Firstly, I never said you had described your position as rationalist. The 'you' in my parentheses is the generic you ('one' in formal English), not the vocative.
I was thinking of someone like Hitchens (honorary associate of the Rationalist International according to wikipedia), whom you have frequently cited as if his opinions are of interest.
That's a nice tactic. Maybe just use 'one' next time. I've shared Hitchens because he interests me. His opinions are at least as interesting as CS Lewis', for which we have no meager quantity here thanks to @ChastMastr.
Secondly, I don't know what is going on in your second sentence. You may wish to be clearer. Or you may not. There were no questions in your post to be answered or unanswered.
One can answer a statement as well as a question. (see what I did there)
Thirdly, your reference to Pee Wee Herman appears to belong in Hell.
It's nice to know one can call down the Hosts from on high, yes? Very good.
To spell what I was saying out: Religious people do indeed sometimes make arrogant claims of the 'speak for yourself' variety about non-religious people (you're right - I wasn't disagreeing with you directly), but then atheists and agnostics and so on sometimes make arrogant claims about religious people. Your post seemed to me to imply that religious people are uniquely prone to it. If I was wrong about the intended implication, I retract my remark.
There would be no atheists without the religious. If the religious would pipe down a bit and/or back off, I'm sure you'd hear from atheists far less.
It’s a reasonable question. For which there are no definitive answers.
As a matter of scale and probability it seems more than likely that there are other sentient beings out there. We just haven’t met any yet.
(You will note that I am sceptical of accounts that we have that such encounters have already occurred).
Should they turn up any dialogue we might have re eternal beliefs would be interesting! Unless of course they were like the Independence Day aliens, for whom the rruth was that they wanted us to die. Not much chance of dialogue there.
Sentience does not imply sympathy. Of which we have evidence all around us. That might be a problem affecting other sentient alien species for all we know.
In a way, a universe in which we are the only life, or the only sentient life, or the only sentient empathic life, would raise even more questions. A creation that sentient life will never see 99.999999% of just seems so bizarre.
Reading back on the replies, I think this expresses well my skepticism. The whole of everything is massive. In one sense, I would be unsurprised if there was some kind of higher being behind it all. But either way I do not see that it makes a whole lot of difference.
The part that makes no sense to me is that this projected being somehow holding everything together is also interested in humanity, and not only that, is interested in individual humans.
And then, we are asked to believe, that the deity projected in a convoluted way by one societal group of humanity is uniquely representative of this deity that created all things.
I do not buy it at all.
This is, I'm afraid,moving into epiphanies territory. I didn't 'buy it at all' until God showed him (or her)self to me . Just let me say I had the Pentecost experience recorded in Acts. That story became real to me.
As a rational scientist, I believe the universe, or universes, are teeming with life. How could they not be? And everywhere is our dear God. To quote: 'In him I live and breathe and have my being'.
Your reported experience is just that. Whether or not there is teeming life in the universes is a subject of science fiction not fact and as such is basically a non-testable and non-falsifiable thought experiment
But we find life in what we thought were the most unlikely places, or habitats, on earth. Shall we have a wager about life on Mars (before it is b*gg*red by Musk?)
In my philosophy training I was told to be very suspicious of the word 'just'.
My thoughts (and yours) are, after all just the moving of electrons and the firing of neurons.
PS: I was very rational in my assesment of my own, and my students, experiments!
Blessings!
As you know, even finding life on Mars says nothing about the 99.9999+% of everything that is not in our solar system.
And I do not need your gratituous blessings thanks.
As you know, even finding life on Mars says nothing about the 99.9999+% of everything that is not in our solar system.
No, I don't know. You are claiming our Solar system is unusual or unique? Finding life on Mars would be very pleasing.
This is a Christian forum. Gratuitous blessings are, alas, inevitable!
As for (the Riv's words) , 'There would be no atheists without the religious. If the religious would pipe down a bit and/or back off, I'm sure you'd hear from atheists far less.' Hmmm ... one for Epiphines methinks.
Given what we know about consciousness, I don’t see how the universe can not be conscious. If it is conscious, it meets most definitions of a God - is everything, contains everything, creates everything, is all times and all places etc.
I don't see that.
The universe as a whole is (understatement alert) not nearly as connected as our brains are. Unless dark matter is a lot more complicated than the observable universe. So if the universe as a whole were conscious that would imply that consciousness can occur without a complex physical vehicle, which is not something we have evidence for.
The universe seems to be finite, at least in past time and therefore in space. So any consciousness it has is also finite. It can't be aware of everything any more than we can be conscious of what our brains are doing. I feel it's misleading to say we create our brains either: we don't have any conscious control over our brains' structure. Despite the use of the word 'god' for both, I think there's a big difference between anything finite on the one hand, however powerful, and the creator and ground of all being on the other.
