God Does Not Play Dice!
[quote=Albert Einstein]God does not play dice with the universe.[/quote]
It was many decades ago when this Moslem chap, complete with a keffiyeh. tried to convince me of the existence of Allah (God). The gist of his argument was that there's order in the [s]world[/s] universe. He was especially moved by how the 9 planets (Pluto was still a planet back then) revolved around our sun in a way that puts to shame the world's best orchestral performance.
What troubled me most was I couldn't figure out the following:
Did,
1. Order -> God
or
2. God -> Order
???
If it's 1, he had clinched the argument. There's no way I could argue against him if 1. Order -> God.
I made no effort to refute him since I hadn't learned logic then and he seemed like someone who couldn't recover/survive his worldview being turned on its head.
Anyway, let's grant the atheist his right to disagree and concede that, yes, 1. Order -> God is false. In other words, let's accept that the order in the universe isn't a sufficient condition for the existence of Allah/God. My moslem friend, it seems, was wrong. Sadly, we've drifted apart over these years and I won't be able to contact him to pick up where we left off 20 years ago.
That out of the way, take a look at 2. God -> Order. This seems plausible, reasonable, and rational to believe. Even if I'm at a loss as to how I might justifiy it, it definitely is a more believable proposition than 1. Order -> God.
Now, my plea to the theist is to grab this golden opportunity. 2. God -> Order simply means that God is a sufficient condition for order. There is order in the universe. Put simply, atheists are extending a hand of reconciliation towards theist and conceding a point - God is a sufficent condition for the existence of the universe which basically amounts to admitting that the God hypothesis with respect to order in the universe can't be ruled out as impossible.
God then exists as a sufficient condition even if not as a necessary condition for the universe.
What's all this about?
Well, imagine the order in the universe arose, as atheists aver, by Chance.
If so then this:
3. (God v Chance) -> Order
What do we observe? Order. Ergo, it's got to be either God or Chance. Here's where it gets interesting. Our observation of order in the universe can't distinguish between God and Chance. That means, God is just another name for Chance and the converse is true as well, Chance is God's alias. Atheism and Theism are one and the same thing! :chin:
[quote=Marcus du Sautoy (What We Cannot Know)]Archaeological digs of settlements dating back to Neolithic times have revealed a disproportionately high density of heel bones of sheep or other animals among the shattered pottery and flints that are usually found in sites that humans once inhabited. These bones are in fact ancestors of my casino dice. When thrown, these bones naturally land on one of four sides. Often there are letters or numbers carved into the bones. Rather than gambling, these early dice are thought to have been used for divination. And this connection between the outcome of a roll of a dice and the will of the gods is one that has persisted for centuries. Knowledge of how the dice would land was believed to be something that transcended human understanding. It's outcome was in the lap of gods.[/quote]
It was many decades ago when this Moslem chap, complete with a keffiyeh. tried to convince me of the existence of Allah (God). The gist of his argument was that there's order in the [s]world[/s] universe. He was especially moved by how the 9 planets (Pluto was still a planet back then) revolved around our sun in a way that puts to shame the world's best orchestral performance.
What troubled me most was I couldn't figure out the following:
Did,
1. Order -> God
or
2. God -> Order
???
If it's 1, he had clinched the argument. There's no way I could argue against him if 1. Order -> God.
I made no effort to refute him since I hadn't learned logic then and he seemed like someone who couldn't recover/survive his worldview being turned on its head.
Anyway, let's grant the atheist his right to disagree and concede that, yes, 1. Order -> God is false. In other words, let's accept that the order in the universe isn't a sufficient condition for the existence of Allah/God. My moslem friend, it seems, was wrong. Sadly, we've drifted apart over these years and I won't be able to contact him to pick up where we left off 20 years ago.
That out of the way, take a look at 2. God -> Order. This seems plausible, reasonable, and rational to believe. Even if I'm at a loss as to how I might justifiy it, it definitely is a more believable proposition than 1. Order -> God.
Now, my plea to the theist is to grab this golden opportunity. 2. God -> Order simply means that God is a sufficient condition for order. There is order in the universe. Put simply, atheists are extending a hand of reconciliation towards theist and conceding a point - God is a sufficent condition for the existence of the universe which basically amounts to admitting that the God hypothesis with respect to order in the universe can't be ruled out as impossible.
