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Jaketejas View Drop Down
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Points: 2162 		Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote Jaketejas Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: June 21 2019 at 15:37
Here we were talking purely about philosophy and rational thought, and we did not mention any religion.
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Jaketejas View Drop Down
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I think my previous argument, and Baldjean's comment, point to the futility of a science versus religion debate. They can be, on the one hand, fully compatible, with the religion side being a matter of faith, and science not providing satisfactory or satisfying answers on many topics (for example, moral law).
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BaldJean View Drop Down
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Originally posted by Argo2112 Argo2112 wrote:

Originally posted by BaldJean BaldJean wrote:

Originally posted by Jaketejas Jaketejas wrote:

You are right. We probably shouldn't say words like must, but in logical reasoning it happens. My bad! The reason I say that if a creator God exists, should be outside the universe is because the assumption is that God created the universe and therefore, how could the creator God exist solely within the creation, especially at the point of creation? Yes, the creator God may be able to intersect the creation once it is created, but to create within the creation at the onset seems illogical. As a result, I find it an exercise in futility to try to detect God with scientific instruments. Perhaps you have another view?

this mirrors some of my thoughts. scientists say that theological arguments should not be used in a scientific debate, and of course rightly so! what most of them however fail to realize is that the opposite of course also applies: scientific arguments should not be used in a theological debate.

the whole issue of "science versus God" is erroneous in the first place for one does by no means exclude the other

I think it depends on the issue being debated. If it's a question of " is there a God" or something where a scientific conclusion isn't possible then I agree. However if it's something like " the Bible says the Earth is only 10,000 years old"  then I think you can use science to counter that agreement since we have pretty conclusive evidence that the Earth is much older

you are confusing two things. if a theologian says "the bible says the earth is 10,000 years old" then this is a theological statement about the bible, and science has to keep out of it. however, if a theologian says "the earth is 10,000 years old because the bible says so" then he uses a theological argument in a scientific debate, which, as I mentioned before, he should not. I hope you notice the subtle difference

Edited by BaldJean - June 21 2019 at 16:19


A shot of me as High Priestess of Gaia during our fall festival. Ceterum censeo principiis obsta
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Jaketejas View Drop Down
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Again, to clarify, never did I mention the Bible. We are not even discussing religion. We are only talking about philosophy. The debate you are seeking is not with me.
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Jaketejas View Drop Down
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Maybe you should consult a theologian with a degree having to do with the statistically significant limits of detection of scientific methods of dating. And, if you believe in God, you might consider what a "day" might mean to such an entity.
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BaldJean View Drop Down
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Originally posted by Jaketejas Jaketejas wrote:

Again, to clarify, never did I mention the Bible. We are not even discussing religion. We are only talking about philosophy. The debate you are seeking is not with me.

my answer was directed at Argo2112, not you


A shot of me as High Priestess of Gaia during our fall festival. Ceterum censeo principiis obsta
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Jaketejas View Drop Down
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Points: 2162 		Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote Jaketejas Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: June 21 2019 at 17:46
Good deal. That question reminds me of the Bill Nye versus KY pastor debate. Of course, I had to watch it, but I think that the debate did not consider any of the basic points I mentioned earlier, and it seemed to try to pit science versus religion. As such, I think it was a huge step in the wrong direction.   And, I apologize for being snippy. Your question just unearthed a bad memory for me.
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Jaketejas View Drop Down
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I'm not a theologian. But, the whole "what is a day to God" argument seems to be inferred by passages like Psalms 90:4. So, one has to be careful when doing any kind of dating ... scientific (be it carbon-14 isotopic or based on theology).
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BaldJean View Drop Down
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Originally posted by Jaketejas Jaketejas wrote:

I'm not a theologian. But, the whole "what is a day to God" argument seems to be inferred by passages like Psalms 90:4. So, one has to be careful when doing any kind of dating ... scientific (be it carbon-14 isotopic or based on theology).

I personally think that this whole "God made the world in seven days" (or rather six since he rested on the seventh) is belittling God to what I call "the wandweaver". "Let there be light" and "ta-dah", there is light. isn't it much more marvelluous to have a God who thinks of such a sophisticated method of creation as evolution, a concept no human being could ever have thought of, instead of a God who just goes "let there be lions", "let there be zebras", "let there be skunks" or "let there be crocodiles"?


