Was the universe created by purpose or by chance?
Was the universe created by purpose or by chance?
The question has two possible outcomes so we should initially assign a 50% probability to each outcome.
Start by examining the universes origins. The Big Bang. A huge explosion in space of a least 10^53 kg of matter that created the universe. Was this by chance or the work of a creator? I’ll conservatively assign a 50% probability to each outcome. Combining this probability with the initial staring probability:
50% + 50% x 50% = 75% chance of creator
Next examine the universe itself. It’s incredibly unlikely for a randomly selected universe to be life supporting so we live in a fine tuned universe. What are the chances that the fine tuning is the result of a fine tuner? Again I’ll assign a 50% probability:
75% + 25% x 50% = 87.5% chance of a creator
Prime mover argument. Logically we need a creator (so our best meta-physical argument goes). It’s a bit abstract so I’ll assign 25% probability to it being correct :
87.5% + 12.5% x 50% = 93.75% chance of a creator.
Next you need to allow for actualities that count against a creator god. I am not aware of any such.
My definition of God is strictly limited to a benevolent creator. Above I’ve addressed the creator aspect; I have separate arguments for why he is benevolent.
The question has two possible outcomes so we should initially assign a 50% probability to each outcome.
Start by examining the universes origins. The Big Bang. A huge explosion in space of a least 10^53 kg of matter that created the universe. Was this by chance or the work of a creator? I’ll conservatively assign a 50% probability to each outcome. Combining this probability with the initial staring probability:
50% + 50% x 50% = 75% chance of creator
Next examine the universe itself. It’s incredibly unlikely for a randomly selected universe to be life supporting so we live in a fine tuned universe. What are the chances that the fine tuning is the result of a fine tuner? Again I’ll assign a 50% probability:
75% + 25% x 50% = 87.5% chance of a creator
Prime mover argument. Logically we need a creator (so our best meta-physical argument goes). It’s a bit abstract so I’ll assign 25% probability to it being correct :
87.5% + 12.5% x 50% = 93.75% chance of a creator.
Next you need to allow for actualities that count against a creator god. I am not aware of any such.
My definition of God is strictly limited to a benevolent creator. Above I’ve addressed the creator aspect; I have separate arguments for why he is benevolent.
Comments (175)
I'm terribly opposed to this method of going about things. I fail to see how it makes sense to investigate the origin of all that is, and the origin of intelligibility as such, by giving a modal binary like 'contingency vs. necessity', then exclaiming: 'Aha! That exhausts logical space, so we have our starting point and can move on...'
Obviously, with the countless logical proofs of the existence of God, I'm in the heavy minority here, but what makes you think that the origin of all of existence can be meaningfully understood by such a method?
So we can discuss the physical world as much as we like but we will never reach any conclusions without employing probability.
I'm not posing an objection as much as a skeptical worry that you're a flesh and blood animal employing concepts which you acquired in the course of participating in an earth-bound human form of life and it seems bad philosophical practice to investigate the nature and origin of both all that is and the existence of entities as such without first giving some consideration as to why you feel entitled to hold that these abstract concepts are capable of doing that sort of work. This needs some initial justification before you get going with probabilities and all that.
I should add that I am putting this concern out there only as a good faith effort to suggest additional philosophical problems you might want to consider as part of your reflections. :smile:
Well, I wish you the best of luck. :smile: I hope you might consider the alternative of embracing the idea that it is not a question which admits of an answer; that the question itself is the first step in a movement towards faith in God's pervasive love (Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky) and/or the joyful immanence of discovery and creation in a world one can share with friends, family, and community (Nietzsche). That is, the question is embraced and answered in how you live a life rather than a solution you give in words.
In either case, I suggest you consider engaging a bit with this wonderful thread.
The interesting question in my eyes is if this proposition is very clever of very dumb. Could be both. The naive dumbness assigns 50% just because there are two options - either you win in the lottery or not. Or - the clever alternative: You exactly know that there is no necessity that would speak for either alternative and hence people's answers could correctly be interpreted as coin-flips...
Deciding that logic trumps reality is one of the ways we go astray.
But in any case, supposing that the universe was made on purpose by some agent is entirely compatible with the Big Bang: God made it happen, and then everything follows from there. I don't believe God caused the Big Bang, but it is certainly possible to believe such a thing, just as it is possible to believe that a god created the world in 6 days about 6,000 years ago.