God then exists as a sufficient condition even if not as a necessary condition for the universe.
What's all this about?
Well, imagine the order in the universe arose, as atheists aver, by Chance.
If so then this:
3. (God v Chance) -> Order
What do we observe? Order. Ergo, it's got to be either God or Chance. Here's where it gets interesting. Our observation of order in the universe can't distinguish between God and Chance. That means, God is just another name for Chance and the converse is true as well, Chance is God's alias. Atheism and Theism are one and the same thing! :chin:
[quote=Marcus du Sautoy (What We Cannot Know)]Archaeological digs of settlements dating back to Neolithic times have revealed a disproportionately high density of heel bones of sheep or other animals among the shattered pottery and flints that are usually found in sites that humans once inhabited. These bones are in fact ancestors of my casino dice. When thrown, these bones naturally land on one of four sides. Often there are letters or numbers carved into the bones. Rather than gambling, these early dice are thought to have been used for divination. And this connection between the outcome of a roll of a dice and the will of the gods is one that has persisted for centuries. Knowledge of how the dice would land was believed to be something that transcended human understanding. It's outcome was in the lap of gods.[/quote]
Comments (61)
Bingo!
Quoting 180 Proof
I concur. Order is a phase in Chaos. It appears that time plays a big role in our perception of order and chaos. A video on youtube reports that the solar system is unstable - the earth is drifting, only by a few centimeters every million years or so, away from the sun and our dear ol' moon is doing the same, inching away from the earth. If we could record all that, speed it up like in timelapse photography, gone is the order! :chin:
Reality is the standard by which we measure if something is consistent or not.
What ever is consistent with reality, is true. Whatever is not, is false.
We create maps that are either consistent or inconsistent with reality.
If our map of reality leads us to the conclusion that reality is itself inconsistent, it means our map is inconsistent with reality.
Reality is consistent with our model because the model is our reality. That's truth.
So there is nothing but models of models of models ad infinitum>?
In everyday conversation reality is a word for what we might imagine to be out there.
From a philosophical perspective only formal technical models can be constructed because we can't be certain of anything more. Then the models can be tentatively presumed to correspond to what is now labelled reality. The debates are about possible improvements and objections to improvements of that model. What is labelled truth is the correspondence of a statement to that model but of course not to some unknowable outside world.
But common conceptions always remain very different from the terminology used by philosophers. Lack of understanding of this distinction leads to most if not all public criticism of philosophy. No, we are not shoveling clouds.
All this is very nice and I found a lot of good arguments. However, the subject of order vs. randomity in the universe seems quite debatable, as well as how someone perceives one or the other. So I am not going to get involved in it, but only remind us that Einstein has also stated that "God Plays Dice with the Universe" in a letter regading his issues with quantum theory. The context and conditions in which these statements were made were different, of course. But they show the debatability of the subject.
***
P.S. Einstein wasn't referring to a personal god in the quote. He was using "God" as a metaphor. Neither was this an affirmation of destiny.
What do you mean by consistent? Because if you mean repeatable then I’m afraid there are myriad examples of phenomenon and things in the universe that can never be repeated more than once. That doesn’t make them false just exceedingly rare or “unique”.
Does anything ever repeat? I doubt it. However, I suspect core principles, and reality itself at its core, don't change.
Consistent: compatible or in agreement with something.
Chaos, on the other hand, I understand as something that is incompatible or in disagreement with something. How can Reality act in a way which is incompatible or in disagreement with itself?
Are you saying we have a model of reality, and then theories about the model? And the model is constructed based on experience and interpretation, and experience is something internal and cannot be know-ably of external origin?
No. I'm suggesting that philosophical reality is made up by the philosopher, constructed out of the elements of the model, to match a particular philosophical model. For example, if all objects make up everything there is, then we darn well better make sure we can say what objects are. Is the Sun, which is an extended cloud of mysterious plasma an object or must we be able to grasp all objects?