Edited by BaldJean - June 21 2019 at 18:50


A shot of me as High Priestess of Gaia during our fall festival. Ceterum censeo principiis obsta
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Jaketejas View Drop Down
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For anyone who reads the Bible ... as with any text ...I think you have to be careful about context. When Peter asks how many times should I forgive someone who wrongs me ... is 7 times enough? Jesus says not 7 times but 70 times 7. Do you think Jesus means at 491 sins, that's it! You're finished! Obviously not. He means there's no limit to how many times we should forgive people. So, I think we need to exercise our brains and recognize beautiful prose when we see it.
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Jaketejas View Drop Down
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Some people are so literal they believe that dinosaur bones were planted by evil spirits to confuse the humans of today. Or that humans and dinosaurs coexisted. When others read Genesis, they might think ... if I were an ancient person trying to describe the magnificence of creation through something like an evolutionary process of which I had minimal understanding, this is what it might sound like. It really is beautifully written. (Then, a bunch of really nasty stuff happens after that.)
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Jaketejas View Drop Down
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That would be a cool wand, though
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Jaketejas View Drop Down
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I'm actually at a planetarium right now
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Originally posted by YESESIS YESESIS wrote:

Sorry for the double post and I should be in bed, but I wanted to share what just happened. I was praying before bed, like I always do, and I asked about doubts and what not. Ok, sometimes God answers me(I believe) simply by putting thoughts into my head. So anyone who wants to take the following with a grain of salt.. by all means. Anyway the response I got was(again not some external voice or anything like that but rather thoughts popping into my head) that this life is basically a 'learning camp' and if He just revealed Himself to everyone then it would destroy the purpose of the whole thing. And then that for now I should just be happy that I got what I needed to believe and in the end I will understand everything.

So that's it. Just wanted to share that. Sleep well everyone.

I've noticed that the "learning camp" idea you mention is also a common theme that is heard from the psychic/medium/intuitive folks. It's more on the lines of coming down to this plane of existence to learn lessons to improve ourselves, review what we've learned when we return to a higher plane (afterlife), then come back for more lessons (reincarnation).
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Polymorphia View Drop Down
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Originally posted by Logan Logan wrote:

That's interesting. It seems there was some confusion as I never intended to imply that Occam's Razor is the apparent reasoning behind the quote. Jaketejas was responding to a post I made to Yesesis about his revelation where I brought up Occam'r razor, and earlier in the thread I had responded to his revelation by starting my post with "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof". I feel that both concepts apply to the claim/ revelation. They both relate to what I have said in this thread on a particular matter, and I would argue that one can find relations between the concepts themselves. Methinks that it was a more mundane comment than you inferred.

I'm not convinced that Occam's razor always, or does indeed at all, favour divine intervention because that requires the assumption that God exists, the assumption that God is omnipotent, the assumption that God created the universe and other assumptions about the nature of God.   And then one gets into the whole if a God was required to create the universe, was another needed to create God? And so on. It's not as simple as we only require one assumption, God, we then have to make assumptions about God.

Are you familiar with the Solomonoff prediction and Occam's razor?

I'm going to lazily quote from an article on this instead of trying to explain it in my own words (it's late): https://unherd.com/2018/09/can-occams-razor-prove-god-doesnt-exist/

Originally posted by Tom Chivers Tom Chivers wrote:

...the Christian philosopher Richard Swinburne, in a 2010 paper, deployed Occam’s razor when he suggested that God is the simplest explanation for the universe, because God is a single thing. “God did it” is certainly simpler to say than “the universe emerged from quantum fluctuations in space-time”. But I would say that Occam’s razor is an argument against the existence of God. Who’s right?

Conveniently, in the 1960s, the mathematicians Ray Solomonoff and Andrey Kolmogorov developed a mathematically formalised version of Occam’s razor. One version of it is known as ‘minimum message length‘, and it asks: what is the shortest computer program that could produce what we’re seeing?

Let’s start with a simpler example than the creation of the universe: producing a string of numbers. I’ve taken this example from a Czech mathematician/computer scientist called Michal Koucký. He gives three strings of numbers: 33333333333, 31415926535, and 84354279521. If you wanted to write a program that carried on those strings for a million digits, what’s the shortest it could be?

The first you could do very easily: a simple bit of code saying “print the number 3 a million times”. You could do it in four lines of the beginners’ programming language BASIC.

The other two look random. But, in fact, the second string is simply the first 11 digits of pi, and you could print it out to a million digits by using one of the many quite simple algorithms which determine the digits of pi.

The third, however, is truly random. To write it out to a million digits you would need the program to specify all one million of them.

According to the ‘minimum message-length’ version of Occam’s razor, the first string is the simplest; the second is nearly as simple; and the third is the most complex.

So what does this mean for Swinburne? Well, the equations needed to describe the Big Bang are certainly complex. But they are sufficiently simple for humans to have written them. The algorithms needed to describe God – an all-powerful, all-knowing being – are not. We haven’t even managed to write software that’s as powerful as a human brain yet. From a minimum message-length perspective, God is much more complex – and therefore unlikely – than physics.

