultimatly knowlegdable, and then claim that it is the fault of the observer that what we see is not what the equations tell us what we should see.
This I'm afraid has nothing to do with science but more with some kind of mindgame that we are playing with the universe and ultimatly ourselves.

We have to come and accept the inherent complexity and start with that. Claiming that there is no way we can get results out of it is to easy. What we have to give up is the notion of locality : particle aren't the ridged little balls of matter with a definite mathematical coördinate, it is a probability distribution of mass. Actually there is no such thing as a particle, the word is wrong and carries a bad meaning. We should think of it as a quantum of the underlying matterfield. This giving up of locality solves the whole discussion of determinism or indeterminism, there is only probability.

I must say that I completly agree with your opinion about meaning of the universe. In the words of Popper :

Truth lies in having grasped the essential becoming of nature, i.e., having represented it as implicitly infinite, as a process in itself.

However when you say that the meaning lies in searching for the meaning you are talking about an activity and this is impossible in a deterministic universe. There is no activity only passivity ! Time is an illusion, everything is layed out and we just have the impression of change. In a deterministic universe the meaning is implied in the universe itself so there is no search, only an illusion of search. :(


Indeterminism is just another word for acausality. When you say that something is acausal, are you really saying that it had no cause -- or are you saying that the cause is not known? That is the question


I don't agree, if we give up the notion of locality, we can still speak of causes but only of how certain probabilities give rise to other probabilities. The way we do this is mathematically determined.


However, just as lattice abstractions never truly represent all the complexity that is happening in a real structure, so it is highly unlikely that in the particular case of quantum mechanics that the statistics and the rest of the math are referring to the fundamental nature of the observed phenomena


Again, I don't agree. I would even agrue the contrary if you don't look at probabilities a whole bunch of information get's lost. Simply look at a living organism and its constituant atoms. Suppose we would have a way to model the movements and beheaviours of all the atoms in a bacteria. This would tell us nothing of the bacteria itself while there is an enourmous difference between the configurations of atoms as in a bacteria and as in a gas eventhough we are talking about the same atoms !

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"If I have been able to see further, it was only because I stood on the shoulders of giants."
Isaac Newton

[This message has been edited by Plato (edited April 28, 2000).]

Originally posted by Cris:
[B]
If something is believed based on faith then it cannot also be based on reason; from the above text – faith is not needed if reason can be used, and faith is only used where reason fails. It follows then that faith and reason are opposites. There is no reconciliation or common ground. Faith is belief without, or in spite of reason.

B]


I disagree, my reason rightly tells me to have faith in my doctor, my lawyer, my car mechanic etc.And not always with good or desirable results. We reason, according to information we receive and analyse but at the end of the day you have to take a decision based on your faith in the facts. And I would say that in many cases 'the facts' are largely an illussion (as they are usually very broad and subjective).
Therefore, reason and faith are not mutually exclusive even when the faith is in something as intangible as God/spirit/whatever turns you on baby and might in fact be a total illussion. The person in the faith feels as though they have all the reason in the world and cannot understand the hardness of heart of the faithless.

My best regards to you all.

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Oh my God it's the funky shit!!!

Hi tab,

There are a number of definitions of faith and I was targeting the definition that applies to the context of religion – hence the reason I quoted the definition at the beginning of my topic. This is perhaps one of the dangers of the English language, we tend to interchange the same word in different contexts and become confused when we see apparent contradictions. When we use the term faith in the context of our doctor, lawyer, etc. then we are using faith in a different context and it takes on one of the variants. In this context you really mean trust or confidence. If you replace the word faith with trust in this context then you see a different interpretation. Trust and confidence are normally based on some form of evidence. Here we would expect the doctor, or lawyer to have some form of qualification that would inspire us to have appropriate confidence in his ability. Would you, for example, trust a doctor who has just finished medical school and you are his first patient and he is recommending he perform complex surgery on you? If you had faith in this doctor simply because he is a doctor, then you may not survive for very long. I choose such professionals based on at least some research of their qualifications, e.g. I seek for evidence, and hence I am making my choice based on reason.

I try to never make any decision based on faith, where in this context there is no evidence to support the action. However, it is not always easy to recognize the problem. For example have you ever been the victim of a very experienced salesman. They are able to convince you, overwhelmingly, that their product is exactly what you want, and you reach a stage where you completely believe what they say without any form of independent evidence. You now have faith in the salesman and you are quite likely to purchase the product. Recognizing such situations, especially in our commercialized society is quite a challenge. Religious evangelists come into the same category as the experienced salesman and the greatest problem here is that there can be no independent evidence of their product, usually a god or spirituality. The only defense you have in these situations is to verify the choice you have chosen by using reason, i.e. seek independent evidence, and base your decision on facts.

To make any decision or choice based on faith alone means you are irrational as I was trying to prove in my original text.

Strong emotions (feelings of the heart) are notorious for misinformation and for ignoring obvious evidence. Any important decision should be based on reason, evidence, and facts. Your life will become chaotic otherwise. If there are components of the decision based on subjectivity then seek very hard for objectivity before committing.

You have not convinced me. Faith and reason are mutually exclusive.


[This message has been edited by Cris (edited April 28, 2000).]

What you just said reminds me of a discussion I had with Samus before about "faith."

You seem to be saying that religious faith and reason are mutually exclusive. If Christianity was a religion then I would object to your statement. But since Christianity is not a religion, it is a relationship with Jesus, I don't need to :)

If you meant to include Christianity in with that statement, which I think you did, then you have a piece of evidence that is right here posting a reply to you that contradicts your statement.

I am working on a web page dealing with Christianity and blind faith. It is almost done. I have a few more paragraphs to insert. This was written more for Christians but you should be able to glean something from it. Anyways, here it is:
http://www.angelfire.com/co/JesusFreak/blindfaith.html


Vinnie

Praise Jesus!!!

Vinnie,

My original intent was not to target Christianity specifically but to tackle the general approach and comparison of faith and reason that is used between theists and atheists. The term faith as defined in my original definition is used by ALL religions because it is accepted that there is no proof or evidence of a god or spiritual existence. However, to many whom have such faiths there are very strong desires to find evidence or proofs. There are quotes from many leading Christian theologians (e.g. Aquinas, etc.) and from Jesus himself that state that there is no proof, and that the wise (those that require evidence) are deluded. I'll grab the quotes when I get home later. Such theologians recognize that there is no rationality to a religious belief.

Now I recognize that you have a strong desire to appear rational and hence you very much need to show that proofs and evidence do exist. Here is a paradox – if I say “I am superior to you because I say so”, would you accept that without independent proof or evidence? I don’t think so. Now you are trying to show that the bible offers evidence and proof of God’s existence, but Christians also claim that the bible is really the word of God written by inspired humans. We now have the paradox – through the bible you are claiming that God says he exists because he (the word of the bible) says so. That is just as unacceptable as my claim to superiority. You cannot claim as evidence the thing you are trying to prove. So pretty much any recourse to potential evidence from the bible will fail on this basis. You must seek independent verifiable evidence if you are to succeed in any proofs that would be acceptable to atheists. Your approach as you have stated elsewhere might be to prove that the writers of the bible were truly inspired by God, only then can we then start to use the bible as the basis for other proofs.