This in contrast to personal reality that we usually mean when we say that this or that event or memory is real, As memory of a personal experience fades into the past it becomes less real. More or less real which we swear by is not allowable in philosophy, some thing is either real or it is not.
OK so far.
Whoa! Who broke the window? It was either my brother or it was me. You can't tell from observation which of us did it. Therefore my brother and I are the same. That reasoning does not work.
It's interesting enough before the final part.
Can I tell, from the broken window, who broke it? Was it your brother or was it you? I can't and in that blind spot, both you and your brother are identical.
Tell me what the definition of identical means. If A is identical to B, it means, given a set of propositions about A and B, I can't tell them apart, no? Take that and see where it leads to.
Thanks for that tidbit!
What exactly is it that you find "debatable" about chaos and order?
Whether Einstein, eh, I mean God, plays dice or not! :grin:
Note: Maybe physicists know better? I am not good in Physics ... so I can't take part in the debate!
Irrelevant!
Quoting Alkis Piskas
Physics is (becoming) a branch of mathematics.
First of all, I said that jokingly. (Didn't you see the laughing emoji?) Second, it's not that irrelevant as you say, since we are talking about order vs disorder. I remind you that your question was"What exactly is it that you find "debatable" about chaos and order?" Besides, it is you who brought up the concept of "God" in real terms (literally), based on Einstein's statement, altghough, as I mentioned, he used "God" metaphorically.
Anyway, whether God is involved in the order of the universe or not, we have to bring in physics, and in particullar, quantum physics. So, regarding always my "debatable", here is something interesting from Prof. Alan Tennant, who has won the Europhysics Prize:
[i]"Prof. Tennant remarks on the perfect harmony found in quantum uncertainty instead of disorder. ‘Such discoveries are leading physicists to speculate that the quantum, atomic scale world may have its own underlying order. Similar surprises may await researchers in other materials in the quantum critical state.'"
"If there’s an underlying order in the quantum world, that would be a rather significant philosophical shift. So I’m guessing this meaning of this result is going to be rather highly debated."[/i]
(https://entangledstates.org/2010/01/09/golden-ratio-observed-in-quantum-states/):
Do you see now what debate I am talking about? However, I can't go further than this, because as I already told you, I have little knowledge of physics.
Quoting TheMadFool
Well, it's my turn now: "Irrelevant!"
(Really, how does this statement relate to anything else in here? Who has said anything about mathematics?)
They aren't necessarily / probably aren't identical; they are in an analogous position. You don't have further information to tell them apart. A lot of the puzzles of Raymond Smullyan leave us at that point:
http://www.logic-books.info/sites/default/files/lady-or-the-tiger-and-other-logic-puzzles.pdf
is a link given on another thread and here is part of my comment on that:
[i]I like:
- that many of the answers will remain incomplete or even almost completely unknown, due to too few clues
- that you often have to change the sequence in which you attend to issues, and not deal with them in the order someone told you to[/i]
On a related note I find serendipity very provident: ideas and good books or articles seem to come looking for me.
Serendipity = serenity dip.
Because maths is orderly - until you get the deranged teacher :cry: :fear: :scream: :worry: :groan:
What's that?
Sorry, I'm bad at humor. I used to be a jolly chap until I discoverd fate had other plans for me. My bad!
Quoting Alkis Piskas
The "debate" is about whether the quantum world has order or not. However, my argument isn't about order/chaos (disorder) per se. Order insofar as my argument is concerned is only a representative of the category of evidence that makes theists go, God!
I picked order only because my moslem friend used it in his argument for Allah/God. A contingency rather than necessity i.e. what order/disorder is doesn't matter to the point I'm trying to get across. Any other piece of evidence to do with the existence of the universe that makes the God hypothesis plausible will also work in my argument. The atheistic response to such God arguments being it could be chance. For instance, the fine-tuning argument made by theists claims that the universe couldn't have been a chance occurrence - the probabilities involved are near zero. The response from atheists is that theists are talking out of their hats - people do win the lottery.
Ergo, you're barking up the wrong tree. :grin:
Quoting Alkis Piskas
Physics is mathematics in action in the physical world. You seem to be enamored of physics as if physicists are privy to information mathematicians are not. False.
Thanks for the link to a book on puzzles.
