Comments by "MC116" (@angelmendez-rivera351) on "Rationality Rules"
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@davidgould9431 Ancient philosophers were justified in making the mistake, though: axiomatic set theory did not exist in their day, so it was quite literally impossible to have known that their understanding of infinity, which is based on intuition, was actually inaccurate. WLC, on the other hand, is certainly not justified in making this mistake, as he lives in the 21st century, during an era where we have a better understanding of infinity, and of set theory, than we ever did before.
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@AShaif ...but suddenly we go all skeptic when it comes to the cause of the universe, because there is 1% chance there is no cause, despite arguments from fine-tuning, irreducible complexity, contingency, truth, language origin, the evolutionary argument against naturalism, and other cosmological, teleological arguments for the first cause.
You have an idiosyncratic usage of the word "despite." Why would you use the word "despite" only to proceed to mention a crap ton of extremely bad arguments that are straight up just much worse than the Kalam cosmological argument in terms of validity and soundness? You can present 100 bad arguments for the existence of God if you want. Present 1000. A million. Hell, you can present an infinite amount of bad arguments, if you want to. It will not change a thing. 0·ω is still equal to 0. What we need is a good argument, not a trillion extremely poor ones.
So if induction is a problem, why don't we act skeptical with things that are far more taken-for-granted.
Whatever do you mean? I cannot think of anything more taken for granted than the existence of God. There is more evidence for the existence of UFOs than there is for the existence of God. And this is really saying a lot. The 100 bad arguments you listed above do not make it less taken-for-granted. All they do is demonstrate that not only is the belief taken-for-granted, but it is also indefensible.
But my favorite is the contingency argument and the argument from language origin.
Seriously? Your favorite arguments are the worst of the bunch? Well,... you are a creationist, so I guess this makes sense.
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Are some of these questions unanswerable?
A better answer is "are these questions meaningful and coherent?" Typically, if a question has no answer, then it is because the question itself is nonsensical. The fact that you can throw words together to form a grammatical correct interrogative sentence does not imply that the sentence itself is meaningful. "Why is the Sun equal to the number 5?" This sentece is grammatically correct and mechanically correct too, but the question is literally nonsensical. It is meaningless. Is it unanswerable? Yes, it is unanswerable, but not because there is some fundamental flaw in human reasoning; rather, it is because the question is, in a sense, not even really a question at all, just a nonsensical string of words that happens to be grammatically correct. It is because the person who asked the question is not very bright and does not have the best understanding of how questions are supposed to work. Questions like "Why is there something rather than nothing?" seem, superficially, like they deserve an answer, because they appeal to the very flawed and unreliable thing that we call "common sense", but upon further and careful inspection, such questions are equally as nonsensical as the example I gave. There is nothing to answer, because the question is meaningless: ultimately, it is not asking anything at all.
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This is exactly right, and it explains why Christianity is currently (though not for long) most popular religion in the world. Christianity is such an ill-defined, ambiguous-or-incoherent mess of a belief system, that it is very malleable, and thus, very easy to reinterpret in a way that agrees with your already pre-existing intuitions and conceptions of the world. It can easily adapt to any culture, and most mindsets. Other religions are a lot more rigid with what exactly defines their belief system, so they are not as malleable, and so, not as easy for people to adopt as a way of justifying their pre-existing intuitions and conceptions. Virtually no Christian is actually willing, or capable, of aligning their beliefs in accordance to the actual history of how Christianity evolved from Judaism. Christianity functions as nothing more than a tool for confirmation bias.
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@ruaraidh74 The result of throwing a die is a digit from the set {1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6}. Therefore, the result of throwing a die is a 10^120-tuple from the set {1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6}^(10^120). A 10^120-tuple of digits is not an epistemically meaningful message, so what you describe is impossible. Also, what is this supposed to be analogous to? Although we tend to model dice throws with probability theory, the reality is, the physics of a die throw are deterministic. With sufficiently precise control of the initial conditions of the throw, one can control the outcome of the throw, and accurately predict it, with the accuracy improving as the amount of throws increases. As such, in principle, one could throw a die 10^(10^(100)) times, and have it always come out a 6. Dice throws are not random. The reason we often have to model them as if they are random is because, under most circumstances, it is not possible to determine the initial conditions with sufficient precision, and as dice are examples of chaotic systems, any predictions you end up making on the basis of the initial conditions is redundant. Instead, we assume a uniform distribution for the initial conditions, and provided that there are no irregular forces acting on the die during the throw, as is usually the case, the uniformity is preserved by the physics, so we can model the outcome of a die as a random variable distributed uniformly. Therefore, in practice, we have sufficient justification to state that the outcome of a die is approximately probabilistic, and that the outcome of each digit during a single throw is approximately 1/6. This is analogous to what can be said for all other physical interactions in the universe.
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@karlwinkler4223 Of course, this does seem to be in conflict with "Love your neighbour,"...
How so? The Greek word translated as "neighbour" has essentially a meaning equivalent to today's "fellow Jew" phrase. The person who suggested that this was not meant to be about Jewish people, but all humans, was the apostle Paul, but Paul never met Jesus, and all of the other leading proto-Christian preachers of the time clearly disagreed with Paul, since Paul said so himself in the letters that he wrote to those leaders. The apostle Peter, in particular, who Paul claimed to have met, and who was presumably one of the 12 Disciples, was described as having believed that Christianity was only for the Jews, and that you still needed to observe the Torah (i.e., be a religious Jew) to be Christian. This was a different religious sect from the one Paul started, and the only reason Paul's sect won was because Roman theologians and political leaders liked that Paul was antagonizing Jewish people, so they began to subscribe to his belief system, and they weaponized it to justify persecuting the Jews. It eventually became the Church of Roman Empire, and the preachers were all Roman priests who persecuted the Jewish Christian sects that still persisted. It was a very openly anti-Semitic view, and they treated Jewish people as "Christ-killers," all in view of the Gospels, which portray the Roman government as essentially being innocent and having "washed" their "hands," since the Jews were the ones who asked for Jesus' crucifixion.
Does this mean Jesus himself was racist? No. No one knows what Jesus actually preached, but it seems that Jesus was still some type of Messianic, apocalyptic Second Temple preacher, so solely from a socio-cultural viewpoint, it is unlikely that he was spreading any message of universal salvation like Christians today would have you believe.
...but I would think it would be foolish to say that those ideas align with the spirit of Christianity.
Do they? Slavery was openly endorsed in the New Testament by Paul. Even Jesus said nothing against slavery, not according to the Bibles, anyway. Besides, what do you mean by "the spirit of Christianity"? What exactly makes you think we get to define what that is? As soon as 15 years after the death and crucifixion of Jesus, there were dozens of Christian sects competing with each other, some more universalist and less ethnocentric than others. All sects of modern Christianity are descended from only one of those sects: Paul's sect. Does Paul get to define "the spirit of Christianity," solely because his sect is the only one that did not get persecuted into evolution or extinction? That is a pretty ridiculous standard, I would say. Moreover, at the end of the day: no one actually knows what is it that Jesus taught or believed. We do not know even the general gist, much less the details. Pretending that we can know or define "the spirit of Christianity," especially in light of the history of Christianity as a whole, is very arrogant, and I would say, naïve.
Either way, if anything is undeniable, it is that slavery has always been a part of the history of Christianity. Jesus himself was never said to oppose slavery, and evidently, no Christian leader had the motivation to use their "Christian values" to oppose slavery, so, trying to pretend that Christianity can be meaingfully construed as somehow being "anti-slavery" is dishonest at best. Let's not give credit to Christianity that it does not deserve. I am tired of irreligious people trying to defend indefensible things that religion has been directly involved with.
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Also, we DO have enough information. You are just personally ignorant about the information. For example, the I.O.C. is, as far as is currently known, far more reliable a source than the I.B.A. Additionally, we can corroborate by realizing that Imane Khelif is an Algerian athlete. In Algeria, being transgender is illegal, and if she had been born intersex with male genitalia and a propensity for high testosterone production, she simply would have been raised as a man and her birth certificate and passport would reflect this, because the government would have dictated for this to be the case. The only reason she has female in her birth certificate, female in her passport, and female in any other legal document used for her to be allowed to compete in Algeria's women's sports is because she is biologically female. The government knows she is biologically female, and this is about as strong confirmation as you can get from a country like Algeria. So there is no significant risk of the I.O.C. having made a mistake when most of the screening and testing simply would have occurred long before she was even allowed to be a boxer in her country of residence.
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@youwillwin7107 For many, the regularity of the universe and the precision with which the universe exploded ( expands ) into being provides even more evidences for the existence of God.
I have no clue why you present "exploded" and "expanded" as being synonymous. They are not synonymous. Also, the universe did not "expand into being." This is nonsense.
The Teleological argument goes like this: 1. Every design has a designer 2. The universe has high- complex design 3. Therefore, the universe has a designer.
Premise 2 is false. The universe is not a design, and does not exhibit signs of being a design.
Scientists are finding the universe is like that watch ( anology of William Paley ), except even more precisely designed.
Citation needed.
These highly-precise and interdependent environmental conditions (called "anthropic constants") make up what is known as the "Anthropic Principle"-- a title for the mounting evidence that has many scientists believing the universe is extremely fine tuned (designed) to support human CONSCIOUSNESS on earth.
No, this is a misrepresentation of what the anthropic principle is.
Thats why some notorious atheists including Antony Flew later believed in God.
Antony Flew converted right as he developed a severe case of dementia.
Some Anthropic constants example include: birth date of the star-planetary system if too early: quantity of heavy elements would be too low for large rocky planets to form if too late: star would not yet have reached stable burning phase; ratios of potassium-40, uranium-235, -238, and thorium-232 to iron would be too low for long-lived plate tectonics to be sustained on a rocky planet flux of cosmic-ray protons (one way cloud droplets are seeded) if too small: inadequate cloud formation in planet’s troposphere if too large: too much cloud formation in planet’s troposphere rotation period if longer: diurnal temperature differences would be too great if shorter: atmospheric jet streams would become too laminar and average wind speeds would increase too much fine structure constant (a number, 0.0073, used to describe the fine structure splitting of spectral lines) if larger: DNA would be unable to function; no stars more than 0.7 solar masses _if larger than 0.06: matter would be unstable in large magnetic fields _ if smaller: DNA would be unable to function; no stars less than 1.8 solar masses oxygen to nitrogen ratio in atmosphere if larger: advanced life functions would proceed too quickly if smaller: advanced life functions would proceed too slowly Jupiter’s mass if greater: Earth’s orbit would become unstable; Jupiter’s presence would too radically disturb or prevent the formation of Earth if less: too many asteroid and comet collisions would occur on Earth.
This is all mere speculation. We have no way of knowing what the universe would be like if the universe were different. These claims are unscientific, as they are unfalsifiable.
For more evidence: https://reasons.org/explore/blogs/tag/fine-tuning/page/2 https://reasons.org/explore/publications/articles/rtb-design-compendium-2009
This is not a scientific source, so this is dismissed at hand.
What are the chances? It's not there just a few broadly defined constants that may have resulted by chance. There are more than 100 very narrowly defined constants that strongly point to an Intelligent Designer.
No, there are not. Currently, per quantum field theory, there are only 20 degrees of freedom in the constants of the universe. Also, it is impossible to know how narrowly defined these constants are, since it is impossible to measure them with infinite precision. Also, determining the width of definition is not sufficient for determining the probability of these constants occurring.
Astrophysicist, Hugh Ross, calculated the probability these and other constants would exist for any planet in the universe by chance (i.e, without divine design). To meet all conditions, there is 1 chance in 10^1038 (one chance in one with 1038 zeroes after it)-- essentially 0% chance. According to probability theory, odds of less than 1 in 10^50 equals " zero probability".
Citation, or it did not happen.
Check:https://reasons.org/explore/publications/articles/probability-for-life-on-earth
Not a citation, so dismissed at hand. I doubt Hugh Ross actually ever did any of this: at best, he is being taken out if context and misunderstood, but if he had ever made such a sloppy, mistake-filled calculations, then his credibility as an astrophysicist would be lowered tremendously, as it would display ignorance of probability theory at a basic level.
It only proves that atheism is just a dogmatic belief.
What it proves is that you do not understand what citing your sources means.
Important: The term “entropy” describes degree of thermodynamic “disorder” in a closed system like the universe.
It does not. What it does actually describe is the information that we have about the microstates of a system in extrapolation from the known macrostate.
Amazingly, our universe was at its “minimum entropy” at the very beginning,...
No, it was not. The classical laws of thermodynamics are known to not be applicable at the Planck scales at which rapid cosmic inflation began.
...which begs the question “how did it get so orderly?”
This is very simple: entropy is not a description of orderliness. "Order" and "disorder" are not scientifically valid concepts, not within physics.
Looking just at the initial entropy conditions,...
The initial conditions of cosmic inflation are literally unknown, what the hell are you talking about?
...what is the likelihood of a universe supportive of life coming into existence by coincidence? One in billions of billions? Or trillions of trillions of trillions? Or more?
This is a meaningless question. To ask what the probability of an event is, you must assume that other events are possible (not known to be true), and what the probability of the other events is (not knowable).
Sir Roger Penrose, 2020 Nobel prize winner and a close friend of Stephen Hawking, wondered about this question and tried to calculate the probability of the initial entropy conditions of the Big Bang...
No, he did not. Once again, you are misrepresenting well-known scientific ideas. In this case, you are strongly misrepresenting Penrose's work.
According to Penrose, the odds against such an occurrence were on the order of 10 to the power of 10^123 to 1.
Citation needed.
But Penrose's answer is vastly more than this: It requires 1 followed by 10^10^123 zeros It’s important to recognize that we're not talking about a single unlikely event here. We’re talking about hitting the jackpot over and over again, nailing extremely unlikely, mutually complementary parameters of constants and quantities, far past the point where chance could account for it.
Alright, cool story. Now, show me some nonfiction. Show me some science.
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@AShaif The composition fallacy is not a decisive defeater,...
It is, though. Formally speaking, the composition fallacy is the claim that if S is the mereological sum of the parts in collection P, and each element of P has a property Q, then S also has the property Q. Even just from naive set theory, this does not follow, obviously. For example, every natural number is finite, but the set of natural numbers is infinite.
Induction is taken for granted for everyday life, but suddenly we go all skeptic when it comes to the cause of the universe...
Everyday life, and the origins of the universe, are fundamentally different circumstances, and the distinction is relevant. So it is reasonable to not overextend induction here.
...because there is 1% chance that there is no cause,...
The probability is much bigger than 1%.
...despite the arguments from fine tuning,...
I provided a systematic debunking of the strongest version of the fine-tuning argument below.
...irreducible complexity...
Irreducible complexity is mutually inconsistent with the fine-tuning argument, as the fine-tuning argument assumes evolution is true. Also, the concept of irreducible complexity is unscientific.
...contingency...
I already addressed the argument from contingency you presented above. However, there are better, strongers versions of the contingency argument. The strongest version I know of is the modal ontological argument presented by Alvin Platinga. However, the argument is flawed, in that the starting premise is speculative assumption, and also, the jump from "Possibly, necessarily, a maximally excellent being exists" and "necessarily, a maximally excellent being exists" requires accepting modal axiom 5, which is very much questionable.
...truth...
The existence of truth is entirely explained by the theory of evolution.
...consciousness...
Idbit.
...language origin...
Idbit.
...evolutionary argument against naturalism...
The evolutionary argument against naturalism betrays a misrepresentation of the theory of evolution, so it is unscientific. Also, this is mutually inconsistent with the argument from irreducible complexity.
...and other cosmological, teleological arguments for the first cause.
These all have the same unsoundness problems that the Kalam has: they all fundamentally misunderstand causation, and all assume that the universe "began," which is false.
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@MZONE991 If causal finitism is true, then we end up with a simple non-composite thing which is being itself.
This is nonsensical, as "being" is not a thing in itself, nor can it be.
You just showcasing your ignorance of classical theism.
You can make up your own worldview and slap a catchy name onto it. It does not make any less made up. You are just showcasing your ignorance of all concepts philosophical.
because the first cause of the universe cannot be a composite thing, because this eternal composition of parts is also infinite causation.
No, it is not the case that an eternal composition of parts is infinite causation.
because that's what we mean when say "God"
No, it is not. I assure you most Christians do not define "God" in such a manner, and neither does WLC, or most apologists. All you are demonstrating is that you are sufficiently intellectually dishonest, that you are willing to let the word "God" mean whatever you want it to, even change its meaning, as long as your ego thinks it is helping you prove a point. To define "God" in such a manner is pointless, as someone who accepts the existence of "God" defined in this manner is not even a theist, only a deist. You have yet to demonstrate that "God" is worthy of worship, is accurately described by the Bible, etc. You cannot call it "God" until you demonstrate such things, lest you admit you are intellectually dishonest.
this is like asking "why call the molecule with 2 hydrogen and oxygen atoms water?"
No, it is not like that at all, because "water" is what we call just a particular liquid, though to what extent the name is applicable is nebulous, vague, ambiguous, fuzzy, and ill-defined, since it is just a colloquial categorization based solely on intuition; but it just so happens that this liquid is composed of molecules of 2 hydrogen atoms ionically bonded with 1 oxygen atom, and so by extension, we also call it "water," whenever applicable. This is not at all analogous to taking multiple completely different definitions, and slapping the label "God" onto them without (0) proving any of the definitions is satisfied or even satisfiable, (1) the definitions are equivalent.
Because if they don't, then by definition, they are not one composite whole, and do not form one being.
That is not what the definition of composite being is.
Analogy: if each mechanism in a car does not interact with the other, then is this really a car?
This is not a valid analogy. Built into the definition of "car" specifically is the fact that certain parts interact in a specific way, but there is no reason to suggest this ought to be true of all composite things.
Language is a human construct.
No. Language is a construct of a social-emotional species. Language exists in other animal species, and it even exists in plants, strangely enough. Anyway, this is just a minor nitpick on my part. But what is actually important is that you are failing to undertand how this social-emotional construct actually works. Words are signifiers, but signifiers serve no purpose without making reference to a signified thing. A correct use of language only declares a same usage of meaning for a signifier when the signified is the same in the different usages. If I take a word two refer to two different things, while pretending that it actually only refers to one thing, then I am using language incorrectly, and it demonstrates I am ignorant or dishonest.
but the actual cause of lightning is not identical to what Greek mythology calls Zeus.
You are so close to understanding the point that Kanna-chan is making.
however, the fundamental origin of reality is exactly th God described by classical theism.
The problem is that this is just not true, whatever you think classical theism is. Also, it is nonsensical to talk about the fundamental origin of reality, since whatever that origin is must itself be a part of reality. That is, unless you think the origin is fictional.
Beyond this, there are multiple other problems with your argument.
0. You have yet to demonstrate that "atemporal" is a coherent property.
1. That "causation" is not inherently temporal.
2. That causal finitism is true.
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@Thefamilychannel723 The question you ask does not make sense, if you analyze it carefully. You see, in physics, we analyze worldlines. A worldline is just some path in spacetime, and the laws of physics just tell us what the restrictions are for these paths. These paths are meant to describe physical systems, and we can interpret the endpoints of the path as the "beginning" and "end" of the systems' lifetime. At each point (t, x, y, z) in the path, you can ask question about the state of the system at that point. If you have two systems, you can compare their worldlines, and you can compare their beginning points. This means you can compare the time coordinates of their beginning points. So, it makes sense to ask "which came first?," in the sense that you can ask "if t0 is the beginning time of system A, and t1 is the beginning time of system B, then, is t0 less than t1, are they equal, or is t0 greater than t1?" This question is perfectly coherent.
So, why is your question not coherent? Is it not analogous to the scenario I just presented? No, it is not analogous. The problem is, spacetime, as a physical system, cannot be represented by a worldline... because it is the collection of all possible worldlines to begin with! As such, it really makes no sense to ask about the "beginning" or "end" of spacetime as a system. Your question is analogous to taking the set of real numbers, treating it like a number in itself, and then asking "Does the set of real numbers come before 0, after 0, or is equal to 0?" That question does not make any sense. You can ask if a real number comes before another real number, but you cannot ask if the set of real numbers itself comes before or after a particular real number included in the set. Your question is completely analogous to this: the example I presented is the 1-dimensional analogue of your question, since spacetime is basically just 4 copies of the set of real numbers multiplied together.
The lesson here is this: you can meaningfully ask about spatiotemporal properties of physical systems embedded within spacetime, but those questions stop making any sense when you ask them about spacetime itself. Spacetime is fundamentally different from all other physical systems which exist, so you need to think about it separately. By the way, I do not know if you are religious or not, but I will just say this: Christian apologists consistently fail to understand this fundamental distinction between spacetime, and other systems embedded in spacetime. This is why the Kalam cosmological argument fails miserably: the argument insists that the universe (and therefore, spacetime) had a beginning point. But if you study the mathematics and physics of spacetime, then one can see that this is simply not true.
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@Jeremy-wp4yh As expected, the comments are filled with people quoting scripture out of context or not understanding what they've read.
I seriously doubt you have the high literacy skills necessary for your opinion to hold any weight in that subject-matter. Besides, the criticism is completely worthless, as it fails to point out examples, and as it fails to actually provide corrections anyone could learn from. You are exhibiting the behavioral traits of an Internet troll, and not the traits of an intellectually honest individual who is willing to have a discussion in which you and other people help each other learn and improve yourselves. Why should anyone even take you seriously, when you are only here to antagonize, and not to be civil? Do you seriously believe anyone is going to convert to Christianity, when the only thing you are doing is be a bit of an annoying pest?
But nevertheless, why are atheists always debating Christians.
I know this sentence is meant to be a question, but you clearly forgot to replace the period with a question mark. When you make mistakes like this, do you expect me to believe that you have the sufficient literacy skills to actually be a reliable judge of other people's comprehension of the text that they are reading? Because if that is your expectation, then my advice to you is: stop it.
Anyway, to actually answer your question: we are not always debating Christians. Most of the time, we are just living our lives, and not debating anyone at all. The problem is, people like you always show up, and start cooking up some trouble. People like you are always trying to overthrow democracy by imposing religious laws onto the country, and are always promoting that we indoctrinate our children and brainwash them with mythology. You expect us to sit back and allow that? Of course not. People like the Jehovah's Witnesses are always knocking on people's doors and trying to annoy us with beliefs they are incapable of supporting with evidence, all while promoting anti-scientific drivel. Are Muslims doing that? At least in the West, no, they are not. Are Jewish people doing that? Again, at least in the West, no. Are Buddhists doing that? No. Are Satanists doing that? No.
Why not other religion?
Again with the linguistic mistakes. You are really not inspiring confidence, as far as literacy goes.
Anyway, we DO debate people from other religions. We even debate fellow atheists. We do not debate people from other religions as commonly as Christians, because they do not bother us anywhere nearly as much Christians with their nonsense, but we still do debate them whenever they try.
Why not Satanism?
Satanism is a lot like Daoism, in that while it can technically be argued to be a religion, many of the adherents are essentially irreligious, and only hold Satanism philosophically, and not ritually. Satanism and Daoism are also like Buddhism in that these religions are functionally atheistic. Sure, you can be a Buddhist and believe in gods, but this is not actually a requirement of Buddhism. The Great Dao in Daoism is essentially a metaphor for the divine, incomprehensible aspects for the universe, and so, Daoism is basically a form of pantheism, but at the end of the day, pantheism is essentially a form of superstitious or panpsychic atheism that reinterprets religious language and tries to make that language work within the confines of atheistic worldviews. Basically, pantheism and atheism are identical in what they assert, they only differ in the details of the semantics they use when making their assertions. Satanism is like Daoism in this regard. Satanists, generally speaking, treat Satan more like an abstract symbol than like an actually existing, concrete entity. It is basically a modernity-resurrected form of ancient "pagan" pantheism. So, when it comes down to it, people who self-identify as atheists do not have all that much to disagree with when it comes to Satanism.
Besides, every Satanist I have met has been far friendlier and far more ethical than almost all Christians I know. Also, these people hold no political power at all, given how much of a minority they are. They are not even trying to legislate our lives with religious laws infringing upon human rights, so there is not much of a point to debating them.
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@MZONE991 I did not make up classical theism nor did I come up with the name. Further proof you are ignorant of it
Oh, c'mon. I was being fascetious. Of course I know you did not make-up classical theism. Poe's Law, I guess. My point is, though, that proclaiming to adhere to classical theism, as opposed to any other form of theism, adds absolutely nothing to the conversation. It does not make any claims or premises you present any more true or any better substantiated.
When I say "we define God this way" I am reffering to us classical theists, not people like WLC or most popular apologists.
I know that. But God is not well-defined in classical theism, any more than in other form of theism. This is what I was getting at. Immanence and transcendence are not well-formed properties, at least not in the presentation that most philosophers who adhere to classical theism present; let alone simplicity and timelessness.
But anyway, in contignent entities, it is always the case that they are a composition of essence and existence.
On basis of what? There is no universal agreement among philosophers that this view is true. Between essentialists and existentialists, there is a disagreement as to what roles essence and existence play, and how they are related. In Quinean ontology, though, existence is not even a property. Hence, it is incoherent to speak of essence and existence on the same grounds. Here, I can agree that for any given thing, (0) there is a set of properties, encoded in well-formed formulae in higher-order logic, that uniquely defines a thing, or classification of things, and (1) there is an existence clause that speaks of said set of properties being satisfied (instantiated) or not being satisfies, and this corresponds to the existence or non-existence of a thing in question. This much I can agree to.
Suppose we call the parts A, B and C. If A, B, and C don't interact with each other at all then it cannot be said that A and B and C compose one entity.
Says who? This is completely arbitrary, ontologically speaking. What if I consider every mereological sum of entities to be itself an entity? There is nothing incoherent about this. It may not be practical, but there is nothing fundamentally problematic with such an ontology.
If such parts interact from past eternity then this is literally a causal Loop, A interacts with B, B interacts with C, C with A and so on....
That is not what a causal loop is, though. This very obviously ignores the possibility of relative simultaneity of the parts interacting, in which case, there is no loop.
A causal loop is an infinite regress And since it has been shown to be impossible then the ground of all reality is an entity whose essence is identical to existence.
Okay, there are two issues here.
0. An infinite regress has not been shown to be impossible. To the contrary, I consider infinite regress to be the most plausible description of reality, mathematically and physically.
1. The fact that it is without parts does not imply that it is an entity whose essence is identical to existence. I know classical theism subscribes to the doctrine of divine simplicity, but that doctrine is precisely what we are scrutinizing here. It is precisely what you are being asked to demonstrate. Simply making the assertion will get us nowhere.
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@MZONE991 There are schools within classical theism, but we all agree that God is divinely simple.
Good job missing the point. The agreement is irrelevant. The notion of divine simplicity is ill-defined. This would not change if every single human on the planet Earth accepted it as infallible doctrine.
Every entity that exists contingently has a certain essence.
Yes, but this is because every entity, contingent or not, has a certain essence. By definition, for something to be an entity, it must have an essence that defines it, and the existence of that essence must be satisfied.
Nothing can exist without an essence, thus we have a composition of essence and existence,...
No. That is not how composition works. Composition is a function of tuples of essences, not of essences and non-essences. Existence is not an essence, because existence is itself part of the description that qualifies what an essence is. So it is incoherent to talk about an entity being composed "of existence" and something else. No, the being merely either exists or does not exist, and the Boolean description of existence here is not a defining component of the being itself.
...and this is a composition because it is possible for that entity to not have existed in some possible world.
That is a baseless assertion. Leaving aside the fact that you are completely wrong as to how composition works, there is also the issue that there is no well-defined ontological characterization of what comprises a possible world.
Causal loops don't need to be time dependent,...
Yes, they do, by definition.
...even if the causation is timeless, this is still a causal loop.
No, it is not. Causation is temporal, by definition. Whatever it is you are describing, it is not a causal phenomenon. You are equivocating terminology here.
And Alexander Pruss has shown in his work that they are impossible using many arguments and paradoxes.
No. Alexander Pruss has claimed to prove their impossibility, but I am confident in saying he is mistaken. His argumens are not sound.
So a car that exists is a composition of its essence and existence.
No. There is no distinction between a car that exists, and a car that does not, because existence is not part of a car's identity/definition. A distinction between any two entities can only exist in essence, because the essence is literally what makes the entity in question. To put it more plainly: an entity is its essence. To say that an entity exists makes a difference in the ontological description of the world, but not of the entity.
Following the causal finitism principle, the first cause of everything has to be simple.
You are begging the question. The causal finitism principle is the very thing we are challenging and asking you to prove.
God is something that we can never fully understand.
This is a self-contradicting claim. In order to be able to claim this with sufficient justification, you would have to have sufficient knowledge about God, since this is not a claim that can be derived from first principles.
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@yoichiswiftshot902 Fundamentally, people choose everything,...
Not according to the Bibles. According to the Bibles, Elohim, or alternatively, YHWH, is sovereign over all the world. Nothing happens unless YHWH permits it to happen. "When a prophet is deceived, I have deceived that prophet," says the beginning of Ezekiel 14:9.
...even in the Bible, Adam ignored God.
Adam did not choose to ignore Elohim. Elohim created Adam to be prone to deception. Adam being deceived was an inevitable consequence of Elohim's choices. Adam did not even have knowledge of "good and evil," so Adam had no awareness that he was doing such a thing as "ignoring" someone.
Do you not murder because your parents told you?
No. I do not murder, because, as I am not a psychopath, I do not enjoy murder. I would hate to do such a thing, and I find such a thing to be deeply unloving.
Were you born with perfect knowledge of good and evil?
No. Neither was Adam.
Do you not choose what you want?
We have the illusion of choice, but the scientific evidence does not support the conclusion that we have freedom of choice.
If you did it, then you chose it,...
This assumes we have freedom of choice, which I have already dismissed as a baseless assertion.
...there's rewards and social pressure for every action you take,...
No, not necessarily. The only actions that are rewarded are those that satisfy two conditions: (a) someone is willing to provide the reward, (b) that same someone is aware that the action has taken place, and knows how to find the person who committed it.
If God tells you to love your neighbor as you love yourself, it's like a parent teaching their children how to see the world.
No, it is not. YHWH has never told me anything. Delusional people insist that YHWH has said something, all without being able to prove it. Also, my parents are flawed people. My parents could be trying to teach me incorrect things - as many parents in the real world actually do. Therefore, accepting their teachings is not necessarily ethical. In fact, many of the things I learned from my parents were false. On the other hand, you are not willing to accept that anything YHWH says could be false, and you also have no way of proving that YHWH has ever said anything.
We can let the void of meaningless atheism guide us to nothing, since meaning is a made up social construct for human survival,...
No. "Meaning" is a concept we apply to words. We say that a word has meaning if there is a definition for the word that is known by someone.
...or we can let a God guide us into goodness, compassion, charity and all these other values that are getting hallowed from society, thanks to your secular worldview being so prominent.
0. No "god" is guiding you to do anything. Even if you have been brainwashed to delude yourself into thinking that someone else is responsible for your intuitions about what is ethical, you are still ultimately relying on those socio-biological intuitions, regardless of whatever fictional name you are choosing to attribute to those intuitions.
1. Compassion and charity are not being hallowed from society. To the contrary: compassion and charity are at an all-time high.
If your idea is so great, why are the results so bad?
The results are not even slightly "bad." You are thoroughly misinformed.
Suicide, divorce, mental health, baby killing, isolation, has all gotten worse in modern times.
No, it has not. This is factually incorrect, and you have no sources to support your claim.
Church means community,...
You can be without religion, not believe in the existence of mythological beings, and still belong to a community.
...it's not good for people to be alone and not apart of something,...
That is not for you to decide. Some people prefer being alone. Some people need to be alone.
If atheism has anything to say about it, then it's just for random chemicals to shoot in our brain for survival sake, and that's depressing just to hear.
0. "Atheism" has nothing to say about it, because "atheism" is not a worldview. "Atheism" is merely the stance of not being convinced that a mythological being exists in the actual world.
1. Chemicals in the brain are not random. I suggest you take an introductory course to chemistry. Maybe I can buy you a textbook. Chemistry is deterministic, just as all physical processes are.
2. There is nothing "depressing" about hearing that the entirety of our bodies can be accurately described as a physical system. In fact, most people who have this understanding are mentally healthy.
The smartest people ever were agnostic or religious, along with the greatest people.
This is false. Some of the "smartest" or "greatest" people in history (whatever this means) were indeed religious, but many were deists, and some were atheists. Also, the "worst" people in history were religious.
Now we have transgenderism becoming prevalent,...
No, transgender people always existed, and they probably comprised the same proportion of people they do today. Their existence not being recorded in writing as commonly is not indicative of them not having existed. The fact that society has evolved towards becoming more accepting of people's gender identity is one thing, but this has no bearing on how prevalent transgender people have been historically.
...we're so stupid without god...
There is no evidence to support this assertion. The evidence indicates that there is a strong positive correlation between irreligiousity, and higher education. This does not demonstrate a causal link, but it does categorically disprove your assertion. Your assertion is false.
...we somehow argue there's more than men and women by saying it's a social construct.
No, more like, we argue that there is no such a thing as "men" or "women." Biologically speaking, people have different sexual characteristics, but these characteristics are impossible to identify for a layperson beyond, superficially, their genitalia, and for 99% of the people that you will ever meet, you will never know what their genitalia is, or accurately be able to guess what it is, anyway. Moreover, as your biological characteristics are literally irrelevant outside of the bed, and irrelevant to anyone besides your mating partner and the medics responsible for your healthcare, they have absolutely no bearing on how you should be named, how should you speak, what jobs you should have, what sports you should be allowed to participate in, what people you should be allowed to participate with, how you should dress, what social traits people should expect you to exhibit, or how you should be treated by others in general. As such, "masculinity" and "femininity" are entirely fictitious concepts, examples of a societal delusion. They are the remnants from a time when people lacked an understanding of human biology, and incorrectly believed that people with some sexual characteristics were literally a different biological species from people with certain other sexual characteristics, and were thus classified as "not human," and were thus treated like property. They are essentially mythological, archaic constructs, no different than the belief in YHWH or Zeus.
Every single word is a social construct.
Every word is a social construct, but the concepts being represented or named by those words are not necessarily social constructs. For example, the existence of electrons is not a social construct. Their existence is demonstrable, independent of the delusions that society holds to. Gender cannot be demonstrated to exist in such a manner. Gender is nothing more than what society has deluded itself into thinking it is.
Atheism only accomplished making everyone feel no accountability, because everything means nothing, and now we're getting dumber for it.
0. "Atheism" has accomplished no such thing, because "atheism" is not a worldview.
1. I can assure you that there are no atheists or irreligious people who assert that "everything means nothing." The sentence "everything means nothing" is not even a coherent utterance.
2. There is no evidence that we are getting "dumber," this is a completely baseless assertion.
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@DoofusChungus ...if God wanted to create a universe that works, it would be in a way that makes sense in this universe.
This statement is hardly coherent. If God wants to create a universe, then They are free to create it however They want to, since they are omnipotent. On top of that, even if the type of life God wants to create is physically incompatible with the just created universe, God can still choose to create that life in that universe, and have it be self-sustained within that universe. Again, God can do this, since They are omnipotent, which means that They are not limited by physical restrictions. Bold of you to assume that physical restrictions could ever put a hamper on God's all-creative powers. Also, if a particular universe created is physically incompatible with a type of life being created, then why are these two incompatible? Is God not the one choosing to make them physically incompatible?
If God created the universe with certain logic and physics purposefully, why would he choose to go back on it?
This is a strawman. No one in this thread (or anywhere) has suggested that God should go back on Their creation and start all over. The argument being presented is simply that, in the presence of an omnipotent creator, there cannot exist such a thing as fine-tuning. You see, by definition, fine-tuning a phenomenon to an external parameter refers to calibrating the parameters of the phenomenon to be compatible with the external parameter. This act of calibration for compatibility insinuates that there are restrictions that need ti be accounted for to make a given phenomenon-external paramater combination possible. However, God is omnipotent. Therefore, no such restrictions exist. Therefore, there is calibration that is possible, by definition, since no restrictions exist in the combinations existed. Therefore, there is no fine-tuning. If classical theism is true, then it is, by definition, impossible for fine-tuning to exist when it comes to creation. Since fine-tuning does not exist, it quite literally cannot serve as evidence for the existence of God.
For me to be typing this comment on this phone, trillions upon trillions of coincidences had to happen for trillions upon trillions of other coincidences to happen,...
Coincidences? According to who? Because, I know you do not believe these are coincidences, you believe these are consequences of God's creative will. And I also know that I, like most non-theists, do not believe these are coincidences either. I cannot speak for the other non-theists in the thread, but I can speak for myself, so I will just clarify this right now: I am a physicalist. As a physicalist, I do not believe there exists such a thing as a "coincidence," because the word "coincidences" implies that events in the universe occur randomly. They do not occur randomly, though. As far as all evidence available points to, the universe is deterministic, which means that every physical interaction that happens happens with a probability of 1. Well, that is an oversimplification, though. I am not a classical determinist, because as a physicalist, I account for the existence of quantum phenomena. As such, I instead hold that quantum determinism holds. Even then, the conclusion is essentially the same: in the sense that you apparently meant it, I do not believe there exists such a thing as a "coincidence." So, again, I ask you: trillions of coincidences had to happen, according to who?
Once is an accident, twice is a coincidence, three times is a pattern.
Yes. And?
I believe the point of that was to show that, despite all of the coincidences that needed to happen for any of us to to be here, we are still here.
Well, no. There were no coincidences that happened. Every event that happened along the way can be entirely explained via the scientific method.
By some miracle our parents, out of billions of people in the world somehow happened to be in the right place at the right time.
There is absolutely nothing miraculous about it. Do you not know how many sexual couples exist on planet Earth? There are literally billions of them. Also, the right place at the right time? Hm... I was born in a colony, into poverty, into a land with high crime rates, with several chronic health issues, to a dysfunctional family, and raised in an unsanitary environment. Sorry, but that is definitely not "the right place, at the right time."
Not to mention, for each generation, the correct sperm [cell] had to make it.
There is no "correct" sperm cell. The probability that in any given generation, some sperm cell was going to fertilize an ovum, would have been extremely high, and you would have been whatever that sperm cell was, because it necessarily would have been impossible for you to not be, since clearly, you were born.
It would be "finely tuned" so that everything that has happened or existed would happen or exist.
No, it would not be finely-tuned. God is omnipotent. You believe this, right? If God is omnipotent, then the exact sequence of events that led to our existence would have been possible in all universes, because God could have simply chosen to trigger the sequence of events at will, without having to worry about whether it is physically impossible or not: They transcend physical constraints. Am I wrong in claiming that you believe God is omnipotent? Am I wrong in claiming that you believe God transcends physical constraints?
Who knows if God has to abide by the laws of this universe or not? That part of the question really does not matter.
Who knows? Does this mean you do not believe God is omnipotent, or am I misunderstanding the question? As to whether it matters or not: it absolutely does matter. If God is omnipotent, then They are not constrained by the physical incompatibility between a given universe, and the life They create in it. As such, it is genuinely impossible for any God-created universe to be uninhabitable, since God can always create life in such a universe.
The real question is, why wouldn't he?
Why would They?
If he created the universe a certain way, with the whole of the future already planned out, then what would be the point of changing anything?
