Thread: Purgatory: The Point of Time Board: Limbo / Ship of Fools.
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Posted by Yorick (# 12169) on
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I’ve been watching the BBC series, Wonders of the Universe, by Brian Cox, and it’s made me think of one particular existential question. The universe has been around for a long time, but we know it will be a very much longer period of time yet before everything ends at its eventual heat death. The universe will die in ten thousand trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion years. If you used single atoms as counters to represent each year, there wouldn’t be anywhere enough atoms in the entire universe to count it all out.
Conditions necessary for life in the universe can only exist for a tiny little flicker of an instant in all that vast stretch of time, and after all life has gone, the massively huge majority of the lifespan of the universe will yet continue as it decays immensely slowly into nothingness. As Brian Cox put it, quote:
As a fraction of the lifespan of the universe as measured from its beginning to the evaporation of the last black hole, life as we know it is only possible for one thousandth of a billion billion billionth, billion billion billionth, billion billion billionth of a percent.
What do theists believe is the point of all this 'created' time, if it is empty of and unobserved by life?
[ 05. January 2015, 01:09: Message edited by: Kelly Alves ]
Posted by Hawk (# 14289) on
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For the glory of God
Posted by Alogon (# 5513) on
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And the glory of the life that it nourished for that small fraction of the time it existed. I'm not ready to assume that we humans on earth are the only ones with our level of intelligence in the universe-- but if so we are, fine.
Does it make sense, however, for an atheist to expect the universe to have a point?
Posted by Crœsos (# 238) on
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Here's a visual aid. It's on a double-log scale, so the top is a lot bigger than it looks.
Posted by tclune (# 7959) on
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quote:
Originally posted by Yorick:
What do theists believe is the point of all this 'created' time, if it is empty of and unobserved by life?
Is the underlying assumption of the question that time has a point, and that is to be observed by someone?
--Tom Clune
Posted by The Revolutionist (# 4578) on
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It's rather anthropocentric to suggest that the vast expanses of time and space are pointless without us being around to see them. The universe is made for the glory and delight of God, not us. Which makes God's love for us even more amazing when we put it into perspective.
"When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers, The moon and the stars, which You have ordained, What is man that You are mindful of him?"
Posted by ken (# 2460) on
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Presumably the same as the point of all the space we're not living in either
Posted by Crœsos (# 238) on
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quote:
Originally posted by The Revolutionist:
It's rather anthropocentric to suggest that the vast expanses of time and space are pointless without us being around to see them. The universe is made for the glory and delight of God, not us.
Indeed. Getting away from anthropomorphism, I think we can infer that even God's well-known "inordinate fondness for beetles" is nothing compared to his apparent love of huge, empty voids.
Posted by Beeswax Altar (# 11644) on
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That's one of those questions you'll have to ask God when you get to heaven.
Posted by Schroedinger's cat (# 64) on
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And there is an anthropocentric attitude which assumes that because "life" has to be like us, and so life can only exist when it it like us.
The vast emptiness of space must be something that God celebrates, because there is so much of it, both in terms of space now and in terms of a whole view of time.
Posted by Freddy (# 365) on
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The point of time is the same as the point of space. These two amazing attributes of the created universe are the most basic conditions for what we celebrate as a free and independent existence.
The reason that it needs to be so large and empty is to make it possible for randomness to be its governing feature. This allows God to be invisible and undetectable, fulfilling the requirements of an apparently autonomous existence.
The point of all of this is that God is love and love needs three things:
- To have something to love.
- To be joined freely and reciprocally with what is loved.
- To make the object of love happy.
These three things dictate there there must be a universe that is not God and that there be beings in that universe that are capable of freely responding to God's love.
Time and space enable there to be an apparently autonomous existence that continues in existence according to constant rules.
The laws of probability are particularly important, since they practically define the lack of bias, or the lack of purpose, and effectively mask any divine plan. This is a cornerstone of human freedom.
None of this works if the universe isn't huge and empty, and time is just a function of space.
So the point of time is to enable you to do what you want, and not just what the Creator wants. The point of that is so that you can be happy, because God is love.
Posted by cliffdweller (# 13338) on
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quote:
Originally posted by Yorick:
What do theists believe is the point of all this 'created' time, if it is empty of and unobserved by life?
some theists (mostly process and open theists) do not assume that time is a created entity.
Posted by Crœsos (# 238) on
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quote:
Originally posted by Freddy:
The reason that it needs to be so large and empty is to make it possible for randomness to be its governing feature. This allows God to be invisible and undetectable, fulfilling the requirements of an apparently autonomous existence.
The point of all of this is that God is love and love needs three things:
- To have something to love.
- To be joined freely and reciprocally with what is loved.
- To make the object of love happy.
These three things dictate there there must be a universe that is not God and that there be beings in that universe that are capable of freely responding to God's love.[/QB]
In what sense can anyone be said to love something undetectable? Is there any functional difference between "undetectable" and "imaginary"?
Posted by mousethief (# 953) on
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Does time need a "point"?
Posted by IngoB (# 8700) on
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Since with the Second Coming of Christ there will be a New Creation, and since it is revealed that humans will be present, the question has no basis. Whatever you wish to consider as the maximum time humans can still live in this universe, that is also the maximum remaining time of this universe. That may well be a long time, but certainly the universe will become uninhabitable for humans long before its heat death. Then - at the very latest - there will be something new. Personally, I would be rather surprised if this universe had more than a few thousand years left...
Posted by LeRoc (# 3216) on
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quote:
Yorick: What do theists believe is the point of all this 'created' time, if it is empty of and unobserved by life?
After all humans are gone, the angels throw a big party.
Posted by Adeodatus (# 4992) on
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As has been said before, time is just nature's way of stopping everything happening all at once.
Beware ascribing a "point" to the apparently vast wastelands of time. That way lies the Strong Anthropic Principle, a delightful example of self-important scientism disappearing up its own backside.
Posted by Yorick (# 12169) on
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I don’t believe there’s a point to time in general, nor, specifically, to the staggering superabundance of time during which the universe will continue to exist without any life in it, anywhere. What I’m trying to discover here is what people believe was God’s purpose in creating the universe the way He did- such that life is such an unimaginably tiny part of it? Can you speculate about 'what's the point' from His perspective? He created it, right? He must have had His own good reason for creating it the way He did?
I know it’s awfully biocentric to imagine the universe was created for life, but it seems to me that a universe completely devoid of life can have no meaningful existence- rather like that fabulous tree that falls unobserved in that remote forest. Furthermore, it seems clear that life is indeed very special to God- particularly human life- as I think is shown in scripture. What, then, do you speculate, would God want with such a vast and empty playground, in which nothing exists except to Him alone, for trillions upon trillions upon trillions of aeons? What will he do when He gets omnibored of looking at all those same old decaying black dwarfs and dissipating black holes?
My point is this: why do you believe God made the universe the way it is, in particular respect of its enormous, absolutely incomprehensively enormous, utter redundancy of space and time? There’s so much waste.
Posted by Adeodatus (# 4992) on
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quote:
Originally posted by Yorick:
There’s so much waste.
Almost any great work of art is extremely wasteful.
Posted by Yorick (# 12169) on
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Why though?
I believe the universe is the way it is because it’s bound to be that way, by natural physical law. The size of the universe in space and time is therefore necessary and inevitable (and staggeringly wonderful too). It strikes me, though, that its very size must beg questions of a belief system that states that the universe was created by a designing entity. Why would any god create it to be the way it is when so MUCH of it is empty of all existence?
I presume the answer to my own question is that the universe is the way it is because it’s bound to be so by the exact same ‘godless’ natural physical law, because that’s precisely how God made it (and it isn’t godless anyway)- but this is a tautology, and it doesn’t explain why He made the natural physical law to work in such a way that there’s so much wastage of space time. I assume He could have made the physical laws operate differently, so that the universe would die sooner after it became unfit for life, thus minimising creative waste. He made the universe operate under the laws of nature, which means so very very very much of it is lifeless (and therefore philosophically nonexistent)- and I’d like to know if theists could offer some sort of speculative explanation for this.
Posted by Pre-cambrian (# 2055) on
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quote:
Originally posted by The Revolutionist:
It's rather anthropocentric to suggest that the vast expanses of time and space are pointless without us being around to see them.
quote:
Originally posted by Schroedinger's Cat:
And there is an anthropocentric attitude which assumes that because "life" has to be like us, and so life can only exist when it it like us.
quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
Whatever you wish to consider as the maximum time humans can still live in this universe, that is also the maximum remaining time of this universe. That may well be a long time, but certainly the universe will become uninhabitable for humans long before its heat death. Then - at the very latest - there will be something new. Personally, I would be rather surprised if this universe had more than a few thousand years left...
So yes, anthropocentrism is alive and well in Kleve.
Posted by Trin (# 12100) on
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quote:
Originally posted by Yorick:
Why do you believe God made the universe the way it is, in particular respect of its enormous, absolutely incomprehensively enormous, utter redundancy of space and time? There’s so much waste.
It being the case that you must be at least as theologically savvy by now as many who will consider themselves qualified to attempt an answer to this question, why do you think it is, Yorick? Assuming for a moment that God is real, of course.
Posted by Yorick (# 12169) on
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It honestly makes no sense to me- I think it's a paradox that reveals the nonsense of the idea of a creative agent, so, yes, the bigness of the universe implies to me that there is no God. If the universe was designed and created by an intelligent entity, they must have had an internally rational reason for making it just the way it is, and not some other way- don’t you agree? The implication is therefore that God deliberately chose to make the universe to be mostly devoid of life (and therefore of existence), to a mindcrushingly huge degree. It’s the degree of the meaningless surplus of spacetime that begs the question, for me.
Think of it like this. The meaningful bit of the universe is that in which life may become existent and actually exist. This is the Gift. The Gift is wrapped in a Package, representing the universe in which existence happens. We know the size and shape of the Package, and we know the size and shape of the Gift. The Gift is the size of a sugar cube, and the Package is the size of a galaxy- hundreds of thousands of light years of wrapping paper. Why do you think God would package such a small (but wonderful) Gift in so MUCH wrapping paper if you believe that the wrapping paper only exists for the sake of packaging the Gift?
Posted by Hawk (# 14289) on
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quote:
Originally posted by Yorick:
It honestly makes no sense to me- I think it's a paradox that reveals the nonsense of the idea of a creative agent, so, yes, the bigness of the universe implies to me that there is no God. If the universe was designed and created by an intelligent entity, they must have had an internally rational reason for making it just the way it is,
Why must He have had a rational 'utilitarian' reason? Are we internally rational? - I know I'm not. If I was building a universe, I know I'd make it ridiculously massive, just for the love of it.
That's what I meant by 'for the glory of God'. Why make the bare minimum necessary - why create only one thing? You seem to be assuming that God is an engineer - obsessed with utility, rational 'purpose', and efficiency, when I think the universe shows he's more of an artist.
Posted by Yorick (# 12169) on
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quote:
Originally posted by Hawk:
Why must He have had a rational 'utilitarian' reason?
The universe is the way it is. >
God created the universe the way it is. >
God chose to create the universe the way it is. >
God could have created the universe in some other way. >
The universe is only the way it is because God chose it to be this way. >
This is the reason why the universe is the way it is. >
The universe conforms to God’s reason. >
... which is rational 'utilitarian' reason.
Posted by Yorick (# 12169) on
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quote:
Originally posted by Hawk:
You seem to be assuming that God is an engineer - obsessed with utility, rational 'purpose', and efficiency, when I think the universe shows he's more of an artist.
Okay, if God is an artist, why do you suppose His meaningful creation is such a tiny little eenie-weenie smudge on such an unimaginably vast and meaningfully empty canvas? The picture is the size of a sugar lump and the canvas is the size of a galaxy. By such proportions, we must assume the ‘point’ of his artistic creation is the canvas, not the picture, which seems totally contradictory to the message of the Bible.
Posted by LeRoc (# 3216) on
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quote:
Yorick: Okay, if God is an artist, why do you suppose His meaningful creation is such a tiny little eenie-weenie smudge on such an unimaginably vast and meaningfully empty canvas?
Maybe He's a bit like Ad Reinhardt?
quote:
Yorick: By such proportions, we must assume the ‘point’ of his artistic creation is the canvas, not the picture, which seems totally contradictory to the message of the Bible.
To me the message is, that in spite of us being tiny little creatures in this really big universe, He still cares for us. Quite a strong message, really.
Posted by IngoB (# 8700) on
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quote:
Originally posted by Yorick:
I know it’s awfully biocentric to imagine the universe was created for life, but it seems to me that a universe completely devoid of life can have no meaningful existence - rather like that fabulous tree that falls unobserved in that remote forest. Furthermore, it seems clear that life is indeed very special to God- particularly human life- as I think is shown in scripture. What, then, do you speculate, would God want with such a vast and empty playground, in which nothing exists except to Him alone, for trillions upon trillions upon trillions of aeons?
Unsurprisingly, you fail to engage with traditional Christianity, which simply does not have the problems you are so keen to find. Firstly, angels (and their fallen brethren, demons) may very well have been around from the beginning of the material universe, thus filling it with plentiful life, even intelligent life, from the start. Secondly, this universe will end with the Second Coming of Christ and since we know from Genesis and St Paul that its fate is coupled to ours, it is not particularly daring to suggest that it will be resurrected from (heat) death into a new life. Nobody knows when this will happen, but assuming our current state of knowledge as true it is a few billion years tops (because interstellar space travel is just not going to happen with current physical laws, and our sun will almost certainly wipe us out when it goes red giant).
quote:
Originally posted by Pre-cambrian:
So yes, anthropocentrism is alive and well in Kleve.
As far as the material universe is concerned, certainly: we are the stewards of nature. But as far as creation is concerned, this is an unfair charge. I see humans as the "hinge of creation", the least of the spiritual world, the highest of the material world. Above us is the hierarchy of angels, and of course also God, though He is really "off the scale". We are basically the janitors around here, i.e, our stewardship for nature is not the top job, but a consequence of our own proximity to its low, material state. On top are naturally the highest angels, and beyond them God. That God lowered Himself to our state, the lowest that possibly can accommodate a Spirit, is what makes the angels serve us. And it is a popular theological speculation that Lucifer and with him many angels fell because they just could not accept God putting them into this position. So I would say that my worldview is theocentric and hierarchical, and as a consequence, anthropcentric concerning the material universe - but only concerning that.
quote:
Originally posted by Yorick:
It honestly makes no sense to me - I think it's a paradox that reveals the nonsense of the idea of a creative agent, so, yes, the bigness of the universe implies to me that there is no God.