Quoting Banno
Material implication.
Buddhists don't worship a creator God, but they have no trouble acknowledging there's an order to nature. They also believe there is karma, the results of intentional actions, which in their view is a natural moral law that has consequences beyond the individual's current existence. But there's no God in their belief system required to underwrite that.
It seems to me that there's a dialectical process at work behind all this. In the early modern period, Newton, Galileo, Descartes, and others, all assumed that the order of nature is a consequence or manifestation of God's laws. Yet as the natural sciences advanced, the role for God seemed to be diminished. A Buddhist scholar's analysis of this:
[quote=Bhikkhu Bodhi;https://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/bodhi/response.html]The early founders of the Scientific Revolution in the seventeenth century — such as Galileo, Boyle, Descartes and Newton — were deeply religious men, for whom the belief in the wise and benign Creator was the premise behind their investigations into lawfulness of nature. However, while they remained loyal to the theistic premises of Christian faith, the drift of their thought severely attenuated the organic connection between the divine and the natural order, a connection so central to the premodern world view. They retained God only as the remote Creator and law-giver of Nature and sanctioned moral values as the expression of the Divine Will, the laws decreed for man by his Maker. In their thought a sharp dualism emerged between the transcendent sphere and the empirical world. The realm of "hard facts" ultimately consisted of units of senseless matter governed by mechanical laws, while ethics, values and ideals were removed from the realm of facts and assigned to the sphere of an interior subjectivity.
It was only a matter of time until, in the trail of the so-called Enlightenment, a wave of thinkers appeared who overturned the dualistic thesis central to this world view in favor of the straightforward materialism. This development was not a following through of the reductionistic methodology to its final logical consequences. Once sense perception was hailed as the key to knowledge and quantification came to be regarded as the criterion of actuality, the logical next step was to suspend entirely the belief in a supernatural order and all it implied. Hence finally an uncompromising version of mechanistic materialism prevailed, whose axioms became the pillars of the new world view. Matter is now the only ultimate reality, and divine principle of any sort dismissed as sheer imagination.[/quote]
Which leads me to....
Quoting 180 Proof
I don't understand how you can justify this. The order of nature, even on the most simple levels, is not dependent on us in any sense. The rising and falling of the tides, the laws of motion which determine them - these are not 'aspects of disorder'. Maybe Brownian motion is disorder. But I can't see how you can plausibly deny that there is an order to nature which science and reason can discern, and then exploit for practical advantage. Imagine if every time you turned on the tap, fire came out, and when you struck a match, it produced water. Absurd, of course.
That seems to have slipped my mind. However, there is/has to be difference between answering the question, "whence this order?" with chance and simply refusing to answer the question (Noble Silence, the Buddha). The former is a knowledge claim while the latter is to either deny that the question is a sensible one or to avoid, as you put it, prapañca, getting entangled in thought or possibly because there was no point to knowing the answer or our priorities are messed up or...I'm out of ideas.
Buddhism's law of karma suggests that the Buddha did recognize the existence of laws in the universe, specifically laws concerning causality, karma being moral cause and effect. Rather, or for some, too scientific don't you think?
[quote=Pierre-Simon Laplace]Je n'avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse-là. ("I had no need of that hypothesis).[/quote]
Quoting Wayfarer
Imagination, it seems, is the cornerstone of my argument. We have order. Ergo, theists claim, it could be God. Theists counter, it could also be Chance. It could be God or it could be Chance. The distinction between necessity and contingency is the difference between what is (the former) and what could be (the latter, imagination).
Is it,
1. God implies Order (God is a possibility - imagination)
Rain implies wet ground (Rain is one way the ground becomes wet but it could also be a leaking pipe)
OR
is it,
2. Order implies God (God is a necessity - not imagination)
Decapitation implies death (Death is a necessary outcome of decapitation)
To my knowledge, the question of whether the Universe was ordered was never put to the Buddha. It was not one of questions he declined to answer, because he wasn't asked it.