Once again, no one is arguing that God should change anything. We are discussing the impossibility of fine-tuning in the presence of an omnipotent creator. We are not discussing the problem of evil, nor making any judgments on whether God should have created the universe the way creationists claim They did or not.
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@x-popone6817 Whatever begins to exist has a cause.
This is completely meaningless unless you define what you mean by "begin to exist", and what you mean by "cause". That being said, by most definitions of the word "beginning", this premise is at least debatable.
The universe began to exist.
By most definitions of the word "beginning", this premise is completely unsubstantiated. It is an assumption, not a fact.
Therefore, the universe has a cause.
Yes, this does follow from the premises, but the premises are questionable, and even if I grant the premises too, this only establishes that the universe had a cause. The argument fails to establish the nature of the cause.
there are implications of what this cause is and what properties it has
No, there are not. Any claims concerning the properties of such a cause are necessarily speculative and unprovable.
It does get you to a mind, as I already explained.
No, it does not, and you have not explained anything. All you have done is claim that it does, and followed it up with "please, trust me", which is not an explanation.
The Big Bang was the beginning.
No, it was not, and I would know this, since I am a physicist, as I already said in a previous comment.
Even if it wasn't necessarily and it was just a singularity,...
Here you go, using the word "singularity" without having any idea of what it means. No, it could not have been a singularity, because singularities are not physical objects that exist, singularities are mathematical artifacts. You can literally find this in the Wikipedia article on singularity.
...you would still face the problem of how an impersonal force like that can expand at a point and not have the effect permanently.
Effect permantly? You are just linking nonsense together. As for expanding from a point, there is no evidence that the universe's expansion began from a single point.
The universe can't be because then we would be eternal.
No, that is a non sequitur. Our eternality does not follow from the universe's eternality. The age of the objects contained in the universe is not beared upon by the age of the universe. The universe is 13.8Ε9 years old, but that does not mean we humans are that old. The universe has average temperature 2.3 K, but that does not mean we have said temperature. A property that is had by the universe as a whole does not need to be had by its constituent parts.
Its finite.
There is actually no conclusive evidence demonstrating that the universe is finite in volume.
The universe is expanding, if you reverse that, you get a beginning.
No, you do not. If you reverse the expansion of the universe, you get to an immeasurably hot and dense state of the universe, such that any further contraction is not coherent with current physical theory, and this state of the universe is known to occur at the end of the Planck epoch.
If there is a mind with free will, he can create the universe, no problem.
No, not necessarily. If we have free will, that does not mean we can create a universe.
if the cause of the universe was impersonal, that can't happen since there's no person, no free will.
This is just an speculation, not a fact. You have not proven that this is true, you have merely assumed it is true, and then you expect us to agree. Non-intelligent processes can cause things. Meteorites cause craters. Stars cause hypernovas. Stars are not intelligent beings, and neither are meteors. Besides, you are begging the question. You are trying to prove the universe has a cause, but in order to do so, you are assuming that the universe had to be created, which is more specific than just being caused. "Caused" and "created" mean different things. If something was created, then it was caused, but being caused does not imply it was created. You do not get to just smuggle non-synonyms into your argument.
The effect should've been clearly eternal as well,...
No. Causes need not transfer their properties to their effects. This is just another assumption. Actually, not only is this not substantiated, but it is demonstrably false. Humans can cause objects to exist that are not themselves sentient. There. Cause-to-effect transfer of properties has been falsified.
How am I dishonest?
You make false claims, knowing that they are false, and you proclaim yourself to be more knowledgeable on topics of science despite not being a scientist. You also refuse to define your terms rigorously, but insist in still presenting an argument. These are all defining characteristics of dishonesty.
Atheists ALWAYS claim us Christians or theists are dishonest.
No, not always, but very often, yes. Is this surprising to you? It should not be. We make this claim so often because it tends to be true far more often than not.
Atheism is not some ultimate standard where everyone that disagrees is dishonest.
You are right, and not every theist is dishonest. Some theists are merely ignorant. You, in particular, just so happen to be both.
I wouldn't be surprised if you think almost all YouTube apologists are dishonest.
They ARE dishonest. Apologetics actively requires that scientific data and mathematical concepts be misrepresented to prove a point.
This is not to mention the philosophical grounds for the finitude of the past.
All the philosophical arguments for the finitude of the past are flawed. In fact, professional philosophers generally do not take them seriously. Only theologians and apologists specifically do.
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@user-fb2jb3gz1d I like the constant digs at my character...
I take digs at you, because you have been acting in a way that is very intellectually dishonest this entire time. You seem to not have any care for details or for anything that you are not willing to accept as true, so you barely even listen to what people tell you. Not unlike someone else from earlier in this thread.
What I'm saying is, that to prove their experimental verified predictions are correct, they have to compare that to the real thing. And the really thing happened a long time ago. Thus, no one can truly verify if their experimental verified predictions are correct.
No, comparing it to "the real thing" is not at all necessary to verify the data. This is a classical misconception about how the scientific method works. Besides, you ignored the part where I mentioned that the conditions have been reproduced in particle accelerators. See? This is why I take digs at you: because whenever I say something inconvenient for you, you simply ignore it. I am not even sure why I am even bothering to talk to you at this point.
Who is to say that tomorrow, they will not discover something that puts the 370,000 number further or closer away?
The experiments have been conducted so many times that, by now, the probability that an experiment could find completely different data is close to 0. And, even if a new study did find such data, this would not actually accomplish much of anything. I mean, in that case, the most likely scenario is that were was an error in the methdology. You seem to be under the impression that if a single study finds data contradicting all previous studies, that this automatically proves all the previous studies wrong. That is not how it works.
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@nics4967 I accept that there is evidence that is interpreted by some to mean as you say. The problem is, did they interpret it properly?
If you are going to initiate this discussion by already dismissing their findings on the basis that you disagree with the interpretation, without having even looked at the evidence, then I have no reason to engage on the topic seriously. See, this is exactly the thing I was warning you about in my previous comment.
It may show levels of devoutness, not lack of doctrine.
How are you making this assessment when I have not even cited my sources yet? This is the lack of intellectual honesty I was talking about earlier. You are not actually interested in engaging with the evidence. You have an apologetics script prepared beforehand, ready to pull out some bullet point in response to anything anyone says, rather than engaging with integrity and a sound epistemology.
Biden goes to Mass. If he didn't, does that show there is not an expectation to go on Sunday.
Why are you comparing 1 human being to an entire civilization of thousands of human beings? Biden is only one person out of 300 million people in the United States of America. What Biden does or does not do has no relevance, as far as archaeology is concerned, when describing the practices of modern Usayite civilization as a whole.
Your argument is pretty obviously fallacious, but this is the issue: you do seem to not really care about it being fallacious. You seem to have put no effort into it at all. This sounds like something you regurgitated, something you pulled out of a script. Again, I have not even cited my sources, and you are already trying to debunk them. There is saying that goes "Don't judge a book by its cover." Dude, you have not even looked at the cover of the book at all, and you are already judging it!
What seems needed is evidence of doctrinal development that can not be explained by laxity.
This is an entirely baseless assertion.
Some experts think there is evidence in biology for I.D.
No. There is one "expert" in the world who alleges that I.D. is true, but he has never presented a single piece of evidence to support his claim, he has not conducted a single experiment testing his hypothesis. This is completely different from the situation in archaeology I am referencing here.
I'm interested.
Your comments demonstrate otherwise. Are you lying, or are you just extremely lacking in self-awareness?
You dismissed the evidence without even waiting for me to cite my sources. No who is genuinely interested would do such a thing.
Why can't I start with such when there isn't anyway to know if the person is interested in honest dialogue?
I do not understand what this particular sentence is saying, but I suspect that you are criticizing me for taking the approach I took for initiating the conversation. I could be wrong, because your sentence lacks coherence. If I am right, though, then let me say this: if you want other people to be serious with you, then you need to demonstrate that you are serious with them. You did not do this. I had to warn you, because I needed to avoid miscommunication, and make sure you understand that I will not waste my time. You had the opportunity of making good use of the warning and replying to me with intellectual honesty. Dismissing the evidence prior to looking at it, obviously, does not satisfy the criterion of intellectual honesty. Why are you complaining in spite of this? I have no idea.
I would hold on philosophy on theology, I am morally obligated, to be honest.
...or so you say, but you have not demonstrated any honesty whatsoever in this conversation. Are religious people unaware of what intellectual honesty actually looks like? Because you continue acting as if you really believe you are honest, but your comments demonstrate such a seamless intellectual dishonesty, I find it impossible to believe you.
I will stand by what I said earlier. Whether you truly are sincere or not, your standards for what count as "honesty" are so clearly different from what reasonable individuals hold, there is no point in me trying to have this discussion with you.
I wish you a good life.
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Why would I need to rephrase a definition? Do you not understand the definition? If you do not understand the definition, then you are not qualified to be having this conversation with anyone at all. If you do understand the definition, then there is no need for me to rephrase. If I were your teacher, then I absolutely would rephrase. However, you came into this conversation correcting everyone else, as equals, pretending you already knew enough about the topic to actually present arguments and issue corrections from it.
So, you have two options here: (A) you can continue pretending to understand the topic, and we can have a conversation as equals, but in the process, I will continue exposing your ignorance and your lies until you have walked yourself into a deadly corner, because regardless of how much you are pretending, you are still not knowledgeable enough to present well-substantiated argument. Option (B) is, you can admit that you were pretending to know about the topic when you actually know little to nothing, and stop issuing corrections you are not qualified to make. In that case, we can still have a conversation as equals, and one in which we are both being intellectually honest. In that case, I would gladly rephrase the definition, and then we can openly have a discussion as to how both the Christian narrative and the Greek narrative are examples of mythology.
It is your decision to make, and you are the one at odds here to miss out.
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Wikipedia is not a scholarly source, though. Neither are documentaries. Actually, to be honest, Wikipedia is hundreds of times more reliable than a documentary. Also, it should be mentioned that George Lemaître was explicit in telling everyone, including the Pope, to not misinterpret his theory as being about the book of Genesis at all. He came up with the theory by analyzing Einstein's field equations, and realizing that the equations necessarily predict the expansion of spacetime. Meanwhile, most theologians were against the idea, because they believed a steady-state universe better reflected God's perfections. As for cosmologists, they only accepted the steady-state model, because that was exactly what the evidence suggested, prior to Lemaître's work. But it was not secular cosmologists who opposed the changes. It was people like Fred Hoyle who did.
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Well, you are right, but this problem is fixed as soon as you replace "infinity" with "Aleph(0)", and then there is a legitimate question to pose: if the Earth orbits 30 times as fast as Saturn, and both planets have been orbiting for Aleph(0) years, then they must have both completed Aleph(0) orbits. How can this be possible?
Thankfully, mathematics have an answer to this. The reason this seems like an absurdity is due to a misconception that we have, regarding the way sizes of sets work. Intuitively, we think that if X is a proper subset of Y, then Y must have a larger size than X, because it has every element X has, and then some other elements, so intuitively, the number must be larger. However, if there happens to be a bijection from X to Y, then X and Y are the same size, because they have the same cardinality, and every element can be matched correspondingly, even if X is a proper subset of Y. This is counterintuitive. This phenomenon is called Cantor's property, and it is a property that only sets that are infinite satisfy: they can be the same size as proper subsets of themselves. This property is the property, so unintuitive, that mathematicians prior to Cantor simply could not accept, and which is why the idea of infinite objects was not accepted mathematically until Cantor developed his set theory. By rejecting the property, you are required to accept certain implications, and therefore, certain contradictions and absurdities. Rather than doing that, mathematicians dispensed with the idea of infinite sets altogether. Cantor gave them serious treatment, and his discovery is what led to realizing that our intuition was wrong, and that Cantor's property needs to be taken seriously. At the core of this, lies a profound and unexpected revelation: that for infinite sets, there actually do exist two distinct, incompatible notions of size. These are order type and cardinality. As it happens, these two notions are equivalent when dealing with finite sets, but distinct when dealing with infinite sets. This explains why Cantor's property is so counterintuitive to us: order type concerns membership of elements in a set, and it concerns properties of subsets of a set. So proper subset of Y has a different order type than Y does, even though the two sets may have the same cardinality, because there may exist a bijection between the two sets. What this also reveals to us is that addition with infinite quantities works differently than it does with natural numbers. Actually, to be more concrete, there are two different kinds of addition for infinite numbers: one with regards to cardinality, and one with regards to order type, and these are called cardinal addition and ordinal addition. This explains the inherent weirdness behind the concept of "infinity + 1 = infinity": because when considering cardinal addition, ω ++ 1 = ω, but when considering ordinal addition, ω < ω + 1. This is because, introducing one new element to your infinite set does not change its cardinality, but it does change its order type. For natural numbers and finite sets, both notions are indistinguishable: a set A with 8 elements and a set B with 5 elements has a larger cardinality, because there is an injection f : B —> A, but there is no injection g : A —> B. On the other hand, it is also true that 8 comes after 5 in the sense of an order relation: I need to keep counting further to get to 8 than I do to get to 5. So 5 < 8. These notions are equivalent for natural numbers, but not for infinite sets. 5 + 3 = 8, regardless of whether I consider cardinal addition or ordinal addition, but not so for ω + 1.
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@Melesniannon Substituting one linguistic absurdity for another absurdity still affects nothing in reality.
Nothing that I have said here is a matter of linguistics. It is a matter of mathematics. None of the things I have mentioned here are absurdities, either. Just because a theologian many centuries ago called it an absurdity, due to the counterintuitive nature of the phenomenon. For it to be an absurdity, it has to be a logical contradiction, which it is not, in this case. The claim Aleph(0) = 2·Aleph(0) is not a logical contradiction.
If the cardinality of a set is defined as infinity, and infinity is undefined, then the cardinality is undefined and thus can't be said to equal anything, least of all another undefined infinity.
There are various misconceptions in this argument that need to be addressed.
0. Infinity is not a cardinality, so the cardinality of a set cannot be defined as infinity, this is nonsensical. It is however, sensical to say that a set is infinite and that the set has a given cardinality. They idea to understand here is that two sets can be infinite, but have different cardinalities. As such, different infinite cardinalities exist, and so it is nonsensical to define infinity as being a cardinality itself.
1. Infinity is not undefined. Infinity is a property of sets. It is, however, accurate to say that infinity is not an object, and so you cannot say that "infinity = infinity". However, I at no point have made the claim that "infinity = infinity". My claim is that Aleph(0) = 2·Aleph(0). Yes, Aleph(0) is an infinite cardinality, but it certainly is not the only infinite cardinality, and so it itself is not "infinity", which refers to a property of sets. I know you have said earlier that you are not a mathematician, but my claim that Aleph(0) = 2·Aleph(0) is not particularly technical and can be understood by mathematicians. I do not want to be accused of saying "infinity = infinity", because I have never made such a claim.
It's the turtle and hare "paradox" where the hare can never catch up to the turtle, as long as you regress the time interval infinitely. Yet in reality, that turtle eats the hare's dust.
The issue with these arguments from paradox is that these paradoxes never constitute an actual contradiction, they only always constitute apparent contradictions, originated from a fault in deduction that is not detected by our intuition. This is because our intuitions are not logical in nature. The idea that, as long as you regress the hare's time interval infinitely, the hare can never pass the turtle, is flawed, but the flaw does not lie in the assumption of infinite regress, the flaw lies in the assumption that infinite intervals cannot be traversed.
While you can validly state that infinity = infinity, when two potential infinities are contingent upon the same constant which affects them differently, stating they are identical is nonsense.
I have no idea what you just said here, but I will say that 0. potential infinities are not a thing in mathematics, and so, not a thing in reality, they are just an outdated concept invented by ancient philosophers from a time before we understood how infinity works, 1. I never claimed infinity = infinity.
You yourself pointed this out when talking about order addition, which is fundamentally the same as what I do: thinking about infinity in multiple dimensions,...
No, ordinal addition is not fundamentally what you are talking about, and it also has nothing to do with thinking about infinity "in different dimensions", whatever that means.
...which in my simple example I was referring to a WIDTH and not a LENGTH.
Oh, for fuck's sake, seriously? Width and length are literally the same thing, mathemagically. In the English language, we use different words for them to account for the direction of the line segment we are interested in, but as far as measurement and size goes, they are literally identical concepts: the distance from an end A of an object to the other end B of the object in a certain direction.
At any point on its length, the surface area of the 2 cm wide line is twice that of the 1 cm wide line. It doesn't matter that both are potentially infinite in length, this will be always true.
Again, potential infinity is a meaningless concept. As for your actual claim, yes, it is true, only if the point at its length being considered is finite.
However, if you do that the Kalam cosmological argument breaks instantly, because you no longer have causality,...
Dude, I never even said the Kalam cosmological argument works. I am an atheist. I thought this was very clear from my very first reply. sigh Well, I suppose trying to have a conversation with you was a waste of my time. I have no idea why I ever hoped to be understood by you. Good bye.
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@charlesmadison1384 From Wikipedia, "...the theory describes an increasingly concentrated cosmos preceded by a singularity in which space and time lose meaning (typically named "the Big Bang singularity")."
I suggest that, next time you try to quote an article, you actually bother to provide the quote in-context, rather than taking it out of context and giving it your own unwarranted spin. The article on the Big Bang starts with "The Big Bang theory is the prevailing cosmological model explaining the existence of the observable universe from the earliest known periods through its subsequent large-scale evolution.[1][2][3] The model describes how the universe expanded from an initial state of high density and temperature,[4] and offers a comprehensive explanation for a broad range of observed phenomena, including the abundance of light elements, the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, and large-scale structure." This is how the Big Bang theory, at its most basic level, is defined by the scientific community. What follows afterward is not a definition, but merely a pointing of relevant facts: for example, "Crucially, the theory is compatible with Hubble–Lemaître law—the observation that the farther away a galaxy is, the faster it is moving away from Earth. Extrapolating this cosmic expansion backwards in time using the known laws of physics, the theory describes an increasingly concentrated cosmos preceded by a singularity in which space and time lose meaning (typically named "the Big Bang singularity").[5] Detailed measurements of the expansion rate of the universe place the Big Bang singularity at around 13.8 billion years ago, which is thus considered the age of the universe.[6]" This is why context is important. Your out-of-context quote paints this non-scientific source as presenting said quote as the defining feature of the Big Bang. An in-context analysis reveals instead that this idea of the singularity is merely one model of the theory historically arrived at by a rather simple extrapolation, which is compatible with other well-evidenced phenomena.
In the "Features of the Model" section of the article, there is more detail as to why your initial comment on the Big Bang theory is inaccurate. Specifically, in the "Expansion of Space" subsection, we have, "The expansion of the Universe was inferred from early twentieth century astronomical observations and is an essential ingredient of the Big Bang theory. Mathematically, general relativity describes spacetime by a metric, which determines the distances that separate nearby points. The points, which can be galaxies, stars, or other objects, are specified using a coordinate chart or "grid" that is laid down over all spacetime. The cosmological principle implies that the metric should be homogeneous and isotropic on large scales, which uniquely singles out the Friedmann–Lemaître–Robertson–Walker (FLRW) metric. This metric contains a scale factor, which describes how the size of the universe changes with time. This enables a convenient choice of a coordinate system to be made, called comoving coordinates. In this coordinate system, the grid expands along with the universe, and objects that are moving only because of the expansion of the universe, remain at fixed points on the grid. While their coordinate distance (comoving distance) remains constant, the physical distance between two such co-moving points expands proportionally with the scale factor of the universe.[16]". So in summary, part of what the Big Bang Theory comprises is the fact that the spacetime universe we are familiar with has the FLWR metric, which results in a homogeneous, isotropic expansion of spacetime. This explains the precise mechanism by which the universe went from its earliest states to the current state. Nowhere in this expansion is there any causation to account for. Furthermore, "The Big Bang is not an explosion of matter moving outward to fill an empty universe. Instead, space itself expands with time everywhere and increases the physical distances between comoving points. In other words, the Big Bang is not an explosion in space, but rather an expansion of space.[4] Because the FLRW metric assumes a uniform distribution of mass and energy, it applies to our universe only on large scales—local concentrations of matter such as our galaxy do not necessarily expand with the same speed as the whole Universe.[17]". In other words, there was not something that went "bang", because there was no "bang" to begin with, despite the misleading name of the theory, which is actually the result of Fred Hoyle mocking the theory and misunderstanding it.
Do you take note of the keyword "precede"?
"Precede" is not a keyword here, and there is nothing here to take note of, as you are misunderstanding what the out-of-context quote is saying in-context. As I said, there was no object that went "bang". The so-called singularity refers to the fact that for time 0 of the stages of the universe, the mathematics of general relativity result in nonsensical results. As Wikipedia itself put it in the first paragraph of the subsection "Singularity" in the "Timeline" section, "Extrapolation of the expansion of the universe backwards in time using general relativity yields an infinite density and temperature at a finite time in the past.[20] This irregular behavior, known as the gravitational singularity, indicates that general relativity is not an adequate description of the laws of physics in this regime. Models based on general relativity alone can not extrapolate toward the singularity—before the end of the so-called Planck epoch.[5]" In other words, there is no event called "singularity" that "preceded" the Big Bang. The singularity simply refers to a point of spacetime in the universe where the laws of physics are not well-understood and require a new theory to be well-understood. This singularity just so happens to take place during the Planck epoch. Look, the article even expands on this later on, in the "Inflation and Baryogenesis" subsection, saying "The period from 0 to 10−43 seconds into the expansion, the Planck epoch, was a phase in which the four fundamental forces — the electromagnetic force, the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force, and the gravitational force, were unified as one.[25] In this stage, the characteristic scale length of the universe was the Planck length, 1.6×10−35 m, and consequently had a temperature of approximately 1032 degrees Celsius. Even the very concept of a particle breaks down in these conditions. A proper understanding of this period awaits the development of a theory of quantum gravity.[26][27] The Planck epoch was succeeded by the grand unification epoch beginning at 10−43 seconds, where gravitation separated from the other forces as the universe's temperature fell.[25]". So, for all we know, the events of the Planck epoch may not obey the same type of causal relations that events in posterior epochs obey in the first place, and so there may not need to be anything that precedes time 0, or anything, of the sort.
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@JelloBeanzer This is a sin in itself.
No, it is not. Nowhere in the books is it stated to be.
Someone who actually reads their Bible and tries to comprehend it without bias would know that the verses used to support slavery were about the relationship between man and god, not man and man.
No, this is false. The verses very explicitly talk about interhuman interactions, and never mention YHWH as being involved in the interaction.
Not to mention that there's not a single white person in the Bible, making all racial arguments immediately void, because there's no mention of whites being more deserving.
You are ignoring the historical context behind the arguments they presented back then, as well as their actual content. To start with, the ancient Greeks and ancient Romans were very much classified as "white" by the so-called "racial scientists." Since they featured prominently in the Bibles, the statement that there are no "white" peoples in the Bibles are objectionable. As for the historical context, the backdrop for these arguments was an ideology known as Manifest Destiny, a worldview that stated that the Anglo-Saxon race was chosen by God Himself to bring Christianity and the Gospel to all the inferior races of the world, and to destroy the enemies of God, and that the United States of America were going to set the stage for the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. There were entire books and doctrines written on the ideology, this was not some whimsical concept thrown around only to preserve slavery. This concept had already been around for centuries before the Civil War.
In religion, it's the same as studying a scientific study, and oversimplifying the results of it to prove an opinion.
The problem is that religious thinking encourages this. The very spine-and-backbone of religions' existence is this type of rhetorical strategy. Christianity was built almost entirely by cherry-picking concepts from Hellenism, Second Temple Judaism, Zoroastrianism, and the various Roman religions, and syncretizing them together into one belief system, going so far as to distort the meaning of texts in the Tanakh, and re-interpret it in far-fetched ways to claim that Christianity is the correct religion over Judaism. As far as religion is concerned, this is a form of divine revelation, not a form of intellectual dishonesty.
There is no "what if," simply understanding the logic behind anything can be unbiased and objective (to an extent).
The "to an extent" caveat makes the argument self-defeating.
Slavery in the Bible typically in the context of indentured servitude,...
No, it is not. There are plenty of verses about owning people as property for life.
...and not the typical view of slavery.
Biblical slavery is not identical to chattel slavery, and is slightly less brutal, but it definitely is a form of slavery, and not merely indentured servitude.
And racism is not supported in the Bible.
This is just false. The Bible very explicitly condones ethic cleansing (an extreme form of racism), and it also portrays clear prejudice against the Canaanites and against Egyptians, as well as many other ethnic groups.
Again, making the biblical justifications for slavery immediately void in the whole context of the Bible.
If your assertions were true, then maybe, but they are not true. I honestly do question whether you have read any of the Bibles at all.
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@SlimThrull I've looked other places, no one wants to discuss it let alone answer a fairly simple question.
Interesting. Thank you for confirming my hypothesis. So this was the case after all. Also, if you want to insist that the question is simple, despite it obviously not veing so, then you do not deserve to have it answered.
I have no doubt you do question my sincerity, as you think I'm "demanding" an answer.
I have no idea why you think I would expect you to doubt my claim that I think you are insincere. Saying "I have no doubt..." as if that adds anything to the conversation is weird, suspicious, and only reinforces my point about your insincerity, ironically.
No reasonable person could possibly come to that conclusion with what I posted.
You would be right, if your standards for "reasonable" were not so skewed and disingenuous.
There was no demand anywhere. You're assuming things that simply aren't true. Naturally, this leads to bad conclusions on your part.
Right, which is why you were able to refute my claims so easily— oh, wait. You refuted nothing.
Well, anyway, I am not going to entertain having a full blown discussion with you, especially because I know this will just boil down to ad hominems. I merely commented to provide with you constructive criticism regarding your bad attitude. You proved my point, and chose to reject the criticism. This is fine by me, as it is ultimately none of my business. My job is done here. Ciao.
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@caiomateus4194 Philosophy is not at all grounded in common sense. Quite the opposite, really: philosophy is all about going against common sense. Hence you have things such as solipsism and what not. And besides, 2 + 2 = 4 is legitimately false is you are working in a finite field of characeristic 3. Also, I should let you know that most of science defies common sense, and a lot of mathematics as well. For example, in mathematics, we have a theorem that say that there are true statements that cannot be proven to be true. This is completely contrary to common sense, and yet it is a theorem, a fact. The entirety of quantum theory is just so flabberghasting that "defying common sense" is a huge understatement. I say this as someone with a degree in physics who specializes in quantum physics. Common sense is stupidly overrated. Which is all the more reason why the Kalam argument is so stupid. The Kalam argument is not good philosophy. It is just sophistry. No self-respecting philosopher takes the Kalam seriously: only apologists, and philosophers who are specifically dedicated to countering especially bad arguments, take the argument seriously, though the latter take the argument seriously because it needs debunking to a bunch of people.
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3:52 - 3:59 Yes, that is precisely where we should start. I am glad this is the approach Rationality Rules is taking here, because I always find that other channels analyzing the argument fail to explain what exactly is it that is problematic with the premises, and it makes it confusing for both theists and nontheists.
4:04 - 4:30 To elaborate on this, we work with formal theories to discuss existence in any given context. We start with first-order logic, or possibly, second-order logic, and this enables us to use the existential quantifier "There is some" and the universal quantifier "For all." We then find a set of axioms telling us about what we say must or must not exist, along with some proof-theoretic criteria to derive other existence propositions from the axioms. These criteria, ideally, will be based on verificationist epistemology. This also requires having some primitive notions. The most prominent example of such a formal ontology is axiomatic set theory: especifically, Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory, where the primitive notions are sets. The ontology is about which sets exist and which sets do not exist. Something like this is mere abstraction, though, and is not an ontology that has immediate consequences for discussing physics, for example.
4:40 - 4:46 A more careful phrasing of this definition is that "There exists some t such that for all t' > t, X exists at t' AND such that for all t'' < t, X does not exist at t''." This is what I would take as the definition for the notational abbreviation "X begins to exist (at t)." This much precision is needed if one wants to effectively demonstrate the fallacy in the old cosmological Kalam. But I applaud Rationality Rules for getting this right in spirit, because it is important to understand this definition and its implications.
5:35 - 5:50 I hope this video delves deeper into the tensed theory of time and explains why it is unscientific, since this is a key task in debunking the old Kalam, and even the new Kalam.
6:02 - 6:07 Immediately, this is a problematic definition. Christian apologists like to do this thing where they define some undefined terminology in terms of other terminology that is also undefined, and like to pretend that this somehow solves the problem. What does it mean for something to "come into being"? Defining "begins to exist" in terms of "come into being" achieves nothing, since "come into being" itself requires defining.
6:08 - 6:45 The problem with this definition lies, not with the definition itself, but with how WLC interprets it. He claims that this definition merely formalizes the notion of past finitude, but it does not. Because it is not sufficient that the object has past finitude. It is necessary that x exists at t AND there be some t' < t such that x does not exist. This is what his requirement (ii) is in the definition, and translating the definition as formalizing past finitude ignores this requirement altogether. Why? Because it is possible that the length of time interval of existence of x is finite, but that there is no t' < t, where t is x's earliest instance of existence, such that x does not exist. Such a situation would violate criterion (ii) of the definition, yet WLC would still insist x has a beginning.
6:54 - 7:07 I am not convinced this is a coherent definition. What does it mean for x to bring about y? All this does is rename the object "cause" into the action "bring about," but no unique characterization of the action with this name is being given. Thus, it actually defines nothing. And, so far, all it describes is a relationship between x and y, but the parameters of the relationship remain unstated.
7:18 - 7:35 I acknowledge that the controversy is there, and that defining what "causation" is metaphysically is so difficult that there is no consensus. But that is still a problem we cannot just let slide. By going with the "intuitive" understanding, we are walking right down the path WLC wants us to, and that is itself part of the fallacy in WLC's argument: it lies in the fact that his terms for causation are all ill-defined. This is where the appeal to intuition fallacy kicks in. So we really should not just grant him an intuitive understanding, and commit to an actual definition of causation, regardless of how much controversy it may cause. Besides, in my view, I disagree that this should be so controversial at all. I think the only reason behind any essential disagreements on the definition is mere pettiness.
To be continued in the replies...
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This entire video is a non-starter. It grants WLC's claim that the causal principle is confirmed by our experience, but even this is not true. In fact, the causal principle, as stated by WLC, is completely misconceived: it is conceptually mistaken. Why? Because WLC's metaphysics of causation relies on Aristotelian physics, and an Aristotelian understanding of causation, where (0) causes can be discretely categorized into formal cause, final cause, material cause, and efficient cause; (1) objects and phenomena can be discretely categorized into causes and effects. Our modern understanding of physics and the scientific method reveals that Aristotelianism is false, and as such, WLC's principle of causation could not possibly be true. It is not compatible with the scientific understanding of causation that we have today. Causation delineates spatio-temporal relationships between objects and phenomena across spacetime, and so it exists as a spectrum. Therefore, there is no coherent notion of discrete categorization into causes and effects. There is also no coherent notion of causes being discretely categorized into types, as such. Instead, any statement of scientific causation must include a discussion of geodesics and worldlines, and an ontology that accounts for locally Minkowski spacetime. Any hypothesis that you present as the explanation of some body of evidence must meet these criteria before even being considered a coherent hypothesis. On that note, any ontological notion of beginning to exist must also be defined in such a way that the definition is congruent with these ontological considerations. This should be the starting point for any honest individual discussing causation today.
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@logicalliberty132 No, those are definitely mistakes of the video, and your response is completely incorrect too.
20:20 - 20:41 "Two things can be said in response to this example. First, we know that some kinds of quarks, which are, as far as we currently know, not composed of simpler things, can turn into other kinds of quarks. This doesn't seem to be a case of already existent things being re-arranged to form a new composite; instead, it's a case of a fundamental particle beginning to exist."
This is exactly what the video claimed, and it is simply incorrect. Quark decay is in fact an example of a rearrangement: it is an interaction where energy in the quark field is lowered and redistributed into the neutrino field. Nothing here is beginning to exist in a sense other than as a re-arrangement of energy states of quantum fields.
20:42 - 20:51 "Many composite objects aren't merely arrangements of pre-existing things. For instance, I exist, but I am not identical to an arrangement of a particular group of particles."
This is incorrect. True, I am not a particular arrangement of a group of particles, but I never said I was. I am still a composite object that is merely an arrangement of wordlines of particles throughout spacetime.
Also, you claimed I said that the video claimed that I am composed of atoms, but that is actually not what I said. Read my previous comment again.
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contingent things by definition don't exist in some possible worlds
I know that, and I never said otherwise, but the issue is the notion of what counts as a possible world. I believe the concept of possible world is ill-defined.
in our world cars exist, but in some other possible world humans maybe did not invent cars
Except you do not know that it could have been possible. Conceivability and possibility are not the same thing.
thus the essence of a car is combines with it's existence to form the whole
No. Again, that is not how that works. You can try to convince me otherwise, but as long as you appeal to false concepts, I will keep pointing it out.
nothing in the definition of causal loops of causality implies they are time dependent
Then you do not understand the definition of causality.
Alexander Pruss' work which you have not refuted demonstrates this with Paradoxes that are time independent.
I never said anything about time-dependent paradoxes. You are getting different parts of my response mixed up together. I do not have the time to provide a thorough refutation of everything that Alexander Pruss has written, it would take dozens of pages, and it would be impossible to type in a YouTube conversation, not to mention that constructing a well-written response would literally take weeks. That being said, many philosophers have written rebuttals of Pruss' works. So I have no obligation to provide my own refutations. I am justified in simply rejecting his works on the basis of those refutations. You can insist otherwise, but you are wasting your time.
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This is an excellent objection, but the real problem for Benny's argument is simply that the universe is not random. The universe is deterministic. When we throw a die, since it is a chaotic system, under usual circumstances, we lack sufficiently precise information about the initial conditions of the throw to determine accurately the trajectory of the die, and thus, to predict the outcome of the throw. This is why we use probability theory to model a throw of a die as a stochastic process. However, in principle, if you can program a dice-throwing machine with sufficiently precise control of the motion of the throw, you would be able to accurately predict the outcome of every throw, despite the throw still looking like a random motion to a human not equipped with the mathematics to make this prediction. Therefore, making an appeal to randomness, which does not actually occur in nature, as an analogy to demonstrate that the universe is designed, is hopelessly fallacious.
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@DoofusChungus I don't even know what Answers in Genesis, but I'm just saying that it not only makes sense in a religious context, it makes sense in a science context.
I have already demonstrated how fine-tuning is false if classical theism is true, but fine-tuning makes even less sense in a scientific context. There is no fine-tuning, scientifically speaking. The claim that the constants of the universe could have been different at all is unfalsifiable. The claim that life could not have existed in a universe with different values of the constants is unfalsifiable. The claim that the universe would have even had any constants at all, if it had been different, is unfalsifiable. The claim that the constants taking on the values that they did is highly improbable, if random, is also unfalsifiable, since we do not know how these variables are distributed: they could be uniformly distributed, which is what Christian apologists assume, but this assumption is unjustified, and unfalsifiable. They could also be normally distributed, Poisson distributed, discretely distributed, or any other probability distribution imaginable. In short: it is scientifically impossible (or otherwise) to know what the universe could have been like if it were any different than what it is.
My point is that these 1 in a gazillion chances happen over and over.
These events do not have a 1 in a Gazillion chance. The universe is, by all acounts of the available evidence, deterministic (quantum deterministic). So,... no, these events do not have a probability of 1 in a Gazillion. They have a probability of 1.... in whatever way it is even meaningful to actually say that. This, of course, assumes that all events can be meaningfully assigned a probability, which we know is mathematically false.
Do you believe aliens are real?
I choose to withhold my judgment about the existence of aliens, as I do not think we have sufficient evidence to make a conclusion in favor, or against, their existence. Some form of extraterrestrial life probably does exist somewhere in the universe, but it being intelligent enough for us to call it "aliens" is an entirely different subject. We do not even have a sufficiently rigorous understanding of what it means for life to be intelligent here on Earth, so we are definitely not ready to make those judgments for non-Earthly life.
The possibilities and outcomes are virtually infinite, no?
If you mean possibilities in the sense of randomness, then, no, since the universe is definitely not random. If you mean possibilities in the sense of possible states of the universe, that depends entirely on knowledge we can never have: things such as the size of the total universe, its topology, the initial conditions of the universe, if there even exists such a thing as initial conditions of the universe, etc. Anyhow, there is no scenario where we are justified in concluding that the space of possibilities is infinite.
Not only the perfect set of events, but so improbable that this sequence of events will never happen again.
This assumes there is no multiverse, which no one knows to be true (or false). Also, again: the universe is not random. Events have probability of 1. Events happened, because the way the universe behaves means they had to happen. It would have been impossible for the universe to behave the way our current laws of physics say it does behave as, and yet for those events to not have happened.
When there are 100 zillion events that are required to occur just so life on Earth can exist at all,...
The events are not random. You do not believe they are random, because you believe God is guiding these events. We do not believe they are random, because we believe these events are a consequence of the physical and deterministic nature of the universe. Thus, no one in this conversation believes these events are random. So, why do you keep throwing this strawman as an objection?
...then it didn't just randomly happen by pure chance!
I agree! Which makes me all the more confused as to why you keep saying the events are random. Virtually no biologist thinks life emerged from random events. No, we think life emerged via organic chemistry. And, I do not know if you have ever taken a course in chemistry, but let me just say this: chemistry is not random. If it were random, then there would not exist such a thing as "the laws of chemistry." If you throw a sodium coin into a fountain of water, what is the probability that it will react with the water, release energy, and form hydroge gas with sodium hydroxide? The probability is exactly 1. It will happen (well, in Earthly conditions, anyway). It is impossible for it to not happen, and we have verified this experimentally so many times, the number of experiments is probably in the millions by now. Not only can we say for certain it will happen, we can predict the speed of the reactions, the amount of particles that will interact, the amount of energy released, and the amount of hydrogen gas molecules that will be produced, and more: and we can do all of this with such high accuracy, it would make you cry tears of joy. Chemistry is not random, and neither is biology. Therefore, unless there exists such a thing as the soul, all life can be reduced to the chemical reactions it undergoes. Therefore, the origin of life is described by some sequence of chemical reactions, by all accounts of the evidence. Do we know which sequence of chemical reactions? Not yet, no, but we are getting closed every year.
Anyway, in conclusion: (A) since God is all-powerful, there is no fine-tuning, because there being fine-tuning, by definition, implies God is limited by physical constraints, and simply making the creative choice to make a physical compatible universe/life combination is not an example of fine-tuning, because that is not how the concept of fine-tuning has ever been defined. (B) Science does not claim that events in the universe are random, so you need to stop insisting that they are.
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@DoofusChungus How do you know he wouldn't?
I never claimed to know that. And the point is, neither should you, or anyone else, since such a claim is unknowable. You are the one who made the claim that you know God would, so the burden is on you to provide evidence.
Yet my argument isn't baseless, as if he creates the universe with rules, he created those rules for a reason.
How do you know God had some reason in mind when creating the universe? Did you ask Them if They had a reason to do so?
So, what would be the point in going back on those rules?
Oh my Siesta. Are you illiterate? No one is arguing that God should go back! That is not the point of the argument. Stop making this strawman already.
"Even if theism is true" yet "I never even argued that God doesn't exist."
Again, are you illiterate? Saying "Even if theism is true" is not the same as arguing against theism.
You also even called yourself a non-theist.