Do you really feel that your life is lost in a void of space and time? Nobody around, nothing to do? My life actually feels busy and full to breaking point. Perhaps God is just happy to give us some appropriate perspective of the importance of it all...
Posted by Freddy (# 365) on
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quote:
Originally posted by Yorick:
It honestly makes no sense to me- I think it's a paradox that reveals the nonsense of the idea of a creative agent, so, yes, the bigness of the universe implies to me that there is no God.
Maybe I didn't make myself clear. The point of bigness is so that randomness can have the desired effect.
You have to roll the dice a lot of times to get snake-eyes ten times in a row.
And without randomness you have a visible creator, which would ruin everything.
Posted by Yorick (# 12169) on
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quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
Perhaps God is just happy to give us some appropriate perspective of the importance of it all...
Then why do you imagine He would choose to demonstrate the importance of life by making it and revealing it to be so insignificant?
I can understand that the point of a very large and empty canvas can be to emphasise by perspective the tiny picture in its middle: by creating a vast amount of spacetime in which life cannot exist, life’s brief flicker is shown to be all the more precious. The lifeless spacetime around the tiny meaningful part frames its importance, revealing its rarity.
However, this begs the question of why God did not choose to fill His canvas entirely with meaningful, valuable art, which would surely give the actual picture itself more importance than any perspective it may be afforded by framing it as rare. Rarity is not importance- it is merely the context in which something has value. Rarity only adds to a thing’s value by effect of this context- its higher value is only the expression of its desirability/unavailability ratio. Why would God choose to play such a trick of perspective, when He could just as easily fill spacetime with actual real meaningful importance, instead of leaving it mostly as empty canvas for visual effect?
By showing life to be proportionately insignificant in spacetime, He may demonstrate its importance to Him, but this is at the expense of the importance of life to itself. If life is important in and of itself, why wouldn’t He fill His universe with proportionately more of it, even if this would be at the expense of His artistic trick of composition?
Posted by Yorick (# 12169) on
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quote:
Originally posted by Freddy:
The point of bigness is so that randomness can have the desired effect.
You have to roll the dice a lot of times to get snake-eyes ten times in a row.
And without randomness you have a visible creator, which would ruin everything.
And why do you suppose there should be so much empty meaningless randomness continuing for SOOOO long after you've rolled your ten snake-eyes in a row? It's only taken 13.75 billion years of randomness for us to roll the ten snake-eyes (which is an extremely tiny amount of time, proportionately), and we'll soon be gone. THEN, the dice will continue to be meaninglessly rolled for a VERY long time. VERY.
Why?
Posted by Lamb Chopped (# 5528) on
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I think you're being biocentric, Yorick. God is interested in more than life-as-we-know-it. Even if we are the ONLY form of life (and I suppose angels, we know about those a tad), why should God not value matter, energy, and so forth? He made them after all. And never consulted us in the making.
Just because you find it boring and intimidating doesn't mean God does.
Posted by LeRoc (# 3216) on
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quote:
Yorick: However, this begs the question of why God did not choose to fill His canvas entirely with meaningful, valuable art
Who says He didn't? There is some pretty interesting stuff out there in the universe, even if it isn't life.
Posted by Yorick (# 12169) on
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quote:
Originally posted by Lamb Chopped:
Just because you find it boring and intimidating doesn't mean God does.
Well, now who’s being anthropocentric? You’re proposing that God would be interested (in a human sense) in observing (in a human sense) the immensely slow (in a human sense) decay of the universe to its heat death.
But the notion that God would find the dying cellestial objects somehow fascinating seems highly dubious to me, given how totally anthropocentric scripture is. Genesis suggests that man is the pinnacle of creation, but that would make it almost absolutely flat.
Posted by Yorick (# 12169) on
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quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
Unsurprisingly, you fail to engage with traditional Christianity, which simply does not have the problems you are so keen to find.
Right. The universe has, since the very beginning, been populated with intelligent angels, and it will end and be resurrected at the Second Coming of Christ to our planet at a time no later than its destruction by the expansion of our sun, and all this will happen because Genesis and St Paul say so.
That's depressing.
Posted by 205 (# 206) on
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quote:
Originally posted by Yorick:
My point is this: why do you believe God made the universe the way it is, in particular respect of its enormous, absolutely incomprehensively enormous, utter redundancy of space and time? There’s so much waste.
Your thread reminds me of Chesterton's 'cosy little cosmos'.
Posted by la vie en rouge (# 10688) on
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Only if you think that's the end of it. Which isn't the traditional view of Christianity. Universe 1.0 has a limited lifespan, which according to my understanding of the Bible is related to the presence of human beings in it, but once that gets rolled up like a used garment, God is going to move onto Universe 2.0.
[x-post with 205]
[ 06. April 2011, 12:20: Message edited by: la vie en rouge ]
Posted by Schroedinger's cat (# 64) on
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The problem you seem to have, Yorik, is that looking as a form of life that can only exist for a brief period, you are asking why the universe is not more focussed around yourself. Whereas you maybe should be asking how astounding it is that any form of life can exist that can comprehend its own insignificance.
Turning the question around completely, how do we know that the universe is not the new earth and the new Jerusalem, meaning that we will continue to exist in a non-corporeal form for a significant proportion of the history of the universe.
Putting it another way, how do we know that life will not evolve along with the universe, to exist within the universe, at least for a considerable portion of its life? And we do not certainly know that the stories of the future are accurate. They are predictions based on our current knowledge. Our current knowledge is not perfect, and is especially challenging when we are talking about the universe. I am not suggesting that the cosmology theories are wrong, just that there is a huge amount that we do not know, and that we cannot yet comprehend ( dark matter being a prime example ).
Posted by Yorick (# 12169) on
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quote:
Originally posted by Schroedinger's cat:
how do we know that life will not evolve along with the universe, to exist within the universe, at least for a considerable portion of its life?
We know that conditions in the universe will become unfit for any life, anywhere, relatively soon, but that spacetime will continue for an unimaginably long time afterwards. This is not a matter of belief; it is a matter of known fact.
Now you could piss about with this all you like, by proposing that our knowledge may be wrong, or that things will change within a few billion years (the blink of a ludicrous eye) when Jesus Comes Again to reboot the universe, or that a flying spaghetti monster will rewrite the laws of nature with one wobble of His noodly appendage in 2012, or whatever. But those are the facts as we do indeed know them, and I think there’s enough of staggering interest to be going on with already, without having to posit all kinds of silly and obviously contradictory nonsense.
Posted by Marvin the Martian (# 4360) on
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quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
(because interstellar space travel is just not going to happen with current physical laws, and our sun will almost certainly wipe us out when it goes red giant).
You mean fast interstellar travel, of course. We can go as far as we like so long as we're not bothered about how many generations it takes us to get there!
Posted by Yorick (# 12169) on
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I apologise for the tone of the above post. IngoB's fantastic forecast has seriousy fucked my head up, and I find I'm all ranting.
Ignore my outraged skepticism, if you will.
Posted by Freddy (# 365) on
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quote:
Originally posted by Yorick:
quote:
Originally posted by Freddy:
The point of bigness is so that randomness can have the desired effect.
You have to roll the dice a lot of times to get snake-eyes ten times in a row.
And without randomness you have a visible creator, which would ruin everything.
And why do you suppose there should be so much empty meaningless randomness continuing for SOOOO long after you've rolled your ten snake-eyes in a row? It's only taken 13.75 billion years of randomness for us to roll the ten snake-eyes (which is an extremely tiny amount of time, proportionately), and we'll soon be gone. THEN, the dice will continue to be meaninglessly rolled for a VERY long time. VERY.
Why?
Several reasons:
- 1. In order for the system to work as intended the laws need to be constant. Constant means "for a very long time." If the laws change once life happens that wouldn't be constant.
- 2. The whole thing surely repeats itself innumerable times stretching into forever. I can't believe that life is a once-and-done phenomenon. Having very large numbers, very large spaces, and very long periods of time enables randomness to account for that.
- 3. Didn't you see "Men in Black"? In universal terms size and persistence are relative. From our perspective time and space are necessarily limited. Vast amounts of empty space and time seem unnecessary and wasteful. But in a larger context those concerns are meaningless. What does it matter if space is empty? Waste means nothing if the supply is infinite.
As others have said, our understandable problem with so much emptiness is anthropocentric.
It would be poor city planning to locate fire stations millions of light years apart. The apartment would be ruined before the fire truck was half-way there. ![[Frown]](frown.gif)
But these kinds of things aren't a problem for God. ![[Biased]](wink.gif)
Posted by Yorick (# 12169) on
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Freddy, the window of time in which the universe is and will be hospitable to life is very long indeed. Note that I’m not just talking about terrestrial human life here, but the conditions necessary for any sort of life (and I would assume the universe contains many different forms of life as we speak, just from the sheer mathematics of it all). Life must surely abound during this condition-permitting window, coming and going locally, as planets thrive and eventually become extinct of life.
But there will, eventually, come a time when the conditions of the universe become unsupportive of any life, in any form, anywhere. This eventual point will be reached relatively soon- relative to the vast outstretching of time between then and the very end of the universe. Thus, the huge window of time in which the universe may sustain life, as all its different species come and go- is but an infinitesimally brief moment in the overall lifespan of the universe, in the vast majority of which life will not be possible, in any form, anywhere.
It is this, much MUCH bigger post-life period of time that I’m wondering about.
Posted by LeRoc (# 3216) on
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After humanity has gone, God needs a loooooong time to think about what He'll do to us at Final Judgement. For my sins alone, he'll probably need an exasecond or two. This requires such deep thought, that He simply forgets to switch off the Universe.
Posted by PixelPi (# 16160) on
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quote:
Posted by LeRoc
Originally posted by Yorick:
What do theists believe is the point of all this 'created' time, if it is empty of and unobserved by life?
After all humans are gone, the angels throw a big party.
Where's the 'Like' button when you really need it?
Posted by ken (# 2460) on
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From God's point of view "after" is no more significant than "before". Or indeed "north" or "south". Or "inwards" and "outwards". All just names for directions within the complex manifold surface of the multidimensional universe which God creates and observes.
Posted by Crœsos (# 238) on
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quote:
Originally posted by Freddy:
And without randomness you have a visible creator, which would ruin everything.
So if the Creator of the Universe made Himself manifest, say as a burning bush or a Jewish carpenter, that would "ruin everything"? I'm normally pretty critical of Christianity, but even I wouldn't go so far as to claim that its teachings ruin literally everything.
Posted by cliffdweller (# 13338) on
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quote:
Originally posted by ken:
From God's point of view "after" is no more significant than "before". Or indeed "north" or "south". Or "inwards" and "outwards". All just names for directions within the complex manifold surface of the multidimensional universe which God creates and observes.
Again, assuming that God is very much outside of the universe, which I don't believe. If God has voluntarily entered into the unverse, including time, that changes everything.
Posted by Freddy (# 365) on
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quote:
Originally posted by Crœsos:
quote:
Originally posted by Freddy:
And without randomness you have a visible creator, which would ruin everything.
So if the Creator of the Universe made Himself manifest, say as a burning bush or a Jewish carpenter, that would "ruin everything"? I'm normally pretty critical of Christianity, but even I wouldn't go so far as to claim that its teachings ruin literally everything.
It does no harm for God to appear to a particular person here or there. His biblical appearances are generally cast in a positive light.
The trouble would be if God were demonstrably present and in charge of every single person every single minute.
That would ruin everything, and I am pretty sure that no one would deny it. ![[Two face]](graemlins/scot_twoface.gif)
Posted by Freddy (# 365) on
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quote:
Originally posted by Yorick:
But there will, eventually, come a time when the conditions of the universe become unsupportive of any life, in any form, anywhere...
Wow. I didn't know this.
quote:
Originally posted by Yorick:
It is this, much MUCH bigger post-life period of time that I’m wondering about.
I don't get why this is a problem. If there is a God why wouldn't He just do it all over again?
Posted by Crœsos (# 238) on
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quote:
Originally posted by Freddy:
And without randomness you have a visible creator, which would ruin everything.
quote:
Originally posted by Freddy:
It does no harm for God to appear to a particular person here or there.
These are mutually incompatible positions. If "a visible creator" ruins everything, then having such a creator "appear" (i.e. "become visible") would seem to do harm. Likewise if it "does no harm" for such a creator to appear, how can His being visible ruin anything, much less "everything"?
Posted by Crœsos (# 238) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
Nobody knows when this will happen, but assuming our current state of knowledge as true it is a few billion years tops (because interstellar space travel is just not going to happen with current physical laws, and our sun will almost certainly wipe us out when it goes red giant).
<snip>
As far as the material universe is concerned, certainly: we are the stewards of nature.
Speaking of contradictions, doesn't it seem to be a bit awkward to claim to be the "steward" of something you can't even reach, much less have any effect on? What exactly is involved in the stewardship of the Crab Nebula (everything normal, still nebulous), or the Hydra Supercluster (everything normal, still clustered), or the Boötes Void (everything normal, still really empty)?
Posted by Freddy (# 365) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Crœsos:
quote:
Originally posted by Freddy:
And without randomness you have a visible creator, which would ruin everything.
quote:
Originally posted by Freddy:
It does no harm for God to appear to a particular person here or there.
These are mutually incompatible positions. If "a visible creator" ruins everything, then having such a creator "appear" (i.e. "become visible") would seem to do harm. Likewise if it "does no harm" for such a creator to appear, how can His being visible ruin anything, much less "everything"?
They're not incompatible positions.
Having a God who was visibly and tangibly present with you continually, or even at intervals, would completely change your life. How could you disobey Him? How could you even think independently of Him?
But having stories about these credulous ancient individuals who saw marvelous things is not nearly such a big deal. They were surely impressed for the moment, but they were impressed by a lot of things. It didn't ruin their lives, nor does it ruin ours to read about it in the Bible. It might not even be true for all we know.