Quoting TheMadFool
In the early 20th Century, when Buddhism first became popular in the West, comparison was often made between karma and the 'scientific laws' of 'cause and effect', to illustrate that Buddhism was a 'scientific religion'. But really I think it's a specious comparison, I don't think it's a scientific principle in the modern sense. Not that it's unscientific, rather a pragmatic principle which Buddhists don't believe would require scientific validation.
Quoting TheMadFool
The other point is that the odds of the Universe being ordered in such a way that it can give rise to matter and so life, and everything else, are vanishingly slight. If it were a matter of pure chance, then the odds are very small indeed, as explained in Martin Rees book, Just Six Numbers. This, of course, is the observation behind the cosmological anthropic principle, which gets a lot of pushback because it seems to indicate some sort of divine providence. After all, Bertrand Russell wrote in his famous atheist manifesto, A Free Man's Worship, that 'Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving', whereas the anthropic principle seems to demolish that, as if the emergence of life were written into the very fabric from the outset. Disputing this claim is often cited as a rationale for the 'multiverse':
[quote=George Ellis, Does the Multiverse Exist? Scientific American Aug 2011]Fundamental constants are ?nely tuned for life. A remarkable fact about our universe is that physical constants values needed to allow for complex structures, including living things. Steven Weinberg, Martin Rees, Leonard Susskind contend that an exotic multiverse provides a tidy explanation for this apparent coincidence: if all possible value enough collection of universes, then viable ones for life will surely be found somewhere. [/quote]
So simple and yet so profound. I feel sages like the Buddha and the like are what in sci-fi are known as super-advanced AI. No sooner than they're discovered/invented, we start off by asking questions to them. Quite naturally; we are, after all, looking for answers. Rather unfortunate that no one had the sense to ask the Buddha that question. His answer would've been either true or interesting! I don't see how we could lose given that.
Quoting Wayfarer
For better or worse, probably the latter, discerning fine distinctions, so important to life and philosophy, isn't my strong suit. Good point!
If memory serves, it was you who said, some time ago, that the multiverse is a bad hypothesis. I'm inclined to agree - nobody in faer right mind would buy a lottery. Hmmmm :chin:
Take a walk outside the philosophy studio for a minute. I am not the same as my brother. Now go back inside. Whatever account of identity we come up with it has to be consistent with that. If we come up with a meaning for 'the same as' in which I'm the same as my brother, we've gone obviously wrong. And not going obviously wrong can often be as good as it gets in philosophy. Sometimes even that is out of reach.
Good advice! I'll keep that in mind.
Quoting Cuthbert
You fail to see the point. Perhaps you've read detective stories, true/fiction I don't care. What happens? A crime is committed. The detective then draws up a list of suspects. Given the evidence, logic dictates, it could be anyone on that list. In other words, given the crime, given the knowns, all people on that list are indistinguishable from each other - they're all identical insofar as the crime is concerned.
I just realized that we're both talking about different things - your point is about, my best guess, ontic identity (you and your brother are definitely not identical) but I'm interested in epistemic identity (with the broken window alone, I can't know whether it was you or your brother - the two of you are identical).
It is as if, because everyone is a suspect and you don't know who did it, you conclude that they are all guilty. You are writing as if Murder on the Orient Express is the only story.
Please, be a jolly chap again! It's much mor fun! :grin:
Quoting TheMadFool
OK, I admit I disregarded this. My bad!
Quoting TheMadFool
It may well be so! (And I see you got your humor back!)
Quoting TheMadFool
I am not enamored with physics. On the contrary, I generally dislike physics (school trauma!).
(But I think I have cleared this up a few times, by saying that I'm not good in physics ...)
Quoting Cuthbert
Yes, focus on what you know and not on what you can know and it should be clear to you.
OK, :grin: and :meh: it!
Chance could be working through "god" - whether a necessary OR a contingent "god".
I keep stating (because I love to see myself typing it) that we are on an existence wave in which something has the propensity (nice Popper word) to be rather than nothing; that is why "god" does appear to play dice which are loaded.
Hypothetically, a "god" that was self-effacing in relationships rather than modelling a power craze, might want us to respect what and who is, as a priority over earning cosmic brownie points.
Some of His / its adherents might have distorted the meanings (a different thread expands on this): after all those around Moses were getting it wrong, that's the core of the story. The wording is in places carefully ambiguous in tone so that transmitters of the meaning will be held responsible. (I'm only alluding to a common ground for distaste for "god" talk.)
