What are the best philosophical arguments for God?

[mitchellmckain (Scientist and Christian)]

@DoKo

And quantum indeterminancy by itself doesn´t preserve you free will, you need an account for the personal agency. To quote Jack Smart: “ I wouldn´t feel any freeer if a random brain state forced me to run in the garden and eat a slog. Quite the opposite. ”

Quantum indeterminacy is how free will must appear in a worldview which restricts itself to time-ordered causality.

@DoKo

But yes it is clear that physics the way it is practiced is now is at least very incomplete.

Also, isn´t it certain that QM is wrong, but that it is usefully wrong?

QM is neither wrong nor incomplete. That hypothesis has been disproven.

@DoKo

Sabine Hossenfelder

There have been a long list of physicists who have rebelled against QM, one of its founder Einstein included. But their efforts to disprove it have repeatedly failed. QM is not wrong. Only evolution comes close to the shear quantity of corroborating evidence and doesn’t even get close the to precision of that supporting evidence. The most that Hossenfelder can say is that QM doesn’t explain everything any more than evolution or General Relativity does. But frankly QM explains more things than any other theory. Frankly, I think Hossenfelder’s article was mostly tongue in cheek reflection that the instincts of many physicists rebel against it and would very much LIKE to say it is wrong. But no, it is not wrong – NOT. AT. ALL!

That’s Mitchell McKain, physicist in Salt Lake City and the vast majority of other physicists, by the way.

@DoKo

I was recapping the position you gave back then.

No you were recapping the bin you decided to put me in according to your own peculiar binning. I have just repeated what I have said every time. The mind is a physical living organism using linguistic encoding of information much the way biological life uses DNA – meme life rather than gene life.

@DoKo

You denied that, although the mind is physical, that it can be reduced to the physical constituents.

That’s because of emergence. A topic I will now skip to next…

@DoKo

mitchellmckain:

You have emergence because of self-organization – new rules that derive neither from component parts or previous external causes but from internal patterns which possibly have arisen at least partly by chance.

I´d qualm with the formulation. If a new property arises, then self-organization is only the mechanism by which it is expressed. That tells us little about the ontological status of the property, but it is clear that it has to differ in at least one way from the constituents. Just refering to the internal patterns only pushes the question back instead of answering it.

Let’s try an example. Consider the game of chess. Everything from the board to the players consist of atoms. Does this mean that the rules of chess come from the physics governing atoms? Clearly not. So where did those rules come from? Well… people just made them up. That is emergence, right there! Everything doesn’t reduce to their component parts because the things composed of those parts can make up their own rules having absolutely nothing to do with the laws which govern those parts. And NO this doesn’t mean that the things made of those parts have to have either life or intelligence. They just need enough complexity to exhibit the phenomenon of self-organization which can be observed everywhere in the universe.

So… continuing on from where we left off before…

@DoKo

mitchellmckain:

Sounds to me like the difference between the physicalist view of the universe and the physicalist view of reality, which are two different things as far as I am concerned.

I can only come up with panentheism, but you are pretty hostile to it, so that can´t be right. I need an explanantion.

This was a very strange leap to me… panentheism is about God and God was nowhere mentioned so that must be some kind of hidden subtext to your use of the words… does physicalist mean “without God” in your personal dictionary? It doesn’t mean that anywhere I have looked.

How about this… Take the physicalist view of the universe and simply add something else which is not the universe and then use the phrase “physical universe” for the original, “non-physical” for the addition and reality for the sum of the two.

In case you are still stumbling over God in this… God would be part of the non-physical addition.

@DoKo

Since we display different abilities when thinking (e.g. intentionality) that are not to be found in the physical alone, I conclude that mind and brain are different.

I also conclude that the mind and brain are different. I just don’t think the mind is non-physical.

@DoKo

It could indeed be the case that free will is impossible or physicalistic-mechanistic philosophy was right all along.

Or it could be that both are wrong and both are so busy dismissing and discounting anything that doesn’t agree with their worldview that they fail to take into account how the new discoveries in science alter the big picture.

@DoKo

Are you an idealist?

According to what definition of idealism?

Do I “assert that reality, or reality as humans can know it, is fundamentally mental, mentally constructed, or otherwise immaterial?”

I do not.

When I say that I am a substance monist that means I think that monism is the superior approach to understanding reality because it explains more – explaining both the separate phenomenon (such as mind and body) AND how they are related and differ from each other. This takes after what we see in physics and extrapolates beyond – how everything seems to be different forms of energy, and thus suggests that there is one stuff and different forms of that same stuff are all the things which exist both physical and non-physical.

@DoKo

Now I´m not a platonic universalist, but at least some kind of realism I affirm. Usually the weaker version, that universals exist, but only in minds.

And I typically say that I am a nominalist and that the universals in minds are themselves particulars of a different degree of generality.

@DoKo

After all, is there nothing which makes someone a human? In general human beings get classified as rational animals, so that seems to be a common denominator. Aristotle doesn´t affirm the platonic realm, but that the human form is a universal. Everyone participating in it has at least one common attribute, and that here would be rationality.

And I think this restriction of rationality to human beings is spurious. The one thing we really know is unique to human being is language (not merely communication but with symbolization ability to rival that of DNA). What makes us human is the mind (living organism using language as its information coding) which often makes use of rationality but is not defined by rationality – not even close. I continue to assert that computers have demonstrated superb abilities in rationality without a shred of either consciousness or life.

But to use the word “substance” for the fact that we can make a distinction between man and the animals seems very strange to me. In the end these are just lines we draw in the sand as an aid to communication and we shouldn’t project such made up lines upon the nature of reality itself.

@DoKo

your definition of physicalism is so broad

On the contrary, it is extremely specific. It is simply one answer to the mind-body problem, that both the mind and body are physical entities and thus interact by all the forces of nature as discovered by the physical sciences.

To be sure I have acknowledge in our discussion there is another use of the word for a broader metaphysical position, but it is not one I am accustomed to using.

@DoKo

mitchellmckain:

To me the English word “substance” seems closer to Aristotle’s word “hyle” which usually gets translated as matter, another word whose meaning has been greatly changed by the findings of science.

Yes and no. The greatest change was the affirmation of the cartesian distinction, which I reject completely. Nature is not exhaustively quantifiable, since there are obviously qualitative aspects, like qualia.

I was refering to changes in the meaning of the word “matter.” And thus I doubt if the translation of Aristotle’s word “hyle” as “matter” is really a good fit anymore.

I do not acknowledge the existence of “qualia” any more than I accept the existence of Plato’s ideal forms. I don’t see the merit of using an atomist or reductionist way of thinking on human experience.

@DoKo

through philosophy.
The biggest problem I see is that only very few people in the science departments have the holistic picture in mind. Biology for example, due to it being concerned with functions of organisms, is constantly confronted with a broad version of teleology/physical intentionality.

Ah yes! In this, your praise of Aristotle is very appropriate. I have often thought of him as the first organic philosopher taking so much of his thinking from the study of living organisms as he did.