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Source: (consider it)
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Thread: Ex nihilo? Much ado about nothing?
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LeRoc
Famous Dutch pirate
# 3216
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Posted
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Grokesx: My point was that the question, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" might turn out to be a question about the properties of an imaginary entity, and hence be an incoherent question.
Many, many, many questions within physics are about imaginary entities:- How big is the force that acts on this object?
- What are the properties of an ideal gas?
- Can we resolve the singularity in this quantum field?
Do you think these questions are incoherent? If we remove all imaginary entities from Physics, we might as well flush it down the drain.
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I know why God made the rhinoceros, it's because He couldn't see the rhinoceros, so He made the rhinoceros to be able to see it. (Clarice Lispector)
Posts: 9474 | From: Brazil / Africa | Registered: Aug 2002
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Dafyd
Shipmate
# 5549
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Posted
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Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
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Originally posted by Dafyd
Nothing comes from nothing is not an axiom in any logical system that I'm aware of. You could perhaps deduce some form of it from the axiom of non-contradiction. But I don't believe that there's any logical principle that would support such a proposition in the way and to the effect that you're using it.
But the axioms of logic constitute a tool that we apply to propositions and concepts, which, of course, include the principles of causality. These axioms are necessarily applied consistently. Therefore, logic cannot tell us one thing about the nature of causality, on the one hand, and then contravene that position with regard to the origin of information.
I'm struggling to see how that establishes as a logical principle that if something comes into being it must be made out of something pre-existing.
Anyway, my argument is that you're not applying them consistently. That is, you think it's impossible for matter to be created, but you're fine with information being created. (And yes - I've read your argument that information isn't created - I think it isn't sound.)
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We are not defining existence in terms of composition. Therefore it is irrelevant what would happen if we did.
You made the following statement earlier in the thread:
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[QB] [QUOTE]God's thoughts aren't made of pre-existing matter. Nor is information made of anything. But do you reject the term 'ex nihilo' for this?
You claim that information is not made of anything. This leads me to wonder whether you believe that information actually exists. This question seems to be answered - in a rather obscure way - in the following comment:
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You have a bad case of noun-itis - the belief that where a true sentence contains a noun like 'thoughts' there must be a something the noun refers to in reality.
This was in response to my comment:
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You say that information is not made of anything, but you are assuming a materialistic position. Thoughts are still something. And thoughts exist eternally in the mind of God, and then can be realised as a series of active instructions that define the nature of reality.
Putting all this together leads me inexorably to the conclusion that you don't believe that information actually exists, because it is not "made of anything". In other words, you are defining existence in terms of composition.
So putting two and two together leads you inexorably to the conclusion five.
I'd say you were getting hold of the stick by the wrong end, except I'm not sure you've even got the right stick.
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I certainly believe that information exists, otherwise the functionality of memory is inexplicable. Does this physical mechanism really store 'nothing'? Do we really spend years in school and university putting 'nothing' in our brains? And also... Are the posts on this thread really nothing more than patterns of pixels, that are interpreted entirely subjectively? Are we all engaging in a mass delusion when we communicate, and when we speak about meaning?
I refer you to the passage in the post you didn't reply to about 'falls' and 'freezes' and 'melts'.
Do shapes exist?
You have a lump of plasticine and you make it into a cube. Do you now have the plasticine and a cube as well? No. You just have the plasticine which is in the shape of the cube. If we talk about the shape we can reduce that to talk about the plasticine. We don't need both shape and plasticine lying around in our ontology.
Does that mean shapes don't exist? That would be a misunderstanding too. Both 'shapes exist' and 'shapes don't exist' are misstatements, misunderstandings of what talk about shapes is talk about.
Ditto thoughts. Talk about thoughts is talk about people thinking. When I say thoughts are not something, what I mean is thoughts are not things. They're activities. Nor are activities things. You can't apply phrases that apply to things to thoughts. You can't talk about being 'made of thought' in the way you can talk about being 'made of matter'. The word 'thought' does not function in that language game. But that doesn't mean people don't think.
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You seem to be implying that somehow there has existed a state in which God is ignorant of some fact about His creation. But God's eternal knowledge (which anthropomorphically is termed 'foreknowledge' - inaccurate of course, because that implies that the eternally present God has knowledge of 'the future', which, of course, is a contradiction in terms) is knowledge of that which 'is', quite irrespective of how it came into being.
But actually your objection is irrelevant. Because the information by which Everest was created pre-exists its existence. We are talking here, of course, about formal cause. No matter how we may think God brought it into existence - whether by direct creation, or indirect formation through the action of tectonic plates, there still existed information that determined the nature of the effect. And then, as mentioned, there is the information relating directly to the effect, which is (anthropomorphically speaking) foreknown by God.
At this stage, you cannot use the temporal anthropomorphic analogy of foreknowing. That's too anthropomorphic.
Let's run through the argument for God as creator again.
Anything that is contingent has a cause determining why it is that way rather than another.
Given an infinite contingent set, we can ask the question about the whole set.
Therefore we require a necessary cause to determine that which is contingent.
Now, information about creation is contingent. Whether or not God foreknew it or not, the truth of that information is as contingent as creation. Therefore, that information must be caused by a necessary cause just as creation is.
So in same the logical sense in which God preexists creation God preexists any information about creation.
And, no, appeals to omniscience are not going to bridge that logical gap. It makes no sense to say God knows something that isn't there to be known. God does not know the value of the largest prime number. God's foreknowledge of the future is possible because for God it is not foreknowledge - but is there to be known just as our present is. But if we're using temporal analogies for God's logical eternity, we cannot have God step out of the logical sequence into a logical equivalent of eternity. That's confusing the categories.
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we remain, thanks to original sin, much in love with talking about, rather than with, one another. Rowan Williams
Posts: 10567 | From: Edinburgh | Registered: Feb 2004
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EtymologicalEvangelical
Shipmate
# 15091
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Posted
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Originally posted by IngoB
You keep going on about this being a "God of the gaps" explanation. Sure, it is, but in a perfectly unproblematic sense. Namely, we have demonstrated that 1) there is a gap, and 2) nothing but God can fill it. We were able to deduce the sort of entity that must occupy this particular gap, and we know that nothing in nature can fill it in principle. Since this is a principle argument, it matters not in the slightest what the study of physics will come up with say in the next ten thousand years. If the argument is true, it will hold against any specifics there will ever be. If the argument is false, it should be possible to show this now (because it makes no reference to specifics).
That an explanation of mechanism is absent does not mean that this argument is invalid or useless. Any mechanistic explanation would have to operate within the constraints of this argument, it sets the framework.
I referred to the phrase "God of the gaps" to describe an argument from ignorance, where either God - or some putative activity of God - is simply proposed as an explanation of what we don't understand. I agree that God can be inferred as the creator of the universe by a process of elimination, and, of course, I certainly believe that God is indeed the creator of the universe. But while we may be able to justify inferring God as the creator, we cannot then hang illogical or counterintuitive ideas onto that explanation. My dispute is not with the claim that God is the creator, but rather the insistence on the idea of creatio ex nihilo. If we acknowledge that we cannot understand the means by which God created the universe, then we should not formulate ideas suggestive of a particular creative approach, and certainly we should not promote them as dogma, and insinuate that those who question them are somehow less than orthodox in their Christianity.
The rush to assume creatio ex nihilo is presumptuous. You have referred to the "sin of presumption" in other contexts, but why should it not also apply in this context?
And it is no good saying that I do not understand the specific and technical meaning of creatio ex nihilo, because 'nothing' cannot be qualified. There can, by definition, be no categories of nihil! Only things can be qualified and categorised. Therefore nihil is an absolute, not subject to any technical tinkering or contexual reformulation.