So they're not incompatible positions.
Posted by W Hyatt (# 14250) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Yorick:
But there will, eventually, come a time when the conditions of the universe become unsupportive of any life, in any form, anywhere.
The implications of this for my theology do trouble me some, although not enough to question my beliefs. I understand that the evidence says that the most probable destiny for the universe is to expand indefinitely and inevitably cool off to a "heat death" or "Big Freeze" so I do not dispute that. I do, however, hold out some hope that we will eventually discover some further new factor that invalidates the current projections, so I have to wonder how strongly the current evidence rules out such optimistic alternatives.
I was happy with the "Big Bounce" idea of never-ending cycles of Big Bang to Big Crunch so I would like to return to the good old days, please. ![[Smile]](smile.gif)
Posted by Yorick (# 12169) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Freddy:
quote:
Originally posted by Yorick:
It is this, much MUCH bigger post-life period of time that I’m wondering about.
I don't get why this is a problem. If there is a God why wouldn't He just do it all over again?
Do you mean repeating His creation from scratch- after the universe has died- all over again? That’s an interesting idea, of which I’m sure there must be a theological view or two. However, I don’t think it addresses my problem of why God should create spacetime to be so massively predominantly devoid of life.
The following suggestions have been made about this problem of God’s purpose in making a very long-lasting but empty-of-life universe:
For the glory of God. [Objection: He made the universe to glory Himself with it? Like some sort of cosmic porn magazine for His Almightiness?]
For the glory of life- by showing it to be relatively precious; to show us how much He loves us. [Objection: if life is so precious to Him, why didn’t he make the universe more supportive of it, to allow more of it? There surely ought to be better ways of showing us how precious we are than making the universe so overwhelmingly predominantly unfit for habitation]
Because God loves and celebrates huge empty voids. [Objection: what is the scriptural or theological basis for this proposal? It sounds like complete bullshit to me. What is there to love in the void, comparable to His living creatures?]
It’s a mystery. [Objection: we’re just speculating here- there’s no need to be bound by what we do or can know. Go for it!]
Because randomness must be its key feature, for the permission of free will, and for the obscuration of God. [Objection: this doesn’t explain why there should be so much spacetime continuing after all life has been and gone]
That the universe will in fact not last very long- just until it cannot support human life (which is, at most, a billion years, but probably will be only a few thousand years). [Objection: fantastic conjecture, which bears no scrutiny in the light of what is actually known. Nonsense until proven otherwise]
For the provision of a venue for a big party for angels. [Objection: see immediately above. Sheer nonsense]
For the sake of Art- abstract art, no less. [Objection: this puts the empty canvas artistically before the picture]
Because God values time and matter and energy in its own right, and finds it interesting. [Objection: Self-contradictory implausible nonsense- it posits God is like us in finding stuff interesting, and yet unlike us in finding phenomenally slowly decaying spacetime interesting]
Contrary to the evidence, life will evolve to be able to continue after the life-supporting era. [Objection: impossible, by definition. Illogical nonsense]
God will need a long time to decide what to do with us in the Final Judgement after all life in the universe ends. [Objection: not if He’s omniscient and ‘above’ time]
Time is meaningless to God, so a long time (to us) isn’t (to Him). [Objection: so why would he bother with so MUCH of it, after all life is extinct?]
Have I missed anything?
[ 07. April 2011, 09:52: Message edited by: Yorick ]
Posted by Herrick (# 15226) on
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It's (all) life Jim, but not as we know it!
Posted by Adeodatus (# 4992) on
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Thanks for the summary, Yorick.
How about another possibility? - that this universe is, in fact, the only physically possible universe. The huge empty stretches of space and time are necessary because they're ... well ... necessary.
Or how about a modified version of the idea? - that, despite all the perceived drawbacks, shortcomings, hardships and sorrows of living in this universe it is actually the best of all possible universes?
There's been a lot of writing about this in the past few years. Paul Davies (who taught me quantum mechanics back in the 80s, and always seemed fond of metaphysics) seems to have a continuing fascination with this "Goldilocks Enigma" as he calls it.
Posted by Chorister (# 473) on
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Except, of course, if you believe in the resurrection, it won't be a life-starved empty void. The biblical idea is that God created life because he wanted the company. And, presumably, created eternal life for eternal company.
And as for the tiny little earth inside a huge space void idea, have you ever seen a little girl, sitting in a small room on a vast planet in the vast universe, happily playing with her little doll's house?
Posted by Yorick (# 12169) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Adeodatus:
How about another possibility? - that this universe is, in fact, the only physically possible universe. The huge empty stretches of space and time are necessary because they're ... well ... necessary.
Yes, this is how science sees it, and I agree that it also happens to be the Goldilocks ‘best’. The universe is precisely the way it is because it must conform to its natural laws, which make it so.
This, however, does away with the necessity for God, which is my tacit point here, obviously.
Posted by LeRoc (# 3216) on
:
I agree that probably we won't be able to stop the cooling off the universe, and the dying out of all of its stars.
But who needs stars?
A billion of years or so from now, the Sun will become so hot that we won't be able to live on Earth as we do now. We'll change our environment and ourselves in such a way that we'll still be able to live on Earth, even with all this heat.
After a couple of billions of years more, our Sun we'll go nova and burn our Earth. We'll abandon it and live on another planet around another Sun. Even if it takes generational spaceships to get there.
After doing this two or three times, we have advanced enough technologically that we we won't need generational ships any more. We'll simply take our planet with us.
After having gone through this cycle a couple of times, we decide that spectral class G stars aren't the best option. They burn too fast. So we take our planet in (close) orbit around a brown dwarf, and adapt ourselves to live in these conditions.
But eventually even these burn out, so we're forced to go from brown dwarf to brown dwarf. This is when we decide that dragging a planet with us is really a burden. So we'll choose a sub-brown dwarf that generates enough energy to sustain us, and we'll live on it.
By the time that we've burned out a couple of sub-brown dwarves (SBD's), galaxies have become scarce in this universe. So we accelerate our SBD to nearly light speed, and cruise the Universe in search of suitable SBD's that can replace ours.
After a lot more time, even SBD's become scarce. So on our voyage through the universe we'll just search for loose matter to replace the hydrogen that our SBD burns, or even the protons that will decay.
But eventually, even matter will become scarce. So we'll look for small energy fluctiations and convert those in matter. At that time, our SBD will be the only form of matter existant in the Universe.
There will come a point that there even won't be many energy fluctuations any more. We search the black hole that will last longest, and park our SBD in orbit around it, feeding off the energy present in its accretion disk.
Eventually, even that won't be enough. So we'll cannibalize our SBD, burning everything we won't need. In the end, we transform our thoughts into energy patterns that circulate within what's left of the matter in our SBD.
When our SBD eventually burns out completely, we'll just live as energy fluctuations around the black hole, feeding off its Hawking radiation.
Maybe we won't be able last until 10^10^200 years in this way, but we'll get a long way.
I think that at the end, either the Angels will come to announce the End of Time (and we'll discover that we transformed ourselves so much that we're not that different from them after all), or we discover how to use the last energy in our black hole to create a new Big Bang and a new Universe, and we'll live in that.
And God saw that it was good.
I know that what I wrote above is far-fetched, but at least we'll have plenty of time that will enable us to develop a lot of technology. And as far as I can tell, in this scenario I haven't broken any laws of Physics. Mr. Cresswell?
Posted by Adeodatus (# 4992) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Yorick:
This, however, does away with the necessity for God, which is my tacit point here, obviously.
Not necessarily. There are at least two possible arguments against this.
First, this assumes that what we observe from our angle as "the laws of physics" exist independently of God. This is, at best, not obvious.
Secondly, it ignores the possibility that if the laws of physics are independent of God, he created them deliberately to be so, for his own inscrutable reasons.
Posted by Lamb Chopped (# 5528) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Yorick:
quote:
Originally posted by Lamb Chopped:
Just because you find it boring and intimidating doesn't mean God does.
Well, now who’s being anthropocentric? You’re proposing that God would be interested (in a human sense) in observing (in a human sense) the immensely slow (in a human sense) decay of the universe to its heat death.
But the notion that God would find the dying cellestial objects somehow fascinating seems highly dubious to me, given how totally anthropocentric scripture is. Genesis suggests that man is the pinnacle of creation, but that would make it almost absolutely flat.
Theocentric, if you please. You've invoked Genesis, and the point of that account is that humankind is made in God's image (and not vice versa). So the original capacity-to-be-interested would be God's, and our own interest a reflection of his.
As for the pinnacle of creation-- ![[Snigger]](graemlins/snigger.gif)
Um, no. Perhaps on this one particular world (and God rarely if ever gratifies our curiosity about things that don't pertain to our personal business, like other worlds, angels, etc.). What we are is essentially the lead species on our particular world, charged with the care of the rest of it (which we have obviously screwed up). We are the head animal, the link between the animal creation and the purely spiritual creation (angels etc), with one foot in both. Not the pinnacle or center of anything--that'd be God.
There are creatures who outstrip us in natural gifts and abilities, including the various kinds of angels. Call them our elder brothers if you like. We are middle children, caught between the angels (and who knows what else?) and the animals and plants. And that's not a bad place to be.
Posted by IngoB (# 8700) on
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quote:
Originally posted by Yorick:
Then why do you imagine He would choose to demonstrate the importance of life by making it and revealing it to be so insignificant?
There could be many reasons, and quite a few have been suggested already. I would add that humans are rather prone to taking themselves too seriously. The stewards of creation may start considering themselves as Lords. However, it is pretty damn difficult even for a human to look at the universe in its sheer spatiotemporal size and believe to be the Ruler. Clearly, whatever sway we may have over creation is granted to us by the actual Lord.
Furthermore, I think you are stuck with your human perspective there. You look at the universe and think something like "Well, if I had to build that, it would take a lot of energy, engineering skill, etc. Can't we do with something way smaller, to keep within budget?" However, a smaller universe does not cost God less than a bigger one, and a bigger or more complex universe does not require more effort. God just wills things to be, and they are. He literally can do whatever He wants, no constraints, no costs, no nothing but His will alone. There are not even any other gods out there to impress. Given this background, it is entirely possible that God made the universe enormous just for some minor concern, say, giving us the opportunity to look at cool stuff with telescopes.
quote:
Originally posted by Marvin the Martian:
You mean fast interstellar travel, of course. We can go as far as we like so long as we're not bothered about how many generations it takes us to get there!
Not really, no. There is no available knowledge and ready technology that would allow us to build a generation ship that could support a sizable human population for a few thousand generations. We are so far incapable of constructing a closed biosystem that supports a handful of people for even a few months (attempts have been made, but some stuff always had to be brought in from the outside to prevent failure). Even if we knew how to construct a biosystem for a large enough group of people, it would almost certainly be of a size that we would not know how to build in space, much less accelerate to high enough speeds for interstellar travel. Finally, the necessary social and psychological engineering that would keep a confined group of people stable over thousands of generations is utterly unknown.
quote:
Originally posted by Crœsos:
Speaking of contradictions, doesn't it seem to be a bit awkward to claim to be the "steward" of something you can't even reach, much less have any effect on? What exactly is involved in the stewardship of the Crab Nebula (everything normal, still nebulous), or the Hydra Supercluster (everything normal, still clustered), or the Boötes Void (everything normal, still really empty)?
As far as one can say that of objects like the Crab Nebula, the Hydra Supercluster or the Boötes Void, they are all dying. That's what this thread started with, the eventual "heat death" of the universe. With Christ's Second Coming, there will be a resurrection of humanity to New Life, and since we are the stewards of all creation, there will be a New Creation (or a resurrection of creation, in the same manner of speaking as we use when pointing to a dying nebula). Our reach hence indeed will encompass the entire universe - not because we are Lords of the universe, but because God is the Lord and has incarnated as a human being. We will have been raised to this power by God, and as I said above, maybe that there is nothing we can do in our own power to have such an effect on the cosmos is an intended feature to drive home that point.
quote:
Originally posted by Yorick:
Because God loves and celebrates huge empty voids. [Objection: what is the scriptural or theological basis for this proposal? It sounds like complete bullshit to me. What is there to love in the void, comparable to His living creatures?]
God coughs softly, looks briefly out of the window with a sigh, and politely refuses to answer...
quote:
Originally posted by Yorick:
That the universe will in fact not last very long- just until it cannot support human life (which is, at most, a billion years, but probably will be only a few thousand years). [Objection: fantastic conjecture, which bears no scrutiny in the light of what is actually known. Nonsense until proven otherwise]
That it is so has been revealed, and therefore is known. Of course, you do not believe that this source of revelation is trustworthy. I however do. Can you show that this source is untrustworthy? No, you can't (not for the lack of trying either). Can you show that the above contradicts other knowledge from other sources? No, you can't. Therefore the above is just rhetorical bluster.
Posted by Yorick (# 12169) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Adeodatus:
quote:
Originally posted by Yorick:
This, however, does away with the necessity for God, which is my tacit point here, obviously.
Not necessarily. There are at least two possible arguments against this.
First, this assumes that what we observe from our angle as "the laws of physics" exist independently of God. This is, at best, not obvious.
Secondly, it ignores the possibility that if the laws of physics are independent of God, he created them deliberately to be so, for his own inscrutable reasons.
No, firstly, it does not make any such assumption, for no assumption about God is necessary. We do not need to assume anything about God’s involvement with an apple falling towards the floor when we consider the effects of gravity. No assumption about the involvement (or non-involvement) of God is necessary to our observation and consideration of the laws of nature.
Secondly, there is no need to make any kind of assumption about the possibility of God ‘creating’ the laws of physics independently of Himself when one considers the effects of gravity in the observed falling of apples.
If you introduce your necessary God into our universe, the onus is strictly on you to justify your assumptions about His necessity in it. I do not need to assume or justify anything about Him, because I make no necessary claims about Him.
Posted by Yorick (# 12169) on
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quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
it is entirely possible that God made the universe enormous just for some minor concern, say, giving us the opportunity to look at cool stuff with telescopes.
Stop it, Ingo. You’re frightening me.
Posted by Freddy (# 365) on
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Yorick, I'm impressed that you can summarize all of these wandering arguments, and figure out how to dismiss each one.
