Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
47
Of course I got it from physics. Where else? We are physics. What arbitrary, baseless presuppositions, presumption does my, as opposed to your, vaunted rationality make? There is no alternative to rationality, to the rationality of infinite, eternal nature. None. Apart from aardvark, Kalamazoo, green swimming, thrppst45)*!@
Why would any rational being deny rationality? As in quantum mechanics, stochastics, Kolmogorov complexity, uniformitarianism, you know, physics. How can any rational being deny rationality? In the name of what perverse, meaningless, unnecessary ‘faith’?
You did not get that there is no beginning to time from physics. “We are physics”! That’s a hoot. Show me a relativistic equation that says there is no beginning to time. All I see is pretense and double-talk because you cannot conceive of anything free from the constraints of time. Blowing thin smoke does not make a good smoke screen.
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
49
Yes I did by the blindingly obvious application of uniformitarianism, a physical phenomenon. Where do you get the irrationality from that the universe is the beginning of nature?
Physical phenomena had a beginning, obviously, and your uniformitarianism had nothing to work on ‘before’ that. You are trying to extrapolate backwards into what you do not know.
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
51
Right, so the universe is the beginning of nature, is nature in fact or just one object in an infinite array created by William Lane Craig.
I don’t have to try. I know. That God, Einstein’s or otherwise, changeth not. You can’t.
That God is omnitemporal fits well with that. It does, however, allow him to intervene providentially into ‘nature’, that fact denied by some who think they know more than they do.
And I think that speaks to a deep problem in religion that it can serve both good and evil. What is its purpose? Is the purpose of religion to call us down to humility or to puff us up to arrogance. Is it really about declaring how much we know or about how much we DON’T know. I see very very very little in the Bible to support the former and everything to support the latter. AND NO! It is NOT about saying how little OTHER people know, but about how little WE know! If you know God then it is YOU knowing God who must understand the insignificance of your own knowledge about anything. If religious people lived up to that understanding then there would be no conflict with science. That conflict is entirely about religious people claiming to know far more than they can possibly know. Science begins with doubt, testing every hypothesis to see if it agrees with what we can measure with procedures giving the same result no matter what we want or believe.
To be sure, religion calls us to faith, but a faith in WHAT? A faith in ourselves? A faith in our OWN knowledge? Seriously? I don’t think so. The faith religion calls us to is a faith in the knowledge and wisdom of another – a faith in the knowledge and wisdom of God! If that is our faith then we would have little reason for conflict with science. If that was our faith, then I think it likely we would see the findings of science as a revelation from God.
I can basically agree with you. The only thing I would say is that part of the conflict has to do with the “top-down” vs the “bottom-up” points of view. Science, at least physics, tends to work from a bottom-up view. We are happiest when we can build a whole concept from a small number of simple propositions and reproduce what we see in nature. We are often trained to dislike any authoritative claims, one reason Einstein kicked at the poke over quantum mechanics.
Somewhat intermediate fields like chemistry or biology start with some propositions as given and then try to build from there. Of course, quantum chemistry or nuclear chemistry is looking at a very fundamental standpoint, and basically, there, physics and chemistry are rather indistinguishable. Biology pretty much assumes chemistry and works from there. However, when you get to problems like protein folding, some people work from a bottom-up perspective and others work from a top-down. Neither seems to be working all that well, frankly. Basically, the most successful approaches hardly use any physics at all, which shows how little we understand this problem. The laws of thermodynamics would guarantee that we would get this right every time. However, the worst predictions come out of physics: top-down or bottom-up. … though maybe top-down is slightly better off because of the “power of coercion”.
Anyway, at the most extreme end of the top-down approach are these religious faith propositions. My faith is there there is a God, that there is purpose, that we don’t need to shout at an indifferent heavens “I have purpose!”, that somehow, our suffering has meaning, even if we cannot understand it. I also accept that Jesus died for my sins. However, for the rest of it, I largely have to throw up my hands. The problem, I surmise, is that people think that can use their big black book (B3) and prejudices they assume based upon a particular reading of that B3 to declare how this is supposed to work. In protein folding, the top-down approach still admits when it is wrong. In religion, we seem unwilling to admit that we are wrong.
That is the really bad side of cheap faith from authoritarian rule. The faith should be directed at looking for God within the horse manure that life hands us. Not everything does make sense. No, God is not necessarily “testing us”. All that stuff about suffering and having some neat plan and an answer is mostly nonsense. We won’t prosper better because we give more to some hornswoggling preacher who has more money than God. However, carrying on in faith is what is important and shows what we think is important. It is not to impose our will on others, but to learn from this life and become better through the vicissitudes.
So far, we have no evidence of a multiverse, that is true. We may also never be able to find evidence, but that depends on what it actually is. It seems like Science Magazine publishes short essays from people, at least annually, that propose particular cases where it would be possible to detect it. I take little stock in it, but M-theory for example has “branes” and depending on how what exactly they are (and even whether string theory is true, which I am far from convinced at this point), some cases (if true) are “testable”. String theory is probably the one that has been worked on the most, but some other ideas independent of that may also have special cases that might be testable.
