Taking the fight to the real issue

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*raises his hand*

I have a question: Is it possible for a mere human, descendent of "monkeys" to have even an inkling of the intellectual capability to even begin to grasp or answer the question is there a god? What makes us think we even have the intelligence to do so, given our effed up world? I think that is the REAL QUESTION not being asked. Also the other question is.. being that Awesomelyglorious is a descendent of stupid killer monkeys, does he even have the brainpower and faculty to approach the question with any kind of sophistication beyond that of a descendant of a monkey? (I'm purposely being cheeky AG but these are valid questions ... don't take it personally).

From where comes this contempt for monkeys? Considering some of the posts I have seen here monkeys have it all over a great many humans. AG rates quite high by monkey standards. He's a credit to the species.

the point is perspective. we currently lack the ability to see the universe from without. if time can seem constant and objective, while being subjective and inconsistent, our understanding of it's "direction" could be quite heavily colored by our perspective.

to the "light" from a star, everything it passes is all in one place.

it may very well be that there is an objective "time" outside of our universe. a "time" by which many universes could be measured. if relativity makes sense "up" there, i'd imagine "time" would still be slippery and hard to grab on to.

einstein was brilliant to see the speed of light as a constant but i still think we lack the perspective of anything that travels at that speed.

it's deeper than "light takes this much time to cross this distance" because light travels at the speed of light. forget about approaching the speed of light and the impact that has on our consideration of "time." light travels at the speed of light.

i'm terrible at translating brainspew to mouthspew (though textspew is a little easier) so maybe i'm being vague and confusing. try this: spin a coin on a table. it gives the illusion of transforming from a disk, to a sphere. at any one point in "time" it is a disk. if the time it took to complete half of one cycle was effectively compressed into one point in "time," it would be a solid sphere.

i have a terrible habit of comparing long timescales to short timescales and i've seen some promising science on the idea of a "shortest" timescale that could correct my terrible perception of "time" but, as it is, hypothetical perspective from the speed of light (assuming that actually is the "speed limit" of the universe), that quarter isn't just a solid sphere. it's a solid object that exists everywhere it's ever been and everywhere it'll ever be. this would seem to violate the pauli exclusion but, seeing as how the pauli exclusion is a feature that only definitely effects certain aspects of our universe, not to mention all that "blank" space inside even the smallest of particles, i'm ok with that.

*gets high and keeps rambling until proclaiming the universe to exist, in it's entirety, in a(/every) subatomic particle in the same universe.*

**during drug-induced nap, dreams of being presented nobel prize for his "incredibly unsatisfying theory of everything:" "if anything, then everything" as well as much high-fivery**

I assume here that you are talking directly about what is termed ‘the question of evil’. The question I have is do you believe that God cannot logically inhabit a world with evil in it? Once you answer this I will be in a better position to respond to you.



Well this question essentially has two parts. Firstly the question of God of the gaps and secondly about the practical usefulness of religion.

Firstly I personally find the term ‘God of the gaps’ rather silly. It implies that we know just about everything and that Theists hide their faith in the little parts of science that we have not yet finished developing an understanding of. The problem with that sentiment is that what we do not know is a bit more than a gap. Unless one takes the word gap to mean, the vast majority, then the term is not really useful.

Secondly, the vast majority of the planets population believes in God under some definition. They clearly find it useful. Also religious practice does not have to have utility in order to justify its existence. If we defined everything by direct utility then music and poetry would be gone, long before religion.

To relegate music and poetry to disposability before religion is a signal clue to a frightfully shallow mind.

I have some degree of skepticism towards that point, but I am not wedded to it. I know a few theodicies and defenses exist to justify a certain degree of evil. Mostly, I just think that a significant number of evils lack reasonable excuses for their existence.


I actually don't find it silly. The reason being that God is usually a poorly justified explanation, and one that we continually push back as we discover more. Science doesn't need to know everything to have a "God of the gaps". Even further, while science doesn't know everything, we have basic explanations for a LOT of reality, and for the most part, we're just tinkering on a lot of the details on these issues. (This doesn't mean that overhauling will never happen. It just means that a lot is accounted for on a basic level, just not the level of proficiency)


Here are the problems with the first argument:
1) A lot of things can exist without having utility as an explanation, all we have to have is network effects that reward people for upholding these structures. Religion clearly has this, as regardless of truth, religions can be used to fill in psychological gaps and also to build social connections.
2) The majority of the world's population is stupid in the broader sense. A large number of these people will also uphold ghosts, sorcery, and so many other things that generally the educated find unbelievable.

As for "religious practice", the problem with that is that religious practice does not require a god. There are church-going atheists. Usually they are former Christians who still have emotional connection to these practices. Generally speaking though, we do define truth in relation to some explanatory utility. If we can't use something to explain, then there will be the people who call it pure "metaphysical mumbo-jumbo", as it will lack empirical basis, and it is somewhat rational to reject non-empirical things as less likely to be true, as metaphysics does not have a great track record at finding the truth.

Looking at the topic of time, what I'd figure, relative or nonrelative - you have perhaps an intelligent person and mentally ret*d individual, time might be perceived differently or at different speeds by the two people but ultimately things are happening around them both at the same speed - their subjective measure of it means little to the broader picture.

As for the notion that light traveling from distant stars means anything to time - it simply means that light isn't infinitely fast. Do I think that there is an accurate universal clock? I think absolutely anyone could make up their own units and as long as it paces consistently it should be fine for whatever area of the universe we're talking about, if an area happens to be moving slower on the subatomic level, well, its moving slower and you have two ways of looking at it, our time and its time extrapolated to meet ours across a given ratio or curve.