A "god" that was self-effacing in relationships would be content to slip out of the picture for agnostics "modularly" and want us - especially if we claimed to be adherents - to focus on respect (another thread deals with morals), which especially includes mental honesty in logic and epistemology.
This is why Russell and the anthropic principle aren't in contradiction (except insofar as he averred they were). A "multiverse" is a range of parallel calculations (a set of diagrams), but separate reasoning will tend to help us pick which apply better to the time and place we are in: calculations aren't wasted, if other uses for them don't emerge at least they were good practice.
As to the Bodhi quote, I think it was sophists like Berkeley and Hume that entrenched the dichotomy between matter, spirit etc in usual thinking, not scientists. Spinoza and Hegel pretended to be closing the gap but weren't. It took Husserl to affirm that what is out there and what is in our heads both exist at the same time (what I thought every child knew), but W James vetoed 1 his being published in the States, causing the continental / non-continental gulf and the vacuum into which the nihilist Ayer stepped. (My opinions are based on my "digesting" of secondary sources.)
1 James adversely recommended against Walter Pitkin's translation, f/n 26 - citing a Herbert Spiegelberg book - to Dallas Willard's chapter, 'Knowledge' in Smith B and Smith D W eds, Cambridge Companion to Husserl, 1995.
Yes, that's why we can't tell the difference between chance and God.
Rest of your post, irrelevant! Good vibes though!
Is this what Hume was referring to when he was commenting on most people's abysmal grasp of causation?
Good "swerve" :wink:
:meh:
That's an interesting miniature history of philosophy! :smile:
Quoting Fine Doubter
Is there something missing here?
I was expecting something like "rather that not (to be)", "rather than (to) perish", etc.
("rather than", as a conjunction, joins two parallel grammatical constructions; "be" and "nothing" aren't such.)
It would be good if you fix this, because your idea looks like it has a potential but it is left incomplete.
Quoting Alkis Piskas I had to be frank about the state of my reading and "digesting". "Interesting" is such a tactful word! At any rate I'm finding out things that are very different from what we were usually told in the summaries of summaries. I try to gauge where to spend my money first - not Descartes or Ayer. Secondary sources give me a "feel" - usually mutually contradictory among themselves. I feel sorry for undergraduates who have to swallow the canonical fare in the prescribed sequence. No wonder so few went in for "philosophy".
So when God plays with Himself, He plays dice?
(See for instance the God Melichrone in Sheckley's Dimension of Miracles. He has abolished all his creatures and also deleted the Hereafter, because He needed time to think, and He has become very very bored as a result, so he wants to destroy the book's main character too, for the fun of it...)
Another reason is: why would a non-gamer create animals like us (or cats) who like to play so much?
OK. So I am glad I filled in the hole! :smile:
Quoting Fine Doubter
Alright, I like this. Quite creative! :up:
That is a cool paradox!
Quoting TheMadFool
I gather that in the Middle Ages "proof" meant logical plausibility for further trial by experience. At best, they were admirable agnostics.
As for order, there is no outer limit on its level of complexity. There are subatomic scales, the scale we're at, the cosmic scale. We're nowhere near "completing" our understanding of any of those scales. Comets with a too long orbit to calculate (yet) may additionally be influenced by "fields" we've barely begun to sense a glimmer of. As it was only a couple of years ago observations were strengthening Einstein's gravity wave idea, or they started photographing black holes, it's beyond credence when some big people claim everything is an open and shut case.
Maybe the elements are in a dance, and we are green with envy because we didn't choreograph it . . .
(On the actually religious side which I want to leave for other threads, often when "god" is mentioned what is really meant is "god pretext" and lots of "god subtexts".)
This actually describes me - I'm a middle-aged person, agnostic and trying my best to formulate a coherent worldview which, I'm told, involves testing theory against experience.
This thread is about how atheism and theism amount to the same thing but, mind you, only in the sense that what's being sought after is an explanation for the existence of the universe. Theists think it's god, atheists think it's chance and as described in the OP, the two were connected in that God(s) worked their magic so to speak as the so-called chance factor.