The attempts by theists to redefine the term faith to be either stronger or weaker given different contexts are nonsense. Faith when applied to religion simply means belief without proof. If you had proof you wouldn’t use the word faith, your claims would be accepted by way of reason. Hence faith and reason are mutually exclusive.

You have also taken an interesting stance by stating ‘a relationship with Jesus’ and that Christianity is not a religion – is that really what you mean? This works fine if you agree that Jesus was never divine. Religion is defined as “(1) belief in a divine or superhuman power or powers to be obeyed and worshipped as the creators and rulers of the universe” (Webster’s New World College Dictionary 4th Edition). I accept that Jesus existed but was just a man and that his teachings to his early followers had substantial merit, unfortunately these teachings were twisted out of nearly all recognition by the Apostle Paul (who never met Jesus), and who primarily created Christianity.

Plato,


Actually what we are doing is in advance postulating a deterministic universe, which is ultimatly knowlegdable, and then claim that it is the fault of the observer that what we see is not what the equations tell us what we should see. This I'm afraid has nothing to do with science but more with some kind of mindgame that we are playing with the universe and ultimatly ourselves.


Well, since you brought up Popper, why not consider Logical Positivism? We have two alternatives: 1) assume the universe is ultimately not knowable, and halt all attempts to know it, or 2) assume the universe is ultimately knowable, and pursue that knowledge. Regardless of actual reality, with the first assumption we will never get anywhere, regardless of what the truth actually is. It assumes a negative, and in so doing it forestalls any attempts to disprove it; it's a self-perpetuating epistemological dead end. With the second assumption, we have hope of eventually attaining the ultimate level of understanding, should the universe indeed prove to be ultimately knowable -- and if it's not, then we would have merely wasted an effort, which is no biggie. Any investment involves risk. However, you must invest if you expect a payoff. You may call it a mindgame, but I would call it a prudent strategy (which, by the way, has worked beautifully to date.)


We have to come and accept the inherent complexity and start with that. Claiming that there is no way we can get results out of it is to easy.


What does it mean to "accept the inherent complexity"? Does it mean to assume that there is more happening than meets the eye (which is what I'm trying to do) -- or does it mean to assume that what we see is all there is? You seem to be contradicting your own stance with such a statement! Assuming determinism, or so-called hidden variables, does not mean that one has to reject simplified models, such as Quantum Mechanics. Of course results are important, and they teach us what is truly happening. However, it is not enough to merely observe and record trends. It seems to me that the ultimate goal must be elucidation of the underlying mechanisms that give rise to the very trends that we statistically model.


This giving up of locality solves the whole discussion of determinism or indeterminism, there is only probability.


Not so. Locality has nothing to do with determinism or lack thereof. It may come into play within discussions of simultaneity and causality in a relativistic framework, but who is to say that relativity's approach to defining reality (through an electromagnetic looking glass) gives us an undistorted picture? At issue is not locality, but causality in an absolute sense.

Relativistic and quantum approaches finesse the issue by postulating that our knowledge of the world is only the knowledge of observers, and hence our observations determine what we must regard as fundamental reality. From a utilitarian perspective, such approaches are reasonable, since they lead directly to models that replicate obseved behavior and hence enable practical applications in a relatively straightforward way. However, I personally cannot make peace with such an approach to modeling as a fundamental constraint of reality. Invariably, I place myself in a mental experiment not as an observer of some interaction, but as one of the very agents participating in the interaction. From the point of view of the real players, be they local or nonlocal, focal or fuzzy, their behavior has to be directly driven by their environment. Were I to become a sentient electron, I would observe myself buffeted and tossed by a myriad forces, but my behavior would be a direct derivative of those forces; all of my even minutest motions would have some underlying cause. One dilemma of quantum mechanics is that one cannot truly decouple the observer from the system -- and understandably so. After all, at a low enough level that is what we observers are -- made of the same microscopic stuff that we are trying to observe, and hence we must inevitably interact with anything we measure. Another dilemma is that even at the smallest scale we are dealing with near-infinite complexity. Especially if the "particles" truly turn out to be nonlocal, then every single particle in the universe interacts with every other at any moment in time. Such an enormous web of interactions is not only impossible to quantify, but it is even impossible to establish, since the very observer itself is part of the equation, and therefore would have to completely know the state of the entire universe as well as its own complete state at one and the same instant -- which is the "omniscience" paradox I've used earlier to show that God as conceived by judaic faiths doesn't make sense. However, just because we cannot quantify or indeed detect all of the influences affecting any particular entity at any moment in time, doesn't mean that those influences are not individually completely deterministic.

What quantum mechanics calls uncertainty is, in my opinion, more properly described as behavior of a chaotic and insanely multivariate dynamical system. Describing this sytem with simple statistical approximations is akin to describing the pseudorandom number generator in the standard C library via the mean and variance of its output over time -- you may be capturing something very descriptive and true about it, but you are missing all the interesting details (and if you weren't looking for details, you might never discover that there is a method to the madness; indeed in the case of the pseudorandom generator, for examle, you could exactly predict its next output based on the recent outputs.) And while in the case of the quantum realm we may never be able to disentangle the web of its interactions, nor measure all of the variables important to those interactions, we could at least learn how exactly those individual interactions occur, just what it is that is interacting, through what agents, and in turn what those agents are and how they interact, etc. -- all the way down to what surely must ultimately be the lowest possible, the most fundamental, and by necessity somehow self-referential, level of detail.


However when you say that the meaning lies in searching for the meaning you are talking about an activity and this is impossible in a deterministic universe. There is no activity only passivity ! Time is an illusion, everything is layed out and we just have the impression of change. In a deterministic universe the meaning is implied in the universe itself so there is no search, only an illusion of search.


There are a number of things you said here that I take issue with. First of all, the perception of change is not merely an "impression" -- it is a factual measurement, and indeed the basis of deterministic processes. The change may be entirely dictated by initial conditions, but nevertheless it occurs and is very real indeed. Second, it is not entirely correct to speak of time as an illusion. What is an illusion is the continuum of time. Time indeed exists in the sense that the universe retains memory of the past states via its current state, and indeed the current state determines the future states. There is still an ordered sequence of causal transformations, so the past and the future are still defined. They just cannot be thought of as locations or as something that exists tangibly; rather, they are abstractions arising in the context of deterministic evolution of the universe's state. Finally, you misinterpreted what I said about meaning. The search for meaning, and indeed the meaning itself (should it be found), are encoded in us and our environment as part of the universe's state. They <u>do not</u> give meaning to either the universe or to our existence from an "outsider's" point of view; they are only "meaningful" to us in particular. And, how can you say that there is only an illusion of search, when that very search could indeed be (fat chance, of course, -- but it <u>could</u>) the point of this entire affair. For example, consider a key breaking program running on some supercomputer. It is entirely deterministic, and its subprocesses are merely subsets of the whole. Yet, the parameter search that occurs in each subprocess is part of the larger process whose goal also happens to consist of parameter search. Indeed, the point of the whole program is to search the parameter space for the correct decryption key, and every subprocess not only contributes to that goal, but is indeed representative of it in its very structure. Such analogy, of course, need not apply merely to humans, merely to Earth, or merely to search for meaning. There is an uncountable infinity of possible goals to the universe, even aside from the possibility that there may indeed be no goal at all. However, it is brash and narrowminded to assume that the meaning of the universe, if any, is only represented in its total state, and that smaller subsets of that state cannot be key to, or at least representative of, that meaning.


