posted
"Sounds like a bank loan with a promise to pay. But the bank hadn't yet printed the currency."
And, again, nothing violates causality, since God in this case is also the bank. Someone dies, He says, "Okay, a thousand years from now, your afterlife is paid for."
posted
Now it has evolved to the point where we finally have Swerpunkt. The point of concentration or "conflict", yessss.... *sits back top enjoy the show* Posts: 1567 | Registered: Oct 2004
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Sorry, Dag, but when you say "We do not know what physical theories are possible" you prove yourself ignorant. There are vast swathes of theories that can be eliminated by very modest assumptions, and much that can be said about what kinds of theories are logically possible. Note, I did not say physically; I said logically. As in, can God create a rock too heavy for him to lift?
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posted
"There are vast swathes of theories that can be eliminated by very modest assumptions, and much that can be said about what kinds of theories are logically possible."
Sadly, this isn't always true of God. For one thing, most of those logical inconsistencies can be brushed away with a "we don't know." And in religion, that's an acceptable answer.
BTW, KoM, please stop calling Dag ignorant. It's not only insulting but so inaccurate that it calls into question the quality of your own observations.
posted
When it comes to physics, Dag is indeed uninformed, just as I am uninformed on the finer points of law or Catholic theology.
And 'omnipotent' does not mean that a god can do things that are logically impossible. Again I refer you to the example of creating a rock too heavy to lift.
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quote:Sorry, Dag, but when you say "We do not know what physical theories are possible" you prove yourself ignorant.
There a many, indeed infinite, theories we could say are impossible. But there an infinite number of theories that are possible. Therefore we don't know what theories are possible.
posted
But we know what kinds of theories are possible. Certainly you can adjust coupling strengths, which gives you an infinite amount of theories right there, but we know what the consequences of that would be.
Now, you can postulate new forces if you like. But then you need to explain why those forces are no longer operating; and remember, the instant you resort to 'divine intervention' I'm going to call 'Liar!' Changing the rules in unpredictable ways is cheating.
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posted
Now what happens if god is a 9 year old playing a massive game of Sim Metaverse?
God: Hey look! Theres Earth! Lets get the nearby aliens to invade them and wipe them all out for the hell of it! dah du dah de dum."
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quote:Now, you can postulate new forces if you like. But then you need to explain why those forces are no longer operating;
At high enough energies, the electromagnetic, weak, and strong forces are unified. There's hope/speculation that at even higher energies gravity is unified as well. There is always the possibility than rather than unifying, another force exists at those high energies. Or that gravity acts very differently than how we comprehend it.
Hell, for that matter, the Earth could have been ferried around the universe for a while at near the speed of light while the light traveled from the stars, allowing one day to pass on earth. If the acceleration were great enough, the time slowdown would start almost immediately, right?
quote:and remember, the instant you resort to 'divine intervention' I'm going to call 'Liar!' Changing the rules in unpredictable ways is cheating.
"Changing" the rules in ways unpredictable to us is not cheating. Think of all the things impossible to predict prior to relativity and quantum theories. It's very possible that 100 years ago you would have called it "cheating" to suggest that there is no such thing as simultaneity, that two observers could each observe their own time going more slowly than another's and both be right.
posted
OK, moving the Earth around gets you bonus points for creativity, I admit. But it also comes under the heading of divine intervention.
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posted
But it's specifically not lying, because Einstein proved that each such viewpoint is equally valid.
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posted
But there is no natural process that could cause such a thing, so it's still cheating by using means we cannot reconstruct. In any case, it doesn't account for the evidence that the Earth is 4 billion years old.
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posted
My sole point is that a literal intepretation of the Creation stories in Genesis is possible, and does not mean that God lied to us.
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posted
While the lightspeed evidence is possibly the best evidence for an ancient universe, it is hardly the only evidence, nor have I ever claimed it was. So how do you account for radioactive dating, lake layering, and so forth, without divine intervention? Which, incidentally, you still haven't gotten around in the case of the lightspeed evidence, since there's no natural process that would move Easth around so fast and then slow us down.
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posted
I'm not trying to avoid divine intervention. I'm positing it. Your specific problem was with the information encoded in the light. I've answered that - in this theoretical creation story it was naturally created and not a lie.
As to all the other evidence, that is our interpretation of something that happened, and there are many more possible, more plausible theories for such things than for the light from the stars objection.
Geologic layering seems the easiest - if there was a globe-encompassing flood, it would have to mess with everything.