I did. I am a non-theist. But that does not mean I argued against the existence of God. The only thing I have actually argued here is that the fine-tuning argument, as presented in favor of classical monotheism, is unsound. That does not prove God does not exist, nor does it approve all other apologetic arguments are unsound. We can have a discussion about those other apologetic arguments, but I doubt you wany to. Also, lacking a belief in God is not the same as having a belief in the nonexistence of God. Those are very different things.
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@DoofusChungus Brain waves basically refer to oscillations in the electromagnetic activity fields in the brain, these fields emerging from the fact that there is a net electron flow between neurons to exchange information. Electromagnetic fields are physical. They are a primary topic of study in physics, and we have characterized them mathematically.
Physicalism, in a nutshell, makes the claim that everything is physical: in the sense that, for whatever systems we can conclude exist via the study of physical theory, the systems they are causally related to are also physical, meaning that they too can be subjected studied via a physical theory. Basically, physicalism is a revamped version of materialism, but more modern, and meant to account for how modern physics describes the universe, rather than just naively asserting "everything is matter," since we know this to not be true.
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@DoofusChungus But you call yourself a physicalist, which is a belief that everything is in the physical (at least from what I've read online).
Yes.
So you very much have a belief in the nonexistence of God,...
I do, but I have never argued in favor of this belief, and yet, you are pretending that I did. And, what do we call it someone pretends that someone else did something, and yet they did not do it? Want to take a guess?
...and you're also arguing against many things about God, not just finely tuned.
No, I really have not said anything about God, other than that, if God is omnipotent, then the fine-tuning argument's premises are false. I have not made any other arguments about God. I do not know where you get that from. Maybe you are confusing my claims with the claims of someone else.
Also, side note, I don't know if there's an actual definition for the term finely tuned religion-wise, but what I mean by it, is that the universe has specific scenarios that had to play out for us to exist.
If you assume a godless universe, then yes, it is true that a very specific sequence of events had to happen for us to exist. This is not true if God exists, though.
So it's "finely tuned" so that those scenarios did play out, and here we are.
No, that is now fine-tuning works. Yes, IF God does not exist, or if God is not omnipotent, THEN, the fact that we are here necessitates that a certain sequence of events have happened. This is true, simply because if God is not omnipotent, then physical constraints matter. However, if God is omnipotent, then there is no sequence of events that "had to happen" for us to exist.
My point for that first one is that we both can go back and forth about "you don't know that" and "how do you know?"
Yes, and my point is that the fact that neither you nor I can know whether God would have wanted a particular outcome or not defeats your argument.
Everything played out as it did. Everything happened to such a degree that here we are, so obviously, there's a plan going on.
No. The fact that things happened the way they happened does not at all demonstrate that there is a plan.
And being all knowing, even if he didn't create the universe with a reason in mind, being an omnipotent God, he knows what's going to happen, or I guess in his case, how to make it happen.
Yes, per classical monotheism, God does know what will happen. This does not mean that God has a plan. It also does not mean God actually cares about what will happen. Look, I could, hypothetically, grant you the existence of God, and you still would not be able to prove anything else about God, at all, much less prove that Christianity is true. And if I grant you that God exists, I can still debunk the notion of fine-tuning, because the notion of fine-tuning in direct, definitional contradiction, with the omnipotence of God.
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@x-popone6817 because nothing would be able to happen if it was eternal.
False. "Eternal" is not synonymous with "timeless" or "changeless".
So you continue with your unfounded accusations that I am dishonest?
The accusations are not unfounded. I explained the accusations, and other did before me too.
It's your religion,... to call someone "dishonest".
The fact that you think a frequent retort makes a stance a religion proves that you do not understand what a religion is.
I literally just did explain it.
No, you did not, you simply provided a false claim that someone else debunked before Ant even replied. The fact that you pretend otherwise actually further proves your dishonesty.
God isn't a set of events, which is what the problem is with an infinite regress.
This does not actually explain what is it that makes an infinite regress problematic.
Scientists are biased as well...
Here, you demonstrate your ignorance of science. Scientists are biased, but the scientific method is not.
An infinite regress isn't possible because then we would never reach this point,...
No, the latter does not follow from the former. ω is an ordinal number infinitely larger than 0, but yet it is well-defined.
unless, of course, the past, present, and future are all equally really, and we just live in some type of block in time at different "locations", but that seems counter-intuitive.
It is counter intuitive, but that is how time actually works. We have known this for 106 years now, thanks to Einstein's theory of general relativity.
No one casually thinks that's how time works.
False. That is precisely how physicists and cosmologists think time works.
Faith is not, by definition, belief in the absence of evidence.
Yes, it is. Your Bible literally says so.
The Biblical definition of faith is trust,...
No, it is not, and you will not be able to find a Biblical verse that defines it as such.
then the implications of that conclusion lead to a mind.
They do not.
Yes, you don't know what dishonest means.
Projection much.
An infinite regress is impossible.
An assumption with no evidence, not a fact.
Something from nothing is impossible.
An assumption with no evidence, not a fact.
Conclusion: the universe had a beginning.
This literally does not follow from the previous two sentences, and depending on how you define "beginning", it can be the case that this conclusion is contradicted by the previous two sentences.
This leads to a mind behind it.
An assumption with no evidence, not a fact.
refute this.
There is nothing to refute, as your claims are all baseless assertions.
A natural explanation wouldn't work because how can an impersonal force suddenly, randomly, create the universe?
This is an example of the argument from ignorance fallacy. Your ignorant self is unable to imagine or understand how quantum physics, which are themselves beyond your own understanding, can lead to the universe existing as it is. Therefore, you deny the possibility altogether, but it does nothing to actually disprove said possibility. Things can be possible, regardless of whether you understand how they can be possible, or not.
The problem with an infinite regress is that we wouldn't be able to reach the present.
You have not explained how is it that we would not be able to reach the present.
Time exists outside of the physical world
No, it is not. Time is one of the four axis of spacetime, and spacetime is part of the physical world.
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@x-popone6817 No, it's not an argument from ignorance. Quantum mechanics does not show that something can come from nothing, nor does it should that the effect of an impersonal force, shouldn't be permanent.
Unbelievable. You went as far as to misrepresent your own argument in order to also misrepresent mine. Yet you complain when we accuse you of dishonesty. At this point, I find it hard to believe that you are not just trolling me.
The paragraph in which you mentioned the point to which I replied by appealing to quantum physics is completely different from the paragraph in which you mentioned your "something cannot come from nothing" claim, which I also replied to separately. So I have no idea why you are pretending that my appeal to quantum physics was in response to your "something cannot come from nothing" claim, and at this point, I do not care to know why. When you have to lie this much in a conversation, it just demonstrates without the shadow of a doubt that your position is indefensible, and that you are just desperate, and that there is no point in trying to continue have a conversation with you on the subject. Frankly, you have defeated yourself.
My argument was philosophical, that it isn't possible for an eternal cause to suddenly have an effect that hasn't been permanent.
No, it was not. That was an entirely different paragraph altogether, which I had already addressed. Your argument was, and I quote your exact words: "A natural explanation wouldn't work because how can an impersonal force suddenly, randomly, create the universe?" I find it amusing that you are lying about what your argument is, despite the fact that your actual written argument is still not only part of your comment, but part of the exact words I quoted in my previous response. Here I am quoting them again. Those exact words constitute an argument from ignorance, whether you want to admit it or not. Why do they constitute an argument from ignorance? Because you asked "how could (this) be possible?", (this) referring to an impersonal force suddenly and randomly creating the universe. The fact that you asked this is precisely what makes it, definitionally, an argument from ignorance. There are more than a dozen of plausible naturalistic explanations for the hypothetical beginning of the universe, in the assumption that such a beginning did exist. You are apparently, personally not acquainted with them, because they are highly technical explanations that require more than just a degree in quantum physics to suitably understand. As such, you are unable to imagine a plausible naturalistic explanation, so you rhetorically ask, "how can that be possible?", as if trying to drive home the point that, "of course it is not possible, for if it were possible, I would be able to imagine it, and then I would not need to ask how". In other words: it is an argument from incredulity, and an argument from incredulity is a special case of an argument from ignorance, as incredulity is a consequence of ignorance. So, yes, it is an argument from ignorance, and no, it has nothing to do with your false claim that "the eternal impersonal cause caused a non-eternal effect" is a logical contradiction, which I already addressed elsewhere.
Science can't disprove logic. Science presupposes logic.
I never stated otherwise here. The issue here is that you have not been using logic at all. You have not provided me with a sound syllogism. You have provided me with claims that you have not proven, terminology with no definitions, and then you expect me to either take your word on those claims, or you simple reiterate the claims, saying "well, this is obviously true, how can you not see that?" rather than, well, actually explaining the damn claim and proving it. You arguments have all been non sequiturs, misrepresentations of my responses, or an argument from incredulity. Nothing about that is logical.
Finally, your comments seem kind of like ad hominem. You say quantum mechanics is beyond my understanding. In other words, that I couldn't understand it even if I tried and studied it, that I don't have the mental capacity.
Firstly, let me go ahead and admit that I made a mistake. The phrasing "beyond your understanding" was very poor and careless. I apologize. I definitely intended to communicate the point that it was beyond your current understanding, but by trying to be concise in my words, I just made that into an insult. Secondly, now onto actually addressing the argument at hand. No, saying quantum theory is beyond your understanding is not an ad hominem. At worst, it is just rude. It would have been an ad hominem if I had said "your ignorance in quantum mechanics falsifies your conclusion", but I never actually said such a thing. Besides, in saying that it is an ad hominem by putting the claim out of context, not only do you misrepresent the claim, but you also miss the point of the argument.
You also said I am dishonest, without any proper basis.
No, I definitely provided more than just a proper basis. Not only did I explain exactly in what ways have you been dishonest and how exactly those things qualify you as dishonest, I also have provided explicitly examples along my commentary of such dishonest shenanigans, and have made sure to individually call those moments out in my responses. I quoted exact words, too. I am completely justified in calling you dishonest. Of course, you say otherwise, but guess what: a dishonest person would never admit to being dishonest. So you are only making your case worse here.
Speaking of dishonesty, I spent way more time in this comment correcting your misrepresentations of my arguments than I spent actually discussing any logic or philosophy, which is honestly disappointing. Conversations like that are not productive, frustrating, and a waste of time. They are not even entertaining. Now that I know exactly what you are all about in this conversation, I am going to be prudent and stop reading your replies, and stop replying to your replies. There is no point in discussing anything else further with you, and I have more important things to do with my energy than continuing to get baffled by this tomfoolery. Farewell.
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@angelbrother1238 I would say that fine-tuning is a real problem.
If so, then you should cite several peer-reviewed studies that prove the claims being made by Ben Shapiro here. The problem is that I know you cannot do it, because such studies do not exist, because Ben Shapiro's claim is false.
This is why the physicists that disagree with this have to posit a multiverse.
No, this is false. To start with, the idea of the existence of a multiverse in physics is much, much older than the idea of fine-tuning in theistic apologetics, dating back to the early days of quantum mechanics. Also, the existence of the multiverse is not a hypothesis endorsed by most physicists or cosmologists, it is a minority position, and not the consensus. In particular, the multiverse hypothesis is only considered as an actual prospect in string theoretic research, which is itself just the study of a particular hypothesis that we are not yet able to test experimentally.
The problem is that even with that, you need to deal with an ultimate beginning.
This assumes that the universe had a beginning, which is an assumption I have no reason to grant.
Then you have the problem with explaining consciousness, and with that, near death experiences.
Explaining consciousness itself? Yes, but near death experiences are fairly well-explained now in the neuroscience research. It is to the extent that we can actually induce the sensation of a near-death experience by applying certain stimuli to the brain, all without any of the near-death stuff actually happening to the person. Also, there are many studies that have served as strong evidence that the no actual out-of-body experiences are happening with patients who feel them happen. Take for example Parnia, S.; Waller, D. G.; Yeates, R.; Fenwick, P. (2001-02-01). "A qualitative and quantitative study of the incidence, features and aetiology of near death experiences in cardiac arrest survivors". Resuscitation. 48 (2): 149–156. or French, Christopher C. (2005-01-01). "Near-death experiences in cardiac arrest survivors". The Boundaries of Consciousness: Neurobiology and Neuropathology. Progress in Brain Research. Vol. 150. pp. 351–367. or UK Clinical Trials Gateway. Primary Trial ID Number 17129, entitled "AWARE II (AWAreness during REsuscitation) A Multi-Centre Observational Study of the Relationship between the Quality of Brain Resuscitation and Consciousness, Neurological, Functional and Cognitive Outcomes following Cardiac Arrest". or Greyson, Bruce (2014). "Chapter 12: Near-Death Experiences". In Cardeña, Etzel; Lynn, Steven Jay; Krippner, Stanley (eds.). Varieties of anomalous experience : examining the scientific evidence (Second ed.). Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association. pp. 333–367.
As for the stimuli that induce near-death experiences, consider Van Gordon, William; Shonin, Edo; Dunn, Thomas J.; Sheffield, David; Garcia-Campayo, Javier; Griffiths, Mark D. (2018-12-01). "Meditation-Induced Near-Death Experiences: a 3-Year Longitudinal Study". Mindfulness. 9 (6): 1794–1806. or Vincent, Jean-Louis (2009). "Towards a Neuro-scientific Explanation of Near-death Experiences?". Intensive Care Medicine. [S.l.]: Springer New York. pp. 961–968. or Judson, I. R; Wiltshaw, E. (1983). "A near-death experience". Lancet. 322 (8349): 561–562. or Martial, C; Cassol, H; Charland-Verville, V; Pallavicini, C; Sanz, C; Zamberlan, F; Vivot, RM; Erowid, F; Erowid, E; Laureys, S; Greyson, B; Tagliazucchi, E (March 2019). "Neurochemical models of near-death experiences: A large-scale study based on the semantic similarity of written reports". Consciousness and Cognition. Consider also “There is nothing paranormal about near-death experiences: how neuroscience can explain seeing bright lights, meeting the dead, or being convinced you are one of them” by Dean Mobbs and Caroline Watt, 17 August 2011, Trends of Cognitive Sciences. At the end of the day, we do not know everything that there is to know, and the research will continue for all of the foreseeable future regardless, but the scientific explanations are there.
As for explaining consciousness, we are actually much closer to explaining the fundamental aspects than you realize. However, I also want to point out that this is irrelevant. The fact is, a worldview has no obligation to explain the origin of consciousness, or the origin of anything, for that matter. Having explanations for the phenomena that we observe is desirable, yes, but the only obligation a worldview has is that the assertion that it makes actually be sufficiently justified and correspond to reality. Not having an explanation to a particular phenomenon is perfectly acceptable. Saying "I don't know" as the answer to a question is perfectly acceptable, and in fact, there will never be a point in existence when we will know everything that could possibly be known. Saying "I don't know" is not giving up. Saying "I don't know" is literally the first step in acquiring the knowledge and in solving problems with that knowledge.
Like I said, atheists are entertaining. I should know, I used to be an atheist...
Atheists are indeed entertaining. This is why I have atheist friends I enjoy spending time with. If they were not entertaining, then I would not spend time with them.
...until a huge miracle happened in my life.
I would love to hear your story.
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@angelbrother1238 Again, you are trying to fit your emotionally based opinion into the argument.
This is just a baseless assertion.
You can also say that God designing life this way makes it even more rare and precious.
There are two things to say to this:
(A) In the assumption that what you asserted is true, that still would not mean the universe is designed for life. It is entirely possible that God designed the universe to create black holes - something that the universe is actually really good at doing - and that the existence of life is only a by-product that God nevertheless found acceptable, as it does nothing to interfere with God's holy plan about black holes. In fact, even if God did design the universe, it still follows logically that the universe is not finely-tuned, and it does not have to be in order for life to be valuable. Most physicists and cosmologists who are religious will tell you this, an most religious people have no idea what "fine-tuning" is anyway, nor is it relevant to their beliefs.
(B) I have no reason to think that this makes life more valuable. To the contrary: most "theories of value" would render life less valuable in this fashion. The theory of value that the real world seems to operate by is the supply-demand theory: the more accessible a supply with fixed demand is, the less valuable it is, and the less accessible a supply with fixed demand is, the more valuable it is. As it currently stands, life exists on only a finite supply. Even in the assumption that life exists elsewhere in the universe, it is clear that life is extremely, extremely rare in the universe: less than 0.001% is inhabitable. However, if God is invested in creating life, then life becomes an infinite supply. Yes, it is still rare for life to exist in the universe, but only because God decided this would be true during these times. In actuality, the access to the existence of life becomes trivial if God can create life at will and is willing to do so. Hence, in whatever form there exists any demand for life, the supply has increased infinitely, so its value has decreased likewise. Besides, if you postulate the existence of an eternal afterlife, this also decreases the value of life. This is because life is valuable almost entirely due to the fact that death is an inevitable part of it. This means that every second we spend alive is precious and counts. Every second you spend with someone counts, every second you devote to the improvement of humanity counts. If an eternal afterlife exists, then being alive here on Earth no longer has any value of any kind. Well, maybe it has value to God, but most definitely not to us. The reason humans appreciate life so much is precisely because it is delicate, feeble, can easily evanesce.
The better question is what emotional event caused you to not want God to exist.
There was no such event. In fact, even for a few years after I deconstructed my Christian faith, I still felt anguish, because I did not want to abandon the religion. I wanted to believe, but found myself in pain when I realized that, if I take a close look at the evidence, the beliefs become completely untenable. To be clear, I no longer feel this way. I am completely at peace with my lack of religiousity, and the quality of my life has improved significantly since then. All I am saying is that, even after I stopped believing God exists, I still had continued wanting to believe God exists. There was never a point when I said "I wish God does not exist." As for why I stopped believing, there was a myriad of factors. I cannot deny that there were no emotional events that happened that affected my ability to believe, but ultimately, what had the most impact in my ability to believe was obtaining an education in science, philosophy, and religion. I have become acquainted with many religions, and I have started investigating all the ones I studied more deeply, including Christianity, my own religion, and the more I investigated, the more problems there were. Getting a better education in science and philosophy also helped me stop taking many deeply-ingrained ideas that Christian spokespeople inject into you for granted, and started questioning more deeply.
Irrationality rules is someone that would bend his beliefs and convictions when he is socially ostracized.
This is a baseless accusation, and the only thing it proves is that you lack any arguments to present against his points, so you have to resort to insulting his character instead. How extremely emotionally mature of you.
We both know this
Nope, not at all.
This guy is basically making money off his sheep viewers.
Sheep viewers? I have a degree in physics, and another in philosophy. And there are many things I disagree with, when it comes to Rationality Rules. In fact, in one of his videos in against the Kalam series, I heavily criticized the video, having an entire thread dedicated to that. I still ultimately agree with his overall conclusion that the Kalam argument is a bad argument, but that particular video was not a good one.
But again, you seem to have to resort to insulting his viewers, because you actually have no arguments to present against the points being presented. This is pretty pathetic, if you ask me. Every sentence in your comment decreases my opinion of your emotional maturity. So, if you actually have any arguments to present, then I suggest you lead your next reply with those, and omit the insults. Otherwise, I will just dismiss you as an Internet troll.
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despite the Earth's significantly quicker than Saturn, both have made the same number of orbits
This is not an absurdity, but in reality, mathematically correct, and justified by transfinite set theory, which was developed by Georg Cantor in the late 19th century. Since an orbit is a discrete object, of which there can be an exact integer amount, it is a counter, and therefore, in an infinite period, there can only be Aleph(0) orbits. Aleph(0) is a cardinal number that satisfies the property that that Aleph(0) = n·Aleph(0), where n is any natural number. So yes, Saturn would have made Aleph(0) orbits, and Earth would have made 30·Aleph(0) orbits, but both quantities are equal. This is because if I consider the sets N and 30·N, there actually exists a (trivial) bijection between the sets. This is all, just to say that, if al-Ghazali had been born after Georg Cantor, al-Ghazali would have been acquainted with set theory, and would have never created the Kalam cosmological argument to begin with. The entire premise behind the argument, the so-called "absurdity", is false, because there is no absurdity.
The use of the causal principle is not to be found here, for Kindi's arguments are based simply on the notion of the succession of temporal segments.
The fact that WLC wrote this betrays his lack of understanding of the scientific ideas of time and causation. For starters, his argument would need to be rephrased, as it is well-established today that it is not time that passes, but that our time coordinate changes based on our innate spacetime motion. Even if we applied this rephrasing, though, there is still the conceptual problem that time and causation are inherently linked. In fact, causation in science today is understood in full-rigor by way of equations in the calculus of time scales.
But the problems raised by the illustrations are real ones, for they raise the question of whether an infinite number or number of things can actually exist in reality.
This is an entirely valid question to ask, but the problem lies in the approach to answering the question, not the question itself. It is in the approach that al-Ghazali is wrong.
Ghazali argues that this results in all sorts of absurdities; therefore, the series of temporal phenomena cannot regress infinitely.
Ghazali did argue this, but he presented these arguments during a time when mathematics did not stand on a rigorous foundation, and the concept of infinity was very poorly understood and controversial. His assertion that, the Earth cannot have orbited the same amount of times as Saturn, yet also have orbited 30 times as many orbits as Saturn has, is an absurdity... such an assertion is completely unsubstantiated, and stemmed from a very naïve and incomplete understanding of infinite quantities. There is no absurdity here. If anyone in the year 2021 is trying to use the concept of finitude and infinitude to present a syllogism, then their concepts better be grounded on axiomatic set theory, or on type theory, not on intuition.
Infinite quantities or magnitudes are those that are measurable but have no finite measure.
This is a fine definition, although it does have the problem that the definition is only coherent if you also define what "finite measure" means. Later, you mention that an infinite measure is greater than the measure of any finite number, but this still requires having to define "finite" in some way or other. This is not a big issue for the video series as a whole, but I certainly think many people would find it very helpful for "finite" to be defined in a way that is unambiguous, precise, and not overly reliant on intuition, since it would help parse out justifications for arguments concerning the finite and the infinite more easily.
For instance, there are just as many natural numbers as there are [nonnegative] even numbers, despite the fact that the [nonnegative] even numbers are a proper subset of the natural numbers.
This is true, and this is exactly what Ghazali failed to understand when he presented his arguments about the infinitude of time... which is understandable, since Cantor's development of set theory did not exist during his time. There was no possible way for Ghazali, or any of his contemporaries, for that matter, to understand that he was wrong, or why he was wrong. Nonetheless, this does not change the fact that he was indeed wrong, and theologians today need to start acknowledging this.
*A potential infinite is, strictly speaking, not an infinite at all. It is a quantity that 1. is increasing 2. has no finite limit 3. is always finite.
I find this to be a really strange and confusing way of defining a potential infinite, especially when followed by the central caption on screen that talks about lack of definiteness, itself not a well-defined concept. Now, I imagine that when you speak of a quantity that is increasing, you therefore talk about a quantity that we call a variable. So the potential infinite refers not to a set of objects, but simply to a variable, and this variable has the property of always increasing, and the property of always being finite. However, what makes this confusing is the second property: that it has no finite limit. The word limit seems to be used here with a rather loose and intuitive definition, which is not adequate for the explanation, since we are dealing with a precise mathematical idea and making appeals to set theory. When I hear the word "limit", what I think of is the topological concept of a limit point, or equivalently, the idea of limits that is taught in an introductory calculus course. In other words, a potential infinite is a quantity that can take on various values, and is monotonically increasing, but while the set of values the variable takes on is infinite, the values themselves are finite, and bounded. So in other words, this definition, at least to me, communicates the idea that a potential infinite is a variable that converges as its argument increases without bounds. If this is what you intended to communicate with your definition, then all is good, but otherwise, clarification is certainly needed here. I say this, because the following caption only makes this worse.
A potential infinite collection is one "in which the members are not definite in number but may be increased without limit".
This is WLC's definition. I find this to be, at the very least, nonsensical. Ignoring the fact that I have never seen any mathematical text that even makes reference to this kind of "infinity", the fact that "the members are not definite in number but may be increased without limit" is problematic. For starters, in axiomatic set theory, there does not exist any notion of a set not having a definite, fixed cardinality. Perhaps what WLC is talking about here is a sequence of sets, in which the next set in the sequence has a cardinality bigger than the last, yet every set in the sequence has finite cardinality, and the limit point of the sequence is a set with infinite cardinality. However, if that is what he is referring to, then the definition is useless and redundant, because it makes no meaningful, non-trivial distinction between actual infinities and potential infinities: in this case, every potential infinity necessarily gives rise to an actual infinity, so every infinity is both actual and potential. This is why I said clarification is needed. Honestly, what this proves to me is that the theologians' uninformed attempt at trying to make such a distinction in the first place is mathematically unsound and philosophically misguided. I have never seen a definition of potential infinity that is not redundant or nonsensical.
After having looked at the video's coverage of stage 1 of the New Kalam, I also must say that it does disappoint that none of the resources that theologians have provided that I could find on the subject have bothered to provide a scientifically rigorous definition of a "cause" and an "effect". This does make any arguments that attempt to use such a notion fall completely flat on their face, since, if there is no coherent causation to discuss, then there is no cause of the universe that needs to be discussed. In modern science, the universe is studied by way of understanding it states and how those states evolve. These evolutions are described by time-scale equations, and so the idea of causation is not even present: scientifically speaking, there is no such a thing as a cause or an effect, there is only a special kind of mutual dependence between states and variables, called functional dependence.
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Also, talking about the actual definitions:
Defining 'existence': existence is easy to define if you choose the appropriate framework with which to define it. Existence is properly defined by axioms in free logic. All ontology, when formalized, should be presented in free logic.
Defining 'begins to exist': the definition provided on screen is problematic for many reasons. It fails to define what "x exists at time t" means, and while I know that existence itself is already presuably defined here, "at time t" is not defined, because formal ontologies, as defined in free logic, do not use any notion of temporal dependence. Temporal logic, as an extension of free logic, is needed here, but the best way to achieve this, actually, is instead to formalize the concept of a parametric family of ontologies: for each t, one has an ontology O(t), and "x exists at t" if and only if "x exists," in the sense of free logic, is true in O(t). However, this also requires defining what time is, and for this, we need to recur to mathematical foundations of the general theory of relativity, which I contend, no expert philosopher alive is currently equipped to do, undermining the entire argument. This brings me to the other objection to this definition: the idea of "earliest temporal boundary," which is simply ill-defined here, even in cases for objects which have a finite age. You see, the time axis can only be coherently conceptualized (that we know of) as a connected subset of the real numbers, i.e., an interval of real numbers. However, there exists open intervals. For instance, the open interval (0, 1) has a finite length, but there is no smallest real number in this interval: for all s in (0, 1), there exists some t in (0, 1), such that t < s. In the sense of topology, this interval has a boundary, but it does not contain said boundary, and if we are using this to model the physical world, there is nothing indicating that such a boundary actually exists. So, even for objects of finite age, talking about "begins to exist" is problematic using this definition. One amendment I can suggest is to say that "x begins to exist at t" if and only if "x exists at t, and for all t' < t, x does (did) not exist at t'." However, this definition would present problems for WLC's worldview, and I am certain he would not be able to accept this definition, despite his complete inability to propose an alternative. I myself cannot think of a better alternative, though.
Defining 'universe': I think it is simpler to define "universe" as the totality of all the different spacetime manifolds that may exist, all quantum fields that may exist, and all mereological sums thereof, as well as possibly strings, if they do exist. Dark matter and dark energy would be included in the above.
There is an ambiguity as to what "whatever" or "everything" means in premise A of the argument. When it says "Everything which begins to exist..." does it refer to the universal quantifier, "For all x,...," or is it referring to a specific kind of thing, like mereological sums of states of quantum fields?
Defining 'cause': the definition of 'cause' in the video is wholly inadequate for anything: it is just not even really a definition. "x causes y just in case x produces or brings about y" is not a definition, as the relation "x produces y" is itself undefined. All the people writing this did was rename the relation, rather than actually define it. Also, we absolutely DO need to worry about the questions dismissed in the video, as those are essential for having an appropriate definition of 'cause.'
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I think it's a good thing that there's no objective morality. We as a society decide what's moral and what's not.
No, society does not decide that. This whole "morality is objective" vs "morality is not objective" discussion is stupid, and also, dangerous. Ultimately, when it all comes down to it, the way people evaluate whether an action is moral or not is based on what they believe the consequences of those actions to be, regardless of whether those beliefs are scientifically accurate or not. We can measure suffering, scientifically. However, this measurement necessarily must respect the confessions of the people being affected by those actions. If the person claims to be suffering, then they probably are (unless you can categorically demonstrate that they are lying). No one else gets to make the decision on whether that given individual is suffering or not. Society as a whole does not get make this decision. Society does not decide whether some particular action causes suffering or not, to those affected by it. The "society decides" thinking is extremely dangerous, and it is how we got things like chattel slavery, colonization, and the Crusades.
This involves us as individual parts of the society and thus makes each of us responsible to hold up these moral values (as in a democracy).
Nope. The "democracy" idea is very dangerous. Again, this is how we got chattel slavery in the U.S.A. Democracy might be great for doing politics, but certainly not for making judgments of moral value.
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@barnaclejones822 The problem, in my eyes, is trying to appeal to an authority that already excludes what you're positing.
It does not exclude such a thing, and I am not even sure you actually know what it is am positing. Actually, you definitely do not know, because I never even clarified what it is I am positing. All you are doing right now is playing games, pretending you can read my mind, when the only thing I did was respond to an erroneous argument you presented.
You just have to concede that America & its history is not some bastion of liberal democracy.
Oh, I agree completely, but not at all for the reasons you think I would agree. I am the opposite end of the spectrum of where you are.
I never claimed it was an inherently religious document, my claim was that it was written under religious assumptions with the intent to be applied only to a moral and religious people.
And this claim is factually incorrect, as has been pointed out to you by multiple people. Also, what the intent was is completely irrelevant to this discussion, and completely irrelevant, in particular, to what OP said.
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Is time more like the naturals or the rationals?
If we go by our current understanding of the physics, it is definitely more like the rational numbers, but a reliable answer to this question requires that we develop a quantum theory of gravity. A quantum relativity, if you will.
The answer has significant philosophical implications that you won't be able to detect by just considering cardinality.
You are correct. This is why we consider the order types of sets, rather than just their cardinality. (N, <•) is a poset, and so is (Q, <••), and there exists an order-embedding from N to Q. However, there is no order-embedding from Q to N. Therefore, the order type of (Q, <••) is larger than the order type of (N, <•). To be precise, the order type of the latter is the ordinal ω, while the order type of the former is ω^2. Time in our instantiation of spacetime probably operates with a set with order type ω(1) or larger, but ω^2 is closer to ω(1) than ω is, which is why I said time is more like the set of rational numbers. Though, if Wolfram's program is accurate, then time is actually of order type ω.
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@nobodyspecial9 Let's transpose your question to the point of transgender identity. So, how exactly is claiming they have a certain gender when they factually do not, not "lying"? It's not as if they do not know what their actual gender is. That would be impossible, except for the case in which they were extremely cognitively deficient, which is not clinically or legally the case for them.
This makes the assumption that it is actually possible to know what someone's gender is without being told by the person what it is to begin with.
Do you see the problem with that flavour of argument?
I do not, partially because you are strawmanning me here. My claim about Rachel lying is not merely in her claim about her racial identity, but in her claim about what her heritage is. I know I did not make it clear in my comment, but I thought we were discussing common knowledge here. I supoose we are not.
Identity refers to how you perceive yourself, not to what is apparent externally.
This is wrong. Identity has many facets and is significantly more complicated than a matter or self-perception. Of course, self-perception plays a mjor role, but it is by no means the sole defining factor.
You can look, dress and act as a member of a certain gender and still perceive yourself as belonging to another.
Yes, because how you dress and look is much more an issue of gender roles and not a matter of gender identity. Even a person who denies the validity of transgender identity would tell you this much. But the picture that people are missing is that the concept of gender identity is incoherent without gender roles and a cultural context to talk about it. Functionally, how one's gender is perceived, self-declarations aside, is via those gender roles. And gender roles are very much not about self-perception, but societal perception. Think about this: what does it even mean to "dress according to a gender"? This is an incoherent notion if gender truly is just another name for biological sex. One cannot dress according to a biological sex. This is nonsensical, as biological sex does not have a form of clothing intrinsically tied to it. There is nothing inherently female about skirts. The only reason they are "female" clothing is because society said so. And so, if one sees someone on the street with a skirt, they would assume the skirt-wearing person is a woman, and they would be ready to die on the hill of that assumption, regardless of what the truth is.
With race, this is even worse, as race inherently does carry external components to it, and in particular, a very historical context that cannot be changed by one's self-perception. But the difference is, that outside certain specific contexts in the medical field, and outside the specific context of having chidren, one's biological sex is functionally irrelevant, and so is one's gender. Race is not.
As such it makes no sense rationally to exclude racial perception while lauding gender perception, because they both depend on what your perception of yourself is.
But that is the thing: racial perception does not determine racial identity. Because as I said, real, tangible, external component to this exists. Meanwhile, how society perceives gender is almost solely a function of how one chooses to present oneself.
I'm not saying Dolezal wasn't "lying", but to dismiss their claim outright based on your perception of their condition smacks of the same type of disingenuity that many people in the comments accuse Dawkins of having.
Again, I thought we were discussing common knowledge. The reason Rachel has been accused of lying is because anytime she has been asked to explain herself, she has literally lied, regarding how she justifies her claim of being transracial. Lying about your own family still counts as lying. And besides, this objection ignores the fact that race and gender are functionally different in how they relate to one's identity. And gender dysphoria functions very differently from any other kind of dysphoria, which is why the DSM and scientific organizations classify gender dysphoria as an entirely different kind of mental condition altogether. You are not even comparing apples to oranges. You are comparing apples to vegetables.
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@nobodyspecial9 Gender roles and gender identity are two parts of the same coin, wherein one is the internal perception and the other is the external perception. And they are both arguably based but not necessarily in alignment with the tangible and physical component of gender, which is sex. Sex, in the absence of self-declaration to the contrary, is considered to be the basis of gender identity precisely because gender is often derived from and is compatible with sex, however because they are not mutually assured they do not necessarily follow.
This fails to present a full picture of the situation. The reality is more complicated than this. Gender identity, traditionally, has been devoid of self-perception, and has been based entirely on the biological sex of an individual. However, there are major problems with this.
One problem is that our understanding of biological sex today is much more refined than the understanding we had 80 years ago, and we realize that biological sex in humans is not a simple discrete binary, and not uniquely determined by chromosomes either. This also means that while, in the past, the understanding was that biological sex had functional relevance societally, which is what motivated gender roles in the first place, it turns out that we know today that biological sex has no functional relevance societally, and as for an individual, it only has relevance for the purposes of medical necessities, and for the purposes of sexual interaction, both of which are completely private matters. If gender identity is based on biological sex, then it too has no functional relevance. This makes gender as a classification very much arbitrary and meaningless. Effectively, we say gender exists only because we have traditionally believed it exists, not because it has any objective existence to it.
And on that note, another problem is that this makes the traditionally held connection between gender identity and gender roles fallacious and fictitious. If what determines an individual's gender is which reproductive organs the individual has, then masculinity and feminity are equally arbitrary and meaningless distinctions. There is no intrinsic relationship between how one dresses, how one talks, or how one does the vast majority of things in social interactions that do not directly involve having sexual intercourse, and one's reproductive organs. Masculinity and feminity are perceived to be real only by virtue of societal fiat.
But how one interacts socially is functionally relevant and does carry non-arbitrary, meaningful distinctions. So if gender roles were real, in other words, if how one manifested social interactions actually did have an intrinsic relationship to one's reproductive organ, then biological sex-based gender identity would have functional relevance. Gender identity has functional relevance only if gender roles do. The coin with two sides that you describe metaphorically in your paragraph is thus not a symmetric coin, or to say, not truly a coin. That being said, while gender roles are fictitious, they still carry subcultures with them, those being types of masculinity and feminity, which are themselves dependent on the broader context of one's national culture, religion, politics, ethnicity, and yes, race, among other things. This is where self-perception becomes relevant. Self-perception operates on one's sense of belonging which is based entirely on this arbitrary, meaningless distinction between masculinity and feminity as subcultures, and unlike the distinctions themselves, self-perception is not arbitrary nor meaningless, and has functional relevance. Gender identity acquires some level of functional relevance, albeit still artifical, only as a function of how one's self-perception interacts with these gender subcultures. And otherwise, it is completely devoid of objective existence. In fact, hypothetically speaking, if society were to realize that gender is objectively unreal, then it may get rid of the distinction altogether, yet choose to keep the gender subcultures as part of one's identity, albeit choosing to disconnect the notion of those subcultures from any notions of biologica sex, which is the sane thing to do, and would simply treat them as precisely that: subcultures. This is why it is nonsensical to consider gender as anything but a function of self-perception.
Similarly, race has an external perception and an internal perception, based on a tangible and physical component of genetic race. Racial perception can also differ from its genetic roots as it is also based on identity and, to borrow your phrase, "how one chooses to present oneself", and as such distinct from their genetic race.
No. This is demonstrably not the case. Race functions very differently from how gender functions. The distinctions between races are based on external features that, unlike with gender, are very much functionally relevant in society, and are intrinsically tied to socioecionomic history and ethnicity. Race, unlike gender, is hereditary. The existence of race is also very closely tied to colorism. And unlike one's reproductive organs, which very few people know what they are unless they are explicitly peeping on you, or they have had sexual intercourse with you, or unless they are your parents, or unless they are your medic, and thus have no functional relevance aside from an arbitrarily assigned and fictitious importance, one's color of skin is very much visible to everyone, and can singlehandedly affect your life in drastic ways, for the better or for the worse, even if this is not necessarily true for every single person out there.
Race is also inextricably linked to one's geographic location, and to one's cultural history. These are aspects that race does not share with gender. And this means that, unlike gender, race is defined and determined by things that have an objective, unarbitrary, meaningful reality of their own. This much is true, despite the fact that race is not a legitimate biological distinction, contrary to what racist people many centuries ago used to claim. Also, for what is worth, unlike with gender, there is no historical-sociological precedent for transracial identity or race dysphoria that can legitimize self-perception as not only being a genuine component of one's race, but also one which decisively overrides all of the above.
The very fact the Dolezal chose and existed for years as a "black" person before being outed as "white" is proof that racial identity both internal and external can be distinct from genetic race.
This is a very uninformed and ignorant opinion to have on the subject matter. Dolezal was not "outed" as white after many years of having existed as black. It has always been known by everyone who has known her that she is white. And she was merely black-passing, which is not the same as being black. People knew she was white. For context, she was born in 1977, and she only began her charade in 2009. By the time, she was not particularly well-known, but the people who did know of her did criticize her. Yes, the controversy only exploded in 2015, but that does not mean that plenty of critiques of her behavior did not exist from years prior. And the reason the controversy began was not because she was "outed", but because a major article was written about her in which her past hate crime allegations and on her lying, and this was enough to draw attention from the news media, and naturally, the news media exacerbated the issue to the point of irritation, because that is what they do. The reality is, she had already been outed even before this, as her parents had already made public statements as early as 2011. But the news media brought this to the attention of people who were completely unaware of her existence previously, hence why controversy began. Portraying it as "we only found about her being white after she was outed" is not only ignorant, but disingenuous. So, no. This does not prove your thesis about how race functions.