As for mine:
quote:
Originally posted by Yorick:
Because randomness must be its key feature, for the permission of free will, and for the obscuration of God. [Objection: this doesn’t explain why there should be so much spacetime continuing after all life has been and gone]
That is based on the expectation that there is an after, which is purely theoretical. Same with "before." At some point you go mad trying to imagine the point where there is no "before."
The simple fact is that randomness requires large numbers to accomplish anything meaningful.
Posted by Yorick (# 12169) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Freddy:
quote:
Originally posted by Yorick:
Because randomness must be its key feature, for the permission of free will, and for the obscuration of God. [Objection: this doesn’t explain why there should be so much spacetime continuing after all life has been and gone]
That is based on the expectation that there is an after, which is purely theoretical. Same with "before." At some point you go mad trying to imagine the point where there is no "before."
The simple fact is that randomness requires large numbers to accomplish anything meaningful.
Yes, I agree (although the issue of things being actually ‘random’ is another interesting discussion in itself).
Regarding the theoretical expectation of there being an ‘after’ or ‘before’, I’m not sure what you’re getting at, Freddy. Do you doubt the cosmological evidence that points to a post-inflationary expanding universe, which will eventually reach heat death in accordance with the second law of thermodynamics, or are you questioning the thermodynamic arrow of time itself?
Posted by Adeodatus (# 4992) on
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I'll grant you, Yorick, that what we clumsily call the laws of physics (which is really just a shorthand for "the bits of the way that the universe is that we happen to see patterns in, and that crop up in a more or less reliable and predictable kind of way"), as they're formulated, do away with the necessity of God. But you can equally formulate a "law of tables" that does away with the necessity for a table to be made out of wood. That doesn't alter the fact that my table is made out of wood.
Posted by Yorick (# 12169) on
:
Hey, I’m quite happy to accept that tables may be made out of wood, but I get nervous when you claim yours is a flat-topped headless magical wooden quadruped called Elvis.
[ ![[Razz]](tongue.gif)
Just kidding. I'm grateful that you're kind enough to welcome me to your table].
Posted by Freddy (# 365) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Yorick:
Regarding the theoretical expectation of there being an ‘after’ or ‘before’, I’m not sure what you’re getting at, Freddy. Do you doubt the cosmological evidence that points to a post-inflationary expanding universe, which will eventually reach heat death in accordance with the second law of thermodynamics, or are you questioning the thermodynamic arrow of time itself?
I'm perfectly happy with the theory based on the evidence. I'm sure it's legitimate.
I'm saying that this no more says anything about what happens "after" than it does about "before." At some point it is simply impossible to imagine what is before before, or after after. If you don't step outside of time the conundrum becomes irresolvable.
Posted by IngoB (# 8700) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Yorick:
Stop it, Ingo. You’re frightening me.
Seriously? How weird. I'm not sure what scares you there, so I don't really know how to avoid it.
Posted by Lamb Chopped (# 5528) on
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I suppose it's possible that God may be frivolous (or seem so to us). I mean, look at Jesus with all that wine--way in excess of what was needed. And he had a fairly lavish hand with the bread and fish.
Why not the galaxies?
Posted by Timothy the Obscure (# 292) on
:
This may be little like saying, "Hey, that Golden Gate Bridge--all those towers and cables are a bit excessive, why not just run a roadway over the bay?" Maybe you need a universe this size in order to have a planet (or several--we're getting to the point where we can put some actual numbers into the Drake equation) where you can have the kind of life that can have a relationship with God.
Posted by Yorick (# 12169) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
I'm not sure what scares you there, so I don't really know how to avoid it.
What frightens me is the fact that a marvellously intelligent, superbly educated grown-up person can entertain (however facetiously) the shockingly idiotic notion that ‘God made the universe enormous just for some minor concern, say, giving us the opportunity to look at cool stuff with telescopes’. It’s either a seriously fucked up deity or a seriously fucked up belief, and both are equally disturbing.
Posted by Yorick (# 12169) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Freddy:
I'm saying that this no more says anything about what happens "after" than it does about "before." At some point it is simply impossible to imagine what is before before, or after after. If you don't step outside of time the conundrum becomes irresolvable.
We’re not talking about before before, or after after. We’re talking about real spacetime here, not (what we can or cannot imagine) before or after that, so, for the purposes of this discussion, we don’t need to speculate about ‘before’ or ‘after’ time.
We know the universe is 13.75 billion years old.
We know it will die in something more than 10^150 years time.
We know that life is only possible for one thousandth of a billion billion billionth, billion billion billionth, billion billion billionth of a percent of the lifespan of the universe (that's 0.000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 001%).
That's what we're talking about.
Posted by Yorick (# 12169) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Timothy the Obscure:
This may be little like saying, "Hey, that Golden Gate Bridge--all those towers and cables are a bit excessive, why not just run a roadway over the bay?" Maybe you need a universe this size in order to have a planet (or several--we're getting to the point where we can put some actual numbers into the Drake equation) where you can have the kind of life that can have a relationship with God.
Several planets? Data from the Kepler mission has been used to estimate that there are at least 50 billion planets in our own galaxy (which is only one of around 150 billion).
But I think your post reveals the problem here. It's impossible to imagine numbers like this one thousandth of a billion billion billionth, billion billion billionth, billion billion billionth of a percent. If we could, we’d surely abandon our faith in a sensible creator God.
Taking your Golden Gate analogy, it would be more like making a bridge of towers and cables to the moon, so that one nanobe could move one femtometre across it.
Posted by Ricardus (# 8757) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Yorick:
It's impossible to imagine numbers like this one thousandth of a billion billion billionth, billion billion billionth, billion billion billionth of a percent. If we could, we’d surely abandon our faith in a sensible creator God.
Why?
Having accused us of anthropocentrism, you seem to be pretty anthropocentric yourself. Just because very big and very small numbers bother you, doesn't mean they have any kind of objective, cosmic significance.
Basically, all you're presenting is an emotional argument. Which is bad and wrong: making emotional arguments is our job ...
Posted by Yorick (# 12169) on
:
You’re right, although I’m not sure it’s bad and wrong to make an emotional argument. It strikes me that our gut instinct is pretty much all we have to go on with this stuff, and, having personally been impressed with the scale of what I consider to be the contradiction of the message of religion with what we are discovering about reality, I’m keen to see how people may rationally sustain their faith when presented with the same impression.
I guess you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t amaze it with the properties of its molecular bonding.
Posted by mousethief (# 953) on
:
Okay, just to be sure I have you right. When our gut instinct makes us believe there's a god, we're wrong because there is no god. But when your gut instinct makes you believe there is no god, you're right because there is no god.
Did I miss something here?
Posted by Yorick (# 12169) on
:
That's not quite it, mousethief, though it did make me laugh. No, we may intellectually examine our gut instincts and find they tell us something about how we rationalise our beliefs.
Posted by Ricardus (# 8757) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Yorick:
You’re right, although I’m not sure it’s bad and wrong to make an emotional argument. It strikes me that our gut instinct is pretty much all we have to go on with this stuff, and, having personally been impressed with the scale of what I consider to be the contradiction of the message of religion with what we are discovering about reality, I’m keen to see how people may rationally sustain their faith when presented with the same impression.
Actually, I agree with your first sentence, but in this case I think we do have a bit more than gut instinct.
Long before we knew anything about the size of the universe, Christianity claimed that God is infinite, which doesn't just mean that He is Very Big, but that He is not subject to limits of space or extent. Therefore, the relationship between God : something of average size is the same as the relationship between God : something really really really small.
Therefore, size isn't really an issue to God. Therefore, in this particular instance, there's no case to answer. At least so it seems to me.
Posted by Yorick (# 12169) on
:
Yes, I think I understand that, but as I suggested upthread, we are therefore faced with the question of why He didn’t create a universe in which more life is possible for the sake of life itself. Let me put it another way:
If you represent the timespan of the universe as being a thousand years in length, the portion of it in which He has allowed conditions to be favourable to life is the tiniest fraction of one second. Although, to Him, this does not matter, since he sees a nanosecond in the same way He sees a million years, it certainly matters to life. Although a nanosecond may be a very long time from life’s own perspective, and have no significance at all from God’s perspective, the fact that God created so MUCH more time than this- in which no life is possible- may perhaps tell us something about His creative purpose.
And surely, man can claim an interest in speculating about the purpose of his creator?
I know what this says to me about His purpose- it says that He's less interested in life than you might think from reading the Bible.
Posted by Freddy (# 365) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Yorick:
We’re not talking about before before, or after after. We’re talking about real spacetime here, not (what we can or cannot imagine) before or after that, so, for the purposes of this discussion, we don’t need to speculate about ‘before’ or ‘after’ time.
We know the universe is 13.75 billion years old.
We know it will die in something more than 10^150 years time.
If you are asking about the point of having all this extra time and space lying around I don't think that you can get away from talking about before before or after after.
You are saying, if I understand you, that you can see that randomness requires large numbers to fulfill the purposes of love (as I outlined them above), but that having the whole thing come grinding to a halt in only a little more than 10^150 years time is an issue.
I don't see why the assumption that the whole process would repeat isn't a satisfying speculative answer. Especially if you are concerned about wasting time.
There is no evidence that a repeat would happen. But evidence also can't tell us anythng about what happened before 13.75 billion years ago. Or give us any idea what made that original matter suddenly appear. Or decide to go "bang". Unless it just always was and took an eternity of time to get around to it. Reasoning fails at some point in there because an absolute beginning, or end, is not something that we can grasp.
I love the fact that you realize that there must be a point if there is to be a God. It's a tacit admission that without God there is no point. ![[Angel]](graemlins/angel.gif)
Posted by Freddy (# 365) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Yorick:
we are therefore faced with the question of why He didn’t create a universe in which more life is possible for the sake of life itself.
Is there a reason that you don't think that randomness is an adequate answer?
If there is more life than random processes can account for then we are forced to believe in God. If we are forced to belive in God then a prime purpose of love - the free response of the thing that is loved - goes unfulfilled.
That is, what if it just so happened that all the planets in our solar system were just the right distance from the sun to sustain life? And that they magically didn't collide. And that other solar systems were close by and also magically had planets just the right distance from the sun, and they also somehow didn't run into ours. Don't you think people would suspect that this was proof of purposeful agency, and thus of God?
quote:
Originally posted by Yorick:
I know what this says to me about His purpose- it says that He's less interested in life than you might think from reading the Bible.
No, it says that time and space are unlimited quantities, and therefore conserving them, or using them economically, is an unimportant consideration.
The important considerations are all about fulfilling love's goals.
Posted by Lamb Chopped (# 5528) on
:
Alas, poor Yorick! That was a good point. And Ricardus' as well.
What amuses me is you keep applying your own personal standards of what ought to be to God, and then blaming us for being anthropocentric.
Heck, you're applying your own gut feelings of what ought to be to the rest of us, and then being surprised and/or indignant when we reply that large expanses of space and time have no emotional effect on our faith. Because, you believe, they ought to.
And so you conclude that we have never had these facts clearly presented to us. ![[Disappointed]](graemlins/disappointed.gif)
I beseech you, in the bowels of science, think it possible that you may be mistaken.
Posted by Yorick (# 12169) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Lamb Chopped:
think it possible that you may be mistaken.
But of course. One thing you might have learnt about me is that I'm deeply in touch with my uncertainty.
And I'm not the least bit 'indignant' about any of it, BTW.
Posted by Yorick (# 12169) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Lamb Chopped:
we reply that large expanses of space and time have no emotional effect on our faith.
I believe you. And so, upon acknowledging your emotional satisfaction with the way He created the universe to be so staggeringly big and so staggeringly devoid of life for so staggeringly, staggeringly long, I ask you to speculate why God would make the universe in this particular way, and you reply rather breezily that 'He’s an artist', or that 'time doesn’t matter to Him', or that 'He needed a big venue for the after-dinner party for the angels', or 'because He loves voids', or whatever- none of which I find the least bit satisfying in a gut-feeling kind of way (not that that’s anyone’s fault but my own).
Posted by mousethief (# 953) on
:
The vistas of an entirely new branch of theology lay before your feet, Yorick. Go for it.
Posted by Squibs (# 14408) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Yorick:
Why though?
If we are talking about an omnipotent God then why not?
Posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard (# 368) on
:
Life, of course, is not materially possible.
The size of the universe is ... immaterial.
Posted by HCH (# 14313) on
:
Yorick is certainly exhibiting a tremendous faith in the current state of knowledge in cosmology. Based on past experience, it seems likely that the notions of cosmologists will continue to change. I remember a comment once that every estimate of the universe's age seemed to increase it; that trend may have stopped, for now.
Various people apparently have similar faith that the human species will not become extinct in, say, a few million years at most, so that we actually need to worry about Sol's condition a billion years hence. Individual human beings do not live forever, and neither do species (although cockroaches may indeed last a long time).
Posted by Lamb Chopped (# 5528) on
:
Yorick, I made those statements in the hopes that you'd possibly recognize your own anthropocentric bias on this thread. It's sort of screaming and jumping up and down, "Here I am! Here!" A bit hard to ignore.
But whatever.
My first guess on why the long expanses of time and space is not breezy, but serious. I think God likes them. I think he has tastes that vary significantly from some of mine, just as my husband's do. Goodness knows I don't care THAT much for beetles.
The second reason (which is more of an observation) is that space and time reflect God just as all his creation does. Their endlessness is a physical analogue of his own eternity. I am not suggesting that God created them thus to teach us a lesson--that seems a bit puffed up, though it may be true that God "does all things for each" and I won't say it was out of his thoughts either.
But I DO think that any great creation will reflect the artist's mind in some significant way, and the physical/spiritual analogy seems the most obvious explanation to me. The vast expanses of time and space are awe-inspiring--well, so is he. They are at times intimidating--well, the "fear of the Lord" is an old concept, and a great corrective to overchumminess and presumption in faith. Their contemplation forces humility on the observer--yes, and how much more the perceived presence of God who made them. "The heavens declare his glory"--oh yes indeed, indeed they do.
Posted by IngoB (# 8700) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Yorick:
What frightens me is the fact that a marvellously intelligent, superbly educated grown-up person can entertain (however facetiously) the shockingly idiotic notion that ‘God made the universe enormous just for some minor concern, say, giving us the opportunity to look at cool stuff with telescopes’. It’s either a seriously fucked up deity or a seriously fucked up belief, and both are equally disturbing.
