Taking the fight to the real issue

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Ask the one who is arguing. I am simply stating facts, and for two reasons:

1) This thread is another one of those "there is no 'god'" threads and I want to know what people might have to say about the fact I no longer have to drink if that notion is actually true;
2) Some suffering alcoholic who cannot stop drinking on his or her own might come across this thread and discover the same "individual solution" first offered to all alcoholics in about 1939 when "Alcoholics Anonymous", the book, was published.

As sincere as your conviction may be that God himself controlled your desire for alcohol I, and probably a good many other people, think there was something else involved.

Well, a major problem is with the word "before the big bang". There is no "before the big bang", because for there to be moments temporally prior to the big bang, there would have to be time. If time begins with the big bang, then the universe has existed for all of time. So there is little/nothing to explain if the universe has always existed. The only thing that a person can strive to explain is the big bang. Most explanations have problems, but "God" lacks a *lot* of explanatory virtues.

If you can dismiss it so easily, why do you need to dismiss it repeatedly?

Umm.... honestly, you just stopped drinking. It isn't magic. There are lots of programs that promise the same thing.

It is possible one would. It is possible that there aren't a lot of those reading this. It is even possible that an alcoholic would hear about another program. In my area, there were radio advertisements for awhile for another group.

Rebuttal. Many people almost just can't help it. It is not as if leejosepho brings up a new fact each time though.

So, if the universe is deterministic, are you saying that human free will does not exist? After all, we are in the universe.

I am responding to a post. Are you too dense to realize that?

This argument seem to be an echo of that put forward by Brian Pitts in his work on the Big Band Singularity and the Kalam Cosmological Argument. The problem with invoking this argument is that this position has been refuted my times and in different forms. Pitts contention was that ‘if space-time is singular, then there exists no first moment in time, which is a necessary condition of the universes beginning to exist’. Pitts contended that this therefore destroyed the Kalam Cosmological Argument.

In refutation of this point one simply has to point out where Pitts has confused his logic and he indeed has. He has based his position on the assumption that beginning to exist entails having a beginning point. Pitt has given no reason for us to think that this is the case. Plausibly, as Quentin Smith has argued, time begins to exist if and only if for any arbitrarily designated, non-zero, finite interval of time, there are only a finite number of equal intervals earlier than it; or, alternatively, time begins to exist if and only if for some non-zero, finite temporal interval there is no equal interval earlier than it.

This contention also fails in relation to Paramenides’s paradox of motion. For if we assume that beginning to exist entails having a beginning point then Parmenides argued that if an object O is at rest at time t, it is impossible for O to begin to move. For at any time t? > t, if O is in motion at t?, then there is an earlier time t* < t? at which O is already in motion. Hence, nothing can ever begin to move! If we assume the continuity of time and space, the solution to the puzzle is that O can begin to move without there being a beginning point of its motion. Pitts' demand for first instant would force upon us the absurd conclusion that nothing ever begins to move. But if we allow that beginning to move does not entail having a beginning point of motion, then, generalizing, neither should we demand that in beginning to exist the universe must have a beginning point of its existence.

This is a similar arguement to that put forward by Hawking and Mlodinow in their recent book. I see no reason to think that a creature endowed with freedom of the will could not exist spatio-temporally and act upon and be acted upon by other objects; so what’s the argument against such a thing? Hawking and Mlodinow ask, “If we have free will, where in the evolutionary tree did it develop?” If this is supposed to be an argument, there are at least two things wrong with it. First, my having free will does not depend upon my being able to specify where in the evolutionary process organisms first acquired it. Second, free will presumably arose as soon as the human brain evolved sufficient complexity to support self-conscious, rational reflection. So what’s the problem? I personally would not really want to know if free will does not exist; Dennett and Harris shares this view; its one of the few things I could say we agree on.

That you insist the world is deterministic and blatantly deny your method of choice falls into that conformity is rather comic.

Indeed, the Everett interpretation is probably now the most widely accepted interpretation of quantum mechanics, and it is fully deterministic.

However, determinism and causality are not the same. Since the cardinality of the state space remains constant, the universe is deterministic whether you go forward in time, backward in time, or sideways in time across space. This means that the very idea of causality itself is an illusion attributable to our personal selection of time's arrow. The universe is not causal; it just appears that way to us.

Talking about what happened "before" the universe makes no more sense than talking about what happens "outside" the universe. There isn't any "before" or "outside".

IMO this is exactly why, as much as we all might like to beat our chests like King Kong around here, it would seem premature to get too serious about what we know or don't know today vs. what we may know several hundred years from now.

Science as a process enables us to correct erroneous theories, formulate new theories (and test them) and accomodate newly learned facts. The various scientific methodologies have given us the best knowledge we have the the real world and a degree of control over our environment. The trail of dead theories is testimony to the effectiveness of the scientific method. Unlike philosophers, scientists can correct their errors. Philosophers keep repeating the same bogus crap century after century.

ruveyn

The problem is when most people refer to "free will" they mean libertarian free will. Libertarian free will is completely incompatible with determinism, as libertarian free will requires an ability to take actions that are not determined by prior events.

I don't see Hawking's argument as sufficient.

Dennett's view of free will is interesting, but I am not sure how well it fits in with religious traditions, as I am not sure how well Dennett's view of free will supports the religious view. (He just sees us a "clever avoiders of issues", but that does not seem sufficient for the degree of moral agency required by free will based theism)

I think the equivocation is over language. I am not opposing the notion of a "first moment in time", I am opposing the notion of "before the big bang". There is still no "before the big bang".

That being said.... I am unsure about the analysis of time being used. After all, if there is no objective present, then there is no objective line between past and future. If there is no objective line between past and future, then how can we use a metric based upon a set amount of time "t"? It seems to me that no such quality could exist if the amount of time passed is merely a matter of the observor's frame of reference. Without this though, it seems entirely possible that there is no real way of framing before and after, as we have different measurements of time, but also disagreeing frames of reference present to each other, but with pasts that contain the future for other frames of reference.

Last edited by Awesomelyglorious on 15 Nov 2010, 7:29 pm, edited 1 time in total.