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"Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father! So why are you asking me to show him to you?"
"Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father! So why are you asking me to show him to you?"The balance of probability that a human can describe an unknowable being to another human is zero. Same probability that my dog can explain humans to the cats.
Without knowing what "god" is, it can never be proven. Gun to your head, magic tricks, loaves and fishes, doesn't matter. Unless you have an example of this god, it cannot be known whether any performance by any being is indeed from the almighty.
You are claiming to know something about god - that it is completely "unknowable." Where did you acquire this knowledge?The balance of probability that a human can describe an unknowable being to another human is zero. Same probability that my dog can explain humans to the cats.
Sounds like it would be in about the same basket as dark matter and dark energy in that case. You'd better tell the scientists that they have to stop positing explanations for observed phenomena.Without knowing what "god" is, it can never be proven. Gun to your head, magic tricks, loaves and fishes, doesn't matter. Unless you have an example of this god, it cannot be known whether any performance by any being is indeed from the almighty.
One might say the same about your constant generalized insults towards theists and agnostics. The victimhood routine seems to be a trend from the top down in America latelyMore gaslighting. Get back to me when you want to discuss the issue, per se, without the apparent need for constant generalized insult towards atheists.
One might say the same about your constant generalized insults towards theists and agnostics. The victimhood routine seems to be a trend from the top down in America lately
The last point of actual debate or rational discussion in our exchange was post #200, after which you've pretty much just been saying "nuh uh" and playing the victim when I point out the lack of intellectual content in thatSee post #223.
So who fine-tuned God?
It's clear that our universe is a highly complex system. As I've highlighted a number of times before, there are only two observed mechanisms which explain the development of highly complex systems from simple antecedents: Biological evolution based on enduring selection from genetic variation, and conscious thought based on enduring selection from 'memetic' variation. The highly complex and unchanging omni-god of traditional Christianity fails the parsimony test as any kind of explanation for our complex reality: But extrapolating from our certainty that consciousness is real to the likelihood that reality is conscious also provides a plausible potential answer to some other enduring mysteries we face; it opens up the possibility of an observation-derived simple-to-complex mechanism that applies to reality as a whole, ironically essentially mirroring parts of Hume's "infant deity" rhetoric.
The last point of actual debate or rational discussion in our exchange was post #200, after which you've pretty much just been saying "nuh uh" and playing the victim when I point out the lack of intellectual content in that
no i did not.You are claiming to know something about god - that it is completely "unknowable."
weird reply. i make no claims of knowledge. your post makes no senseWhere did you acquire this knowledge?
Sounds like it would be in about the same basket as dark matter and dark energy in that case. You'd better tell the scientists that they have to stop positing explanations for observed phenomena.
You said:no i did not.
It's fairly simple really. You said:weird reply. i make no claims of knowledge. your post makes no sense
It's clear that our universe is a highly complex system. As I've highlighted a number of times before, there are only two observed mechanisms which explain the development of highly complex systems from simple antecedents: Biological evolution based on enduring selection from genetic variation, and conscious thought based on enduring selection from 'memetic' variation.
Just about all complex systems developed from four relatively simple antecedents.
Spacetime is curved.
Particles with an electric charge interact with each other through electromagnetic fields.
Quarks are confined into hadrons through the strong force.
Radioactive decay occurs through the weak force.
The entire universe is pretty much procedurally developed from those four mechanisms.
Aside from all the obvious observed examples of simplicity to complexity, such as weather patterns being more complex than the relatively simple transfer of heat from which weather patterns develop, it is just common sense that highly complex systems develop from simpler preceding systems.
Any time you have a simple system that encounters any kind of contingent interaction, the system will become more complex by appending that conditional branch to the existing simple system.
thanks Concerned. do you have an article that explains the meaning of all of this? seems like a basic i need to pay attention to and invest some time profitably.
No, it's really not that simple at all.Just about all complex systems developed from four relatively simple antecedents.
Spacetime is curved.
Particles with an electric charge interact with each other through electromagnetic fields.
Quarks are confined into hadrons through the strong force.
Radioactive decay occurs through the weak force.
The entire universe is pretty much procedurally developed from those four mechanisms.
I feel as though you're intelligent and well-read enough to have known that what you were posting above was misleading and disingenuous, at best.
