If (and since) they are true, then the ingenuous reader has an obligation to not disallow their obvious implications about the existence of the supernatural and truth in the Bible.
Keener’s chapter on Hume has been on my mind. Check out this quote where I substitute ‘providential intervention’ PI for ‘miracles’:
“Hume claims that uniform human experience leads us to not expect PI. But what happens when eyewitnesses report experiences of PI? How then can human experience be “uniformly” against PI? Many things happen that are not typical experience; we do not for that reason deny they ever happen.”
“We can come up with a nonsupernatural way to explain it if we wish, but merely dismissing inconvenient evidence is not a fair way to argue.”
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“PI” also works because we are talking about an M.O. ; - )
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Which is fine in court, as I can testify. I probably have here on BioLogos. I’ll search.
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There are very few, next to no, ingenuous readers. We have objective evidence.
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I don’t believe I’ve ever committed myself to any view of your thoughts or feelings on the subject of positing an infinite number of things.
This is the comment I remember:
Good, because that’s the comment I remember as well.
So it wouldn’t be wrong to read it as:
It might depend on what they meant by ‘logically possible’. In any case, I have no clue and I am confident that debate and thought are able to get us farther from an answer.
What I read in those quoted words, heymike3, is an over-riding vote of no-confidence expressed about our ability here in this forum to compellingly lay that question to rest. It wasn’t an expression of confidence in his own grasp of it all. He’s just more willing to wager on your ignorance or mistakenness about your own certainty in this than on his own affirmative knowledge of it. That’s what this outsider heard, anyway - please correct as necessary, @glipsnort.
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(An infinite number of things is impossible if they are produced one at a time! You can only have as many as have been made up to that point at any given time, no matter how far you look into the infinite future. An infinity of things in reality is a mirage.)
That’s not an impossible reading of his comment, and I can see how that could have been meant.
Forming an infinite set through successive addition is nonsense, plain and simple, philosophers of religion like Draper, though he is agnostic, last time I checked, would affirm as much.
It’s the possibility of an infinite regress as a brute fact (to which present events are added), that is the pivotal question. And brute facts that have no interest in the rational possibility of solipsism, appear quite disingenuous to me. Especially given the remarkable number of coincidences one can find in the world.
Yes, although I’d probably extend my vote of no-confidence to humans generally. But above all, what I meant by it was, ‘I have no interest in discussing this subject.’
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Sounds like you have made up your mind and you won’t talk about it.
I’m curious if you have ever considered how this little brain of ours can understand that there are only three possible statements to explain the world: from nothing, an infinite regress, or an uncaused cause (whether it’s aware of its action or not).
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A good question I don’t see being asked that often, is what makes it possible for the number of things to proceed to infinity in future space.
I’m trying to tie this into God’s providential intervention, which can truly go on forever. Oh… for what cannot even possibly be imagined with the surprising work of God.
Edit:
Even in the heat death of the universe, there will still be some sort of quantum fluctuation and you just never know what can happen then.
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