Who controls the weather? And we are not talking about ‘forecasting’ providential interventions, we are talking about their orchestration.
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Depends on how far into the future you mean. In the short term you can ask the meteorologists about the variables they use for their predictions… meaning it is basically the laws of nature. But farther in the future and it can anything including butterflies and things we know have no cause in space-time at all.
We are not talking about ‘forecasting’ providential interventions, we are talking about their orchestration.
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How do you explain then God seeing 7 years of prosperity followed by 7 years of famine in Egypt.
Things get pretty chaotic after a week for meteorologist, and seven years is a ridiculous amount of time when we assume uncertainty has some effect on it.
What is the explanation then? Was the story not to be taken literally? Was God’s ability to foresee so great that 14 years weren’t a big deal? Or maybe God influenced the weather himself to carry out his plan?
Anyone that limits God to sequential time limits his power and also precludes even the possibility of true prophecy.
A great number of things are predictable from climate change to economic trends and human behavior. Human behavior is especially predictable when the people are dominated by the habits of sin.
That is correct. But that is when you are expected to predict daily details. It doesn’t mean that the long term climate changes are completely unpredictable.
Only when you are trying to predict whether it will be sunny or rainy on Monday.
I see no reason not to.
Not when He isn’t expected to tell you whether it will be sunny or rainy on Monday.
That is certainly a possibility. I really don’t think God needs to make such extra-ordinary alterations of nature in order to impress people – let alone that He is even willing to do something so bully artless. If God was responsible for the changes in those 14 years then it probably was already planned and Daniel was just relaying the information. I can see this being a part of God’s plan for the future events of Egypt and Israel.
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I see, so like predicting climate change effects in 10 years, you can know that a lot of places will get warmer, natural disasters will become far more common and a lot of other things is not that hard even though predicting a Tuesday weather ten years into the future is nearly impossible.
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We can make pretty good generalizations about weather patterns with La Niña and El Niño situations, so could expect God to do the same regarding weather. And, the number 7 may have meaning regarding completion or fullness in the culture it was written in rather than its stark numerical value. Or, perhaps he did influence the weather to bring about his will for Israel.
Discreteness and Continuity
“Any theory that sees the world as being in any sense a continuum is false. The world is a set of things [which Democritus called atoms,, i.e. “uncuttables”] moving through the void. Within any continuous set of points, only a subset of discrete points is occupied by anything physical. On a small scale, the world has therefore never been uniform in any degree at all, much less perfectly uniform.
Density as a continuous notion has no part to play in a description of the world. Given any measurable region of space, we can divide the total mass of all the particles in that region by the volume of that region and thus compute a density. This density function is not, however, a continuous function of location in space. It jumps by the mass of a particle each time the region is taken to include that particle.
… Start at an arbitrary time t = 0 and an arbitrary point of space. Let v be any constant speed greater than 0. At any time t > 0, consider a sphere centered on the given point and of radius vt. There are a finite number n of particles within that sphere, n being a function of t. The masses of the n particles, at time t, are m1(t), m2(t), . . , mn(t). The total mass within the sphere at time t is the sum m(t) of these n masses. The volume of the interior of the sphere is V(t) = 4πv^3t^3/3. The density within the ball the surface of which is the sphere is ρ(t) = m(t)/V(t).
The variable quantity V is a continuous function of t, for t > 0, but the variable quantity m is discontinuous. It starts out as 0 at time t = 0, assuming that there is no particle at the given central point. The quantity m remains constant and equal to zero for a while, as a function of t, and then jumps to some positive number m = m11 at a specific instant t1 > 0. Assuming for simplicity that v is sufficiently large that no particle ever leaves the interior of the sphere (taking v > c would insure this), the function m then is continuous though not constant for another interval of time, but jumps discontinuously to m = m12 + m22 at some time t2 > t1, m12 being the mass that the particle that had the mass m11 at the time t1 has at time t2. It then is continuous for another interval of time, but jumps discontinuously to m = m13 + m23 + m33 at some time t3 > t2, m13 and m23 being, respectively, the mass that the particle that had the mass m11 at the time t1 has at time t3 and the mass that the particle that had the mass m22 at the time t2 has at time t3. And so forth.
In case there is a particle at the central point at time t = 0, then the value of m at any time t > 0 needs to be increased by the mass of that particle at that time.
If v is so small that particles that were within the sphere at one time have left by a later time, then there is, for each such particle, an instant ti’ at which that happens, in which case the mass mi’ of the particle at that instant must be subtracted from the total mass m at that instant. If the same particles curve around and re-enter the sphere, treat them no differently than as if they were new particles.
The density of any sufficiently large nicely shaped region of the universe is approximately the same as the density of any other such region. A cube or a sphere of diameter a billion light years or so, for example, always contains virtually the same amount of mass, unless the universe contains larger substructures than those about which we know. On smaller scales, we find here a wall of clusters of galaxies, there virtually nothing, here a galaxy, there virtually nothing (nothing that is bright, anyway), here a star, there virtually nothing, here a water molecule, there virtually nothing, here a photon, there absolutely empty space."
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Not compelling. Attribution, please.
Not that you’ll care, but …
- Todd Mathews Kelso (1940-2004), Unpublished Works in the possession of Terry Sampson.
You don’t really think I care, do you?
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I don’t care if you don’t care, so there. ; - ) You wanted me to care about the words you posted, right?
What words?
Any words, but to the point, Kelso’s words and arithmetic. I should have said, “Sorry, not compelling.” I don’t believe the things he claims are discontinuous are. Mass changes continuously with speed. E = mc²
Okay, so you don’t believe that the cosmos has dimensionless parts that have mass. So, you have some other notion of cosmic minimal parts that do have dimensions and mass.
No, I believe
You have not refuted that.
Any chance speed changes with mass?
P.S. Why would I refute the concept of variable mass? Newton was wrong.
Is there a net change in energy?
P.S.: Einstein wasn’t.
Einstein’s still turning in his grave, unless he’s figured out where the Now is.
So, once again, do you know what a Loedel diagram is or have you ever seen one?