Radioactive dating is dependent on the initial ratios of the various isotopes, right?
Again, I don't buy those. I think the evidence for an old universe is fairly compelling. But fairly compelling is a long way from being a lie if it's not true.
posted
I have to roll my eyes at the arrogance of the human race. We are so certain that our theories about the universe are correct, just as people were once so certain about Aristotle's earth-centered model of the solar system. How long till a future "Copernicus" comes along and comes up with a whole new way of looking at things? Yes, I know we are so proud of our current technology, our ability to observe sensitive phenomina, tiny particle paths. And our theories do an excellent job of predicting what will happen. But why should that mean that we understand what is happening?
I can watch the 3 dimensional "shadow" of a rotating 4D object and predict what it will look like next. Does that mean I perceive its true form?
Obviously our theories are not complete since all the loose ends don't tie up neatly. Certainly string theory and M-brane theory have caused us to consider a wildly different understanding of things. If true, they could explain "everything". And yet the evidence to back these theories up is still lacking. Why are we so sure of our understanding of the universe?
Goodness knows I am no creationist. But I would not be suprised should science reveal new information never before considered. Or for that matter, only come to an understanding of it after this life through God revealing all mysteries. In fact, I believe that there are mysteries about the physical universe that science may never reveal.
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posted
Bev, the reason some people get so heated about these debates in not that they think science has all the answers now. It is that the alternative is to go backwards. If we decide that our science may possibly be wrong so the Bible must be literally correct about the age and make-up of the universe, we write off finding further scientific discoveries and theories that some future Copernicus may make.
We don't know the answers, but do have a logical and improving system of figuring out what those answers are. Going back to, "My book says A so A is right. If your book says differently, then you are a lieing hateful pagan sinner who must die." is only useful to those who control the churches.
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posted
And as for the hoary old Plato's cave analogy, even in an updated form with four dimensions, it is totally useless. It may or may not be true, but you cannot possibly make discoveries with such an attitude. Who cares whether you 'understand' what the four-dimensional object is doing? As long as you can describe it sufficiently to blow up your enemies, what more do you want?
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For instance, just as we know gravity (whatever that is) moves stuff towards other stuff with mass, such as the earth, we know evolution (whatever that is) results in new species coming from existing species, such as with the many speciation events we've observed. Yet there are lots of people out there who insist new species can't happen naturally.
Similarly, there are people who insist there's no natural process to add new genetic information to an organism. I've added new information to a bacteria using only naturally occuring enzymes, in high school AP biology.
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posted
"But then you need to explain why those forces are no longer operating; and remember, the instant you resort to 'divine intervention' I'm going to call 'Liar!'"
Why? It seems to me that it would be perfectly reasonable, in a thread about divine intervention superceding the laws of physics, to speculate that certain physical forces no longer operate because of divine intervention.
The problem, KoM, is that it IS logical to assume divine intervention. It's just not necessarily right.Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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posted
Perhaps you misread my post - I'm not calling Dag a liar, I'm calling God a liar. To use divine intervention to make the Universe look as though it is 14 billion years old and was created by natural processes, that's lying.
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posted
King of Men, your labeling God a liar for using divine mechanisms is absurd. What should he use, Genuine GM parts?
Do you think people thought God was a liar when it was proved the Earth is a sphere.
"But, but...I thought we were on a plane! It looks that way. I feel so used."
As Dag points out, the same process will happen again. Knowledge evolves.
And Dag, you've made a valient effort, but a 6,000 year old Earth just contradicts too much science, in too many varied disciplines. True, God could have made the Universe however he wanted, using divine power and miracles. But that is beyond the scope of science.
So you're both right, and both wrong. Posts: 6316 | Registered: Jun 2003
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quote: What, then, is the meaning of it all? What can we say to dispel the mystery of existence?
If we take into account-not only what the ancients knew, but all of what we know today that they didn't know-then I think we must frankly admit that we do not know.
But, in admitting this, we probably found the open channel.
This is not a new idea; this is the idea of the age of reason. This is the philosophy that guided the men who made the democracy that we live under. The idea that no one really knew how to run a government led to idea that we should arrange a system by which new ideas could be developed, tried out, and tossed out if necessary, with more new ideas bourght in-a trial-and-error system. This method was a result of the fact that science was already showing itself to be a succesful venture at the end of the eightennth century. Even then it was clear to socially minded people that the openness of possibilites was an opportunity, and that doubt adn discussion were essential to progress into the uknown. If we want to solve a problem that we never solved before, we must leave the door to the unknown ajar.