Quoting Fine Doubter
Order, by definition, is simple - there are rules we can get a handle on. Complexity is a function of disorder - it's impossible to grasp chaos. That said, I agree with you that what we don't know dwarfs what we (think) we know.
Quoting Fine Doubter
Go on...
Well, insofar as theism is untrue, they do amount to the same thing. The (origin of the) universe – finite, unbounded immanence – seems a brute fact. There is no answer to "Why" (which does not precipitate an infinite regress, in effect, begging the question).
I defer to your better judgment!
This is a very interesting point. And it doesn't help "theism" (or only a little in some people's minds), overall.
In my young day "crea-tion" meant (secular agnostically) meant just "what turned up". To non-Hoylites, as an event it might mean "some sort of start" (I think we thought vacuums were more vacuumy then). A "creat-or" was a "being" or even "force" that set things in motion or being. A creator-god was a subset of that, and different religions' gods were very diverse subsets again.
All this was very modular. You just slotted out what you didn't want. Remarkably other people didn't mind us slotting in what we did want for ourselves. (You can't help others if your beliefs - on any subject - aren't held by you for you.)
It looks likely that the "single big whimper / bang" idea and the whole series of them / infinite regression or recursion-regression probably aren't incompatible: the first is either part of the second or is the second viewed in less detail.
Why questions are largely how questions and how questions are largely what questions.
Our finding is that things appeared. Out of nearly nothing (there are things in vacuums).
Our findings are mostly done with the considerable aid of complicated calculations and inferences. For example planet / star speeds and distances, as well as chemical compositions, are done by colour spectrums last I heard. I wish I had stayed in sciences of these kinds but am grateful I stayed near to words.
I'm referring to infinites. The questions that remain are infintely regressing from view, but maybe not uniformly. Whether this maps a kind of recursion, or there are spin-offs that have gone out of "sight" I wouldn't know. Maybe the existence wave that swung one way swings the "other way" or "all other ways". Are there several existence waves - but not all washing the same sort of "stuff" - "interfering"? This would interrelate with the shimmering Epicurus intuited (and people long before).
I think infinite (as mathematical "fiction" or ideal is an approximation to an approximation, as are infinitesimals. I got to this in my spatial imagination, by edging back, as near as couldbe no amount from almost more than everything. Or edging forwards, or something like that. And the same in reverse in miniature.
I jumped off the picnic tabel at the end of the universe!
I believe that zero is an approximation. The point 180 proof is making is that apparently finite and apparently infinite have intricate relationships. And we never get to "why-why". I think people should take more interest in how and especially what. Isaac Newton got where he did because he embraced the what.
In a sense "why" is "so that we can talk about it". Even better: "so that we can laugh about it". :rofl: (I'm no panpsychist because of individuality.)
Chaos is an ideal, a fiction. Disorder is relative. It means in effect complexity. Complexity scientists (they are called that because they got chucked out of every other "discipline") are finding that complexity is, well, complex.
I don't know Maxwell nor notations but I wonder if this is the sort of thing. I got a gut feeling when I looked at the prose bits:
https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/how-to-explain-the-overdetermination-of-maxwells-equations.803535/
Here's a lovely piece about underdetermination:
https://lishanchan.com/2012/09/27/underdetermination/
I wish we had done (simple versions of) these two at school. It's vital for critical thinking, which is the opposite of jumping to conclusions.
:lol:
Dont be!!! Im not sure where that lol-smiley is for but I had to laugh from the inner bones because its truly funny! You just made me laugh. I couldnt hold it in fact! God is there but I dont care about him. I rather care about his creations!
In Afghanistan, the only jokes in circulation are about a certain Mollah Nasruddin.
Why should that be indeed? I think all fundamentalists (be they religious or non-religious) take themselves too seriously. There was a right fundamentalist her 10 years ago (Europe, in Sweden, Im sure you have heard about it) who shot over 80 peple dead. They were trapped on an island... Parttaking in a socialist-organized holiday. The tears come in my eyes just thinking aboug that. Why he did that. He was a human too. But why going such a path?
Anyhow, jokes should be abundant. Wherever! :smile: