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Source: (consider it)
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Thread: How do you see time?
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cliffdweller
Shipmate
# 13338
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Ad Orientem:
quote:
Originally posted by cliffdweller:
If you have no other possibility of choosing anything other than the choice that is known, then it's not a real choice.
You have to think outside the box. It's a paradox but not necessarily one that is illogical.
quote:
As others have pointed out, "eternal" does not necessarily mean "outside of time."
Then it is not strictly speaking eternal.
These are both the sorts of things we have heard so many times we just accept them to be true. But the fact is, they are illogical. They don't make sense. And we don't have to bend all over ourselves trying to construct some complicated system and then keep resorting to "paradox" and "mystery" to explain it. Yes, there will always be some degree of mystery/paradox re the divine, but we run to the answer far too often rather than re-examining our assumptions.
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"Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid." -Frederick Buechner
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Ad Orientem
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# 17574
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Posted
Paradox is something we have to accept, but as paradoxes go I'm not sure this is a particularly big one: God merely sees time from a different perspective.
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Martin60
Shipmate
# 368
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Posted
Eternal no more means outside time than infinity means outside space or numbers.
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Love wins
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Dafyd
Shipmate
# 5549
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by cliffdweller:
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
quote:
Originally posted by cliffdweller:
Again, God did not have to create a universe with an "open" future, but (IMHO) chose to do so because that is the only way in which our choices would be in any meaningful way free.
Why are they not free in a meaningful way in the other case?
Let us distinguish between two meanings of free:
'Metaphysical freedom': there are other possible future chains of events, in the sense that there is only one past.
'Agent freedom': what I do depends upon my choices, within relevant constraints.
Now a classical theist position affirms agent freedom but not metaphysical freedom. Now it appears to me that the claim that without freedom we could not love depends upon agent freedom. Metaphysical freedom is irrelevant to the claim.
For example, it makes sense to say you acted out of love in the past. But the past is fixed. There is no longer any metaphyiscal freedom in the past; yet you have still acted out of love. The past has agent freedom but not metaphysical freedom..
Your choices made in the past are unchangeable-- they are fixed, you do not have free will to change them. At the moment you made them when they were present, you had free will to choose otherwise-- they were changeable-- because the present is not fixed.
Careful with tenses.
When you say 'choices in the past are unchangeable' - is 'are' temporal present or eternal present?
If it's temporal present, then the sentence is nonsense: our past choices aren't anything in the temporal present, because they're past. If it's eternal present, on the other hand, then assuming we had free will at the time the statement is false, because they were changeable at the time we made them.
The sense in which 'our past choices are unchangeable' is true is simply a roundabout and metaphysically misleading way of saying that there is nothing we can do now which will have the effect of changing our past choices. But that's not a metaphysical statement about whether they're intrinsically fixed.
quote:
But if God has definitive knowledge of the future, that means the present and the future are also fixed. Since it is impossible for you to choose anything other than what God exhaustively knows as a definitive future, that means that what might feel like a free choice in the present is not at all-- since it would be impossible for you to choose anything different. Our future choices would be as determined as our past ones.
Our future choices would be determined by what?
Our past choices were determined by our free will. They haven't become determined by anything else. If our future choices are as determined as our past choices all that means is that our future choices will be determined by our free will just as our past choices were. There's nothing additional in the picture that fixes choices. Time isn't a substance like a kind of aspic that does any additional fixing.
If God has knowledge of our future, then our future would be fixed by what?
Suppose God is in time, but God is at the very end of time. (Something like Teilhard de Chardin's theory I suppose.) God knows the entirely of the past because for God it has all already happened. But suppose God is able to time travel and change past events (e.g. by talking to Abraham). Does that mean Abraham's future suddenly becomes fixed once God tells him what will happen? But everything that God tells him about are things that when they happened were not fixed. What actual metaphysical alteration takes place meaning they're now fixed? How would that work?
If that is coherent for you, it shouldn't become incoherent just because God in classical Abrahamic philosophy is outside time rather than at the end of time as in Teilhard.
quote:
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
Incidentally, we don't interpret the Bible to mean that the moon actually gives forth light or that the earth is flat and surrounded by sea. The sensible ones among us don't interpret it to mean the world was actually created in six days.
Apparently, you are under the illusion that my understanding of time is based on a literalistic reading of Scripture. It's not. Like most Open Theists, I am a theistic evolutionist.