In my opinion the point of contention between us is in that you seem to adhere to a kind of special pleading fallacy wherein gender identity is allowed to be solely determined by internal perception while racial identity has to be determined by external perception, or worse a tangentially related physical characteristic.
This is far from special pleading, as both of these claims have actual justification. If anything, I would say your argument is a false equivalence: pretending that race and gender function the same without any good reason to treat them as such, and even when one should expect them, even outside this context, to function differently.
So she lied about her genetic links to the race of her identity. So what? What could that possibly have to do with her identity?
Everything, as I explained above.
That's like outing that a trans person has sex organs that are not in line with their identified gender and then accusing them of lying when they refute it. It might be true, it might not, but more to the point it doesn't matter.
And again, this is a false equivalence, as explained above.
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@nobodyspecial9 I dislike your tendency to cut up my arguments into random sections,... ...so I will simply refer to them in the order your rebuttals appear. -Paragraph 0
I am not dissecting your arguments into random sections. I am dissecting your arguments according to how you yourself separated them on your paragraph structure, each paragraph being its own claim. I acknowledge that you are trying to build a narrative, which is precisely why I make sure to address every single individual claim you make, rather than only focusing on one claim and then pretending that your stance has been fully debunked. I also acknowledge precisely the nnarrative in question at the end of each segment of my reply, after explaining why a particular claim being made is inaccurate. Hence the length of my previous reply. This is also the reason why I copypaste your arguments and quote them in boldface: it makes sure that both you and I know which of my claims addresses which of your claims, and it ensures that in me addressing your claims, I am addressing exactly what you said, and not some strawman of the claim. I put as much effort into being intellectually honest as I expect my opponents to be, even though I am aware that most people I will have discussions with are not intelectually honest, as is the nature of humanity. This is because I care about it. So, despite your qualms, I am not going to stop using this format. If it is a dealbreaker for you, then feel free to stop replying to me. No one is forcing you to jave a conversation you do not wish to have, and if you did, it would only be a waste of my time, not to mention of your time. Besides, contrary to your claim, the topic of my reply is precisely the subject of discussion. To be clear, your thesis here is that race and gender have an equivalence, in such a way that you think transgender identity is valid if and only if transracial identity is. The very topic of my reply is in explaining why that is not the case.
Part 1. I completely agree that biological sex exists on a spectrum, and I have never claimed otherwise... ...as gender roles are an external construct that has its foundations in societal norms and perceptions, an ever changing paradigm. -Paragraph 1
I never said you claimed anything about biological sex. My explanation was there to provide further context for my argument, and without that context, the claims made in the argument would have appeared to any reader simply as complete baseless assertions. I am not conflating anything. Everything I said in that particular section is specifically reliant on the distinction between the three, and I even explained in painful detail how the three are related. However, I never said they are the same thing. The reason I assert gender identity was historically and traditionally solely determined by one's reproductive organs is because this precisely what was considered correct in the majority of developing societies. In the language of SJWs, the traditional view on gender identity is the trans/phobic view (the things one has to do get around censor bots these days), not the modern view we have access to today. The existence of transgender identity is by no means recent, but it certainly has never been societally recognized until modern times, hence why it is not the traditional view. This has absolutely nothing to do with me conflating gender identity with gender roles. It has to do with the historical fact that it has been traditionally inaccurate and even absurd to say that one's gender identity is determined by one's self-perception of it, outside of some minority ethnicities, especially in the West-European values, which are the values that eventually were forced on most of the world many centuries ago.
Traditionally, gender roles are determined by gender identity. But this is not what my reply is contesting or objecting to. The determination of gender roles from gender identity is fallacious for the reasons I explained. Since the only thing that even has the potential to have functional relevance is gender roles, it should be the case that gender identity should instead be determined by gender roles. As I explained, this is where self-perception comes in, and this explains phenomenologically why self-perception must be the determining factor in gender identity for it to be a coherent and meaningful distinction between individuals in society.
It may be unrealized, but it is fallacious to claim... So when you base your argument on that foundation, your entire argument falls flat. -Paragraph 1
No. The claim "traditionally, gender identity was devoid of self-perpcetion, and so was based solely on one's biological sex (which was traditionally understood to just be one's reproductive organs)" does not imply that I believe that gender is a choice or that gender dysphoria is a novel phenomenon. This is not even a syllogism, so it is impossible for this to be a material implication. When one speaks of past tradition, one speaks about what was held to be true on a societal level, regardless of the actual accuracy of the belief in question. Talking about traditions is not fallacious. I know the distinction between traditional beliefs and what is understood in modernity.
Your claim that biological sex has no functional relevance is proven wrong... They do not cease to exist just because certain individuals do not experience them. -Paragraph 2
This is disingenuous, and a complete misrepresentation of what I said. I never stated, nor implied, that sex drive is non-existent. Many individuals do indeed experience sex drive. Sex drive is the reason why the industry of p**nography exists. It is also one of a few reasons why sexual crimes occur, though not by any means the primary reason. I never denied any of this, and nothing that I said regarding functional relevance of categorization of individuals in-context is in opposition to this. The fact that you are stating this, and then proceeding to assume my motivations for making the claims I never made but you said I made, is just a complete misrepresentation of the concept, and it is also intellectually dishonest.
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@nobodyspecial9 You also argue that gender identity only gains function due to... As such my point about them being two sides of the same coin stands. -Paragraph 3
No. The gender identity of someone else is not determined by how you perceive them. Self-perception is the perception of oneself, not the perception of others. Regardless of your perception of them, their self-perception as it interacts with the gender norms of society determines their own gender identity. Gender norms are also not determined by your perception of them either, since the perception of any one individual person is incapable of dictating gender norms: gender norms are necessarily a sum of perceptions, as they are a societal phenomenon. But besides, as I already explained, gender norms are completely fictitious, since the pre-established norms one's self-perception interacts with for gender identity to occur to begin with are themselves completely arbitrary, meaningless, and based on a tradition we now know to be false. The masculinity and femininity subcultures historically emerged from how society traditionally connected gender roles with one's gender identity. However, as I pointed out, these can conceivably exist independetly of the existence of gender, given that what their existence is also determined by several other major factors I mentioned in my reply. And these subcultures are themselves entirely subjective anyway: their existence is contingent on several factors independent of gender, but their determination for any given individual is not, as there is not even an objective metric that is capable of distinguishing the two. Society is able to dictate that masculinity and femininity exist, but it is unable to dictate how or where one fits in that distinction.
Part 2 Despite your claims to the contrary, race is not based solely on external features. Race is also a social construct that has gained relevance due to subcultures in the same way that gender has. -Paragraph 4
Race is indeed a social construct, because race has no basis in the laws of nature, it is a completely made up form of categorization of individuals that is arbitrary and meaningless in origin, and made up solely for the purpose of justifying oppression against one group of people or another. I never disputed this. This does not imply that determination of one's race is not societal and that there is no objective metric by which one determines how one fits into the social construct. I already mentioned that race is indeed tied to culture in more than way, but how it is tied to culture is very different from how gender is tied to culture.
You are conflating colorism, and racism based on color,... This statement smacks of ignorance. -Paragraph 4
The statement does indeed smack of ignorance. Thankfully, I never actually made this claim. You are twisting my words, presenting them to mean something completely different from what I actually said. So much for representing my argument fairly. I am not conflated race with colorism. The fact that I used the language that the two are inextricably connected implies that I acknowledge a distinction between them in the first place, and I furthermore explicitly stated that race is also inextricably linked to one's cultural history, geographic location, heritage, ethnicity, among other things. You are completely ignoring this. I am not so dishonest to assume whether this is due to a lapse of judgment on your part, or out of malicious intent, but you can stop pretending you present my arguments more fairly than you think I represent yours, at any rate.
If one’s racial identity is not... ...into classifications similar to gender identity. -Paragraph 4
No, such reasons do exist. I provided them in my reply, and rather than addressing them head on, you decided to ignore them, and pretend that the only factor I considered when discussing racial identity was colorism. This is dishonest on your part.
And if race exists... ...unarbitrary and meaningful reality of race fails to hold. -Paragraph 4
Yes,... if.
Part 3 I believe that I have already answered this claim. Your biased language aside, you have yet to prove that she didn’t truly believe her claim. You have also failed to prove why her supposed lack of black ancestors matters. -Paragraph 5
I never claimed that she did not truly believe her claim. This is completely tangential to the point I actually made. I have no obligation to prove to you a claim I never made. I have briefly overviewed why ancestry matters in the segment of my reply on race. You completely have misrepresented that segment of my reply, and pretended I did not connect race to anything else besides colorism. So, no, you have not answered anything.
Parts 4, 5, and 6... ...which is the very definition of special pleading. -Paragraph 6
The only thing you did was misrepresent my arguments more than once and twist my words to conclude that I made claims I never made, and then address those claims, rather than addressing the claims I actually did make. So, no, your thesis does not stand.
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@BlarglemanTheSkeptic2 From a fraction of a second, until 370 kya, the entire universe was like the inside of a star: super hot, super high pressure, composed of nuclei and electrons that were FAR too hot to stick together, and photons EVERYWHERE, being emitted and absorbed and electrically charged matter.
The universe was very hot, dense, and pressurized, yes, but it was nothing like the inside of stars. Nuclei did not exist: quarks were actually free, as the temperature of the universe was above the Hagedorn temperature, 10^12 K. Stars do not achieve these temperature in their interiors.
Then, as the expansion continued, it's like travelling outwards from the center of the star...
No, the cosmic expansion was nothing like this at all. The cosmic expansion is an expansion of spacetime itself: the actual matter embedded in the spacetime is not experiencing any motion.
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@BlarglemanTheSkeptic2 You are beating a dead horse, as I already acknowledged that the hadron epoch started 10^(–6) seconds after the initial moment. However, you continue to be wrong with regards to the existence of matter in the form of plasma, which did not occur until the photon epoch, 10 seconds after the initial moment. I was pretty clear about this in my previous comment. I guess reading comprehension is difficult for most people, though.
An atom is defined as nuclei comprised of baryons (nucleons, to be more precise) with electrons in a state bound to said nuclei. Lone protons do not meet this definition. They do meet the definition of an ion, though, but protons bound to antiprotons, which is what would have existed in the hadron era, are not lone protons, nor are they atoms.
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@dieSpinnt I wouldn't bother. The dude is a troll. He keeps insisting that that I have not admitted to a (minor and careless) mistake I acknowledged I made. He continues to be unnecessarily hostile, utilizing a lot of CAPS LOCK, in the style of what a teenager would do. Also, anyone who tries to cite Wikipedia as a scholarly source of discussion is not worth their salary. He also fails to address the rest of my arguments, while consistently strawmanning my claim. I have a degree in physics, and while I did get a timeframe mixed up, I think it is clear he does not have an actual grasp of what he is talking about. By the way, I have also seen him comment in other threads in this video, as well as other videos I have been watching these past two days. He always does this: antagonizes people over minor details, while being wrong about them, always being rude in the process. I have saved screenshots and sent them to some friends, to laugh over at them. He is not worth it. Your energy would be better spent on someone with intellectual honesty.
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@user-fb2jb3gz1d you keep using indefinites to say it's a fact.
I am not using indefinites.
Close to 0 is not 0. Could is not is. Mostly likely is not is.
These are not indefinites. The reality is that, in the scientific method, there is no such a thing as probability 0 or probability 1. You yourself acknowledged this in your previous reply, by noting that science is ever-changing.
Were you there? NO Was human there? NO
True, but irrelevant. A human does not need to be there in order for us to verify that it happened. Were you there when the colonization of the Americas happened? No. So, according to your logic, we should actually be rejecting the idea that such colonization happened, since according to you, it is not a fact. Is that what you want? Okay, then. That is great, actually, because now, I can hit you with "were you there to experience the resurrection of Jesus?" And I know the answer is "no," because I know you are not 2000 years old. As such, by your own logic, you have an epistemic duty to not accept the resurrection as factual.
See? Your argument only works against your worldview, not against science.
In all those times the experiment was done, how many times were the variables changed?
Plenty.
Now if new findings bring new variables, there is no possible way you can tell me that you know it won't change drastically.
I know it beyond the shadow of any reasonable doubt. There. I said it.
That's just stupidity.
No, it is not. Just because you are scientifically illiterate and you have no understanding of how the scientific method or how scientific linguistics work, it does not mean that experts who have studied physics for at least 3 decades more than you have are being stupid. In fact, you are the one who said in the other thread that simply criticizing someone's purposeful actions when they are vastly more knowledgeable than oneself is stupid. Well, that is literally what you are doing right now.
I'm pointing out that we don't know for a fact that there are no other variables because we don't know exactly what happened.
No, we do not know exactly what happened, but we know more than sufficient information to know that it did happen.
To say it's a fact is BS. To say it's most likely or most probable..........that's correct.
You contradicted yourself in the same sentence. After all, a fact is nothing more than a statement whose probability of being false is so small that it is unreasonable to take seriously. There are no statements whose probability is exactly 0. No such a thing exists.
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@user-fb2jb3gz1d I mean, I do have a degree in physics, but this is not about me. The scientific method is a collective, even global effort. There are millions of physicists around the world that have been contributing to our knowledge of the Big Bang theory for almost a century. It is laughable that you think that all several million of them are utterly stupid, just because you have no understanding of basic science and epistemology.
I agree that 99.999% is not equal to 100%. This is irrelevant. In science, there are no statements which have a 100% probability of being true. It is impossible for such statements to exist, due to the unfalsifiability problem. For example, solipsism is unfalsifiable. There is no method by which you, or anyone else, can prove that solipsism is false. Another example is the gargantuan reincarnation conjecture. What is that, you may ask? It is a conjecture that I literally just made up right now, and here is what it claims: it claims that every 1 second, the universe flashes out of existence, and then comes back into existence an infinitesimal amount of time later, such that the discontinuities in the timeline are unmeasurable. This is unfalsifiable, as well: there exists no method by which you can ever establish that the probability of it being false is 100%, because any objection you throw at it can be addressed trivially, simply by appealing to flashing out and into existence.
None of the statements you consider "facts" have a 100% probability of being true. The Earth being round? That does not have a 100% probability of being true. That the rotation of the Earth takes 24 hours? That does not have a 100% probability of being true. That plant leafs are green dureng springtime? That does not have a 100% probability of being true. That your phone will not crash right now, as you are reading this comment? This does not have a 100% probability of being true. Absolute epistemic certainty is impossible, and the scenarios presented demonstrate this pretty convincgly.
This is why, rather than adopting a dumb definition of "fact," which you propose we should do, which would result in facts not existing at all, scientists opt to not work with the concept of epistemic certainty, and instead use Bayesian epistemology supplemented by empiricist methods. This has always worked fine for us, and it is how the technology you are using to type these comments have been working so well.
I read that we can't see past the cosmic dark ages, a period that lasted from 370 000 to 1 billion years after the Big Bang.
Uh, no. It would be about 150 million years, and no, it is false to say we could not see past that. What is true is that there were no stars during those dark ages, but light still definitely traveled around the universe. That is how see the cosmic microwave background.
So because of this, we can't see when the first stars were born, 100 to 500 millions years after the big bang.
The numbeds you gave now literally contradict the ones you gave in your previous sentence. Are you so bad at this that you cannot paraphrase a number correctly from a website without contradicting yourself?
Read that on phys.org
I have read articles from them before. I guarantee you, they are nowhere near so badly informed that they would make mistakes this dumb. So, I have no idea where you actually got it from.
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@lukeriely4468 This is stupid and unreasonable. Human beings are not mind readers. If you say a sentence, then I have no reason to expect you intended to say something different than what you actually said. When I try to have conversations with people, then I expect them to have the extremely basic communication skill of knowing how to say exactly what they mean to say. This is something 8-year olds learn how to do in grade school. If you failed to communicate the point you wanted to communicate because you made the choice to use a sentence which does not mean said point, then this is your fault, not anyone else's.
Saying, please, before nailing someone to a wall is still nailing someone to a wall.
This is completely irrelevant to what we are talking about here. In fact, there is nothing analogous between this conversation we are having, and this scenario you are describing. However, let me add this: in an scenario like this, literally no one in their sane mind would care about the intentions of the person doing the nailing. No, they would care about what their actions. Communication is no different, as I explained above.
Simple, really.
Calling it "simple" when you are the one failing to understand requires a certain type of graceless audacity.
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Some sentences are grammatically correct, but completely meaningless and incoherent. "Why does the Sun smell like the number 5?" is a sentence that is grammatically correct and mechanically correct in the English language. Is the question meaningful or coherent? No, it is a nonsensical question. Someone naive may think that we have an obligation to answer this question, and may even choose to call it a primordial question, and will he left unsatisfied at the fact that the question has not been answered. But the truth is that, it does not matter how much the asker protests, the question itself is nonsensical and meaningless, and so there is nothing to answer: ultimately, the question is not really asking anything, hence the question is not answerable. It is unanswerable, not because there is some fundamental flaw in the way humans reason philosophically, but rather, because the person who asked the question lacks an understanding of how meaningful questions work.
I would very much argue that "why is there something rather than nothing?" is another example of a question that is nonsensical. The question seems reasonable if you are not thinking about it at all: it is grammatically correct in the English language, and it appeals to our very flawed intuitions, so it seems like the question deserves an answer. But upon careful inspection, this question is just as nonsensical as my constructed example. How so? Because "something" and "nothing" are not well-defined metaphysical or ontological concepts. These words are merely consequences of our flawed intuition, and of the fact that abstraction is something that we have to train ourselves to do with imperfect crutches, rather than do naturally, since our brains did not really evolve to be good at abstraction. The words "something" and "nothing" can help us to transition from relying on intuition alone to relying on critical thought and abstraction, but ultimately, they serve no other purpose in the grand scheme of philosophy. And this is not for lack of trying. We have been trying to define what "something" is for millennia, and have failed so miserably, that we are not any close to solving that problem than the Ancient Greeks were. But at least now we know that maybe it just is not possible to solve the problem, because "something" does not embody any particular concept at all to begin with. Also, "why" questions tend to, very typically, be meaningless on their own right. "Who" is a question predicate that wants an individual for an answer. "Where" is a question predicate that wants a location for an answer. "Why" is a predicate that wants... some answer. But it does not tell you what kind of answer it allows. It is, in a rigorous sense, not actually a question predicate at all, which is how so many "why" questions end up being just incoherent. You can, of course, counterargue that "why" does ask for a specific type of answer: an explanation. But on its face, this is stupid, since all answers are explanations, by definition. The craftier among you will be more careful and instead counterargue that "why" asks specifically for justification. But this does still render most "why" questions meaningless, which proves my point. How does it render them meaningless? Because justification is an very specific category of answer that is only applicable if the question is being asked about the action of a sentient individual. For example, asking "Why did you cheat on me?" is very sensible, since you are demanding for a justification for an action. "Why did he cry so much last night?" is also sensible question, since again, it is asking about an action. But "why is the sun red?" is not a sensible question, because it assumes that 0) "being red" is an actuon (it is not), 1) the sun chose to be red (it did not). Of course, we do often use "why" and "how" interchangeably, but this only proves my point further: if you want to have a chance that your question is actually coherent, you should instead ask "how is it that there is something rather than nothing?". But even then, the question is still nonsense, due to the problem aforementioned concerning "something" and "nothing" not being well-defined.
So, being that the question is plainly absurd and incoherent, I am not particularly bugged by the question or interested in trying to answer it, and the fact that we still have such a primal urge to insist that the question needs an answer in spite of all the aforementioned things tells me that we have to not truly reached the age of reason. We are still in the age of instinct and intuition.
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Language is a layer on top of signaling, that both sender and receiver should understand. It works as a coder/decoder, coded from the sender, decoded from the receiver, and this language is carried on top of a materialistic medium. So "language" is not the medium itself, nor is it the signals, but it is the coded signals that we call "superimposed."
What you provided here is a description of how language physically propagates. It is not a definition of what language is, and it is certainly not how a linguist would describe language. A language is just a system of signs with an assigned meaning that can be extracted by the interpreter, together with rules or a structure that indicate how distinct signs interact together. Given that language is a tool, a sender is often required for this tool to actually be useful, but as far as what a language is, a sender doing an encoding at all is not necessary. In any case, you only need an interpreter decoding the assigned meaning, whose corresponding signs may or may noy have been put there by a sender.
So in the examples of flowers and insects, that flowers develop shiny or colorful or attractive appearance, these are signals to insects to trigger them for feedback, that's a communication system for sure.
No one disputes this, but this discussion is not about flowers signaling to insects. This discussion is about the relationship between the DNA molecule family, and language.
However, we can't say it's purely language here, as there's no coder/decoder, or superimposed messages (or there could be a basic one, I am not a biologist to identify the meaning of animals signals).
I find it absolutely hilarious whenever you theists do this. You guys love doing this thing where you acknowledge that you are completely unqualified to speak on a subject, decide to make a bunch of bold, factually incorrect statements on that subject, and then close it with "...buuuuuuut, I am just an untrained layperson in this subject, what do I know?," as if this somehow strengthens your argument at all. It is truly comical. I always find myself wondering why you guys even bother with the disclaimers anyway, when you still present your statements with all the seriousness in the world, and with all the expectation that we are supposed to accept them as true, and that it supports whatever point you are trying to make. Should you not be taking more of a humble approach, trying to learn more about the topic, before making the decision to present these arguments? I always wondered why most people fail to do this. If you know you are unqualified to make these claims, then you should not be making them at all. This is not to say you are not allowed to have opinions, but you probably should refrain from deductively coming to conclusions you are not willing to budge on without doing some very thorough self-fact-checking.
But "language" as superimpised signals on top, can't emerge.
Sure it can. Pareidolia exists.
C++, Java, etc., have never evolved by their own, but an intelligent IT developer designed them, either directly, or indirectly, and they can sure develop (mostly not on their own).
You are talking about computer languages here. Computer languages are a subclass of artificial languages. Obviously, artificial languages cannot emerge on their own, that is literally what the adjective "artificial" means. But, I hate to break to you, not all languages are artificial, and not all languages work the way computer languages specifically work.
...and accordingly, I see no reason to expect that human language just emerged as well out of nothing, if not built-in already or pre-designed with.
You mean that all of the evidence that we have for the theory of linguistic evolution (which is just a special case of the theory fo biological evolution) is not sufficient for you, somehow? You mean to say that because artificial languages cannot emerge on their own, non-artificial ones cannot do so either, despite the fact that you have absolutely no valid justification to make this strange, bold extrapolation to all languages from what is only a tiny subclass of languages?
If you rejected that last point, then we have another problem with "the coevolution between evolving entities." Here, you then assumed that these evolving entities are not intelligent, or are lifeless.
What is wrong with you? You are not even going to wait and listen for my explanation for why I disagree, and instead, you are going to decide I disagree for X reason, even if you have no way of proving it? You are so arrogant. I am sorry, but this behavior so many of you theists exhibit is the reason why many atheists have given up on trying to have reasonable conversations with you: because with this kind of dishonest, rude behavior, you are communicating to us the fact that you are NOT interested in having an open conversation, you are not interested in learning anything new, you are not willing to correct your beliefs on the basis of any information presented to you, you are not even willing to listen to what we have to say on a given subject. You have decided that we are going to say something before we even actually say it, and if we fail to meet that expectation, you are going to ignore that and move on anyway, following your script, which is why nothing we say to you actually matters. You guys do not know how to have a conversation, you only know how to evangelize and listen to yourselves talk.
So, I do apologize, but I have a difficult time taking you seriously whenever you pull rude dishonest nonsense such as this. It is a conversation-breaker. I would like to only address the actual arguments presented and not have to comment on you as a person, but that is not a reasonable stance when you behave so poorly that you are not even allowing us to say our part. I point out these behaviors so that you guys can stop doing them. And if it bothers you that I have spent this much time commenting on your character and not so much on your actual argument, then it is on you to ask yourself "why? What did I do? What should I be changing?" Reflect more upon yourself.
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In all of the levels of mentioned interaction in the video, between different cells or organisms or animals, they are all living things, with certain intelligence.
The assertion that all living things have certain intelligence is a complete baseless assertion. Here you are, again, a non-biologist, trying to pretend you know more about the topic than biologists, making a claim so bold that virtually no biologist would agree with it with as much confidence as you have asserted it. And despite your confidence, you do not make even a semblance of an effort to try to support your claim.
As IT engineers, we categorize things in layers,...
Yes, whenever it concerns something in IT, you can do that. We are not discussing something that concerns IT. We are discussing biology. IT engineers should keep quiet when it comes to discussing biology, unless you are actually going to provide all the scholarly sources to back your claims up (which I know you will not do, given your attitude thus far).
Even if we go with the hypothesis that layer 1 & 2 (till the signaling) emerged on its own, we have never observed any on-top layer being developed on its own, really never.
This is a completely baseless assertion, once again. This is you, an engineer who lacks an understanding of biology, making speculations on how biology should work based on your perspective as an engineer, and then deciding that certain ideas are facts based on these speculations. You are using what little you do know, and using that to interpret a list of hypotheses you could not possibly know is factual, and coming to a conclusion from there. To be fair, I am not insulting you. I am not a biologist either, I am just as unqualified as you are when it comes to this (though I do know many reliable sources I can consult if I wish). The difference is: I am not the one jumping to conclusions. You are.
So, it's not God of the Gaps here,...
It absolutely is. You, a competent IT engineer, are not a biologist, so you have very limited knowledge and understanding of facts and concepts from biology, as am I. We are both ignorant, when it comes to biology, but you are using this ignorance as an argument that God must be the source of intelligence and language, because you lack the sufficient understanding to make a conclusion as to how it could have happened on its own. This is, categorically, a textbook example of what the God of the Gaps fallacy us. And I am qualified to say that.
...assuming languages and coding is a self-made product is not scientific by any means, as it has never been observed, nor does the current evidence point to be self-created language.
Pareidolia is a phenomenon that has been observed repeatedly, and it is one of several ways in which language can develop without a sender intending for it to exist. Also, the gradual evolution of human languages is natural: no one programmed a piece of technology for these languages to evolve. Also, as a non-linguist, you really should stop speaking so confidently on matters of linguistics as well.
All observations leads to the same [conclusion], that any design needs a designer...
Citation needed. Also, this is a red herring, because it distracts from the fact that you have not proven that DNA (and the universe in general) is a design. If it is not a design, then it does not need a designer. You calling it a design is a completely baseless assertion.
...we have never managed to observe a self-designed system,...
Self-catalytic chemical systems would like to have a talk with you.
...but it's unproven, non-observable hypothesis.
The existence of self-catalytic systems is a fact. We have observed them repeatedly. You can do a basic Google search. I would provide sources, but I have no incentive to, seeing that you have none to provide yourself.
The problem is that this "layered" vision is missing in many biologists,...
Yes, it is missing, because it is woefully inaccurate. It is inapplicable to biological systems. It is only applicable when the concepts in IT engineering are relevant, which they are not here. What is with engineers trying to pretend that all other disciplines of scientific study have to borrow their methods to be valid? I have met way too many of you who pull this nonsense.
However, life, mind, or intelligence, are not phenomena, these are facts that we can't even agree on their proper definition...
Us not agreeing on their definition does not make them not phenomena. Your argument is not remotely close to being valid.
While, for materialistic science...
Materialistic science? This is nonsense. There is no such a thing as non-materialistic science.
material is the medium to carry data on, and material can largely impact the quality of data for sure, but it isn't data...
This is false, and we know this is false because of quantum thermodynamics and quantum information theory. Information. All physical systems, material and non-material, have an inherent data content to them, that cannot be separated from the system itself, because it is a property of the system, much like energy is.
God, and that definition can be really enough for religions...
No, it cannot be, because not all religions agree with this definition. Shinto and Daoism categorically disagree with this definition, for example, and so do some sects of Neo-Confucianism.
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@EskChan19 Slavery, for example, could be seen as morally just, in a society based on maximizing happiness, making the majority as happy as possible, even to the detriment of a few.
There are many problems with this:
0. You are conflating "just" with "moral," and treating them as synonymous. They are not synonymous. They often align, yes, but that which is just is not necessarily that which is moral. Besides, the comment you are responding to is using the word "optimal," so neither word applies here.
1. You are conflating "society believes that slavery maximizes happiness" with "slavery actually maximizes happiness (regardless of what people believe)." Only the latter would contribute towards slavery being moral. Societal beliefs can be wrong. When society used to believe that blood-letting was medically effectively and scientifically supported, their belief was wrong.
2. You are ignoring that, the way the definition is presented, an action has to both maximize happiness AND minimize suffering. Since your example does not accomplish both, it is not optimal. Now, you pointed out that accomplishing both may be impossible, but you have not actually demonstrated that the scenario being discussed is an example of an scenario with such an impossibility. There could very well exist an alternative to slavery that maintains equal levels of happiness, but reduces suffering further.
3. Even if it turns out that in a given scenario, there is no way to both maximize happiness and minimize suffering, that does not suddenly make slavery acceptable. What it does mean is that in that scenario, there simply is no optimal course or action. Dealing with a scenario with no optimal course of action is uncomfortable, but that lack of comfort does not make it a valid objection.
A society built on minimizing suffering would forbid slavery, but might allow human sacrifices.
No, probably not, since human sacrifices cause, almost assuredly, suffering comparable to that induced by slavery.
If you have enough resources to sustain 99 people, then if the 100th is born, what to do? Keep them and cause 100 people to suffer because no one gets enough? Or cast someone out who will likely just suffer for a while alone in the woods, until they get mauled by a hungry bear? Or just sacrifice them in a quick, as painless as possible way, and thus, allow 99 people to continue with enough resources, and preventing the 1 from suffering needlessly as well?
There is so much information missing from this scenario, the only rational answer is "No one knows." No real-world scenario will require you to take action with this little, tiny amount of information. In a real world scenario, you would actually know what exactly these resources are (is it food? Housing? Clothes?); you would know exactly the reasons behind why we only have enough resources for 99 people; you would figure out the circumstances behind how 1 extra person was born, even when we agreed to not have this happen; you would know the people personally, and you would be able to figure out what course of action would cause the other 99 people the most amount of happiness, and the least amount of suffering, and you would be able to map out the relationship between happiness and suffering in this case, in order to try to figure out what to do; etc. Even in that case, the answer would still not be easy to think about, which is why being a leader in a political setting is always a difficult task. This is why education became a thing.
You have essentially created a scenario with so little information, that making a determination of what action is optimal is categorically impossible due to a lack of information and a lack of realism, and then used this impossibility to... what, argue that OP is wrong about optimal actions being defined as maximizing happiness and minimizing suffering? This is essentially a God of the Gaps fallacy, except you are not actually arguing that a god exists. I am not even sure what your point is. If your point is merely that "determining what is moral is difficult in practice," then, yes, everyone agrees, and I think OP knows this. If your point is that "whether an action is optimal or not depends on many, many variables," then, again, OP probably already knows this.
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To be fair, these mutually exclusive deities are only mutually exclusive if you include some minor petty details about the what defines the deity. It is possible to define the concept of deity such that it encompasses every deity in every currently existing religion, without also being unreasonably broad and including mundane concepts, though constructing such a definition is a different story. Religions differ not very significantly with regards to deities, just with regards to other theological and metaphysical aspects. Of course, the names given to the deity in each religion are different. For example, Judaism and Christianity and Islam all worship the same deity, categorically, even though each religion gives a different name to the same deity. But it would be unreasonable to say that the deity in all three religions are mutually exclusive to one another. In fact, the three religions differ not in who the deity is, but what the deity did. In this regard, it is unsurprising that a theological argument for deities is unable to actually distinguish between those deities.
Of course, the arguments are absurd, but their inability to distinguish petty details concerning deities is not what makes them absurd.
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The cardinality of the two planets' orbit sets being equal isn't the same as the number of orbits being equal.
It is the same. It is the same, by definition.
If the first elements of the sets are 1 and 30, respectively, and in both sets, the value of the successive elements increases at fixed but different rates, then at what point do the values of elements become equal?
Firstly, the premise of your question is wrong, because there is no such a thing as a "successive" element in a set. If you want a notion of next element in a set, or a successive element in a set, then you need not just a set, but a partial order on that set. A partial order is a binary relation on a set that is reflexive, transitive, and antisymmetric. You can induce a partial order on a set by having a sequence from the set of natural numbers to it, and the partial order is induced by making the sequence monotonic with respect to that partial order. Consider the set of natural numbers N, and consider the set 30·N := {n natural : n = 30·m, m natural}. You can take the standard partial order of N, restrict it to 30·N, and this forms a partial order on 30·N.
Secondly, by asking about different rates of increase, you must be talking about functions. However, there are problems with this consideration, as you shall later see.
The answer is that the values are never equal, the later will always be greater than the former as time trends towards the infinite.
Yes, if I have a function f of real numbers with f(x) = x, and a function g of real numbers with g(x) = 30·x, then it is true that for every 0 < x, f(x) < g(x). It also is true that the functions f and g diverge unbounded as x grows unbounded. However, this is completely irrelevant to the scenario being discussed. The question being asked is not "what happens to the number of orbits as time gets bigger?", the question being asked is "what is the number of orbits for each planet after an infinite amount of time?" The answer to the question is that, for both planets, Aleph(0) units of time have passed. This is not a contradiction or an absurdity.
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@frede1905 Surely you can vary the value of some parameter, keeping the other parameters the same, and then use the laws of physics to predict how the universe would evolve with that other value.
Mathematically, yes, you can do that, but there is no evidence that this is physically meaningful at all. There is no evidence that there exist any undetermined parameters which could have been different than what they are, and there is no evidence that, even if they could have been different than what they are, that it changing would not somehow lead to changes in all other parameters. The claim that these things are true is fundamentally unfalsifiable. Also, again, there is no reason to assume a universe different than ours has to obey the same laws than ours does, so this talk about considering different universes as being just variations of our own universe with different is, again, unfalsifiable. There is no evidence of such a thing, and there will not be such evidence in the near future, probably. Playing around with the mathematics of our current laws is physically meaningless, if we cannot confirm that a different universe could have existed, instead of our own, satisfying such mathematics.
Plug a different value for the cosmological constant than that which is observed into the Friedmann equations, for example.
There is no evidence that the cosmological constant could have been any different than what it is, or that if the universe had been any different than it is, that it would still have satisfied Friedmann's equations. These assertions are, again, unfalsifiable.
If fine tuning appears in the model, then as mentioned before, there would appear to be something suspicious in the model, and the better, revised model (which surely must exist, as our models are incomplete, as you say) should somehow resolve it.
The "if fine tuning appears" part is the problem here, since any assertion that there is fine tuning is necessarily unfalsifiable, due to things I have mentioned above. Yes, it is true to say that a model having fine tuning is a problem, I am not denying this. However, you can never actually establish that the model has such a problem, because in order to so, you have to make unfalsifiable assumptions.
That's the fine tuning argument in physics anyway.
In the assumption that there really do exist undetermined parameters in our models (as is the case with the current models), we want to find new models which do not have such undetermined parameters. It is true to say that this is a real problem that is being attempted to solve, but this has nothing to do with the notion of whether the universe could have actually been different than what it is, and how different it would be if it were. At best, this concept of "what if the value of this parameter were different?" is just an inaccurate simplification presented to laypeople in order to basically answer the question "why do we care that there are undetermined parameters?"
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@yohanessaputra9274 Firstly, I didn't insult you.
Yes, you did. You told us to "read the literature", presupposing that we have not read it before this discussion, and that we are thus ignorant on it.
I was merely responding to what Alan Animus said about his dislike about the term "timeless".
He adequately had already explained that his dislike of the term has nothing to do with the neutrality of the term, which you should have known, had you bothered to carefully read the conversation before trying to butt in. Your response was to deliberately ignore that, and then tell us to "read the literature", with implications that I already explained.
Secondly, you exchange with me by Ad Hominem and you presupposed me a theist.
At no point in this conversation have I presented any ad hominem to you. I have also not presupposed you a theist. I said your comment makes you look like an ignorant theist. I never said I believe you are a theist. The fact that you do not know the difference proves my point about your arrogance.
That's a one way to have an exchange lol.
It is the way of exchange that you chose.
I feel of things we will talk is probably just insulting each other, so good luck with your life
You wanted to insult us, so I decided to reply accordingly. If you want to stop being called out for insulting people, then you need to stop insulting people. The fact that you are even pointing this out exposes you as a troll. You know what would be conducive to a productive conversation where I would glady be discussing time and philosophy, instead of your own insults? A conversation where you do not begin by insulting people perhaps. Anyway, I will not waste my time having any further interactions with you, because I have been on the Internet for a long time, and I know that feeding trolls is a bad idea. Farewell.
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@Melesniannon What you are appealing to is a different concept altogether, a concept from measure theory, which is not about determining the number of elements in the set, but measuring the length of the sets. Namely, there is a function called the Lebesgue measure, which, when applied to a set, gives you the length, area, or volume, or the set, depending on whether the set has dimension 1, 2, or 3. Since the intervals (1, 2) and (1, 3) are one-dimensional sets, they have lengths, and the Lebesgue measure, when applied to these sets, gives their lengths, namely 1 and 2. In general, if you have an interval (a, b) with a =< b, and the Lebesgue measure λ, then λ((a, b)) = b – a. So λ((1, 2)) = 1, and λ((1, 3)) = 2. However, even though the Lebesgue measure of the sets is different, their cardinality is the same.
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@Melesniannon I think you misunderstood my example, it's not about length, it's about being able to understand the set in a second dimension which leads to the understanding that even though they are infinite in one way, one infinite set will, given the same parameters, always be larger than the other.
I disagree. This absolutely is about length. You are talking about meter sticks, and comparing an interval of length 1 cm with an interval of length 2 cm, and claiming that while both intervals are infinite, the latter is larger than the former. Meter sticks are precisely about lengths of intervals, not about the number of elements that are members of the intervals. Of course, if you intended to imply something different, then your analogy does not work for your purposes.
A 2 cm wide line extended infinitely is always twice the area as a 1 cm wide line given that they are both extended towards infinity equally.
Yes, it has twice the area, but it also has exactly the same amount of area. This is because Aleph(0) = 2·Aleph(0), so if they both have Aleph(0) square units of area, then one has twice the area of the other, and they have the same area. I am unsure if you are meaning to imply they do not have the same area, but they absolutely do.
A planet that revolves 30x every time another planet revolves 1x, always makes 30x more revolutions, even when time is extended infinitely.
Mm, no, not quite. For every real number x > 0, it is true that 30·x > x, so 30·x and x are unequal. However, this does not hold for x being an infinite quantity.
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@andresvillarreal9271 The claim that the infinite cannot be traversed is something that you have to discuss with mathematicians, not with philosophers.
Thank you! This desperately needed to be said.
In fact, there are a gazillion ways in which, through artifacts of language and not of science, mathematics or good philosophical reasoning, you end up treating infinity as a number, and not a cardinality.
This may just be unnecessary nitpicking, but as the connotation of the conjunction "and" in the English language is more ambiguous than it is in formal logic, I should remark that a cardinality is a number. It is unclear whether your comment is meant to imply otherwise or not, but just in case, I wrote this clarifying remark.
You can add an element to a set that has a cardinality of infinity.
Infinity is not itself a cardinality, though infinite cardinalities do exist. It would be more accurate to say that you can add an element to a set with infinite cardinality. This may seem like a pedantic distinction, but actually, it is quite an important one.