Ahh, so you were rhetorically frightened...
Your problem is not only a lack of belief in God. You are apparently also incapable of imagining a "personal god" as anything but a solemn bureaucrat with a five-eon plan for improved efficiency. I think your "personal god" is just a natural law wearing a human mask.
But we are made in His image and likeness, so God is necessarily at least as quirky as we are. And that's plenty quirky...
Posted by Timothy the Obscure (# 292) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Yorick:
quote:
Originally posted by Lamb Chopped:
we reply that large expanses of space and time have no emotional effect on our faith.
I believe you. And so, upon acknowledging your emotional satisfaction with the way He created the universe to be so staggeringly big and so staggeringly devoid of life for so staggeringly, staggeringly long, I ask you to speculate why God would make the universe in this particular way, and you reply rather breezily that 'He’s an artist', or that 'time doesn’t matter to Him', or that 'He needed a big venue for the after-dinner party for the angels', or 'because He loves voids', or whatever- none of which I find the least bit satisfying in a gut-feeling kind of way (not that that’s anyone’s fault but my own).
I just think it's really cool that God would create such a big universe...maybe to make sure we don't get too full of ourselves?
Posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard (# 368) on
:
There is probably (understatement) some profligacy involved, but if You are going to make a material creation, then you probably have little choice in the parameters.
As the universe has no centre it may well be infinite, which in the mind of an ineffable God is neither here nor anywhere.
At the quantum level it didn't have a beginning either obviously as Hawking realised.
Unfortunately for the parsimonious among us, orthodoxly there's only one incarnation which makes it all rather mysterious as to what Love was doing for eternity before the creations.
Posted by Freddy (# 365) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
Unfortunately for the parsimonious among us, orthodoxly there's only one incarnation which makes it all rather mysterious as to what Love was doing for eternity before the creations.
Yes, that's a puzzler.
I think the answer is that if there is no time before creation then the problem goes away.
But I can't imagine that. It seems easier to imagine that there has been an endless series of creations stretching into forever in the past, and that there will be the same in the future.
I think the real answer, though, is that there is no time before creation. Thus no "before." As hard as that is to grasp.
Posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard (# 368) on
:
And meaningless. Relationships happen. Are processes. Conversation, play, creation, drama, dance are processes. Love is a process. It ALL takes time. Time is an attribute of all existence. Of all being. On is on and off is off. The Trinity was on forever before the angelic and later material creations.
Posted by Freddy (# 365) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
Relationships happen. Are processes. Conversation, play, creation, drama, dance are processes. Love is a process.
So right.
I think that it is important to realize that succession, or process, is something spiritual, but that time itself is just an attribute of space, so it is purely physical.
Posted by ken (# 2460) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Crœsos:
What exactly is involved in the stewardship of the Crab Nebula (everything normal, still nebulous), or the Hydra Supercluster (everything normal, still clustered), or the Boötes Void (everything normal, still really empty)?
Maybe we'll find out when we get there.
What exactly was involved in the stewardship of the Amazon basin, or the Atlantic Ocean, or Antarctica, or the asteroids, when all our ancestors were living in East Africa?
Its only a matter of scale.
quote:
Originally posted by Yorick:
But I think your post reveals the problem here. It's impossible to imagine numbers like this one thousandth of a billion billion billionth, billion billion billionth, billion billion billionth of a percent. If we could, we’d surely abandon our faith in a sensible creator God.
That makes no sense at all. You really cannot be saying that there cannot be a God because we don't understand how big the universe is. What has that got to do with it?
You are clutching at straws here!
quote:
Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
Unfortunately for the parsimonious among us, orthodoxly there's only one incarnation which makes it all rather mysterious as to what Love was doing for eternity before the creations.
Same as Love is doing in the space between them.
Augustine's answer was "Preparing a special place in Hell for those who ask such stupid questions"
Posted by Yorick (# 12169) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by ken:
quote:
Originally posted by Yorick:
But I think your post reveals the problem here. It's impossible to imagine numbers like this one thousandth of a billion billion billionth, billion billion billionth, billion billion billionth of a percent. If we could, we’d surely abandon our faith in a sensible creator God.
That makes no sense at all. You really cannot be saying that there cannot be a God because we don't understand how big the universe is. What has that got to do with it?
No, you’re misrepresenting or misunderstanding what I said. What I said was that, if people could appreciate the enormity of the time in which the universe shall continue to exist after all life in it has ceased to exist everywhere, they would surely abandon their faith in a sensible creator God, since it makes no sense that this God would create such an unimaginably long period of spacetime in which nothing living exists, given the alleged nature of said God and His fondness for living things- only by whose existence His created universe has any meaning to anything other than Himself.
Posted by ken (# 2460) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Yorick:
quote:
Originally posted by ken:
quote:
Originally posted by Yorick:
But I think your post reveals the problem here. It's impossible to imagine numbers like this one thousandth of a billion billion billionth, billion billion billionth, billion billion billionth of a percent. If we could, we’d surely abandon our faith in a sensible creator God.
That makes no sense at all. You really cannot be saying that there cannot be a God because we don't understand how big the universe is. What has that got to do with it?
No, you’re misrepresenting or misunderstanding what I said. What I said was that, if people could appreciate the enormity of the time in which the universe shall continue to exist after all life in it has ceased to exist everywhere, they would surely abandon their faith in a sensible creator God, since it makes no sense that this God would create such an unimaginably long period of spacetime in which nothing living exists, given the alleged nature of said God and His fondness for living things- only by whose existence His created universe has any meaning to anything other than Himself.
I understand it entirely and I think it is blatantly and obviously false. Assuming you believe it and its not just an arbitrary stick to beat theists with then that you believe it is evidence that you do not understand the questions you have been asking.
Posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard (# 368) on
:
Time is an attribute of process.
Posted by Freddy (# 365) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
Time is an attribute of process.
You would think. But processes can exist without time. Space cannot.
It is true that processes are always associated with time in this world.
Posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard (# 368) on
:
Uh huh. But in metaphysics there are processes that are instantaneous?
Posted by Freddy (# 365) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
Uh huh. But in metaphysics there are processes that are instantaneous?
Yes. The life that flows from God into all living things does so by a process, but it is instantaneous. The metaphysical aspect of any process is instantaneous. The part that takes time is physical.
Posted by mousethief (# 953) on
:
"Enormity" does not mean "enormousness." Look it up.
Posted by Yorick (# 12169) on
:
Popular usage of the word ‘enormity’ has changed to become synonymous of ‘enormousness’, such that the orthodox meaning is no longer considered the only correct form. I deliberately chose the word, rather than the more cumbersome ‘enormousness’ or other similar, because it conveys in a very particular way the conceptually overwhelming immensity of the scale I was referring to. Your very own president used the word in this way in his victory speech in November 2008, “I know you didn’t do this just to win an election and I know you didn’t do it for me. You did it because you understand the enormity of the task that lies ahead.” So, I consider myself in grand company, and do not despair at the anachronistic and snobbish pedantry of your jibe.
Oh, and BTW, mousethief, just one more weasely little poke like that and you’ll earn yourself a Hellcall of some enormity.
Posted by mousethief (# 953) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Yorick:
Oh, and BTW, mousethief, just one more weasely little poke like that and you’ll earn yourself a Hellcall of some enormity.
You sweettalker.
Posted by IngoB (# 8700) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Freddy:
But processes can exist without time. Space cannot.
It would be better to say that processes span up space and time. A clock is nothing but a regular process of which one can count cycles to time another process. Hence there is no process in God Himself, since otherwise He would be measurable in terms of space and time.
Martin's assertion has no foundation. For example, love is no process, it is a state: the state of willing good for another. People fall in love, and fall out of love as well, and that's a process indeed. However, God never changed in His love. His love is eternal.
Posted by Freddy (# 365) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
quote:
Originally posted by Freddy:
But processes can exist without time. Space cannot.
It would be better to say that processes span up space and time.
What does "span up" mean? Measure?
If so I agree. I guess it really isn't a process until it approaches space and time.
quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
Hence there is no process in God Himself, since otherwise He would be measurable in terms of space and time.
Yes. Think of the implications. Does God plan? Does God act?
I think that God's constancy means that He does neither of these things but simply is omnipresent and eternal, outside of space and time.
quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
Martin's assertion has no foundation. For example, love is no process, it is a state: the state of willing good for another. People fall in love, and fall out of love as well, and that's a process indeed. However, God never changed in His love. His love is eternal.
Yes. Thanks.
Posted by IngoB (# 8700) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Freddy:
What does "span up" mean? Measure?
Hmm, quite a bit more than that. But the extra bits are actually rather speculative, so let's pretend that it means "measure".
(If you are really interested: I was boldly asserting that there is no such thing as space and time, but rather that they are an abstraction from comparing processes with each other. For example, if one counts 9,192,631,770 transitions between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium 133 atom, then one has a "second of time". This does not require that there be any "time" as independent entity, but merely that there be separately observable transitions. I'm not sure that I can defend this assertion though.)
Posted by Freddy (# 365) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
I was boldly asserting that there is no such thing as space and time, but rather that they are an abstraction from comparing processes with each other.
Wow. I knew it!
Posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard (# 368) on
:
The fact that [triune, relational, perichoretic, flowing, pacific, raging, every aspect of fire and wind and water; concurrent] God's love, God, is constant, in a constant state, a state of constancy, from eternity does not negate time. Eternity is lots of time. Constant love is a process. The state of constant love is a process. Constancy takes TIME. The state of love is not a process, but the moment it segues to an other moment makes it a process. The state, the attribute of the sky being instantaneously blue is not metaphysical or a process. The state of it being blue for two Planck ticks makes it a process.
It's just words boys. If you want a timeless instant to be constant within itself, then process is state.
That's calculus for you.
None of this speciousness makes any sense, any meaning of anything happening or being outside time.
If something is it has an attribute of time. God is. Was and shall be. Neither of which ARE. Capital ell Love is constant. A TEMPORAL concept. That doesn't mean that all the Love that there ever was from eternity is and all the Love that that ever will be to eternity is.
Words boys.
Common sense boys.
Never mind the meaningless dogma, feel the parsimony.
Your WRONG IngoB. And you ain't even that Freddy.
Posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard (# 368) on
:
... YOU'RE wrong too ...
Posted by Dave Marshall (# 7533) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
I was boldly asserting that there is no such thing as space and time, but rather that they are an abstraction from comparing processes with each other.
An abstraction from comparing states, I would say. Space reflects the states, and time our experience of successive changes as a process.
quote:
I'm not sure that I can defend this assertion though.
Works for me.
Posted by IngoB (# 8700) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
Eternity is lots of time.
Eternity is not lots of time.
quote:
Summa Theologica Ia q10 a1:
... the definition of eternity given by Boethius (De Consol. v) is ... : "Eternity is the simultaneously-whole and perfect possession of interminable life." ...
Thus eternity is known from two sources: first, because what is eternal is interminable - that is, has no beginning nor end (that is, no term either way); secondly, because eternity has no succession, being simultaneously whole. ...
Eternity is called whole, not because it has parts, but because it is wanting in nothing. ...
Two things are to be considered in time: time itself, which is successive; and the "now" of time, which is imperfect. Hence the expression "simultaneously-whole" is used to remove the idea of time, and the word "perfect" is used to exclude the "now" of time.
Summa Theologica Ia q10 a3 r2:
The fire of hell is called eternal, only because it never ends. Still, there is change in the pains of the lost, according to the words "To extreme heat they will pass from snowy waters" (Job 24:19). Hence in hell true eternity does not exist, but rather time; according to the text of the Psalm "Their time will be for ever" (Psalm 80:16).
Summa Theologica Ia q10 a4:
... granted that time always was and always will be, according to the idea of those who think the movement of the heavens goes on for ever, there would yet remain a difference between eternity and time, as Boethius says (De Consol. v), arising from the fact that eternity is simultaneously whole; which cannot be applied to time: for eternity is the measure of a permanent being; while time is a measure of movement. ...
granted also that time always goes on, yet it is possible to note in time both the beginning and the end, by considering its parts: thus we speak of the beginning and the end of a day or of a year; which cannot be applied to eternity. Still these differences follow upon the essential and primary differences, that eternity is simultaneously whole, but that time is not so.
quote:
Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
Never mind the meaningless dogma, feel the parsimony.
May your idol "parsimony" burn in hell extravagantly for an infinite amount of time!
quote:
Originally posted by Dave Marshall:
quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
I'm not sure that I can defend this assertion though.
Works for me.
Consider General Relativity.
Posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard (# 368) on
:
You Dantean man of straw you!
Posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard (# 368) on
:
By the way the Marshall-IngoB definition works for me too. How could it not. Unless Dave is being nicely ambiguous. As IngoB seems to paranoidly see ![[Devil]](graemlins/devil.gif)
But there's a but hovering.
I see God, reality - eternal, relational, personaed-personned, gestalt, mutually interpenetrating, fractal love - as constantly changing, in process, flowing, concurrently, infinitely in every parallel state as alluded to by the imagery of the Holy Ghost. All of it. Now. No one clock ticks in God. Harmonics ensue.
There is no basal, hypostatic ground of being from which God emerges against which God is measured. No pulse. But God surely pulses. The pulses pulse. There is no hierarchy of being. There is true irreducible complexity. God is self-emergent. Constantly. Eternally. God is. Becoming. Constantly. God is the measure. God IS Time.
I've said this before here. Every year or so 'recently'.
And Time does not surround all of time, past let alone future, the train of nows, each as a now, regardless of the ineffable complexity of Time.
time is quantized, Time is not.
And only one now is current. now.
Would have to be my necessarily IMPARSIMONIOUS proposition. now NOW.
From which Dave would demur. I.e. that God isn't quantized.
God=Time=Mind can't have a metronome. Is THE Metronome.
And time, the possibly infinite cosmos, is an ephemeral transition; now is ALL there is of it. The twinkling of His eye.
In Now. now is a transient harmonic in Now the integral of which, all thens and now, is the 13.75 Ga infinite cosmos. Of which every past then is gone. Every future then has not happened now matter how now is encompassed by Now. The integral of Now? Is the ineffable, unknowable, eternal, constantly infinitely varying story of God=Time.
