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Heroes Community > Other Side of the Monitor > Thread: Talking about Christianity
Thread: Talking about Christianity This thread is 63 pages long: 1 10 20 30 ... 40 41 42 43 44 ... 50 60 63 · «PREV / NEXT»
JollyJoker
JollyJoker


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posted November 02, 2019 11:04 AM

Guys, first this wiki qiote from the uncertainty principle:

Quote:
It has since become clearer, however, that the uncertainty principle is inherent in the properties of all wave-like systems, and that it arises in quantum mechanics simply due to the matter wave nature of all quantum objects. Thus, the uncertainty principle actually states a fundamental property of quantum systems and is not a statement about the observational success of current technology.


In plain words: the uncertainty principle is something INHERENT in all wave-like systems - there IS NO WAY to know both exactly. And THAT is the reason why "determinism" is done. Because determinism says, "If all factors and variables are known, you can determine what will happen".

However, the uncertainty relations kills that, because it says that it's physically impossible to know all factors and variables (in all wave-llike systems). Since our world is built on that (and quantum processes take place in the mind as well), not even God could determine what would happen - If THEY exist, they made sure even THEY can be surprised, which makes sense, otherwise THEIR existence would be all-boring.
Whethe that means we have free will, depends what you understand by "Free Will". For me, it DOES. Why? Because whenever there is a decision to be made we are FREE do decide this or that way. We could, for example, throw a coin, ask someone "yes or no" and decide whatever they answers - or we could decide informed or spontaneous or not at all. We have that capacity and that capacity (remember, quantim processes in the mind) is NOT determined.
That is something entirely different than assign PROBABILITIES to how a specific person will behave. How people behave (and decide) depends on the patterns in their life that developed and their personality - still the capacity is there to do something "out of character".

I won't discuss this; with the current state of physics and understanding of the world there is nothing to discuss here. Things are the way they are and it makes no sense to speculate or fantasize. Yes, there are genetics, yes, there are probabilities - but that's not determinism.

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artu
artu


Promising
Undefeatable Hero
My BS sensor is tingling again
posted November 02, 2019 11:34 AM
Edited by artu at 11:36, 02 Nov 2019.

Stevie said:
What Blizzardboy is trying to say, and I agree with him as I was convinced the same, is that God's foreknowledge does not cause an event, the event causes God's foreknowledge. The fact that God knew I'd write this post did not cause me to write this post, me writing this post caused God to know. And I wrote this post out of free will. That's how it goes..

Yes, of course, that’s what he’s saying but that’s not how foreknowledge can actually work IF there is choice. You guys can say it can but that doesnt make it so.  It is not much different than those paradoxes you call contradictory by definition: Knowing something before it happens requires that it is determined to happen before it happens where as free will requires no predetermination. These two are contradictory by default. You writing your post can cause god to know only afterwards if there was a probability of you, choosing not to. That is the very essence of causality. You can either imagine a pantheistic god of space-time which is just pure semantics and calling a deterministic universe itself god OR a theistic god who isnt omniscient about the infinitely possible futures.

@JJ: Yes, that’s why I said, the dice analogy is flawed, statistical probability is not about free will, the very existince of one thing happening or the other but not out of six (or a thousand) predetermined  outcomes but ANY arbitrary choice among countless ones. One possible future can naturally be more probable than the other but that’s beside the point.
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JollyJoker
JollyJoker


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posted November 02, 2019 01:39 PM

Yes, artu, what I meant with probability was, the more you know about a person, the higher the probability you can "predict" a specific decision, based on genetics, upbringing and so on.

The problem is, that determinism doesn't allow for probabilities.

And the question - for all we believe in science, and we do that - IS solved: the universe isn't deterministic, therefore, if any Gods exist, they are not all-knowing. Which also means, yes, we would be accountable.

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Neraus
Neraus


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posted November 02, 2019 01:59 PM

Determinism allows for probabilities, more correctly, it means that what was supposed to happen had an observed rate of happening of a certain probability.
I never agreed with the conclusion that the uncertainty relation leads to undeterminism, it simply ruins our own chances of cracking the correct determination. Which is also why probability hasn't got anything to do with determinism, probability is an observed property of likelihood according to our own observations of how a phenomenon acts, but the determined outcome is theoretically set in stone if determinism is correct, we just don't know which is the correct outcome on observation.

Our own determinism is flawed because of it, but a deterministic universe can as well exist, we just can't know it.