...if we give up the notion of locality, we can still speak of causes but only of how certain probabilities give rise to other probabilities. The way we do this is mathematically determined.


Probabilities do not give rise to probabilities; only actual events affect probabilities. For example, you may have a formula to compute P(A|B) for any B=f(x); however, P(A|B) never takes a defined shape until f(x) is specified. In quantum mechanics they refer to it as wavefunction collapse, but it really is simply the event of a specific interaction. You must understand that probabilities fundamentally represent frequencies of occurrence. They say nothing about the mechanisms that drive these occurrences; neither do they explain why the particular distributions they assume are favored over others. In statistics (as in much of empirical science), the data comes first, and then a model is constructed to fit the data. There is nothing wrong with this approach, as long as one keeps in mind that it is the statistics that represent the data, not the other way around. You have to keep in mind that mathematics is merely a language that describes reality. It is not a fundamental mechanism of reality; on the contrary, it is merely a derivative of reality. Thus, the Copenhagen-like attempts to crown mathematics as the cornerstone of the universe's foundation do not sit well with me at all; they are akin to saying that it is the exhaust that comes out of your car's tailpipe that makes the car move forward -- they are taking the superficial effect, and painting it as the underlying cause. Certainly it is not to say that mathematics is not intimately connected to the universe's structure; indeed, were the structure any different, then in all likelihood the mathematics that it defined would have to be different too -- just as the particular engine of a car determines whether the exhaust is combusted diesel, natural gas, gasoline, or hydrogen. What I am trying to not very successfully express here through all of these inept analogies to computers and engines, is that we need to look for the very reasons our mathematics is the way it is, and the very reasons our quantum statistics come out the way they do. We need to look for the fundamental self-sufficient and universal causative agent and structural component, from which everything else is built. I in fact expect (though hardly hope for it to be verified within my lifetime) that the universe is ultimately reducible to one or very few fundamental building blocks with a very limited set of straightforward (though not necessarily intiutive) properties, from which all of the complexity at the higher levels of abstraction can be axiomatically or assymptotically derived. Furthermore, these building blocks or block, being fundamental, must be mutually referential (i.e., none of them can be defined or constructed without including another in the definition or structure.)


I would even agrue the contrary if you don't look at probabilities a whole bunch of information get's lost. Simply look at a living organism and its constituant atoms. Suppose we would have a way to model the movements and beheaviours of all the atoms in a bacteria. This would tell us nothing of the bacteria itself while there is an enourmous difference between the configurations of atoms as in a bacteria and as in a gas eventhough we are talking about the same atoms !


You are confusing information with perception. When we abstract from the gory details, we are in effect performing a lossy compression on the structure. Indeed, any model that does not explicitly represent the system through to its smallest component, looses information about the system. Despite such loss, compression sometimes nevertheless gives acceptable results in that the perceptual quality has not degraded significantly compared to the authentic original. Given our limited cognitive resources, we abstract and compress all the time -- and that is why simplifications are so attractive to us. However, if we truly want to know what is going on, we can no longer ignore the gory details; indeed, it is those details that interest us! Your bacteria analogy is invalid, because to represent the complete state of a bacterium you must not only specify all of its atoms and their precise states, but you must also specify the relationships between all of those atoms. Given such a complete representation, we would indeed have much more information than we normally have when we look at a bacterium through a microscope. Not only that, but such knowledge (were it possible) would enable us to do powerful new things that we couldn't do with our previous, cruder, representations. For example, given a precise atomic (or even subatomic, though I'm not sure we need to go that deep) model of a bacterium and its immediate environment, we can predict precisely the state the bacterium (or any of its offspring) will be in an arbitrary amount of time into the future. Not only that, but we can also backtrace the bacterium's current state into the past, to examine its precise history. And not only that, but conceivably we could design new tools to manipulate the bacterium in interesting and amazing and predictable ways at an atomic level, to create effects we never even dreamed of back in the microscope era.

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I am; therefore I think.

Is the Universe, divinely or mundanely created, a process or an event?

A big explosion from a volcano we think of as an event, but the geology of that explosion we see as a process.

Is the Universe a process which has not finished operating? Or is it an event, which has not finished occurring? It's a subtle difference, but something close to the transcendent paradox of proving existence.

thanx,
Tiassa :cool:

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We are unutterably alone, essentially, especially in the things most intimate and important to us. (Ranier Maria Rilke)

tiassa,

I have an image, which Boris has refuted, but he might be wrong on some things sometime, but anyway my image feels satisfying. The Big Bang is just one event of many which are occurring concurrently throughout a much larger universe than we currently consider. The matter from our big bang will either cool down and disperse or will be pulled back by an increasing number of black holes which will eventually merge into a single primary particle, a Big Collapse.

I suspect the universe is infinite and is active. I think an infinite universe means that there can be no creator. Infinite time means there was no beginning and therefore there cannot be a time when something existed before and was able to create the universe.

As to whether we are experiencing an event or a process seems to be a question of how we perceive time relative to something else. If we were able to stand outside the universe and look down and where we can see the passage of time in trillions of years per second then each Big Bang in my model would appear as simple events that come and go relatively quickly. But from our human perspective we see time much more slowly so the current expansion of our Big Bang bubble appears as a very slow process.

So I think the answer is that it is both an event and a process but which you choose depends entirely on your perspective.

I don’t think I have answered your question, as I don’t think I fully understand it. What do you mean by “the transcendent paradox of proving existence” and why would an event or process perspective help us?


[This message has been edited by Cris (edited April 28, 2000).]

Tiassa,

This is a bit silly, but isn't a process just a sequence of events, and isn't an event just a confluence of processes? :)

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I am; therefore I think.

Chris, you still haven't answered you own question. Just reminding you, I want to see your answer.

You also said:

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I suspect the universe is infinite and is active. I think an infinite universe means that there can be no creator. Infinite time means there was no beginning and therefore there cannot be a time when something existed before and was able to create the universe.
________________

I don't know if you know this or not but what you just said has been shown to be false. Our universe came into existence along with time. A mere suspection compared to the evidnece scientists have found for the origin of our universe is like the view of the earth being 6,000 years old compared to the view of it being 4.6 billion. I don't even need to point out the paradoxes that arise in an infinite universe. All I have to do is point to the creation event, the Big Bang.