You can believe whatever you want. If you run into obstinate resistance from reality, that's your problem. (Humans are always running into obstinate resistance from reality, no matter what they believe.)
While it is certainly possible to believe both, they are not equivalent beliefs. The former is not in conflict with fact or reason, the later is.
God created the earth in 6 days 6000 years ago and in doing so constructed it in such a way as to appear much older to our limited technology. What's in conflict with fact or reason in that account?
They are not equivalent beliefs, true enough. But many people are prepared to believe at least six impossible things before breakfast.
These sort of questions are basically Solipsistic. While Solipsism is logically self-consistent, it is also an exponentially more complicated theory than Realism. "Why is the fossil record the way it is?" becomes the same question raised to the power of, "Why fake it?", "Why fake it that way?", "What's in it for the faker?", ...
We reject Solipsism and it's related theories because, if you take them seriously they reveal themselves not to be simplified world-views, but rather indefensible over-elaborations of Realism.
God, after all, is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent. He knew exactly how smart and how stupid we would be, about what, and for how long.
We can rest, assured, that global warming is part of The Plan -- the End Game where we fizzle out.
Sic transit gloria mundi.
I'm not sure that probability is of any use to you. It cannot be applied to explanatory theories (i.e. scientific theories), and it even doesn't work for your two non-explanatory theories.
E.g. you claim that p=0.9375 for there being a creator, which means chance has p=0.0625, even if there is a mature explanatory theory of the origins of the universe that involves something like quantum tunneling. We end up with a fully developed explanatory theory compared with nothing more than "God did it". Are "Chance" and "God" even mutually exclusive theories?
Quoting Devans99
If you accept cosmological science as a believable starting point, then already a heavy constraint has been laid on your theological Bayesianism. The "logical alternatives" are not as you are outlining them.
To accept the Big Bang as the creation event is already to accept a scientific tale of existence in which a deity is materially absent AND where chance and purpose are accounted for as complementary aspects of that materiality.
The Big Bang is a story with both necessary and contingent features. It must have unfolded due to global laws or conservation symmetries. We "know" the rules in play all the way back to the effective "first moment". We also "know" what seem to be the contingencies or accidents.
It may not be a final theory yet - we know that too. But it is a strong constraint on any Bayesian reasoning. We have established that the rules of quantum physics would have had to have been in play. And that those rules say something about the material fluctuations that would have been de novo possible.
Then likewise the fine-tuning issue. This is more speculative in terms of cosmology. But the strongly divided form of the choice is either that our own creation event is part of a multiverse of creation events, or that there are structural necessities in play that made our particular universe the only creation event that could actually happen.
Again, quantum physics - with its path integral formalism and employment of the (telic) least action principle - says it is certainly possible, if not even highly probable, that we exist in the one universe that has the configuration optimal for material existence.
But either way - whichever cosmological option you feel inclined towards - neither answer on fine-tuning gives any credence to a fine-tuning creator. Fine-tuning is either just an actual random accident - and so the multiverse applies. Or fine-tuning is our illusion in not yet having a better grasp of the physics. We haven't yet got to the mathematical reasons why different flavours of particles have their varied coupling constants, for instance.
So to the degree you accept existing physics as a constraint on assessing the probabilities, fine-tuning is divided on the degree of mathematical necessity involved in our own form of universe. But a creator of fine-tuning is already ruled out as a 0% option.
Or at least, now you have to start arguing that God had the freedom to invent a different maths of symmetry and symmetry-breaking. Good luck on that.
However, I can take issue with this:
Quoting apokrisis
Certainly the discovery of the 'big bang' is based on empirical observations, but it is nevertheless it is an intrinsically mysterious or mystical model - the idea that the Universe springs into existence from an infinitesmally small point sounds suspiciously like 'creation ex nihilo'*. Indeed, when it was first floated in the 1930's many scientists were extremely hostile to it on exactly those grounds.