The universe can still be infinite even though finite in time. The big bang isn't about a finite universe expanding into unoccupied space; it's the expansion of space itself which could still be of infinite extent.
The big sticking points for the universe as God are (a) consciousness (as you point out) and its having had a beginning. To the best of our knowledge. The big bang might be a manifestation of an event in a more fundamental level of reality. We don't really know.
The universe can still be infinite even though finite in time. The big bang isn't about a finite universe expanding into unoccupied space; it's the expansion of space itself which could still be of infinite extent.
My understanding is that the universe started as a point. So for there to be infinite space wouldn't it have to expand at an infinite speed, which I think isn't what we have evidence for?
The universe can still be infinite even though finite in time. The big bang isn't about a finite universe expanding into unoccupied space; it's the expansion of space itself which could still be of infinite extent.
My understanding is that the universe started as a point. So for there to be infinite space wouldn't it have to expand at an infinite speed, which I think isn't what we have evidence for?
That's the point exploding in three dimensions into "not yet space" which isn't quite what the big bang necessarily means. You can have a universe of infinite extent with zero space between its infinite constituents. As soon as that distance exceeds zero you have an infinite extent universe without requiring infinite expansion speed.
Missed Edit Windoe to add - Put another way, the big bang theory posits a universe that was at its starting point infinitely dense. If it's finite, then that starting point a singularity. If it's infinite, then, well infinity over infinity means our physics maths basically falls apart in the first few Planck times.
I wasn't thinking about expanding into not-space. Rather if it expands to become an infinite space then the distance between the first protons and electrons goes from zero to infinity posing some problems for the development of molecules and stars and stuff.
But can that be sorted out by presuming that matter/energy in the early universe was a property of space?
The distance between particles (we don't have protons yet - more quarks and weird stuff) doesn't go from 0 to infinity. It goes from 0 to a finite amount - as low as the Planck Length. But if there are an infinite number of those particles, then the universe has infinite extent if there's any finite distance between them.
If it helps, reduce the 3d universe to a 1d number line. Now if all the numbers from -infinity to +infinity have zero space between them, then its length is 0 x infinity- which is undefined; our maths can't deal with the universe at time=0. Once there's any separation between them - no matter how small - then that number line is infinite in length.
Or watch it backwards. Imagine an infinite universe. Now imagine that everywhere the space between things starts shrinking. When the space reaches zero, that's the state an infinite universe was in at the big bang.
The last time I looked at the speculations, I thought that an infinite universe was an open question. Personally I’m satisfied with very very VERY large and very very VERY old.
The last time I looked at the speculations, I thought that an infinite universe was an open question. Personally I’m satisfied with very very VERY large and very very VERY old.
Yeah - the point I'm making is that the universe isn't forced to be finite by the big bang.
As for (the Riv's words) , 'There would be no atheists without the religious. If the religious would pipe down a bit and/or back off, I'm sure you'd hear from atheists far less.' Hmmm ... one for Epiphines methinks.
What happened to Hosting, as in, the actual message board Hosts weigh-in when something needs to be said or done about a post? Some of you are bucking for a promotion, it seems.
Turn it around then: did atheism come before religion? Does that seem likely?
What form does "the fall" have since the Adam and Eve story is not true?
It can be true, but not literal. It could be something in which the only way we can comprehend it is in the literary form of myth.
Let me reword the question:
"What form does "the fall" have since the Adam and Eve story is not literal?"
I should mention that there can be the fall of Lucifer and his allied angels affecting the world and bringing death before man existed, or even before organic life, before whatever "Adam and Eve" refers to.
If my supposition above is true ("It could be something in which the only way we can comprehend it is in the literary form of myth"), then--we can't know, I would think. There are lots of ways it could work, but that doesn't mean I think I know for sure about any of them. It could have even broken time itself, so we would only know the fallen world in our experience and history (the way we see the world "always having been different" as we see in numerous time-altering science fiction stories). Or it could be like the Song of the Ainur. It could be all kinds of things.
If the universe turned out in some way to be conscious, to me that would still not be God--that would be Nature (as a created being), or even Mother Nature. Due some reverence perhaps, but worthy of dulia rather than latria:
I actually have no intrinsic problem with such a thing, as I've suggested with some of my references to animism/Shinto stuff (but again within a Christian context--so if I were to meet the tutelary spirit of a wood, a river, or even a planet or the created cosmos itself, it might be due dulia but not latria, as that would be, in my view, idolatry).
This is a Christian forum. Gratuitous blessings are, alas, inevitable!
Alas indeed. I wish more Christians would understand just how condescending saying things like “Blessings” can come across.
As for (the Riv's words) , 'There would be no atheists without the religious. If the religious would pipe down a bit and/or back off, I'm sure you'd hear from atheists far less.' Hmmm ... one for Epiphines methinks.
The last time I looked at the speculations, I thought that an infinite universe was an open question. Personally I’m satisfied with very very VERY large and very very VERY old.
