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Osmosis

Do we got any real Christains here?

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I can't resist the opportunity to use a C.S. Lewis quote to make a point.

 

"We can, perhaps, conceive of a world in which God corrected the results of [the] abuse of free will by His creatures at every moment: so that a wooden beam became soft as grass when it was used as a weapon, and the air refused to obey me if I attempted to set up in it the sound waves that carry lies or insults. But such a world would be one in which wrong actions were impossible, and in which, therefore, freedom of the will would be void; nay, if the principle were carried out to its logical conclusion, evil thoughts would be impossible, for the cerebral matter which we use in thinking would refuse its task when we attempted to frame them. All matter in the neighbourhood of a wicked man would be liable to undergo unpredictable alterations. That God can and does, on occasions, modify the behaviour of matter and produce what we call miracles, is part of Christian faith; but the very conception of a common, and therefore stable, world, demands that these occasions should be extremely rare. In a game of chess you can make certain arbitrary concessions to your opponent, which stand to the ordinary rules of the game as miracles stand to the laws of nature. You can deprive yourself of a castle, or allow the other man sometimes to take back a move made inadvertently. But if you conceded everthing that at any moment happened to suit him- if all his moves were revocable and if all your pieces disappeared whenever their position on the board was not to his liking- then you could not have a game at all. So it is with the life of souls in a world: fixed laws, consequences unfolding by causal necessity, the whole natural order, are at once limits within which their common life is confined and also the sole condition under which any life is possible. Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself."

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Not sure how that point was defeated. If there are intrinsic truths that even God must follow (meaning that He has the power to do anything so long as it does not contradict itself), then to give man free will He must allow the possibility of pain. To create a world in which there was no ability to sin, or to create creatures who were incapable of it, would be useless. He would be creating something, but not something of free will. To give his creations the ability to interact, he must give them a world of shared space in which to do so, for two creatures of free will could not even conceive the notion of each other without one or both being able to exert some of its own will into that of the other. In fact, it is not conceivable that one could even understand a sense of self (which seems to be essential to free will) without the sense of "other". And as I said, without shared space, there can be no "other". So God could have done many things, but he could not create a world without the possibility of sin while creating a world of free will. It is simply a contradiction in terms.

 

Now if we are discussing whether or not it would have been better for God not to create humanity at all, we are asking a question which we cannot answer. In fact, it is an intrinsically nonsensical question. "To be or not to be", is not something we can gauge. As Lewis put it: "I am aware of no human scales in which such a portentous question can be weighed. Some comparison between one state of being and another can be made, but the attempt to compare being and not being ends in mere words. 'It would be better for me not to exist'-in what sense 'for me'? How should I, if I did not exist, profit by not existing?" It is something akin to a man who lives his whole life underground debating the beauty of a sunset. He cannot truly understand the sky, much less its beauty; he has no frame of reference (though maybe a blind man would make more sense, as a man underground still understands the idea of visual beauty, where a blind man would not have a proper reference at all). Similarly, we cannot compare existence with nonexistence because our conceptions of the two are unbalanced. We know what it is to exist, but we cannot begin to understand nonexistence. In fact, it seems that there could be no true understanding of nonexistence because how could someone who did not exist understand anything. They could not. Even among those whose existence is constant suffering (if there truly is such an existence), the question is still a hollow one.