Tho I'm an undeterminist myself tbh, I'm one of those who says that the future is just an abstraction and doesn't exist.
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artu
artu


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My BS sensor is tingling again
posted November 02, 2019 02:13 PM

That’s just streching out the meaning of words and concepts to adjust them to a certain theology which wasnt thought through well.
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Neraus
Neraus


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posted November 02, 2019 02:39 PM
Edited by Neraus at 14:40, 02 Nov 2019.

I'm just saying it's short-sighted to declare an idea dead because there's a concept of alternate possibilities and we can't accurately predict the correct one. I haven't even applied it to theology.
We are unable to observe, so what?
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artu
artu


Promising
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My BS sensor is tingling again
posted November 02, 2019 03:43 PM

But I already mentioned that the uncertainty principle is no longer about being able to measure and then JJ confirmed with the wiki quote. If you go full mystical and question physics itself, sure. But then anything goes, doesn’t it, there can be 37 prankster Gods who pulled out recent religions to juss mess with us, too. If you bet on the mystical, you are in the realm of  complete oblivion. And from an ethical point of view, whether we can observe it or not, if things are determined, there can be no responsibility, hence no morality, we’d be as automated as the bacteria. So no “objectively omnibenevolent” being would punish you for being what you are. Btw, objectively omnibenevolent is also a very problemetic concept, since it contradicts with every cultural study at hand. Nothing adds up.

Also, time is what makes change possible, imagine a universe where everything was perfectly still, no change at all, that universe would be an infinite “pause” and you can only then talk about time being an illusion or transcending time etc. However, if something acts out, does things, creates things etc, that thing is inevitably within time. Time cant be an illusion if there is any level of process at all.
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Neraus
Neraus


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posted November 02, 2019 05:08 PM

I actually had wrote something else but forgot to post, hence my confusion.
Anyway, my point with the later post was simply my usual polemic against being opposite to not taking into account unobservable forces, I didn't want to go to those lengths.
In my other post I did dabble in explaining some absurd scenarios and I prefaced them as that. Plus I already gave a parallel explanation as to why determinism contradicts our theology (not about responsibility but rather on the nature of God). Lastly, I gave my opinion on omnibenevolence, and granted that to make it work you need a fixed code of morality, now, Christian morality is a fixed one, arguing outside of that is useless since the term only works inside of that.

If you want to have a discussion on the concept of time benmy guest, but right now I can't really answer.

I'm literally posting while walking and writing in large spans of time. heh. Time.
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blizzardboy
blizzardboy


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posted November 02, 2019 06:21 PM
Edited by blizzardboy at 18:25, 02 Nov 2019.

@artu:

No. Space and time need matter to exist or operate.

Something can also occur instantaneously. Or it might have always been around (no beginning point). Things in the universe can happen slowly or quickly but nothing occurs instantaneously. Something can also perceive something before it happens if it is looking at time with a bird's eye view.  

Our bodies evolved in an environment with time and we perceive time as a way of processing information, so we don't have the hardware to fully conceptualize something outside of time, just like a fish doesn't have the necessary hardware to use multiplication or division. It's not because multiplication is nonsense, it's just because the fish is only a fish. It has a tiny brain. Maybe we also have a tiny brain compared to some other species.

Human beings are smart enough to reasonably assume there are things that we don't have the hardware to conceptualize. The reason this is a reasonable and more plausible assumption (as opposed to assuming we can understand everything) is because we have only ever had to interact in an Earth environment, so we can do necessary things in that environment like perceive depth or color. Not all animals can perceive depth or color and you could never, ever explain it to them. There is no reason for why we would have the faculties to understand things that are completely foreign to our environment.
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artu
artu


Promising
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My BS sensor is tingling again
posted November 02, 2019 06:51 PM

Yes, you need matter but if it was perfectly still, there would be no way to sense time. Speed and time are relational.

Causality is a pretty fundamental thing to suspect, there is a reason the universe is called the Space-time CONTINUUM and having a bird’s eye view over it is only possible if it is a singularity, then you can only have the pantheistic version of a god which is intrinsically the universe itself, not an agent creating various outcomes and possibilities. Saying we can be out of our depth and going beyond causality, you might just as well be talking about krnhsnzvootlussszccvfff, there is no point in claiming anything on such a level, it is absurd. That’s what I said in the very beginning anyway.