I wasn't accusing you of being literalistic. My argument rather relied on you not being literalistic. I'm just saying that I do not think that you can prooftext Scripture to support philosophical and metaphysical points that are not the direct message of the passage. (I apologise: I had to go and pick up my baby and hit post.)
In particular, I do not think that a conditional prophecy is a statement giving information about possible futures. A prophecy is a persuasive utterance, not a statement. Claiming that conditional prophecies would be untrue if the speaker knows what will in fact happen is a misunderstanding of the way language is being used.
quote:
I will say there are a number of very well-regarded physicists who are part of the Open Theist academic group (part of AAR) to which I belong and participate. They assure me that your statement "modern science favours an actually existing future" is not an accurate reflection of where the field is at this moment.
I don't see how that can be possible without rejecting central assumptions of Einsteinian physics, in particular the relativity of a universal temporal ordering.
quote:
If you have no other possibility of choosing anything other than the choice that is known, then it's not a real choice.
Whether something is or is not possible is defined by the context in which you're considering it. And the context in which realism about the future means that it's not possible to choose anything else is a pretty tenuous context, and not at all the context in which if you can't possibly choose anything else then it's not a real choice.
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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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Alyosha
Shipmate
# 18395
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Posted
Surely, if anyone is genuinely interested in time travel then they simply need to publish a piece of writing which asks anyone who creates a time machine in the future to meet them at a certain time and place?
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Martin60
Shipmate
# 368
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Posted
Reality isn't a film.
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Love wins
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itsarumdo
Shipmate
# 18174
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Posted
There was a randomised study of retrospective prayer published in the BMJ - it works.
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"Iti sapis potanda tinone" Lycophron
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Martin60
Shipmate
# 368
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Posted
So we can change the past by praying about it?
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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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Russ
Old salt
# 120
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
we can rule out most kinds of "time travel" as leading to illogical scenarios. It cannot for example be that I travel back in time and kill myself before I travel back in time. Any sort of time travel that would allow such things to happen is hence ruled out a priori, if one believes in a fundamentally logical universe.
Not illogical at all. I think Brenda Clough covered this earlier.
If you have a spreadsheet which automatically recalculates every cell, and you put in a circular reference, you create an error condition (which the programmers put in to prevent the software entering an infinite loop...).
But if your spreadsheet is set up so that each time you change a cell it only recalculates the columns to the right of the cell you've changed, then you can still edit a cell to reference a number three columns to the right. Which may cause that number to change, but you've still got the same reference (to the number that was there before you made the edit). No circularity.
If the universe works like that - natural causality (automatic recalc) working only forward in time, but the possibility of the user taking information backward in time, there's no paradox.
The intervention you've made is now apparently inexplicable - you don't know how that number came to be, there's no chain of causality leading to it. It popped into your universe (the current state of the spreadsheet) from somewhere that doesn't currently exist in the columns representing past, present or future. Like an angel, maybe.
It's caused by an extension - a superset - of the logic you can see.
Best wishes,
Russ
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Wish everyone well; the enemy is not people, the enemy is wrong ideas
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itsarumdo
Shipmate
# 18174
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Martin60:
So we can change the past by praying about it?
No - but the past prayed for is better than the past not prayed for. The group retrospectively prayed for (randomly selected) had far better outcomes on their operations than the group that was not prayed for. So what has happened has already happened - but your prayers now still count towards the past you obvserve! Is that mind bending or what?
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"Iti sapis potanda tinone" Lycophron
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Gee D
Shipmate
# 13815
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Posted
Our time is a part of the universe, along with the 3 spatial dimensions. So time as we know and understand it did not exist before the universe came into existence and will cease if/when the universe does.
God's time must be different and in a way that we can neither comprehend or understand. In one way, it will be like ours in that if we sing praises to Him in the afterlife, the singing will occur over a lapse of time. And as the Son was begotten by the Father, and the Spirit proceeded from Him, all before this universe began, there must equally have been a time when the Father was without the other 2 members of the Trinity. But not in a way comparable to there having been a time before you and I were born.
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Not every Anglican in Sydney is Sydney Anglican
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Alyosha
Shipmate
# 18395
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Posted
Maybe it's therapeutic to pray about the past and imagine God changing a negative situation?
I know that nothing is impossible with God, but I'm not sure he would ever allow time travel. I guess he has a policy on it.