And the new set also has a cardinality of infinity, creating the apparent contradiction that infinity plus one is infinity. But there is no contradiction because infinity is a cardinality, not a number.
This is incorrect, and there are a few misconceptions to unpack here. As I clarified earlier, a cardinality is a number. Every cardinality is a von Neumann ordinal number, and every von Neumann ordinal number is a hyperreal number. As I also clarified earlier, infinity is not a cardinality. Infinity is the property of a set S of there existing an injective function f : N —> S, where N is the set of natural numbers. Infinite sets are said to have infinite cardinality, but different infinite sets have different infinite cardinalities, which is why infinity cannot be called a cardinality itself. The set of natural numbers has cardinality Aleph(0), which is the smallest infinite cardinality. Aleph(0) satisfies the property that Aleph(0) = Aleph(0) + 1, and Aleph(0) = 2·Aleph(0). The set of real numbers has a larger cardinality, the cardinality 2^Aleph(0), which is not equal to Aleph(0), but is larger instead. Assuming the continuum hypothesis, this means the set of real numbers has cardinality Aleph(1).
As for the equation that Aleph(0) = Aleph(0) + 1, it seems to be an apparent contradiction due to our preconceived, erroneous intuition, regarding cancellability. When we work with a commutative algebraic structure (S, +), where S is nonempty, we say that an element x of S is +-cancellable if x + a = x + b. If every element of S is +-cancellable, then we say that + is a cancellable operation. Every algebraic structure you learn about in primary schools, and even in undergraduate colleges, is a structure where + is cancellable. So by intuition, we tend to assume that every algebraic structure in mathematics must satisfy this property. So when we encounter Aleph(0) = Aleph(0) + 1, we immediately assume that cancellability holds, and so we conclude from this that 0 = 1 must be true. However, we know that 0 = 1 is false, so we believe there is a contradiction. Since most people are non-mathematicians, they lack the training to recognize that the problem is not with Aleph(0), but with our cancellability assumption. In fact, historically, it was impossible to know this was the case, because the study of non-cancellative algebraic structures did not develop until many centuries after the topic of infinity had become already controversial. This is where the apparent contradiction comes from.
When you say that the infinite cannot be traversed you are declaring that infinity is a number, and everything you do from that point onward is pure garbage.
I disagree. I would argue that the word "traversing" is not sufficiently well-defined for this conversation to hold, but even if we hold on to just intuition, saying "the infinite cannot be traversed" reasonably translates to "infinite objects do not exist", which in modern terms, is understood as simply rejecting the set-theoretic axiom of infinity. Historically, this makes sense, since axiomatic set theory did not exist until Georg Cantor came along, and it was he who provided a framework for working with infinite sets in seriousness and good faith, by way of equivalence classes and functions, and this happened centuries after the infinite was already controversial.
The answer to everything in the first minutes of your video is that those philosophers did not know much about mathematics.
This much is very true, though, in their defense, neither did anyone else, at least prior to Leonhard Euler.
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@TheWrongBrother The reason for philosophical assessment other than mathematical stems from the ambiguity of results from mathematical operations on infinity when viewed either as a cardinality or a natural number
Prior to the 19th century, you would have been correct in stating that the results of operations with the infinite would have ambiguous and with many apparent absurities. However, we live in the 21st century, and von Neumann-Bernays-Gödel set theory is a tentative foundational theory of mathematics that exists. Rigor for the infinite is well-understood now, and there is nothing ambiguous about operating with the infinite.
♾ + 1 = ♾
Here is where you are relying on an outdated idea of infinity. Infinity is a property of sets. Specifically, a set S is called infinite if and only if there exists an injective function f : N —> S, where N is the set of von Neumann natural numbers. Infinity is not a direct description of the size of a set, let alone a number. For example, the set of natural numbers has cardinality Aleph(0). The set of real numbers has cardinality 2^Aleph(0). Both sets are infinite, but it is false that Aleph(0) = 2^Aleph(0). In fact, according to Cantor's theorem, Aleph(0) < 2^Aleph(0). Aleph(0) and 2^Aleph(0) are numbers, and are infinite cardinalities, but neither of them is called "infinity", and "infinity" is not a number. So what you should have written is that Aleph(0) + 1 = Aleph(0), which is indeed correct.
since the mathematical size of the infinite quantity has grown by one, its logical size has not been impacted in any way and still remains infinity.
Wait, what? Your sentence is extremely confusing. You are making a distinction between mathematical size and logical size, but in reality, you have defined neither. Also, because you wrote "since" at the beginning of your intended sentence, you are indicating that the logical size of the infinite quantity not changing and remaining infinite is a necessary consequence of the mathematical size being increased by 1. However, the meaning of this, and therefore, its truth, is far from obvious.
If two separate events added to the infinite quantity, how would you know the size difference from two separate view points?
I am not sure I understand your question, but if there exists a bijection f between an infinite set X and an infinite set Y, then the two sets, by definition, have the same cardinality, i.e, the same number of elements. This is true, regardless of whether there are elements of Y that are not elements of X, or vice versa.
Hence philosophical assessment bodes better for this analysis...
What your comment has demonstrated seems to be the opposite of this. Philosophical assessment of the infinite is inadequate to understand the infinite, which is why no good understanding of the infinite existed historically until mathematicians took it upon themselves to set the theory of sets on top of a rigorous foundation. To put it more succintly: the ontology of infinite objects is the theory of sets. There is no other way to do it.
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@TheWrongBrother The usual assumption is that the variable V(N0) is linear and the observer assessing it is 1.
No. There are no linear variables required in this discussion. There are no observers required either.
At the end of the set...
There is no end to such a set. If a set has order type ω, then there is no such a thing as its last element.
If the V(N0) is moments in time with the assumption that there have been infinite moments in time till then, can you get to the present?
Yes, you can.
as the last element, if another moment is added, you immediately become the past and are excluded from the state of the present and by that it becomes impossible to get to the present.
This is nonsensical, since (0) time does not work that way, time is a coordinate in spacetime, (1) there is no last element in such a set.
its logically impossible to observe the last moment since new ones are added every 'time'.
No, observation is completely irrelevant here.
If you take an infinite crowd concert (non linear set with infinite elements).
There is no such a thing as a linear set. Stop saying nonsense and inventing terminology that means nothing.
how would you establish that everyone in the set has their lighters on?
Via a bijection.
Traversing a set with Aleph-Naught cardinality is logically impossible and absurd from a math/philosophy point of view.
No, it is not. Your understanding of mathematics and set theory is just REALLY bad.
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Also, saying they are of the "same infinity", is not accurate, or rather, it is imprecise. The set of real numbers has a larger cardinality than the set of integers, while the set of integers has the same cardinality as the set of natural numbers. In other words, the cardinal number corresponding to the set of real numbers is larger than the cardinal number corresponding to the set of integers, which also corresponds to the set of natural numbers. Specifying that you are talking about cardinal numbers here is important, because a more fundamental type of infinite number are the ordinal numbers, but even though the set of integers and the set of natural numbers have the sams cardinal number, they do not have the same ordinal number. The ordinal number for the set of natural numbers is ω, while the one corresponding to the integers is ω + ω. The ordinal number corresponding to the real numbers is some ordinal number greater than or equal to 2^ω, possibly ω(1).
You also would be better of explaining why a pair of sets have the same cardinality or a different cardinality. If there exists an injective function f from a set X to a set Y, then the cardinality of X is less than or equal to the cardinality of Y. This defines a well-order on the class of cardinal numbers.
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@fokocrispis4036 If we say that existence is "something with qualities", nothingness would...
"Something" is not a well-defined metaphysical concept either, so trying to piggy back off "something" to get to a well-defined metaphysical "nothing" is not going to work. Appealing to common sense is also not going to do you any favors.
Nothingness would lack all qualities.
This statement is nonsensical, since, at least in the context of how "quality" is defined in essentially every context, "lacking all qualities" is itself a quality. What you are doing is akin to saying that there is a set of all sets, which is known to be impossible, as it is a logical contradiction. Besides, what does "lacking a quality" even mean? In a formal context, it means literally nothing, since if you "lack" a quality, then you have the opposite quality, hence you still have a quality.
If your nothingness has 0% of events happening, you are not talking about nothingness in the first place.
Exactly. Somehow, you missed the point of the comment, though, and failed to use this as the key premise to conclude that nothingness is incoherent as a concept, which is precisely what the comment set out to prove in the first place. You disagreed for no reason. And ultimately, nothing that you have described in your reply is a sensical definition of "nothing" either, so you have sort of reinforced the point. "Nothing" is not a coherent idea, it is merely a flawed intuition that humans naturally have.
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@fokocrispis4036 but the important part there is that everything in existence has a quality.
That begs the question of what "existence" is. Because, as pointed out in the video, "existence" is not really well-defined idea either. And if it was, then it would no longer really be a matter of ontology. Besides, I can make the claim that "there exists one entity such that this entity has no properties", and I do not think you can prove that this statement is false. This makes your definition of "nothing" inadequate.
Lacking all qualities is a contradiction because of language but it is by itself not a quality.
No, this has nothing to do with language. The contradiction would remain if I used formal logic to state this instead of a natural language. So it is, in fact, a quality.
Lacking a quality also doesn't mean you have the opposite. Lacking size doesn't make something big or small, it just doesn't have size.
This is a bad analogy. Lacking quality would better be compared with lacking bigness, or lacking smallness. Also, if you lack size, then you are sizeless, the opposite quality of being size-having or "sizeful". Of course you do not become big or small if you lack size: I never claimed you do, because those are not "opposites" of "sizelessness". This is a misrepresentation of my point.
I disagreed with the original comment, because I don't see that as nothingness.
The original argument does not claim to see that as "nothing" either. So you did miss the point.
The point in the original comment was nothingness negates itself, therefore it is an incoherent concept.
This is indeed the thesis of the comment, and this is a different claim than claiming that nothingness is probability.
But my point was that nothingness is a viable state, but there is no actual way to describe it as there is no actual contrast to even identify it.
If there is no identification for nothingness, then it is not a viable state. Well-definedness requires that there be precisely something that identifies the thing being defined, even if the identification cannot be put into words. Otherwise, it is not a "thing" in any meaningful sense of the word. It is a non-concept.
I don't believe there is a coherent definition of nothing, though, but that doesn't mean that reinforces the impossibility of nothing as a state,...
It absolutely does reinforce it. If there is no coherent definition of it, then it is undefined, by definition. That is just how it is. Undefined things are not concepts, let alone states. This is a lot like calling "Undefined" a number. It just does not work like that.
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Infinite is a vague and general statement without reference points.
No, it is not. Infinity is a precisely well-defined property of sets, based on the axiom of infinity. A set S is an infinite set if and only if there exists an injective function f : N —> S, where N is the set of natural numbers.
The numbers between 1 - 2 are infinite,...
Which kind of numbers are we talking about? Because, for example, there are infinitely many real numbers r satisfying 1 < r < 2, but there are no natural numbers r that satisfy it. I will assume that you are talking about real numbers here, though, so in this case, yes, you are correct. The interval (1, 2) is an infinite set.
...but not as infinite as the numbers between 1-3, as it contains both the subsets 1-2 and 2-3.
No, this is incorrect. (1, 2) and (1, 3) are sets of the same cardinality, because there exists a bijection from (1, 2) to (1, 3). If you want a specific construction of the bijection, then consider, f0 : (1, 2) —> (0, 1), (f0)(x) = x + (–1); f1 : (0, 1) —> (0, 2), (f1)(x) = 2·x; f2 : (0, 2) —> (1, 3), (f2)(x) = x + 1. Now consider g = (f2)°(f1)°(f0) : (1, 2) —> (1, 3), such that g(x) = (f2){(f1)[(f0)(x)]} = (f1)[(f0)(x)] + 1 = 2·[(f0)(x)] + 1 = 2·[x + (– 1)] + 1 = 2·x + 2·(–1) + 1 = 2·x + (–1). It can be proven quite easily that g is a bijection, and so (1, 2) and (1, 3) have the same infinite cardinality. Yes, it is true that (1, 2) is a proper subset of (1, 3), but this only implies that they have different order type, not different cardinality. In fact, the set difference (1, 3)\(1, 2) of (1, 3) and (1, 2) is [2, 3). (1, 2) and [2, 3) have cardinality Beth(1), while the set of natural numbers has cardinality Aleph(0) = Beth(0). As it happens, the union of (1, 2) and [2, 3) is (1, 3), and that all three sets have the same cardinality reflects the fact that Beth(1) + Beth(1) = Beth(1). For the record, Aleph(0) < Beth(1).
I think this is why infinities are argued against so vehemently.
The reason infinity is argued against so vehemently is because our understanding of infinity via set theory is extremely recent for humanity, and transfinite set theory is so counterintuitive, that some people just reject it. For example, as I already clarified, if we have a set X that is a proper subset of Y, it is still possible for X and Y to have the same cardinality, because it is possible that there exists some f : X —> Y that is a bijection. This is counterintuitive, because intuition tells us that if X is a proper subset of Y, then Y should have a larger cardinality than X, and so such an f should not exist, yet we can prove that such an f can exist. Again, what this reveals is that the subset relationship only gives information about the order type of a set, not the cardinality of a set. For finite sets, order type and cardinality just so happen to align and be equivalent, which is why our intuition fails when this equivalence no longer holds if infinite sets are introduced. This is why the movement called finitism, the rejection of the axiom of infinity, has become so popular. Together with finitism, there is also the intuitionist movement and the constructionist movement.
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@anghusmorgenholz1060 My previous comment was deleted, so I should say this again: I at no point presented 0 as being infinity. You did. You have poor reading comprehension skills. Your original comment asked for a definitive infinite numeral to be talked about in this discussion. I replied by saying that the video is using the numeral Aleph(0). For some reason, you are now insisting that I am instead talking about the numeral 0. I am not. The numeral Aleph(0) is a different numeral than the numeral 0, and I only talked about the former, not the latter, so you need to stop being a lying piece of garbage, and stop pretending that I ever talked about the latter as being representative of infinity.
Using the infinity in mathematical terms to prove a religious or philosophical claim without using actual math doesn't work.
Once again, you display your idiocy, and your lack of reading skills. I never presented any religious or philosophical claims here. I only answered your comment, by explaining that the video did use a definite infinite numeral in its discussion, like you wanted them to. As for using actual maths, the video also did that. It is called set theory.
Anyway, you have exposed yourself as a t-r-o-l-l. I will no longer be interacting with you. I will no longer be reading your comments.
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@EskChan19 It's not quite a code in the general meaning, but it's similar to a code how it's used in computer science.
No, it is not, and this much is common knowledge among geneticists and computer scientists alike. You can even search explanations on Google for why they are only superficially similar at best, if at all.
ASCII for example is a good analogy, in that this really isn't language, it's just more a codec, a way to store and parse data.
No, it is not a good analogy. DNA does not store data anymore than any arbitrary molecule does (yes, all molecules store data, this is a basic fact of thermodynamics), and it certainly is incapable of parsing data, which requires a parsing algorithm. The fact that DNA does not store data any more than any other molecule already disproves your thesis.
And it works similar to an extent, in that certain patterns of base pair 'codes' yield certain results, and the same pattern would theoretically result in the same pattern for people.
No, it would not. Again, every geneticist knows. The reason the discipline of epigenetics exists is precisely because genes do not work this way. Gene expression has an effect on whether a given string of base pairs will give a codon for a protein strand or not. Also, there are a number of other factors that can alter the result that have nothing to do with that particular string itself. Then, there is also the issue of thermodynamic entropy changing the interactions, something that does not exist with actual code.
And just like an ASCII, if it corrupts, it can change all of it.
And unlike an ASCII pattern, a "corruption" can result in no changes at all.
DNA is not a code. It is a molecule.
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@lurch666 If you have infinite time then your past is infinite.
Yes. This is a tautology, so there is nothing to discuss here. Proceed.
So say you wait 10 billion years to do something. Since your time has no start (because you have an infinite past) there's no time to start counting your 10 billion years.
No. Having an infinite past does not imply your past did not have a start. If my time coordinate is t = ω, then because ω is infinite, my past is infinite. However, my past still did have a start, because t = 0 is the minimum time coordinate. Time starts, then ω years pass, then I start counting, until I reach ω + 10 000 000 000 000 years. So I have now counted 10 000 000 000 000 years, which is a finite amount of time, but I still have an infinite past with a beginning.
Because you have an infinite past, you can't start counting from the start like with finite time so like I said any finite amount of time is swallowed by your infinite past.
Why exactly am I obliged to count from the beginning? Just because I cannot count from the beginning, it does not mean there was no beginning. You may just be confused as to what exactly "counting" entails.
The problem with infinity is that it makes no sense.
Wrong. Infinity makes perfect sense. Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory has an axiom dedicated just to infinite sets. von Neumann-Bernays-Gödel set theory goes further by introducing the axiom of global choice, and by being able to quantify over proper classes, rather than just sets. Really, it should just be called von Neumann-Bernays-Gödel class theory. Anyway, infinity is well-studied and well-understood by mathematicians, and it works just fine. It even has applications in physics.
But if time is infinite that now needs an infinite amount of time to pass before it can happen so we never reach it.
You keep insisting that if something takes an infinite amount of time to be reached, then it cannot be reached, but you have not actually explained why this is the case. To me, this just sounds like an unnecessarily elaborate way of saying "infinite sets cannot exist".
Infinity causes paradoxes...
No, it does not. Before the 19th century, when set theory was developed, people had a really poor understanding of the concept of infinity. As such, it did cause paradoxes, though the paradoxes actually originated from wrong intuition, rather than from infinity itself. However, we live in the 21st century. There exists an entire super-discipline of mathematics called transfinite mathematics dedicated to studying infinity. We understand infinity so well today, that it is actually shocking in retrospect how bad we used to be at handling infinity as a concept in the past.
Obviously we have reached now. But if time stretches back into infinity then an infinite amount of time has to pass to get to now.
Yes, an infinite amount of time has to pass to get to now, if the past is infinite. What is the issue? Are you implying that an infinite amount of time cannot pass, so therefore, an infinite past cannot exist? This just sounds like you are saying infinite time cannot exist, which is the conclusion you are trying to prove in the first place. Why is it that infinite time cannot pass?
Because infinite time doesn't get us to now-it gets us to the future.
If it gets us to the future, then it necessarily gets us to now, because now precedes the future. So your claim is wrong. Also, infinite time does not necessarily get us to the future. So your claim is also wrong. If my time coordinate is ω, and I have a time machine, and I set my time coordinate to 0, and then I let my time run for ω units, I am back when I started, and this true, in spite of the fact that ω is infinite. No future required.
Imagine a sea with infinite depth under a sky with infinite height. The surface of the sea is now, under the sea is the past, so the deeper you go the further into the past you go and the sky is the future, the higher you go the further into the future you go.
Yes. Your scenario is reasonable so far.
Now how long of a stick would you need that could stand on the bottom of that sea so the tip of the stick just reaches the surface?
An infinite stick. Specifically, if the sea has depth ω units, then my stick needs to be ω units long.
Any stick of a finite length wouldn't reach the surface because the bottom is an infinite distance away.
Correct. The bottom is an infinite distance away. Please remember this for the next sentence.
Any stick of infinite length would reach the surface but because it's infinite, it would keep going into the sky.
No. In order for it to keep going into the sky, the stick would have to have a length larger than the length from the surface to bottom of the ocean. If both lengths are infinite, then it is not warranted for the stick to have such a larger length, and so it is not warranted that the stick would continue into the sky. If the ocean depth is ω meters, and my stick measures ω meters, then my stick will just reach the surface, and not go into the sky, but the ocean will still have infinite depth, and my stick will still have infinite length.
So there is no length of stick that can just reach the surface (now).
I have just proven otherwise. Such a length of stick does exist.
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@homotheticwren So instead of saying that if infinite time precedes an event, you will never reach the event, it might be helpful to think about infinite in a more numerical sense.
Yes, please. Are working with surreal numbers, hyperreal numbers, ordinal numbers, or just cardinal numbers?
take the set of natural numbers, for example; this is, I think, is the kind of thing you're imagining, where you could theoretically count to an arbitrarily large element in the set.
Yes, although I am not sure how counting to an arbitrarily large finite number is relevant here.
However, what about the set of real numbers? If you tried to count the set of real numbers, or even just the real numbers between 0 and 1, you would never reach even an arbitrarily low number, because where do you even start?
The set of real numbers is known as a dense set. What this means is that, for any two real numbers x and y, there exists many real numbers r such that x < r < y. Density is a property that you can have even with a countable set, such as the rational numbers. 0 is a rational number, but there is no "next" rational number, because for any rational number 0 < q, there are rational numbers r with 0 < r < q. However, the set of rational numbers is a countable set, because there exists a bijection f from the set of natural numbers N to the set of rational numbers Q. This means that every rational number can be written in a list, even though there is no "next" rational number. However, the interval of real numbers (0, 1) is not countable, because there is no bijection from N to (0, 1), so it is not possible to write the real numbers of the interval in a list. What this demonstrates is that density and uncountability are different properties that are not equivalent. I think you may be confusing one for the other.
Also, while it is true that the cardinality of (0, 1) is larger than the cardinality of N, this does not prove that an infinite amount of time cannot pass to reach a point in time.
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@lurch666 But infinity + infinity is still infinity.
Yes, if α and β are infinite numbers, then α + β is also infinite. How is this exactly relevant to what I said?
When you say the depth of the sea and the stick are the same length, then of course the stick would just reach the surface, but since infinity (depth) + infinity (sky) is still infinity then the stick would also reach the sky because the stick has a length of infinity.
No, that is not how that works. I wanted to avoid correcting you explicitly with your previous paragraph, but I have no choice now: "infinity" is not a number. Infinity is a property of sets, and therefore, of numbers, and other mathematical constructs. There are finite numbers, and there are infinite numbers, but infinity is not itself a number, infinity is simply the property of a number being infinite. When you talk about the ocean and sky having some kind of infinite depth or height, you need to specify what kind of infinite number you are working with. This is why in my arguments, I specified a size ω. ω is an infinite number, but it is a different infinite number than ε(0) or ω(1). More importantly, ω is different from ω + 1, and different from ω + ω. What you are doing here is giving the ocean a depth α (which is infinite), the sky a height β (which is infinite, and which may or may not be equal to α), and the say that the stick must have length α + β, which is not true: there is no logical necessity for the stick to have the sum of the lengths. Of course, if it does have length α + β, then of course it will reach into the sky forever and ever. But this is cheating: you are conflating various different quantities and treating them as being the same quantity solely because they all share the same property of being infinite. That is simply not how the infinite works.
That's why infinity doesn't make sense
No, that is why your incorrect understanding of infinity does not make sense. Treating infinity as a number does not make sense. Treating infinity as a property of a class of numbers, however, does make sense.
because when you think about infinity you get contradicting results and math falls apart.
Oh, yeah? Tell that do the the hundreds of thousands of mathematicians studying transfinite set theory, right now. Tell them that if they continue developing transfinite set theory like they have been doing for 150 years, their mathematics are going to fall apart. Please do that, then come back to me and tell me, how the mathematicians took that. Good luck.
Got to admit I don't know infinity from any deep learning this is just what I have figures out myself so I've make some big errors that's down to this being a difficult subject
I would very much argue set theory is not a difficult subject. Only the theorems that are counterintuitive are the difficult ones.
but an infinite past can't have a start.
It absolutely can. I just demonstrated how it can. There exists a smallest ordinal number: the empty set, also called 0. However, ω is an infinite ordinal (the smallest infinite ordinal). So if my time coordinate is ω, then I have an infinite past (because ω is infinite), but said past has a beginning, because 0 is the smallest time coordinate. Are you going to tell me that mathematicians are wrong on this?
but if you have existed for an infinite time then you would never reach the point where you can start because it would take an infinite amount of time to get there.
No, you are wrong. You saying "an infinite amount of time must pass to reach point A" does not demonstrate that "point A cannot be reached." You need to prove it. You keep insisting that it is true, but it is not.
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@homotheticwren I genuinely don't mean to be rude,...
Ah, yes, the classic "I don't mean to be X, but..." only to follow up with a remark that fits exactly the defining characteristic of X, except this time, you wrote said remark before saying. I am sorry, but I cannot take this seriously when say this immediately after saying "it's both utterly irrelevant and unnecessary". It would have been better if you had simply called it unnecessary, irrelevant, and then left it that. The feigned humility in your comment is devoid of meaning, and leaves me unimpressed.
...I don't think what you said has any bearing on the purpose of my comment.
If so, then that is your own failure, not mine. Your comment, by your own admission in your first paragraph, was an attempt to help illustrate Lurch's claim that infinity cannot be traversed or reached. My reply was a direct sentence-by-sentence response explaining why your comment does not help illustrate the point you intend to illustrate, by mentioning the fact that the phenomenon you appealed to has little to do with infinity itself, and more to do with the density property of some sets. If my response somehow has no bearing on the purpose of your comment, then neither does your comment itself. Though, I would also argue, as I indicated at the end of my reply, that much of what you said in your comment had little relevance to Lurch's claim anyway. What you and Lurch argued were effectively two completely separate topics.
Anyhow, I will not be replying to you any longer. This response of yours has made it evident than trying to correct you on your own mistakes is a waste of time, and is even unappreciated, given the rudeness of your comment. Very well, then. Stay wrong, for as long as you want. I will no longer bother you. Farewell.
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@SlimThrull I honestly question the sincerity of your "skepticism". Having questions is fair, but the Internet is a place that exists, and very in-depth discussions on the subject involving various complex topics in sociology, anthropology, physiology, and neuropsychology can be found if you just put 5 minutes of effort into it. Given this, demanding for an answer on YT of all places is suspicious. Also, the fact that you have to assume that people will bring up an objection like "oh, and before you assume that doesn't happen, Google this" as opposed to any other objection over is disingenuous. I do not think you are doing this maliciously, but with an attitude like this, you will just never get a satisfying answer, especially because I doubt many people would want to engage when you present those red flags in the first place. Saying you are open minded does not make it so.
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8:10 - 8:13 THANK YOU! There is no time at which there is no time. I think, whatever else is said in the video later on, that this is the most important sentence in the entire video. Because this one sentence, this one tautology, is what signifies defeat for the Kalam, singlehandedly. It creates problems with both premise 1 and premise 2. More on this later, but for any readers, just keep this sentence in mind. There is no time at which there is no time.
8:25 - 8:30 Exactly! This is the issue that WLC does not understand, and it is the issue that made him look completely foolish when having his live-streamed debate with Scott Cliffton. No one claims the universe popped into existence out of nothing. Such an accusation is a strawman, and all it demonstrates is the people do not understand the Kalam, not even WLC himself, apparently.
9:45 - 9:59 Yes, but the problem with this version is that premise 1, in this case, is just arbitrary baseless assertion that, whenever apologists try to justify it, they always end up having to resort to the unrestricted principle anyway. The restricted principle cannot be substantiated on its own terms. I honestly think it is not even worth discussing, until such an attempt of independent substantiation is given. The burden of proof is on WLC here.
12:08 - 12:21 But that is precisely why appeals to intuition are fallacious. Ultimately, an intuitive statement has no relationship to being a true statement or a demonstrable statement. Whether a statement can be intuited or not should be universally considered irrelevant to discourse, because it does nothing to determine whether asserting the statement is reasonable or not. It adds literally nothing to the conversation. The fact that, in metaphysics, intuition is regarded an acceptable avenue of argument by many philosophers, is part of the reason why I find it very difficult to take metaphysics as an academic field of study, seriously. In my opinion, it is philosophy done poorly.
12:30 - 12:38 I disagree. To start with, this description makes it sound like it is difficult to overturn intuition, and that is just not the case. Every form of evidence to the contrary necessarily overturns intuition, no matter how weak. Intuition is the weakest form of evidence possible, if you can even call it call that. Epistemically, the entire point behind saying that X supports Y is that, in more situations than not, X could only have occurred if Y did. But since there is no correlation between intuition and truth, intuition does not satisfy this basic minimal criterion for what constitutes evidence. Something has no correlation to truth under any circumstances cannot serve as support of anything, by definition. Intuition is as good as support as any other thing not related to truth, such a beauty, naturalness, or what have you. Epistemically, if intuition can support a statement, then literally all things can, regardless of how fallacious it is.
12:40 - 12:52 This is not true. Most mathematical truths and logical truths are not only unintuitive, but counterintuitive, and this also goes for scientific truths. The fact that we find the material implication in logic so weird and "wrong" is an excellent demonstration of this. So I fail to see how exactly these things are based on intuition.
12:52 - 13:07 Well, no, that is inaccurate. You are treating it as if "if p and p implies q, then q" is a conclusion that we make. But that is not how it is. "If p and p implies q, then q" is literally just the definition of the word "implies." There is nothing to conclude here, intuitively or otherwise. So I disagree with your explanation that logic is based on intuition. The evidence very strongly suggests it is not, and treating a definition as a conclusion does not demonstrate otherwise.
13:12 - 13:20 What? No, that is, with all due respect, utterly ridiculous. It does not "seem" to the scientist that there is any pressure gauge there. That is literally not how measurement works. The scientist simply reads what the instrument of measurement is saying to the best of their ability, and they write it down. They say the pressure gauge is 14 atm, because to the best of their sensorial-cognitive coordination, that is what the instrument is saying. There are no "seemings" here in the way that you explained them earlier.
13:29 - 13:32 No, that is just false. What makes science reliable is the scientific method, not intuition. In fact, in multiple occasions, the scientific method has had us conclude that seemings actually are unreliable. And to be honest, this entire segment on seemings felt very different from the rest of the video, very lackluster and significantly less well-substantiated than everything else in the video. It was completely unnecessary, and the way it was presented was like propaganda. The video would have been better off without this segment. Everything else so far has been on point, but this segment alone had so many inaccuracies, it made me think you had an agenda of sorts there. It was completely unneeded, as you and I both agree that something being metaphysically intuitive is not sufficient reason for accepting premise 1 of the Kalam (otherwise, this video would not exist). Hopefully, the rest of the video is better than this.
13:34 - 13:50 Okay, so I retract some of my previous statements. This here clarifies what you actually meant, but you did a poor job at explaining it. It is not the case that intuitions actually serve as support for a claim. That much is false, and I already discussed why. But if it is the case that enough people have the intuition, and there is no available information that contradicts the intuition, then it does become more reasonable to believe in the intuition, than to not believe it. This does not mean the claim is sufficiently justified, though, but in this case, a Bayesian analysis would reveal the claim is more likely to be true, based on the available information. But this all falls apart in light of the counterarguments we will encounter only a few seconds later in this video.
14:03 - 14:21 Ditto. And I think this sole response undermines the entirety of the previous segment, hence justifying my admittedly harsh criticism of it. I fail to see why one would have that segment when this objection exists. And I do not think this video will provide a good objection to this counterargument.
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14:26 - 14:52 What? No, I am sorry, but I have to become harsher with my critique. What on Earth does it mean for something to be reliable if not that it consistently proves decisively that statements are true? Now it just seems to me as though you are using the word "reliable" idiosyncratically without providing a disclaimer that you are doing that. If intuition is so often incorrect, why should we trust that it is correct in this one, isolated instance, and not be skeptical right away? All you have done is say "Intuition is not infallible, but that does not mean we should discard it" without even attempting to provide a good reason for why that is the case. I apologize, Rationality Rules, but you are just completely wrong on this point. And let us address the analogy you gave, shall we? Yes, it is true that perception also fails often. But we are talking completely different scales here. Not only is sensorial perception correct much more often than intuition is, but unlike with intuition, we can actually provide very precise and accurate qualitative and quantitative measurements of when our perceptions will fail, and when they will succeed, and we can also explain why they will or will not fail. There is no such thing for intuition that allows us to make it useful for coming to conclusions. Perceptions are reliable, as long as we limit ourselves to a certain class of circumstances that have been well-studied. There is no known class of circumstances for which we know intuition will be reliable. So we should not think of intuition as being reliable, except for the most mundane of circumstances. And as we are clearly talking about the universe beginning to exist here, we are definitely in the realm of "not mundane." So intuition definitely should be discarded in this context. So, again, Rationality Rules, with all due respect, you are super off the mark here. Everything else in the video so far has been great, but your deliberation on intuition is rife of misunderstandings.
15:02 - 15:07 And if that were true, then that would help support the above counterargument against my objection. But as pointed out earlier, this is just not true. There are very few assumptions that logic, mathematics, and the scientific method make, and some of those are not even intuitively true, for what it is worth, but are there just as a matter of formality. Also, I have no idea why you keep insisting so strongly on defending this notion of metaphysical intuition. This creates many more problems than it solves. If we ought to accept premises on metaphysical intuition alone in the absence of evidence to the contrary, then you should be deists, and not atheists. I mean, according to WLC, the existence of God is justified by metaphysical intuition. The entire worldview of reformed epistemology is reliant on this notion. What evidence to the contrary do you have that resists this intuition? To my knowledge, none. What about the kinds of mental gymnastics that people engage in, such as confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance? Those are clearly examples of intuition. And you may say, "yes. But the point of intuition, in this context, is that the evidence can overridde it." But how do you come to that conclusion? The very concept behind cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias is precisely that one does not need to accept that such evidence overrides anything. So if intuition is really to be taken as primitive, as you insist, then why should evidence override anything at all? That does not make any sense, and I know you agree that it makes no sense. So, please, for the sake of the quality of your arguments, stop trying to defend this reformed-epistemology-ridden idea of metaphysical intuitions. It creates more problems for your arguments and everything else you say in the video, than it solves. And it really is unnecessary. Again, I have no clue why you insist so strongly on this point that you have spent a full 3 minutes presenting essentially the same argument. It serves no purpose.
15:15 - 15:29 No, this is completely wrong. The law of contradiction does not rest on intuition, and as I explained, the fact that people feel comfortable in not only engaging in cognitive dissonance, but also straight up just holding mutually exclusive beliefs, demonstrates that the law of noncontradiction is not such an intuition, and perhaps it may not be true at all. This is why there is an entire discipline of formal logic dedicated to researching contradiction-tolerating logics. And the idea that an external world exists at all is not even an assumption the scientific method requires. The scientific method is all about data and making predictions. What the data is describing is solely a matter of interpretation.
15:50 - 15:57 Because that implication is built into 1 itself. It is not possible to accept premise 1 without accepting the implication that defines premise 1. This goes back to the whole "if p and p implies q, then q." You guys claimed this is an intuitive assumption, but it is not: it is literally what defines the implication in "p implies q." sigh You guys are just repeating yourselves now, and it really is just harming the quality of the video. You are trying so hard to defend the indefensible, and I do not understand why. It makes me a bit sad. I have watched many of your other videos, and I know for a fact that you do not actually think arguments from intuition are reasonable in these contexts, so why are you now pretending that you do think that?
16:00 - 16:16 What even makes you conclude that? Did you seriously not acknowledge the possibility that one possible such argument would be "...by definition"?
16:17 - 17:33 Ugh. Okay, in what domain of discourse do you think, conclusively, that intuition is reliable? I understand what you are getting at, and in the end, you are rejecting WLC's argument from intuition based on an appeal to inappropriate domain, but what was the point of that? Why use all of these bad arguments to say that there exists a domain in which intuition works, while failing to describe it, when you know that it does nothing to add nuance to the discussion and defend WLC's argument? And again, all it does is raise many more questions, and put into question everything else you have said, simply because I can argue that something is metaphysically intuitive, and that the domain of discourse in question is appropriate for the intuition. How would you ever debunk such an objection? That is why I find this entire segment problematic. By accepting that there it at least one presumably unspecifiable domain of discourse where metaphysical intuition obviously works - using very fallacious arguments to justify that - it makes anything else you have to say undermined by this. In fact, it makes the Kalam redundant, because as I explained earlier, metaphysical intuition can be and has been used by WLC as justification to believe God exists. It "proves" at least deism, if we are to accept your arguments. But I know you guys are not deists and I know you guys do not accept reformed epistemology. So I fail to see why you spend so much time defending it, when in the end, you are going to reject WLC's premise anyway. It feels like one big waste of everyone's time, and it puts you in a difficult spot. Anyway, I am moving on from this.
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17:35 - 18:39 But the problem with this is that the notion of a statement having "clarity" is inherently subjective. There is no way anyone can come up with an objective standard for this. Philosophers have tried, and all have failed. This is why formal logic formalizes tautologies in terms of truth-tables with respect to a choice of truth-functions, rather than just accepting a formal standard of obviousness.
18:40 - 19:03 There is no proposition that we can demonstrate that definitely satisfies this second criterion. Even the law of noncontradiction, upon further reflection, can seem less likely to be true. And again, this is entirely subjective.
20:17 - 20:23 Yet another example of the unreliability on intuition: the fact that it is subjective. And this brings me to the next point: which philosophers should we trust here? Is the causal principle intuitive? Or is it not? Whatever the answer is, someone is wrong here. If we are to regard intuitiveness as not a property that can be true or false of anything due to its inherent subjectivity, then how can it be evidence of anything? The more elaboration is being given here, the more thoroughly skeptical I am.
22:30 - 22:45 Oh, goodness, what is this? Metaphysically necessary truths? I thought this could not get more absurd.
24:01 - 24:29 This is exactly the problem with the entire discussion. It all boils down to "my opinion is...." "oh really? Well, MY opinion is..." who cares? Stop using intuitions, and actually start providing actual evidence. Personally, I am going to skip ahead in the video to a point in time where the interlocutors finally decide to stop discussing intuition with such unmerited philosophical seriousness, and move on to a legitimate use of logic, because I feel tired of beating the dead horse here.
25:45 - 25:50 You cannot claim that god has any properties before first determining whether god exists or not. This is a circular argument. "The cause of the universe is omnipotent." That assumes the conclusion of the Kalam is true, but that is the very thing we are questioning to begin with.
28:00 - 29:00 This principle is just false, though, and I do not need to "appeal to intuition" to tell you that. We know, for a scientific fact, that there are material things without material causes. In fact, the very notion of "material" is nothing but an emergent property, according to physics, thus making the very classification of "causes" into "material, efficient, formal, and final" deeply flawed. And this is why I complained earlier in the video when you guys gave no definition for causation.
29:55 - 29:58 There is no such a thing as "before the beginning of the universe." That would entail the existence of "before time." And that is nonsense. Remember what you guys said earlier? There is no time at which there is no time. So there is no "before time."
33:30 - 34:14 Excellent presentation of that argument. Finally, we are back to the actually high quality arguments that I am used to seeing from Rationality Rules and Joe.
34:14 - 34:51 Yes, which is why Rationality Rules and Joe's defense of metaphysical intuition as being sometimes reliable is completely untenable. There is no situation where this symmetry problem does not apply. You guys completely debunked WLC's defense, but also debunked your own defense for intuition. This is why I complained so much about. You could have simply foregone that segment altogether and just addressed the contradictions in WLC's argument directly.
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37:05 - 37:15 I am so glad you guys did decide to talk about the A and B theories of time. And yes, the previous description given of the B theory is quite accurate, and it does undermine the Kalam entirely, not only in premise 1, but premise 2. And the B-theory of time, unlike the A-theory of time, is scientifically supported.
37:15 - 37:37 Exactly.