Therefore I certainly do understand what the term means, because I understand the proper, sane use of the term 'nothing'. And if language is being used incorrectly by theology, then that is even more reason to ditch the phrase.
This picks up on your next point:
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First, "creatio ex nihilo" (creation out of nothing) and "creatio ex deo" (creation out of God) are essentially the same thing, unless perhaps if you use a materialistic interpretation of the latter (i.e., if you think God is matter, and all is made out of pieces of God). By "creation out of nothing" we mean "creation out of nothing by God", and thus if we ask where all is coming from we can just as well say "creation out of God". Second, we can validly reject "creatio ex materia" (creation out of matter), because matter is invariably contingent and/or comes into being, hence requires causal explanation and cannot be "uncaused". Your only option is to combine "creatio ex materia" with "creatio ex deo" and make such matter part of a (necessarily existent) God. But note that in a sense the cosmological argument is not affected by this. We are then having a debate about what a necessarily existent entity can be like, we are no longer having a debate about its position as Creator.
What you seem to be saying is this: creatio ex nihilo actually means "creation out of nothing material", which is equivalent to "creation out of something, which is not material". It is only not equivalent if you mean "creation of out absolutely nothing or out of nothing material", which is simply a statement describing the first step in a process of elimination: "we have ruled out matter, but are open to the idea that God created out of something else, even though we think He could have actually created the universe out of absolutely nothing." Well, these formulations are so far removed from the common sense meaning of "creation out of nothing", that really the phrase creatio ex nihilo is not fit for purpose. Language is a tool of communication. It should not be a tool of obfuscation.
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Our ongoing investigations in the nature of matter have never revealed anything that would change the metaphysical assessment of it being contingent and/or coming into being. If at all, investigating matter to ever greater detail has made it appear ever more contingent and "arising", i.e., a chunk of gold naively may seem to be made for eternity, but our physical investigations suggest that it is made out of transient entities like quarks and gluons, has arisen in dramatic supernova events, and can be dissolved in aqua regia. Here you are appealing to the miraculous, i.e., some sort of never heard of scientific insight that would revolutionise the metaphysics. I suggest that you cannot even imagine what sort of discovery that would have to be. So should we drop a perfectly fine metaphysical argument just because of the purported possibility of unimaginable fantasy? I do not think that this is reasonable.
But I am not disputing the contingent nature of matter. The biblical position (which as Christians we must surely refer to, while acknowledging that the Bible is not a science book) appears to be that God created the universe by His Word. Word is information (although, of course, we know it can also refer to Christ). The idea that matter derives from, let's say, information, does not undermine its contingent status. A command can be spoken forth, and realised in space-time. It can be expressed in a certain way through contingent forms. The contingent entity is 'made of' - and therefore dependent on - that which eternally exists in God.
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Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
I am well aware of that. But to prove that you are not just playing a semantic game with me, please give me an example of something that is logically possible, yet counterintuitive.
Not addressed to me, but anyway: Every electron passing individually through a suitable double slit will be detected as a single particle, but if we detect many of them sequentially (but still proceeding individually), we build up spatial interference patterns as if each electron was a wave.
I asked a question and you have given a good answer. I agree that counterintuitive cannot be defined as "logically impossible", as your answer shows. But when we discover something in nature which we cannot understand, but whose reality we cannot deny, then we try to look for an explanation. Scientists and philosophers do not simply conclude that "every electron passing individually through a suitable double slit will be detected as a single particle etc...", because that is an observation not a conclusion. We say that this is true - is part of reality - because it has been observed. We have empirical proof, even though we do not understand how this can be.
But the idea of creatio ex nihilo stands on a completely different epistemic basis. We have not observed this. I know that some scientists claim that particles can pop in and out of existence, but could that not simply be an assumption? We may observe that particles act like this, but how do we know that they are not simply popping in and out of unobserved dimensions of reality? Furthermore, if that argument holds, then that rather plays into the hands of those who may affirm creatio ex nihilo sans God.
Divine creatio ex nihilo is not an observed reality that we just happen not to understand. It's the conclusion of a particular line of reasoning based on certain philosophical premises. So it would be a category error to compare this idea with the observation of the behaviour of particles in the double slit experiment.
More anon...
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You can argue with a man who says, 'Rice is unwholesome': but you neither can nor need argue with a man who says, 'Rice is unwholesome, but I'm not saying this is true'. CS Lewis
Posts: 3625 | From: South Coast of England | Registered: Sep 2009
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Grokesx
Shipmate
# 17221
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Posted
@mousethief and leRoc
The renaming of this thread turned out to be an inspired move.
Anyway, it seems to me we are talking past each other because we are confusing two separate strands of the issue. My fault as much as anybody's because I have conflated the two due to not thinking particularly rigorously.
Well, here goes nothing. I used the word "entity" because it was the nearest thing I could think to a word meaning an abstraction that may or (in my opinion more likely) may not have a counterpart in reality. It was probably a mistake to think this would make the something from nothing question incoherent if it turned out that the counterpart did not or could not exist. That doesn’t mean it actually is a coherent question, though.
What makes it possibly incoherent to me is related to the difficulty in defining nothing in an absolute sense in any intelligible way. I should say here that defining it without referring to the word "nothing" does not make one jot of difference to the argument.
Taking onboard mousethief's point that something, nothing and anything are pronouns - in their case indefinite pronouns that refer to unspecified things - we can try to re-formulate the question. Well, the best I can do is "Why is there an unspecified referent rather than no unspecified referent?" Or maybe “Why is there an unspecified referent rather than another unspecified referent?” Does that help? To me it doesn’t seem to, nor does it give us an intelligible definition of nothing. And that’s because I don’t see how nothing can have any referent other than itself, which would make any definition problematic to say the least.
The philosophers get around all this by coming up with the idea of necessary existence, which I think is a cop out and serves no function other than stopping philosophers going gaga. And of course it allows theologians to slap the label of God on it.
Turning to leroc's imaginary entities from physics, I don't think I advocated anywhere that we junk all imaginary entities from science. For a start they can be useful. Force is a handy shorthand for something causing an object with mass to change its velocity. The properties of ideal gases are useful in that under certain conditions many actual gases have approximately the same properties. Also, these things, you will notice, are pretty easy to define, because there are specified referents aplenty.
Useful, too, in theory and hypothesis generation. But if a hypothesis depending upon some imagined/ unknown property or thing makes predictions that turns out to be incorrect, it may be still logically consistent, but within a paradigm that is useless. We would be stupid to waste time generating more hypotheses that include the imagined property. All I’m saying is that the concept of nothing might turn out to be like that. Just a failed hypothesis. I don’t see, LeRoc, how you can generate any sort of disagreement with that statement from a scientific standpoint. You can’t have any scientific hypothesis that allows no possibility of being false.
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For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. H. L. Mencken
Posts: 373 | From: Derby, UK | Registered: Jul 2012
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mousethief
Ship's Thieving Rodent
# 953
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Posted
Once again you are requiring "nothing" to have a referent. It means "not anything." It doesn't point to a thing at all, specified or otherwise. It says "there is no referent." How "there is no referent" can require a referent is completely beyond me. It's as if I've said, "That set is empty" and you keep asking, "Yeah, but what's in it?"
[ 24. October 2013, 18:30: Message edited by: mousethief ]
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This is the last sig I'll ever write for you...
Posts: 63536 | From: Washington | Registered: Jul 2001
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EtymologicalEvangelical
Shipmate
# 15091
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Posted
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Originally posted by Dafyd
I'm struggling to see how that establishes as a logical principle that if something comes into being it must be made out of something pre-existing.