[quote=Wikipedia]]By 1951, Pope Pius XII declared that Lemaître's theory [of the 'primeval atom'] provided a scientific validation for Catholicism. However, Lemaître resented the Pope's proclamation, stating that the theory was neutral and there was neither a connection nor a contradiction between his religion and his theory. When Lemaître and Daniel O'Connell, the Pope's science advisor, tried to persuade the Pope not to mention Creationism publicly anymore, the Pope agreed. He persuaded the Pope to stop making proclamations about cosmology. While a devout Roman Catholic, he was against mixing science with religion, though he also was of the opinion that these two fields of human experience were not in conflict.[/quote]
Without even going down that route, however, one can always ask, how is it that what emerged from total disorder was order? You can't peer back in time past the 'singularity', nor can you see anything beyond the horizon of this universe.
So, believers are able to believe, sceptics will continue to challenge them. The dogs bark, the caravan moves on.
-------------------------
*There used to be a bumper sticker about this very thing: God said 'bang', or something like that.
Just FYI, Lemaître was a priest
But the non-religious might have the advantage of having an argument that hinges on the test of evidence?
One might scientifically keep an open mind on the possibility of eventually encountering this Creator face to face at some point. And yet we are also able to say - as cosmologists - we've gone all the way back to the first 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000000000001th of a second, and He ain't showed up in any essential way thus far. And everything we understood by that scientific route reduces any telic role He might have played to plucking a few constants out of the air for no obvious good reason.
Did God care so much about the mass of a quark or electron that he "fine-tuned" the number? Rum sort of Creator, if so.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yeah. Which is why I always promote the systems-thinking alternative of creation as an emergent structure of constraint on unbridled material freedoms.
Something from nothing is the problem for notions of causality that already presume causality is about material/efficient cause. Rather than wheeling in a creator god to make that nonsense idea work, it is better to just say it doesn't work and get on with an Aristotelian four causes/immanent/systems approach that sees creation as the constraint on a plenum of chaotic potential.
Quoting Wayfarer
And modern science has the answer. It has mathematical models of order out of chaos. Those models are being applied in cosmology.
Quoting Wayfarer
Again, these are points that count against a "creating god" notion of causality, and for a self-organising systems approach to cosmic causality.
So your shotgun is pointed squarely at your own foot here.
If you can't go back earlier in time to reach this mythical singularity - the place where this God of the Blue Touchpaper must reside in prime mover fashion - then maybe time itself is thermally emergent. What we are talking about is the first moment when time starts as already a symmetry-breaking.
Likewise the fact that we are bounded by cosmic event horizons. Everywhere we look around us now, we see that broken symmetry. The self-organising nature of cosmic structure is the scientific fact staring our metaphysical musings in the face.
But I don't see you factoring that in to your own line of thought. You seem to be suggesting some behind the scenes prime mover can rescue the standard materialist conception of causation for you.
Give it up. Move on. A creating god is the kind of last ditch myth you would invent if you can't in fact let go of a materialist understanding of creation events.
You want it to be true that existence has a first cause. The principle of sufficient reason appears to demand it. And yet you agree cosmological science finds no evidence of that right back to the first measurable instant. Why not just let go of this materialist conception of how the metaphysical answer ought to look?
The latter may not have been in conflict with "fact and reason" six thousand years ago. The same may be said of our present beliefs in 6000 years (if humanity manages the energy, resources, population, pollution and global warming crises sufficiently well to survive that long).
Absolutely possible. In the end it is either God, or a big black hole.
Sure - if you think about 'God' as on the same level of existence as the kinds of things that science investigates, then I would certainly agree that there is no such thing.
Quoting apokrisis
Other than the fact that, without them, nothing.
It depends on what you mean by "God" and "big black hole".
We have no way of knowing that. Without them, then no us and the nature we are familiar with, but perhaps something else.
If you are skeptical of theism and this describes your disposition, then I sincerely encourage you to reconsider what, precisely, you believe theism to entail. It is a historical fact that "atheism" did not appear on the European continent as an explicit denial of all divinity until this same divinity had been transformed into what we now call "personalism" - i.e. a God that is a thing-among-things, distinguishable only by quantitative properties.
It is interesting, I think, that those who parade science as overcoming theology seem to be unaware of the relatively recent advancements in the social sciences, particularly anthropology, ethnology, and sociology. This austere naturalism seems more fit in the days of Feuerbach, Marx, Freud, Frazer and Tyler and not in the more contemporary scene, where empirical facts are more valued than armchair speculation and modern mentalities are not artificially transposed onto ancient minds.
There are many models of theism, to be sure, but there are just a few prominent and historically lasting classical notions of God, and the Abrahamic traditions have, arguably from their beginnings, upheld the idea of a personal God, who created the Universe and who cares what happens.
