Religious Neutrality and Philosophical / Scientific Theories

[heymike3]

Aseity is a good term for what you are describing.

An uncaused cause can be contingent or necessary in being. A contingent uncaused cause as an explanation for the universe, while philosophically possible, merely begs the question of whether there can be an infinite number of them. Like the cause of this universe as the effect of something that happens in another universe. Are an infinite number of universes philosophically possible?

[Terry_Sampson]

@heymike3

Are an infinite number of universes philosophically possible?

It depends on how big it is: if it’s boundless, only one is possible; if it’s bounded [finite], an infinite number are possible.

[T_aquaticus]

@RoyC

If you believed atoms & the subatomic realm to be a fiction, would you spend your time with experiments to confirm their existence?

Luckily, Rutherford did think they were real and spent time discovering them, most notably the atomic nucleus.

Do you think Rutherford’s experiment worked because he believed in atomic nuclei, that if Mach did the Rutherford’s experiment he wouldn’t get the same results?

@RoyC

Here’s another. Heisenberg wrote (in Physics and Philosophy) that logic doesn’t apply to the Q world, only math does.

That’s contradictory. Math is logic. If by logic Heisenberg meant human intuition, then I would agree.

[Dale (evolutionary providentialist)]

Houston, we have a problem – imagining that an infinite number of things can exist or whether an infinite number of real things can actually exist sometime in the future. (Hint: the future does not exist – all you have is now.)

[Dale (evolutionary providentialist)]

Oh, and we’re not talking about the conceptual infinite number of geometric points on a line between zero and pick a number.

[RoyC (Roy Clouser)]

No, he meant what we mean by “logic.” He said it applied only to language.

The theory that math & logic are identical has been refuted many times. Russell, e.g., claimed that math was just a shorthand way of writing logic and that logic could express the same concept without any idea of quantity - which is patently false. The existential quantifier is read: “there is at least one x such that…” and the symbol for class membership is read: “is a member of” where “a” is an obvious synonym for “one.”

[RoyC (Roy Clouser)]

There are number of senses of “necessity.” The existence of God is an unconditional nondependnece, not guaranteed by any laws since God created all the laws.
That multiple universes are logically possible means only that the idea is not self-contradictory.

[Klax (The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)]

Answer the question.

I.e. tell us a coherent story in which the history of religion changes the facts of gravitation or abiogenesis or consciousness now.

[Klax (The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)]

As above. . .

@RoyC

Anything regarded as the self-existent origin of all else is thereby regarded as divine.

By whom? Nature is of natural self existent origin from natural sempiternity. What’s divine about that? Apart from its tone?

[RoyC (Roy Clouser)]

Gentlemen: As I said early on, I must now leave this discussion. I will be out of the US for 3 weeks, until March 5th.
If any of you would like to pick it up again when I return, you know how to do it!

Ciao!,
Roy

[heymike3]

@RoyC

That multiple universes are logically possible means only that the idea is not self-contradictory

The number may proceed to infinity, but can it become actually infinite?

Hope you have a great trip! Look forward to having you back around.

Gracias adios… as I heard my mother in law say, and I thought she was kicking me out (gracias a Dios)

[Terry_Sampson]

• What a difference an accent mark makes, eh?

[Klax (The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)]

We’ll be waiting mate. Bon voyage. Veilige reis.

[RoyC (Roy Clouser)]

Thank you! We’ll be where its nice & warm: St Maarten.

[heymike3]

@mitchellmckain

Science can explain how the event came to be.

This is the ideology of the age.

If an event is uncaused, it cannot have an explanation.

[Terry_Sampson]

@heymike3

If an event is uncaused, it cannot have an explanation.

Which is pretty much why, explanations proliferate beyond the number of possible causes.

[heymike3]

Can you explain what you mean?

[mitchellmckain (Scientist and Christian)]

@heymike3

If an event is uncaused, it cannot have an explanation.

Going around in circles much?

@mitchellmckain

But they are not uncaused. They have all kinds of causes. They just just don’t have causes in the preceding conditions sufficient to determine exactly what happens.

[heymike3]

Ok. Simple enough. The part that is caused can be explained, and the part that is uncaused has no explanation.

So EM noise that is uncaused is unexplainable. Right?

[mitchellmckain (Scientist and Christian)]

@heymike3

So EM noise that is uncaused is unexplainable. Right?

Why?

There are lots of phenomenon where the only thing you can calculate is a probability distribution. For example… there are things which decay with a half-life we can measure or calculate:

Uranium 235 - 700 million years.
a neutron - 14 minutes and 39 seconds.

We can explain why these decay as they do and why they have such a half-life. So it isn’t right to say science cannot explain these things. But no it cannot explain why a particular neutron or a particular Uranium 235 atom decays when it does rather than at a different time.

P.S. It may surprise you that neutrons are so unstable, since they are a permanent part of so many stable atoms. It is because neutrons inside an atomic nucleus are constantly changing and interacting with the other particles in the nucleus. In a way, their decay is part of the process by which they are bound to the protons in the atomic nucleus.