Yeah - the point I'm making is that the universe isn't forced to be finite by the big bang.
OK. I did get that. Forgetting about the envelope, the agreed truth between all people, of faith, no faith and maybe somewhere in between, contributing to this thread, is that the observable universe is unimaginably big and unimaginably large.
For the purpose of this discussion, interesting though the speculation may be, does it matter? I don’t see any Young Earth Creationists about. I’ve never thought other than the YEC position was a head-in-the-sand rationalisation.
I’m also very comfortable with the view that the various Creation myths are a speculative read-back attempt to explain the various “nasty, brutish, and short” miseries of human lives.
Also, the Sun did not stand still in the sky for over a day. All similar references in the Bible are evidences of world views of the physical universe which might have been understandable at the time, but not defensible any more.
Also, the nature of any end-time has historically been a source of massively distracting arguments. There’s an influence of Fundamentalism there too.
Personally I’m much more interested in the questions about the quality of life before death. Aren’t you?
The last time I looked at the speculations, I thought that an infinite universe was an open question. Personally I’m satisfied with very very VERY large and very very VERY old.
Yeah - the point I'm making is that the universe isn't forced to be finite by the big bang.
OK. I did get that. Forgetting about the envelope, the agreed truth between all people, of faith, no faith and maybe somewhere in between, contributing to this thread, is that the observable universe is unimaginably big and unimaginably large.
For the purpose of this discussion, interesting though the speculation may be, does it matter? I don’t see any Young Earth Creationists about. I’ve never thought other than the YEC position was a head-in-the-sand rationalisation.
I’m also very comfortable with the view that the various Creation myths are a speculative read-back attempt to explain the various “nasty, brutish, and short” miseries of human lives.
Also, the Sun did not stand still in the sky for over a day. All similar references in the Bible are evidences of world views of the physical universe which might have been understandable at the time, but not defensible any more.
Also, the nature of any end-time has historically been a source of massively distracting arguments. There’s an influence of Fundamentalism there too.
Personally I’m much more interested in the questions about the quality of life before death. Aren’t you?
It doesn't need to be either/or. Otherwise we wouldn't have astrophysicists.
To me the scale of the cosmos matters because - well, I've raised the questions at least twice on this thread. They matter to me because questions like that are what I naturally ask. Also, they matter because if I can't cobble together a reasonably coherent narrative I really do start to think it (Christianity in particular and religion generally) is ancient people grasping at straws but devoid of any real substance.
I don't do uncertainty well. There's a part of me that would make a very good fundamentalist, alongside the part that would make a good atheist. But I'd have to reject science, which is like a cat giving up being furry.
Ockham's Razor doesn't necessarily mean we end up with a bald cat, but I can understand that @KarlLB.
I'm not applying this to you, but I know a few very brittle fundamentalists who've become atheists.
I'm not sure any of us have the luxury of complete and utter certainty. An observation which probably doesn't help very much.
I don’t know how far the bough bends before it snaps.
It can take effort to keep things supple.
Within my own Tradition I'm struck by how much leeway and latitude there is at times, whereas at others it can feel like, 'Look, this is the way it is, right? Deal with it '
Oh I agree! I never ever think about giving up a cat which is furry! Seems silly to me. Searching for meaning and understanding must include acknowledging furry cats. (I really like the metaphor and will use it in the future).
Thing is I believed that before I came to faith - and still do 51 years later. And I really don’t mind the residual rationalisation argument. I appreciate it must look like that. It’s not easy to explain why it doesn’t look like that to me.
My personal reflection probably goes back to Simon and Garfunkel’s “Sound of Silence”. Always loved that before I came to faith. Still do.
“The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls and tenament halls, whispered in the sound of silence”.
On one level just poetry. But for me the whispers became consistent and insistent, and eventually became too loud to ignore.
The last time I looked at the speculations, I thought that an infinite universe was an open question. Personally I’m satisfied with very very VERY large and very very VERY old.
Yeah - the point I'm making is that the universe isn't forced to be finite by the big bang.
OK. I did get that. Forgetting about the envelope, the agreed truth between all people, of faith, no faith and maybe somewhere in between, contributing to this thread, is that the observable universe is unimaginably big and unimaginably large.
For the purpose of this discussion, interesting though the speculation may be, does it matter? I don’t see any Young Earth Creationists about. I’ve never thought other than the YEC position was a head-in-the-sand rationalisation.
I’m also very comfortable with the view that the various Creation myths are a speculative read-back attempt to explain the various “nasty, brutish, and short” miseries of human lives.
Also, the Sun did not stand still in the sky for over a day. All similar references in the Bible are evidences of world views of the physical universe which might have been understandable at the time, but not defensible any more.
Also, the nature of any end-time has historically been a source of massively distracting arguments. There’s an influence of Fundamentalism there too.