Again, I pointed out to you two things.
Expecting our metaphysical speculations to be constrained by actual evidence seems to have emerged as the best way to go about reasoned inquiry. You don't seem to disagree.
So if a theory can't be cashed out in acts of measurement, it is classed as an idea that is "not even wrong". You seem to think this is a good argument against string theory for instance. So let's apply the same principle to all metaphysical speculation, including theism.
Then I also pointed out that your principal complaint is that materialism doesn't work as a causal story, and yet you are still talking like a materialist to the degree you accept there is some kind of necessity for a creating God.
Of course you can take refuge in ambiguity here. You can say you don't buy the concrete notion of a big daddy in the sky who actually decides to construct a Cosmos by knocking up some set of laws and constants - a God who is a substantial agent acting with material effect. But how else are we to understand the idea of "a creator"?
A systems view of the divine would see "god" as the name given to some kind of generalised finality and even Platonic form. That could be the immanent cause of being in delivering a telic drive towards order out of chaos. The cosmos would self-organise due to a purpose.
But now this is a radically different notion of a divine hand behind creation. There is no kind of specific creator making His choices about purpose or structure. Being itself is the coming-into-being that expresses some structure-producing tendency which cannot be denied.
At which point, we have an image of God so ambiguous you might as well give up the divine influence tag as we now have a well developed physicalism of that kind of self-organising systemhood. Mentioning anything supernatural feels rather redundant. The story of creation no longer needs an answer to the materialist riddle of who moved something first. Instead, we now have a more interesting story of what could have stopped a Cosmic tendency towards definite order in the first place.
How could creation have been resisted given the mathematical-strength necessities we now understand pretty well?
The whole God issue can be neatly turned on its head in that fashion. The scientific question now - or at least it will be the telling question once we get to a Theory of Everything - is what prevented the Cosmos becoming as we observe it?
Yahweh ... Yahweh ... what a funny-sounding name. No wonder it's so popular as a mockery.
This point, which Apokrisis and I also discussed in another thread, is related to the cosmological argument. It is the fact that there is a causal chain that appears to terminate at the very point of the singularity. Put it like this: we have a good understanding [and I fully accept] the naturalist account of how stellar explosions gave rise to heavy matter, how solar systems and then planets formed, and the fact that life evolved on Earth after this period. When all of this was first discovered, it was commonplace to say that this showed or proved that the origin of life itself could be understood as a chance event - when the right materials come together in the right way, whether it’s a thermal vent or Darwin’s ‘warm little pond’, then the first living organisms form as a kind of chain reaction.
But now it seems the case that in order for that to occur, there already had to have been the aforementioned stellar explosions. It was the investigation of those, that led Fred Hoyle to discover something called ‘carbon resonance’, which he said seems to rely on a very specific property of the atoms of stars. [There used to be a very good Paul Davies magazine essay online about this, but it seems to have vanished.] But the thrust of the idea is that every step in the sequence leading to the formation of life, has antecedents, and ultimately those antecedents appear to go back to the formation of the Universe out of the so-called ‘big bang’. That lead to the intuition, expressed also by at least some scientists [Freeman Dyson being one], that ‘the universe knew we were coming’. So it undermines the idea of chance or randomness or of life just occurring as the consequence of the shuffling of the deck.
So what I’m saying is that natural theologians will always be able to say that this was ‘all part of the plan’. And of course, scientific naturalism, which eschews such an understanding, will always reject such an attitude.
But another point is this. The ‘sky-father-god’ which Apokrisis mentions above, in some ways skews the debate. That’s because for Apokrisis [and many people], the whole ‘conception of the divine’ is inextricably bound up with that understanding. Whereas for others - well, for myself - that’s not what it means. My approach is something more like ‘religious naturalism’ - which is that religious traditions and symbols are representations or archetypes. So my way of interpreting religious mythology is that it symbolises something real about the human condition. However the mainstream religion in current culture has become radically out of sync with the outlook of current culture. That’s where interpretation is required - analysis of the symbolic meaning of the ideas.