[ 12. May 2015, 07:02: Message edited by: Alyosha ]
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Ad Orientem
Shipmate
# 17574
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Gee D:
And as the Son was begotten by the Father, and the Spirit proceeded from Him, all before this universe began, there must equally have been a time when the Father was without the other 2 members of the Trinity.
That's Arianism.
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Martin60
Shipmate
# 368
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Posted
No it's magical thinking itsarumdo. None of what you said is scientifically true. You can't even cite a link. Not a peer reviewed, repeatable, scientific one. Just one anecdote that is true for you but that you can't make possibly true for others unless they have your wiring, chemistry, enculturation and conditioning: disposition.
As in any magical claim, show me.
And guys, the Son was eternally begotten of the Father. That's just meaningless orthodoxy, but that's all we've orthodoxly got. We can go orthodoxly heterodoxly forward beyond the economic Trinity, in to God's ineffability and the cultural limitations that MIGHT limit the Incarnation. But saying that once upon a time God the Son and God the Holy Spirit weren't, is heterodoxly heterodox. Modal at least.
As Rowan Atkinson, as the Reverend Walter Goodfellow, says of God in Keeping Mum: "I'm mysterious. Get over it.".
Mysterious doesn't mean an eternal film in the can: Meta-Bender.
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Love wins
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itsarumdo
Shipmate
# 18174
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Posted
BMJ. 2001 Dec 22-29;323(7327):1450-1.
Effects of remote, retroactive intercessory prayer on outcomes in patients with bloodstream infection: randomised controlled trial.
Leibovici L1.
Author information
Abstract
OBJECTIVE:
To determine whether remote, retroactive intercessory prayer, said for a group of patients with a bloodstream infection, has an effect on outcomes.
DESIGN:
Double blind, parallel group, randomised controlled trial of a retroactive intervention.
SETTING:
University hospital.
SUBJECTS:
All 3393 adult patients whose bloodstream infection was detected at the hospital in 1990-6.
INTERVENTION:
In July 2000 patients were randomised to a control group and an intervention group. A remote, retroactive intercessory prayer was said for the well being and full recovery of the intervention group.
MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES:
Mortality in hospital, length of stay in hospital, and duration of fever.
RESULTS:
Mortality was 28.1% (475/1691) in the intervention group and 30.2% (514/1702) in the control group (P for difference=0.4). Length of stay in hospital and duration of fever were significantly shorter in the intervention group than in the control group (P=0.01 and P=0.04, respectively).
CONCLUSION:
Remote, retroactive intercessory prayer said for a group is associated with a shorter stay in hospital and shorter duration of fever in patients with a bloodstream infection and should be considered for use in clinical practice.
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"Iti sapis potanda tinone" Lycophron
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Gee D
Shipmate
# 13815
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Ad Orientem:
quote:
Originally posted by Gee D:
And as the Son was begotten by the Father, and the Spirit proceeded from Him, all before this universe began, there must equally have been a time when the Father was without the other 2 members of the Trinity.
That's Arianism.
1. An explicit affirmation of the Trinity of Father, Son and Spirit is scarcely Arianism.
2. You have failed to quote and take into account the next sentence of my post: But not in a way comparable to there having been a time before you and I were born. which takes us back to my basic proposition that whatever time there is in Heaven is not time as we know or can understand it.
Martin 60, I think that point 2 covers much of your post. The Son was eternally begotten of the Father but that is according to our comprehension of time, limited as it is by this universe. Father, Son and Spirit all existed before this universe was created and will exist after this universe ceases. The Trinity is eternal. And I'm not sure how you conclude that what I said was modalism.
[ 12. May 2015, 11:18: Message edited by: Gee D ]
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Not every Anglican in Sydney is Sydney Anglican
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Jengie jon
Semper Reformanda
# 273
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Posted
Gee D
You are assuming that language even that of the creeds is directly descriptive of God. Language is only ever analogically applied to God. In describing God we are trying to remove a nail with a spanner.
We use verbs to describe God as acting, but that is applying our experience to God's. As God is outside time this is not strictly true, or you really need some weirder tenses from Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations.
Jengie
[Edited to adjust the link to fix scroll lock. -Gwai]
[ 12. May 2015, 13:55: Message edited by: Gwai ]
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"To violate a persons ability to distinguish fact from fantasy is the epistemological equivalent of rape." Noretta Koertge
Back to my blog
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Ad Orientem
Shipmate
# 17574
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Gee D:
quote:
Originally posted by Ad Orientem:
quote:
Originally posted by Gee D:
And as the Son was begotten by the Father, and the Spirit proceeded from Him, all before this universe began, there must equally have been a time when the Father was without the other 2 members of the Trinity.