If you really want to go there, then if anything "gaslighting" is what @AConcernedCitizen was doing; providing a false or misleading impression of reality in an attempt to make others question their own perspectives. If I'm a big ol' meanie for pointing that out, then I guess I'm a meanieWhy this constant need for gaslighting? Why can't you just debate the topic without playing king of the hill? What's the problem here?
If you really want to go there, then if anything "gaslighting" is what @AConcernedCitizen was doing; providing a false or misleading impression of reality in an attempt to make others question their own perspectives. If I'm a big ol' meanie for pointing that out, then I guess I'm a meanie
I understand that there are folk here who might not automatically think of questions like "What do those fundamental forces act on?" or have cosmic inflation cross their minds when thinking about the development of the entire universe, but I respect ACC enough to think that at the very least those (and likely dark matter and dark energy also) should have been blindingly obvious points for him to consider. There are others here that I wouldn't have said the same thing to
Rather than responding to the 99% of my post in which I replied extensively to ACC's erroneous claim, you've decided to make two posts in a row (so far) which are utterly off-topic and fixated exclusively on my character as a personNow you're lying. I just read the post from CC to which you responded, and it was directly on topic without a single bit of gaslighting. What exactly is the problem that you feel the need to do so on practically every post that you make. You do know that it is not a reflection on the person that you are trying to gaslight, but rather a reflection on your unwilligness or inability to stay directly on topic. Quite frankly, gaslighting is a very juvenile chat tactice and does indeed reflect very poorly on those who feel the need to do so constantly.
Rather than responding to the 99% of my post in which I replied extensively to ACC's erroneous claim, you've decided to make two posts in a row (so far) which are utterly off-topic and fixated exclusively on my character as a personNaturally I'm a little flattered to be the object of such intense fascination.
Each person has their own style of discussion of course: Some folk are all seriousness and impersonal civility, some like me enjoy in-depth discussions of the topic at hand with occasional petty asides and point-scoring as a bit of a guilty pleasure to liven things up a little, some like ACC are here primarily for entertainment and rank serious discussion as a distant third place at best (and it's quite impressive of ACC that while there are times that it shows such as this, they're really not all that common), and some folk such as you frequently devote post after post after post to fixating exclusively on personal comments and insults (generally while declaring, apparently without irony or self-awareness, that personal comments and insults are simply awful and totally unacceptable).You accused CC of gaslighting. That was a lie. I have read his posts for a very long time and I can’t think of a single one that ever went off topic and into personal insult of any kind. Unlike you, who can’t seem to make even a single post without doing so, the lame excuse-making of your last two posts notwithstanding.
No, it's really not that simple at all.
First and most blindingly obviously, the four fundamental forces themselves would do nothing without having matter to act upon: Physicists currently recognize no fewer than 17 elementary particles
Of course the biggest limitation of the standard model of particle physics is that it doesn't account for the fourth fundamental force at all. You've imprecisely suggested that the spacetime of our universe is curved - as far as we can tell it's actually flat, as if even that were a simple concept! - but the force of gravity refers more specifically to the 'local' curvature of spacetime by objects with mass as described by the general theory of relativity. We haven't yet worked out how (or if) relativity and particle/quantum mechanics can be reconciled.
Thirdly, while all of the above outlines our most fundamental understanding and parameterization of the current observable universe, there's still at least two aspects of its development which they don't cover or explain: The widely-hypothesized period of cosmic inflation during which the early universe expanded faster than the speed of light, a mind-boggling concept but widely regarded as necessary to explain the structure of our observable universe, and of course the big bang itself.
I feel as though you're intelligent and well-read enough to have known that what you were posting above was misleading and disingenuous, at best.
You stated that17? Wow. Yeah. If it's 17, then that is definitely more complex than the entire universe. I stand corrected.
I didn't say that everything else develops from more complex to less complex; I referred to the development of "highly complex systems" from simple antecedents, which of course is quite vague, but I imagine most people would intuitively understand that "add more protons, neutrons and electrons" would not exactly qualify as becoming "highly complex" compared to the antecedent.This idea that everything develops from more complex to less complex except for the two exceptions of biological life and consciousness is just bonkers. On the balance, it is much more common for things to naturally become more complex as they develop rather than less. Helium is more complex than the hydrogen it gets built from.