 

If we are questioning the ability of an omniscient God to create a being who could have free will at all, being that God would know all of the actions the being would take at its creation, that is essentially questioning the entire concept of free will. It is like asking, "Could I, in fact, make a choice different from whatever choice I make?" Is it true that only what can happen will happen? Is the world truly deterministic? Again, Lewis predicted its logical counterargument. We now know, through quantum physics, that any observable system will and in fact must have inconsistencies and though we should be able to measure and predict these, effectively eliminating them, we cannot. Any attempt to do so only creates more inconsistencies. Even having all the necessary information with all our laws of physics, we cannot gauge the behavior of matter when broken down far enough. This is relevant, because of what Lewis predicted, that this creates an entry point into the traditionally viewed closed system, where a scientifically described physically probable/improbable event could be philosophically described as an action of a non-physical entity on physical reality. The "God in the machine" has been glimpsed by scientists, even if most of them don't realize it. Lewis also argued that naturalistic, complete determinism is irrational. For determinism to be true, there would have to be a rational basis for their thought. But if determinism is true, then there is no rational basis for thought, since all is determined by non-rational forces. So, if determinism claims to be true, then it must be false.

 

I have read through all of the posts here, and I don't see any of these points defeated. Perhaps if you could be more specific. A simple copy and paste, perhaps?

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Much of that is an argument from authority. You can just as easily raise these points without trying to lend them extra credibility by attaching a recognizable name to them. The ideas should be able to stand on their own merits.

 

The rest is an argument from ignorance. You're basically saying "We don't know. Therefore, God." That doesn't work. For one, it doesn't allow for distinction between what you define as God and any other possible definition. But beyond that, it's a just really weak way to argue something. It allows you to easily dismiss anything you don't have an answer for as unanswerable or beyond our comprehension, and allows you to claim any such unanswerable questions or incomplete knowledge as evidence for a god without good reason for doing so. This is the "God of the gaps" argument, and it doesn't work.

 

But since you brought up quantum physics, I'm curious to know what your understanding is of the principle you cited. Can you explain it to me in more detail? What are these "inconsistencies"? Why can they not be eliminated? Why can it be described as "an action of a non-physical entity on physical reality"? Is there a reason for this, or is it another argument from ignorance?

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If there is one person whose opinions on quantum physics in the 2011 I trust as an authority on the subject, it's a Christian apologist children's novel writer who died in 1963.

 

Although in the defense of Lewis, he's not making claims about anything; later Christian apologists are taking quotes of his out of context and applying them to quantum theory that do nothing, save demonstrating both a profound arrogance towards science as a whole and a gross lack of understanding of quantum theory.

 

And as Brooks Thompson already pointed out, "We don't yet know" is a perfectly valid scientific answer to a question, and in many instances is the only valid one.

 

"God did it" is not a scientific answer to any question, and using it as a replacement answer for any question that we currently lack the resources or knowledge to answer with rational, scientific experimentation is ridiculous.

 

A person's, or even all of science's, inability to provide a logical enough(to you) sounding answer to a question does not mean there is no answer, and it certainly doesn't mean that we must accept the answer is divine in nature.

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I understand your point about citing C.S. Lewis. I didn't mean to add weight by adding a name, I just don't like citing someone else's ideas without giving proper credit. C.S. Lewis was no more a Bible scholar than I am a physicist. That is to say that he never officially studied the subject in an educational institution. He was however a man of considerable logic, at least as far as I can follow. I quote Lewis because I find that he, being a philologist, is far better at explaining what are somewhat complicated matters. Whomever's ideas they are, they still carry the weight which their logic entails.

 

As far as quantum physics, I will not claim to be an expert (though who truly can make that claim). from what I understand, quantum physics is, at least as far as it pertains to this discussion, essentially the study of the absurdly small. On a broader scale, it studies the wave-particle duality of matter and energy. That matter, like light, which exists both as a wave and as a stream of particles. Once scientists had the math and science necessary to study these things, they began to understand that they are inconsistent They do not follow traditional laws of conservative physics. It should not be possible for something to operate as a wave and at the same time as a stream of particles. Here, you must forgive me, I am not a physicist, so I must take the word of my physics instructor from high school. What research I have done, however, seems to back up this theory. At least, it seems from what I've read that even scientists can't make the two views consistent. Thus we have quantum physics. I will give an example of something we cannot explain logically: quantum foam can move faster than the speed of light. How this is accomplished is a matter of debate, but however it is done, it is obviously not done in the same Newtonian physical sense that determines the movements of larger bodies. These inconsistencies in the dual nature of matter cannot be eliminated, because we are not able to manipulate such bodies, or even accurately predict their nature. They defy the laws of what we so far understand. This, as C.S. Lewis said, can be called the action of a non-physical entity on a physical reality, simply because these bodies, which are the building blocks of reality, do not behave in a physical way, at least not in one which can be explained using physics. Thus we create quantum physics, a new set of rules to govern that which we cannot reconcile to our traditional views. Quantum physics is interesting because it is really a collection of mostly unprovable theories used to try and explain things we can't yet understand.