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monere
monere


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posted November 02, 2019 07:23 PM

Quote:
Space and time need matter to exist or operate
time is not material / matter (it's just a convention made up by people so they can measure and organize their activities and various events). So, time doesn't need any matter to exist or operate

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Drakon-Deus
Drakon-Deus


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Qapla'
posted November 02, 2019 07:26 PM

Time does not die. Only people die.
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Oddball13579
Oddball13579


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Grandmaster of the Hunt
posted November 02, 2019 07:59 PM
Edited by Oddball13579 at 20:01, 02 Nov 2019.

Stevie said:
Oddball, problem of evil is not hard to explain. A powerful and benevolent God gave man free will and called it good, man used it to sin. Man is responsible for the mess it caused and has to deal with the consequences.
But if God is so benevolent then why give man free will? If he knew it would lead to untold suffering and death and destruction, why grant us it in the first place? Why make the people He made in His own image, His children, suffer like this?

Doesn't seem like something any loving parent would allow to happen.


Stevie said:
God just respects the free will he invested in humanity, leaving us to see for ourselves the consequences (death, suffering) so that we can draw the conclusion that God was right all along and that our sin is an unjustified abomination worthy of condemnation. He also gave us a way out, proving His loving nature once more.
God was right about what exactly? He gave us free will and the ability to sin, to prove a point? He lets us sin and sends those sinners to hell to pay for the gift that He gave us? Just so we won't stray from the path that he set for us, even though he gave us the ability to chose our own path?

That is awfully manipulative.

Stevie said:
Also, those paradoxes are poor arguments. If God is omnipotent, he should be able to make square circles, or stones He couldn't lift - no, those just fail the logical test, they're impossible by definition, contradictory within themselves.
They don't make poor arguments actually. They are logical tests. These tests are logical to us, because we have a meager understanding of the universe as a whole. We are trying to apply our rules of the universe and apply it to something we'll never understand.

Stevie said:
Claiming God should be able to follow through with illogical things is misunderstanding omnipotence.
That's literally what omnipotent means. God should be able to create things, that by our standards and understanding of the universe, are illogical and contradictory.

So you literally just proved my point. God is either not omnipotent, or omnibenevolent, or omniscient. Or none of these things.  

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blizzardboy
blizzardboy


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posted November 02, 2019 11:37 PM
Edited by blizzardboy at 00:36, 03 Nov 2019.

@artu:

Except it's pretty standard to admit that when dealing with the universe 'before' the Bang, we're probably dealing with processes that are totally alien to anything we could ever imagine. Again: we evolved in an Earth environment so it only makes sense that our minds are only equipped to conceptualize so much. Even when dealing with higher level physics it starts to become very counter-intuitive at a certain point and that is a deficiency on our account as a species.

I don't think that makes us _completely_ unable to talk about it because we can speak of things with analogies. Like, just how we couldn't describe depth and color to a simple organism, we can reasonably assume that we are in the same boat for certain things. That is a useful analogy to keep us from oversimplifying or to make bad assumptions, like calling something a paradox when it probably isn't a paradox at all.

I'm not using this to try to put God into a scientific box, or to diminish him to a pantheistic God. I think God is ultimate Reality and any description of Him ends up falling flat of the target.


@Stevie:

Yes, I agree. Most of the hang-ups over omnipotence are pointless semantics. "Omnipotence" is just a word in a dictionary and when we describe God in certain ways it's just a human attempt to help us get a better grasp on him, so we use words like omnipotence, or omnibenevolance, or omniscience, or omnipresence as scaffolding or training wheels to help us out. It's not meant for people to come up with 'gotcha' questions that are odd and irrelevant. God is God and nothing else is like God.

The question of suffering is indeed a very interesting question, but when people bring up weird scenarios about omnipotence it seems like they're either bored or purposely want to stop the conversation.
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Neraus
Neraus


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posted November 03, 2019 12:39 AM
Edited by Neraus at 00:39, 03 Nov 2019.

Trying to define omnipotence begets absurd scenarios by necessity. It's fun to experiment with what could be, but in the end, the other guu either won't convince himself since it's impossible to observe and prove, or it gets outright not considered because it's absurd.
Truth be told, we use these terms because we have our own framework of how things work, when one starts to argue them outside their context... You get endless and pointless arguments.

And then you get the gotcha guy, like Voltaire and his not Holy nor Roman nor an Empire, because he was a friggin' idiot that lived at the end of the poor thing, and not when Frederick II ruled an empire from Germany to Sicily, that had a political center on Rome and holy as the imperial crown was bestowed by the Pope.

Moral of the story, don't be a Voltaire.
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artu
artu


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My BS sensor is tingling again
posted November 03, 2019 08:58 AM
Edited by artu at 09:01, 03 Nov 2019.