38:20 - 38:48 This misses the point entirely. Remember, there is no time at which there is no time. Yes, things within spacetime have spatiotemporal boundaries that demand explanations in terms of other things within spacetime themselves. But as there is no spacetime outside the boundaries of spacetime, the notion that any causal explanation is required here at all is misconceived, a categorical error. The reason things with spatiotemporal boundaries require causal explanations is because they are surrounded by regions of spacetime not occupied by themselves, and so this needs to be accounted for. But spacetime is the entirety of spacetime itself. Its boundaries are just inherent properties of its intrinsic geometry, they are not causally related to any other objects, and it makes no sense to say that they could be, precisely because they are the boundaries of spacetime. A thorough understanding of this would require mathematical understanding of manifolds. This is the problem with talking about metaphysical things on their own terms without being properly defined, and is another reaosn why I find it difficult to take it seriously.
38:55 - 39:33 Yes, and this all brings me back to wondering why you guys defended arguments from intuition as legitimate, when this point undermines their legitimacy almost entirely. Again, I acknowledge there are very limited contexts where they are clearly okay, but this is not one of them, and we all agree. And this is really just the same objection to the argument from intuition as the other objections. They are all really the same objection, and they all boil down to this: "intuition sucks and is not (sufficient) for this." Which is what I was saying all along. The only objection that is different, in this case, is just that the B-theory of time undermines the Kalam.
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Overall, I think this was a good video, and some things were pointed out that needed pointing out that are typically not pointed out. My one issue with the video is the bad attempt at defending the legitimacy of intuitions, which not only was rife with false claims, but also undermines everything else that they say, and which completely distracts from the more powerful and legitimate objections that they gave that could have been made without discussing intuition. Nonetheless, the video was still ultimately effective in demonstrating the difficulties with premise 1 of the Kalam (to say nothing of premise 2, which the video did not discuss in depth).
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No, you are completely wrong. The problem is the logic. You seem to believe that the only thing that matters here is empirical evidence, but that is just absolutely not the case. I want to redirect you to mathematics. Can you provide me with an experiment that can prove that there is no rational number such that x^2 = 2? No, you cannot. By your own advice, you would thus end up dismissing the claim as being ridiculous, even though, in reality, this is an important theorem in mathematics with real life consequences in the sciences. Abstractions, by definition, cannot be empirically studied. I doubt you actually dismiss mathematics as a whole, though, especially since the scientific method is reliant on mathematics in the first place.
You say that one can construct logical arguments about a multitude of ridiculous things, like gods. This is incorrect, though. You cannot construct logical arguments to prove things that are false. That is why the entire concept of a logical fallacy exists. The very point of contention is whether gods fall under the category you named "multitude of ridiculous things" or not in the first place: that is why this discussion is happening. I find it arrogant and insulting of you to suggest that this is a waste of time simply because you fail to understand the importance of the logic of an argument.
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The implications of set theory for the Kalam are quite disastrous, because, as far as I am concerned, set theory is inconsistent with the distinction between actual infinity, and potential infinity, and set theory is consistent with the existence of sets of infinite cardinalities having different cardinalities. This to say, there exist uncountable models of any reasonable set theory you choose. Thus, the idea of the infinite being traversed being impossible is contradicted by these models, because in these models, ω < ω + 1, yet card(ω) = card(ω + 1).
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@littleredpony6868 You are talking about one of Zeno's paradoxes. The idea is that, if I want to from 0 to 1, I must first go from 0 to 1/2. Then I must go from 1/2 to 1, but to do so, I must go first from 1/2 to 3/4. Once I do, I must them go from
3/4 to 7/8..., etc. Inside the interval [0, 1] that you want to cross, there are infinitely many intervals that you have to cross individually to be able to cross the full [0, 1]. Since there are infinitely many, intuition dictates that crossing the interval [0, 1] should be impossible. However, in the real world, you cross intervals of the form [0, 1] all the time. Hence the apparent contradiction.
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@hlulanizitha9920 Craig is a well-reputed philosopher with great credentials to back it up,...
No, he is not. He is well-reputed only among Christian apologists, and even then, plenty of fundamentalists hate him too. As for his published work in philosophy, it is quite average, if not mediocre. I say this as someone with a college degree in philosophy.
he's defended his Kalaam arguments publicly many times,...
No. He has attempted to publicly defend the Kalam argument plenty of times, but in all his attempts, he fails to convince anyone who is not already a theist, and he fails to address the objections by the opponent.
This harsh criticism of his work is unfounded
No, it is not.
even the best philosophers make mistakes.
Yes, but Craig is not among the best philosophers, he is not even among the good philosophers. If we were talking about someone like Saul Kripke, then it would be a different story, but Craig? Hell no. The fact that you even attempt to compare Craig to the best of philosophers is actually insulting.
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@Hello-vz1md That was a podcast with alex not debate.
It is still a debate. It is called a debate in podcast format, sillybilly.
Theist and Atheist Academic philosophers respect Craig while disagreeing with him
"Respect" is a strong word you are using.
unlike some random people in YouTube comments section with no philosophical background.
Maybe, but I have a degree in philosophy, and I can tell that much of Craig's work is garbage.
Both Rationality Rules and Alex said Craig is an inteligent person
Well, yes, he is an intelligent person. Most people are intelligent people. This does not change the fact that he is not a good philosopher.
but I will not call him complete idiot
No one here has called him that. You need to get off your high horse and actually start reading the replies you are responding to.
philosophy is BS 😂😂😂😂😂 i have no words for your ignorance
No, I will not call him ignorant. While I agree with you that he is patently wrong in saying philosophy is BS, he is justified in incorrectly believing that, precisely because mediocre philosophers like WLC exist. It is people like him that give philosophy an extremely bad reputation where it is not deserved.
i highly recommend you to watch this introduction course on philosophy
No thanks. I already have a degree, and if I want to study more, then I will just buy some books instead.
But I can't remember when science disprove the existence of God or even study or do research about God.
You are right: science has technically never conducted an experiment to gather data concerning the existence of deities. However, a quick cursory analysis reveals that, given the nature of deities, as per theology, the fact that there is no immediate non-trivial evidence for their existence is itself evidence of their non-existence, making their existence quite unlikely.
And blind faith is complete useless and stupid but every knowledge have some level of faith if you think deep philosophically and critically
No, this is nonsense. For one, faith is, by definition, blind, so writing about "blind faith" is literally redundant, as you just said blind twice. Secondly, knowledge does not require faith. Taking something as an axiom is different than having faith.
it's completely different and philosophically, it's about the nature of reality, like do I or anything or anyone really exist, like how we see/think it exists around us.
No, this has nothing to do with faith either. Also, whether this actually constitutes a problem of knowledge depends on how you define "existence". Really, this is all just semantics.
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@Martial-Mat Aha, you're today's designated mind reader huh?
If I had the power of mind reading, that would be nice. However, you give me too much credit.
Shouldn't you be on stage conning old ladies?
No thanks. I have a moral compass.
Your arrogance is a particularly appealing trait btw.
Is it? You have not demonstrated that I am arrogant, but even if I was, how would that be appealing?
Without understanding the basis for my opinion, you are simply going to tell me why I don't understand.
No, this is not what I did, and this is not what I will do. I simply stated a fact: the available evidence contradicts your claim concerning your understanding of philosophy. I have no idea how or why you decided to twist this into me making a claim about why you do not understand, but the fact that you did that makes you quite arrogant yourself.
Anyway, this reply of yours makes you seem like a prime example of the Dunning-Kruger effect in action, so I get the impression that continuing to interact with you will be a waste of time. Have fun talking to your echo chamber.
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@outermarker5801 Again, I did NOT say that meditation is prayer, or even a form of it.
I understand this. I never said that you said that.
I said FOR THE CHRISTIAN it does the same thing to THEIR brain.
One of the effects prayer has is certainly similar, but this alone is not sufficient to justify treating prayer and meditation as comparable in this context.
I don't know about you, but I WAS a Christian,...
I was one as well. I never said anything that should invalidate your experience of prayer.
I'd encourage you to be like Hitchens, calm down,...
I hate to say it, but I am pretty calm. I am not convinced that you are calm at all, though. You are using CAPS LOCK every five words, and you compared me to a dogmatic Christian. These are not actions a calm person does in the beginning of a conversation, solely from a disagreement. Honestly, you seem like a person filled with anger.
...and actually analyze why religion, for all it's bullcrap, is so persistently captivating to the human mind.
I have. This was one of the many things I researched when I studied in college. I am probably more qualified to speak on the topic that you are, and frankly, I would be so bold as to say, more qualified than Hitchens. I never denied that religion is persistently captivating to the human mind, and my point was never about addressing this.
It is literally brain chemistry, specifically dopamine.
It is far more complicated than brain chemistry. Brain chemistry definitely plays a role, but it is not as major as you would claim to be.
Objective observation of the phenomenon rather 'impudent' dismissal will make you a better educated atheist.
(A) The only thing I have dismissed here is the grossly inaccurate comparison between prayer and meditation.
(B) I want to hear nothing about "objective observation" from someone who has conducted no observations of their own on the subject matter.
(C) Given your clear incompetence in holding a civil conversation, you are certainly not qualified to make any worthwhile judgments on how well-educated an atheist (or anyone else, for that matter) is.
Because right now, you remind me of some Christians - so dogmatic, you can't understand what's being said to you over the din of your own negative opinion and contempt.
This is just projection on your part. I understood your argument just fine the first time. You are the one who misunderstood my response to you. You are also the only one here being negative. You decided to proceed with this discussion by insulting me, despite my replies to you being polite. I will end my comment with an insult of my own, pointing out how this all demonstrates that you are definitely not smart enough to understand that this approach you are taking is completely counterproductive: you will not succeed at convincing anyone of your point of view, and if anything, you will only succeed in turning them away. Alas, if there is anyone here who is like dogmatic Christian, that would be you.
I am going to mute you, because there is no point in me bothering to try to have a conversation with someone so irrationally angry, that they are unable to hold a conversation.
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@Vee-Hive No, it is not logically incoherent. Corruption is one of the most well-established ways to damage one's credibility, and the I.B.A. being corrupt is well-known by now. Also, chromosomal tests themselves are not very reliable either, which is why, since the Olympic Games in Sydney at the beginning of the millennium, they were discontinued. So, unlike the corruption idea, the narrative you are promoting has no legs to stand on, beyond the very suspicious yellow-journalism going on of the trainer allegedly having verified the test, even though none of the sources actually can corroborate this independently.
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@AShaif take your time not proceeding to engage
Have some patience, child. Unlike you, I have a life, and yesterday, I did not get a chance to sit down and write down a response to what you wrote. Are you one of those children who will arbitrarily alot a deadline for when I have to respond by, not tell me about the deadline, and then dishonestly claim I forfeit the conversation because I did not follow this arbitrary stupid deadline I was not told about? Geez. Talk about being aggressive: you are the only with the attitude problem here. But hey, with disingenuous, jerklash response like this, it almost seems like you want me to be aggressive you. That would actually explain why you made such a bold accusation despite having nothing to back it up.
At the first time you replied to me, you were too aggressive, arrogant and provocative, with no substantial counter-argument.
Concerning the accusations of me being aggressive, arrogant, and provocative, see my previous paragraph. Concerning there not being a substantial counter-argument: you listed about a dozen of arguments by name, and then a few others you went into more detail. You know very well that each of these arguments would require an essay-length response, followed by a discussion on that response. I know very well that writing a dozen and a half essay responses would be unrealistic, and it would become a wall of text you know you will not read nor reply to. Also, I have no responsibility to provide these counterarguments when the topic of discussion is the cosmological Kalam, a topic of discussion you seem unable to stick to. So this is yet another disingenuous remark by you. And all this does is prove my earliee snarky remark of your dishonesty.
You didn't come to me as a seeker of truth, but rather as a troller.
This is meaningless when coming from you.
However, I have time now and could spend a couple of minutes on your big discovery here :D
There is no big discovery here. Most people with the level of education that I have are at least aware of the things I have mentioned. Or do you think being educated is a rare trait?
Causality is axiomatic to science. Otherwise, no need to discover or look for illness causes, etc.
This is a non-sequitur. The need to look for cures has very little to do with causation, though we do happen to utilize causation in our quest for cures. Also, causation is not axiomatic to science. Causation is something we establish through science. The only thing that is axiomatic to science is that regulated empirical observation is necessary to establish facts about the universe, and that the value of a theory is a function of its predictive power.
Even in quantum theory, there are different interpretations of the Schrödinger equation that don't lead to non-causality, or indeterminacy, or violation of first principles.
Causation and causality are different things. Causation is the notion that things are related via causal relationships of some kind. Causality is a specific scientific principle in the theory of special relativity that restricts the possible types of causal relationships to those that are consistent with locally Minkowski geometry.
Also, I have no clue why you bring up Schrödinger's equation. Schrödinger's equation is not consistent with the theory of special relativity, with curved spacetime, with quantum spin, and is unable to account for quantum electrodynamics, among other things in quantum theory. So it is not suited for a discussion of causality, let alone causation. Also, the interpretations of quantum mechanics do not interpret Schrödinger's equation, they are just potential solutions to the measurement problem. The measurement problem is irrelevant in light of quantum field theories, though, which is how we establish the ontology of the universe in a physicalist worldview.
Bohm's quantum interpretation to give a single example.
Which one? There is an entirely family of interpretations of quantum mechanics attributed to Bohm. This smacks of ignorance, to me.
Also, even if causality is like a spectrum, it's still an uninterrupted chain of causes,...
It is an interrupted chain of causation, not of causes. Again, things cannot be discretely categorized into causes. That would literally contradict it being a spectrum.
...that can't go forever, unless you think they can, or that you adopt determinism.
I see no reason to think causal chains cannot regress forever. And sure, I would be willing to adopt determinism. The only unresolved issue here would be free will, but I fail to see how free will is relevant. There is no known physical process that is known to not be deterministic, not even within quantum theory. I know that quantum mechanics uses plenty of probabilistic calculations, but this tells us nothing about what is actually physically happening in the interactions.
But enough of the Kalam, let's speak of the worst of the bunch as you say, the contingency argument.
I think the argument from language origins is slightly worse, but sure, I am not opposed to discussing contingency.
How can you explain a universe that is made of parts and subject to addition, destruction and change, i.e. dependent, when you take the side that there is not a necessary independent existence?
This is a loaded question. The entities in the universe experience change, insofar as their world-cylinders progress through spacetime. Since the universe is the collection of all entities said to exist, the world-cylinders are themselves a feature of the universe. There is no meaningful sense in which the universe itself is changing, though, because it already contains all the histories of all the entities. There is no need for me to explain how the universes experience change, because I hold that the universe does not experience change, that is only entities within the universe that do.
My argument is as such: - Contingent existences are existences that depend on something else for their existence, and could be any other way. Necessary existence is an existence that is independent for its existence, and could not be any other way.
In what sense do contingent existences depend on other existences? What type of dependence are you talking about? There are many types of dependences, and so this makes your statement ambiguous, and so you could be referring to a wide variety of things you may not intend to refer to. I can tell you what contingency would look like in my worldview, but I doubt it matches your concept of contingency. For example, I, as a human, am a merological sum of histories of quantum field states across spacetime. I am a contingent existence, for the quantum fields did not exist as I do, or did not have the histories that they do, then I would not exist. However, the quantum fields are just... sort of there. Their existence is not ontologically correlated to the existence of any other entities.
Contingent existences could be any other way? In what sense do you mean this? Are you using counterfactuals? Are you using Kripkean semantics? Again, you could be referring to several distinct things.
A world of only a set of contingent existences is inconceivable without a necessary existence.
I am unconvinced this is true.
The set of contingent existences cannot depend on itself to bring itself into existence.
This may just be a quirk of your usage of language, but the set of contingent existences is not itself an existence. As such, there is no sense in which such a set needs to be brought into existence. The set of contingent existences may be the empty set, or it may be some other set, but it is never not a set, and there is no sense in which one can say that there is no set of contingent existences.
Therefore, there exists a necessary being that brought this set into existence , whereas it itself depended on nothing to be existent.
Again, the set does not need to be brought into existence. For the notion of "being brought into existence" to even be meaningful, one has to be able to talk about the entity not existing at some point, and then existing at some later point. Ultimately, this means that "being brought into existence" requires spacetime to be coherent. It is a spatiotemporal concept, and not fundamentally ontological. So if we are talking about some set of contingent existences without spacetime, then there is no meaningful sense in which you can say individual entities in the set can be brought into existence, much less the entire set.
prove me wrong
Before we try to prove each other wrong, we should probably try to clarify the language and understand the claims being made.
stage 2 , how many necessary beings ? stage 3, what are the features of this being ?
Okay, so listen, how about we focus only on stage 1 right now? There is no point in you bringig up these other stages if I already disagree with the argument on stage 1.
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@youwillwin7107 The teleological argument can actually be steel manned, but even then, can still be debunked. This is done using Bayes' theorem. The idea is simply this: The evidence that we observe (E) is better explained by monotheism (M) than by atheism (~M). The argument considers that P(E | ~M) << 1 and P(E | M) >> 0, and the conclusion is that given E, M is more likely than ~M, which is to say, P(M | E) >> P(~M | E). By Bayes' theorem, P(M | E) = P(M)·P(E | M)/P(E), and P(~M | E) = P(~M)·P(E | ~M)/P(E). The idea is that P(E | M) >> 0 means that, as long as P(M)/P(E) >> 0, P(M | E) >> 0, while P(E | ~M) << 1 means P(~M | E) << 1. But the problem here is the assumption P(M)/P(E) >> 0, which is impossible to justify.
So the teleological argument, as even its strongest version is not sound.
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@sidarthur8706 Why would a god have to be beyond understanding?
Labeling any system which can be understood by the scientific method, or by otherwise reliable epistemic criteria, by the name of a "god" or "deity" is redundant. The entire point of theism, and the religions for which it serves as a backbone, is that there exist supernatural beings, which, as they transcend all other forms of knowledge, they can only be understood via divine revelation. Even deism, which does not claim a personal deity, still claims that there was a 'who,' a creator, who is beyond the comprehension. That is the thesis of these worldviews. Sure, you can redefine the word "god" to mean whatever you want. You can call your cellphone "God" if you want, but we are having a philosophical discussion, we are not playing word games here. So, the discussion has to start by acknowledging the actual thesis of theism, and discuss it, and that is what I am doing.
How do you know that the natural laws apply everywhere, and not only in the bit that we're aware of?
We have very strong evidence for the homogeneity and isotropy of the universe, save for a few anomalies, and we have even stronger evidence for the general theory of relativity, which, among various things, holds that the laws of physics are covariant. Meanwhile, we have no evidence that there could even be a mechanism by which the behavior of the universe could be any different than what we observe it to be in parts where it is unobservable. So, from a scientific standpoint, it makes absolutely no sense to actually conclude that the laws of the universe are somehow not the same everywhere, and it also makes no philosophical sense, as Occam's razor applies here.
Why do you think that what God happened to do is what he was compelled to do?
I do not? I never claimed God exists. I do not hold that God exists. I am a physicalist.
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@DoofusChungus How you define physicalism depends exactly on the variant of physicalism you are considering (for instance, token physicalism is not equivalent with supervenience physicalism, the latter being the most popular variant, and the one I subscribe to, mostly), but all physicalists agree on the causal closure I described earlier, and all physicalists agree that what defines "physical" should be in reference to what the scientific method calls "physical" or "natural." A succinct way that I like to put it is this: if a conceptual entity has well-defined properties that in any way make reference to a causal process or property that characterize the entity, then there can exist a conceivable physical theory of that entity in principle. This would, therefore mean that the claim that the only way to know said entity is via something like "divine revelation" is false, unless you also think that divine revelation itself can be understood solely in terms of physical theory (and/or chemistry, biology, etc.), but the latter view is rare, and is basically something that most physicalists would say does not exist, since at that point, labeling it "divine revelation" is not really justified.
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@sidarthur8706 you're specifically discussing the thesis of some forms of christianity.
No, this is not exclusive to Christianity. Sikhist doctrines maintains classical monotheism. So do Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Islam, Mandeism, and several other major religions. Though, to be clear, the definition of the word "god" given is not exclusive to classical monotheism either. It applies to many forms of polytheism just as well, and to other forms of monotheism.
the pantheistic god isn't supernatural.
I agree, and I maintain I said earlier. Calling the "pantheistic god" by the label of a "god" is semantically unreasonable.
odin isn't supernatural.
Odin is very much supernatural. I have no idea where you get the idea that he is not.
you've argued from your conclusion back to your conclusion.
You have not demonstrated how this is the case at all. Simply making a claim does not make it true, and this is what you are doing here.
we have evidence that the universe is probably homogenous but that's not the same as knowing that it really is...
Do you not understand how the scientific works? Or even just how the concept of evidence works? Knowledge is defined in terms of evidence. I never claimed to have "absolute certainty," but that is because having "absolute certainty" about anything is categorically impossible. It is an incoherent notion, and this is why in epistemology, it is not taken seriously. Instead, we work with the idea of sufficient justification or sufficient evidence. This is how we distinguish knowledge from belief. As for the scientific method, all conclusions drawn by science are tentative. The existence of gravity is tentative. The roundness of the Earth is tentative. It is not impossible that, one day, we will find sufficient evidence that overturns everything that we know today. Yet, I do not see you doubting the roundness of the Earth. So, quite frankly, and with all due respect, your objection is very ridiculous. You are pretending to, all of the sudden, for this one very specific scenario, not understand the basics of the concept of scientific evidence, solely to try to defend a completely untenable worldview.
or that there aren't alternative laws of physics in other universes.
Why are you bringing other universes into this? There is no evidence that other universes exist. Also, I should point out that, at this stage, everything you are saying is a strawman. I never made stated assumptions about the laws of the universe prior to your replying to me. You decided to bring that up on your own, because the only thing I had said prior to you replying is that the fine-tuning is in contradiction with theism, and that a theist who presents the counterargument you had presented is missing the point. But, I suppose reading comprehension is difficult, so it is what it is.
actually from a physicalist perspective and on the anthropic principle you'd surely have to assume that besides the universe that we know there must have been failed experiments of nature with laws of physics that couldn't sustain a universe and which were outsurvived by ours
No. Neither physicalism, nor the anthropic principle, imply this conclusion. The proposal that there were "failed universes prior to ours" is unfalsifiable, and, strictly speaking, not really a scientific hypothesis. This is about as unnecessary of an assumption as assuming that a god exists.
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@DoofusChungus That's the problem I have with your argument. Much of it is based on "you don't know," which yeah, but neither do you.
You saying this proves you do not understand my argument at all. You see, my argument does not require me to be able to know anything about God's mind. Yours, however, does. Therefore, me not knowing is not a problem for me, but you not knowing categorically debunks your argument. My argument does not rely on pretending to know what God wants. Yours does.
I'm arguing that I believe that God created the universe a certain way, and the reasoning and possibility behind it.
No, you are not doing that. You have presented zero reasoning behind God creating the universe the way you claim They have created it. You made the baseless assertion of "God would have wanted the universe to make sense." Sorry, but baseless assertions are not reasoning. You made the baseless assertion of "God has a plan." Sorry, but baseless assertions are not reasoning. If you want to present this as an explanation, then you have to provide evidence, which you do not possess. This is actually pretty funny, because I never asked you to explain why God made the decisions you claim They made. I never questioned those decisions, and the fact that you keep insisting that I did question them makes me question your lacking in reading comprehension skills, and your intellectual honesty. Still, I am giving you the benefit of the doubt here. Anyhow, all I did was refute the fine-tuning argument by appealing to God's omnipotence, and you made the decision to start trying to explain God's decisions, as if that somehow addresses my refutation, which it does not.
I could assume he has a plan,...
Well, don't. If you are not going to provide evidence for you claim of God having a plan, then I am not interested in hearing said claim.
...if you "grant me the existence of God," then him having a plan for everything is almost guaranteed,...
No, it is not. The fact that God exists, created the universe, and is omnipotent, does not imply God has a plan for the universe. That is not how logic works.
...as knowing everything would mean knowing the future, and knowing the future would mean creating things a certain way for that future to come into fruition...
No, it does not. Having knowledge about the future does not mean you have a plan for the future, nor does it mean you are actually interested in the future or care about it. All of these assumptions you are making are basless conjectures. This is not "reasoning." This is not "an explanation." This is you making a bunch on unjustifiable, unknowable claims, and expecting me to be like «ah, you got me, I guess God exists now.» Sorry, but no: that is not how any of this works. You cannot just make claims about God without substantiating those claims. The only things I have granted you here are (a) God exists (b) God created the universe (c) God is omnipotent and knows the future. Having a plan does not follow from those three premises at all! Your argument is invalid.
Again, if you grant me the existence of God, the fact that these astronomically low probability events happen again and again for humanity to be where we are...
No no no no. Stop right there. We already talked about this. These events are not low probability events. They are events of probability 1, the highest possible probability. Why? Because the universe is deterministic, not random. The laws of physics are deterministic. I granted you the existence of God, but your claim about these events being random remains scientifically false.
...means he's gotta have a plan...
If it were true that the events were low probability, then maybe. But, you are wrong about the events being low probability.
Exactly, the minuscule chance that all of this stuff happened is so low...
No, it is not. You are just pulling claims out of your ass now. Somehow, whenever you make a scientific claim, you happen to be wrong, every single time.
You are arguing against my belief in God through your perspective of physicalism...
Okay, you are very confused here. My holding a belief in physicalism is not the same as making an argument for physicalism. I have not presented any arguments for physicalism in this thread, not yet, anyway. It is entirely possible to have a belief, and not actually present an argument for that belief. The topic of this discussion is not "does God exist?," nor is it "is physicalism true?" The topic of this discussion is "is the fine-tuning argument sound?" Me saying it is not sound does not actually constitute an argument against the existence of God, and I have no idea why you keep insisting that it is.
And by the way, I only brought up physicalism, explicitly to address your claim that atheists believe in random chance. We do not. I did not bring physicalism up as a way to refute the fine-tuning argument, or as a way to argue against God's existence. You would have known this if you had, you know, read my comments carefully.
which I'm course not offended by...
Are you sure? I don't know, brother, but you seem fairly offended to me. You literally lashed out at me earlier being all like "Fine, you win, God doesn't exist anymore," which is the adult equivalent of throwing a tantrum. You have also continued to repeatedly misrepresent my position, almost as if you are unable to handle facing my argument head on.
but still, you are arguing against God,...
My guy. I granted you the existence of God for the sake of discussion. I do not know in what language I should be trying to explain this to you, but apparently, it is not English.
We don't know what he had in mind when creating everything.
See, you say this, but then you are turning around and contradicting yourself by claiming that we can know for sure that God had some kind of plan, and then you are refusing to present evidence for that claim. Do you not see how the conversation cannot go anywhere when you do that? Pick a lane. Do we know for a fact that God had a plan? If so, present the evidence. If not, then, my argument against fine-tuning stands. That is all there is to it.
My original argument was simply arguing for the existence of God being needed for everything to play out the way it did.
See, now you are shifting the goalpost. OP's comment, the comment that started the thread, was about the fine-tuning argument being refuted by God's claimed omnipotence. Everyone else's comments were about that too, and you replied to those comments by defending the fine-tuning argument. Then, I replied to your replies, also by discussing the fine-tuning argument. You replied to me by, again, defending the fine-tuning argument. And now, you are trying to pretend that, all along, you were actually making an entirely different argument for God's existence, rather than defending the fine-tuning argument. Not only that, but now, you are also trying to pretend I was arguing against that argument, and against your beliefs in general, and not against the fine-tuning argument, even though that is the argument that I explicitly stated I was arguing against in the beginning of the thread. You are either being extremely careless with the way you read comments, or you are dishonest.
But, okay. Fine. Have it your way. Since you are not going to accept that this discussion is about the fine-tuning argument, even though everyone else is on the same page about that (which, by the way, makes your behavior here pretty unreasonable), let's talk about your other argument instead. Let me put it in syllogistic form for you:
(A) Many improbable events had to occur for life to exist.
(B) Since life does exist, those events either happened by random chance, despite being highly improbable, or God made them occur.
(C) It is more reasonable to believe God made them occur.
Conclusion: Therefore, more likely than not, God made those events occur.
Is this an accurate formulation of your argument?
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@DoofusChungus To disprove what I said, you gotta have proof, too, no?
If what you said is a baseless assertion, then no, I do not have to provide proof that your assertion is false. I can simply dismiss the assertion, because I have no epistemic obligation to accept an assertion for which no evidence has been presented.
You're argument requires you to assume God has no plan, or at least may not have had a plan.
My argument only requires assuming that it is not impossible that God had no plan. In this case, this would be the equivalent of the null hypothesis: as concluding it would have been impossible demands evidence.
I have said that for God to have wanted to create the universe a certain way with the outcomes it has, then there has to be a plan.
I know you have said this, but it is still just another baseless assertion. The premise "God wanted to create a universe" does not imply "God had a plan."
He didn't just create the universe and say "Well, I hope life forms."
You are assuming that God's primary goal was the existence of life, though. Maybe God created the universe because They really like black holes. After all, this universe is extremely good at producing black holes. The universe is definitely much better at producing black holes, than at harboring life. Perhaps God created the universe for some other reason. Perhaps God was just really bored, so They wanted create something. Either way, as there are multiple possibilities, and there is no evidence for any of them at all, your assumption is baseless.
And fine-tuning means having a plan, no?
Yes, but as I am arguing against fine-tuning argument, I am also arguing against the assumption that God had a plan. There is no reason to make that assumption.
It means that God created the universe a certain way, so it would work in a way he wanted it too.
Whatever plans God had, if any at all, can be accomplished in any universe. The universe does not need to be created a certain way for things to work the way God wants them to.
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@DoofusChungus You call my points invalid because I have no clue what God's intention was,...
Yes, because the validity of your argument is directly contingent on knowing God's intentions, even though you yourself admitted it is impossible to know. My refutation does not require me to know God's intentions. My refutation only requires me to, for the sake of argument, assume God is omnipotent, but you already agree with that, so you have no rational justification for not accepting my refutation of the fine-tuning argument. Then again, you have no understanding of what the fine-tuning argument even is, so I guess that expectation on my part is unreasonable.
...although everything points to life as the specific events that happened were very much only there to create life,...
No, this is a baseless assertion. Sure, the events led to the existence of life, but many events happened that had nothing to do with the existence of life, and many events that happened are actually bad for the existence of life.
...and create a world that works.
Again with this nonsense. There is no such a thing as "world that works" or "world that does not work" for an omnipotent being. Do you actually not undeestand what the word "omnipotent" means? Do you even actually believe God is omnipotent? Because I have been suspecting for a while that you do not actually believe God is omnipotent.
That would be like me saying "nope, physicalism is false because you don't have proof that there's only materialism."
No, it is nothing like that at all, because at no point have I ever claimed your assertions about God are false. I only claimed they are baseless, and since they are baseless, I can dismiss them. And here is the thing: if I were to come out and tell you "well, physicalism is true anyway, so nothing you say about God actually matters," you would be completely justified in dismissing physicalism on the basis of me claiming it to be true, despite not providing evidence for it. Because, yes, that is how the burden of proof works. Right now, the burden of proof is on you to prove your claims, and if you are unable to, then I am 100% epistemically justified in ignoring and dismissing those claims. Again, that is how it works. You may not like it. You may not be comfortable with it, but it is how it works.
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@DoofusChungus Also, I should mention that while I merely have dismissed your claims about God to be baseless, your claims about the universe are indeed false, and I have actually explained how and why they are false, I have provided you with evidence. Every single time, though, you have ignored the parts of my comments that actually provide said evidence. For example, you keep saying "these events have astronomically low probability." No, they are not. Their probability is 1. You keep saying that chemistry and the laws of physics are random. No, they are not. If they were random, then there would be no such a thing as the laws of physics. Also, it is very obvious to scientists that this universe is not "designed for life," since it is extremely bad at harboring life: almost all of it is uninhabitable. This universe is much better at making black holes, so your argument here really should be "God created the universe because They like black holes." However, there is no way you will ever actually argue for that.
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@DoofusChungus You keep saying my points are baseless because "the probability is 1".
Yes. You claim that the events have low probability. They do not. Your claim is false. Since your argument relies on this false claim, your argument is unsound.
Yes, the probability is 1 because it did happen, that's how it works.
No, that is not how probability works. The probability of an event does not depend on whether it has happened or not. People who make this claim are people who pretend to understand Bayes' theorem, but do not. The reason real-life events have probability 1 is that the universe is deterministic. It is not random. Random events do not exist. It is physically impossible, as far as the evidence points, for processes to be truly random.
Yet scientists best guesses as to what happened to lead us here, and what has been proven to lead us here, rely on such random chance and coincidence, over and over.
No, this is false, and a claim that you pulled out of your butthole. There are no reliable scientific studies suggesting that random events actually exist. Even dice throws are not random.
All I've seen you say to rebut this is "it happened tho, so you're wrong".
No. You are lying. I never used this as my response.
Please explain to me how the perfect elements that we needed were carried on meteors and just so happened to hit Earth...
The perfect elements? There are many types of aminoacids, and organic compounds, that could have served as the basis for life to form. The reason we do not know how life originated is not the lack of scientific explanations, but rather, that there are too many scientific explanations: there are too many combinations which are possible which would lead to life, and we do not know which of the possible ones exactly happened.
As for the meteor hitting the Earth... that is completely mundane. All planets are hit by a meteor at some point. Remember, though, that Earth was hit by a meteor only half a billion years after the Solar System was formed. Meteors would have been far more abundant because of this, back then.
...but only after it cooled down from being a flaming ball of fire is just luck, I guess?
Nope. It is not luck. It's called "physics." Perhaps you have never taken a physics course before, so you have no understanding of physical processes work. But I have a degree in physics.
Please explain to me how, Earth just so happened to crash into another planet randomly so we can have the moon, just luck, I guess?
Planetary collisions are not uncommon during the early stages of stellar systems. There is nothing lucky about it, just the natural order of things. Again, it's called "physics."
Please explain to me how whatever wiped out the dinosaurs was impactful enough to get rid of them, yet mammals and other animals were spared, just luck, I guess?
Are you scientifically illiterate? These are all questions answered by high school level textbooks. The only mammals that survived were marine mammals, and very small mammals, like proto-lemurs and rodents, and such. Why did they survive? Because, as they were small, they required significantly less oxygen than dinosaurs did. So, while the dinosaurs were asphyxiating from the lack of oxygen, caused by the debris-filled atmosphere from the impact, small mammals were still capable of breathing and obtaining food. In fact, small dinosaurs survived too! And they evolved into the modern species of reptiles we have today, and they also evolved into modern avians. The ones that went extinct were the large dinosaurs, due to lack of oxygen and nutrition, because the meteor impact had catastrophic effects on the global climate.
And you're right, when we say anything about God, there is no hard proof. I can't just pull out a picture of God and say, "There, proof."
Don't be ridiculous. I am not asking you to pull out a picture of God, obviously. But surely, as a Christian, you can do better than no evidence at all... right?
But yet the burden of proof doesn't only fall on me though, because you claim to have disproven my other points,...
No, it absolutely does fall on you. You are the one making the claims here, not me. I am merely responding to your claims by (a) dismissing them, or (b) showing that the science disproves them.
but until you provide proof that God doesn't exist, imma dismiss your claims.
No. That is not how the burden of proof works. You are being unreasonable. I have not made any claims that God does not exist. In fact, I have, for the sake of argument, granted the existence of God, in order to debunk your arguments. So, I am not required to provide any proof here, because I have not made that claim. You do not get to dismiss my claims, because the only claims I have made are supported by scientific evidence. The claims you have made are not.
Exactly my point: the universe is extremely bad at harboring life yet we're here.
What you are failing to realize is that the universe being bad at harboring life contradicts your argument, but is consistent with science. Life existing despite that, is also consistent with science. Your worldview is incapable of explaining why the universe is bad at harboring life. Mine is not.
Also, I can't believe you could assume that the universe is bad at harboring life.
How many planets have we discovered? Several thousands of planets. How many of them do we know of harbor life? 1, and that is planet Earth, where we live. So, less than 0.1% of planets that have been studied are capable of harboring life. That counts as "pretty bad at harboring life." If you teleport a living being to anywhere in the universe, there is 99.99999999% that they will die immediately. More likely than not, you will either end up in (a) an empty void, (b) inside a hypergiant star, (c) inside a supermassive blackhole. In the off chance that you actually land somewhere else: if you land in some other type of star, instant death. If you land in some other type of blackhole, that is almost instant death. If you actually happen to land on a planet... most of them can kill you in matters of microseconds, if not faster. Even among the planets that are actually Earth-like and apparently inhabitable, no life has been found. Furthermore, solar systems like the Sun, which do have a goldilocks zone, are pretty normal, and despite this, still no life in other places has been confirmed. This alone is conclusive to demonstrate that life in the universe is pretty rare. That does not mean there is no extraterrestrial life of any kind. It just means, the universe is sufficiently bad at harboring life, that even though life may exist elsewhere, it was still definitely not designed to harbor life.
That's baseless, as only the Milky Way might be bad at it.
Except, that argument does not work, because the Milky Way is a very typical spiral galaxy, and is actually among the few galaxy types capable of supporting a galactic habitable zone.
Where's your proof?
Where is yours? I just presented you with mine, but I know you are still not going to provide me with any evidence, because you are incapable of doing so. So, basically, your position is untenable and unreasonable. Furthermore, you are extremely lacking in basic knowledge of biochemistry, astrophysics, probability theory, Big Bang cosmology, epistemology, and basic propositional logic.
I rest my case.
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@sidarthur8706 i didn't have to show how your arguments are circular, you've done it yourself for me.
Sorry, but no, this is not how this works. You cannot claim a fallacy was committed without explaining how the argument presented is a fallacy. Ironically, doing such a thing is itself a fallacy. And dishonest.
the pantheistic god doesn't help you make your case so you've deliberately left it out of the exact definition of a god that you needed for your conclusion to follow from it.
Calling the pantheistic "god" by that name is not substantially different from calling your cellphone a god. I apologize for not considering such semantic sophistry to be a real argument worth addressing.
that's not a straw man, it really is your argument.
You are seriously lacking in reading comprehension skills, or you are just fragrantly dishonest. I did not say that you telling me I was leaving out the pantheistic god is a strawman. My accusation of you strawmanning me was specifically in reply to you bringing up the laws of physics. I even quoted the exact part of your comment I was replying to.
Well, seeing as how you are either illiterate, or dishonest (possibly both), I will not read the rest of your comment, and I will not reply to it. That would be a waste of my time. Have a nice day, and hopefully, your approach to conversations will change in the future.
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@DoofusChungus Wait, so you're telling me random events do not exist?
Yes! I have been telling you that since the very beginning of the conversation! Finally! Took you long enough to realize it.
So, then, without something pushing it to happen, how does it happen?
Can you provide an example of anything that has ever happened without something pushing it to happen? No, you cannot.
You know exactly what I mean when I say random.
I really do not, because you apparently do not know the definition of the word random.
If I'm walking down the street, and a completely random person unrelated to me in any way walks up to me and shoots me because he felt like killing someone, that's not random?
No, it is not. There is an actual cause behind why the person would have done so. Actually knowing the cause is nigh-impossible, but this is only because the number of variables one would have to know to accurate have predicted such an outcome is very large, and the amount of precision with which one would have to know them is also unmatched by current technology. Even then, there is still a lot that can be said about the causation of the sequence of events. If the person shot you, as opposed to someone else, this means that you looked easier to kill, and that it would be harder for your body to be discovered, than if they shot someone else. Of course, this assumes the shooter is actually somewhat sane. If they are insane, then... that already contributes significantly to a causal explanation for why they shot you. Much of the focus of forensic psychology is actually to understand such scenarios. You act like no research has ever been done on the topic. You have the digital era in your hands, and you do nothing with it.