The same is true of evolution – you can quite easily write a program that approximates evolution by natural selection. But an intelligence sufficient to design all the creatures that evolution has made would be amazingly hard to program.

It also has implications for arguments within science. The “many worlds” interpretation of quantum theory, which says that every fraction of a second the universe splits into billions of parallel universes, sounds complex. The alternative, the “Copenhagen” interpretation, which says that quantum events aren’t resolved until they are observed, needs only one universe, and so sounds simpler.

But the program you’d need to create millions of universes would be pretty much the same as a program needed to create one universe – just have an extra line in it which says “do that again”, essentially – while a program that had to keep track of what every human in the world was looking at would be much more complex. According to minimum message-length Occam’s razor, a cosmos consisting of infinite universes can be ‘simpler’ than one that contains just one.

None of this means that these arguments are correct. The Copenhagen interpretation might be right despite being more complex. God might still exist; if the evidence shows that intelligent creation is more likely than the Big Bang, then it doesn’t matter how simple the theories are. But it means that you need more evidence for them.

William of Ockham was by all accounts one of the finest philosophical minds of his time, but he was also a friar and a Christian. I don’t know if he would be pleased to see me using his razor as an argument against the existence of God. But I think he would appreciate the simplicity of Solomonoff and Kolmogorov’s update of his argument for simplicity.
Interesting! I know little about computer programing, so I will leave this quote from composer Olivier Messiaen speaking of God (paraphrase), "You are complex, and yet you are simple. You are so simple." More poetic than a direct reply to the example, but if humor makes it way into debates, why not poetry?

But more to the point, a physical event is made up of component atomic and sub-atomic events. To assume Suspect A committed the crime is to assume all of those component events happened or that one of a set of possible component events happened. "Goddidit" is made up of far fewer component events. No component events to be exact. Though, as I said, this is not to say that Occam's razor is the best method in these cases. Rather the opposite in fact. 

Perhaps I am speaking where I do not know here, but I feel this idea of overwhelming complexity in these hypothetical algorithmic attempts to quantify God is an assumption itself. Infinity can't be constructed by mathematical operations consisting of only finite quantities (to add or multiply infinitely is to create infinity via circular argument), but that is because it is such a simple concept that it can't be broken up into component parts. To assume God exists is only to assume God exists and not that an infinite amount of component Godparts exist. It is one assumption. 
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Jaketejas View Drop Down
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This relates to my prior arguments. If a creator God exists, we are talking about a being that is not confined by time and space. Therefore, the what came before God is a moot point. And, the idea that everything is predetermined is not necessarily correct. Assuming that such a God being exists means that this entity can likely see along the entire time coordinate. That does not mean, however, that events in your 3 dimensional space and unidirectional timeline are (at least in part) uncontrollable. In other words, you could and would be likely expected to exercise your free will, because such a being would not be interested in creating automatons, otherwise there would be no good or evil in the world.
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YESESIS View Drop Down
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Originally posted by progaardvark progaardvark wrote:


I've noticed that the "learning camp" idea you mention is also a common theme that is heard from the psychic/medium/intuitive folks. It's more on the lines of coming down to this plane of existence to learn lessons to improve ourselves, review what we've learned when we return to a higher plane (afterlife), then come back for more lessons (reincarnation).


Well I know Buddhists believe in reincarnation, so this certainly could be.
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Originally posted by Jaketejas Jaketejas wrote:

This relates to my prior arguments. If a creator God exists, we are talking about a being that is not confined by time and space. Therefore, the what came before God is a moot point. And, the idea that everything is predetermined is not necessarily correct. Assuming that such a God being exists means that this entity can likely see along the entire time coordinate. That does not mean, however, that events in your 3 dimensional space and unidirectional timeline are (at least in part) uncontrollable. In other words, you could and would be likely expected to exercise your free will, because such a being would not be interested in creating automatons, otherwise there would be no good or evil in the world.


Good point.
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What does the word God mean to you?

My answer.
Everybody got his own god.

God is the reason who move your actions, is your motive.
Amos Goldberg (professor of Genocide Studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem): Yes, it's genocide. It's so difficult and painful to admit it, but we can no longer avoid this conclusion.
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Jaketejas View Drop Down
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Human nature tends to be my motive, but something is nudging me to do the right thing (my conscience) against my own selfish motives. If God exists and is good, I think such a being would be against my self-centered motives until I realize I'm wrong and change. So, I cannot for myself see how such a God (if exists) could be translated to generally mean "human motive."
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