The other reason that some people accept the idea of a multiverse is largely pragmatic, it works. In that sense, it is sort of like dark matter. If we just use relativistic dynamics and try to construct galaxies, it doesn’t work. The dark matter is a hand wave to get it to work. It may be that we just don’t understand gravity completely, but it is undeniable that there is “something”. There is nothing saying that we “need” other universes, in principle, but there isn’t anything that says that they cannot be, other than that we have no detectable evidence of them at present.
I don’t say there are or are not, but I think we should be cautious about ruling them out just because we have a big black book that doesn’t mention anything about them. The big black book is there to help us learn how to get to heaven, not a treatise on how the heavens go. Within that framework, our desire should be to look to Jesus and become more like Jesus as we walk on this earth.
Yeah, since God is the alpha and omega, a lot of this, in principle, could be “baked in” before the foundation of the world. It is still God “intervening” at a particular time, by way of entirely natural processes. At the same time, I don’t have any problem with God actually intervening. God gets to be God. Can I say “hey, what are you doing?”
Anyway, as soon as we introduce God into all this, it is faith. God is the over-arching part of the picture of all that is, most of which I expect we are completely ignorant of.
I would like to see you define that distinction precisely. As far as can see it simply boils down someone claiming to have knowledge and authority about something – whether knowledge about nature or knowledge about what God supposedly says. So I am not really buying into this distinction you are making. Perhaps the best you can do is make this a distinction between methodologies: physics looking to measurements and theologians studying the words of ancient texts. To be sure, the disputes over the vague meaning of passages in a text compares poorly to the measurements of increasingly accurate measuring devices.
We physicists are happy when we accurately reproduce what we see in nature no matter how many propositions it takes. Though the easier we can calculate the correct numbers, the better we can tackle more difficult calculations.
What physics department was that? I don’t recall any such training… sounds more like something you would find in philosophy to me. And I certainly don’t think this had anything to do with the problem Einstein or others physicists had with quantum physics. Rather it was a fundamental contradiction with the objective of physics to find the means to calculate the results of experiments… we didn’t like finding out that this wasn’t always possible – that the best we could do was just a probability distribution. So Einstein says “I, at any rate, am convinced that He does not play dice,” and proposed there were hidden variables with which these results could be calculated. He was wrong.
My faith in God comes from an equivalence to an existential faith that life is worth living. In general I see our experience as the teaching of a loving parent, but would not insist that this is always the case for everyone – perhaps it is because the lesson is actually for someone else. And I don’t think we need a tool maker to assign us a purpose as if we were nothing but a means to an end.
I think that is a rather charitable description. I think it is far more likely a product of adapting religion to use as a tool of power. I have a rule of thumb that when something is extremely convenient for a particular purpose, then that is the most likely origin of that apparatus.
I think we are asked to have faith in doing the right thing, “cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression; defend the fatherless, plead for the widow” – to have faith that goodness will give us the better result eventually.
1 Like
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
60
? Who says that it is ? And I’m glad you agree. A single universe is an incalculably significant and impossible delusion God or no. A universe among spontaneous infinity is utterly insignificant, if the ground of being isn’t purposeful, but each of the infinity of them is significant and so are you and me if it is. That’s what you meant isn’t it?
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
61
Well how else could I know but by thinking? Unlike your more Jungian knowing.
All concepts are fabricated. Like QM, which maps to nature. Unlike your [Content removed]. Why is it threatened by eternity? What invention has deceived you by intent?
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
62
How does that superfluous infinite complexity beyond mere God allow Him to do anything? Or how does His unchangeability? Whatever you meant? Which ‘fact’? I deny none whatsoever, no matter what the facts of any one’s mental configuration.
I think we have a very interesting One And the Many question. Philosophers think that the One And the Many is really the One or the Many. You seem to have come to the conclusion that the Many becomes One by being Infinite…
As I said this is very interesting in that it is a vision of the Philosopher’s God that merges the One and the Many, but it is not the God of Jesus the Messiah and the Logos, Who is God of the the One And the Many, the Creator, the Logos, and the Spirit/Love.
There is absolutely no evidence for the multiverse, as far as I know. Now, perhaps the multiverse is a reality and I am totally willing to accept that, but no one really knows for certain. Yet you seem to claim that it is absolutely fact.
Can you please explain why, friend?
-Joshua W.
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
65
All the evidence one needs is this universe. The alternative is meaninglessly, absurdly, irrationally and childishly inextricably unnecessarily complex.
Show me a relativistic equation that says there is no beginning to time. All I see is pretense and double-talk because you cannot conceive of anything free from the constraints of time. Blowing thin smoke does not make a good smoke screen.