Dice rolls are random.
No, they are not. You can use Newton's laws to model the trajectory of the throw of a die if you have sufficiently precise measurements of the initial conditions of the throw. In practice, this is difficult to achieve, even with machines, but it is not impossible.
They are determined by how a person throws it, how it hits the table, what the table is made out of, etc.
Yes... that makes it not random by definition. See, this right here proves that you have no friggin' clue as to what the word "random" actually means. You really do like to use words and throw them around in a conversation without knowing what they mean. If dice were truly random, then the outcome of a throw would not depend on any variables at all. You would not be able to even slightly manipulate the probabilities, regardles of how much information you had: there would be no equation that would allow you to predict the outcome, even in principle.
So, what you're arguing randomness is, sure, nothing is random.
What I am "arguing" randomness is is the actual definition of randomness, and the one that nearly everyone uses.
Stop trying to get me on scientific hypotheses and stuff like that.
No, I will not. I respect you as an individual, but I would be lying to you I told you that know anything about science. You talked about the Big Bang theory, and you got it wrong. You did not know basic facts about biology that are answered by standard high school textbooks. You did not know that brain waves and radio waves are just examples of electromagnetic phenomena. You are out here trying to pretend you know science, and you are arguing with a physicist who is correcting you on these topics, and you have the audacity to tell me to stop. I am sorry that you fail to realize how unreasonable this is.
Are YOUR literacy skills undeveloped,...
You cannot say that, and then fail to put a question mark at the end of a question.
...because what I said was the best guess' as to what led to life as we know it, such as the meteories carrying the right chemicals and elements,...
I addressed this already. A meteor with the appropriate organic molecules landing on Earth is not a random event. In fact, there is nothing abnormal about. Many meteors and comets have hit the Earth.
...all the events that led to life rely on random chance.
No, they do not. Biochemistry is not random. We can predict chemical reactions with high accuracy, much more easily than we can predict a dice roll. We can predict astrophysics with even higher accuracy.
See, my point exactly, you rely on my wording to try to prove me wrong.
So, what, you want me to rely on words you did not say, and strawman you? You want me to lie? No. Stop.
...you wanna know what there's more of than chemicals and elements that can begin life? Elements and chemicals that cannot.
And? So what? Every carbon-based molecule can begin life. There are more of those than you can count.
And we do know the ones that happened, the ones that are being used currently so we can live.
Nope, that is false. Of course, life today is still carbon-based as it was in the past, but the exact molecules and chemistry involved are not all the same. Life has evolved for billions of years.
My whole point out about the meteor is that it needed to be to such a degree that the dinosaurs were killed, but other life wasn't.
And your point is false. What happened with the dinosaurs is not specific to that meteor. Any meteor that would have hit the Earth would have caused the same effects, because that is just how meteor impacts work. Also, there are many other events that can do exactly the same thing, such as mass supervolcanic eruptions, and the Milankovich cycles of the planet Earth, combined with the greenhouse effect.
What I meant was the fact that for the elements to survive, they couldn't hit too early, because, you know, ball of fire.
And? Plenty of meteors hit the Earth during that time, and many of them probably did contain those elements. The fact that the Great Bombardment kept happening after the Earth stopped being a molten ball is not at all abnormal.
But our systems orbit patterns make it incredibly hard for planetary collisions.
The orbits of systems today, yes. Not the orbits from when the Solar System was a freaking baby. Orbits take a while to stabilize in the formation of stellar systems. What, you really thought the Solar System from 4.5 billion years ago looked identical to today's? Oh my Siesta.
Just to make sure I wasn't misremembering anything, I went to Google and it literally uses the word "uncommon."
Citation needed. I have looked at several sources, such as NASA, and Centauri Dreams, and these sources, if anything claim that they are common, not "uncommon." For example, https : // www . centauri - dreams . org / 2020 / 07 / 16 / planetary-collisions-and-their-consequences (type the URL into your browser, without the spaces) explicitly claims «Let’s hope we never share such a fate, but it’s likely that collisions are commonplace in the late stages of planet formation, and many researchers believe that Earth’s Moon was the result of the collision of our planet with a Mars-sized planet about 4.5 billion years ago.» Also, in the other thread you commented on, I demonstrated that you are not great at actually doing searches on engines for a topic anyway, so I am skeptical of your search. Incidentally, you also never cite the sources you find in your alleged search. I have no reason to think you are not lying, especially as I have already caught you lying in previous replies.
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@DoofusChungus Did you forget about the part where it had to be to a perfect degree that the dinosaurs weren't capable of living, but other animals were.
You say this as if it would have been difficult for this to happen. It was not difficult, this is literally just how meteor impacts work.
A little bit faster or bigger and everything's gone, a little slower or smaller and nothing is.
This is not substantiated by any science at all, this is just a claim you pulled out of your butt.
You have yet to debunk all these very improbable events happening, one after another.
The events are not improbable, and I already have proven this multiple times. You being unreasonable and actively choosing to ignore my explanations has nothing to do with me.
You keep saying that "they happened so, there, debunked."
I have never made this claim. You are LYING. You should be ashamed of yourself, and I would say you are lucky that the Bible does not actually ever condemn lying, but you should still be ashamed of the fact that you think lying is acceptable in a philosophical conversation. Honestly, I am not even sure you are worth any respect from me now. Perhaps I should hit the "mute" button on your name and start ignoring all your replies, as it seems that trying to have a conversation with you is a waste of time. You lack the intellectual honesty to admit that you are not able to refute my arguments, so you have to resort to lying in order to try to make it seem like there is a problem with my arguments, as if I would be too stupid to not realize that you are lying. Well, listen: perhaps the average atheist you interact with on your day-to-day life is stupid, but not me. You chose to mess with the wrong atheist. When people lie, I call them out without hesitation. If you are going to behave dishonestly, then I have no qualms scolding you whatsoever. I quote your exact words, to ensure I am not misrepresenting you, and I also go back and check my own comments, to see if people are misrepresenting me. Perhaps others let this kind of bullcrap from you slide. Not me. I hope this is clear.
You even explain how they happen in a scientific sense for me, saving the me trouble.
Saving you the trouble? No, this actually spells trouble for you. The fact that I can provide science-based deterministic explanations for these events categorically debunks the claim that they are random.
...all this stuff happening, whether you wanna admit is random or not, there's so much chance involved with.
sigh You can insist "there is chance involved" all you want, but you have no evidence for your claim. Furthermore, I have presented evidence against your claim. In response, all you have done is act along the lines of covering your ears, and going "LA LA LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU I CAN'T HEAR YOU," rather than acknowledging the evidence. I may as well be talking to a brick wall here, but that actually might be an insult to a brick wall, since a brick wall does not have the ability to listen. The brick wall also does not lie about my claims, like you have been doing. At this point, it is very hard to take you seriously, and I am very close to just deciding to stop talking to you.
That is proof...
No, it is not. A claim that has been debunked as false by deterministic (read: deterministic implies non-random) explanations cannot serve as proof anything.
...even if you don't see it as proof, then I guess we'll call it a theory,...
I want to smash a table... no, my guy, you cannot do that. Okay, so I guess you also do not know the definition of the word "theory." Let me give you the first paragraph of Wikipedia's "scientific theory,": «A scientific theory is an explanation of an aspect of the natural world and universe that has been repeatedly tested and corroborated in accordance with the scientific method, using accepted protocols of observation, measurement, and evaluation of results. Where possible, theories are tested under controlled conditions in an experiment.[1][2] In circumstances not amenable to experimental testing, theories are evaluated through principles of abductive reasoning. Established scientific theories have withstood rigorous scrutiny and embody scientific knowledge.[3]» The sources cited for this claim are the National Academy of Sciences; Winther, Rasmus G. "The Structure of Scientific Theories," and Schafersman, Steven D, "An Introduction to Science."
...as that's what Christianity mainly is. As the whole point of it is faith.
The reliance on faith makes it (a) not a form of knowledge at all, and (b) not a theory at all.
Also, you are the one making claims as well, as you claim my arguments are false.
Yes, but here is the difference: I have provided reasoning and evidence for my claims, and I can actually cite sources, as I already have. Meanwhile, you are ignoring all of that evidence, and repeating nonsense I already dismissed as having no evidence. On top of that, you are literally lying about my arguments. So much for being a Christian. Is the name of your belief system "Lying for Jesus Christ?"
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@DoofusChungus You can't respond to a point with "Well, I read a study that says you're wrong," and then not supply proof.
Yes, I can. As Christopher Hitchens once said, "That which is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence." You have made many assertions, but have provided no evidence for any of them. As such, I have no epistemic obligation to actually accept them, and I can readily dismiss them. In fact, I have no epistemic obligation to even acknowledge your claims, since no evidence was presented for them. Despite that, because I actually wanted to educate you, for you to learn something about the world, rather than stay intensely ignorant on the topics of discussion, I went out of my way to actually explain to you why several of your claims are false. I have provided proof, and I have cited sources, whilst you have done neither. The fact that you chose to ignore said evidence is your problem, not mine. I already met my burden of proof for the claims I made. The only claims I have not proven are the claims that you say I made, but did not make. But, that is just you lying. I have no obligation to defend claims I never made, regardless of how much you want to insist I did make them.
And actually, I made it really easy for you to learn about the topic by citing sources aimed at laypeople, rather than trustworthy scholarly sources. I could have bombarded you instead with the hundreds of scientific peer-reviewed studies that I have read on the various topics we have discussed, and gone into detail as to how each of them proves my point. However, since everyone can tell from 1000 km away that you are not qualified to do, so much as read a published scientific study, and actually understand any of the stuff they are talking about (considering you fail to understand even basic physics and such), you would not actually learn anything. You would stay confused, and you would not have an opportunity to understand why your arguments are incorrect. At worst, you would completely misinterpret what they said in the studies, and develop some really bizarre ideas about the universe that are just not true. So, I avoided doing this instead.
You think I have read one single study, and concluded you are wrong? Let me put your arrogant self in your place then, because you need to be humbled: I did not read "one" study. I am a physicist. I have read more studies than you ever will in your entire life. I have written a thesis for my undergraduate degree in a methodology comparison between cosmology and quantum mechanics. I have a degree in physics, and another degree in philosophy. I own a dozen of textbooks in philosophy, and about two dozen in physics. I have studied mathematics much more advanced than you or anyone in your circle of friends will ever encounter. Have you ever heard of tensor calculus? I doubt it, and you probably don't even understand the definition of a "tensor." Have you ever heard of category theory? Do you know what a morphism is? No, of course not. Normally, making these assumptions about a stranger is unjustified, but I have learned quite a lot about you from these conversations. I have also studied various religions, beyond just Christianity. I probably have a better grasp of Judaism and Islam than you do. I have studied Shintoism and read the creation myth, as well as several other classics of Shinto mythology, such as the Tale of the Bamboo Cutter. I have studied some Japanese as well, though that was primarily in summer programs when I was in high school. I also own a beautiful copy of the Dao de Ching, I own a copy of the Analects, copies of several scholarly texts about Buddhism, I know the basics of Fengshui animism in China, and I even understand some of the Yoruba religions, due to my family ancestry. Now, let me ask you a question: have you ever put this much effort into understanding other people's beliefs? I doubt it. And you have definitely never put as much effort into the sciences. You think I am sitting in an armchair, just doing random Google searches, just so I can be like "ha! See? You're wrong!" Well, no. This is all knowledge I have accumulated over the years, after having had my beliefs changed several times, after having put blood, sweat, and tears into my studies.
I am not telling you all of this to brag. Look, I know absolutely nothing about theater. I know absolutely nothing about starting a business, or about making a law. I know absolutely nothing about social networking. If you gave me a car with an engine problem, and you asked me to identify the problem with car on my own, it would probably take me 4 years to do it. If you told me to make a scultpture, I would be outperformed by a toddler. So, no, I am not trying to say I am superior in any way. The reason I say all of this is so that you can understand that dismissing what experts have to say on the matter just because you have the arrogance to think you know everything, despite not being able to provide evidence for anything, is only harming you in the end. So, stop doing that. You clearly have the capacity to do better than this. You are just choosing not to. And that is infuriating, especially because you are also so dishonest about it. It honestly makes no sense, because the point of this conversation was never to disprove that God exists. In fact, for the sake of the conversation, I actually sacrificed my viewpoint entirely, and granted his existence. And I know how to do that, because I was Christian for many years in my life. I own three distinct copies of the Bible, and I have read the Bible in all the languages I am fluent in. I have even researched some of the ancient Hebrew and ancient Greek of the original text, which I doubt you have ever done. But, despite me granting you the existence of God, all you did was have tunnel vision and insist that I have to somehow prove that God does not exist, even if this meant lying about my claims. You chose this. The only thing you think about is "do they agree with my belief in God?" You don't actually listen to what they are saying to you, you do not look at the evidence, you do not bother to understand the beliefs of other people, you do not bother to learn about any of the science, even though the information is available for free online and in libraries, you do not bother to look at sources beyond the first Google result that pops up in your most primitive search. You choose to act this way, even though you do not have to, as a Christian. You think the world revolves around your relationship with God? Well, it doesn't. There are 7.8 billion people in the planet, and humans have existed for over 100 000 years. This is why you needed to be humbled, and this is why I told you everything I just said.
But, whatever. My guess is, you will not even read this comment carefully enough anyway, because I can tell you never read any of my other replies to you carefully either. And for that reason, I am going to end the conversation here, since I see no worth in continuing to interact with you. I gave you all the advice I can give you, plenty of evidence, and even tolerated your dishonest behavior. If, even after that, you cannot figure out why you are wrong, then I do not think you are actually rational enough to change your mind. Please reflect on this conversation. Anyway, I hope you have success in your endeavors.
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@user-fb2jb3gz1d where are you getting the definition of omnipotent?
The definition is very simple: we say that x is omnipotent if and only if, for all things y, x can do y.
Because having unlimited power and authority, doesn't mean if you create something, it can't have fine tuning because that would mean you're not omnipotent.
This demonstrates that you do not understand the definition of "omnipotent," nor the definituon of "fine-tuning." Let me define "fine-tuning" for you. "Fine-tuning" refers to the act of taking a free parameter of a system, and matching its value to a very narrow range of values, in order to accomplish a particular goal. For example, if you are listening to a radio station, your receiver's audio frequency has to be tuned to a very narrow range of emitted audio frequencies, in order to be able to listen to a particular radio station of your choice. This is fine-tuning. Matching a frequency to another frequency range is called tuning, but here, it is called fine-tuning, because the range of frequencies is very narrow. The argument that Ben Shapiro, and other monotheistic apologists are presenting, is that the free paramaters of the universe had to be given very specific values, in order for intelligent life to exist. In other words, they are claiming the universe is finely-tuned for the existence of intelligent life. However, if God is omnipotent, and God created the universe, then this is false: the universe cannot be finely-tuned. Why? Because, since God is omnipotent, all values of the free paramaters work equally well for producing intelligent life, since the only factor that would matter in the production of intelligent life is God's Will. Since all values of the free parameters work equally well for the existence of intelligent life in a universe created by God, such a universe is, by definition, not finely-tuned.
It's ignorance of God, that makes one think God is a god of miracles or magic. He isn't.
The Bible claims that God is a god of miracles. If you disagree, then you disagree with the Bible.
We acknowledge laws of everything around us. If God created it all, then he willingly, purposely created it as such. So he understands exactly how it works. It is us who doesn't understand.
This has nothing to do with whether the universe is finely-tuned or not. Can you stick to the topic of conversation, and not avoid my arguments, please? This is cowardly.
You acknowledge God is supposed to be omnipotent so you want him to do whatever without limits. Yet you fail to see that what he created, has limits so what you are asking him to do is to break those limits.
Yes. Is that too much to ask? Then God is not all powerful. The only reason God's creation has limits is because he put them there, no? So, he can also just remove those limitations. Yet, here you are, saying God cannot remove those limitations, resulting in a finely-tuned universe.
You know your arm can only bend so far. Let's break those limits. So now you have a broken arm.
What is the point of this analogy? God is all powerful. God is perfectly capable of doing literally whatever he wants whilst simultaneously leaving the universe unbroken and safe. Yes, if I bend my arm too much, my arm will break. And guess what? I am not all powerful. So, of course it breaks. Someone with sufficient power can bend their arm freely without breaking it, though. Such people do exist in fiction, and I would presume an all powerful being that is not fictional is not an exception to this.
What's the purpose of that? Just to see your arm can break? Why do it if YOU already know the outcome?
Why are you assuming that anything God does will break the universe? You seriously do not believe God is omnipotent.
Let's say this 4 year old does know that and he asks you to go past your arms limit. Are you going to amuse him with what you already know is not a good thing? Of course not.
No, but I would explain to the child precisely why I am refusing to engage with their request. God has never done anything analogous to that.
Does that make you stupid, less knowledgeable or weak? Of course not.
I would say that it does make you less knowledgeable or weak if you are incapable of explaining to the child why you are refusing. Such a task should be trivial for an omnipotent, omniscient being.
Yet you want God do it?
What are you talking about? I never asked God to break the universe. In fact, I am postulating that God can do literally anything he wants to without breaking the universe. You are the one who thinks that anything God does will break the universe. Not me.
You're the r year old asking God to do something he already knows the outcome.
No, I have not asked God to do anything at all. You are strawmanning me.
You're the one making God into this magician.
No, the Bible is the one making God into a magician.
Christians will say miracles, the bible will have examples of these miracles. But it's not a miracle. We just call it that to explain what we do not know.
Are you saying that everything God does can be explained by the laws of physics? Because if so, then God is not omnipotent.
Nowhere in the bible does God call himself a magician.
It does not matter. God is still a magician, even if he does not call himself by that name.
He has a reason for it. You may agree but it's a reason.
I never disagreed. God obviously has a reason to create the universe in this particular way. This does not change the fact that the universe is not finely-tuned.
You obviously don't know the gid according to the bible.
I absolute do. I think I understand the Bible a lot better than you do.
You know the god according to angel mendez-rivera
Nope. I do not have a concept of God, because I am an atheist.
It's not God according to you.
No, it is according to the Bible.
Though you can certainly think so. But that's ridiculous to presume every Christian and I should also.
No, it is not ridiculous for me to assume that you guys think God is omnipotent per the Bible. Yet, here you are, insisting that he is not omnipotent.
That's like telling a star wars fanatic that Luke has a ring and uses the Schwartz because Q says so. Or that orangutans and humans don't share a common ancestor because Q said so.
Nope, these things are not at all analogous to me saying that God is omnipotent.
That's exactly you on the character of the God of the bible.
It really is not. Your reading comprehension skills need vast improvement.
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@ruaraidh74 Atheism makes no claims about the origin of life. Atheism is not a worldview. Again, you are demonstrating that you do not know the definition of the word "atheist." An atheist is, quite literally, someone who is not a theist. That is all. Me not being a theist does not tell you what my worldviews are at all. Currently, you have no way of knowing whether I am a Daoist, Buddhist, Confucianist, legalist, naturalist/physicalist, solipsists, or something else entirely. All of the aforementioned are consistent with not being a theist. The fact that I am not a theist has absolutely no implications on a discussion about the origins of life.
Now, if you want to have a discussion about the origins of life, we can certainly do that, but just know that this has absolutely nothing to do with atheism at all.
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@user-fb2jb3gz1d I'm not saying God is not omnipotent.
Yes, you are. You have made many statements with this precise logical implication, and I have quoted you making those statements.
You have a total different definition of omnipotent than what the accepted definition is.
No, I do not. As I explained in my previous reply, Merriam-Webster, the prestigious dictionary, defines the adjective "omnipotent" as "having virtually unlimited authority or influence." This definition matches my definition.
And you obviously don't know the bible. Your statements prove that.
No, it is you who does not know the Bible.
Give your definition of omnipotent and where you got it from.
I already gave my definition. It is not my fault that you are illiterate.
And give that scripture verse that says God is a god of miracles.
I already did that. Psalm 77:14. Again, it is not my fault you are illiterate. Before accusing me of not knowing the Bible, you should read the Bible. Had you read the Bible, you would have known about Psalms.
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@ruaraidh74 Even if that were a valid argument, it wouldn't be sound, because fine-tuning is an internal critique of atheism.
It does not work as an internal critique of atheism, because the argument concludes classical monotheism is true, even though classical monotheism being true contradicts the existence of fine-tuning. You cannot present something as an internal critique, when it does not actually appeal to properties of the thing it is critiquing, and when the critique fails to be consistent with its solution.
Suppose some effect X. The cause of X can either be of type P or not P. All effects of [cause] type not P suffer from the same probability objection: [teleological argument semantics here]
The supposed "probability objection" to effects of cause type not P amounts to nothing more than a collection of unfalsifiable assertions, in this case, and the premises of the objection are, again, not implied by atheism... because atheism is not a worldview.
Therefore, all else equal, P is a more probable cause of X than not P.
This argument is valid, but not sound, since the premises are unfalsifiable.
Your objection is: "Well, if P is truly the cause of X, then [teleological argument semantics here] don't apply!"
In a sense, yes, this is my objection. If it is improbable that X has a cause of type not P, then it follows that it is more probable that X has a cause of type P, but the problem is that if X does have a cause of type P, then it is not actually the case that X is a real effect, falsifying the premises of the argument, as X not being a real effect means no causal discussion is meaningful. In other words, if the argument is valid, then it is unsound. Since it is unsound, it fails as an internal critique.
The problem is that, in order for your objection to be sound, it requires "P is truly the cause of X."
It does not. The point of my objection is that the argument in question is self-undermining: the conclusion, if it is implied by premises, actually contradicts the premises. The keypoint you are missing is that the premises of an argument can imply a conclusion without either the conclusion or the premises being true.
It supposes that "P caused X" in order to suggest that the probability of (not P) causing X is not subject to the teleological critique.
No, it does not. You are taking two completely different objections, and treating them like they actually are the same objection. You see, here, cause type P refers to the God of classical monotheism, an omnipotent, omniscient creator. But, a universe created by such an entity cannot by finely-tuned. Here, effect X being caused is the existence of a finaly-tuned universe. If the cause of the existence of a finely-tuned universe is an omniscient, omnipotent creator, then said universe is actually not finely-tuned. Hence, we have a contradiction. If you change what X is, and you claim that it is merely the existence of the universe, then there is no problem, but in that case, you cannot claim that the universe is finely-tuned. Alternatively, you can postulate P as being not an omniscient, omnipotent creator, but rather, just a generic creator god that may not be omniscient or omnipotent. Then, again, there is no problem. The specific combination of P being an omniscient, omnipotent creator, and X being a finely-tuned universe, however, is contradictory.
The above contradiction has nothing to do with the "probability objection" in the premises of the argument. If you change P and X, such that there is no contradiction, then the argument remains valid, but another problem that makes it unsound remains: namely, that X having a cause of type not P being is improbable, is an unfalsifiable, unknowable assertion. Atheism does not entail the truth of this premise, so the argument cannot even function as an internal critique. This is an entirely different counterargument from the counterargument I presented above, regarding the contradiction.
Look, let me simplify things for you, since you are still missing the point. The argument being presented is essentially of the structure A ==> B, where A is the proposition "The universe exists as it does (i.e., is finely tuned)," while B is the proposition "It was created by an omnipotent, omniscient deity." It is entirely possible for A ==> B to be true, while A and B are false. ==> denotes material implication from formal logic, here. As such, there are two possible cases to consider here. Case (i) is that A ==> B is true. Case (ii) is that A ==> B is false. My objection is the following claim: B ==> not A. Why? Because in case (i), it follows that A ==> not A, since A ==> B and B ==> not A implies A ==> not A. A ==> not A is equivalent to A being false, i.e., the universe is not finely-tuned. Meanwhile, in case (ii), A ==> B is false, so B is false, and the argument fails to establish B as its conclusion, which is exactly why I object to the truth of B. On an entirely separate note, I can choose to ignore all of the above, and still comfortably say A is an unfalsifiable proposition, so I can freely dismiss A and reject it as a premise.
Thus, your goal here is (a) to prove that B ==> not A is actually false. But you can't, because again: a universe created by an omnipotent-omniscient being cannot be finely-tuned; (b) to actually demonstrate that A is true (and not unfalsifiable).
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@ruaraidh74 That's a completely different argument from your rebuttal that "if God exists, then it's not true that fine-tuning is required for life."
Yes, I explicitly clarified that it is a different objection. You would know this if you actually carefully read my reply to you.
If I conceded that the probability objection was unfounded, then what the heck is the rigamarole about fine-tuning about?
I do not understand what you are confused about. I presented two different objections to the fine-tuning argument. One is an internal critique, whereby the conclusion being implied by the premises necessarily implies the falsehood of the premises. The other is an external critique, where I point out that, even if my internal critique were to not hold, the premises of the fine-tuning argument are unfalsifiable.
Let's not shift the goalposts around, please.
I am not shifting any goalposts here. I introduced a new objection to the discussion, while still defending the objection I had presented previously. This is not what shifting the goalpost is.
That doesn't make any sense. "Fine tuning" is another way of saying "the universe needs to be a really specific way for this to happen, given what we know about the natural world."
If it is true that the universe has to be a specific way in order for intelligent life to exist, then it cannot be true that the creator of such a universe, if there is one at all, is omniscient and omnipotent, because if such a creator is omniscient and omnipotent, then there is no specific way in which the universe must be for life to exist.
Also, there is absolutely no evidence that the universe needs to be a specific way for intelligent life to exist. Such an assertion is unfalsifiable.
If the natural world was different, then of course, the tuning would be different.
We do not know if the natural world could have been any different than what it is. We do not know whether life could exist in the natural world if it were any different than what it is. Any assertions regarding the matter are unfalsifiable. On the other hand, if the world is not natural, but the creation of an omniscient, omnipotent entity, then said world is not tuned at all for life, since life can exist in any universe created by such an entity.
The universe needs to be a specific way to permit intelligent life, given some axioms about the natural world.
This is unfalsifiable speculation. We do not even completely know what conditions a planet in our universe must satisfy for intelligent life to exist in it. Nothing that we know about the natural world can allow us to know about what would be possible in a universe different than ours.
For instance, if God decided people would be made of transcendent jelly instead of molecules and energy... then that's what they'd be made of.
Yes, and I agree, which means there is no fine-tuning. The universe could be literally anything, and the above would be true as long as God commands it.
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@user-fb2jb3gz1d Interesting. Alexandrian manuscript is the bases for modern bible translations.
Yes, this is correct, and is why I brought it up.
Apparently, you don't get into bible discussions.
I do, far more than you imagine.
When in biblical apologetics, nobody uses modern translations.
This is untrue. Cameron Bertuzzi, Frank Turek, Jay Warner Wallace, Justin Briar, William Lane Craig, etc., all use modern translations of the Bible. This also applies to New Testament scholars, such as Sean McDowell, Dale Alison, Michael R. Licona, and even Gary Habermas.
After the 1611 KJV bible and protestant reformation.............brought forth many denominations of christianity. And each takes their own translation.
Yes, and this is irrelevant. The accuracy of a translation is not based at all on how many new denominations it can spring off.
To get to the way the original teachings were, you have to use the older texts. This isn't up for a debate.
You have to use older manuscripts of the original text, not older translations.
You would know this if you actually knew about apologetics.
The fact that you do not know biblical scholars use modern translations is a demonstration of your ignorance, not mine.
Alexandrian manuscript refers to the new testament.
Not necessarily, no.
The old testament was written in Hebrew, except for the Septuagint, apocrypha.
Again, this demonstrates your ignorance. The Septuagint is not part of the Tanakh. The Septuagint is a translation of the Tanakh into Greek.
Psalms is written in Hebrew because its part of the old testament, the Tanahk.
It's "the Tanakh." It is sad that you cannot transliterate the name of your sacred books correctly.
Little things like miracles and wonder makes a big deal. For our reason exactly. You're saying miracles and I say wonder. Apparently you attribute miracles to just that.
No. I am saying the word used translates to "miracle." You using the King James Version does not disprove my point. If you want to have this discussion, then you better start demonstrating at least a basic understanding of Hebrew, which you clearly lack, because if you had a basic understanding of Hebrew, you would not be using the King James Version of the Bible.
I'm saying it's not a miracle because God doesn't do miracles,...
And I am saying the Bible disagrees with you. You have not actually addressed the problem here. You just chose to ignore it.
...he created the universe and it's laws so he knows how to use them.
If God created the universe, and intervenes in it freely, then there is no such a thing as "the laws of the universe." All this tells me is that you have no clue as to what word "law" means in the context of science. A law of nature is simply a description of a behavior of the universe that is consistent and the universe never deviates from. There are no such behaviors if God intervenes in the universe at will.
So to the ignorant, it seems like a miracle but it's actually not.
It is a miracle, by definition. The word "miracle" is defined as an extraordinary event manifesting divine intervention. What makes the intervention divine is precisely the fact that it is an act of God.
God is omnipotent, he doesn't need to perform a miracle when he knows how everything works.
God does not obey the laws of nature. If he did, then he would not be omnipotent.
Doing a wonder, is acknowledgment of something that we don't know how it's done, so it's a wonder. One can say it's a miracle but that's not the correct interpretation or meaning.
Yes, it is correct. That is literally the definition given in the dictionary, and it is the definition that most Christians use too.
In the bible, Jesus talks about the things he does, these "miracles," but he tells his disciples how to do them.
Even if he tells everyone how to do them, they are still miracles, by definition, since they are a manifestation of God intervening in the world.
How hard is it to realize that if God is omnipotent, knows everything and has authority of everything; if he made a limb grow back, you would say it's a miracle. Because you don't know how he did it, he just did it.
No. Me knowing how he did it has nothing to do with it. If I knew how he did it, it would still be a miracle, according to the dictionary definition, as is still counts as an act of divine intervention. Knowing how God did it does not make it not divine.
But if you become a disciple of God, meaning to give your life and follow every word he spoke, you would understand how he did it.
This is false. I know this is false, because I used to be a very devote Christians many years ago, but I never learned how to regrow limbs.
It's not magic.
Okay, sure, it is not magic, but as it still divine intervention, it is, by definition, a miracle.
This the teaching of the bible. Any practicing biblical scholar of christianity would tell you, an educated Muslim and educated Jew, would also tell you the same thing about God.
No, they would not, and I know this, because despite being nonreligious, I have many highly educated friends who are Christian, Muslim, and Jewish. I even have highly educated friends from other religions, such as Buddhism and Hinduism.
I bet you didn't know that Jews, Muslims and christians, have the same God.
I have literally known this since I was in elementary school. What, you think you are smart because you know this? 🤣 That is pathetic. Virtually every self-respecting individual who knows about Islam actually knows this. This is not some "fun fact" or secret knowledge. It is common knowledge.
I pretty sure I'm going to have to get technical with you.
Even though you do not know Hebrew? Yeah, right.
Psalms 77 is someone saying God doest wonders, in your case, miracles. I'm should say that God never says that about himself.
And? This is irrelevant.
It's only someone else who says it about God or Jesus.
Again, this is irrelevant.
Neither does Jesus claim he does miracles. People today claim God does miracles. Because they can't explain how he did it.
No. People call them miracles, because by definition, that is what divine acts of intervention are.
But I assure you it's not by magic.
Again, you are conflating the words "magic" and "miracles." They are not the same thing.
How do I know.............. Because sorcery is forbidden.
You clearly have very little knowledge of paganism. Magic and sorcery are actually not the same thing.
You would know this if you actually read the bible.
You are the one who has not read the Bible, clearly.
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@ruaraidh74 No, I get it perfectly fine. You are the one who does not get it. The reason I have kept repeating myself, is because you continue to understand the argument. In fact, you have completely failed to address my two objections, and are now just ignoring them, on the alleged basis that I am missing the point, despite failing to explain how this is the case.
"Fine tuning" is another way of saying "the universe needs to be a really specific way for this to happen, GIVEN what we know about the natural world."
No. If there is no omnipotent, omniscient creator, then what we know about the natural world does not imply anything about how the universe needs to be in order for life to exist. The claim that the universe needs to be a specific way for life to exist is an unfalsifiable claim. This is what you are failing to understand. However, if there is an omnipotent, omniscient creator, then there demonstrably does not exist any specific way the universe needs to be for life to exist. This is what you are failing to understand.
In summary: if classical monotheism is true, then the assertion you make is demonstrably false. If we do not assume classical monotheism is true, then the assertion is unfalsifiable, and entirely speculative. Either way, your argument is unsound.
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@user-fb2jb3gz1d What is wrong with fine tuning something?
No one has claimed there is anything wrong with a non-omnipotent being fine-tuning a parameter. The claim is that it is impossible for a parameter to be fine-tuned if the entity doing it is omnipotent. See? Literacy goes a long way in a discussion.
So, it has limits, but that does not mean the creator does.
Nope, you are wrong, because that is not how that works. If a creator has no limits, then neither does its creation.
I've been saying that there are laws, boundaries that we, the universe, have. And that God knows these limits, and si he abides by them.
Then he is not omnipotent, by definition. If God abides by the laws of nature, then God does not unlimited authority or influence over the universe. In order for the universe to actually have laws at all, God cannot be omnipotent. The universe has no laws at all if God is omnipotent.
But being omnipotent,...
No. You just said God is not omnipotent. You just said God abides by the laws of nature. Since God abides by the laws of nature, God is omnipotent. You are the one who said God abides by the laws of nature, not me.
If I were God, I wouldn't do anything to amuse you.
No, but unlike God, you are not interested in having a personal relationship with me. In any case, no one has asked God to do anything in this conversation, except for you.
If we as humans can create fine-tuned things and then improve on them... then an omnipotent entity should be able to do the same.
Nope, that is not how that works. The reason humans can fine-tune parameters is because we are not omnipotent, and we are constrained by the laws of physics. If we were omnipotent, then there would not be such a thing as fine-tuning, since the values of a parameter would be irrelevant, and in fact, meaningless.
When he creates, he automatically creates something with detail, fine tuning.
Once again, you are demonstrating your ignorance. You are demonstrating that you do not know what the word "fine-tuning" means. Creating a detailed universe is not "fine-tuning."
What's interesting is that whenever something gets created, it automatically has limits.
Nope, that is not how that works. Now you are just pulling nonsense out of your butthole, and pretending it is a fact.
the Septuagint is not part of the Tanahk.
Yes, I know. I am the one who taught you this. You are the one who implied it was part of the Tanakh earlier, not me.
The Tanahk is all in Hebrew. The Septuagint is all in Greek.
Yes. Again, I am literally the one who told you this.
You would know this if you read the bible.
I do know it. I am the one who taught you these things. I guess you fail to realize this because you are illiterate, but there is nothing I can do about that, since I am not omnipotent. Why did God send an illiterate messenger to talk to me? Who knows?
Protestant bibles don't use the Septuagint. Catholic Bibles do.
No, this is false. Bible translations are not divided into Catholic or Protestant translations, and there are no Bibles today that use the Septuagint. All Bibles use the Alexandrian manuscripts, or in case of the older translations, the Textus Receptus, which is not in Greek, but in Latin.
I say nobody uses modern translations in apologetics... yes they do. I mean to say that when it comes to certain words or meanings, the practice is to go back to the Hebrew and Greek manuscripts.
Ah, okay then. Well, that is the same thing I did. I did not use a particular translation. You did.
They don't use the modern translations for that.
Neither did I.
I do associate miracles with magic. Because the miracles in the bible are wonders not magic.
Why do you associate miracles with magic when the Bible contradicts? How are you typing this, and not realize how incoherent your argument is?
So why are you still using miracles for Psalms 77:14 when the majority of bibles use wonders?
What the majority of bibles use is irrelevant. You literally just said that apologists "don't use modern translations for that," and that "miracles in the Bible are wonders, not magic." Therefore, you literally proved my point, while failing to realize that this is exactly what you did. Geez. Put some thought into what you write.
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@user-fb2jb3gz1d How can a loving merciful god allow such evil?
Well, there is an easy solution: said god is not omnipotent, or not omniscient.
Science also knows that once we know these laws, we can manipulate them, use them in different ways.
No, science does not say that at all. Citation needed. Certainly, you can use knowledge of these laws to build technology, but this is not "manipulation" of those laws.
Like a child doesn't know good or bad, until experiences shows them or someone teaches them.
This is false. Many aspects of morality need to be taught to children, yes, but some aspects are just innate to human biology.
I look at creation with balance, everything created has balance because that is what is required for it work as it was intended to work.
No, not if God is omnipotent, but I suppose you have already made it more than clear that your God is not omnipotent.
I get my views because I am a mechanic.
Too bad God is not a mechanic. Mechanics are human. They are fallible, they are not omnipotent nor omniscient, and cannot behave in a fashion contrary to what the laws of physics have predicted.
I have to fix vehicles, troubleshoot issues.
God does not have to fix vehicles, or troubleshoot issues. Nothing God creates can have issues at all, since God is omnipotent and omniscient.
So, that's how I see things, because it has to be that way...
It only has to be that way for humans, who are not omnipotent, nor omniscient. None of your analogies work, because again, God is omnipotent and omniscient. There is no "balance," because God does need to achieve a particular thing in order for the universe to work. In fact, to the contrary: no matter what God does, it is impossible for the universe to "not work," since God is willing the universe to exist.
So, God says he gave us free will.
Nowhere in the Bible is this stated. Furthermore, the scientific evidence most definitely does not support the thesis that we have free will.
I see God as the parent.
You cannot do this. You already compared God to a mechanic. Now you are comparing God to a parent. Make up your mind. You cannot have it both ways.
Yes, he would love to keep us from harm but then we would eventually hate him for not letting us experience life.
Well, maybe you would, but that just speaks to your emotional maturity. I know I would not hate him at all! In fact, I would very much prefer it. Besides, a competent parent actually has a conversation with their child, explaining to them why they are not allowing a particular behavior. Most children are fairly understanding when you take this approach. No, the success rate is not 100%, but again, humans are not omnipotent, nor omniscient, so this makes sense, and children often have disabilities that also prevent them from understanding. However, mental disorders are nothing to God, and God is omnipotent and omniscient. Having his children understand is not merely very easy, but actually trivial. In fact, if God actually bothers explaining, and if God is truly omnipotent, then it is simply impossible that we will not understand his reasons at all and fail to abide by them. The truth would be so compelling, even us mortals would not be able to resist it. Your suggestion that we would hate God only aligns with the idea that God is incapable of making us understand, and therefore, not omnipotent.
Just like having your own child. You can't protect them from everything, because then you are controlling them, taking away their free will.
Yes, but human parents are neither omnipotent nor omniscient, and are bound by the laws of biology. We have irrational brains, and can suffer from problems of mental health that can be obstacles in us making safe or sound decisions. None of this is true for God, so your analogy fails: if God truly is omnipotent and omniscient, then it is literally impossible for us to not be compelled to by God's truth. Since we do observe that there are people not convinced by God's truth, it proves at least one of two things: (a) God is neither omnipotent nor omniscient; (b) God has not actually revealed the truth to all of us. Also, God actually explaining his reasons to compel us does not violate our free will, not any more than him having omniscience and creating us already does (because it is already not possible to have free will if God created us and is omniscient).