Anyway, my argument is that you're not applying them consistently. That is, you think it's impossible for matter to be created, but you're fine with information being created. (And yes - I've read your argument that information isn't created - I think it isn't sound.)
Firstly, I was talking about the application of logic, and secondly, I am certainly applying it consistently. I did not say that "it is impossible for matter to be created", but rather that is not created from nothing. Secondly, I did not say that information was created, even though you then acknowledge that I have argued that it is not created. Maybe there's a typo in your comment somewhere, because you've contradicted yourself. I made the point that, because God is omniscient, then the information in His mind co-exists with him 'through' all eternity (and I explained what I meant by that preposition). Therefore information is not created.
All possibilities exist in the mind of God. That is what the concept of "infinite mind" implies. Some of these possibilities are actualised. Funnily enough, if the experimental outcomes of QM are to be believed (and how can they be denied?), we actually have a hand in their actualisation.
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So putting two and two together leads you inexorably to the conclusion five.
I'd say you were getting hold of the stick by the wrong end, except I'm not sure you've even got the right stick.
Well, given that you haven't presented any argument in this response, I cannot really comment. You've asserted that I have put two and two together and made five, and you support that claim with.... nothing! Well I guess that's what the thread's about!!
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Do shapes exist?
You have a lump of plasticine and you make it into a cube. Do you now have the plasticine and a cube as well? No. You just have the plasticine which is in the shape of the cube. If we talk about the shape we can reduce that to talk about the plasticine. We don't need both shape and plasticine lying around in our ontology.
Does that mean shapes don't exist? That would be a misunderstanding too. Both 'shapes exist' and 'shapes don't exist' are misstatements, misunderstandings of what talk about shapes is talk about.
An analogy that has all the force of common sense intuition behind it, but unfortunately it doesn't stand up to scrutiny, I'm afraid. I hope you remember that you reminded me that counterintuitive is not synonymous with illogical, and the corollary of this is obviously that intuitive is not synonymous with logical. So just because an analogy may press all the right intuitive buttons does not mean that it's the final word on reality.
Here's a little thought experiment, that fits well with a concept in Quantum Mechanics (namely, the idea of superposition):
We have a being who is omnipresent. God, in other words. He is in all places at all times, but we know from the Bible (and I hope our own experience) that He can also act in time and space.
Now, even though He is omnipresent, God decides to take a journey on earth, between point 'A' and point 'B'. Now, let us suppose that there are four different routes that God could take. He decides, because He is omnipresent, to take all four routes at the same time. Now that is a perfectly possible real journey for God, because He is not limited by space, but yet He can choose to act within space. Therefore He can spatially limit Himself to whatever degree He likes.
But suppose God wanted to take a human being with him on this journey? Could He then take all four routes at once? Answer: no. The real journey involving multiple routes constitutes a range of possibilities (expressed in QM by the probability wave function), but this collapses into one actuality when a finite being is involved. The human being can only take one route. So therefore, to the human being with the finite mind, what is the simultaneous multiple route journey? It is merely a range of possibilities and nothing more. In other words, it is information. It cannot be applied, it can only be conceptualised. Yet this very same entity is a real journey for God.
This is an example of how something which is merely conceptual to a finite mind can be real to an infinite mind. I understand (from what I have read) that the particles in the double slit experiment are really acting like a probability wave function before they are observed - especially when the particles are shot individually one after another. In other words, a range of possibilities is having a definite material affect (the counterintuitive interference pattern), and then collapses into real material discrete particles when observed. This wave function is not be confused with an actual physical wave, of course (although I am aware that 'physical' waves are involved in some aspects of this experiment). Here we see information (a range of possibilities) acting as something materially real, and that actually becomes materially real when observed by finite beings. It is as if matter is nothing more than a concession to human finiteness, or the means by which possibilities are actualised to the finite mind. How can a particle interfere with itself or with particles that have not yet been emitted? Particles appear to be responding to possibilities: "if the particle behind me were here then I would interfere with it, thus creating an interference pattern". Therefore the particle interferes with the idea of the presence of the other particle and thus a pattern is created. Or a particle going through one slit interferes with the idea (or possibility) of itself going through the other one, and thus it interferes with itself after passing through.
In other words, we should not assume that because something seems merely conceptual to us, that it cannot be a real 'something' to God.
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Now, information about creation is contingent. Whether or not God foreknew it or not, the truth of that information is as contingent as creation. Therefore, that information must be caused by a necessary cause just as creation is.
So in same the logical sense in which God preexists creation God preexists any information about creation.
What do you mean by the information being 'caused' by a necessary cause? There is no state in which God exists where the information in His infinite mind does not exist. This information is therefore a possession of God. As I said, an infinite range of possibilities exist in the mind of God. Did he 'cause' these possibilities? If so, it is a concept of causation about which we know nothing, and therefore the word 'cause' in this context is effectively meaningless.
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And, no, appeals to omniscience are not going to bridge that logical gap. It makes no sense to say God knows something that isn't there to be known. God does not know the value of the largest prime number.
This is just a variant of the "can God create a stone too heavy for Him to lift" objection to His omnipotence. It is easily refuted. Just as God cannot do what is logically impossible, so He cannot know that which is logically impossible. Valid information is subject to the laws of logic, so your point is completely irrelevant.
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God's foreknowledge of the future is possible because for God it is not foreknowledge - but is there to be known just as our present is.
Whether you have a point here or not is actually not particularly relevant, because this kind of contingent knowledge is not necessarily the information God used in His work as first cause of the universe.
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You can argue with a man who says, 'Rice is unwholesome': but you neither can nor need argue with a man who says, 'Rice is unwholesome, but I'm not saying this is true'. CS Lewis
Posts: 3625 | From: South Coast of England | Registered: Sep 2009
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Grokesx
Shipmate
# 17221
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Posted
At mousethief
So we can get back where we started, via Russell's Paradox if you like. We could formulate, or we could if we were Zermelo and Fraenkel, a way out, but whether we think there actually is any isomorphism between ZFC and the real world depends very much on our opinions about the philosophy maths. Which is just another way of saying what I have been saying all along, which was simply that the concept of nothing may well turn out to one that lives only in our collective heads. Like infinity.
Again, I really don't know what is so controversial. After all, greater minds than mine, and maybe even yours, have been exercised by this apparent conundrum without the sky falling in.
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For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. H. L. Mencken
Posts: 373 | From: Derby, UK | Registered: Jul 2012
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Dafyd
Shipmate
# 5549
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Posted
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Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd
I'm struggling to see how that establishes as a logical principle that if something comes into being it must be made out of something pre-existing.
All possibilities exist in the mind of God. That is what the concept of "infinite mind" implies. Some of these possibilities are actualised.
You're rather quick to accuse me and IngoB of making statements about things we can't possibly know. Yet here you're making a confident statement about what 'infinite mind implies', which, again, you can't possibly know.
There's a whole lot of argument about whether God can know non-actualised possibilities. E.g. if you suppose free will can God know what I would have chosen under different circumstances? What makes a statement about non-actualised possibilities true?
The general conclusion is that the only way God can know non-actualised possibilities is if they in some way 'exist' independently of God. Which would contravene the definition that God is the personal creator of everything that 'exists'.
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So putting two and two together leads you inexorably to the conclusion five.
I'd say you were getting hold of the stick by the wrong end, except I'm not sure you've even got the right stick.
Well, given that you haven't presented any argument in this response, I cannot really comment. You've asserted that I have put two and two together and made five, and you support that claim with.... nothing![/QB][/QUOTE]
I think I'm entitled to make claims about what I personally am arguing. Besides, I went on to (try to) explain what I'm arguing in the subsequent paragraph.