That's Arianism.
1. An explicit affirmation of the Trinity of Father, Son and Spirit is scarcely Arianism.
2. You have failed to quote and take into account the next sentence of my post: But not in a way comparable to there having been a time before you and I were born. which takes us back to my basic proposition that whatever time there is in Heaven is not time as we know or can understand it.
Martin 60, I think that point 2 covers much of your post. The Son was eternally begotten of the Father but that is according to our comprehension of time, limited as it is by this universe. Father, Son and Spirit all existed before this universe was created and will exist after this universe ceases. The Trinity is eternal. And I'm not sure how you conclude that what I said was modalism.
Yes it is Arianism. There was never a "time" when the Son and the Holy Spirit were not.
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Dafyd
Shipmate
# 5549
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Gee D:
quote:
Originally posted by Ad Orientem:
quote:
Originally posted by Gee D:
And as the Son was begotten by the Father, and the Spirit proceeded from Him, all before this universe began, there must equally have been a time when the Father was without the other 2 members of the Trinity.
That's Arianism.
1. An explicit affirmation of the Trinity of Father, Son and Spirit is scarcely Arianism.
The Arians did believe in Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. They just thought that the Son and Holy Spirit were created. A bit of argument and polemic later, both parties seem to have settled on the idea that 'there was a time when the Son was not' was a decent expression of the Arian position.
Hence the Nicene position is that the Son and Spirit are co-eternal, and that whatever is meant by 'begotten' it does not imply that there is any 'time' in any sense in which the Father exists without the Son and Spirit.
So Ad Orientem is right that you've inadvertently said something specifically associated with Arianism.
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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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cliffdweller
Shipmate
# 13338
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Jengie jon:
We use verbs to describe God as acting, but that is applying our experience to God's. As God is outside time this is not strictly true, or you really need some weirder tenses from Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations.
Jengie
More of the strange fruit that comes from clinging to this totally arbitrary, unnecessary notion that God *must* be outside of time.
[Edited to adjust link to fix scroll lock. -Gwai]
[ 12. May 2015, 13:55: Message edited by: Gwai ]
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"Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid." -Frederick Buechner
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Ad Orientem
Shipmate
# 17574
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Posted
[ 12. May 2015, 13:58: Message edited by: Ad Orientem ]
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Martin60
Shipmate
# 368
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Posted
No weirder than believing that the possibly eternal creation was corrupted, eternally corrupted, by the immediately eternally corrupted (as in eternally begotten) Devil.
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Love wins
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Russ
Old salt
# 120
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by itsarumdo:
In July 2000 patients were randomised to a control group and an intervention group. A remote, retroactive intercessory prayer was said for the well being and full recovery of the intervention group.
...Length of stay in hospital and duration of fever were significantly shorter in the intervention group than in the control group (P=0.01 and P=0.04, respectively).
CONCLUSION:
Remote, retroactive intercessory prayer said for a group is associated with a shorter stay in hospital and shorter duration of fever in patients with a bloodstream infection and should be considered for use in clinical practice.
If you were doing some other form of analysis or experiment, and your random sample gave you a statistically significant difference before any intervention was applied, you'd conclude there was a flaw in the randomisation procedure...
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Wish everyone well; the enemy is not people, the enemy is wrong ideas
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no prophet's flag is set so...
Proceed to see sea
# 15560
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Posted
I saw this thread when it started, and thought about how this question has troubled and intrigued me for some 50 years before posting. I'd be interested in reactions to what I'd about to post.
I remember a piece of slate about 1m×1m×30cm tumbling end over end down the chute we were in, on Mnt Coleman in 1973 on our way down. They told me I was knocked out for 45 seconds. It felt like 10,000 years to me. It is profound to me today, and the memory of is today, the experience is in the past equally profound. My sense of the experience is thus present-day, not of the past.