Omniscience cannot possibly know any past, happened indetermined now attribute, any indetermined element, entity of then, or now or future then. Indeterminism is how now is determined. It can't NOT be. Except by Omnipotence. God can change what He wills. Except the past of course. That would be ... immoral. Inconsistent. Absurd. That would create multiverses. The floor lurches for a moment, but no.
The precedent is ONE incarnation. Of NOW in now. Just as the denial of universalism is Satan. So far.
Straw on the wind?
And Yorick, there will soon be a new heaven and a new earth. It's OUR time.
Posted by Dave Marshall (# 7533) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
Consider General Relativity.
You'll be more familiar with this than me, but a process model of metaphysical creation requires only that there is no discontinuity of time between adjacent points in space. I wasn't aware General Relativity implies this.
quote:
Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
There is no basal, hypostatic ground of being from which God emerges against which God is measured. No pulse. But God surely pulses. The pulses pulse. There is no hierarchy of being. There is true irreducible complexity. God is self-emergent. Constantly. Eternally. God is. Becoming. Constantly. God is the measure. God IS Time.
This is where theology gets interesting. Within this kind of pool of possibilities we have to decide which features are real, and where and how best to locate them relative to each other in order to credibly map the result onto human experience.
I think God can only be One that simply creates - no complexity. Creation, ie. now (N or n), cannot coherently be both God and the expression of God. Time (T or t) only exists as the becoming of creation, so it also cannot coherently be God. Mind doesn't fit God because the idea drags in a whole raft of time-bound, memory-requiring attributes unrelated to the rest of the model. As does incarnation. Both are imparsimonious. They confuse consistent model-building with explanatory story-telling. I want to be able to distinguish between the two.
[ 16. April 2011, 23:51: Message edited by: Dave Marshall ]
Posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard (# 368) on
:
"I think God can only be One that simply creates - no complexity."
No complexity of definition, no. In its broadest sense, yes. But or as the East would say 'and', to be inclusive and not divisive, despite us being divided there is creation and Creation, time and Time, t & T as you rightly use below. orthodox God necessarily, eternally, constantly Creates. And does NOT necessarily create.
"Creation, ie. now (N or n), cannot coherently be both God and the expression of God."
In God being and expression are one. Is syntactic but is it semantic? C=T=N=God. We gots to get REAL philosophical here. God HAS to be thinking the insensate matter I inhabit. He has to be thinking me autonomously thinking. T does t.
"Time (T or t) only exists as the becoming of creation, so it also cannot coherently be God."
This is pantheism. And less even! At least Consciousness emerges from pantheism.
t proceeds from T.
T is not dependent on t IS dependent on T.
T !> f(t), t > f(T)
T becomes C, is C
t = c (is quantized, T/C ain't)
e t c
"Mind doesn't fit God because the idea drags in a whole raft of time-bound, memory-requiring attributes unrelated to the rest of the model. As does incarnation. Both are imparsimonious. They confuse consistent model-building with explanatory story-telling. I want to be able to distinguish between the two."
Tough! Reality is panentheistic. God is relational, persons in relationship. Not only does (eternal, infinite) T do (ephemeral, subset) t. T became t that t become T. That the ephemeral might become eternal.
Imparsimony is a heuristic. Not a law. Not axiomatic. Reality does not have to comply with it at all. It's a rule of thumb for sifting between explanations of observations.
The mystery of God, the Trinity, Perichoresis and the hypostatic union of Christ, God the vicarious human are givens, observed not rationalizable, reductionable.
You reduce theology to materialism by logical positivistic fiat.
Surely?
Posted by Dave Marshall (# 7533) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
In God being and expression are one. Is syntactic but is it semantic? C=T=N=God. We gots to get REAL philosophical here. God HAS to be thinking the insensate matter I inhabit. He has to be thinking me autonomously thinking.
Nope. God precisely does not have to think. If by C here you mean Creation, to indicate a useful (and orthodox, not that that's an axiom of mine) model you have to stick at God->C->N->T. To use equality there reduces your model to a God/C/N/T mush with no explanatory value at all.
quote:
"Time (T or t) only exists as the becoming of creation, so it also cannot coherently be God."
This is pantheism.
Not for God->Creation->N->T.
quote:
Reality is panentheistic.
No, reality is how things are. Your model of reality is panentheistic, because you're locating God in it at the convergence of cause and effect, rather than as simply the first cause. That allows you to hold onto the traditional thinking, rational God, but only by rejecting the orthodox separation of God from Creation.
quote:
The mystery of God, the Trinity, Perichoresis and the hypostatic union of Christ, God the vicarious human are givens, observed not rationalizable, reductionable.
Er, not observed. As you well know.
[ 17. April 2011, 11:51: Message edited by: Dave Marshall ]
Posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard (# 368) on
:
Au contraire, I'll deal with = vs > later! The awkward eternal reality of the perichoretic triune primum mobile cannot be reduced, by-passed, ignored.
Which your last para does.
It's THE premiss.
ALL theology is contingent upon it.
You may be right in other regards, > !=, WITH that premiss, but we'll see.
UNLESS I'm missing something, UNLESS you are having your cake and eat it? That you ARE saying that, are accepting the orthodox God AND saying > != ?
I don't think you are.
Mahlzeit!
Posted by Dave Marshall (# 7533) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
The awkward eternal reality of the perichoretic triune primum mobile cannot be reduced, by-passed, ignored [...] ALL theology is contingent upon it.
Depends on our point of view. If we want in whatever sense the approval of historical institutional orthodoxy, I guess you'd be right. For making contemporary sense with a mindset that assumes a scientific view of reality, it's only one possibility to be explored. And in my view rejected, if ultimate consistency and coherence have value.
quote:
I don't think you are [accepting the orthodox God].
Not by your description. But I think that's really based on a (very old) literalisation of story. I suspect I'm not far from the essential idea of God that originally underpinned it.
Posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard (# 368) on
:
Non-relational? A unitarian ground of being? Not even that as you can't not believe in the eternity of creation, therefore god is just an attribute of [eternal] stuff?
Where do you project that in to the text?
Posted by Dave Marshall (# 7533) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
Non-relational?
Not at all. An eternal creator is in an eternal relationship with what is being created. It's only orthodoxy's hang-up that God must be free to not create that sees this as a problem.
quote:
A unitarian ground of being?
Why not?
quote:
therefore god is just an attribute of [eternal] stuff?
For an audience unattached to a thinking, rational, loving God that would be almost right. But I wouldn't have thought 'just' was appropriate when that 'attribute' is by definition the creator and sustainer all that is.
[ 17. April 2011, 17:27: Message edited by: Dave Marshall ]
Posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard (# 368) on
:
Hmmmm. It would seem that the single, discrete, once in an eternity incarnation has to be the ... crux of the matter.
As the orthodox God incarnated once then there is only one creation, finite with respect to time: with a beginning. Of the increase of which there will be no end.
So what was God doing for eternity before doing that? Being, Becoming, Boogying - the perichoretic perichorea, Creating.
God doesn't have to think? Mine does. He thinks all creation without raising a sweat. To relate within Himself between His Persons? Mine does. Before and now independently of creation.
He isn't just relational with regard to creation. He is relational.
He is ... mush. Not explanation offered. As with Job. None we could compute. Ever. Eternally, pre- extra- meta- creationally ineffable. Mysterious. Other. So. And good. Daddy.
Posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard (# 368) on
:
No explanation ... it seems that both you and the truly imparsimonious neo-Platonists are struggling to make creation constant ins some way to make God constant.
To the neo-Platonists all future creation has to have already happened in God from eternity so that He remains unchanged.
Tail wagging dog or what.
Your more rational, parsimonious approach goes too far by making God dependent on creating.
He ain't.
Posted by Freddy (# 365) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
you and the truly imparsimonious neo-Platonists are struggling to make creation constant ins some way to make God constant.
But God is constant. That means that our ideas of creation need to adjust.
Posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard (# 368) on
:
God created. Once upon a time. Incarnated. Once. It's our ideas of constancy that need to change.
Our childish, pagan, imparsimonious, inconsistent, incoherent, absurd, perverted, heterodox ideas:
All of the future eternity of creation has to be known, have happened in God to comply with Him unchanging?!
Tail. Dog. Wagging.
Posted by Dave Marshall (# 7533) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
Your more rational, parsimonious approach goes too far by making God dependent on creating.
No, I'm suggesting creating and eternal are the essential features of what God means. Anything else that we can or cannot rationally say about God follows from that. The alternative is an arbitrary invented god. That's handy if we have particular features in mind, but useless as the basis for metaphysical extensions to a worldview we want to have faith in.
Posted by Freddy (# 365) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
God created. Once upon a time. Incarnated. Once. It's our ideas of constancy that need to change.
Are you sure that it is not our anthropomorphic ideas that need to change. God is not just a large man with superhuman powers who suddenly decides "I think I'll create something today!"
God is unchanging, but the created universe changes constantly - that is its very nature, and the nature of time.
It seems to us as if God changes, decides to act, decides to be incarnated. But it is we who change.
quote:
Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
All of the future eternity of creation has to be known, have happened in God to comply with Him unchanging?!
Not at all. God is outside of time. Humanity is truly free. The certainty of the outcome is based on the fact of God's infinite wisdom, not any kind of predestination.
The point is that it's not forced and can't be forced, otherwise the purposes of love that are God's very nature won't be fulfilled. This is the point of time.
Posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard (# 368) on
:
Yeah I'm sure.
God is anthropomorphic.
Posted by Freddy (# 365) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
God is anthropomorphic.
You don't mean that humans are created in God's image and likeness?
Posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard (# 368) on
:
No.
Posted by Freddy (# 365) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
No.
Is that your final answer?
Posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard (# 368) on
:
Is that your final question?
Posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard (# 368) on
:
And Dave, you mean 'Yes'. Which is heterodox. God is not defined eternally by creation, which IS defined by God.
Posted by Freddy (# 365) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
Is that your final question?
I don't know. But thanks for asking.
[ 19. April 2011, 21:33: Message edited by: Freddy ]
Posted by Freddy (# 365) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
God is not defined eternally by creation, which IS defined by God.
Yes, creation is defined by God. God is not defined by creation.
He does, however, define Himself in relation to creation. This is why He seems to operate in time, to make decisions, to act or not act as He chooses.
Posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard (# 368) on
:
Now He does.
Posted by Dave Marshall (# 7533) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
And Dave, you mean 'Yes'.
No, there's no dependency within the definition of a single entity.
quote:
Which is heterodox.
Why is that so significant for you?
quote:
God is not defined eternally by creation
Not what I said. God means eternal and creating.
Posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard (# 368) on
:
Same thing Dave.
Posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard (# 368) on
:
And why's it significant? Because it's so tempting. Because I've been there. Because orthodoxy doesn't make sense. But there it is. Half way through eternity God created. First a supernatural realm, then aeons later a 'natural' one (the latter came as such a surprise it caused the former to fall perhaps).
Since Augustine at least we've been proudly telling Him how He had to have done that or more recently that He didn't to comply with our philosophy.
How ... human.
Posted by Freddy (# 365) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
Now He does.
He always did.
Posted by Freddy (# 365) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
Half way through eternity God created. First a supernatural realm, then aeons later a 'natural' one (the latter came as such a surprise it caused the former to fall perhaps).
I assume you're joking about eternity being halfway over before God got around to creating. Was He loitering over His morning coffee?
Yes, the supernatural realm came first, and then the natural one through it. How did you know that?
But aeons didn't elapse between the two events. They were simultaneous, part of the same instantaneous process.
Posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard (# 368) on
:
Nope and nope.
Posted by sharkshooter (# 1589) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
... Half way through eternity ...
Eternity is not a very long time-line, it is the absence of time, so there is no such thing as "half-way through eternity".
Posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard (# 368) on
:
That's nice dear.
Posted by Freddy (# 365) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
That's nice dear.
So you are saying that the movie "From Here to Eternity" is based on shaky assumptions about the nature of eternity?
It reminds me of a description of how Santa Clause is able to distribute presents to everyone on earth in one night. He spends half the night on the first house, and half of the remaining time on each successive stop. ![[Paranoid]](graemlins/paranoid.gif)
[ 20. April 2011, 19:44: Message edited by: Freddy ]
Posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard (# 368) on
:
... that's nice dear. Why it reminds you of that particular Zeno's paradox I'm not sure.
Well I am.
Ever decreasing halves eh? Eternity is lots of time. Not timelessness. Which is an instant. Of time. Of no duration. An abstraction. Unreal. Meaningless unless you're doing calculus.
Unless you mean that all time, all nows are in Now in trying to make God "timeless". By which you mean changeless. For all ... time.
A-doo-doo-doo. A-dah-dah-dah.
Submit.
Accept the givens. They are uncomfortable, gob-smacking. Ineffable. But they're not risible. Meaningless. !parsnip.
They don't distort God and pretend that He is omni beyond meaning and therefore limited in love.
For eternity God did not create. Then He did. Quite possibly in two phases. 13.75 Ga into the second phase (which may have been concurrent with the first OR older, if the phases are states) He stepped in to it in phase two feet.
And He didn't change in ANY meaningful regard in ANY of this.
He was, is and shall be good throughout.
I don't see a problem.
I must be simple minded.
Posted by Freddy (# 365) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
Eternity is lots of time. Not timelessness. Which is an instant. Of time. Of no duration. An abstraction. Unreal. Meaningless unless you're doing calculus.
Wow. You really don't believe that God is apart from time? ![[Confused]](confused.gif)
Do you also think that He is somewhere in outer space?
Posted by cliffdweller (# 13338) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Freddy:
quote:
Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
Eternity is lots of time. Not timelessness. Which is an instant. Of time. Of no duration. An abstraction. Unreal. Meaningless unless you're doing calculus.
Wow. You really don't believe that God is apart from time?
Do you also think that He is somewhere in outer space?
don't mock, dear, it's a viable theological position.
Open & Process theologians believe either that God is in time because time is an inherent & eternal reality, or that God voluntarily places himself within time in order to have a relationship with created beings.