Personally I’m much more interested in the questions about the quality of life before death. Aren’t you?
It doesn't need to be either/or. Otherwise we wouldn't have astrophysicists.
To me the scale of the cosmos matters because - well, I've raised the questions at least twice on this thread. They matter to me because questions like that are what I naturally ask. Also, they matter because if I can't cobble together a reasonably coherent narrative I really do start to think it (Christianity in particular and religion generally) is ancient people grasping at straws but devoid of any real substance.
I don't do uncertainty well. There's a part of me that would make a very good fundamentalist, alongside the part that would make a good atheist. But I'd have to reject science, which is like a cat giving up being furry.
I do not think "science" is a coherent thing that one either accepts or rejects. That framing is a mistake in my opinion.
I think what you mean is that you are contrasting a cosmology of enormous size and billions of years with a small earth-centred, human-orientated myth. If that is what you mean, I do not think there is much argument, those who say the creation was last Thursday or a few thousand years ago are just wrong.
In a similar way there could be some paradigm shift in the geological knowledge about the composition of the interior of Mars based on new measurements and new ideas, but we are never going to go back to the idea that it is a small satellite of Earth. It just is not.
There’s a dynamic to scientific enquiry which I like. It proceeds by verifying and falsifying. Each of those dimensions is important. There is no phlogiston. Observations of a solar eclipse verified an Einstein prediction.
It is open ended. But not about everything. An unimaginably old and large universe is not really open to question. Else we ignore furry cats.
But Science doesn’t suffer any crises if hypotheses are disproven. The same can’t be said about Religion. @KarlLB has been pretty specific about the scope of his inquiry.
But Science doesn’t suffer any crises if hypotheses are disproven. The same can’t be said about Religion. @KarlLB has been pretty specific about the scope of his inquiry.
What do you mean by "crisis"? The paradigm shift model suggested by Kuhn as a regular part of scientific progress/progression seems like a repeated crisis, does it not?
A thing about the big bang theory is that it was not at a point of infinite density or even a ripple of energy. Physicists call it a singularity which is a state beyond the reach of our current physics. t=0 is where general relativity breaks down.
That’s a very romantic view of the scientific method and the easy acceptability of its results. Historically, new and conclusive findings have often taken time to be accepted. . The phlogiston theory died quite hard. So did the ether theory. So did Newtonian mechanics.
And the postmodern view of the behaviour of scientific communities is not without validity
Mind you, people don’t die. But reputations sometimes take a battering. Power games may be found anywhere. More’s the pity.
The scientific method, properly applied, is not wedded to past theories. You can’t say the same for everyone who applies it.
That’s a very romantic view of the scientific method and the easy acceptability of its results. Historically, new and conclusive findings have often taken time to be accepted. . The phlogiston theory died quite hard. So did the ether theory. So did Newtonian mechanics.
There's a danger of flattening things out here, a lot of these transitions took place when scientific thinking and the process of scientific inquiry was at its infancy. After all, there's an obvious issue with your list in that one of these things is clearly not like the others. Newtonian mechanics is now known to be an approximation, but for everyday physics and engineering (outside extremes of speed, gravity, distance, size etc) it remains pretty useful.
Worth adding that Newtonian mechanics is indeed different to the other two because of its continuing local usefulness. But it took a while to be dethroned as a universal view by General Relativity.
I would be curious to hear what others make of the "no miracles" argument from scientific realism. From Wikipedia
One of the main arguments for scientific realism centers on the notion that scientific knowledge is progressive in nature, and that it is able to predict phenomena successfully.[11] Many scientific realists (e.g., Ernan McMullin, Richard Boyd) think the operational success of a theory lends credence to the idea that its more unobservable aspects exist, because they were how the theory reasoned its predictions. For example, a scientific realist would argue that science must derive some ontological support for atoms from the outstanding phenomenological success of all the theories using them.
The short version is "we do not believe in magic and this theory works therefore it must in some way match reality."
The problem would appear to be if you do, in fact, believe in magic/miracles.
Worth adding that Newtonian mechanics is indeed different to the other two because of its continuing local usefulness. But it took a while to be dethroned as a universal view by General Relativity.
Took a while in what sense? Chronologically maybe, as it took some time for experimental physics and applications to run into issues with it (see the caveat about extreme), but actually Einstein's GR was accepted relatively quickly (the other way of viewing Kuhn is that he observed a general tendency which was somewhat historically contingent).
Nor is a criticism of the positive value of the scientific method.
In the context of this thread it seems to be away of sneaking in a "God of the gaps" without actually stating it explicitly.
To me the scale of the cosmos matters because - well, I've raised the questions at least twice on this thread. They matter to me because questions like that are what I naturally ask.
Indeed. A Brief History of Time is as relevant to my faith as anything by C S Lewis.
Also, they matter because if I can't cobble together a reasonably coherent narrative I really do start to think it (Christianity in particular and religion generally) is ancient people grasping at straws but devoid of any real substance.
