I’m not exactly sure what you mean, but it sounds interesting. Care to elaborate?
2 Likes
Our family has seen functional, not glamorous, partial animation for hemifacial paralysis. Yep. There is work of significant value done by plastic surgeons.
2 Likes
Yes, that’s a great testimony. Thanks for adding that.
1 Like
It’s something I noticed in a thousand comment thread on uncaused causality. Not sure how to explain it, it’s something you have to see for yourself.
On a few occasions since then, I’ve admitted the difficulty for beginning to understand how something can affect change without changing. No where has it been observed, and neither can it be. And yet that is what a person does when and if they can cause an action.
It’s also interesting how when you consider that when something happens, that event may be caused by something else that happens, to which the same question applies. Or it is caused by something that doesn’t happen, or the event just happens.
And when you consider the universe, there are only three possible statements to explain it’s occurrence: from nothing, an infinite regress, or an uncaused cause.
All three statements are also empirically unverifiable.
1 Like
It is a real head-scratcher. I’ll grant you that. There is certainly something going on that we have yet to grasp. Could be some holy reality (God)… or it could be some incomprehensible physical reality.
Nobody really knows.
[This is where people like to put in their own pet theory that explains it.]
The cosmological argument doesn’t bug me that much. It’s one of theists’ better approaches (there is a genuine mystery there). But at the same time, you can ask “What caused God?” Then of course: “God doesn’t require a cause.” And we’re back to square one because “everything requires a cause” was one of the starting premises, and it is proven false by the conclusion.
As for the choices we make, not everyone accepts free will. And that includes many physicists. Whether it exists or not, it’s difficult for physics to say how we human beings can be a cause unto ourselves.
1 Like
Granting the deductive ‘god’ arguments which I’m willing to argue, they prove an infinite being, but not an infinite number of things. But this doesn’t answer the question of whether the cause of the universe is aware, unaware, or not yet aware of its action.
As I found Kant alluding, we don’t know whether it is to found in us or outside of us.
Another head scratcher, is how well the rational possibility of solipsism evidences our fallen nature.
1 Like
I believe the premise is that every effect (or occurrence) has a cause.
1 Like
I know, but all it takes is a single instance of a single person causing an action for determinism to be false.
Do you know that some of the leading voices in the consciousness debate go as far as saying our perception of being an individual is an illusion?
Strict materialists kind of have to say that, don’t they? Solipsism’s logical end?
I don’t see the connection to solipsism.
Here’s a pithy quote about the illusion of the self:
“Modern versions of eliminative materialism claim that our common-sense understanding of psychological states and processes is deeply mistaken and that some or all of our ordinary notions of mental states will have no home, at any level of analysis, in a sophisticated and accurate account of the mind. In other words, it is the view that certain common-sense mental states, such as beliefs and desires, do not exist.”
I recently started reading Myron Penner’s The End of Apologetics: Christian Witness in a Postmodern Context. He uses the work of William Lane Craig as a case study, so to speak. I think these quotes from the chapter “Apologetic Amnesia” get at Penner’s deep-seated concern for what is happening in the world of apologetics. I’m hoping the rest of the book continues to answer questions I have as well as the beginning has:
The End of Apologetics, Myron Penner. Page 29.
In discussion of William Lane Craig’s apologetic concept and project as representative of most all modern (Modern Period) apologists:
So we can say the crisis of faith Craig describes appears to be generated by his embeddedness in a modern world insofar as it requires that God’s existence is not intuitively plausible and that individuals are responsible to justify their beliefs rationally for themselves. The entire story of his intensely personal need to produce an apologetic for Christian faith that makes his personal experience intelligible in terms of “the demands of reason” signals that Craig’s is a profoundly modern experience. And perhaps most important, Craig imagines that his apologetic arguments are normative to society but take place in a public sphere outside political or religious power. They are “neutral” means of establishing a rock-bottom truth about things regardless of one’s vantage point or perspective. All things being equal (e.g., intelligence), the only hindrance to our understanding and beliefs are our evil intentions and the hardness of our hearts. And Craig imagines he is engaged in a public conversation in which rational consensus is not only possible but is absolutely vital to society and Christian faith. Craig is thoroughly disembedded from premodern imaginary.”
P. 42.
“What I find particularly concerning about [modern apologists’] response to postmodernism…is what is defended in this apologetic effort is not the gospel or even an aspect of Christian doctrine but what amounts to the modern conception of reason (OUNCE)1 and modern philosophy in general…[T]he overarching characteristic of the church’s Enlightenment project can be summarized as “the attempt to commend the Gospel on grounds that have nothing to do with the Gospel itself.”1 OUNCE: objective-neutral-universal complex; Penner’s shorthand for the main components of modernist reasoning.
2 Likes
I’m doubtful that anyone can settle everyone’s questions about how religious experience accords with our somewhat modern experience through an apologetics argument of the sort Craig pursues. People’s religious experience can be any where from nonexistent to a total identification with a literal reading of a mythos. People have more or less curiosity about how the sacred and profane do or should fit together. Unless you’re in a curious faze, you won’t be listening and if you’re in a 100% gnostic state at either faith extreme, you’re long past reflecting openly on anything. Rationality and logic can’t reach all people all the time. Apologetics should be an inward activity for those who are ready not an outreach blitz.
1 Like
You profess to be, making like you’re objectively looking for “what gives rise to God-belief.”
Can anyone help me find a Terry Pratchett Meme (was entirely an image - so text search doesn’t help) somewhere in the forum here in the last few days? I don’t see it in the humor thread. It was something about “I’ll encourage thinking outside the box when I first see any evidence of thinking inside it.”
[or here’s the quote more accurately since that’s easy enough to find … I’ll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there’s evidence of any thinking going on inside it.]
4 Likes
Seems well worth finding.
Maybe I saw it on Facebook. Oh well. I got the important part.
1 Like
“The fact that proximate, human decisions played a role in the development of the canon does not rule out the possibility that ultimate, divine activity also played a role. The two are not mutually exclusive. It appears, then, that the insistence on a human-conditioned canon may not be something that can be readily proved—or even something that its adherents regularly try to prove—but is something often quietly assumed. It is less the conclusion of the historical-critical model and more its philosophical starting point.”
3 Likes
Since the soul is large enough to contain the infinite God, nothing less than Himself can satisfy or fill it.
E.B. Pusey
Here’s a really good one with a video of two AI programs talking about love:
“What researchers have determined, however, is that you cannot simply trust a language model when it tells you how it feels. Words can be misleading, and it is all too easy to mistake fluent speech for fluent thought.”
1 Like