__________________
because it is accepted that there is no proof or evidence of a god or spiritual existence.
__________________

Accepted by who? I strongly disagree with what you just said. There is proof if you stay rational. If you start talking about invisible pink elephants creating the universe then I have no comment. I have never seen california but I take it on faith that it exists. The same type of faith that I have in the existence of God scientists have in the existence of a neutrino. I have never seen them but I have seen the evidence. What needs to be addressed in discussions like this is what exactly is proof? Look in the other thread. I attempted to provide rational justification for my faith. Maybe someone will refute it though.

Also, if you don't respond to anything I say in this post, please do one thing for me. Show me those scriptures you speak of where Jesus says there isn't any proof of God's existence. If you checked out my page you already saw what I am about to post.

From the link to my web page I provided

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Read Matthew 6:25-33. Jesus said, "If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will He not much more clothe you, O you of little faith?" Nowhere does it say to just blindly hope that God is real and assume He will provide for you. It says God (it assumes His existence as a fact) will provide for you. Do not worry about food or clothing. God will provide for you.

Mark 10:27 records Jesus as saying, "With man this is impossible, but not with God; all things are possible with God." God's existence is taken for granted here as in many other places in the Bible. It is assumed as a fact.
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The Bible assumes God's existence as a fact from cover to cover. Nowhere does it promote the idea of blind faith. Some Christians might say we don't need proof because we have faith but having and prove cannot be mutually exclusive and they are inaccurate. I pointed out on my page that intellectual faith isn't enough for salvaion but it is the bottom of the spiritual food chain. Hebrews 11:1 says, "Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certian of what we do not see." Taking the entire New Testament into account we get a definition of faith being: belief and action based upon established facts. You and even some Christians may not agree with that definition but if you believe and have studied the Bible then thats the one it uses.

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Such theologians recognize that there is no rationality to a religious belief.
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Robert Jastrow (self-proclaimed agnostic): "For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries."

Jastrow, R. 1978. God and the Astronomers. NewYork, W.W. Norton, p. 116.

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We now have the paradox – through the bible you are claiming that God says he exists because he (the word of the bible) says so. That is just as unacceptable as my claim to superiority.
____________________


I agree and wouldn't say something circular like that.

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So pretty much any recourse to potential evidence from the bible will fail on this basis. You must seek independent verifiable evidence if you are to succeed in any proofs that would be acceptable to atheists. Your approach as you have stated elsewhere might be to prove that the writers of the bible were truly inspired by God, only then can we then start to use the bible as the basis for other proofs.
________________

In the other topic I attempted to do so.

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Now I recognize that you have a strong desire to appear rational and hence you very much need to show that proofs and evidence do exist.
_____________

Apologetics is a branch of theology that provides rational justification for the central claims of Christianity in accordance with 1 Peter 3:15. "But in your hearts set apart Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect."

Thats where my desire comes from.

Re: Christianity as a religion. Obviously by definition Christianity is a religion. But most religions seem to have all kinds of ceremonies and traditions and stuff. The main aspect of Christendom is having a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. Don't read to much into it, its just a famous Christian expression.


Have a great weekend.

Vinnie

I have seen the holes in thy hands.

vinnie,

Sorry, I'm responding to things somewhat out of sequence. No intention of ignoring your other messages, I just need a little more time for them. Hope to catch up this weekend.

Some quickies for now - the Big Bang is still only a theory and we simply don't know if there was anything before the big bang, so a claim for it being a creation event is premature. All other events in our experience have a cause; we have no reason yet to suppose that the Big Bang didn't have a natural cause. Also, the points I made to tiassa were somewhat in fun, perhaps a little bit of faith on my part – there being no evidence or proof of any kind.

Here are a few quotes from Christians who reject reason and rationality –

The Church father Tertullian (CE 150-225). In De Carne Cristi he states - And the Son of God died; it is by all means to be believed, because it is absurd. And he was buried and rose again; the fact is certain because it is impossible. Quoted in Wiliam Barret, Irrational Man (garden City: Anchor Books, 1962). pp. 94-95.

He also states – My first principle is this. Christ laid down one definite system of truth which the world must believe without qualification. From - The Prescriptions Against the Heretics, quoted in Classical Statements on Faith and Reason, edited by L. Miller (New York: Random House 1970), pp 3-10.

Etienne Gilson, a prominent Thomist scholar states – Where reason is able to understand, faith has no further role to play. In other words, we cannot both know and believe [on faith] the same thing at the same time under the same aspect …… since man requires knowledge of the infinite God, who is his end, and since such knowledge exceeds the limits of his reason, he simply must get it by way of faith. From – Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of St.Thomas Aquinas, p. 17.

... when the non-Christian scientist or philosopher begins to reason in the field of philosophy or theology, the very nature of the subject matter, dealing as it does with the ultimate causes of the universe, makes it impossible for him to reason correctly. The distortion brought about by the fall of man into sin completely blocks the intellectual channels of such a non-Christian thinker and prevents him from reasoning correctly. From - Floyd E. Hamilton, The Basis of the Christian Faith (New York: Harper and Row, 1964, 1964), p. 14.

Martin Luther, calls reason "the devil's bride," a "beautiful whore" and "God's worst enemy." "There is on earth among all dangers," writes Luther, "no more dangerous thing than a richly endowed and adroit reason, especially if she enters into spiritual matters which concern the soul and God. For it is more possible to teach an ass to read than to blind such a reason and lead it right; for reason must be deluded, blinded, and destroyed." According to Luther, "Faith must trample under foot all reason, sense, and understanding, and whatever it sees it must put out of sight, and wish to know nothing but the word of God. Quoted in Walter Kaufmann, Critique of Religion and Philosopby, pp. 305-307. (First printed 1958. Reprinted by Harper Torchbooks, New York, 1972.)

Jesus, openly admitting the absurdity of his teachings, states – I thank thee, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that thou hast hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to babes. (Mathew 11.25).

And again he admits that he intended for his parables to be confusing, states – To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside everything is in parables; so that they may indeed see but not perceive, and may indeed hear but not understand… (Mark 4.11-12).

The apostle Paul, who in many respects had more influence on Christianity than did Jesus, was quite candid in his hostility to reason. "See to it," he warned, "that no one makes a prey of you by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the universe, and not according to Christ" (Colossians 2.8).

Paul announced that "We are fools for Christ's sake," but he saw nothing wrong with being a fool.

... the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written, "I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the cleverness of the clever I will thwart." ...Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe.... God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise.... (I Corinthians 1. 18-27)

And again-.

Let no one deceive himself. If any one among you thinks that he is wise in this age, let him become a fool that he may become wise. For the wisdom of this world is folly with God. (I Corinthians 3. 18-19)

Paul argues that the truths of Christianity transcend reason-

The unspiritual man does not receive the gifts of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned. (I Corinthians 2. 14).

I'm out of time for this session.

Hope you also have a pleasant weekend.

Cris

Cris,
I think you and others may find this interesting.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_729000/729750.stm

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Oh my God it's the funky shit!!!

Thanks tab.

