How (not?) to speak to scientists about Jesus

In the hands of a better equipped philosopher and communicator, I’m sure it would make more sense. Maybe it is the judgement (or irony) of God you are stuck with me.

Not just you, Mike - I’m stuck with myself too, and a whole host of others whose boxes don’t quite match my current one. God’s gift to me, I suppose! Lord, help me receive it and grow accordingly. :neutral_face:

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:rofl: I’ve been in a serious mood lately, thanks for the good laugh. You are God’s gift to me this morning!

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Even well equipped philosophers do not have a good track record when it comes to defining the set of statements that can be made about, well, anything.

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No kidding! Look at their track record of being able to define an uncaused cause as being unobservable by nature :wink:

That sets off alarm bells for scientists. It is essentially like hearing, “If only I were a better salesperson, then I could selling those time shares.” So it’s not that Flat Earthers are wrong, they are just poor communicators.

With philosophy, it is what people say about the world, and as you are showing it depends on how well they sell it. With science, we are looking at what the world is saying about itself, and it stands on the evidence, not on the communication skills of any one person.

Choices that we get to make, right? Whether to investigate an offer that sounds to good to be true, or to carry on dreaming about a final theory.

Or to do the research and discover that final theory.

How do you know it won’t be an infinite regress?

Or as a knowledgeable physicist told me, this theory was going to explain how something happens without cause. The unconscious belief formation was strong with that one.

Sorry, if something happens without cause, there is no explanation for it. Might as well start dreaming about unmarried bachelors, and if you say it often enough you might start to believe in them.

You won’t know until you pursue it.

We already see things that happen without cause in our universe. Why are you stuck on this?

Sorry, but you’re wrong. Nuclear decay happens without cause, and we have an explanation for it.

Nuclear decay happens because the atoms are unstable? And don’t we know why? We just cannot know when a particular atom will decay.

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Really? You never can tell, and at some point the universe is no longer regressing, but starts to appear like it is progressing.

This is what I am stuck on, this idea that a theory can explain how something happens without cause. It’s like a dream to explain the dream.

Kind of like a chaotic sea

That reminds me of science fiction.

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Then I would suggest you spend time on the concepts until you do understand it.

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If something happens without a cause, then by definition it cannot have an explanation.

What if it happens, and it is not able to be determined what the cause is/was? In the case of things happening in this universe, such as the nuclear decay of atoms, there are limits on what we are able to observe, including the velocity and position of any subatomic particle, and there are even limits on the shortest length of time we can observe. There could very well be causes that are not observable, but the outcome of many events can be predicted statistically without identifying detailed cause of each event. I hope you are only saying that the cause of the event is unexplained; it is “intuitively obvious to the most casual observer” (quote from the college science professor, who for other reasons was a major influence in me not continuing to get instruction in science at a religious college) that we can explain a whole lot about the event for which we do not know a cause, based on real observations of the event, and anything that happens subsequently, and even some inferences about that may shed real light on what the cause may, or may not, have been. I think you will find that most of us scientists (even those, like me, who have gone over to engineering in the hope of finding real solutions to real problems that can help real people) do not accept the presumption that just because we don’t know “something” (the cause), that doesn’t mean the “something” is eternally unknowable.

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That’s a perfectly legitimate position.

However, the event that happened may be explained by another event that happened, even if it happens in non-classical spacetime, or it may have happened without cause, or it may have been caused by something that doesn’t happen.

The problem I see with your “deceptively simple mapping” is that the limits of our ability to measure (Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, e.g.) make it impossible to empirically verify which of the three options is true. For us scientists, we will not accept something as absolutely verified just because it appears to be the most reasonable option out of a set of possibilities. And any non-scientist who insists that a choice can be made on other grounds is not talking with scientists in a way that will ever be convincing, and might well not even be heard.

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