Richard Dawkins... points out that whereas evolution comprehensively details and explains a long series of incremental increases in complexity or 'design' from simple origins, like the height increases in a crane's load from a grounded base, Creationism or Intelligent Design simply appeal to a fantastic skyhook which lifts our incredulous load with no apparent foundation or explanation of its own.
However he also notes four remaining points of potential incredulity where the evolutionary crane or the gradual slope of Mount Improbable may still be unsatisfactory as a complete explanation:
> The origin of consciousness
> The origin of eukaryotic cells
> The origin of life
> The origin of our 'finely-tuned' universal constants....
But we needn't be so culturally-blinkered in our thinking as to assume that this makes all theistic hypotheses of the skyhook variety. And in fact Richard Dawkins himself inadvertently acknowledges this very fact: Natural selective pressure on self-replicating structures is the only known physical 'crane' or process by which complexity or apparent design increases over time. But in his criticism of religion Dawkins carefully and explicitly illustrates an analogue to genes' variation-with-adaption in the case of thoughts, or memes.
My point is simply that a form of idealism/pantheism, using the most obvious and effective simple-to-complex mechanism of enduring selection from varying thoughts (even if we suppose that other less impressive mechanisms have occurred under the scope of our universe's patterns of behaviour) stands out as currently the best and most reasonable way of speculatively explaining our puzzling universe.
You stated that
"Just about all complex systems developed from four relatively simple antecedents....
The entire universe is pretty much procedurally developed from those four mechanisms."
That's not some kind of tangent or throwaway line, it was the main and repeated thrust of your response...
and yet the actual number of currently-identified antecedents and mechanisms is not four or eight within a reasonable margin of error: It's more like twenty
to account for just the 5% of estimated mass-energy that 'ordinary' matter provides, as I showed and referenced.
Whatever else they might have to say on the topic, an honest person might acknowledge that their comments were wildly and obviously misleading rather than getting all snarky about it
I didn't say that everything else develops from more complex to less complex; I referred to the development of "highly complex systems" from simple antecedents, which of course is quite vague, but I imagine most people would intuitively understand that "add more protons, neutrons and electrons" would not exactly qualify as becoming "highly complex" compared to the antecedent.
This is not exclusively my argument incidentally, it was suggested to me by Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion.
As one blogger quotes the book directly (see for more context),
"We really need Darwin’s powerful crane to account for the diversity of life on Earth and especially the powerful illusion of design. . . .
One might say that "apparent design" would have been a more precise way of phrasing my earlier comments than "highly complex systems," but either way it's clear that Dawkin's professional scientific assessment was not "oh, this sort of thing happens all the time, everything gets more complex, we don't need any special mechanism or evidence to explain it!"
The whole universe; the big bang, the entire mass-energy of the universe, relativistic spacetime, the cosmic inflationary period and dozens of 'finely-tuned' universal constants including those underpinning the bosons which carry three of the forces and permit the mass which curves spacetime.Which highly complex systems developed independently of the four fundamental forces?
Which as I've pointed out was a strawman. My error, such as it was, was trying to avoid the anthropocentric or teleological bias inherent in the word "design" while still conveying a fairly obvious point in a simple manner. There is simply no reasonable comparison between gold or weather patterns and the systems produced by evolution and conscious thought. The former have effectual component parts with little variation, just a handful of if not uniform component types; and if they were significantly altered, a fraction or even half of their component parts removed, we'd still be left with a coherent (albeit different) whole producing similar or at least comparable effects to the original whole - a category 2 storm rather than category 4, say, or zirconium rather than gold. If you remove half the components of the International Space Station you're not left with a smaller station or a different kind of machine, you're left with floating junk and dead astronauts; it's a machine consisting of millions if not billions of component parts, most of which have essential contributions towards the effect of the whole. Meanwhile even the simplest bacterium is considered comparable to if not more complex than technological marvels like the ISS or a nuclear submarine!It was one example of the natural progression from simple to complex. Another example I gave was the progression from simple transfer of heat to weather patterns.
The main thrust of my response was that biological evolution and consciousness are far from the only examples of increasing complexity in the universe.
There is no such thing as an agnostic. You either believe a god exists, or you lack belief a god exists.
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