I've also experienced what we called "bardo" in the 1970s and 80s, misusing a Tibetan Buddhism word, it was the years of 'Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance' - but we lacked another word and the internet to correct us - where an experience compresses or expands the sense of time, such that there's a perception of being outside of time, and outside of conventionally felt reality. Gaps in time perception. Senses of non-ordinary reality. We were also reading Carlos Castenada, but felt he was over the edge in the use of substances, which we refused. All of our experiences were while in the bush somewhere with no-one else within a hundred miles. It seemed to us that one had to be out for about a week before we were in the rhythm of world and our connection with something profound was restored.
I've only had 3 such experiences where the sense of non-ordinary time and reality was confirmed by others as experienced at the same time, and we talked after 'arriving'. I think it's probably common to have the experience as internal to the neurology of an individual. The shared ones take more explaining, where neither a folie à deux nor intoxication are available as explanations.
In the movie StarTrek Insurrection, there is a scene that corresponds to what I'm on about, at about 30 sec in of this youtube clip, where Picard experiences such a slowed moment in time with Anij.
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Out of this nettle, danger, we pluck this flower, safety.
\_(ツ)_/
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Martin60
Shipmate
# 368
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Posted
Gee D, I apologize, you are no modalist. But as Ad Orientem said, you are Arian.
quote:
Originally posted by Gee D:
Our time is a part of the universe, along with the 3 spatial dimensions. So time as we know and understand it did not exist before the universe came into existence and will cease if/when the universe does.
True cubed. Although rationally creation is eternal. So there will have always have been materially, entropically measured time.
quote:
God's time must be different and in a way that we can neither comprehend or understand.
True.
quote:
In one way, it will be like ours in that if we sing praises to Him in the afterlife, the singing will occur over a lapse of time.
Like ours now? Or when we are 4+? dimensional beings?
quote:
And as the Son was begotten by the Father, and the Spirit proceeded from Him, all before this universe began, there must equally have been a time when the Father was without the other 2 members of the Trinity. But not in a way comparable to there having been a time before you and I were born.
So in what way? And on what authority do you deny the eternal begottitude of the Son?
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Love wins
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cliffdweller
Shipmate
# 13338
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Martin60:
No weirder than believing that the possibly eternal creation was corrupted, eternally corrupted, by the immediately eternally corrupted (as in eternally begotten) Devil.
Is there any group that thinks the Devil was eternally begotten, much less eternally corrupted?
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"Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid." -Frederick Buechner
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Martin60
Shipmate
# 368
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Posted
It's an analogy old thing.
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Love wins
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Gee D
Shipmate
# 13815
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
The Arians did believe in Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. They just thought that the Son and Holy Spirit were created. A bit of argument and polemic later, both parties seem to have settled on the idea that 'there was a time when the Son was not' was a decent expression of the Arian position.
Hence the Nicene position is that the Son and Spirit are co-eternal, and that whatever is meant by 'begotten' it does not imply that there is any 'time' in any sense in which the Father exists without the Son and Spirit.
So Ad Orientem is right that you've inadvertently said something specifically associated with Arianism.
Thank you, and I agree with all of that. What I am saying that in before the creation, before time as we know it, there were events that we can only think of in our understanding of time, an understanding which is wrong in the eternal world of God.
I'm sorry Martin 60, you have lost me.
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Not every Anglican in Sydney is Sydney Anglican
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Martin60
Shipmate
# 368
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Posted
At what point?
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Love wins
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ChastMastr
Shipmate
# 716
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Schroedinger's cat:
can our actions today change the future, or is the timeline fixed (i.e. does God have a Big Picture plan that we cannot change)?
Yes. ![[Razz]](tongue.gif)
quote:
Is it actually true that the present is all there is?
Or is there another understanding of time that makes sense?
Again, yes.
I believe Boethius has come closest. Our experience of time as sequential is part of our creaturely experience, and God transcends that, living in His Eternal Now, so in a sense the present is all there is, but it includes what we would call the future and the past... and we make our decisions freely, but those free decisions are part of the pattern of the tapestry that God weaves, so in one sense we can truly say that we are free, and yet in another we can truly say that the future is determined--we're just part of what determines it.
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My essays on comics continuity: http://chastmastr.tumblr.com/tagged/continuity
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Dafyd
Shipmate
# 5549
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Gee D:
What I am saying that in before the creation, before time as we know it, there were events that we can only think of in our understanding of time, an understanding which is wrong in the eternal world of God.
Orthodoxly, the begetting of the Son isn't an event in any analogy of time. There isn't even a logical before.