Constructing a coherent narrative of one's own is more viable if you're less bothered about what other people think.
To me the scale of the cosmos matters because - well, I've raised the questions at least twice on this thread. They matter to me because questions like that are what I naturally ask.
Indeed. A Brief History of Time is as relevant to my faith as anything by C S Lewis.
Also, they matter because if I can't cobble together a reasonably coherent narrative I really do start to think it (Christianity in particular and religion generally) is ancient people grasping at straws but devoid of any real substance.
Constructing a coherent narrative of one's own is more viable if you're less bothered about what other people think.
Well, I'm bothered in the sense of not reinventing the wheel. I'm also conscious of an ability to imagine almost anything but that doesn't mean my ideas have any grounding in reality. I can have more confidence that an idea might reflect reality if it chimes with other people's ideas.
The problem of making suggestions here I think is not shortage of possibilities but that there simply isn't enough information to choose between them or to work out which if any of them are incoherent.
Also the problem is compounded by our ignorance of how common intelligent life is in the universe and ignorance of its conditions. The temporal return of Jesus to Earth within a time scale of the same order of magnitude as current human history looks likely to result in some kind of incoherence if there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe.
I don't think the temporal return of Jesus is incoherent if we are in fact the only intelligent life in the universe - but it is subject to the crying wolf factor: people have been predicting it for the last two thousand years and it hasn't happened.
That leaves miraculous recreation of the universe after the end of time / heat death. That may seem a long way off (understatement) but to God it's a mere moment.
(As an aside, Isaac Watts' poem O God our Help in Ages Past "A thousand ages in thy sight/ Are like an evening gone/ Short as the watch that ends the night/ Before the rising sun." may not be reckoning with billions of years but it does seem to me to envision a timescale rather longer than the five and a half thousand Watts would have got from Ussher.)
Or possibly, and this feels more likely to be coherent to me, the resurrection takes place in a parallel creation or recreation.
But I don't honestly know on what grounds you could choose between them.
Do not all these theological points require a human-centred universe? Or is the modern Scientist who is also an Ecologist or Geologist or Cosmologist somehow able to find a way to integrate the ideas? I guess for example one could believe in some kind of future destruction of human civilisation foretold as the destruction of all things given the limited knowledge of the culture from whence it came.
Re acceptability of General Relativity. I looked again at the history and I now agree with you. The interval between publishing the equations and the Eddington solar eclipse observation was about 4 years, which is not all that long. There were alternative theories around for a while but they didn’t survive experimental tests.
Do not all these theological points require a human-centred universe?
I think we're speculating about how they apply in a universe that is not human-centred.
But I don't see at all how the theology we call Christian requires a human-centered universe. It's centered on Christ (aka God the Son), yes; but not on human beings per se. It's simply false to say that Christianity depends on a geocentric worldview, or teaches that human beings are at the center of God's interest and concern in a way that any other life is not. We've always known that there were created beings greater than ourselves. and that we were placed in this world to care for it and not simply to make it serve us. What authority we were given was that of caretakers and was limited to our own world. Even during the European middle ages the model of the cosmos they were working with was one where human beings were essentially suburban--not at the center at all.
The Incarnation doesn't change our importance in the universe. The fact that the Incarnation took place in this world can be seen as a mark of demerit more easily than as a mark of special merit on our part. The other actions that flow from that (the second coming, the renovation of creation) are similarly not marks of honor or special importance; if another species had fallen (gone bad, whatever you want to call it), no doubt God would have done everything there and not here. If God always intended to descend into his creation regardless of whether a Fall ever took place (which some theologians believe), it might as well happen here as anywhere else. It was going to happen somewhere, after all, and the place chosen can't conclude that it was specifically deserving.
Also, the Sun did not stand still in the sky for over a day. All similar references in the Bible are evidences of world views of the physical universe which might have been understandable at the time, but not defensible any more.
Or they’re reflecting linguistic differences. I’ve heard/read arguments that the reference to the sun standing still is idiomatic or poetic language found elsewhere in ancient Near Middle Eastern writing that wouldn’t have been understood literally by the original audiences.
For all we know it takes a universe this big and this old to create even one sentient species. Some cosmologists are saying things similar to this, or at least I have read such sentiment in articles about cosmology.
To me the scale of the cosmos matters because - well, I've raised the questions at least twice on this thread. They matter to me because questions like that are what I naturally ask.
Indeed. A Brief History of Time is as relevant to my faith as anything by C S Lewis.
Also, they matter because if I can't cobble together a reasonably coherent narrative I really do start to think it (Christianity in particular and religion generally) is ancient people grasping at straws but devoid of any real substance.
Constructing a coherent narrative of one's own is more viable if you're less bothered about what other people think.