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Does that mean shapes don't exist? That would be a misunderstanding too. Both 'shapes exist' and 'shapes don't exist' are misstatements, misunderstandings of what talk about shapes is talk about.
An analogy that has all the force of common sense intuition behind it, but unfortunately it doesn't stand up to scrutiny, I'm afraid. I hope you remember that you reminded me that counterintuitive is not synonymous with illogical, and the corollary of this is obviously that intuitive is not synonymous with logical. So just because an analogy may press all the right intuitive buttons does not mean that it's the final word on reality.
Firstly, would you like to support your claim that my argument doesn't stand up to scrutiny?
Secondly, what are you wanted to disagree with me about here? a) shapes do actually exist? b) shapes don't exist, but the analogy doesn't apply to thoughts or information?
By the way, I did point out some questions that need to have sensible answers if thoughts exist in a previous post. You still haven't replied to that.
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We have a being who is omnipresent. God, in other words. He is in all places at all times, but we know from the Bible (and I hope our own experience) that He can also act in time and space.
Now, even though He is omnipresent, God decides to take a journey on earth, between point 'A' and point 'B'.
That is nonsense. It is meaningless to say that an omnipresent being can take a journey, just as it is meaningless to say that an omniscient being can learn something new.
You I hope concede that when the Bible says God changed God's mind it is not speaking literally. Just so, when the Bible says God walked in the garden the Bible is not speaking literally.
It is true to say that God can act in time and space if by that you mean that God can act on objects in time and space. It isn't true if you mean God can be in one particular point in time and space as opposed to another.
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Now, information about creation is contingent. Whether or not God foreknew it or not, the truth of that information is as contingent as creation. Therefore, that information must be caused by a necessary cause just as creation is.
So in same the logical sense in which God preexists creation God preexists any information about creation.
What do you mean by the information being 'caused' by a necessary cause? There is no state in which God exists where the information in His infinite mind does not exist. This information is therefore a possession of God. As I said, an infinite range of possibilities exist in the mind of God. Did he 'cause' these possibilities? If so, it is a concept of causation about which we know nothing, and therefore the word 'cause' in this context is effectively meaningless.
If we know nothing of any such concept of causation, we know less than nothing of any concept of the states God's infinite mind does or doesn't exist in.
If we know nothing of any such concept of causation, we know less than nothing of any concept of information being a possession of God.
If we know nothing of any such concept of causation, we know less than nothing of any concept of an infinite range of possibilities existing in the mind of God.
That contingent information is caused by God is a claim about contingent information and its relation to a God whom we posit as the creator of that information. You, however, are boldly making claims about the contents and inner states of God's mind. You as a human being do not have perfect insight into created human minds. As human beings, even our own introspective knowledge is imperfect. And yet you are claiming knowledge or understanding of what God introspects.
Human beings do not and cannot have any concept of God's knowledge beyond bare analogy. All we know is that it makes no sense to deny that God knows something for any true something. It is true likewise that we don't have any concept of God's causation - but again we do know that it makes no sense to deny that God caused something where that something has contingent existence.
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It makes no sense to say God knows something that isn't there to be known. God does not know the value of the largest prime number.
This is just a variant of the "can God create a stone too heavy for Him to lift" objection to His omnipotence. It is easily refuted. Just as God cannot do what is logically impossible, so He cannot know that which is logically impossible. Valid information is subject to the laws of logic, so your point is completely irrelevant.
The point is that it is impossible for anyone to know information that isn't valid. (True by virtue of the meaning of 'know'.) The statement does not become possible if you put 'God' in for anyone. God doesn't know information that isn't valid. Information doesn't become valid until God decides that it is valid. Therefore, in the logical state in which God has not yet decided that the information is valid God doesn't know it.
Note that this is a statement entirely about the concepts of knowledge and information. It's not appealing to any knowledge of any intrinsic properties of God - of which we can have no conception.
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we remain, thanks to original sin, much in love with talking about, rather than with, one another. Rowan Williams
Posts: 10567 | From: Edinburgh | Registered: Feb 2004
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mousethief
Ship's Thieving Rodent
# 953
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Grokesx:
At mousethief
So we can get back where we started, via Russell's Paradox if you like. We could formulate, or we could if we were Zermelo and Fraenkel, a way out, but whether we think there actually is any isomorphism between ZFC and the real world depends very much on our opinions about the philosophy maths. Which is just another way of saying what I have been saying all along, which was simply that the concept of nothing may well turn out to one that lives only in our collective heads. Like infinity.
Again, I really don't know what is so controversial. After all, greater minds than mine, and maybe even yours, have been exercised by this apparent conundrum without the sky falling in.
Only if it's Zermello Frankel PLUS CHOICE. ![[Big Grin]](biggrin.gif)
No, again you miss the entire point. Nothing has nothing to do with it. It's merely a way of speaking. The question, as has been demonstrated, can be formulated without using the concept of "nothing" at all. You clearly are stuck on this nothing idea. That's not the issue.
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This is the last sig I'll ever write for you...
Posts: 63536 | From: Washington | Registered: Jul 2001
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IngoB
Sentire cum Ecclesia
# 8700
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
I agree that God can be inferred as the creator of the universe by a process of elimination, and, of course, I certainly believe that God is indeed the creator of the universe. But while we may be able to justify inferring God as the creator, we cannot then hang illogical or counterintuitive ideas onto that explanation. My dispute is not with the claim that God is the creator, but rather the insistence on the idea of creatio ex nihilo.
To make this clear once more (for indeed I must have explained this half a dozen times by now), the very process of the cosmological argument that leads to a proof of God absolutely requires "creatio ex nihilo". We are not attaching some concept there based on a whim. We are stating precisely the condition that allowed us to deduce the existence of God, namely that nothing else than God could still be left at the point of creation. We know exactly one thing about how God created, thanks to this argument: namely that it was from nothing. If that is not true, then this argument for the existence of God fails. You have not shown that it fails, and there is absolutely no need for me to fill in some further "mechanistic" gap. There is no gap in the logic of the argument, just because it does not deliver all the information that you would like to have.
quote:
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
If we acknowledge that we cannot understand the means by which God created the universe, then we should not formulate ideas suggestive of a particular creative approach, and certainly we should not promote them as dogma, and insinuate that those who question them are somehow less than orthodox in their Christianity.
But we do understand that God must create from nothing, and we can hence declare with certainty not only that people who think otherwise are heretics or non-Christians, which is a point about Christian doctrine, but also that they are plain wrong, which is a point about metaphysics.
quote:
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
The rush to assume creatio ex nihilo is presumptuous. You have referred to the "sin of presumption" in other contexts, but why should it not also apply in this context?
There has been no "rush". (Primary) matter is not necessarily existent, therefore it cannot have existed at the point of creation. If you disagree, then you need to show that it is possible to declare that both God and (primary) matter can be necessarily existent, in spite of us being able to tell them apart. If they are two different entities, then there must be a cause why there are these two entities. If they are part of the same entity, or one is part of the other, then there must be a cause for this internal structure. At any rate, this is incompatible with necessary existence of God and (primary) matter, since it depends on a cause. If you say that the differentiating cause itself is necessary, then it is this cause that I call "God", whereas the resulting entities I call demiurge (not "God") and (primary) matter.
As for presumption, it is not generally sinful but merely foolish. If one becomes foolish about salvation, but could have known better, then that is sinful.
quote:
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
What you seem to be saying is this: creatio ex nihilo actually means "creation out of nothing material", which is equivalent to "creation out of something, which is not material".