We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our repsoniblity is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on. It is our responsiblity to leave the people of the future a free hand. In the impetuous youth of humanity, we can make grave erros that can stunt our growth for a long time. This we will do if we say we have the answers now, so young and ingorant as we are. If we suppress all discussion, all criticism, proclaiming "This is the answer, my friends; man is saved!" we will doom humanity for a long time to the chains of authoriy, confined to the limits of our present imagination. It has been done so many times before.
It is our responisblity as scientists, knowing the great progress which comes from a satisfactory philosophy of ignorance, the great progress which is the fruit of freedom of thought, to proclaim the value fo this freedom; to teach how doubt is not to be feared but welcomed and discussed; and to demand this freedom as our duty to all coming generations.
-- Richard Feynman
Phew. What a load to type.
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posted
Morbo, I don;t object to divine intervention as such, I object to divine intervention which then makes it look as though only natural processes operated.
Now, it's certainly possible that some god created the Earth precisely as described in Genesis (well, one of those accounts, anyway - take your choice) and then made it look 14 Gy old. I don't object to the first part. But the second is a lie, on a literally astronomical scale.
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posted
Dan, I agree and that is why I am *not* a creationist. I believe that scientific observation reveals truth. If I thought there were a huge conspiracy to create false truth and cover up true evidence, I might be more intrigued. I am more responding to KoM's assertions that we already understand everything sufficiently to know what is happening.
Sure, we know enough to "blow up [our] enemies", but that isn't anything near what we are talking about here. We are talking about understanding what is actually happening.
How can we ever really know that we do?
I am a science agnostic.
As for me, I really do want to understand "how things work" even while I will always wonder if we *really* understand them. Ever since I was a kid, I was fascinated by such things. I fell in love with string theory nearly two decades ago when I was but a teenager. I knew that before, we always thought of particles as "points" that yet acted like waves. The idea of a vibrating one-dimensional line was so appealing to me as to almost bring up religious sorts of feelings about it. The beauty, the possibilities, entranced me. It made me realize that there are other ways of looking at things, ways that can blow your mind.
And how can we come up with other ways of looking at things unless we are either extremely creative, or we observe something that makes us think of it? Yet, if we are never looking for it, how can we observe it? Especially knowing how subtle the evidence is for many of our current discoveries! I think there is so much that we just don't know yet. I feel like a child looking with wonder upon a magical universe filled with mystery. Posts: 7050 | Registered: Feb 2004
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posted
Actually bev, from the early-to-mid-20th century (at least) we knew that light was both particle and wave. String theory still isn't advanced enough to be considered a truth (it has yet to make any testable predictions, or the tests are ongoing).
posted
Bok: I know. Sorry if I was less than clear.
Edit: What I read about Superstring Theory was out of the Encyclopedia Britanica year book of science. I can't remember the year, though. Late 80s, I think. At the time, a lot of the actual science was over my head. I learned more later from Stephen Hawkings and other sources. As I said, the theory lacks the evidence to be accepted as true. But it is a fascinating look at the possibilities.
And regardless of its truth, it always appealed to me. But "appeal" just isn't scientific. It is more "religious" to me.
posted
"I object to divine intervention which then makes it look as though only natural processes operated."
Why? Are you offended by the thought that God may have wanted a universe 14 billion years old but only wanted to take seven days to make it? Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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posted
Actually, yes. That is a bald-faced, outright lie. I object to being lied to, especially on a grand scale like this.
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posted
I don't see why that's a lie, exactly. God made it fourteen billion years old because He wanted it that old, perhaps; it's only a "lie" if His intention were to mislead.
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posted
But if God (who is assumed omnipotent) knew that some people would mistakenly misinterpret the data to indicate the universe is 14 billion years old, and He did nothing to prevent such a reasonable misinterpretation, isn't that lying by omission? He allows sincere people to believe something wrong, even though He could easily have prevented it. Isn't that a form of lying?
BTW, KoM, the universe needs only be logically consistent for science. In reality, there is no reason God could not have preformed some one-time miracles that have left no trace. However, making such an assumption immediately takes it out of the realm of science, since there is no possible way to disprove such a contention. It is then a matter of faith, not science.
Posts: 2473 | Registered: Jan 2000
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quote:But if God (who is assumed omnipotent) knew that some people would mistakenly misinterpret the data to indicate the universe is 14 billion years old, and He did nothing to prevent such a reasonable misinterpretation, isn't that lying by omission?
