That’s a statement of (non-pistis) faith. It’s unprovable.
If you’re restricting the field of the material world, that might be true.
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Exactly. Keep going with that.
How does that make any difference.
Hi Klax!
Just to understand your position, you believe that our universe had a beginning, just like countless others before and beside it, and that we needn’t an explanation for existence? Please correct me if I got that wrong.
Pax,
Charles
You got it Charles. Our evolved need for explanation doesn’t make one possible at all. It just spawns myths, stories. As you knew at least intuitively, felt it in yer water, all along. It’s now been SPOKEN! In the beginning was the word…
(I can’t match that you topped and tailed me!)
PS it’s good to know that someone else here, anyone else, can follow simple common sense without pre-empting it with ‘faith’.
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Hi Klax!
Thanks for your engagement with my questions! I do have to wonder though, isn’t it at least a little remarkable that, even if we are but one of a multitude of universes, that an extra-dimensional machine could produce such a remarkable existence to begin with? This kind of reminds me of panspermia, which seems to be pushing the problem of origins further back.
Pax,
Charles
Aye Charles. My pleasure. My rationalistic take is that if anything can happen, i.e. a minimal !null (not null) quantum perturbation in, alongside null, unstable absolute nothingness, then it instantiates all of physics. It can’t not.
If God is the ground of that ground of being that is inexplicability to the power inexplicability. Origins, shmorigins. The problem is in our mesopheric skulls, caught between the infinite and the infinitesimal, the eternal and the scintillation. How can an electron’s spin be truly absolutely indeterminate? How can up, down, L-R sideways, anti-/clockwise, black, white, wave, particle, here, there, now, then be superpositioned? As J.B.S. said ‘The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose’. The problem is in our wiring. As explored, by analogy, beautifully in Arrival.
Existence is remarkable, yes, to us. That’s it.
We can nonetheless put Jesus in that void, that yawning chaos. But that comes first. We surround Him with as much story as we do existence. All of that has to go.
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I like your sense of awe and romanticism. You remind me of Carl Sagan, or perhaps Thomas Nigel.
Oh, and Arrival is a great film! True, I watched 2/3rds of it from a couple seats behind on a commercial flight with no sound, but still!
I’m a very late arrival at the natatorium ball Charles. And I’m in the wee-wee end of the pool. Luckily I’ve segued to Karl Rogers. We’re all worth it regardless.
Tim Mackie with the Bible Project laid out in Hebrew that the phrases there means chaos and that the Hebrew understanding of nothing is not like ours. There nothingness was a vast ocean essentially. Chaotic waters. That as god did creation having ground appear and so on it was controlling the chaos. It’s why it says in genesis there will be no sea becsuse the sea represented chaos. Even tied into that is part of what baptism is about. You enter into the chaos killing your self to raise up to new life and ect…
If interested you can search chaotic waters and the Bible project and find something.
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Even if a multiverse exists, it does not effect belief in God because nothing about the multiverse can be conceived as self-existent. Atheists try to do that, and regard something about the universe(s) as self-existent (even though they can’t conceive of it being that way), but their every attempt fails. Meanwhile, we believe in God not because of arguments but because we experience His word to be the truth about Him, so there is no God of the gaps argument.
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Sauce for the goose. God’s self existence is no more, and is in fact infinitely less, ‘reasonable’ than nature’s.
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That sounds like it is based on some presuppositions which may be rational and themselves ‘reasonable’, but which are nevertheless untrue (infinitely).
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Rationality is always true.
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Not if it is based on mistaken premises and their conclusions! (…like ‘God is impotent to providentially intervene in his creation.’)
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Empty.
There’s far, far more to life than the material world. The material world doesn’t define my relationship with my wife, my love for music, or experiencing a kind of transcendence wonder on a nature walk.
God didn’t create the universe for us to experience mechanistic existence. He created us for loving relationship with him. That explains a heck of a lot.
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The existence of “common sense” is greatly exaggerated—something else is being revealed by the COVID-19 crisis.
Also…are you appealing to “Enlightenment faith”? Or biblical faith?
Even (what you call) “common sense” has, at its base, foundational presuppositions, whether or not they are recognized or acknowledged. That’s…faith. Whether or not it’s recognized or acknoweldged.
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THAT is a great statement of…faith.
It could be true. But you can’t prove it. And you rely on it being true to build any other thoughts, arguments, worldviews, etc.
With the caveats mentioned by Dale—given true premises and their conclusions.
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All that we observe in the universe coms into being and passes away, and so is not self-existent. So atheists who want the universe to be the ultimate (self-existent) reality postulate something we do not observe to fill that role. Today the mis popular proposal is that it is whatever is “purely physical.” But nothing can so much as be conceived as purely physical, so reason - no matter how you construe it - is not on the side of that Gid-substitute. If you’ll write to me privately I’ll send you a detailed argument showing why this is so, and why it can’t be fixed.
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Our mere fallacious beliefs don’t compare with the faithfulness of Christ.
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Faith in Christ works well, too.
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