No. What I'm saying is that it is creation out of nothing, full stop. However. I'm also saying that creation is not a spontaneous process, rather it is an act of a Creator. So imagine a carpenter making a table out of wood. Now remove the wood, but not the table. Then it is entirely sensible to say that now the carpenter is making the table "out of nothing". This does not require me to say that the carpenter has disappeared, too. Of course, in this situation there is a sense in which the table is now created "out of the carpenter". Not in the sense that somehow parts of the carpenter form the table, but in the sense that the only entity we can point to when asked "where does this table come from" is the carpenter. Still, it remains perfectly sensible to say that this table is "made out of nothing", namely without wood. Now, this analogy of course is about a material object, but that's simply because our experience is about material objects. I also say that there was no pre-existing immaterial entity out of which God fashioned creation. God created out of nothing.
quote:
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
Language is a tool of communication. It should not be a tool of obfuscation.
Given that people have communicated just fine with this expression for at least a thousand years, the problem here clearly lies with you.
quote:
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
But I am not disputing the contingent nature of matter. The biblical position (which as Christians we must surely refer to, while acknowledging that the Bible is not a science book) appears to be that God created the universe by His Word.
OK, if matter is contingent, then it is not necessarily existent and therefore it must have been created. The traditional Christian interpretation of "God's Word" is that this means the Second Person of the Trinity, the Logos, the Son, the Lord that incarnated as Jesus Christ. This is of course God Himself, so it changes nothing concerning the cosmological argument. If you wish, it is a further answer concerning the "mechanism" of creation. But it is an answer obtained by revelation, not philosophy. And it is an answer that does not change the philosophical statement that "God created all out of nothing".
quote:
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
Word is information (although, of course, we know it can also refer to Christ). The idea that matter derives from, let's say, information, does not undermine its contingent status.
There is no "also" about this. The "Word" at the beginning of creation needs must be a reference to God, and by Christian revelation we identify this with the Second Person of the Trinity, who by further revelation we believe to have incarnated as Jesus Christ (whom you hence by virtue of Personal union may call the "Word", though I don't think that anybody ever called Jesus that while He walked 1st century Palestine). It is of course up to you to call this Second Person "Information", if that makes you happy. However, that move will not get you out of the tight net of conclusions concerning God, because that "Information" just is God.
quote:
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
But when we discover something in nature which we cannot understand, but whose reality we cannot deny, then we try to look for an explanation. Scientists and philosophers do not simply conclude that "every electron passing individually through a suitable double slit will be detected as a single particle etc...", because that is an observation not a conclusion. We say that this is true - is part of reality - because it has been observed. We have empirical proof, even though we do not understand how this can be.
Indeed. And my endlessly reiterated point has been that we have metaphysical proof that God created out of nothing. Now, if you accept nothing but empiricial proof, then frankly that is too fucking bad for you. That is not a defensible position, as has been argued on these boards many times before. (Essentially, one cannot prove empirically that only empirical proof counts.) If you doubt all metaphysics, then you are in somewhat better company: only imbeciles believe in the absolute rule of empirics but some clever people have adopted a critical stance towards metaphysics. Yet that means that you adopt a fundamental stance of pessimism to the capacity of the human mind, because metaphysics is based on optimism about it (basically, metaphysics assumes that we can correctly infer universals from specifics). At which point any further complaints about "gaps" in explanations are suspicious, for you have declared your own mind to not be trustworthy. Personally, I'm optimistic about the human mind. And yes, that's not an argument, but neither is pessimism about the human mind. It is simply a declaration what sort of discussions I care about.
quote:
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
But the idea of creatio ex nihilo stands on a completely different epistemic basis. We have not observed this. I know that some scientists claim that particles can pop in and out of existence, but could that not simply be an assumption? We may observe that particles act like this, but how do we know that they are not simply popping in and out of unobserved dimensions of reality?
![[brick wall]](graemlins/brick_wall.gif) Dude, seriously, you are not listening. That sort of physical process, whatever it may be, is not "creation from nothing". That's precisely what we tell all those atheists who go on about quantum fluctuations that created the universe. A quantum fluctuation is not nothing. The very point is that we can always ask "and where did that come from". You can ask that about quantum fluctuations, multiverses, M-branes or whatever. The "causal acid" dissolves everything, but it is impossible for nothing to spontaneously become something. Hence, God. And yes, that's a "gap filler". But is an essential "gap filler". You cannot close that gap with anything physical by virtue of the very argument that led you to the gap. Hence, indeed, God.
quote:
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
Divine creatio ex nihilo is not an observed reality that we just happen not to understand. It's the conclusion of a particular line of reasoning based on certain philosophical premises. So it would be a category error to compare this idea with the observation of the behaviour of particles in the double slit experiment.
Well, yes, but nobody here has made that category error. You asked for a demonstration that "counterintuitive" is not equivalent to "illogical", and that has now been shown. It does follow that you cannot simply assume this equivalence when discussing other categories of arguments.
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They’ll have me whipp’d for speaking true; thou’lt have me whipp’d for lying; and sometimes I am whipp’d for holding my peace. - The Fool in King Lear
Posts: 12010 | From: Gone fishing | Registered: Oct 2004
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Grokesx
Shipmate
# 17221
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Posted
quote:
No, again you miss the entire point. Nothing has nothing to do with it. It's merely a way of speaking. The question, as has been demonstrated, can be formulated without using the concept of "nothing" at all. You clearly are stuck on this nothing idea. That's not the issue.
So you are saying the question, "Why is there anything at all?" does not contain an implicit reference to nothing? The question asks the reason for anything at all, so does it not implicitly assume there is a state of not anything at all, at least in theory? And what is not anything at all, if not nothing?
All this is so obvious as not worth saying. My point... oh fuck it, who cares what my point is.
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For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. H. L. Mencken
Posts: 373 | From: Derby, UK | Registered: Jul 2012
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LeRoc
Famous Dutch pirate
# 3216
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Posted
quote:
Grokesx: Turning to leroc's imaginary entities from physics, I don't think I advocated anywhere that we junk all imaginary entities from science.
You said that all questions about imaginary entities were incoherent (here). I have to say that isn't easy to discuss things with someone who keeps backpedalling like this.
quote:
Grokesx: Also, these things, you will notice, are pretty easy to define, because there are specified referents aplenty.
So, now you're saying that questions about imaginary entities can be coherent as long as they are 'easy to define' and there are 'specified referents aplenty' (can you hear the sound of the moving goalposts)?
Do you think that a force, an ideal gas or a quantum singularity is easier to define than nothing? Try it sometimes. Who determines what is 'easier to define'? (And what is this stuff about 'specified referents aplenty' anyway?)
quote:
Grokesx: I don’t see, LeRoc, how you can generate any sort of disagreement with that statement from a scientific standpoint. You can’t have any scientific hypothesis that allows no possibility of being false.
I'm not formulating hypotheses, I'm just asking a question.
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I know why God made the rhinoceros, it's because He couldn't see the rhinoceros, so He made the rhinoceros to be able to see it. (Clarice Lispector)
Posts: 9474 | From: Brazil / Africa | Registered: Aug 2002
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mousethief
Ship's Thieving Rodent
# 953
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Grokesx:
And what is not anything at all, if not nothing?
It isn't some thing, let alone some thing called nothing. The question "what is not anything at all" is meaningless. The only possible answer is "mu." You reify nothing without justificaiton.
quote:
All this is so obvious as not worth saying.
It's so obviously wrong it's not worth saying, you mean.
quote:
My point... oh fuck it, who cares what my point is.
Finally, something on which we agree.
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This is the last sig I'll ever write for you...
