Well everyone who is honest about God.
Being able to conceive it’s unobservability, is right there along side being able to understand there are only three possible statements for explaining the universe.
It really is an initiation into metaphysics proper, and it’s also what allows you to see there cannot be an infinite number of things like planets in space or events in time.
There’s no connection whatsoever. It’s just a matter of incredulity which I share. The brute fact of infinity in eternity remains.
Reality doesn’t work.
How does a mathematical physicist work out the forces on a table with four legs? Work out the forces on a table with no legs, then with infinite legs, interpolate.
Choose:
Nothing/Someone did nothing for forever and then it/they did the universe.
Nothing/Someone has always done universes.
Rationality offers no alternative.
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Nice response… I’m thinking of how best to reply… there’s a lot there.
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Your thinking is very flawed. You made forever into a timeframe, when here it is not. Forever here is timelessness, which is beyond our ken. It is God’s territory.
Thus you have brought God Who is infinite down to our level, which is finite. That elevates us in effect to infinity because then we are able to judge God.
We are able to evaluate God with the criteria that God has given us. That is good and fair, but that is not what we do. We want to put a self-centered spin on our thinking. What makes you say that God did nothing before God created time?
Here’s a good final corollary. If there is a God, there are an infinity of Gods. Unaware of each other.
[I’m sure ours is humble about that.]
I remembered a question from the previous discussion about the “brute fact” that went unanswered by the other person:
Are these two sets of numbers determined differently or the same?
(1,2,3…)
(…3,2,1)
Hmmm. As long as they’re not counted, just ordered, the same I feel.
It’s odd to go back reread the conversation after 10 years. Probably more out of my youthful annoyance, the question went unanswered.
But if you were to transpose some other non-numerical determinate relationship to the elements in the series, I only see one way to add an additional element.
And additional elements are pretty clearly being added all around us.
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Humility has nothing to do with fact, except admitting when one is wrong.
What’s He wrong about?
Amongst what may well be other factors, I think you are projecting your perception of temporality and particularity upon the great I am.
I’m just taking the logic where it goes. To eternity. And infinity. There is no beyond, Buzz!
Sure, and the world may progress to eternity as it begins in the present. That’s philosophically (rationally and empirically) possible.
It’s a wonder to go back and read the texts in this light.
To be able to sift through the chaff and find nuggets of true philosophy. To see Heidegger’s (unconscious) crutch with plural pronouns. The letter on humanism, is a wonder to read in this way.
I like uh bit ah Heidegger. Dasein. And as we progress to eternity, like everyone else from eternity… including God, we’ll never get there. What a perfect paradox!
You don’t get to have it both ways. Well you do but then you are living an inauthentic life.
Both ways is the authentic life.
No matter which “direction” the set goes, I think they would both be considered ‘countable’.
Of course the sets (1,2,3, …) and (2,4,6,…) are both in one-to-one correspondence with each other, and so also considered to be countable infinities of the same order. As opposed to, say, the set of all reals between 0 and 1, which is an ‘uncountable’ set and therefore a infinitely bigger infinity.
Having not read any of this thread leading up to this bit of discussion - I apologize if I’m just repeating already covered turf.
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Is there a difference between saying…
I have a dime and nickel in my pocket.
I have a nickel and dime in my pocket.
I just looks or sounds different but the meaning is the same.
There is such a thing as an ordered set where the order makes a difference but those are defined by an ordering relation and not just by how they are written down.
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Yes, and this came up in the original discussion 10 years ago, as I don’t see how it’s possible to have a (symbolic) infinite series without a determined order.