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Jackwc
Queen Of The Forums

Location: Aaaanywhere Sex: Incredible

SquishypuffDave wrote:

@ Jackwc

Point 1: What I was getting at was that as human understanding developed, a view that was initially counterintuitive was shown to be exactly reflective of what people had always experienced. In the same way, it may turn out that God is not obfuscated and the way the universe works is exactly reflective of the nature of its creator.

Point 2: This may be to do with the framework with which we're analysing the situation. Here's how I'd write it out:

1. Given situation X, person Y will freely choose to do Z.
2. God, aware of what person Y will choose in all possible situations, decides on situation X.
3. God causes situation X to exist, and person Y chooses to do Z, as God knew he would.

It is not evident to me that God made person Y do Z, nor is it evident to me that person Y would not be culpable for the action. God doesn't made person Y's decision for them. Regardless of what God knows, all he has directly caused is the situation in which the decision is made.

Takin' a quick break from No Country (cause it's a long-ass movie and y'all reminded me of that when the Skype blinker started goin' off).

Anyway, gonna respond to these first two points briefly:

1. Ah, touche. Nice touch using Dawkins' words against him, especially in an theological philosophy discussion, I approve. Laughing

Of course, logically, every discussion we will have is based on what we know now, and not everything we know now will turn out to have been true, obviously - but this accounts for pretty much everything.

2. Ah, ok, I see what you're trying to say. I'll take a slightly different spin here - by being created with your actions already known you are a victim to predestination. If all your actions are already known, you're just following steps until a final destination which was already known before you even existed, and it is a destination that cannot be avoided.
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SquishypuffDave

Gender: Male
Age: 33

Jackwc wrote:

2. Ah, ok, I see what you're trying to say. I'll take a slightly different spin here - by being created with your actions already known you are a victim to predestination. If all your actions are already known, you're just following steps until a final destination which was already known before you even existed, and it is a destination that cannot be avoided.

But you're still making the decision yourself. "Cannot be avoided" translates to "it's not the case that you will choose to do otherwise". The causation and nature of the action doesn't change.

Jackwc
Queen Of The Forums

Location: Aaaanywhere Sex: Incredible

SquishypuffDave wrote:

But you're still making the decision yourself. "Cannot be avoided" translates to "it's not the case that you will choose to do otherwise". The causation and nature of the action doesn't change.

But what I'm saying is that you're not actually making the decision yourself. The decision itself is an illusion - there is ONLY one choice and it is the one that was pre-destined to be made. If pre-destiny exists (and is therefore, in the model, the will of God), then logically you really do not have a choice (and the "choice" you make is by extension the will of God). I can't stress or paraphrase this enough. To say that in this model it is you who pulls your own strings and not God is akin to saying that it is not the man who should be framed for murder but the bullet.
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Jackwc
Queen Of The Forums

Location: Aaaanywhere Sex: Incredible

SquishypuffDave wrote:

Point 3: Righto. Well I'm not really a fan of that sort of thinking, since it denies some of the basic axioms that comprise logic. I can't really do much with that.

Point 4: I believe the universe has a beginning because I'm a fan of mainstream science, and the standard Big Bang model has held up over time while alternate beginningless models have been routinely discredited.
A recent study by NASA found that due to the distribution of dark energy, the expansion of the universe is going to continue to accelerate and the universe will continue to expand forever as it reaches heat death. On top of this, in 2003 the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin Theorem was able to prove that any universe which has, on average, been expanding throughout its history cannot be infinite in the past but must have a past space-time boundary. The model you propose sounds like it still involves a space-time boundary anyway.

Regardless, if a past-eternal space/time reality were to exist, the same basic ontological questions can still be asked: could it have not existed? If it could have not existed, or been different, then it follows that the space/time reality is still contingent.

3. Yeah, I'm more or less pressed to agree. Once you go there then you're going into the dead-end subject of "what can we be sure we know?" which we already discussed the dead-ended-ness of.

4. "My" proposed model doesn't really adhere to Borde-Guth-Bilenkin as, like with Hawking's no boundary proposal, my model has no technical boundaries. In my proposed model a finite amount of time exists, but there is neither a beginning nor an end. It's a "self-oscillatory" universe, I guess - and unlike in other oscillatory models, it can't succumb to heat death because of it's nature in time.

I haven't become acquainted with this NASA study yet (if you could me, that'd be cool, cause I'd like to read up on it regardless - "fate of the univserse" is always an interesting topic).
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SquishypuffDave

Gender: Male
Age: 33

2. I don't really know what else to add other than that I disagree with the inference. It seems to me that the choice is still causally prior to God's foreknowledge. God's knowledge of what you are going to do in each possible world is dictated by the choices you're going to make.