Posts: 63536 | From: Washington | Registered: Jul 2001
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Grokesx
Shipmate
# 17221
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Posted
quote:
You said that all questions about imaginary entities were incoherent (here). I have to say that isn't easy to discuss things with someone who keeps backpedalling like this
For fuck's sake, man, I said a couple of posts ago that I was mistaken in conflating the two things and endeavoured to clarify. Obviously not well enough.
I'm gone.
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For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. H. L. Mencken
Posts: 373 | From: Derby, UK | Registered: Jul 2012
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Martin60
Shipmate
# 368
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Posted
God ain't nuthin. Nuthin ain't God.
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Love wins
Posts: 17586 | From: Never Dobunni after all. Corieltauvi after all. Just moved to the capital. | Registered: Jun 2001
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EtymologicalEvangelical
Shipmate
# 15091
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd
You're rather quick to accuse me and IngoB of making statements about things we can't possibly know. Yet here you're making a confident statement about what 'infinite mind implies', which, again, you can't possibly know.
In other words, your response takes the form of a 'tu quoque'. OK. So let's agree that we cannot make statements about that which we can't possibly know concerning God. If that is what we all agree, then we cannot make confident statements such as "God created the universe ex nihilo". All that we can say is that we don't know. Which goes back to my point in the OP.
But if you are criticising me simply for making this supposed accusation against you and IngoB (who I am sure is big enough to speak for himself), then that implies that we can make confident statements about God. Hence we can say something about the concept of 'infinite mind'. So whichever way you look at it, your objection doesn't really amount to very much in the context of this discussion.
quote:
There's a whole lot of argument about whether God can know non-actualised possibilities. E.g. if you suppose free will can God know what I would have chosen under different circumstances? What makes a statement about non-actualised possibilities true?
I never said that God could 'know' non-actualised possibilities. I said that "all possibilities exist in the mind of God". The verbs 'think' and 'know' are not synonyms.
quote:
The general conclusion is that the only way God can know non-actualised possibilities is if they in some way 'exist' independently of God. Which would contravene the definition that God is the personal creator of everything that 'exists'.
Well, information does exist independently of God, in the sense that information is not God. For example, God's knowledge of Himself is not a definition of God, but rather it is something that eternally co-exists with God as a possession of God. The same can be true of other information, including hypotheses and conjecture. I think that I am making a pretty strong inference when I say that the eternal God, who possesses an infinite mind, is cognisant of every possibility that obeys the laws of logic. So I doubt that God can envisage a square circle, but I am sure that He can imagine an alternative history of England if, say, William had lost the Battle of Hastings.
quote:
I think I'm entitled to make claims about what I personally am arguing. Besides, I went on to (try to) explain what I'm arguing in the subsequent paragraph.
You can say whatever you like. I'm all for freedom of speech. Whether it makes any sense to anyone else is another matter, of course...
Given that the context is a discussion or debate with another person, I would have thought that your sense of entitlement ought to include some element that facilitates communication with that person, namely, recourse to evidence and logical argument. Otherwise, you are rather leaving that other person in a kind of intellectual limbo, and all he can do is shrug his shoulders and mutter 'whatever...'!
As for the content of the "subsequent paragraph", it rather confirms the conclusion ('4' not '5') that I derived from 2 + 2:
quote:
Do shapes exist?
You have a lump of plasticine and you make it into a cube. Do you now have the plasticine and a cube as well? No. You just have the plasticine which is in the shape of the cube. If we talk about the shape we can reduce that to talk about the plasticine. We don't need both shape and plasticine lying around in our ontology.
Does that mean shapes don't exist? That would be a misunderstanding too. Both 'shapes exist' and 'shapes don't exist' are misstatements, misunderstandings of what talk about shapes is talk about.
Ditto thoughts. Talk about thoughts is talk about people thinking. When I say thoughts are not something, what I mean is thoughts are not things. They're activities. Nor are activities things. You can't apply phrases that apply to things to thoughts. You can't talk about being 'made of thought' in the way you can talk about being 'made of matter'. The word 'thought' does not function in that language game. But that doesn't mean people don't think.
You say that the shape of the cube does not exist, but only the plasticine. But on that basis, where is your evidence that the plasticine exists?
Perhaps you may say: "Ah but we can see and touch the plasticine." If that is what you are likely to say (and I am not assuming that you will), then I could respond by reminding you that we do not see and touch the plasticine in itself, but our brains process information that causes us to assume that we are seeing and touching this substance. We infer that the thing-in-itself is actually there from what is going on in our brains.
Secondly, even if we could make direct contact with the plasticine in itself, do we actually know that it has any more existence than the cube has? Have we exhausted our investigation of matter? If so, how do we know we have? What are sub-atomic particles made of? Are they really irreducible bits of solid stuff? QM seems to suggest that we don't have the final word on matter, and so for all you (and I) know, matter itself could be just as apparently ephemeral as the shape of a cube.
So based on current science, your position is really saying that existence is defined in terms of our perception of objects, because we cannot make direct contact with things-in-themselves. And that means that we cannot assume that the plasticine has any more existence than the cube shape.
As for your definition of 'thing' and 'made of', you are question begging. You are assuming a materialistic definition of these concepts, and then arguing on that basis. It's called petitio principii or proposing as your premise an unproven concept which acts as a proof of your conclusion. It is, of course, a quite serious logical fallacy.
According to my dictionary, the first and most general definition of 'thing' is as follows: an object, fact, affair, circumstance, or concept considered as being a separate entity.
And 'make of': to construct or produce from.
These terms are rather general, and even though they may usually be used to refer to material objects, there is no reason why the ideas of "real existence" and 'composition' should not apply to non-material objects. Information clearly is something objectively real, otherwise we cannot explain brain function, particularly memory function. The idea that we have a component of our brains which merely 'acts' but does not act on anything at all, is nonsensical. The memory possesses a physical function with the express aim of storing and retrieving information. If information does not actually exist, then what exactly is the memory storing and retrieving? You cannot have a physical function which stores and retrieves bits of nothingness!! I am not at all suggesting that information is composed of anything material, but who can prove that matter is all that exists? Materialism is a question begging philosophy.
quote:
That is nonsense. It is meaningless to say that an omnipresent being can take a journey, just as it is meaningless to say that an omniscient being can learn something new.
You I hope concede that when the Bible says God changed God's mind it is not speaking literally. Just so, when the Bible says God walked in the garden the Bible is not speaking literally.
It is true to say that God can act in time and space if by that you mean that God can act on objects in time and space. It isn't true if you mean God can be in one particular point in time and space as opposed to another.
Don't call something 'nonsense' which you have made little effort to understand. In fact, you've destroyed your own objection by your own comments. You acknowledge that God can act in time and space and yet that is the very basis of my analogy.
For example, let us assume that God did actually lead the Israelites out of Egypt by a pillar of fire and cloud (I certainly believe He did, but even if He did not, this is something He certainly could have done). Was God fully present in those phenomena? The answer is yes. Now suppose there was another tribe, whom God wanted to incorporate with His chosen people, whom He was leading to the Promised Land from some other direction, and He was also leading them by a pillar of cloud and fire at the same time as the exodus from Egypt. Could God have done this? I certainly believe so. God in His fullness would therefore have been making multiple journeys simultaneously to the same destination. Of course, this would have been a concession to human limitation (otherwise there would be no need for this kind of activity), but the point is that God's 'multipresent' activity cannot be experienced by a single finite being, but it can only be conceptualised. What exists as merely a range of possibilities in a finite mind (i.e. mere information) can be a reality to an infinite being.