Posted by Freddy (# 365) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by cliffdweller:
don't mock, dear, it's a viable theological position.
I don't mean to mock. I just didn't realize that this is where Martin was coming from.
quote:
Originally posted by cliffdweller:
Open & Process theologians believe either that God is in time because time is an inherent & eternal reality, or that God voluntarily places himself within time in order to have a relationship with created beings.
I see. Doesn't that imply that God is also within space?
Certainly Jesus was within space, and I see Him as God. But I'm not thinking I could go out and physically find Him at this point, so He is no longer within space.
Don't time and space necessarily go together?
Posted by cliffdweller (# 13338) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Freddy:
quote:
[QUOTE]Originally posted by cliffdweller:
Open & Process theologians believe either that God is in time because time is an inherent & eternal reality, or that God voluntarily places himself within time in order to have a relationship with created beings.
I see. Doesn't that imply that God is also within space?
Certainly Jesus was within space, and I see Him as God. But I'm not thinking I could go out and physically find Him at this point, so He is no longer within space.
Don't time and space necessarily go together?
We're getting "above my pay grade" here, but as I understand it, Einstein believed they did, and most modern physicists would agree. But I am given to understand there are alternate pardigms that de-couple the two.
But again, beyond my very rudimentary knowledge base to go much further. I am drawn to Open Theism for some of its theological implications, but can't really comment on it from a scientific basis.
Posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard (# 368) on
:
Ay up cliffdweller.
Null is the only entity that is timeless. Everything-less.
Anything not-null times. Exists. Is. To be is to time.
Is God? Does God?
Just as time happens in God, so does space Freddy.
And 'A' is for Apple!
Posted by Freddy (# 365) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
Just as time happens in God, so does space Freddy.
I take that to mean that God is not apart from the physical world. That He exists in space and time. Does this mean that heaven and hell also exist in space and time? Do I read you right?
Posted by sharkshooter (# 1589) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by cliffdweller:
...that God voluntarily places himself within time in order to have a relationship with created beings.
Time is as much a created thing as space and matter.
It is God who was, not nothing. Granted, space, time and matter did not exist, but God is not any of those, nor is He defined nor constrained by any of them.
And, yes, God voluntarily placed Himself within time in order to have a relationship with created beings - that is what the incarnation of the second person of the trinity is all about. Old Testament revelations of God are all about Him interacting with humankind without placing Himself within time.
Posted by LeRoc (# 3216) on
:
I personally feel attracted to Panentheism: God exists outside of space-time, but is at the same time intrinsically present in every part of it (because She chose so).
Posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard (# 368) on
:
No Freddy.
So, SS, if God is not constrained by time, whatever that means to you as He doesn't even have it as an attribute to you - it means nothing to me, does He know if it's going to rain tomorrow?
now is in God LeRoc. Then isn't. It's gone - past - or not happened, null, indeterminate - future. Your panentheism is Bender God if you mean all nows.
Posted by cliffdweller (# 13338) on
:
Open Theists have done a lot of writing in the last few years on the relationship of space & time, and what it means to conceptualize a God who exists (whether inherently or voluntarily) within time. Like I said, it's far beyond my expertise so I'll defer to them. Just trying to make that point that the common assumption that God "must" be outside of time is not as "just so" as is being presented here.
Posted by LeRoc (# 3216) on
:
quote:
Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard: Your panentheism is Bender God if you mean all nows.
You mean this Bender? In that case you are right, of course.
Posted by cliffdweller (# 13338) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by sharkshooter:
Time is as much a created thing as space and matter.
IYHO.
quote:
Originally posted by sharkshooter:
Old Testament revelations of God are all about Him interacting with humankind without placing Himself within time.
Really? Such as? I can't think of any. Can't even imagine what that would look like.
Posted by sharkshooter (# 1589) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by cliffdweller:
... quote:
Originally posted by sharkshooter:
Old Testament revelations of God are all about Him interacting with humankind without placing Himself within time.
Really? Such as? I can't think of any. Can't even imagine what that would look like.
I'll leave out the creation story, including the Garden of Eden, but we're still left with many, including...
Burning bush
Mount Sinai
Jacob's fight
Daniel's furnace
Multiple appearances described as dreams or voices.
Posted by sharkshooter (# 1589) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
...does He know if it's going to rain tomorrow?
...
Of course He does. But then, we already had a thread on that.
Posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard (# 368) on
:
How? There is a confluence here.
If there is no such thing as time for God, there isn't for us either. I'm experiencing every now of my life as fully as I'm experiencing this one. Now.
Meaningless isn't it.
Posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard (# 368) on
:
And I've just noticed your response to CD SS.
Uh?
We are obviously separated by a common language. Your time isn't mine and neither of us can possibly transfer our meaning of it to the other.
What interactions with us did God have IN time might be a shorter list for you.
What is it?
Posted by sharkshooter (# 1589) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
...We are obviously separated by a common language. ...
Well, that's a given.
Posted by sharkshooter (# 1589) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
...What interactions with us did God have IN time might be a shorter list for you.
...
Ever heard of Jesus?
Posted by sharkshooter (# 1589) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
...If there is no such thing as time for God, there isn't for us either. ...
That does not follow. Gravity does not exist for God, why should time?
Posted by Crœsos (# 238) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by sharkshooter:
quote:
Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
...If there is no such thing as time for God, there isn't for us either. ...
That does not follow. Gravity does not exist for God, why should time?
Does gravity not exist for God, or is He simply unaffected by it?
Posted by cliffdweller (# 13338) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by sharkshooter:
quote:
Originally posted by cliffdweller:
... quote:
Originally posted by sharkshooter:
Old Testament revelations of God are all about Him interacting with humankind without placing Himself within time.
Really? Such as? I can't think of any. Can't even imagine what that would look like.
I'll leave out the creation story, including the Garden of Eden, but we're still left with many, including...
Burning bush
Mount Sinai
Jacob's fight
Daniel's furnace
Multiple appearances described as dreams or voices.
Can't think of anything in any of those stories that specifies that God is outside of time. In fact, they could all be used to argue the reverse-- they all have to do w/ God appearing in particular space & time. But nothing in any of those stories tells us one way or another whether or not God's "normal" is in our outside of time as we know it.
Posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard (# 368) on
:
Ever heard of Melchizedek ? Ever heard of the Angel of the Lord ? El Shaddai ? Yahweh ? Adonai ? Theophanies that according to you, for you, not only didn't experience time, happen in time, despite our observing them, hearing them, interacting with them, feeding them, walking with them, talking with them face to face but have no attribute of time (despite being the One who WAS, IS and SHALL BE) unlike all else that exists, inextricably. Synonymously.
God does not exist in, although certainly partook of, created time, now. It exists in Him. God exists. Times. Is. Happens. And that defining aspect, synonym of existence is not in Him. It is OF Him. It defines Him as inextricably as love. There is no God apart from love or time. Separate from love. Or time.
Unless you believe His Sovereignty and Justice are.
He continues, as He declares above, unquantized, unlike created time (and therefore gravity), itself inextricably defined with space, themselves inextricably dependent on stuff, all of which He wills indeterminately from 13.75 Ga ago.
You say God does not experience time and furthemore has no attribute of time. He therefore does not experience. He therefore does not. Has no. Isn't.
Fine.
That works for you. It is absolutely meaningless to me. All our future indeterminate nows have all happened for you, have all been determined by having happened.
Fine. Whatever you have to believe. There is no freedom at all for God or creation in that. Fine.
Doesn't work for me and never will. Can't. It certainly solves the problem of how God knows that it will rain tomorrow without determining it, it's all happened. All future eternity.
Fine. As long as God didn't make any of it happen that caused someone to be damned.
Good luck with that.
I'm sure many here find that meaningful, real, necessary, mandatory. Freddy for one.
I can't and I don't feel the lack. Like I'm supposed to feel for not being Roman or Greek. Without realising it.
I'm sure I don't know what I'm missing.
Posted by sharkshooter (# 1589) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by cliffdweller:
...In fact, they could all be used to argue the reverse-- they all have to do w/ God appearing in particular space & time. ...
Yes, God appeared in time, but He was not constrained by it until the incarnation. He just appeared when, where, how, in what form He choose to.
Only as Jesus was He subject to time, where He had to experience events chronologically. That is what I meant by not being constrained by time. He was not older, nor younger in any of those appearances, He just was.
[ 22. April 2011, 04:04: Message edited by: sharkshooter ]
Posted by sharkshooter (# 1589) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
...
Fine.
...
That's the closest thing you came to an understandable sentence in that whole post. Mind writing English once in a while?
Posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard (# 368) on
:
So God can step in to tomorrow even though it hasn't happened?
Does He keep stepping in to the past too?
I suppose He must. He HAS to.
The inifinite nows are all now after all.
And in which nows does He not exist?
Do you mind thinking about the semantic implications of your beliefs once in a while?
Posted by Freddy (# 365) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
Do you mind thinking about the semantic implications of your beliefs once in a while?
Semantics. Good. It is true that there is nothing but now as far as time is concerned. The past and future are real but they aren't actual at any given moment.
There are other implications, though, and I think some of them are what is behind this thread.
If God is in a time/space world just as we are, then we must imagine that He was been around for a very long time before we arrived and will be around for a long time after we have gone. The amounts of time involved, as Yorick pointed out, are staggering.
If eternity is nothing but a very long time, you can't avoid running into the question of what God did before creation. You can't help but deal with it and be defeated by it.
If time and space only come into existence with Creation, however, then God exists apart from time. There is no such thing as "before creation."
This is more logical and satisfactory to my way of thinking.
Posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard (# 368) on
:
Ah hah Freddy. And Happy Easter to us all. I LOVE eternity. It scares me to death. The reality of forever and ever. And we are just starting. Eternity is a mind blowing fact and God inhabits it. He has ALWAYS been up to something. Busy from eternity, for LOTS of time ... BEFORE He created.
You put another entity between God and eternity, it's still there.
It's ALL about disposition.
There is NOTHING after us. We go on FOREVER. We have eternal life.
In Jesus.
Yorick is a poor, shivering pagan, meaninglessly waiting for endless oblvion, yet to know he is eternal.
Christ will be risen in three days.
Posted by cliffdweller (# 13338) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by sharkshooter:
quote:
Originally posted by cliffdweller:
...In fact, they could all be used to argue the reverse-- they all have to do w/ God appearing in particular space & time. ...
Yes, God appeared in time, but He was not constrained by it until the incarnation. He just appeared when, where, how, in what form He choose to.
.
A good, orthodox opinion. But again, my point was that showing evidence of God showing up in space/time is certainly not evidence that God is ordinarily not "in" time.
Posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard (# 368) on
:
So did He ever show up tomorrow before He showed up yesterday?
Posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard (# 368) on
:
And Freddy, how you make things real when they aren't actual is the Gostak Distimming the Doshes to me.
Posted by Dave Marshall (# 7533) on
:
I think it's valid to say human experience is subjectively real. The past is an objective reality. It's just ultimately only an imprint on now.
Posted by Freddy (# 365) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
And Freddy, how you make things real when they aren't actual is the Gostak Distimming the Doshes to me.
"Actual" means present, as I'm using it. Maybe that's French. ![[Cool]](cool.gif)
If only the present moment is real then it is true that we are going to have a hard time dealing with the point of time.
Posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard (# 368) on
:
Aye, actual, now, real. The past WAS. If we have hard a time dealing with time we will have a hard time dealing with God. Which we do. God exists. God is, becomes, times. They're all synonyms. And they deconstruct further. God. Is. Time. That's it. A sentence? Three synonyms. Statements. One. All other existence, endurance, time, phenomena (quantal AND supernatural) is thought by God.
There is no need for the future to have already happened. God will will it. Determinedly indeterminate AND determinate.
Posted by Freddy (# 365) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
There is no need for the future to have already happened. God will will it. Determinedly indeterminate AND determinate.
Most sensible things yet.
Posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard (# 368) on
:
Steady Freddy!
Posted by cliffdweller (# 13338) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
Aye, actual, now, real. The past WAS. If we have hard a time dealing with time we will have a hard time dealing with God. Which we do. God exists. God is, becomes, times. They're all synonyms. And they deconstruct further. God. Is. Time. That's it. A sentence? Three synonyms. Statements. One. All other existence, endurance, time, phenomena (quantal AND supernatural) is thought by God.
This reminds me of the 70s and my youthful Kahil Gibran days....
Posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard (# 368) on
:
Which half?
Posted by IngoB (# 8700) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
I see God, reality - eternal, relational, personaed-personned, gestalt, mutually interpenetrating, fractal love - as constantly changing, in process, flowing, concurrently, infinitely in every parallel state as alluded to by the imagery of the Holy Ghost. All of it. Now. No one clock ticks in God. Harmonics ensue.
Panta rei, then. Yet the crucial error occurred already in the second word, equating "reality" with "God". You are basically talking about the "prime matter" of Aristotelian(-inspired) philosophy here, the state of things "without form", as encountered also in Genesis. It is quite an interesting, and perhaps even true, assertion that we should consider the "void" of prime matter not as nothingness but as the absence of restraint on everything-at-once. Yet this state of matter is something to ponder, not to worship. Chaos is not a name of God, Logos is. Let there be light, according to his Word, and therefore also darkness. God is the knife's edge of eternal definiteness separating first something from nothing, then one thing from the other.
quote:
Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
There is no basal, hypostatic ground of being from which God emerges against which God is measured. No pulse. But God surely pulses. The pulses pulse. There is no hierarchy of being. There is true irreducible complexity. God is self-emergent. Constantly. Eternally. God is. Becoming. Constantly. God is the measure. God IS Time.
This is mere pantheism, you truly are regressing back to the Greeks. An emergent god is no God, because it has no power to explain how there ever is something to emerge from. "Irreducible complexity" is a scientific eupheism for "I am incapable of analyzing this stuff", and "emergence" for "I know all the parts but still do not understand what is happening here". They tell us about the limitations of human mind and effort, perhaps, but are no basis for creation. If your god "pulses", then I can count these pulses, and I can compare this count to other "pulses" I see in nature. I can therefore time your god. To escape my empirical gaze there, you have to redefine your "divine pulses" into some unmeasurable sentiments, establishing a sloppy philosophy from which no understanding of creation emerges, but merely the irreducible complexity of the slack jaw.
quote:
Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
God can change what He wills. Except the past of course. That would be ... immoral. Inconsistent. Absurd. That would create multiverses. The floor lurches for a moment, but no.