Well, I'm bothered in the sense of not reinventing the wheel. I'm also conscious of an ability to imagine almost anything but that doesn't mean my ideas have any grounding in reality. I can have more confidence that an idea might reflect reality if it chimes with other people's ideas.
One of the problems I've always had with that is being aware that other people don't think the same way that I do (other people might put it the other way round). In this particular context, as I recall, we disagree about what we mean when talk about reality. That aside, I'm quite happy re-inventing the wheel - I find inventing improves with practice.
Anyway, returning to the issue at the top of this post: for me, a more pertinent issue than the scale of the cosmos is whether we, as a species, are fated to spend the rest of our narrative arc on this planet. There's a really big difference between spending the next few generations on a planet that we've managed to trash, and spending the next few galactic cycles exploring and inhabiting as much of everywhere as we can. (Before trashing that too.)
I find the question of other sentient life matters less if there's a possibility that the sentient life that is us starts knocking off some of those trailing .999…999's.
In the same way that if I construct a personal truth whereby theft isn't illegal I will still get prosecuted if I steal stuff, I see reality as a thing that can bite us on the arse if we are wrong about it.
I think we're probably stuck here to be honest. I've been trying to construct feasible propulsion systems for a sci-fi RPG setting and frankly the rocket equation is a bitch and the speed of light limitation an absolute swine.
There is no neutral place to stand and we do not know what we do not know. We can tell that some of our conjectures appear to have a level of beauty and rigidity (in terms of predictive power, coherence and so on) but we are basically unable to tell to what extent the unknown unknowns complicate the overall picture, or whether the frame within which we are working has any validity outside that frame.
We can only assess "reality" in a small amount of ways from a particular place that we are standing.
In the same way that if I construct a personal truth whereby theft isn't illegal I will still get prosecuted if I steal stuff, I see reality as a thing that can bite us on the arse if we are wrong about it.
I think we're probably stuck here to be honest. I've been trying to construct feasible propulsion systems for a sci-fi RPG setting and frankly the rocket equation is a bitch and the speed of light limitation an absolute swine.
If I were planning to leave a planet by stealing a spaceship, I'd bear in mind that theft is a social construct in the way that gravity isn't.
In the same way that if I construct a personal truth whereby theft isn't illegal I will still get prosecuted if I steal stuff, I see reality as a thing that can bite us on the arse if we are wrong about it.
I think we're probably stuck here to be honest. I've been trying to construct feasible propulsion systems for a sci-fi RPG setting and frankly the rocket equation is a bitch and the speed of light limitation an absolute swine.
If I were planning to leave a planet by stealing a spaceship, I'd bear in mind that theft is a social construct in the way that gravity isn't.
But incarceration is as real as it gets, which is rather my point.
Comments
One can answer a statement as well as a question. (see what I did there)
It's nice to know one can call down the Hosts from on high, yes? Very good.
There would be no atheists without the religious. If the religious would pipe down a bit and/or back off, I'm sure you'd hear from atheists far less.
As you know, even finding life on Mars says nothing about the 99.9999+% of everything that is not in our solar system.
And I do not need your gratituous blessings thanks.
No, I don't know. You are claiming our Solar system is unusual or unique? Finding life on Mars would be very pleasing.
This is a Christian forum. Gratuitous blessings are, alas, inevitable!
As for (the Riv's words) , 'There would be no atheists without the religious. If the religious would pipe down a bit and/or back off, I'm sure you'd hear from atheists far less.' Hmmm ... one for Epiphines methinks.
The universe as a whole is (understatement alert) not nearly as connected as our brains are. Unless dark matter is a lot more complicated than the observable universe. So if the universe as a whole were conscious that would imply that consciousness can occur without a complex physical vehicle, which is not something we have evidence for.
The universe seems to be finite, at least in past time and therefore in space. So any consciousness it has is also finite. It can't be aware of everything any more than we can be conscious of what our brains are doing. I feel it's misleading to say we create our brains either: we don't have any conscious control over our brains' structure. Despite the use of the word 'god' for both, I think there's a big difference between anything finite on the one hand, however powerful, and the creator and ground of all being on the other.
The big sticking points for the universe as God are (a) consciousness (as you point out) and its having had a beginning. To the best of our knowledge. The big bang might be a manifestation of an event in a more fundamental level of reality. We don't really know.
That's the point exploding in three dimensions into "not yet space" which isn't quite what the big bang necessarily means. You can have a universe of infinite extent with zero space between its infinite constituents. As soon as that distance exceeds zero you have an infinite extent universe without requiring infinite expansion speed.
But can that be sorted out by presuming that matter/energy in the early universe was a property of space?
If it helps, reduce the 3d universe to a 1d number line. Now if all the numbers from -infinity to +infinity have zero space between them, then its length is 0 x infinity- which is undefined; our maths can't deal with the universe at time=0. Once there's any separation between them - no matter how small - then that number line is infinite in length.