By that logic, He should have made the Earth stationary and the stars fixed points in a rotating celestial sphere, since at one point this was the best interpretation humanity could make.
Why is our current understanding the standard for what would be a lie by ommission? We know far more than we did, and far less than we will.
I think this is based on an assumption that the Universe should be fundamentally understandable to us, and I'm not sure that's a safe assumption to make.
posted
This discussion is highly amusing. I obviously agree with the points of TomDavidson and Dagonee because I actually believe what it appears they are only defending the "possibility" of. Let me add this point:
Suppose God really did create the world in 6 days recently. KoM, you claim that it is a "lie" to make it seem like the universe is really older than that. However, according to the literal model, in that sixth day God created the first humans who are the descendents of all humans, and walked with them and communicated with them and told them about their creation. Clearly, it is not a "lie" to create a situation in a certain manner, then specify the truthful manner of what happened even if under certain assumptions, if you disregarded what you were told, you could come to a different conclusion. To claim that God was decieving them would be ridiculous, because you would have his direct word. Every human alive would have had this direct knowledge communicated to them from their creator. Subsequent generations should have been able to learn these things from their parents. However, human sin made it so this message became corrupted and twisted, even though it was probably put in writing long before the time of Moses, so God continued to reveal himself again and again through human history, until he finally became human himself.
When you deny the literal truth of the written records handed down to us and assume certain things about what "science" is apart from a creator, you may come up with an old age for the universe. But even now, is that really lying, when we still have his words available? This despite the fact that throughout human history, we have continually rejected God, so why should he still be honest with us anyway? If you accept the Biblical account, you must completely accept it and not just one aspect, such as taking the presented age of the earth out of it and arguing that it contradicts evidence based on naturalism. You have to take the age it presents, and also take the history it presents, especially the knowledge that God intended for us to be in unbroken relation with him, and that it was our own fault that this isn't the case today, and as a result, God cursed all of creation so that we could realize the error of our ways. So we should not expect the creation to be a completely realiable witness to who God is or its own history, if we take it by itself.
Furthermore, when you run into seeming "contradictions," then you stop and look at your assumptions. Is it necessarily wrong to hold some assumptions without question, but to question other assumptions? I would say people do this all the time; when any scientist finds data that doesn't fit the theories, they would not question their observational skills or reason (usually). Rather, they question other scientific theories. Many critics of Biblical inerrancy will cite supposed internal contradictions in the text as a method of disproving it. However, they make the mistake of starting with certain assumptions from outside the text and using it to interpret the text. For instance, people will say the four Gospels contradict each other with the order of events of Jesus' life. This is because they are viewing the gospel accounts as straight biographies, which is clearly not the case. Rather, when you question your assumption that they are biographies while affirming the assumption that they are inerrant, you will realize that since they do not attempt to give a chronological account (except in certain parts of the gospels), there is no point to cling to that aspect of them. However, too many people question the wrong assumption (i.e. that the gospels are the accurate Word of God) and ignore the order of events, which is a net loss because they lose the literary value of why the gospelwriters ordered their accounts in the way they did for thematic purposes.
Likewise, in the Genesis accounts, I would not hold to the fact that the order of events of the six days was necessarily the order they took place in. In my opinion, it's quite likely they are, but it wouldn't destroy my understanding of it if they were arranged that way for literary reasons rather than chronological reasons. But there are aspects of the creation account that do make a significant theological difference, such as the timeframes involved. It also makes a huge difference whether God created a perfect world with no suffering and man rejected it, or God gradually created the world using survival competition resulting in death and suffering as a mechanism for building up to the creation of man. So when there is any argument against those core aspects of my belief, again, I question my assumptions. But not the assumption that I can trust the knowledge my Creator gave us, because to doubt that to me would be to doubt everything and send me spiralling toward nihilism once again. Rather, I call into question the scientific assumptions used to come up with this argument. And I don't find this to be any less intellectually satisfying than most scientists do when they question certain assumptions upon finding inconsistent data but still hold onto others.
posted
Avin, But that nihilism is purely a consequence of the worldview you created. When you set the world up as either 1) I believe in X or 2) The world and my life is without meaning, then you're going to cling to X no matter what. But there are obviously other options. Vast numbers of people, entire civilizations and historical epochs, in fact, have lived lives they've found meaningful without believing in the same thing you do. Hordes of people have believed the very thing that you're saying would rob life of all meaning and yet they don't seem to be succumbing to nihilism. There are other options besides the two you're limiting yourself too.