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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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Gee D
Shipmate
# 13815
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Posted
And all these years, I’ve been thinking there’s not an unorthodox bone in my body. I do stick to what I’ve said though, when you add in an understanding which is wrong in the eternal world of God. ChastMastr has expressed the point I’ve been trying to make, but much better.
I should know when to keep quiet, but shall go on. We think of our universe as having 4 dimensions, as that is how we experience it. Some creatures, such as ants perhaps, think of it as having only 2 – length and breadth. A mosquito would add depth, but I suspect that neither really experiences time. Moving on from there, there are some physicists who theorise that there are many more dimensions than our classic 4, and successfully run their equations on the basis of more than 4. Indeed I recall reading that one posits that there are as many as 14, all beyond our experience save for his success in using his concept to explain other observations. Coming at it from another angle, I recently read of a group seeking to explain dark matter by these means.
The same is true for time. As Chastmastr so neatly puts it
Our experience of time as sequential is part of our creaturely experience, and God transcends that, living in His Eternal Now. I’m happy to stick with that.
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Not every Anglican in Sydney is Sydney Anglican
Posts: 7028 | From: Warrawee NSW Australia | Registered: Jun 2008
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itsarumdo
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# 18174
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Russ:
quote:
Originally posted by itsarumdo:
In July 2000 patients were randomised to a control group and an intervention group. A remote, retroactive intercessory prayer was said for the well being and full recovery of the intervention group.
...Length of stay in hospital and duration of fever were significantly shorter in the intervention group than in the control group (P=0.01 and P=0.04, respectively).
CONCLUSION:
Remote, retroactive intercessory prayer said for a group is associated with a shorter stay in hospital and shorter duration of fever in patients with a bloodstream infection and should be considered for use in clinical practice.
If you were doing some other form of analysis or experiment, and your random sample gave you a statistically significant difference before any intervention was applied, you'd conclude there was a flaw in the randomisation procedure...
No - you define the experimental constraints and a priori assumptions, and then test it - if you post-hoc because the data "doesn't look right" that's data manipulation. The sample was large enough to make the kind of data error you suggest vastly unlikely, and in any case - that's what p values are all about.
I was listening to a R4 program last night about the discovery of the CFC Ozone hole 30 years ago. Although NASA had lots of satellite data that showed the hole, they had automatic data scrubbing algorithms that rejected "doesn;t look right" data - so their scientists never saw the hole - they just saw blank areas "caused by instrumentation error".
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"Iti sapis potanda tinone" Lycophron
Posts: 994 | From: Planet Zog | Registered: Jul 2014
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no prophet's flag is set so...
Proceed to see sea
# 15560
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by itsarumdo:
BMJ. 2001 Dec 22-29;323(7327):1450-1.
Effects of remote, retroactive intercessory prayer on outcomes in patients with bloodstream infection: randomised controlled trial.
Leibovici L1.
Author information
Abstract
....
CONCLUSION:
Remote, retroactive intercessory prayer said for a group is associated with a shorter stay in hospital and shorter duration of fever in patients with a bloodstream infection and should be considered for use in clinical practice.
A search on the 'net for meta-analysis and intercessory prayer such lovely results are not consistent.
If it was ever proved prayer works, I would abandon religion entirely.
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Out of this nettle, danger, we pluck this flower, safety.
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Posts: 11498 | From: Treaty 6 territory in the nonexistant Province of Buffalo, Canada ↄ⃝' | Registered: Mar 2010
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itsarumdo
Shipmate
# 18174
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
quote:
Originally posted by itsarumdo:
BMJ. 2001 Dec 22-29;323(7327):1450-1.
Effects of remote, retroactive intercessory prayer on outcomes in patients with bloodstream infection: randomised controlled trial.
Leibovici L1.
Author information
Abstract
....
CONCLUSION:
Remote, retroactive intercessory prayer said for a group is associated with a shorter stay in hospital and shorter duration of fever in patients with a bloodstream infection and should be considered for use in clinical practice.
A search on the 'net for meta-analysis and intercessory prayer such lovely results are not consistent.
If it was ever proved prayer works, I would abandon religion entirely.
I would just not trust meta-analyses in this case because they will most likely be carried out in a spirit of disbelief. Grace does not happen on demand - but on request. It's an excessively subtle difference for science, being a state of mind, and a very unsubtle difference for prayer. So there will never be a cast iron scientific "proof" in the way you appear to be using the word
Herbert Benson published a series of books on antirecessionary prayer, filled with case studies. If you consider proof as being adequetely provided a substantial and accumulating library of individual case studies, then I honestly cannot understand that statement you made. Does God have to be mysterious and intangible all the time in order to be genuine?