Some people get along just fine without any kind of spiritual sense. For better or worse, I’m not one of them. So that is what causes me to keep reading and debating and thinking about these questions. My belief is, there is a reality which is signified by the name of God, although I remain agnostic about the nature of this reality. But as scientific naturalism has generally developed specifically to exclude such ideas, then naturally I am not inclined to agree with it. That is laying my cards on the table to the best of my ability.
I don't have time for much of a response right now, but I am curious: do you believe in a creator God that existed prior to the Universe, and who cares what happens? You seem to be saying you are agnostic on this issue, but if you are, then what exactly is the 'reality' you are believing in? If the Universe was believed to be created "for a purpose" then that would suggest the Abrahamic model.
The alternative would seem to be to think that the Universe was not created for a purpose. Where does that leave us? Isn't that just what the advocates of science are saying? What sense could we make of any kind of dialetheic third "possibility" such as that the Universe was neither created for a purpose, nor was it not created for a purpose.
Well given that was the kind of god the OP refers to, it seems fair enough to be focusing on that.
And I was pointing out how you were defending the same conception to the degree you thought there is some "physical singularity" whose structural form is in need of a materialistic "cause-and-effect" explanation.
This is not an acceptable question. When you say "who cares what happens", "cares" refers to a human emotion. But it is impossible that a God which was prior to the universe, and creator of the universe could be a human being, and this is what is required to have human emotions. So to combine these two in a single question, assuming a God which is prior to and creator of the universe, yet also having the property of a human emotion "caring", is to ask two very distinct questions, with likely two distinct answers, as one question.
I don’t know - that’s part of the point. It’s a sense of there being some great and really vital thing to discover that one has inklings of but still can’t quite see. There are some parts of the Christian teaching that resonate with it, and others that don’t. It’s a work in progress.
I have said before - I think what many believe in, and what many reject, is a particular archetypal form. The name ‘Jupiter’ is derived from the Indo-European Dyaus-Pitar - meaning ‘sky father’, ‘king of the Gods’. The name ‘Jehovah’ is derived from the Hebrew ‘Tetragrammaton’ and glossed as ‘Yaweh’ and then as ‘Jehovah’. And I think in the popular imagination, ‘Jehovah’ and ‘Sky Father’ are merged into the image that is customarily associated with the name ‘God’ - ‘sky father’. And I’m not trying to be disrespectful to those who do believe in that, but it’s not what I understand by the name.
As Darth observed above, how Plato and Aristotle - the Greeks - understood the ‘first cause’ was very different to what it then became through absorption into Christian theology. But the unfortunate thing is, that much of the wisdom of the classical world then became associated with Christian dogmas and rejected on that account, which is what gave rise to modern scientific naturalism, that was substantially formed on the basis of the rejection of that. It’s a very deep and delicate matter.
The Judaic, Christian and Islamic Gods are pretty much universally understood to care, to be persons in some sense analogous to, but obviously not the same as, mortal or finite persons. These Gods are also understood to have purposes, to be pleased or displeased by human actions, and to judge humans accordingly. So, you are wrong; this is a perfectly acceptable question in the context of this thread.
This is a type of equivocation, surely? What constitutes the "universe" if there is something that is creating it? Would we be better served asking how the universe self-created?
I disagree with the way your probability works - you're not asking what the probability is of the universe forming from some initial conditions, you're asking what the chances of identification are given what the universe looks like now, which is not a probability question, it's a weight of evidence question. You're really asking: Does the evidence support hypothesis A or hypothesis B? In which case, plausible responses involve, "What about hypothesis C?" or "We don't know."
It's not a fifty-fifty chance if I am a woman or a man just because you don't know. It's about a fifty-fifty chance that you'll guess.
If you think that it is "perfectly acceptable" to assign the emotions of human beings to the creator of the universe, then I think you have a problem.
Unless you are accepting of these "Gods", to claim that they are perfectly acceptable is simple contradiction.
Well, that's just a stupid thing to say, so nessun commento...
For example, quantum mechanical "transition" can also be considered a probability: the average number of an event happening per unit time. Indeed, if we look at a single-photon emitter, the timing in which the emitter absorbs / emits a photon (which is an electronic transition) is uncertain to some degree. If we plot the time-intensity in which the photon was emitted after a pulse of excitation light for thousands of times and add them up, then we'll get an exponential function. As such, "probability" of big bang happening makes no sense unless there is some sort of units to describe probability.