Actually, my favorite explanation of the fall is that God changed the past, now and future of all creation around the fulcrum of Adam's action - which is moral, consistent, understandable and does not create even a second universe (since what God does not keep in being simply is not). The world has lurched around the floor.
quote:
Originally posted by Dave Marshall:
quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
Consider General Relativity.
You'll be more familiar with this than me, but a process model of metaphysical creation requires only that there is no discontinuity of time between adjacent points in space. I wasn't aware General Relativity implies this.
This is not what I was thinking about. I was speculatively defining away time and space as independent entities in favor of a strictly relational picture between events, of which time and space are mere measures. However, in General Relativity spactime acts as a real entity. For example, the curvature of spacetime that the sun imposes on spacetime is what keeps earth running in its orbit. I'm not sure whether such a "physical" role of spacetime can be redefined in terms of relational operators...
quote:
Originally posted by Dave Marshall:
I think God can only be One that simply creates - no complexity.
This is actually right, but I think not quite in the way you mean it. It is a proper answer to Dawkins, who apparently believes that God must be "more complex" than the universe He creates (though this answer probably goes over his head). It is however not a definition of what God is as such, only of what God is with regards to creation.
quote:
Originally posted by Dave Marshall:
Mind doesn't fit God because the idea drags in a whole raft of time-bound, memory-requiring attributes unrelated to the rest of the model. As does incarnation. Both are imparsimonious. They confuse consistent model-building with explanatory story-telling. I want to be able to distinguish between the two.
Firstly, the incarnation is utterly imparsimonious and indeed barely thinkable. (People who just accept it have little intellectual understanding of what is being asserted.) It also follows in no way or form logically from observing the universe. It is not entirely unpredictable, indeed it is eminently fitting, but only in terms of the Judeo-Christian salvation narrative. The incarnation has no "philosophical" motivation as such, and its truth value rests on faith in a story - the Christian story. So it simply makes no sense to use the incarnation in your argument here, since nobody is fundamentally disagreeing with you there.
Secondly, the Mind of God is of course neither time-bound nor does it involve memory. You are simply projecting human mind on God. Why would you be surprised that this does not work? It is really the other way around. By thinking about what features of the human mind could in some analogical way be predicated of God at all, you can gain some insight into what is actually crucial to mind as such (rather than to the human realization thereof). For example, God's thought cannot be discursive, so discursion is not fundamental to mind. If you are interested, you can of course go back to Aquinas, who has two entire sections devoted to questions about the mind of God...
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Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
God is anthropomorphic.
Bullshit. Man is theomorphic.
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Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
For eternity God did not create. Then He did.
You pride yourself in believing in square circles.
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Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
If there is no such thing as time for God, there isn't for us either.
A complete non sequitur completely accommodated by the incarnation.
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Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
God. Is. Time. That's it. A sentence? Three synonyms.
Two synonyms, one falsehood.
You realize that you are unintentionally giving an extended argument for the necessity of the incarnation, right? God incarnated so that Martin had a chance in hell to believe in Him...
Posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard (# 368) on
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Er, what's the incarnation, good witless doctor (Who in Adam?) of taurine scatology? Man-shaped God. God come down. Man lifted up. God is NOW vicariously human.
He wasn't always (except in your Tardis).
I see that you are enjoying blessings of which I cannot possibly be aware that I'm missing.
I admire the way you just ignore that that you cannot possibly deal with. Despite being a Time Lord.
And twist words like any good rhetorician. Self-emergent, is, as you know, poetic, nonsense, the end of emergence, like the end of causality in self-causal. Analytically meaningless (as EVERYTHING is as Thom realised one good day a tad later than Gautama Siddhartha and Solomon and Wittgenstein did a tad later yet). Apart from being ripe with meaning out of reach. Ineffable.
Unlike those who pretend it isn't REAL.
Lots and lots and ... of time.
Eternity.
Will we carry on this debate while I clean your lavatory in heaven up the pipe from hell if I'm allowed?
Posted by IconiumBound (# 754) on
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quote:
Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
There is no basal, hypostatic ground of being from which God emerges against which God is measured. No pulse. But God surely pulses. The pulses pulse.
Being "a bear of little brain" I am hesitant to step into this deep, deep discusion but how about this thought.
If the first thing that filled the void was light, does not light have the wave property of frequency? Frequency is a pulse. Could light be God?
[ 25. April 2011, 12:32: Message edited by: IconiumBound ]
Posted by Crœsos (# 238) on
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quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
quote:
Originally posted by Dave Marshall:
I think God can only be One that simply creates - no complexity.
This is actually right, but I think not quite in the way you mean it. It is a proper answer to Dawkins, who apparently believes that God must be "more complex" than the universe He creates (though this answer probably goes over his head). It is however not a definition of what God is as such, only of what God is with regards to creation.
Dawkins' argument about complexity is actually an answer to a specific school of Creationist thought that claims God must exist because the Universe is too huge and complex to have arisen without a guiding intelligence behind it. Dawkins simply points out that the God postulated by these Creationist is even more huge and complex than the Universe and thus, by the same resoning, must have something even more complex to create Him (which in turn would be even more complex and need something to create It, which would . . . etc.)
quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
Secondly, the Mind of God is of course neither time-bound nor does it involve memory. You are simply projecting human mind on God. Why would you be surprised that this does not work? It is really the other way around. By thinking about what features of the human mind could in some analogical way be predicated of God at all, you can gain some insight into what is actually crucial to mind as such (rather than to the human realization thereof). For example, God's thought cannot be discursive, so discursion is not fundamental to mind. If you are interested, you can of course go back to Aquinas, who has two entire sections devoted to questions about the mind of God...
I'm always impressed by how many people seem to definitively know the mind of God. Of course, most of these people seem to disagree vehemently about exactly what's on God's mind. Maybe God's schizophrenic?
Posted by Dave Marshall (# 7533) on
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quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
[God can only be One that simply creates - no complexity] is however not a definition of what God is as such, only of what God is with regards to creation.
Of course. As with anything we can usefully say about God.
quote:
the Mind of God is of course neither time-bound nor does it involve memory. You are simply projecting human mind on God. Why would you be surprised that this does not work?
Take away the time-bound aspects of human mind and I'm not sure what you have left to reasonably call Mind.
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It is really the other way around. By thinking about what features of the human mind could in some analogical way be predicated of God at all, you can gain some insight into what is actually crucial to mind as such (rather than to the human realization thereof).
You're forgetting that I place no reliance whatsover on the truth about God's Mind that has been supernaturally revealed to the Roman Catholic Church. For me talk of mind cannot but be analogical, using aspects of human mind to say something about God.
Posted by no_prophet (# 15560) on
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I imagine that I am an ant, on the limb of a tree, carrying back bits of leaf to the ant burrow 10 m away. If I could think, I'd be thinking of leaves and trees and ant burrows and the hazards of walking on the ground, what with rain, predators and scent trails getting scrambled. And I would ponder why leaves are where they are, and wonder about other trees and know that when I'm up on the end of the branch that I see trees farther than I can see. Are there ants on all of them? Are there forests of ants everywhere? Is every species haplo-diploid such that we are all girls and just make a boy to do it with the queen and then abandon him and go back to being girls together? And I would think God looks like an ant and is definitely a girl, probably looking a bit like our queen.
I think I would then marvel at the grandness and mystery of life, and even if we had ant scientists, I'm guessing they could get no where near things like intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarines, playing the organ, and singing. Thus I suspect us humans are on some branch somewhere wondering about it, and just getting started after 8 or 10 thousand years of so-called civilization.
Posted by IngoB (# 8700) on
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quote:
Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
Self-emergent, is, as you know, poetic, nonsense, the end of emergence, like the end of causality in self-causal. Analytically meaningless (as EVERYTHING is as Thom realised one good day a tad later than Gautama Siddhartha and Solomon and Wittgenstein did a tad later yet). Apart from being ripe with meaning out of reach. Ineffable.
You are no Zen master, so stop fronting so hard. The problem with your appeal to the ineffable is twofold. Firstly, it is thoroughly hypocritical. Everything turns ineffable only when your position becomes indefensible, otherwise you happily hump Ockham's razor. Secondly, the effing ineffable cannot be expressed, at all. Thus it follows by definition that nothing we can talk about is ineffable. Therefore plenty is effable about God, because we can talk a lot about God (as Scripture does as well). If you disagree, feel free to shut up already. After all: Whereof one cannot speak, one must pass over in silence.
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Originally posted by IconiumBound:
Could light be God?
No.
quote:
Originally posted by Crœsos:
Dawkins simply points out that the God postulated by these Creationist is even more huge and complex than the Universe
Really? Is Dawkins explicitly quoting the Creationists themselves declaring that God is "more complex" than the universe? Or is he merely arguing that their God must be so? I bet the latter is the case.
quote:
Originally posted by Crœsos:
I'm always impressed by how many people seem to definitively know the mind of God. Of course, most of these people seem to disagree vehemently about exactly what's on God's mind. Maybe God's schizophrenic?
Nobody has claimed to know the mind of God in the sense of knowing what's on God's mind. What we are discussing is rather what it could mean to say that God has a mind. One easy conclusion is for example that God can never have anything on His mind, because that sort of shifting focus of attention is clearly finite and time-bound, thus not Divine.
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Originally posted by Dave Marshall:
quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
[God can only be One that simply creates - no complexity] is however not a definition of what God is as such, only of what God is with regards to creation.
Of course. As with anything we can usefully say about God.
Not true. One can go further by having faith in human reason, yielding metaphysics, and/or faith in revelation, yielding theology. I have faith in both.
quote:
Originally posted by Dave Marshall:
Take away the time-bound aspects of human mind and I'm not sure what you have left to reasonably call Mind.
Intellect ("understanding") and will ("seeking of the good"), basically - not analogous in operation, but in effect.
quote:
Originally posted by Dave Marshall:
quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
It is really the other way around. By thinking about what features of the human mind could in some analogical way be predicated of God at all, you can gain some insight into what is actually crucial to mind as such (rather than to the human realization thereof).
You're forgetting that I place no reliance whatsover on the truth about God's Mind that has been supernaturally revealed to the Roman Catholic Church. For me talk of mind cannot but be analogical, using aspects of human mind to say something about God.
I'm sorry, but you response has nothing to do with what I said. If you believe nothing revealed to the RCC, even if you believe that God does not have a mind, you can still reasonably do what I said as a mental exercise in order to arrive at a better idea about mind.
Posted by Crœsos (# 238) on
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quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
quote:
Originally posted by Crœsos:
Dawkins simply points out that the God postulated by these Creationist is even more huge and complex than the Universe
Really? Is Dawkins explicitly quoting the Creationists themselves declaring that God is "more complex" than the universe? Or is he merely arguing that their God must be so? I bet the latter is the case.
Dawkins attributes the argument to Fred Hoyle, although it's a second hand attribution through Hoyle's colleague Chandra Wickramasinghe. The specifics can be found in Chapter 4 of The God Delusion. The argument as presented certainly doesn't seem at odds with Hoyle's known positions on the matter.
quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
quote:
Originally posted by Crœsos:
I'm always impressed by how many people seem to definitively know the mind of God. Of course, most of these people seem to disagree vehemently about exactly what's on God's mind. Maybe God's schizophrenic?
Nobody has claimed to know the mind of God in the sense of knowing what's on God's mind. What we are discussing is rather what it could mean to say that God has a mind. One easy conclusion is for example that God can never have anything on His mind . . .
You know, I think I can agree with that assertion, though for a very different reason than yours. ![[Big Grin]](biggrin.gif)
Seriously though, I find it hard to accept an argument that the theological equivalent of psychology is beyond our comprehension but the theological equivalent of neurology has "easy conclusion[s]".
Posted by IngoB (# 8700) on
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quote:
Originally posted by Crœsos:
The argument as presented certainly doesn't seem at odds with Hoyle's known positions on the matter.
Fred Hoyle? Some excellent scientific work, some cool SF, but whatever has he got to do with Christian positions on creation?
quote:
Originally posted by Crœsos:
Seriously though, I find it hard to accept an argument that the theological equivalent of psychology is beyond our comprehension but the theological equivalent of neurology has "easy conclusion[s]".
Of course we are attempting neither psychology nor neurology of God (as God) here, since He has neither a psyche nor a brain. We are doing specific metaphysics, though the answers are easy because we are really just looking at conceptual consistency - thus we are using logic.
Posted by Crœsos (# 238) on
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quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
quote:
Originally posted by Crœsos:
The argument as presented certainly doesn't seem at odds with Hoyle's known positions on the matter.
Fred Hoyle? Some excellent scientific work, some cool SF, but whatever has he got to do with Christian positions on creation?
First, I find it interesting that you automatically equate "Creationis[m]" with "Christian positions on creation". On a more serious note, are you disagreeing with Dawkins' actual argument, or are you simply disagreeing with your idea of what Dawkins must be saying? You seem awfully unfamiliar with his actual writing to be making such definitive statements about it.
Posted by IngoB (# 8700) on
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quote:
Originally posted by Crœsos:
On a more serious note, are you disagreeing with Dawkins' actual argument, or are you simply disagreeing with your idea of what Dawkins must be saying? You seem awfully unfamiliar with his actual writing to be making such definitive statements about it.
Quite so, I have not read any material from Dawkins that is not freely available, including the book in question. If I had read it, then I would not be asking questions about what precisely Dawkins says - I would likely remember or simply look it up myself.
Anyway, the following in your words "God must exist because the Universe is too huge and complex to have arisen without a guiding intelligence behind it ... the God postulated ... is even more huge and complex than the Universe" is a non sequitur. I was asking who made that non sequitur. Apparently Fred Hoyle then, originally?
Posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard (# 368) on
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Good Doctor. Thomistry mate. Straw on the wind. A distraction from that which you cannot address. Care to give a reason why God does not
1 a : move from topic to topic without order : rambling yet
b : proceeds coherently from topic to topic
2: is marked by analytical reasoning
3: uses discourse
apart from your ipse dixit?
And is mindless?
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