I think the best answer for the absolute value to time is - whatever is happening is happening and is still result of causal events. We can measure things against our own perception as a point of reference, or I guess arbitrarily make one up that doesn't fit ours but it wouldn't make a lot of sense.

I have to comment because this has become a very big issue for me. While I believe in a deity, one that is perhaps more intimate to us than perhaps a deistic notion, I can't buy free will - either here or otherwise. If we have souls, they're extra-dimensional. Do other dimensions have time? For consciousness to be coherent or for events to occur, even heaven itself or whatever hereafter reality might loosely fit the term 'heaven', would still be slave to causal events much like here - just that the human condition and the axioms/needs built inherent to us would be freed of the necessary clashes and conflicts of interest that occur here.

The way I see it though - if we are purely material, if the atheists happen to be right that the sense of 'us' is nothing more than meat in our skulls, then not only are 'we' no more than genetics and environment, anything we either take blame or praise for whether failure, accomplishment, wrongdoing, the epiphanies or deciding moments that push us one way or another, are as clamped down as what pushes a rock to finally roll down a hill. We can claim that, if we have ourselves figured out, that we act in our own self interest or broader interest if so desired exceptionally well - but - we can't lay claim to our identities, our motivations, what drives us, or anything about our inherent urges as all of these are given to us.

The other way - we have a soul, that would mean that our identities are part genetic, part extra dimensional or eternal. I can't see it going any other way. The 'we' we know here is only partly us, perhaps one could sort out the difference but still every thought, every impulse, etc. would be measured in time and the factors influencing us, whether extradimensional/superconscious or material, would amount to the same reality as one in an atheistic set - ie. perhaps a more complicated blend of factors but still, no free will as the eternal self would be exactly what it is at any given moment and like the brain chemistry, atmospheric pressure, immediate and long term influences would be for the body and mind.

I don't know if I've missed anything here, I just get the impression that one could walk into a casino, throw lucky 7's at craps, and if one wanted to replay that moment one time, one hundred, one thousand, it would be like watching a security camera - no deviations because everything happened exactly the same, to say otherwise seems to suggest trying to recreate the environment imperfectly at a later time and of course that couldn't yield a carbon copy result, but, it also could be played a million times and come up the same way on its own.

The reason that concept means so much to me - in the case of atheism or theism - it tells me that what we think reality is or our purpose, what this life is about - it isn't so. For theism in particular it seems incomprehensible that God would place anything upon us here, aside from perhaps his influence in the initial construction of events and even there - to breath life or soul into any individual, if life is purely a ride and there is no call in anything, it doesn't mean that people should be libertine - every act has a consequence and those consequences are necessary - but on the other hand it raises a lot of questions about how seriously any notion of a salvation/perdition battle should be taken, especially any notion of Satan/Lucifer as being anything more than God's left or right toe stirring the waters or his wearing a mask of sorts, which it could perhaps be argued that we're all different masks or sub-identities of God.

You are being overly simplistic.

I have always wished for a prehensile tail.

Even a muscular prehensile penis could be quite useful.

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Last edited by Sand on 19 Nov 2010, 12:47 am, edited 1 time in total.

Well, why not believe we have the intelligence to engage in this question? We *seem* to have the intelligence. Even further, we've had enough years of cultural evolution such that our intellectual backgrounds are rich with the concepts necessary for us to get so far. Now, if I were a hutt-dweller, I could see how the question might actually be beyond me. However, I am an intellectual descendent of over 2000 years of continuous improvement on abstract thinking, much of which likely starting off with mere tinkering.

I suppose the question you are getting at is whether the ability to answer these questions is probable given evolution, sort of an invocation of Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism. Well, I'd say that we can explain this all away by pointing out that there is an overlap of intellectual abilities involved here, as "reason" is useful for a number of different purposes, including philosophy. And "reason" is only useful if the ability to reason is sufficient. So, it is entirely plausible that a creature could evolve that reasons, and as a side-effect of this can reason sensibly about God. Now, this is just a guess, but unless the possibility is absurd, just pointing out a possibility is mostly a sufficient rebuttal.

Reason is a very useful tool for dealing with factual matter but there have to be valid facts for its utility. Information about God most frequently gauges His nature as if He were some sort of extraordinary human and this obviously cannot be true considering His accomplishments and the attributes accorded Him. Since real knowledge is so slim (if it exists at all) and highly distorted, reasoning in that area cannot be anything but garbage in garbage out.

and two of 'em would be even better.

Look at your watch and tell me otherwise. Time (measure of interval) is the number of cycles of a simple harmonic oscillator counted between two point like events.

What is primordial is the relation before/after. That is one dimensional and can be adequately described by a linearly ordered continuum like the real number system.

Who is being simple?

ruveyn

I think the problem comes from confused concepts themselves, this is what I'm getting at, does mankind at the present time even have a coherent conception of god? I don't think that it does, so it would require a coherent intellectual paradigm as well as a coherent science, since science relys on assumptions and concepts that may in fact not be correct (we assume what we can detect 'our local universe' and the form of energy and matter is all there is).

So does the concept natural and supernatural have any coherent meaning? If a higher power existed, by definition it would exist out of sheer logical necessity and by definition the concepts "natural" and "supernatural" are too primitive and erroneous to contain a necessity.