But if you want to insist on referring to omnipotence in order to object to my analogy, then we could talk about location. To a finite mind, the idea of a conscious being existing in its fullness in all possible places simultaneously is merely that: an idea, and nothing more. But to an omnipresent being, it is a reality. Therefore, it is illogical to assume that something which can only be purely informational to a human mind cannot be a reality to some other kind of being. Therefore we should not rush to judgment in our pronouncements concerning the nature of information.
quote:
That contingent information is caused by God is a claim about contingent information and its relation to a God whom we posit as the creator of that information. You, however, are boldly making claims about the contents and inner states of God's mind. You as a human being do not have perfect insight into created human minds. As human beings, even our own introspective knowledge is imperfect. And yet you are claiming knowledge or understanding of what God introspects.
Human beings do not and cannot have any concept of God's knowledge beyond bare analogy. All we know is that it makes no sense to deny that God knows something for any true something. It is true likewise that we don't have any concept of God's causation - but again we do know that it makes no sense to deny that God caused something where that something has contingent existence.
I am very happy to be less bold and confident in my claims, if others would kindly reciprocate. In other words, give up the bold and confident (and I would say highly presumptuous) claim of creatio ex nihilo. I find it astonishing - even an example of cognitive dissonance - that those who appeal to the mystery of God and criticise the presumption of others when trying to understand God, insist on the truth of their highly speculative theories concerning the divine. It's a rather fascinating phenomenon of human psychology, commonly known as "having your cake and eating it"!
As for contingent knowledge: I assume that you agree that God's knowledge of Himself is contingent on His own existence? Would you say that God created the knowledge of Himself? If so, then I wonder how God could function as a creative being when even His own consciousness is contingent on this activity (after all, how can God even be conscious without knowledge of Himself?).
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You can argue with a man who says, 'Rice is unwholesome': but you neither can nor need argue with a man who says, 'Rice is unwholesome, but I'm not saying this is true'. CS Lewis
Posts: 3625 | From: South Coast of England | Registered: Sep 2009
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Dafyd
Shipmate
# 5549
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd
Does that mean shapes don't exist? That would be a misunderstanding too. Both 'shapes exist' and 'shapes don't exist' are misstatements, misunderstandings of what talk about shapes is talk about.
You say that the shape of the cube does not exist
Can we agree that here, at least, you have understood me to say something that I specifically and explicitly denied?
I may or may not make myself clear. But could we at least agree before we go on that you'll take everything I say into account before jumping to conclusions about what you think I'm saying?
[ 30. October 2013, 15:05: Message edited by: Dafyd ]
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we remain, thanks to original sin, much in love with talking about, rather than with, one another. Rowan Williams
Posts: 10567 | From: Edinburgh | Registered: Feb 2004
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EtymologicalEvangelical
Shipmate
# 15091
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Posted
Dafyd -
OK, I agree that I was hasty in saying that you were asserting that shapes don't exist, and I realise that you were saying that talk about the existence or non-existence of shapes is a misunderstanding. I apologise.
But I am still not sure what you are saying about the ontology of information.
Whatever you are saying, all I can say is that information definitely exists as something, because I find it impossible to believe that the function of the memory is acting on 'nothing'. Information is stored and retrieved by a mechanism in the brain. That mechanism must be acting on something real (even though that 'something' is not necessarily material).
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You can argue with a man who says, 'Rice is unwholesome': but you neither can nor need argue with a man who says, 'Rice is unwholesome, but I'm not saying this is true'. CS Lewis
Posts: 3625 | From: South Coast of England | Registered: Sep 2009
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EtymologicalEvangelical
Shipmate
# 15091
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by IngoB
To make this clear once more (for indeed I must have explained this half a dozen times by now), the very process of the cosmological argument that leads to a proof of God absolutely requires "creatio ex nihilo". We are not attaching some concept there based on a whim. We are stating precisely the condition that allowed us to deduce the existence of God, namely that nothing else than God could still be left at the point of creation. We knowexactly one thing about how God created, thanks to this argument: namely that it was from nothing. If that is not true, then this argument for the existence of God fails. You have not shown that it fails, and there is absolutely no need for me to fill in some further "mechanistic" gap. There is no gap in the logic of the argument, just because it does not deliver all the information that you would like to have.
I disagree with you. The cosmological argument for the existence of God does not require the idea of absolute novelty in creation, unless you hold to a hyper-reductionist view of 'God' as a pure substance without parts - and therefore without thought. Such a view of God may satisfy the "Cloud of Unknowing" mystics and the Greek philosophers, but it is far removed from the biblical conception of God, and can easily be debunked.
I have already mentioned God's knowledge of Himself. That knowledge is information in the mind of God, which is itself not God, but is part of God. That knowledge must co-exist with God and cannot actually be dependent on God, because God's consciousness is dependent on it (if that is not the case, then perhaps someone could explain how a person can be conscious without any knowledge whatsoever of Himself or others). In other words, we have a part in God. So we have at least two parts in God: His consciousness and His knowledge of Himself (including, of course, knowledge of the other members of the Trinity).
The philosophical ideas of God's immutability (i.e. strong immutability, that denies all change, including the change associated with activity) and impassibility are also bunk. The idea that God's feelings are just a concession to man's perception - an anthropomorphism - makes a mockery of the Christian faith, and reduces God to a nothingness. In fact, it makes man superior to God, and the kenotic experience of Jesus is a contradiction. Jesus emptied Himself to become man, whereas these Greek philosophical ideas suggest that He did the opposite: the One devoid of feeling took on feeling. When Jesus wept, God wept, not metaphorically, or anthropomorphically, but actually. God is full, not some neat philosophically satisfying singularity. Therefore He created the universe out of His fullness, not out of nothingness.
Your ideas stem from a Greek philosophical view of God - the reduced God - which has poisoned the history of Christian thought. Don't expect me to concede to it, because I will not.
quote:
But we do understand that God must create from nothing, and we can hence declare with certainty not only that people who think otherwise are heretics or non-Christians, which is a point about Christian doctrine, but also that they are plain wrong, which is a point about metaphysics.
It is, admittedly, very difficult to have any respect for the intellect of someone who uses words like 'certainty' and phrases like 'plain wrong' when promoting an idea which is thoroughly illogical. You have no idea how something can derive from nothing, even with the action of an agent, and yet someone who questions this 'idea' (if I can dignify the theory with that term) is 'condemned' as a heretic and non-Christian.
I am under no moral and spiritual obligation to submit to the ideas of Greek philosophy. If you want to call me a heretic for refusing to submit to your brand of mystical paganism, then fine. I'll stick with the Bible, thanks. (Interestingly, Jesus never promoted this concept of creation. Take, for example, Luke 3:8, where Jesus said that "God is able to raise up children to Abraham from these stones". If God really was so concerned to insist on conformity to the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo - with one's salvation dependent on it - then wouldn't it have been so much more responsible for Jesus to have said: "God is able to create children to Abraham from nothing"? Surely this reference to pre-existing matter - the stones - was highly misleading of Jesus and spiritually deeply irresponsible!!)
I hope to respond to the rest of your post in due course.
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You can argue with a man who says, 'Rice is unwholesome': but you neither can nor need argue with a man who says, 'Rice is unwholesome, but I'm not saying this is true'. CS Lewis
Posts: 3625 | From: South Coast of England | Registered: Sep 2009
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Dafyd
Shipmate
# 5549
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
But I am still not sure what you are saying about the ontology of information.
Whatever you are saying, all I can say is that information definitely exists as something, because I find it impossible to believe that the function of the memory is acting on 'nothing'. Information is stored and retrieved by a mechanism in the brain. That mechanism must be acting on something real (even though that 'something' is not necessarily material).
The metaphor you're using seems to me to be imagining something like this: Memories are something like a card-index. The cards are stored somewhere and when we remember something what happens is that we start up some mechanism that retrieves a particular card.