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"Iti sapis potanda tinone" Lycophron
Posts: 994 | From: Planet Zog | Registered: Jul 2014
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ChastMastr
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# 716
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Gee D:
As Chastmastr so neatly puts it
Our experience of time as sequential is part of our creaturely experience, and God transcends that, living in His Eternal Now. I’m happy to stick with that.
I will happily point you to C.S. Lewis, in this case his revised version of Miracles in particular, who taught me most of what I believe in these matters. ![[Overused]](graemlins/notworthy.gif)
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My essays on comics continuity: http://chastmastr.tumblr.com/tagged/continuity
Posts: 14068 | From: Clearwater, Florida | Registered: Jul 2001
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Ad Orientem
Shipmate
# 17574
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by ChastMastr:
quote:
Originally posted by Gee D:
As Chastmastr so neatly puts it
Our experience of time as sequential is part of our creaturely experience, and God transcends that, living in His Eternal Now. I’m happy to stick with that.
I will happily point you to C.S. Lewis, in this case his revised version of Miracles in particular, who taught me most of what I believe in these matters.
Seconded. C. S. Lewis is quite good and rather patristic.
Posts: 2606 | From: Finland | Registered: Feb 2013
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Russ
Old salt
# 120
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Gee D:
As Chastmastr so neatly puts it
Our experience of time as sequential is part of our creaturely experience, and God transcends that, living in His Eternal Now.
I suspect that our idea of causation is so tied up with the "experience of time as sequential" that it's hard for us to justifiably conclude that a God who is outside of time actually does anything or causes anything particular to happen.
And there's not much practical difference between causing everything and causing nothing...
Best wishes,
Russ
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Wish everyone well; the enemy is not people, the enemy is wrong ideas
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itsarumdo
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# 18174
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Posted
The principle of free will consigns that to the wastepaper basket
Although, it's an interesting take on why free will is necessary in the first place
And the fact that causality may not be quite what we think it is doesn't completely do away with the principle of causality - it just means we may be mistaken in certain circumstances (or maybe most of the time) when we attribute causality.
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"Iti sapis potanda tinone" Lycophron
Posts: 994 | From: Planet Zog | Registered: Jul 2014
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Schroedinger's cat
Ship's cool cat
# 64
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Posted
The thing is, if the passing of time is just our interpretation, then it has no objective meaning.
Free will only works, I think, if God outside of the passage of time can see any possible future for us as a whole, and so knows the range of futures.
Of course, if the future is fixed (as most SF work dealing with time travel requires) then free will is meaningless - our choices are already decided. But then if the passage of time is a fiction, then maybe the sense of free will is probably a fiction too. If time does not, in an objective way, travel forwards, then maybe our perception of out actions having implications is also mistaken.
I suppose that this leans towards the question of whether reality itself is merely an illusion.
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Blog
Music for your enjoyment
Lord may all my hard times be healing times
take out this broken heart and renew my mind.
Posts: 18859 | From: At the bottom of a deep dark well. | Registered: May 2001
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itsarumdo
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# 18174
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Posted
At this point I tend to look at astrology as a guide to the passage of time
The motion of the planets is relatively fixed (give or take little chaotic interference from the asteroid belt and other bodies over a period of hundreds of thousands of years). So one could say that if astrology is "true" then fate is fixed. But actually there is always a vast (but certainly not infinite) choice as to how each archetype manifests - and free will shifts the expression of the archetype but does NOT interfere with the progression of archetypes. Neptune transits are a particularly extreme example, giving rise to profound spiritual experiences, delusion and dissolution/falling apart, alcoholism/addiction and messing around in boats, amongst other things. This is a limited choice, but nevertheless an extraordinarily wide choice. One Indian guru (can't remember which) chose to express the fact that an astrological chart does not fix events by building his house on the least auspicious transits he could possibly find.
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"Iti sapis potanda tinone" Lycophron
Posts: 994 | From: Planet Zog | Registered: Jul 2014
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cliffdweller
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# 13338
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Schroedinger's cat:
Free will only works, I think, if God outside of the passage of time can see any possible future for us as a whole, and so knows the range of futures.