It's fine if what you blieve brings you meaning, but it should be a positive thing, and not in the sense that it is what holds off the sense of meaningless that you feel.
I also don't agree that desperation is the only state in which we re-examine our fundamental beliefs. The drive towards a static belief state is one of the things I find need changing in our culture. Of course, by the way I see the world, God is the obvious villian in the Garden of Eden story, so there's certainly room for other interpretations.
---
Incidentally, I probably used masochistic in a confusing context there. The technical meaning I was going for differs a lot from the common understanding of it as pain-fetishizing. I was trying to use it in the context of sort of submission in the sense of submerging oneself into something else in order to avoid the anxieties incumbent on being a limited individual.
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posted
You're right; there are more options than what I was letting on. I'm sorry I worded things that way. I was referring to the consequence of naturalistic evolutionary thought as being nihilistic, in my opinion. Theistic evolution is less so, but to me seems to be contradictory, depressing, and a product of compartmentalized religion. Regarding naturalistic evolution, I do fail to see how to establish any meaning to anything if it were true. However there are plenty of other worldviews that do have a lot more meaning attached; to me these primarily consist of worldviews now considered "primitive," such as tribal religions with their own creation stories indicating purpose to our lives. From my current point of view though, I view those with respect in that I believe they all contain an element of truth in that they all originated with the truth of the same God I believe in now, but were corrupted or changed as time went on because of the peoples' rebellion against God.
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posted
Avin, I believe in naturalistic evolution (I think, I'm not entirely sure if I've got your meaning corecct. I'm talking about a non-intelligently guided process of evolution) and yet I find my life and worldview full of meaning, as do plenty of other people who hold that belief. It is possible. If you fail to see how there could be any meaning in it, it's possible that the fault lies in how you're looking at and not necessarily the belief itself.
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posted
Okay explain to me how indians in polynesia who never heard of christianity could possibly rebell against a god of some form?
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posted
One example of old science being shunned because of its ties to religion, to be replaced by new science, only to be replaced by a new version of old science is the geologic concept of catastrophism .
When I studied geology at BYU back in 1978, the textbooks and professors were all preaching the notion of uniformitarianism. That is that nothing happens suddenly or briefly in this world; geologic processes operate slowly and uniformly over eons of time. That this idea would be taught at an LDS university shook many of us kids up, and there were a lot of questions in class about Biblical catastrophes and such. Our professor warned us that the religious view would get us nowhere in professional life, and it would earn us a failing grade in class. I dropped out of the program.
Then Walter and Luis Alvarez came along in 1980 and turned the scientific world on it's ear with their theory of a comet or meteor impact causing a mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous period. Their theory caught on, and now neo-catastrophism is widely embraced. Unfortunately for me, it's too late to get back into geology.
So don't give up your religious beliefs because of a scientific theory, and don't give up your science study when it clashes with your religion.
posted
Re: Polynesia: Regardless of what culture or people you are talking about, I believe they descended from Noah and his family, and hence Adam and Eve. So their ancestors took part in the original fall and rebellion against God. Furthermore, their specific ancestors (i.e. the ancestors unique to their people) would have been dispersed from the rest of humanity at the Tower of Babel. At some point in time, whether immediately after that or a while after that, they would have distorted or abandoned the teachings and history they knew to what we can see today.
And I don't know about Indians that live in Polynesia; I wasn't aware that there were that many Indians living there, but I could be wrong. Being originally Sri Lankan, I am somewhat aware of the religious history of my people, and I find the further back you go, you are almost guaranteed to find some God who is pre-existent and apart from his/her creation. A basic look at wikipedia reveals this to be the case for at least the Samoan peoples (I randomly picked them from the groups listed from Polynesia), and in fact shows evidence of a deified first man and woman myth connected to it.
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posted
I know I said I was going to let this lie, but...
Dag, I'm not demanding a creator make the universe conform to the current theory, I'm demanding he make it possible in principle to find out what really happened. That is not possible if at some point a magic wand was waved and there was light, or a fast-moving Earth, or whatever.
Avin's point about having the words available is moderately well taken, except that it doesn't account for all the people without access to the Bible. Not to mention that you still have to choose which creation account in the Bible you're going to accept.
But really, why would you accept either? I mean, this is the creation account of a nomadic tribe in the desert, 3000 years ago. Why give them special status? They are moderately interesting as anthropology and history, but of complete irrelevance to any other science.
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posted
And this is what I consider a ridiculous and humiliating crawling before false idols, and beneath the contempt of any civilised person.
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