Or watch it backwards. Imagine an infinite universe. Now imagine that everywhere the space between things starts shrinking. When the space reaches zero, that's the state an infinite universe was in at the big bang.
Yeah - the point I'm making is that the universe isn't forced to be finite by the big bang.
What happened to Hosting, as in, the actual message board Hosts weigh-in when something needs to be said or done about a post? Some of you are bucking for a promotion, it seems.
Turn it around then: did atheism come before religion? Does that seem likely?
I should mention that there can be the fall of Lucifer and his allied angels affecting the world and bringing death before man existed, or even before organic life, before whatever "Adam and Eve" refers to.
If my supposition above is true ("It could be something in which the only way we can comprehend it is in the literary form of myth"), then--we can't know, I would think. There are lots of ways it could work, but that doesn't mean I think I know for sure about any of them. It could have even broken time itself, so we would only know the fallen world in our experience and history (the way we see the world "always having been different" as we see in numerous time-altering science fiction stories). Or it could be like the Song of the Ainur. It could be all kinds of things.
We'll find out the details later on, I trust.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CosmicRetcon
https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Music_of_the_Ainur
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veneration#Latria,_hyperdulia,_protodulia_and_dulia
I actually have no intrinsic problem with such a thing, as I've suggested with some of my references to animism/Shinto stuff (but again within a Christian context--so if I were to meet the tutelary spirit of a wood, a river, or even a planet or the created cosmos itself, it might be due dulia but not latria, as that would be, in my view, idolatry).
Why?
@KarlLB
OK. I did get that. Forgetting about the envelope, the agreed truth between all people, of faith, no faith and maybe somewhere in between, contributing to this thread, is that the observable universe is unimaginably big and unimaginably large.
For the purpose of this discussion, interesting though the speculation may be, does it matter? I don’t see any Young Earth Creationists about. I’ve never thought other than the YEC position was a head-in-the-sand rationalisation.
I’m also very comfortable with the view that the various Creation myths are a speculative read-back attempt to explain the various “nasty, brutish, and short” miseries of human lives.
Also, the Sun did not stand still in the sky for over a day. All similar references in the Bible are evidences of world views of the physical universe which might have been understandable at the time, but not defensible any more.
Also, the nature of any end-time has historically been a source of massively distracting arguments. There’s an influence of Fundamentalism there too.
Personally I’m much more interested in the questions about the quality of life before death. Aren’t you?
It doesn't need to be either/or. Otherwise we wouldn't have astrophysicists.
To me the scale of the cosmos matters because - well, I've raised the questions at least twice on this thread. They matter to me because questions like that are what I naturally ask. Also, they matter because if I can't cobble together a reasonably coherent narrative I really do start to think it (Christianity in particular and religion generally) is ancient people grasping at straws but devoid of any real substance.
I don't do uncertainty well. There's a part of me that would make a very good fundamentalist, alongside the part that would make a good atheist. But I'd have to reject science, which is like a cat giving up being furry.
I'm not applying this to you, but I know a few very brittle fundamentalists who've become atheists.
I'm not sure any of us have the luxury of complete and utter certainty. An observation which probably doesn't help very much.
I don’t know how far the bough bends before it snaps.
It can take effort to keep things supple.
Within my own Tradition I'm struck by how much leeway and latitude there is at times, whereas at others it can feel like, 'Look, this is the way it is, right? Deal with it '
Perhaps this is one of those?
I don’t know.
Thing is I believed that before I came to faith - and still do 51 years later. And I really don’t mind the residual rationalisation argument. I appreciate it must look like that. It’s not easy to explain why it doesn’t look like that to me.
My personal reflection probably goes back to Simon and Garfunkel’s “Sound of Silence”. Always loved that before I came to faith. Still do.
“The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls and tenament halls, whispered in the sound of silence”.
On one level just poetry. But for me the whispers became consistent and insistent, and eventually became too loud to ignore.
I do not think "science" is a coherent thing that one either accepts or rejects. That framing is a mistake in my opinion.
I think what you mean is that you are contrasting a cosmology of enormous size and billions of years with a small earth-centred, human-orientated myth. If that is what you mean, I do not think there is much argument, those who say the creation was last Thursday or a few thousand years ago are just wrong.
In a similar way there could be some paradigm shift in the geological knowledge about the composition of the interior of Mars based on new measurements and new ideas, but we are never going to go back to the idea that it is a small satellite of Earth. It just is not.
It is open ended. But not about everything. An unimaginably old and large universe is not really open to question. Else we ignore furry cats.
What do you mean by "crisis"? The paradigm shift model suggested by Kuhn as a regular part of scientific progress/progression seems like a repeated crisis, does it not?
And the postmodern view of the behaviour of scientific communities is not without validity
Mind you, people don’t die. But reputations sometimes take a battering. Power games may be found anywhere. More’s the pity.