Of course, if the future is fixed (as most SF work dealing with time travel requires) then free will is meaningless - our choices are already decided. But then if the passage of time is a fiction, then maybe the sense of free will is probably a fiction too. If time does not, in an objective way, travel forwards, then maybe our perception of out actions having implications is also mistaken.
As argued above, I think quite the opposite: if God is outside of time and has definitive knowledge of the future, it is then that free will is meaningless, since we cannot choose other that what God has eternally known us to chose. It is only if God is inside time (whether voluntarily or as some existential necessity) that the future can be understood to be truly open and our choices are what they appear to be-- free within constraints.
quote:
Originally posted by Schroedinger's cat:
I suppose that this leans towards the question of whether reality itself is merely an illusion.
yes.
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"Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid." -Frederick Buechner
Posts: 11242 | From: a small canyon overlooking the city | Registered: Jan 2008
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Martin60
Shipmate
# 368
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Posted
cliffdweller. How can the same person talk such sense half the time and ... ![[Smile]](smile.gif)
As to whether reality is an illusion, only if the illusory is real.
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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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The Rhythm Methodist
Shipmate
# 17064
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Posted
Originally posted by cliffdweller:
quote:
if God is outside of time and has definitive knowledge of the future, it is then that free will is meaningless, since we cannot choose other that what God has eternally known us to chose.
Why is free will then meaningless? Why does God's foreknowledge of our actions somehow mean that our choice was not (or is not) free?
Surely free will is exercised independently of God knowing what choice will be made. You could choose 'plan A' or 'plan B' (or from a multitude of others)and he would have known what you'd pick all along....but why on earth assume that his knowledge somehow impinges on your freedom?
What is the actual mechanism whereby free will is nullified by God's foreknowledge of the choice which shall be made?
Posts: 202 | From: Wales | Registered: Apr 2012
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Brenda Clough
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# 18061
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Posted
We can see this in our children, or anyone we know very well. My son virtuously declares that he is going to the gym. He then sits down at the computer and powers up his favorite game. Already I know he is not getting to the gym today. (I never say so, because I know it will not be helpful.)
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Science fiction and fantasy writer with a Patreon page
Posts: 6378 | From: Washington DC | Registered: Mar 2014
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Schroedinger's cat
Ship's cool cat
# 64
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Posted
cliffdweller - I think we are agreeing here. What I meant was that God can be outside time, but not know which of many paths we will choose, just the futures that each decision will mean. If God knows the single future that will happen, that is where free will ceases.
Brenda and The Rhythm Methodist - Free will is, to my mind, the ability to make a choice of two actions. If God - or anyone - knows the choice we will make, it is not free. The comparison of children is not the same - in this case, we know the most likely outcome, because we know their character. Knowing the most likely result is not knowing the future.
If I toss a coin 100 times, I can predict that it will land heads around 50 times. That is not knowing the future, that is knowing probabilities. There is a huge difference - the latter enables us to manage our way through life, the former would make managing life much easier.
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Blog
Music for your enjoyment
Lord may all my hard times be healing times
take out this broken heart and renew my mind.
Posts: 18859 | From: At the bottom of a deep dark well. | Registered: May 2001
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Alyosha
Shipmate
# 18395
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Schroedinger's cat:
cliffdweller - I think we are agreeing here. What I meant was that God can be outside time, but not know which of many paths we will choose, just the futures that each decision will mean. If God knows the single future that will happen, that is where free will ceases.
Brenda and The Rhythm Methodist - Free will is, to my mind, the ability to make a choice of two actions. If God - or anyone - knows the choice we will make, it is not free. The comparison of children is not the same - in this case, we know the most likely outcome, because we know their character. Knowing the most likely result is not knowing the future.
If I toss a coin 100 times, I can predict that it will land heads around 50 times. That is not knowing the future, that is knowing probabilities. There is a huge difference - the latter enables us to manage our way through life, the former would make managing life much easier.
Then would God know whether or not any person will at any point offer the free-will choice of love towards him or not? And if that free-will choice is no choice at all is there no reward in it?
You understand that if everyone withdrew the free-will choice of love towards God he would have to act on our demands as he has no-one else to offer free-will love?
I'm not calling for a strike by the way. I was just observing.
[ 17. May 2015, 16:30: Message edited by: Alyosha ]
Posts: 162 | From: UK | Registered: Apr 2015
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Martin60
Shipmate
# 368
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Posted
Does God know if it's going to rain tomorrow?
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Love wins
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