Obviously, if that's the right metaphor then there has to be a card there for the mechanism to retrieve. Mechanisms have to have parts, and those parts have to be things.
Let's say I doubt that's a helpful metaphor.
You say memory is a mechanism that stores and retrieves, and if there's no information there then what object is it storing and retrieving? It can't be storing and retrieving nothing. I say, it's not a mechanism at all. (I mean, yes, there are physiological processes that go along with remembering things - but I don't think either of us wants to reduce remembering to physiological processes.)
A mechanism can't interpret meaning. It only does so when an agent comes along to interpret. Mechanisms can't act on meanings. And information is meaning. From the point of view of the mechanism the information on the card is neither here nor there - all that matters is the physical properties of the card.
Meaning is a noun formed from a verb. Meaning isn't a thing; it's what things do.
So a rough sketch at an ontology. Language has in it nouns, adjectives, and verbs. Corresponding to these we have entities (or substances), properties, and activities. An entity is a thing that exists, properties describe entities, and activities are what substances do. Now, although language and ontology correspond thus far, merely because there's a noun in the language doesn't mean that we're talking about an entity. We could be talking about a property or an activity. For ease of communication we make noun phrases out of verbs and adjectives. For example, the noun 'property' doesn't correspond to a set of entities. And this is absolutely fine so long as philosophers don't come along and decide that if there's a noun there must be an entity. (E.g. Plato's doctrine of the forms is arguably based on thinking that properties behave like entities.)
(Note: I'm not arguing that entities have to be made of matter. I'm agnostic about angels, but if angels exist they're not made of matter.)
Information I think is a noun in language that is used as shorthand for communication when a verb or adjective would better mirror the ontology. It's a noun formed out of the verb inform. Information is something that agents do.
No entity, whether made of matter or not, could have the role in our lives that information does.
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I never said that God could 'know' non-actualised possibilities. I said that "all possibilities exist in the mind of God". The verbs 'think' and 'know' are not synonyms.
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Well, information does exist independently of God, in the sense that information is not God. For example, God's knowledge of Himself is not a definition of God, but rather it is something that eternally co-exists with God as a possession of God. The same can be true of other information, including hypotheses and conjecture. I think that I am making a pretty strong inference when I say that the eternal God, who possesses an infinite mind, is cognisant of every possibility that obeys the laws of logic. So I doubt that God can envisage a square circle, but I am sure that He can imagine an alternative history of England if, say, William had lost the Battle of Hastings.
'Think' and 'know' are not synonyms, but 'know' and 'is cognisant of' are synonyms. So are you sayign that God knows possibilities that obey the laws of logic, or not?
Anyway, I don't believe we need to imagine that the possibilities are logically prior to God's knowledge of them. Firstly, I don't think possibilities are entities. (They're rather potential properties or activities of entities.) Secondly, imagine and know certainly aren't synonyms. If God imagines an alternative history of England, that's quite different from saying that God knows an alternative history of England. 'Imagines' implies there's no such history prior to God imagining.
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For example, let us assume that God did actually lead the Israelites out of Egypt by a pillar of fire and cloud (I certainly believe He did, but even if He did not, this is something He certainly could have done). Was God fully present in those phenomena? The answer is yes.
I do not think you can say God is fully present in the cloud of fire and cloud in that way. Compare the wind, earthquake, and fire that appeared before the still small voice. God is not in the wind, nor in the earthquake, nor in the fire. But was God therefore absent? No. God is 'in' the still small voice and in the pillar of fire, but not in the wind and earthquake, only in some non-spatial sense.
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As for contingent knowledge: I assume that you agree that God's knowledge of Himself is contingent on His own existence? Would you say that God created the knowledge of Himself?
I certainly can't agree that, since if one fact is contingent upon a second fact, that implies that the second fact is itself contingent - might have been otherwise. And God's existence is not contingent.
As for the nature of God's self-knowledge that is well beyond any human ability to conceptualise. Augustine's analogy of the Trinity argues that one way to understand the Trinity is to say that the Second Person of the Trinity is God's self-knowledge. Which is not to say Augustine thinks he understands what that means. Talk about God as God is in Godself is a singularity within language where language breaks down; as with the value of the function x/y where x and y are both zero.
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The cosmological argument for the existence of God does not require the idea of absolute novelty in creation, unless you hold to a hyper-reductionist view of 'God' as a pure substance without parts - and therefore without thought. Such a view of God may satisfy the "Cloud of Unknowing" mystics and the Greek philosophers, but it is far removed from the biblical conception of God, and can easily be debunked.
The cosmological argument for the existence of God is a part of Greek philosophy. The Bible doesn't engage in any arguments for the existence of God. Paul merely says that God can be known from creation without saying how. (The obvious candidate that Paul might have been thinking of would be Greek philosophy.)
If we want to reject the idea that God cannot feel emotions, it is not because we reject the steps in the argument about God. It's because we no longer agree with the Greeks about what emotions are. Most Greek philosophers that emotions were weaknesses or lacks in the soul. And therefore God doesn't have them. But if emotions are positive passions in the soul, the arguments for God's immutability and impassibility would argue that God does have them.
For the record: I am quite happy with formulations such as God creates out of his fullness, or creation exists as thoughts in the mind of God, or such like. Just so long as they aren't taken to posit some entity that logically preexists God's creative act.
Creation ex nihilo is defined against doctrines like Manichaeanism or neo-Platonism that argue that creation is made out of something imperfect or evil - something whose properties are not created by God. For Manichaeanism matter is made out of evil; for neo-Platonism is is made out of something intrinsically imperfect. This is convenient for theodicy: it gets God off the hook for evil; it's not his fault, but the fault of the materials he has to work with. But as with everything convenient for theodicy it leads to worse problems down the line.
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we remain, thanks to original sin, much in love with talking about, rather than with, one another. Rowan Williams
Posts: 10567 | From: Edinburgh | Registered: Feb 2004
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LeRoc
Famous Dutch pirate
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Posted
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Dafyd: The Bible doesn't engage in any arguments for the existence of God.
Out of curiosity: does the Bible say anything about the existence of God?
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I know why God made the rhinoceros, it's because He couldn't see the rhinoceros, so He made the rhinoceros to be able to see it. (Clarice Lispector)
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EtymologicalEvangelical
Shipmate
# 15091
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Posted
Romans 1:20 is the argument from design, which of course applies to the question of God's existence.
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You can argue with a man who says, 'Rice is unwholesome': but you neither can nor need argue with a man who says, 'Rice is unwholesome, but I'm not saying this is true'. CS Lewis
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LeRoc
Famous Dutch pirate
# 3216
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EtymologicalEvangelical: Romans 1:20 is the argument from design
Is it? The way I read this verse, it is only saying that the invisible qualities of God can be understood through His visible creation. But maybe I'm deranging an argument I'm not taking part of.
[ 31. October 2013, 23:35: Message edited by: LeRoc ]
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I know why God made the rhinoceros, it's because He couldn't see the rhinoceros, so He made the rhinoceros to be able to see it. (Clarice Lispector)
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Dafyd
Shipmate
# 5549
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Posted
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Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
Romans 1:20 is the argument from design, which of course applies to the question of God's existence.
'Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine wisdom, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made.'
That really does not have enough detail to distinguish between any of the cosmological arguments, the argument from design, or some other. It's not the ontological argument, but that's about all that can be said. I'm not even sure Paul has an argument in mind: 'seen through the things he has made' implies something like apprehension of created beauty is a window onto the divine nature. If that's an argument it's more along the lines of painting to painter than watch to watchmaker.
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we remain, thanks to original sin, much in love with talking about, rather than with, one another. Rowan Williams
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