 

I must apologize for the brevity of my argument against determinism from the last post. It was late, and I have kids. I should have explained more clearly that things such as quantum physics and the inconsistencies within determinism are not a proof for God. They are simply an argument against determinism. The notion that God could not create free will seems from your earlier posts to find its logic within determinism. If I am mistaken, please explain. A proof of God is something beyond my ability. And that should come as no shock. For if God could be proved by mere intelligence, then He would once again be destroying the free will we have discussed. If it were obvious in a physically provable sense that God existed, we would have little choice but to follow him. And as I have said, lack of choice is lack of life. What I am doing here is simply arguing that the existence of God is possible, and that to my understanding, it is far more likely than the alternative.

 

If I accept that human thought is based on rationality and reason, that these are true concepts, then I accept that there is within man a sense of self. If I deny rationality in defense of determinism, then I deny the sense of self and call it an illusion. To deny rationality and reason seems to me to be a paradox. If you come to me and say, see here, how reasonably and rationally, rationality and reason are simply illusions, then how is what you say to be trusted? If there is no true rationality, how could that be proved.

 

As I said before, however, nothing I have posted has been meant to be a proof of God, only a refutation of the impossibility of God. God is still a matter of faith. I am only arguing that such faith need not be intrinsically unmerited.

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I don't know that it's accurate to call quantum physics a collection of mostly unprovable theories. The Standard Model eventually came out of quantum mechanics, and has been one of the most successful theories to date in its ability to make accurate predictions about the properties of subatomic particles. Theoretical physics in general has outpaced our technology's ability to provide us with ways to test a lot of this stuff, but that's only a limitation of our technology. It doesn't mean the theories are unprovable. The things we can test have generally shown to be in line with the theory, and where they haven't, they've provided additional insights which lead to better formulations of the theory.

 

Newtonian physics has long since been shown to be inaccurate. Newton's work was certainly amazing given humanity's knowledge at that point and the technology available to Newton, and it is still extremely useful for everyday situations. But relativity definitively put to rest any notions of Newtonian physics being the standard to which everything else must adhere. That our current understanding of the way the universe works conflicts with classical physics is no surprise and certainly not a red flag.

 

The real conflict in physics today is reconciling relativity with quantum mechanics. Relativity governs the very large while quantum mechanics governs the very small. Both are extremely successful in making predictions which agree with experimental results to an astounding accuracy. But in situations where things are both incredibly massive and also incredibly small (black holes), the math breaks down. This is a flaw in our understanding, to be sure. But that doesn't mean there is an opening for any kind of supernatural explanation. It just means we have an incomplete understanding.

 

The problem with introducing a supernatural explanation is that it gets to play by different rules. Physics is expected (and rightly so) to adhere to strict standards of proof and explanation, but in those places where our current understanding is limited, a supernatural explanation can be inserted without having to adhere to any of those standards. Why? There is no basis for declaring these things to be outside of our understanding and therefore the work of a supernatural entity.

 

 

As for the free will thing, that argument was about the inconsistencies of Optimist's idea of God and his interactions with the world. I was making all those arguments within the context of what he believed. As I said in another post, I believe free will exists. I just think it is absolutely at odds with the common concept of God. You can have an omniscient god who created everything or free will, but not both.

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