BTW can you receive BBC TV where you are? I miss their quality programmes, there is no equivalent here in California.

Cris

Hi Cris,
yeah here in Cyprus we can receive BBC1,2,CH4,CH5 and some others (which are free to air) by getting a 2.7m dish and digital decoder and subscribing to SKY DIGITAL which can provide another 30 or so channels.
We don't have it yet unfortunately because our roof won't take the dish and our garden's too small but we're building a larger house in a bigger plot in a coupla years so that'll be sorted.
Take care.


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Oh my God it's the funky shit!!!

tab, 2.7m??? That's huge. Have fun.

Boris--

... isn't a process just a sequence of events, and isn't an event just a confluence of processes?

Well, that's the point, sort of.

If the Universe is a process, then each event has its meaning, and we should, theoretically, be able to derive some sense of the grander process from any given event.

But if the Universe is a single event, then our perception of sequential events is inadequate or false. Where we would see an event as an independent event, perhaps of a larger process (e.g.--the Unvierse), if the Universe is merely an event, then the "independent event" is only of consequence in the final outcome.

Has the "event" of the Big Bang, for instance, ceased occurring?

thanx,
Tiassa :cool:

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We are unutterably alone, essentially, especially in the things most intimate and important to us. (Ranier Maria Rilke)

Greetings and salutations. Hope you all enjoyed your weekend.
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Some quickies for now - the Big Bang is still only a theory and we simply don't know if there was anything before the big bang, so a claim for it being a creation event is premature. All other events in our experience have a cause; we have no reason yet to suppose that the Big Bang didn't have a natural cause. Also, the points I made to tiassa were somewhat in fun, perhaps a little bit of faith on my part – there being no evidence or proof of any kind.
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Cris, our universe did not always exist. It came into existence, ie it was created. By defintion, it was caused to exist ehich is the defintion of created. As far as the Big Bang having a "natural" cause, well whats the natural cause for that natural cause? And the natural cause for that cause? etc. It seems you need an uncaused cause to start things off. To say the universe just created itself or there was no cause for it is absurd.

This reminds me of a story I read today at school.[Paraphrased] An atheist was giving a lecture on why there isn't a God. He was talking aout the Big Bang and said it happened naturally and that God wasn't neccessary. A tomato came flying at him from the back of the room and whizzed by his head. Furiously he asked, "Who threw that?" Someone from the back shouted out, "No one. It threw itself."

Your calling the Big Bang a theory doesn't hold too much weight either. From what I hear all facets of astronomy are starting to pour in information supporting the Big Bang.

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Here are a few quotes from Christians who reject reason and rationality –
The Church father Tertullian (CE 150-225). In De Carne Cristi he states - And the Son of God died; it is by all means to be believed, because it is absurd. And he was buried and rose again; the fact is certain because it is impossible. Quoted in Wiliam Barret, Irrational Man (garden City: Anchor Books, 1962). pp. 94-95.

He also states – My first principle is this. Christ laid down one definite system of truth which the world must believe without qualification. From - The Prescriptions Against the Heretics, quoted in Classical Statements on Faith and Reason, edited by L. Miller (New York: Random House 1970), pp 3-10.
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Something tells me those could be quoted out of context. If they mean what you think they mean then they are wrong. I must admit that I I do not think they mean what you think they do. It is a possiblity though. I have seen some really funky doctrine before. I don't have time to read the actual sources now but I am more conerned with your comments on what the Bible said.

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Etienne Gilson, a prominent Thomist scholar states – Where reason is able to understand, faith has no further role to play. In other words, we cannot both know and believe [on faith] the same thing at the same time under the same aspect …… since man requires knowledge of the infinite God, who is his end, and since such knowledge exceeds the limits of his reason, he simply must get it by way of faith. From – Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of St.Thomas Aquinas, p. 17.
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This could also be out of context. Like in the book of Job, sometimes God's ways are way above our understanding. Sometimes we have to buckle down and just trust God. But this is relatioal trust. Not blind trust in God's existence but trusting his word from first hand experience with him. This is a bad analogy but its like a marriage. A woman may trust the reason that her husband gives for being out all night. But in order to trust him this way she must know he exists. The relationship trust that I have in God is based on my personal experiences with Him. The wife does not doubt her husbands existence when she listens to his excuses whether they be valid or not.

The quote could have meant something like that and even if it didn't, I have no clue what that guy was on ;)

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Martin Luther, calls reason "the devil's bride," a "beautiful whore" and "God's worst enemy." "There is on earth among all dangers," writes Luther, "no more dangerous thing than a richly endowed and adroit reason, especially if she enters into spiritual matters which concern the soul and God. For it is more possible to teach an ass to read than to blind such a reason and lead it right; for reason must be deluded, blinded, and destroyed." According to Luther, "Faith must trample under foot all reason, sense, and understanding, and whatever it sees it must put out of sight, and wish to know nothing but the word of God. Quoted in Walter Kaufmann, Critique of Religion and Philosopby, pp. 305-307. (First printed 1958. Reprinted by Harper Torchbooks, New York, 1972.)
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If this isn't taken out of context and possibly referring to something specific like the others you quoted might possibly have referred to then I disagree with Luther and so does the Bible. Check out my page on blind faith: http://www.angelfire.com/co/JesusFreak/blindfaith.html

I may add the questions you asked about the Bible verses below to it.

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Jesus, openly admitting the absurdity of his teachings, states – I thank thee, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that thou hast hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to babes. (Mathew 11.25).
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Jesus had a pinata when He was here 2000 years ago that he constantly rebuked. People like the pharisees had external faith but they lacked the internal stuff neccessary. When fasting they made sure everyone knew what they were doing and the pain they went through so as to be glorified in front of men. They prayed in public only to get honor from men. Not to actually talk with God. The wise is referring to teachers of the Law and the pharisees. The little children are referring to the humble followers of Jesus. When you understand scripture in the context it was written in and do not add modern assumptions to it things will be properly understood.

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And again he admits that he intended for his parables to be confusing, states – To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside everything is in parables; so that they may indeed see but not perceive, and may indeed hear but not understand… (Mark 4.11-12).
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Without faith you will not understand the message. Just like the bible, non-believers do not have the Holy Spirit there helping them understand scripture and will often see things wrongly. No where does this verse say to blindly believe in god with no evidence. It says that without faith you will not understand the spiritual message of the Bible. You can start by examining the facts and build up an intellectual faith. The idea is to just be sincere in your search for God. Continually ask, seek, and knock and your heart will be softened. I couldn't really understand the spiritual message of the Bible before I was saved. Once I started looking at it with an open mind trying to understand what it said my heart was softened. The same should happen to anyone. You can obviously understand lots of parts of scripture but you will not understand all of it. Until you understand the angle that the bible is comming from you will misintepret and miss the points of lots of things. A lot of it deals with our personal relationship with God and if you do not have this then you are at a disadvantage.

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The apostle Paul, who in many respects had more influence on Christianity than did Jesus, was quite candid in his hostility to reason. "See to it," he warned, "that no one makes a prey of you by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the universe, and not according to Christ" (Colossians 2.8).
Paul announced that "We are fools for Christ's sake," but he saw nothing wrong with being a fool.
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This is taken out of context. Paul was counteracting the Colossian Heresy here. They added to the message of salvation certian false teachings. For instance, along with faith they claimed a secret knowledge of things and circumcision were neccessary. It has to do with false, worldy, religious, elemantary teachings. Not with science and philosphy that we study today unless they fit the bill of being "empty deceit."

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... the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written, "I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the cleverness of the clever I will thwart." ...Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe.... God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise.... (I Corinthians 1. 18-27)
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This is out of context as well. I would suggest getting a good study Biblie like the Niv so you can read text notes and stuff and try to get a deeper meaning of this stuff.

[niv study bible text noes paraphrased]

"I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the cleverness of the clever I will thwart."

This reference in Cor 1:19 is from Isaiah 29:144, where God denounced the policy of the "wise" in Judah in seeking an alliance eith Egypt when threatened by King Sennacherib of Assyria. According to Aristides, on every street in Corinth one met a so-called wise man, who had his own solutions to the world's problems.

In verse 1:20 the "wise man" probably refers to a gentile philosphers in general. "Scholar" most likely refers to a Jewish teacher of the Law. philospher of this age is referring to the Greek sophists, who engaged in long and subtle disputes. "God made foolish the wisdom of the world" meaning all humanly devises philosphical sytems end in meaningless because they have a wrong concept of God and His revelation.

Your emotional faith can be "blind" as in trusting God when you do not understand things. But as you can see, the Bible does not teach blind faith as in intellectul faith. In fact, it teaches just the opposite. It says that those who know God will trust him, but that we are to "test everything and hold on to that which is good." Not to just blindly believe jesus or allah or zues existed. Examine the facts with an opened mind. You seem to be biased in your big bang studies. You reject the Big Bang because you feel it points to a creator. That is not being openminded. Thats like young earth creationism. Asuming a false premise and using any shred of doubt or uncertianty to justify a claim.

The big bang points to a creator. If you believe in any kind of spiritual capacity for humans then the Big Bang along with the anthropic principle point to a personal creator. If you believe otherwise then your everyday experiences contradict your philosphy thus giving it an entire set of different problems.

Grace and peace in Christ,
Vinnie

Praise Jesus!!!

[This message has been edited by ilgwamh (edited May 02, 2000).]

Hi vinnie,

Weekend was taken up with building new RAID arrays for my daughter's HS video project. She graduates in a few weeks so has some well defined deadlines. Now she has to use my machine for her work. Responses coming soon, but family has priority of my time.

Have fun
Cris

Boris, and everyone who wants to continue the discussion about determinism :

I order to respect the original topic posted by Cris and the overal topic of this thread (Religion) I will post a new topic in General Sci/Tech that addresses these questions more directly.

In order to stay on the original topic of this thread I would like to point out that faith and reason actually go hand in hand. For example in the discussion of determinism against indeterminism there is, next to reason, some faith involved that what you are saying is the truth. Each scientist who develops a new theory always starts from a certain faith (this I would define as unsupported assumptions) that nature works as he thinks it does.
Einstein's theory of relativity comes from the belief that all observers are equal. This finds its root in the equality principle that drived the French revolution.


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"If I have been able to see further, it was only because I stood on the shoulders of giants."
Isaac Newton

Plato,

Yes good idea, thanks. I've pretty much made up my mind on determinism and have started a response to you several times and have been interrupted. I now have around 5 different trains of thought running through my mind on different threads and topics - but I'll join your topic shortly.

Have fun whatever.

PS. I think you are using the word 'faith' incorrectly, as I've said before there are many variations on what the word means depending on the context. I think it would be wise to seek the nearest alternative for the word and see if that is a better fit. In the case of the scientist having faith in his belief I think that it is more reasonable to assume that he has confidence in his claim but that he continues to seek for evidence. Religious faith on the other hand largely requires giving up on searching for evidence and insists that the participant believe without question. I think this is a qualitively different position compared to the scientist. However, different religious sects will have different opinions on how to define faith.

Hi Vinnie,

I’ll deal with last posts first and work backwards. I had a rule years ago that if I received a mail message that was larger than I could see on a screen then I would put it off until later. Large posts imply a lot of work to respond – so sorry for the delay.
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Cris, our universe did not always exist. It came into existence, ie it was created.
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Why are you so certain? I really want to see facts and not religious assertions which is your domain based on your, I suspect strong unshakable faith. I know the concept of infinity is a difficult one to grasp and there are many scientific theories that discuss whether it is possible or not, however, that remains my preferred choice for explaining the universe, if I have to make a choice at this point. However, we really don’t know yet, it is beyond our abilities to discover the beginning or whether there is such a thing as infinite space. Is there a case for the possibility of a creator? Then I must answer yes in the light of the scientific theories covering the problems with infinite space. But what are the properties of this potential creator? That is a worthwhile question and the answers will be very interesting. But again I don’t see that we know enough yet to answer that question and in my mind Christianity doesn’t come close. The Christian God is impossible based on my understanding of the Christian claims for such an entity, there are too many contradictions and too much of Christianity has been based on political expediency.

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As far as the Big Bang having a "natural" cause, well whats the natural cause for that natural cause? And the natural cause for that cause? etc. It seems you need an uncaused cause to start things off. To say the universe just created itself or there was no cause for it is absurd.

Your calling the Big Bang a theory doesn't hold too much weight either. From what I hear all facets of astronomy are starting to pour in information supporting the Big Bang.
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I think people are misunderstanding my view of the Big Bang theory.

We seem to be forgetting the lessons from history where we all agreed that for example; the earth was flat, and then after some searching we found we could go further. Or the earth was at the center of the universe; and then we found we could see further. And then the sun was at the center, and again we found ways to see further. With the wisdom of hindsight we can look back and think how foolish those people seemed when they didn’t understand the truth. Note also that religions and especially Christianity claimed these states as being the truth as revealed by God and the bible etc., but however it was justified religion always played a major role in influencing the populace and their beliefs of the origin of the universe. Now I believe we are in an identical position regarding the Big Bang. We again have reached the limits of our abilities to see and again Christianity is claiming this new view as the beginning of the universe. History is in the throes of repeating itself, but now we feel more arrogant because of our new “enlightened” scientific abilities, which I suspect have now reached a limit. We now require a new quantum leap to move onto the next realization and discovery that we have always done throughout history.

Now if we view past history in the same way as one would view a partial mathematical series then it would be more rational to assume that the Big Bang is just another point on the horizon that we shall one day be able to see past. I suspect that the feeling people have now about the Big Bang being the beginning is identical to those feelings way back when people believed the Earth was flat and if you went too far you would fall off the edge. There was a conviction that the truth was known.

I grant you that the predominance of scientific evidence points very strongly to the Big Bang being a fact but until that is verified then no matter how much the evidence, the Big Bang remains technically a theory. Remember the majority once believed that the Earth was flat, and there is nothing that states that a democratic majority vote is correct. But I am probably nit picking here, so let’s assume for now that the Big Bang is a fact.

I maintain that because we simply can’t see past something there is no reason to believe that there isn’t something before the Big Bang and my justification for my belief is the evidence of history with similar cutting edge viewpoints. Having concluded this possibility I have then been trying to theorize what the greater universe might be like outside the Big Bang and to imaginatively construct a potential believable scenario. Much the same way that a scientist will construct a theory from very little or no evidence or perhaps circumstantial evidence and then search for justification until the evidence is found or the theory is proved wrong. For now I don’t believe there is proof that my theory is not possible. So I’ll continue until it is destroyed or proved correct. I am not a scientist so I suspect it won’t take much from a real scientist to shatter my ideas.

I hope that from this diatribe you can see why I am not prepared to accept your assertion that the Big Bang is the start of creation. Neither of us can see past the Big Bang and neither of us can claim that there isn’t something that came before. But if you can think beyond the vast size of the known expanding universe and imagine what if all this that we perceive is merely a small bubble in an even more much larger universe and that our Big Bang is just one of many set at great distances apart. This view doesn’t rely on an infinite space and doesn’t preclude the possibility of a creator; all options remain open. For the moment we simply don’t know what started the whole thing, and we should rationally leave the question open until we can discover the real truth, but that requires imaginative theories and the desire to search – hence our desire for this debate among many.

I base my claim on the evidence of past history events when reaching such apparent terminal conclusions. What evidence are you using to claim that this Big Bang is the true beginning?

Most of the rest of your last message dealt with my quotes about faith and reason from historical Christians. You seem to feel that many were taken out of context, and I have to agree that some of the claims were borderline. My theory here is that any attempt by a Christian to encourage the use of blind faith instead of reason or to condemn others for trying to understand their environment based on reason is unacceptable to rational people. In this respect any context should be acceptable. However, some of the historical quotes do seem to say what I have stated. I had other quotes that were simply unbelievable even for Christians. There were indeed some real extreme views held in the distant past. My belief is that Martin Luther really believed his statements.

My knowledge of the bible has become rusty and to study it in detail now seems like a waste of time. I have long since dismissed Christianity as a lost cause and I am sure it will die out soon without my assistance. I also, have no desire to try to convert you or anyone else to my points of view. I am here to learn new things and new views and to test my own knowledge and revise it if I am convinced of something better. I am quite happy to respect your greater knowledge of biblical passages and their interpretation and will strive to avoid potential ambiguous biblical passages in the future.

For now though I stand by my original statements that those who use religious faith to claim new knowledge are technically irrational according to the generally accepted definitions of the words used. You have not shown me anything that would convince me otherwise. I believe that your stance is that the bible can convey a deeper meaning and would provide evidence if I was prepared to study it in more detail and open my heart to the possibility of a loving Jesus etc. I believe that such an approach would be self delusional, mentally dangerous, and would create many false hopes that could never be fulfilled. I have been there and have no intention of returning. Somewhere in this forum I have given full details of my past intensive involvement with Christianity and how I managed to escape and now experience a much richer and rewarding life. To accept your views I would need to see some independent and unambiguous evidence for the claims of Christianity and without those the testimony and assertions made by Christians such as yourself will remain irrational and for me that is an unacceptable way to run my life.

I have a good friend who is a devout Christian and I have a great respect for him. When we depart he has often said he will pray for me, and I usually think and have said that I will find him a good psychiatrist. The personal respect is mutual but the philosophical views are complete opposites. I suspect that religions aren’t going to vanish anytime soon so we must all learn tolerance for one another and continue to search for the truth. I enjoy your challenge.

Until the next post –

Cris


[This message has been edited by Cris (edited May 03, 2000).]

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"Cris, our universe did not always exist. It came into existence, ie it was created."


Why are you so certain?
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The impossiblity of an actual infinte. The impossibility of actually traversing an infinite. The 2nd law of thermodynamics and Big Bang Cosmology. All these things show our universe to be finite. If you want to discuss or debate exactly how or why then post something more on them.

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I really want to see facts and not religious assertions which is your domain based on your, I suspect strong unshakable faith.
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The fact that our universe had a beginning is not only a religious assertion. It is a scietific one as well. Einstien knew the implications of a finite universe...

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I know the concept of infinity is a difficult one to grasp and there are many scientific theories that discuss whether it is possible or not, however, that remains my preferred choice for explaining the universe, if I have to make a choice at this point.
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I've never seen a logical proof for an infinity that doesn't end in nonsense. Maybe you wouldn't mind posting one of those theories?

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However, we really don’t know yet, it is beyond our abilities to discover the beginning or whether there is such a thing as infinite space.
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What do you mean by beginning? Do you mean the beginning of our universe or the "beginnings of that thing outside of our universe." I showed four lines of evidences up above that show we are capable and have shown a beginning to our universe. And as far as "infinite" space, well I am waiting for that theory on infinities. From what I have read they are impossible.

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But what are the properties of this potential creator? That is a worthwhile question and the answers will be very interesting.
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Well, I believe this creator has revealed himself to us in scripture and gave us properties of himself. It is a worthwhile disussion. A lot of stuff can be appealed to.

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But again I don’t see that we know enough yet to answer that question and in my mind Christianity doesn’t come close. The Christian God is impossible based on my understanding of the Christian claims for such an entity, there are too many contradictions and too much of Christianity has been based on political expediency.
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Would you mind posting some examples?

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I think people are misunderstanding my view of the Big Bang theory.

We seem to be forgetting the lessons from history where we all agreed that for example; the earth was flat, and then after some searching we found we could go further. Or the earth was at the center of the universe; and then we found we could see further. And then the sun was at the center, and again we found ways to see further. With the wisdom of hindsight we can look back and think how foolish those people seemed when they didn’t understand the truth.
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You seem to be appealing to a straw man here. Your making a bigger leap of faith than me. The evidence for the beginning is overwhelming. I posted 4 things up above supporting it. All facets of astronomy are starting to pour in data confirming the creation event (the big Bang).


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Note also that religions and especially Christianity claimed these states as being the truth as revealed by God and the bible etc., but however it was justified religion always played a major role in influencing the populace and their beliefs of the origin of the universe. Now I believe we are in an identical position regarding the Big Bang.
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Before Hubble and all that stuff scientists were nice and cumfy in their infinite recliner. The facts shattered their beliefs. Any attemp at a plausible alternative to the big bang is most likely the result of a bias towards a "creation event" by scietists. I lot of scientist don't like the big bang because of its implications. The facts are there though. They cannot be dismissed because someone doesn't like their implications.

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We again have reached the limits of our abilities to see and again Christianity is claiming this new view as the beginning of the universe. History is in the throes of repeating itself, but now we feel more arrogant because of our new “enlightened” scientific abilities, which I suspect have now reached a limit. We now require a new quantum leap to move onto the next realization and discovery that we have always done throughout history.

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Check your science history. The Big bang was not found by christians and a lot of Christians today falsely reject it because they want to believe in a 6k year old earth. Yes people like me will say that that Genesis written many moons ago said the entire physical universe was created and so to does science.

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Now if we view past history in the same way as one would view a partial mathematical series then it would be more rational to assume that the Big Bang is just another point on the horizon that we shall one day be able to see past. I suspect that the feeling people have now about the Big Bang being the beginning is identical to those feelings way back when people believed the Earth was flat and if you went too far you would fall off the edge. There was a conviction that the truth was known.

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You've invented your own blind faith religion then. All the facts disagree with you. Our evidence today is much better and more complete than thiers. You fail to take one thing into account. Science keeps getting better and better.

You seem to be the one using "blind faith" and I'm supposed to be the mindless non-thinking- flaky Christian believing in some dusty manuscripts from 2,000 years ago that say a man rised from the dead and conquered sin.

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I grant you that the predominance of scientific evidence points very strongly to the Big Bang being a fact but until that is verified then no matter how much the evidence, the Big Bang remains technically a theory. Remember the majority once believed that the Earth was flat, and there is nothing that states that a democratic majority vote is correct. But I am probably nit picking here, so let’s assume for now that the Big Bang is a fact.
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Theory, fact, law, who decides what these things are labeled? I'm pretty sure most professors and stuff in astronomy would call the universes origin a fact and not just some theory. The evidence is overwhelming.
Those who disagree are most likely predjudices against "religion".


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I maintain that because we simply can’t see past something there is no reason to believe that there isn’t something before the Big Bang and my justification for my belief is the evidence of history with similar cutting edge viewpoints. Having concluded this possibility I have then been trying to theorize what the greater universe might be like outside the Big Bang and to imaginatively construct a potential believable scenario. Much the same way that a scientist will construct a theory from very little or no evidence or perhaps circumstantial evidence and then search for justification until the evidence is found or the theory is proved wrong. For now I don’t believe there is proof that my theory is not possible. So I’ll continue until it is destroyed or proved correct. I am not a scientist so I suspect it won’t take much from a real scientist to shatter my ideas.

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Your only delaying the inevitable. The need for a self sustaining uncaused cause will always come back to haunt you. I agree that "is no reason to believe that there isn’t something before the Big Bang." Look at my tomato analogy from before. Again though, my question is what created that something and what created that which created that? An uncaused cause is needed.

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I hope that from this diatribe you can see why I am not prepared to accept your assertion that the Big Bang is the start of creation.
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The big bang is the start of our universe. The time and space dimesnions that we have come to know and love, all the nergy and matter that we see, came into existence 14.5 billion years ago. I am not speaking of "before" the big bang. Something else might have been, but our universe was not there. It had a beginning.

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Neither of us can see past the Big Bang and neither of us can claim that there isn’t something that came before.
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I believe someone came before. From nothing nothing comes. There exists more and I beieve that again, we need an uncaused cause to be the starter of it all. By showing there is a beginning and that the universe is not infinitely old we, by definition, find god. I didn't capitalize g because we would still have to debate which one.

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But if you can think beyond the vast size of the known expanding universe and imagine what if all this that we perceive is merely a small bubble in an even more much larger universe and that our Big Bang is just one of many set at great distances apart. This view doesn’t rely on an infinite space and doesn’t preclude the possibility of a creator; all options remain open. For the moment we simply don’t know what started the whole thing, and we should rationally leave the question open until we can discover the real truth, but that requires imaginative theories and the desire to search – hence our desire for this debate among many.
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I pointed out the need for an uncaused cause. Where did that alleged universe come from. Why did our universe come into existence 4.5 billion years ago and not an eternity before if that universe is self sustaining and always exant? Your viewing everything as a big material process. Where did the material come from and why does it behave as it does? An uncaused cause is needed from my viewpoint.


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I base my claim on the evidence of past history events when reaching such apparent terminal conclusions. What evidence are you using to claim that this Big Bang is the true beginning?

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What do you mean by beginning? Is it evidence for the big bang (red shift, cobe, gneral relativity) that your asking for?

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You seem to feel that many were taken out of context, and I have to agree that some of the claims were borderline. My theory here is that any attempt by a Christian to encourage the use of blind faith instead of reason or to condemn others for trying to understand their environment based on reason is unacceptable to rational people. In this respect any context should be acceptable. However, some of the historical quotes do seem to say what I have stated. I had other quotes that were simply unbelievable even for Christians. There were indeed some real extreme views held in the distant past. My belief is that Martin Luther really believed his statements.

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Reason is good. Understanding the enviroment is good as well as using logic. Christians need to remember who they believe gave them their brains sometimes and who created things and designed the universe. If martin luther believed his statements in the context suggested then he was plain wrong. Simple as that.

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I have long since dismissed Christianity as a lost cause and I am sure it will die out soon without my assistance.
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That statement of it dying out has been said many times with a zero percent rate of accuracy.

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To accept your views I would need to see some independent and unambiguous evidence for the claims of Christianity and without those the testimony and assertions made by Christians such as yourself will remain irrational and for me that is an unacceptable way to run my life.
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What kind of "proof" are you referring to. What would satisfy you?

Have a great weekend. :)

Vinnie

Praise Jesus!!!

14.5 billion not 4.5 ;)

Hi vinnie,

Infinity: Looks like you don't want me to believe infinity is acceptable. Doesn't Christianity make a claim for an infinite God? If you can have an infinite entity then why can't I have an infinite entity (a universe)? Ah but science is showing problems accepting an infinite universe, but science can't touch God, so the same problems can't apply to God, right? Seems a kinda convenient escape. Definitely unfair.

By beginning I mean beginning of the physical universe.

I'm covering the impossibility of the Christian God in my posts to pashley in his topic Atheism is Baseless. But I plan to create some other topics later that deal more directly with the atheist claims.

I wasn't disputing the Big Bang, nor proposing an alternative, but I was suggesting that the big bang does not necessarily mean the beginning of the physical universe. At this stage we simply do not know what caused the big bang. My suggestion that there is something outside of or before the big bang based on natural phenomena seems more rational than jumping to the conclusion that it was caused supernaturally.

The original cause for everything is simply not known at this time and we must accept the fact that there will be things that cannot be known until we have obtained more knowledge and information. To invoke irrational supernatural explanations is premature and irresponsible.

My question to you was essentially why do you believe that God caused the big bang, and that there isn't something before the big bang (that, for your benefit, could have been caused by God instead). You have assumed that because we cannot see anything before the big bang then there is nothing there to see. I don't believe we know enough for anyone to state for sure that the big bang was the ultimate beginning of the physical universe.

Christianity dying out: I'm pretty sure it is declining based on my view of Christian activities in the schools of England - massive changes and reduction of Christian influence there. I need more evidence so I can't say much more at this stage. Also the rise and simply existence of atheist organizations worldwide that would have been impossible only a few decades ago.

Proof: God needs to clearly (emphasis on clearly) reveal him/her self and dispense with all this mystery and ambiguity. Main item on the evening news would do fine.

Have fun if you can.
Cris