Although this isn't really a parallel, I'll throw in a little thought experiment: Is it possible to freely choose to do something if it's impossible to do otherwise? "It can't be done!" I hear you say. But listen!

Consider a test subject that is given the choice to pick up either a red ball or a blue ball. The scientists conducting the test have implanted a device in the test subject's brain that will cause him to pick up the red ball if he shows signs of going for the blue ball. If the test subject goes for the red ball, the device will do nothing. The subject is unaware of this device.

They do the test, and the subject picks up the red ball. At no point does the device have to do anything.

The test subject could not have picked up the blue ball, yet they freely chose not to do so. Tadaa!

Happymeal

Jackwc wrote:

Yeah, I'm sorry, I'm really shitty at explaining this.

Ok, I guess the key here is this: should God exist, he CHOOSES to create you. He CHOOSES to make you and does so while knowing what all your choices are going to ever be ahead of time. That's basically akin to programming. He knows what you're going to do. He creates you willfully, so he wants you to do what you're going to do. So, essentially, you've been created to do exactly what you're doing. Which means you never actually had a choice in the matter - in any matter. You were created so that you could make those choices. What you consider to be free will, what you consider to be logical thought before an action would actually be an illusion because you had to have been created with the mindset that you would do this regardless, and were created BECAUSE you would do this regardless.

Consider, of course, that God could also choose to NOT create you - because God has the freedom to either create you or not means that your creation is based solely in this model upon what suits God's will and not your own.

I think I understand that perfectly now. I still believe this specific argument is faulty though, but since I can't put what I have to say into words well, I rather just see where the discussion between you and squishy goes. it's extremely interesting.

Last edited by Happymeal on 11/14/2012 17:18; edited 1 time in total

SquishypuffDave

Gender: Male
Age: 33

Jackwc wrote:

4. "My" proposed model doesn't really adhere to Borde-Guth-Bilenkin as, like with Hawking's no boundary proposal, my model has no technical boundaries. In my proposed model a finite amount of time exists, but there is neither a beginning nor an end. It's a "self-oscillatory" universe, I guess - and unlike in other oscillatory models, it can't succumb to heat death because of it's nature in time.

Hawking's no boundry proposal still involves a time in the past before which there was no earlier time. I think that's a good description of what it means to say the universe began to exist. Even in the Standard Model, theorists sometimes "cut out" the initial singular point without thinking that therefore space-time no longer begins to exist and that the problem of the origin of the universe is thereby resolved.

If there are any writings you know of about that "self-oscillatory" model, I'll check them out. Or about the idea of time being caused by the expansion of the universe.

Just doing a quick search, this is what I could find about the NASA study:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/spac...ludes.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/...rever.html
http://www.thedailystar.net/newDesign/n...nid=154279

Jasonconfused
If We Make It We Can All Sit Back and Laugh

Gender: Male
Location: Washington

While I agree with some of your statements, it is completely wrong for you to say that it takes as much faith to not believe something as to believe it. If you think about it, the default position is to not believe in anything until you have evidence that makes you believe something. Atheism does not take any faith. It is simply not accepting things without evidence.

SquishypuffDave

Gender: Male
Age: 33

Jasonconfused wrote:

While I agree with some of your statements, it is completely wrong for you to say that it takes as much faith to not believe something as to believe it. If you think about it, the default position is to not believe in anything until you have evidence that makes you believe something. Atheism does not take any faith. It is simply not accepting things without evidence.

The statement "I do not believe in God" covers a wide range of positions. It is compatible with strong atheism, i.e. "I believe that God does not exist", as well as weak agnosticism "I don't know if God exists or not" and strong agnosticism "it is completely unknowable whether or not God exists".

If there is no evidence for or against a claim, the default position is to neither affirm or deny the claim. If by atheism you mean the affirmation that God does not exist, then yes it does require some level of faith, as does any factual claim.

Jackwc
Queen Of The Forums

Location: Aaaanywhere Sex: Incredible

Jasonconfused wrote:

While I agree with some of your statements, it is completely wrong for you to say that it takes as much faith to not believe something as to believe it. If you think about it, the default position is to not believe in anything until you have evidence that makes you believe something. Atheism does not take any faith. It is simply not accepting things without evidence.

I think you're confusing atheism with agnosticism. Atheism requires a great deal of faith, as the basis of atheism is an idea which cannot be proven - that God dos not exist. See, the notion that God DOES exist is one without evidence, but so is the notion that he DOES.

(To Dave: thanks for the links! I'll def read through them, but probably next week as I have suddenly been mutha fuckin' swaaamped in work. A kind find that paper on the proposed "self-oscillatory" model, though, mostly because I forget what they actually referred to it as... but it was still pretty radical as it practically completely objected the current standard model of cosmology. My astronomy lab assistant linked it to me, I might be able to get it back off him.)
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