The scientific method, properly applied, is not wedded to past theories. You can’t say the same for everyone who applies it.
There's a danger of flattening things out here, a lot of these transitions took place when scientific thinking and the process of scientific inquiry was at its infancy. After all, there's an obvious issue with your list in that one of these things is clearly not like the others. Newtonian mechanics is now known to be an approximation, but for everyday physics and engineering (outside extremes of speed, gravity, distance, size etc) it remains pretty useful.
The short version is "we do not believe in magic and this theory works therefore it must in some way match reality."
The problem would appear to be if you do, in fact, believe in magic/miracles.
Took a while in what sense? Chronologically maybe, as it took some time for experimental physics and applications to run into issues with it (see the caveat about extreme), but actually Einstein's GR was accepted relatively quickly (the other way of viewing Kuhn is that he observed a general tendency which was somewhat historically contingent).
In the context of this thread it seems to be away of sneaking in a "God of the gaps" without actually stating it explicitly.
Constructing a coherent narrative of one's own is more viable if you're less bothered about what other people think.
Well, I'm bothered in the sense of not reinventing the wheel. I'm also conscious of an ability to imagine almost anything but that doesn't mean my ideas have any grounding in reality. I can have more confidence that an idea might reflect reality if it chimes with other people's ideas.
Also the problem is compounded by our ignorance of how common intelligent life is in the universe and ignorance of its conditions. The temporal return of Jesus to Earth within a time scale of the same order of magnitude as current human history looks likely to result in some kind of incoherence if there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe.
I don't think the temporal return of Jesus is incoherent if we are in fact the only intelligent life in the universe - but it is subject to the crying wolf factor: people have been predicting it for the last two thousand years and it hasn't happened.
That leaves miraculous recreation of the universe after the end of time / heat death. That may seem a long way off (understatement) but to God it's a mere moment.
(As an aside, Isaac Watts' poem O God our Help in Ages Past "A thousand ages in thy sight/ Are like an evening gone/ Short as the watch that ends the night/ Before the rising sun." may not be reckoning with billions of years but it does seem to me to envision a timescale rather longer than the five and a half thousand Watts would have got from Ussher.)
Or possibly, and this feels more likely to be coherent to me, the resurrection takes place in a parallel creation or recreation.
But I don't honestly know on what grounds you could choose between them.
Not my intention at all. I’m not sneaky. I don’t do “God of the Gaps”.
But I appreciate why you thought so.
Unfortunately there was a typo. The quoted excerpt should have said “Nor is it a criticism ..” The missing “it” makes all the difference.
I’d already said I like the dynamic of verifying and falsifying in the scientific method. It shows what we can find out despite human fallibility.
Re acceptability of General Relativity. I looked again at the history and I now agree with you. The interval between publishing the equations and the Eddington solar eclipse observation was about 4 years, which is not all that long. There were alternative theories around for a while but they didn’t survive experimental tests.
But I don't see at all how the theology we call Christian requires a human-centered universe. It's centered on Christ (aka God the Son), yes; but not on human beings per se. It's simply false to say that Christianity depends on a geocentric worldview, or teaches that human beings are at the center of God's interest and concern in a way that any other life is not. We've always known that there were created beings greater than ourselves. and that we were placed in this world to care for it and not simply to make it serve us. What authority we were given was that of caretakers and was limited to our own world. Even during the European middle ages the model of the cosmos they were working with was one where human beings were essentially suburban--not at the center at all.
The Incarnation doesn't change our importance in the universe. The fact that the Incarnation took place in this world can be seen as a mark of demerit more easily than as a mark of special merit on our part. The other actions that flow from that (the second coming, the renovation of creation) are similarly not marks of honor or special importance; if another species had fallen (gone bad, whatever you want to call it), no doubt God would have done everything there and not here. If God always intended to descend into his creation regardless of whether a Fall ever took place (which some theologians believe), it might as well happen here as anywhere else. It was going to happen somewhere, after all, and the place chosen can't conclude that it was specifically deserving.
Anyway, returning to the issue at the top of this post: for me, a more pertinent issue than the scale of the cosmos is whether we, as a species, are fated to spend the rest of our narrative arc on this planet. There's a really big difference between spending the next few generations on a planet that we've managed to trash, and spending the next few galactic cycles exploring and inhabiting as much of everywhere as we can. (Before trashing that too.)
I find the question of other sentient life matters less if there's a possibility that the sentient life that is us starts knocking off some of those trailing .999…999's.
I think we're probably stuck here to be honest. I've been trying to construct feasible propulsion systems for a sci-fi RPG setting and frankly the rocket equation is a bitch and the speed of light limitation an absolute swine.
We can only assess "reality" in a small amount of ways from a particular place that we are standing.
There is absolutely no way to set odds on that.
But incarceration is as real as it gets, which is rather my point.
I suppose it’s 50/50. Will you choose the red pill or the blue pill?