@blizz

There may be no “before big bang” if there was no time. But how did the big bang bang occur etc are questions that may have quite counter-intuitive answers, by your choice of word. Or maybe there is a multiverse with a bigger set of physical rules. We dont know, maybe we never will, it’s not set in stone that humans will eventually understand everything.

Saying god is beyond our reasoning, it is out of our perimeter etc and then calling it the ultimate reality is mindless. Basically, you define what is out of reach as god, yours is literally the god of gaps and to attribute such qualities to such an unknowable being as “ultimate reality, omnithis, omnithat” while you admit it is something beyond your capacity to comprehend it, is just absurd.

We very well know how the belief of god evolved in anthropological terms today, we know the origins of Abrahamic folklore, we know how monotheism evolved from politheism and how politheism evolved from animism and the like. It’s a much simpler, much more rational, extremely better explanation than calling “before big bang” god or arbitrarily making up qualities to a magical entitiy along the way as you see fit.
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Neraus
Neraus


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posted November 03, 2019 11:02 AM

artu said:
We dont know, maybe we never will, it’s not set in stone that humans will eventually understand everything.


But when I apply it it's stretching concepts? Sure whatever.

Anyway, it's not as simple as defining anything out of reach as God, as I said multiple times by now, the absurdities come out when people want to be funny and try to pull a contradiction. God has specific adjectives and characteristics in Christian theology, there are things left unexplained due to the impossibility of proof or thought, while others have been extrapolated through study and lastly other characteristics through the most hated word "divine revelation".

Faith is there for a reason, because I want to see you try explaining how exactly food gives you energy while having no prior knowledge in chemistry, biology, anatomy and physiology, you could speculate something, even guess correctly how the process works in general, but not knowing how enzymes work, how is the energy of molecular bonds transferred etc etc you're going to take steps in the dark.

The biggest problem in this discussion is that God is supposed to be external to the universe, being the creator of it, while you want to argue a god that exists inside of it, we can say God made the rules, He can ignore them if He wants, just like the Dungeon Master of a D&D campaign. You can't accept it, because an internal entity has to be bound by the same rules.

Arguing about the power and bounds of God is a useless endeavour, and useful only if you want to stroke your philosophical ego, because logically arguing about things outside the universe is impossible, or to quote you absurd, since you don't agree on the premise.
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ANTUDO

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Drakon-Deus
Drakon-Deus


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Qapla'
posted November 03, 2019 11:15 AM

oookay, I actually intended my post to start a discussion between Christians based on Scriptural arguments.

But I brought back the classic OSM debates. Is that good or bad?
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artu
artu


Promising
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My BS sensor is tingling again
posted November 03, 2019 11:19 AM
Edited by artu at 11:21, 03 Nov 2019.

@Neraus

You stretch out the meaning of already defined concepts where as I simply say we don't know before the big bang or even if there is a "before." Very different things. The unknown is the unknown, the unknown is not god, there is no reason to attribute god to the unknown, even on a blindly speculative level, god is really quite a primitive and blunt hypothesis to  explain things, because the minute you analyze it as an explanation, it turns into a more complicated problem than the questions it is trying to answer.

Saying things like god is outside or inside of the universe also doesnt make much sense because the universe is not a hotel, it is space-time itself. And blizz's god of gaps or Christian theology are extremely poor arguments, even on a completely speculative level to explain the existence of this universe. We KNOW how and when people invented god, we are passed it both on cosmological and ethical platforms. Nobody actually tries to solve any problem, scientific or social, by reading verses from the Bible anymore.
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Neraus
Neraus


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posted November 03, 2019 11:22 AM
Edited by Neraus at 11:40, 03 Nov 2019.

@DD
We are what? 3 guys now? I fondly remember Svartzorn, when we argued to no end about the Immaculate conception, and then agreed on one thing, at the very least we Catholics and Orthodox should band together to fight heresy. Good times.

EDIT:
@artu
Did I? At the very worst what I did was implying that probability doesn't deny a determined result but we don't know what happens.
You could have a point when I say that time is an abstraction, but in truth I'm saying the same thing as you, time without motion can't be measured.

Lastly, I'm using universe as the collection of all matter, if you want to call it space-time it doesn't change that a creator is supposed to be outside the box it makes. Unless you say it encompasses the"outside" as well, but shall we now argue about the bounds of the universe as well?

But you know I easily get carried away when writing, especially when I'm on the road, so dunno if I wrote something else as well or gave confusing statements.
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ANTUDO

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