Just because there is a God, that doesn't mean he has to intervene in every bad thing.
No, but it does mean that, if God is omnipotent, omniscient, and loving/benevolent, then it is simply impossible that bad things could exist at all.
Imagine if science mocked or hated things they didn't understand?
This is a strawman. No one here is mocking God. We are presenting you with a logical contradiction, and we are asking you to either accept that it is contradiction, or demonstrate that it is not a contradiction. You have failed to demonstrate it is not a contradiction. Saying that "we do not understand God's motivation" is not an argument, and does not address the contradiction. After all, our capabilities to understand God are completely irrelevant to the contradiction.
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@user-fb2jb3gz1d But sometimes, God does intervene.
You say that, but there has never been any evidence that divine intervention has actually occurred.
I say that 95% of people who call themselves Christians are not Christian, because they pick and choose where, when, and to whom they practice Christianity.
This is a No True Scotsman fallacy.
Jesus specifically said that we will know his disciples by their fruit, and their fruit will bear things like healing the sick... you know, things that sound like miracles. Yet we don't see any of that today.
The Bible claims Jesus said this, although no one actually knows if Jesus really did say it. But yes, the Bible does explicitly say that. And as you say: no one in recorded history has actually been confirmed with having these capabilities.
It's because of what I see that no one is a Christian...
Well, that means you are not a Christian either, then. In fact, this just means Christianity is dead, it does not exist. You do not realize it, but you have literally just accidentally admitted that Christianity is effectively false.
Because God listens to those who obey him.
And when you say this, why should anyone believe you?
I have seen some people pray for hours, pray devoutly, and these people have incredible stories of God answering their prayer.
Just because a person believes God answered their prayers does not mean God actually did answer the prayers. These things can always be explained away by things like the Barnum effect, the placebo effect, and other such things. Besides, I have known many devoted Christian people who have prayed intensely for hours, and yet their prayers went unanswered. As such, this is a counterexample.
My only true issue is, condemn me on what I actually believe, not on what you think I believe.
The problem is that you actively refuse to disclose in full formality what your beliefs are, you actively refuse to define your terminology, and when we define our terminology, you refuse to engage with those definitions. You continue shifting the goalpost, and you continue to contradict yourself in every sentence. In one sentence, you say "God is omnipotent," but in the next sentence, you directly contradict it. When I make an assertion, you pretend that I made an entirely different assertion, or that I made none, or you simply throw the assertion back at me, as if you came up with it, when I was the one who initially made the assertion. When I ask you to argue against my particular thesis, you throw all these red herrings about biblical translations, the definition of "miracles," and other such things, which are completely irrelevant to the discussion, since this discussion is about fine-tuning and God's omnipotence, not any of those other things you decided to bring up. In summary: you are engaging in massive mental gymnastics and employing intellectually dishonest rhetorical tactics to avoid facing the criticisms to your beliefs. It makes it obvious that you are experiencing some very heavy cognitive dissonance, and I am willing to bet that many of the things you have said are just you parroting what other pastors or apologists on the Internet have said, as a desperate resort, despite not being totally convinced about those things being parroted. Last, but not least, saying we should condemn you for what you actually believe, and not for what we think you believe, is hypocritical, since this is a principle you yourself are not willing to follow when it comes non-Christians.
I believe in the God of the Bible.
No, you definitely do not, since so many of the claims you have made are in direct contradiction with the Bible. The Bible does not present God as being omnipotent or omniscient, and in fact, prior to the destruction of the Second Temple, there were no Jews or Christians that ever spoused the idea of an omnipotent or omniscient God. Classical monotheism in Christianity did not come to exist until much later, and by that time, all the texts in the Bible had been written. Christians who subscribe to classical monotheism will take the Bible and reinterpret it to suit their needs, cherry-picking the verses they can easily contort as if they supported classical monotheism, while completely ignoring the verses that directly contradict it. In the process of doing this, they have eliminated alternative interpretations, bashing them as "heretical," which is ironic, since classical monotheism did not originate from the Abrahamic religions: it originated with Hellenistic tradition. This reinterpretation and contorsion has erased the cultural context and ancient theological connotations of the text, while also taking a naive approach of taking the Bible literally, rather than treating it as a work of literature, the latter being exactly how the writers of the text treated these texts. This is how you get to unscientific nonsense like the "biblical flat Earth movement" and "young Earth creationism."
Additionally, while the Bible actively describes God as a god of miracles, you actively refuse to accept this. We had an entire discussion around this, which proves my point. Furthermore, you insist that free will is biblical, even though it is very much not biblical. The entirety of Christian theology is based around misinterpreting the Bible and misunderstanding the text; so having the audacity to then say that you believe in the God of the Bible is inaccurate, disrespectful, and could even be taken as antisemitic, as, in the process of contorting the Bible to fit your unbiblical beliefs, you are actually demeaning a work of Jewish literature, and erasing the Jewish social culture and history that gives connotation to the text as written.
He is the same yesterday and tomorrow.
This is not how the Bible portrays God. The fact that there is an Old Covenant, and then a New Covenant, is enough of a rebuttal.
A lot of Mosaic laws, like stoning a chick in her menstrual cycle...
...and you are also misogynystic, to top things off. Great. Look, you cannot be unironically talk about women as "chicks" in a discussion about Christianity. This is pathetic.
...it's because the people wanted it, so God allowed it. Not because he wanted it so.
No, this is false. God explicitly commanded these things to be upheld. These were not laws introduced by humans in the biblical narrative.
We can argue that because he allows it, he condones it.
God condones something he does not like? Now you are really contradicting yourself.
To me, the 10 Commandments are his laws...
Which 10 commandments? The ones from Exodus 20? Or the ones from Exodus 34, which are different, and which the biblical text actually calls "the Ten Commandments" in verse 28?
The Mosaic laws are the laws his people wanted.
No. The Bible is explicit: God commanded these things. God wanted them.
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@user-fb2jb3gz1d I don't see anything wrong with God's laws.
You mean you seen nothing wrong with Numbers 5:11-29, the torturing of a woman solely to find out if she cheated or not, without even requiring any evidence to justify being suspicious of her, and forcing her to have a miscarriage if she did cheat? You see nothing wrong with Exodus 21:2-6, explicitly delineating a God-given loophole for masters of Hebrew slaves to permanently enslave the entirely family, including women and children? You see nothing wrong with Exodus 21:17, where God commands that someone being having an outburst at their parents be punished by the death penalty? You see nothing wrong with Exodus 21:20-21, where God explicitly commands the exoneration of masters who beat their slaves? You see nothing wrong with Exodus 22:16-17, where a woman who is sexually violated can be forced to be married to the offender if the offender simply pays her father? You see nothing wrong with Exodus 22:18, one of the verses that justified the European witch hunts of the second millenium, where millions of people in Europe were killed because of it? You see nothing wrong with Exodus 22:20, in which God literally commands ethnic cleansing? You see nothing wrong with Exodus 23:23-24, where God explicitly commands ethnic cleasing again?
Because, if so, then I want you nowhere near my family ever. Forgive me, but I do not want to be in contact with anyone who sees nothing wrong with torturing women, permanent enslavement of entire families, beating up slaves with no repercussions, executing to death people who just had a bad day and ended up taking out on their parents, forcing a raped woman to marry her rapist via payment, executing people who practice sorcery or who worship other gods, and committing ethnic cleansing.
Especially when Jesus summed them up with 2 commandments... love God with all your being, and love your neighbors as yourself. All of the other commandments of God will follow if you follow the 2.
No, they most definitely will not. Loving your neighbors necessarily entails things such as not committing ethnic cleansing, not forcing raped women to get married to their rapists via payment to their fathers, not torturing women, not owning people as slaves, not giving the death penalty to people committing petty actions, not torturing women, etc. Also, I should mention, commanding someone to love you, regardless of whether you are responsible for their existence or not, is inherently manipulative, and instutiting a punishment for if they do not love you is called domestic/child abuse. Also, commanding people to love everyone is also toxic. For example, no one should be obligated to love, or even forgive, their abuser. This leads to further trauma in the victim, and in the worst case scenarios, this can make the victim completely unable to feel emotions, or overwhelm them so much that it makes them suicidal. If God is omniscient, then God knows this. If, despite knowing this, God is still commanding you to love your abuser, as he does, then God does not care about you well-being, and is not benevolent.
People put things above God, and limit who they love.
Well, no. I do not put things above God, because I do not believe God exists.
I'm omitting the things like what happened to Jericho, the killings God commanded.
Yes, you are, because they very clearly pose a problem for your worldview, so they only way you can continue to pretend your worldview is tenable is simply for you to ignore these things. You are doing that thing again where you cherrypick the Bible. Almost all Christians do this, even the reasonable ones.
I acknowledge the slavery and killings he commanded.
Not only do you acknowledge them, but earlier, you admitted you see absolutely nothing wrong with these things, which to me, suggests you are perhaps a psychopath.
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@user-fb2jb3gz1d There are reasons for them.
Then, present those reasons. It is that simple... No, no such reasons exist. We can prove this logically, and omniscience is not at all required to do so. Why? Because one can understand how omniscience works without being omniscient. Obviously, this must be true, since otherwise, it would simply be impossible for Christians to "know" that God is omniscient. Fact 0: there do not exist any circumstances under which committing genocide is an act of love. Fact 1: an all loving, benevolent entity, by the very definition of these words, will always, to the best of their ability, seek to commit only those acts which are loving, and prevent those acts which are unloving. Deduction 0: it follows that, an all loving, benevolent entity, by the very definition of these words, will always, to the best of their ability, prevent acts of genocide. Fact 2: an omnipotent and omniscient entity can always successfully prevent any act from hapening. Deduction 1: it follows that an omnipotent and omniscient entity can always successfully prevent acts of genocide from happening. Fact 3: an entity which is omnipotent, omniscient, and all loving, benevolent, by the very definition of these words, will always, to the best of their ability, seek to commit only those acts which are loving, and prevent those acts which are unloving, and will always succeed in doing so. Deduction 2: it follows that an entity which is omnipotent, omniscient, and all loving, benevolent, by the very definition of these words, will always, to the best of their ability, seek to prevent acts of genocide, and will always succeed in doing so. The God of the Bible does not satisfy the statement laid out in deduction 2. Therefore, the God of the Bible fails to omnipotent, or fails to be omniscient, or fails to be all loving and benevolent.
You may respond to this by saying "You are ignoring the fact that God has a plan for us, and than plan, in the longterm, involves enduring acts of genocides." However, this does not help: if such is the nature of God's plan, then God's plan is not all loving, and thus, God is not all loving, for if God were all loving, God would not choose to have a plan that requires us to endure acts of genocide. Also, there is another reason why such a defense fails: God is omnipotent and omniscient. Therefore, a plan by God cannot "require" anything at all: there is nothing that needs to be fulfilled for the plan to be achieved, since the plan can simply happen, just because God says so. Requirements are an emergent property of entities with limitations, which God allegedly lacks (although, I should reiterate, the Bible never actually portrays God as limitless, at least not in a non-hyperbolic context).
Though you may not agree with the reasons.
Since the reasons cannot exist, as demonstrated above, it is impossible to agree with them. Saying that one could agree with them is like saying that you can paint an existing wall with a nonexisting paintbrush.
I may not agree either, but if God is omnipotent, then it is impossible to comprehend why he commanded such an evil thing.
It is impossible to comprehend, because it is logically impossible for that to happen. All this tells me is that you are continuing to fail to understand how omnipotence and omniscience work as properties of an entity.
To simply say God is evil, therefore not omnipotent, then I say one is changing the definition of omnipotent.
Nope. No one is saying that, if God is evil, then he is not omnipotent. We ars saying that God is evil, or God is not omnipotent, or God is not omniscient.
We don't know what's beyond 100. God does.
We do not need to know what is beyond 100, because what little we do know is more than sufficient to prove that a logical contradiction occurs.
So how can we say for certain that what God does is evil or wrong, or that he is no omnipotent, based on our limited understanding?
We can do it in exactly the same way you managed to "know" that God is omniscient to begin with. Meaning, if our knowledge is not sufficient to prove that a logical contradiction exists, then it is actually impossible for us to know that God is omniscient to begin with.
That's just stupidity on our part.
Yes, I agree that claiming that we can know God is omniscient is stupidity on humanity's part. Massively stupid, in fact. Which only makes me wonder why you do it anyway.
I don't see knowing the future as not having free will.
That is because you do not actually understand what it means to know the future, or what it means to have free will. Let me explain this for you. God is omniscient, and created the universe. Therefore, God knows exactly what each created entity in the universe will do, and furthermore, what each created entity in the universe will do will be done precisely because God ordained it so. As such, no entity in the universe can do anything differently than how God ordained it will do things at the moment of creation, since God is omniscient. As such, all created entities in the universe are just automata: deterministic systems whose future is completely set in stone. In other words, we cannot choose our future actions: whatever we do at any given point in time, it happened because God ordained it would happen so at the moment of creation, and because God knew it would happen, and as God's knowledge is absolute, since God is omniscient, nothing could ever deviate from it. In other words, it was fixed in stone, since the moment of creation, that we would behave in the way that we do behave and have behaved. Since it was fixed in stone, we had no "choice" on the matter, even if we had the illusion of choice. Therefore, if God is omniscient and created the universe, then we have no free will.
To me, it's like me creating a game with all the possibilities that can occur, and you choosing one,...
No, this is not at all analogous to God creating the universe. In this case, yes, you created the game, but you did not create me, and you are not omniscient, because you do not know the future: since you do not know what choice I will make, you do not know my brain chemistry. It seems like you are confused, so let me make this clear: knowing all of the possible outcomes is not the same as knowing the future. Knowing the future also includes knowing which outcome actually will happen.
I know all the possibilities of your choice, but it's up to you to choose, not me.
Nope, this is not omniscience. Knowing what are the possible choices I can make is not omniscience, because that is not the same as knowing the future. Knowing the future means knowing exactly which choice I will make. Also, in this case, you did not create me, so again, the analogy fails.
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@user-fb2jb3gz1d Yes, religion is written by man, so it's correct to say religion is manmade.
I am glad you understand. So, now, why should I accept any religion is true, if they are just inventions by humans? For the religion to be true, it would actually have to be initiated by the gods the religion proclaims to worship, unless the religion is deistic or atheistic.
So, that's how see religion. I base it off their actual doctrine, not the people who pervert it.
Nope, you completely missed the point of the argument. The point is, the doctrines are manmade, and so, are themselves just results of human's perversions of reality. And by the way, this also applies to the Constitution. This is why the Amendments exist. Even with the Amendments, there are many, many problems with the U.S. Constitution.
We have the written manuscripts or how the teachings and meanings are meant to be.
No, we most certainly do not.
* We do not have any of the original manuscripts used in the text of the Bible. No manuscript in our possession dates to anywhere near as far back as the text themselves do.
* We also do not have the original teachings. The text itself was written decades, sometimes centuries, after the theological idea it was meant to convey originated, only having been communicated by oral tradition otherwise. Most people were illiterate during those times, so traditions could not be written down until long after they emerged.
* We also do not have the original meanings. Ancient Hebrew, Aramaic, and Ancient Greek are all dead languages, and on top of that, the texts contain many words that exist nowhere else in the literature of these languages, words that were literally invented by their authors. We do have some of the meanings, yes, but definitely not all of them, like you say.
Also, I should mention, these traditions evolved from previous religions. Christianity evolved from a new radical Messianic sect of Judaism, combined with theology and traditions of the Essenes. These, in turn, where traditions that had evolved from Second Temple Judaism, having been influenced by the Greco-Roman religions that surrounded them, and also influenced heavily by Zoroastrianism. Second Temple Judaism was itself evolved from early Judaism, having been influenced by Hellenistic philosophy, local post-Babylonian religions, and the religions of the empires that seized control of the Jews, which included Zoroastrianism, again. In turn, early Judaism originated from the ancient Canaanite religion being heavily influenced by the ancient Sumerian religion that pre-existed it, and the Egyptian religion, and then later became syncretized with Yahwism. Would you not say that Judaism is just a perversion of the Canaanite religion? Are they not the heretics who deviated from the real, original doctrines?
We have writings of disciples of disciples of disciples of disciples, and so on,...
No, what we have are writings of Church fathers whose relationships to the disciples of Jesus is highly questionable, according to the scholarly consensus, and then also, lots and lots of anonymous writings and forgeries.
Doing this is why I'm Catholic. Only Catholicism goes right back to Jesus himself...
This is false. Even by the time of the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, at least 8 different major Christian sects had emerged, with their origins being unclear. Among these were the Pauline sect, the Marcionist sect, and the Ebionite sect, but there were several others too. All of these have equal right of claim to being traceable to as far back as history has allowed us to do. Pauline Christianity went on to split into Nicene Christianity, which is the most recent common ancestor of all Christian sects today, and Arian Christianity, which later went extinct due to being persecuted to extinction. There are many non-Protestant sects of Christianity today traceable all the way back to the Council of Nicaea: all of the Chalcedonian sects, the Oriential Orthodox sects, and the Church of the East, which follows the Nestorian theology. These ramifications of all happened in the 1st millenium, long before the Great Schism of the 1000s, where Chalcedonian Christianity eventually ended splitting into many churches, 24 in the Roman Catholic Church and at least 15 in the Eastern Orthodox Church. And this was all before the Protestant Reformation.
...and anyone can read the early church writings...
You mean the ones that the Nicene Church did not burn down or bury in deserts?
...to see Catholicism aligns with what Jesus taught his disciples...
You mean with what the Gospels and Epistles claim Jesus taught his disciples. We have no way of knowing what Jesus actually thought, as he wrote no texts of his own, and neither did the 12 apostles, except for maybe (and this is a big fat "maybe") the epistles that maybe Peter wrote, although most scholars still think those were actually cases of pseudepigrapha. Neither are there writings of anyone claiming to have been a disciple of any of the apostles. We do have writings of someone claiming to be a disciple of a disciple of an apostle, but the person they listed as their master never claimed to be a disciple of an apostle, despite being a fairly accomplished Church father.
Also, no, your claim is false. Even the work of theologians from the second century do not align all that well with the texts of the Bible. The Church does mental gymnastics to try to pretend that it does, but this is just typical of Christians, reinterpreting works to make it seem like they say things they do not say.
All the other Christians come 1500 years later.
Nope, this is false. Gnostic Christianity, Pauline Christianity, and Ebionite Christianity, all existed as mutually exclusive sects of Christianity by 70 CE. Yes, Gnostic Christianity and Ebionite Christianity went extinct, and so did Arian Christianity, but the split between non-Nestorianism and Nestorianism occurred as early as 431 CE, and Nestorianism still exists to this day, in the form of the Ancient Church of the East.
Anyone who picks up a Bible will have their own interpretation on things.
Yes, which is a problem. If the Bible is the Word of God, then it should not be subject to interpretation: it should be objective, and unambiguous. Since this is not the case, I conclude the Bible is not the Word of God.
But how can you simply read a religious book without proper instruction?
It's called "being literate and having reading comprehension skills." Also, I thought the Bible was the Word of God, according to you? Is it not? Because if it is the Word of God, then there is absolutely no reason you would need anyone to give you proper instruction. After all, the Word of God IS the proper instruction.
Well, I say that, but this is only me hypothetically granting the absurd assertion that an omniscient, omnipotent creator who wants to have a relationship with us would actually do something as mind-bogglingly dumb as communicating hyper-indirectly by ordaining other people to write an arbitrary collection of books. In actuality, an omniscient god would know that books are not the best way to communicate knowledge, and are horribly ineffective way of initiating relationships, even by omnipotent standards. So, anyway, this already disproves the idea that any manmade book could ever actually be the Word of God.
And without proper instruction, people will interpret things in ways that were not meant to be.
If the Bible is the Word of God, then it cannot be misinterpreted by even illiterate people. It is called the Word of God for a reason, do you not think? The fact that so many misinterpretations of the Bible exist is sufficient evidence that the Bible is not the Word of God.
Also, this thing where people misinterpret books happens with all books. It is not exclusive to religious books. This happens because most people know how to read at only a moderate level, not a proficient level. And this is why I said that using books to communicate information is ineffective for a God that is allegedly omniscient. An omniscient God would know better than to use books.
...just shows that people do not do their research.
Yes, your replies are a great example.
You need proper instruction.
Not really, no.
It's stupidity to say we don't.
No, it is not. What is stupid, however, is to assert that somehow, it is metaphysically possible for an inerrant book made by God himself, to be misinterpreted by a measly human being. I thought God is all powerful. Is God not capable of making a book that no one can misinterpret? Better yet, if God is omnipotent, why is he relying on books? There is this thing called telepathy. God could just use this. Then your ability to understand books becomes completely irrelevant. Now, does God have to use telepathy? No, God is not obligated to do anything at all. That is not my point. My point is, since he is not using a method of communication that is impossible to misinterpret, it means he clearly has no interest in us actually knowing the truth about him and about the world. Sure, God has a plan, but that plan certainly does not involve us knowing the truth about him and the universe, that much I can be confident of. Maybe God wrote the Bible to confuse us because he thought it would be amusing (whatever that means for an omniscient entity, anyway). You cannot disprove this possibility.
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And in the end, you ignored my previous comments to you. How oddly convenient for you. I think I am going to end my conversation with you here as well.
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@user-fb2jb3gz1d Oh, so now that I have told you that I am going to end the conversation, you finally decide to engage with my argument to try to make me look like a fool? Nice try. Okay, fine, I take back my decision. I will give you one last chance to be intellectually honest here.
So, would you say that because he is omnipotent, that he cannot make things that are fine tuned?
This phrasing is all wrong. You are trying to make it seem like I am imposing a limitation on God's omnipotence, when that is not at all what my argument is doing.
Here is the point: the point is that there cannot exist such a thing as a "finely-tuned universe which is created by an all-powerful and all-knowing entity." Such a "thing" is, in fact, not a thing at all, it is just meaningless word salad, an incoherent notion. Talking about a "finely-tuned universe which is created by an all-powerful and all-knowing entity" is exactly equivalent to talking about a "square circle" or a "married bachelor" or a "blonde redhead" or a "feline insect."
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@lewkor1529 The idea of a potentially infinite collection is nonsensical, so naturally, any definition that any theologian tries to give will be nonsensical, or circular. The nuance that is being missed here is that the idea of actual infinity versus potential infinity originated in the literature millennia before axiomatic set theory was developed, and so, the idea originated during a time where the concept of the infinite was poorly understood, if not rendered invalid. This is the reason why real analysis was invented: there was a requirement to set calculus of real-valued functions of real numbers on a rigorous foundation, one which did not include a concept of infinitesimal or infinite quantities, but which solely relied on the properties of the real numbers. It was only after the end of the 19th century that the study of infinite objects in mathematics was put on a rigorous foundation, thanks to Georg Cantor and other pioneers. This also allowed the development of the hyperreal numbers and nonstandard analysis, and then later, the development of combinatorial game theory, giving rise to the theory of surreal numbers. Today, infinite quantities are understood in terms of these theories, all of which rest on set theory as the ultimate axiomatic foundation.
With this modern understanding, we know one thing: some sets are legitimately infinite. For example, the set of natural numbers is an infinite set, by definition, and it is an axiom of set theory that the set of natural numbers exists. Some sets are infinite, some sets are not infinite. That is all there is to it. The distinction between actual infinity and potential infinity simply does not exist in mathematics, and the idea of a set with indefinite cardinality is also impossible, and this can be proven from the axioms. Note: indefinite cardinality must not be confused with infinite cardinality. Indefinite cardinality refers to a cardinality that is not fixed. This ancient theological notion should therefore be finally put to rest, but old-school thinkers like WLC and Islam theologians just refuse to let this already obsolete, disproven idea, die out for good.
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In axiomatic set theory, there exists an axiom called the axiom of infinity. The axiom of infinity states that there exists a set N such that, (0) {} is an element of N, (1) if x is an element of N, then the union of x and {x} is an element of N. This set N is called the set of natural numbers, also known as the simplest inductive set. Assuming the Zermelo-Fraenkel axioms, or any strengthening thereof, a set S is called an infinite set iff there exists an injective function f : N —> S. A set that is not an infinite set is called a finite set.
Given how finiteness and infiniteness are defined, a set is either infinite, or finite, but as one is the negation of the other, a set cannot be not-finite and not-infinite. A set also cannot be both. This renders the ancient theological distinction between actual infinity and potential infinity as being obsolete, inaccurate, and useless.
Aleph(0) is defined as being equal to the set N. Additionally, it is said that, for a set S, card(S) = Aleph(0) iff there exists a bijective function g : N —> S. If α, β, γ are cardinalities, then γ = α·β iff γ = card(A*B), with α = card(A) and β = card(B). From this, it can be proven that if α = 30, β = Aleph(0), then γ = Aleph(0) as well, by constructing a bijection. So it is a theorem of set theory that Aleph(0) = 30·Aleph(0). There is no contradiction here.
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@lewkor1529 is the Kalam question begging when it states "everything that it begins to exist has "A" cause"? It seems to me that this premise smuggles in the idea of "A" (=single) cause in order to set the stage for "A" god further down the road. Without the usage of the "A" in, is it conceivable or possible that multiple causes could concur or act concomitantly in bringing about an effect, in this case the universe?
This is a very good question, and I think the issue here is that the Kalam argument is just worded poorly, and its premises are not formulated rigorously. In particular, the Kalam argument does not provide a definition for what it calls a "cause". Depending on which of the various definitions you adopt, what the Kalam does could be considered begging the question, although this could be fixed by presenting the argument with a more careful wording, or by simply providing an adequate definition of "cause" beforehand. This is in general a problem with every argument for the existence of deities, not just with the Kalam specifically: these arguments fail to carefully define their terms, and it is by way of this semantic obfuscation that they often get away with making the premises seem known-true when they are not. The classical ontological argument used to suffer from this problem, which is why theologians now have often for Alvin Platinga's modal ontological argument, which has its terms all rigorously defined, though that argument has a different set of problems.
The reason theologians avoid defining "cause" in the argument is because they want to appeal to this vague, intuitive notion that the universe "at some point, came to exist, and it happened in some way", to get us to agree with their premises, because they know that if they actually provide a rigorous definition of "cause" that we can agree to, then the premise of the argument will be easily exposed as unsubstantiated. The truth is that too little is known about the universe, and even about causation as a whole, to actually understand how the concept of cause should be applied here, but theologians do not want to simply present a God of the Gaps argument, because they already know this is not convincing. Every cosmological argument is just an attempt to turn a God of the Gaps argument into not God of the Gaps.
I was told that because of the principle of parsimony, multiple causes can always be boiled down to one, but I disagree.
Well, as I said, this does depend largely on how you are defining cause, in the first place. If a cause is a set of factors, then a pair of sets can always be consolidated into a single set, but this also depends on how causes behave with respect to propositions. However, if the way you are defining a cause is by the factor themselves, then the argument definitely needs to be worded so as to not beg the question. Though, even if it did get reworded, it would still be flawed.
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@donnievance1942 I completely agree. Apologists are a joke in general. To be an apologist, you must misrepresent and reject well-established scientific and mathematical concepts. To mind comes the example of the second law of thermodynamics. Every apologist ever uses the second law of thermodynamics in their arguments at some point, but leaving aside the fact that they always misunderstand the law itself, apologists also refuse to understand that the second law of thermodynamics is not some type of unviolable principle. The second law of thermodynamics is a statistically-attested observation of thermodynamics within the specific context of classical physics, and the moment you abandon classical physics and you introduce quantum phenomena and the theory of general relativity, the law becomes incoherent, or inaccurate, for a multitude of known situations. This is also true of the law of conversation of energy. Really, this is true of any law of physics studied in classical physics. Nature does not operate by these laws: these laws are merely approximations of reality that were once considered valid, back when classical physics was the dominant paradigm, and physicists did not know any better.
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@x-popone6817 That makes it seem like you think that you need to have a degree in physics to prove you wrong, which is absolutely false.
If you think that is what my statement means, then that is an issue with your reading of it, rather than with my statement itself.. In particular, I never said anything about proving me wrong, and even more in particular, there is surrounding context that dictates the implications of my comment that would be obvious to any reasonable person. You claimed you know more about cosmology than another people here, and I responded, by indicating that as someone who actually is professionally trained is cosmology, your statement about understanding cosmology is completely laughable, based on your cosmological claims, which provide strong evidence of your lack of education on the subject. Thus, the only way you could know more about cosmology than me is if you could prove that the education system as a whole is wrong about cosmology, precisely because you do not have a physics degree. This is no way implies that I cannot be proven wrong by you or anyone else about a particular claim in cosmology, but as we were talking specifically about education and knowledge, and not individual claims themselves, such is irrelevant.
You say that if we have free will, that doesn't mean we can create a universe. That's a total misunderstanding of what I said. I said that if God (an omnipotent being) has free will, then He can create the universe as He pleases,...
No, that is not a misunderstanding of what you said. In particular, you never talked about an omnipotent being in your claim. You only talked about a god with free will, and you never provided any definition or descriptions of god being omnipotent. I have no valid reason for assuming that you are defining god as being omnipotent, because plenty of theologians do not do so, and in fact, it is not necessarily true that omnipotence is necessary for a being with free will to create a universe. Such a being would only need sufficient "power", in whatever sense this is even meaningful. How much power would that being need is unknown, and currently, unknowable. So, I am perfectly justified in not assuming you were talking about an omnipotent being, or a being with any particular amount of power at all. I did not misunderstand what you said. What you said simply does not communicate the point you thought it communicates.
...opposed to an eternal impersonal force, which wouldn't be able to create anything, because if so, the effect should be eternal, which clearly isn't the case.
No. I already disproved the validity of your claim that "if a cause is eternal, then its effect must be eternal". You also have not proven our universe is not eternal, to begin with.
As for my claim that the effect should be eternal as well, I think you totally misunderstood me. I never said that a cause's effect needs to be he same as the cause.
Yes, you did say it. I even quoted the exact words in which you said it, more than once too. You may not think you said it, because perhaps you intended to communicate something different. But I am quoting your words, not your intent. It is impossible for me to know your intent through words if your communication is ineffective.
I said that if there was an impersonal force (...), then that wouldn't be able to freely create.
Yes, you said this, but I questioned the validity of this statement, and you replied by saying, that this statement is true because, "if the impersonal cause is eternal, then so should its effect be eternal", implying that you think that the properties of an impersonal cause must also be held by its effects, a claim which is demonstrably false, and for which I provided counterexamples. So no, it is not true that, if a cause is impersonal and eternal, then its effects should also be eternal. The latter does not follow from the former. This is a non sequitur.
If you claim this is not the case, then it is the equivalent of saying that there was water [at] 1°C since all eternity, but it became ice at a certain point.
No, it is not equivalent to this whatsoever, because this analogy has no causality involved, and no transferring of property involved. You are saying that your particular example of a non-contradiction is equivalent to this example of a contradiction, which is obviously impossible. It is not a logical contradiction that a cause be eternal and its effect not be eternal.
Only a being with free will could stop this problem by DECIDING to create the universe.
You are begging the question, by assuming that the only process by which causation can occur is via decision making. No, deciding to create the universe is not the only way an eternal cause can cause a non-eternal effect. This is just an assumption you are making, and it is completely baseless.
Apologetics does not require scientific data and mathematical concepts to be misrepresented to prove a point.
It absolutely does, and this very discussion we are having is an example, where you are grossly misrepresenting the Big Bang theory, and claiming that it stipulates that the universe had a beginning. It does not. You will not find a single peer-reviewed scholarly scientific work that makes this claim. Yet you do this misrepresentation, because it is the only hope of being convincing apologetically.
You seem to presuppose that everything theists say is false, dishonest, misrepresentation, etc.
You seem to make a crap ton of assumptions about people based on things they did not say because you decided to twist and misrepresent their words. For someone who claims I am presuppositionalist, you are very much one yourself. This is an example of it: you claim that I think every theist is dishonest or mistaken, which is a claim I never made. My claim was specifically about apologists. If you think "applogist" and "theist" refer to the same thing, then you are just an idiot.
I never said the scientific method is biased, I said scientists are biased, which you even admit.
Yes, and the fact that you said precisely that proves your ignorance about the scientific method: for if you actually understood the scientific method, you would understand that the bias of individual scientists is actually completely irrelevant to the discussion and has no bearing of the results of the scientific method, and so you would have never even attempted to mention it in the first place.
Bias in scientists can influence their findings, as it can in everything.
No, not really, because the scientific method exists. The scientific method is not perfect, but it certainly cannot be meaningfully influenced by the biases of individual scientists.
To claim otherwise is just ridiculous.
No, to claim otherwise is to understand how the scientific method works: it works precisely by filtering out the biases of the scientists doing the work.
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@x-popone6817 You assume that physical measurements of time are actually time itself.
No, I never said such a thing, but yet you continue to twist my words and be dishonest, as you have been doing this entire discussion. It is not true that the measurement of time is time itself. However, the fact that time can be measured at all, proves that time is physical, because that which cannot be measured, directly or indirectly, is by definition, unphysical. Hence, why I said, that time is physical. But it is not just the measurements of time themselves that indicate that time is physical. In fact, I never appealed to measurements of time in my comment, so the fact that you are pretending I did is another example of dishonesty on your part. What I actually appealed to in my comment was Einstein's theory of general relativity, hence the fact that we have a precise understanding of how time works beyond just measurements by clock.
People like William Lane Craig argue that physical time is like a clock, roughly measuring metaphysical time.
There is absolutely no evidence that there is such a thing as metaphysical time. His interpretation is irrelevant if it is unscientific.
In this same way, it could be argued that physical time is just a "clock" that roughly measures physical time, but it can be faulty at times.
Sure, it can be argued, but that does not imply any such argument is valid, let alone sound. Besides, to say that metaphysical time is the "true time" and that physical time is a "faulty" measuring of it begs the question: it presupposes that physical time is not itself correct to begin with. This is a ridiculous presupposition, given the lack of evidence for the existence for metaphysical time.
I know there are verses used to support this, such as Thomas, and "faith is what is hoped for, but not seen".
See? The Bible does say it. Why are you being a contrarian, then?
However, it has been argued by the likes of InspiringPhilosophy and Whaddo You Meme?? that this can be interpreted differently, especially in the context of the Biblical word for faith, "pistis", which generally means trust.
I have not watched the source material you are referencing, so I have no idea if this is really what they have argued, or if you are misrepresenting their argument, but regardless, it should be noted that simply declaring that the word "pistis" is generally synonymous with trust, and so that whenever the word is translated to "faith", it implies that faith is synonymous with trust, is more than just a bit problematic. Firstly, as it is well-known that much of biblical scripture was at least partially allegorical, especially with these kinds of verses, structurally, claiming that the word in the verse means trust, as it would normally mean, is unwarranted, and analogous assumptions with other words in the scriptures would produce false results in this regard. Secondly, while we have no way to know for certain what the word actually meant to the original authors and their culture, we know that the word, while it can overlap with the meaning of trust, is not actually the same thing as trust. Thirdly, "pistis" having referred to trust back then does not imply it refers to our modern concept of trust today, as the understanding of trust has itself evolved througout history, as has the understanding of most other concepts. This relates to my second point. If the sources you cite did indeed say what you say they did, then their argument was likely a lot more nuanced than you are leading on, and while it would be unreasonable to expect you to reproduce their exact arguments in your comment, it certainly would be a stretch that there is sufficient evidence indicating that faith, as defined in the Bible, is actually equivalent to trust in any way, especially when it is taken in the context of the verses the word was used in.
You don't need a Bible verse that defines faith as trust.
Yes, you do, that is part of what is required to have it be biblical.
All you need is to look at the original language and what the word meant.
The word in the original language likely was not synonymous with trust as it is understood today.
Do you really think they suddenly changed the meaning of the word when used in the Bible?
It is more than plausible that this could have happened, considering that we do have confirmed examples of it happening. Not only that, we even have examples of words that were coined specifically in biblical texts. Besides, this is just a natural occurrence with languages as a whole. Books coining new terminology, especially when they are non-mundane, is the norm, not an exception, and we know this has been happening for as long as writing itself has existed.
Furthermore, I do think there are verses using faith as trust. If I remember correctly, this was brought up in one of InspiringPhilosophy's videos regarding this.
For someone who insists that such verses exist and have been used by a source that you watched, you are struggling an awful lot at providing such a verse.
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@redx11x How is fine tuning not a problem for atheists?
Because (a) fine-tuning does not exist (b) even if it did exist, it has no logical implications regarding the existence of some ill-defined entity that is meant to be capable of reality-warping powers.
I don't see many atheistic physicists say the laws of physics came about by chance; rather, they posit the possibility that we are one universe in an infinite number of universes.
To be clear: there are no atheistic physicists that believe the laws of physics "came about by chance," because the laws of physics did not do any "coming about" at all. The laws of physics are not entities in the universe. They are abstract concepts existing only in the human mind. A law of physics is nothing more than an attempt at an empirically-supported mathematical formulation of some observed phenomenon. In other words, the laws of physics are descriptive, not prescriptive. The laws of physics do not cause the universe to behave how it does. The laws of the universe are our attempts at describing the way the universe does behave.
As for the various multiverse hypotheses, those would indeed solve the fine-tuning problem, if it were a real problem, but the idea of a multiverse is much older than the fine-tuning argument. The multiverse idea originated from physicists' attempts to unify the general theory of relativity with the quantum paradigm of physics. Research in quantum gravity and in string theory has suggested the existence of a multiverse, and there are many different models for what this means. When the idea of fine-tuning was first proposed, many models of the multiverse concept already existed, which is why physicists have never been particularly concerned about fine-tuning.
If fine-tuning were to exist (and it does not), there are many atheistic solutions to the problem besides the multiverse concept. Many such hypothetical models exist in physics already.
Most religious people do not ascribe to the belief that life came about through a naturalistic process, formation of DNA from complex protein chains.
With the exception of biologists, religious people have yet to demonstrate that they have a basic understanding of biology and chemistry. I have yet to meet a religious person who is not a biologist or chemist who understands that chemical reactions are not posited to be random by the scientific conclusions.
I have also yet to meet a religious person who can provide me with an ontologically-coherent definition of the word "naturalistic," and also provide me with an ontologically-coherent definition of the word "non-naturalistic."
With that being said, whether religious people accept basic scientific conclusions or not is irrelevant to this discussion, although they should be ashamed of denying the science, regardless. The fact to the matter is, proponents of the fine-tuning argument for the existence of an all-competent creator (not spaceless or timeless, since a spaceless timeless creator is a logical contradiction) declare that the universe was designed for life, not merely that the fine-tuning barely allows the existence of life. Also, the fact that life exists in a universe that permits life to exist is unimpressive, and does not costitute evidence for the existence of a creator, much less an all-competent one. If the universe were such that it does not physically permit the existence of life, and yet life were to exist anyway, then this would be evidence that some phenomenological entity with powers capable of ignoring the universe's typical behavior is responsible for life existing. Furthermore, if the creator is, in fact, all-competent, then it is impossible that the universe be fine-tuned, by definition. Fine-tuning, by definition, refers to the process of taking some free parameter, and adjusting the parameter to abide by specific constraints in order to achieve its goals of life existing. However, if the creator is all-competent, then no such specific constraints exist: any values of the free parameter, including no value at all, is consistent with the existence of life, simply by virtue of the fact that the creator is all-competent.
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