To make matters worse, the question implicitly assume that timespace is a valid thing even before big bang. Scientifically speaking, the big bang theory does not explain anything about something that happened "before" it but only after it. There are plenty of scientists postulating that timespace was a thing before big bang, but plenty of others postulating that timespace itself was nonexistent. The reason is simple. Because no one knows and Big Bang theory does not rely on unobservables such as the "universe" outside the unborn universe. Since I am no theoretical cosmologist, I cannot defend either position.
You've slipped in the word 'indefensible' here without justification. What grounds do we have to suggest that it is 'indefensible' I believe there are a number of religious scholars and even a few religious philosopher who defend the idea, so it seems entirely defensible to me.
Then you have equated simplicity with the adoption of ideas. You might prefer simple explanations (I do to), but you have no grounds for saying that simple explanation are more 'right' than less simple ones.
Yes, if God is the answer, then we have one extremely convoluted plan. Reminds me of the ways in which the villains would try to kill James Bond, they never just shoot him, do they?
Why don't you defend it then?
I don't believe it myself. I'm a fairly committed naturalist so I've no interest in defending it.
But yet co claim it is a defensible position. How do you even know that, or are you just guessing?
It's a defensible position because people defend it. I't just basic empiricism.
No one defends that position. Basic empiricism.
Look, there's no point in us arguing about it when we can easily settled the absolute, final and unequivocal Truth of the matter by simply asking David Deutch's opinion.
Well, you have no defense, have no interest in a defense, can't point to a defense, but quibble with term "indefensible" to describe an indefensible position.
And yes, Deutsch is quite right to identify such creation myths and explanations from outside as variants of Solipsism, and as such refute them.
That's your opinion, but "the stupid thing" which I said points to the issue of assigning to the creator of the universe, properties which only human beings are known to have. This creates a logical problem right off the bat. How can the creator of the universe have a property which only humans have?
The op employs "purpose". So we must determine what is meant by "purpose". Is purpose something which only human acts may display, or is purpose something which acts other than human may display?
Do we? How?
Answers to questions - "why?" have the format "because...". But 'because' literally means 'the cause of' so all we've done is move the question back, but that's exactly what science is doing, so that can't be quite it.
It seems to me that there is only one option, we have got our conception of cause and effect wrong somehow. But our conception of cause and effect is at the heart of our intuition. So where could we possibly go from here? We could analyse the possibility-space of ways in which the universe could 'be', but what tools are we going to use to do that job? We've just established that one of our most basic a priori understandings is probably wrong, so on what basis are we going to trust the rest like logic and rationality?
In the exact same manner we find it a reasonable belief that unicorns do not exist on earth. Because we would know a unicorn if we saw one and recognize it as such. We have looked in many - many places for a very very long time, and no one has seen a unicorn. Therefor we believe unicorns do not exist and act accordingly.
It is not a fact that unicorns do not exist, but it is an artificial barrier to believe that things, concepts, ideas can only be true if they can be verified by our senses as a matter of physical fact.
We must determine that we would know a creator if we found one (if not, the entire search is pointless). We have certainly looked in many places for a very long time for one and no one has found such a thing. So do we rule out the possibility of a creator on the same grounds? It seems not, hence my question. By what method do we "know" the universe was not created by a human (albeit one with, as yet, unrecognised powers), which would not also be applicable to any God?
by the same logic as above, if there was a human being with the power to create the universe - we would recognize that power. We have known about a lot of human beings, none have had that power - it is reasonable to believe as true that no human being has the ability to create the universe. Further, it is exceedingly less likely to believe as true, and act accordingly that there is or was a human being that created the world.
You logic limits truth into only 3 categories, those that are verifiable facts in time and space, those things that are veritably false in time and space, and everything else that could possibly be true because we have not verified it yet to be false in time and space.
Proposition 1 - There was a creator god
Assume 50% probability true to start with
Big Bang is evidence for creator at 60% probability so combining probabilities:
50% + 50% x 60% = 80%
Fine tuning is evidence for the creator 75% probability so:
80% + 20% x 75% = 95%
Prime mover is evidence for the creator 25% probability so:
95% + 5% x 25% = 96.25% chance of a creator god is
To double check, I’ve done the inverse proposition below:
Proposition 2 - there was not a creator god
Assume 50% probability true to start with
Big Bang is evidence against no creator 40% probability so combining probabilities:
50% x 40% = 20%
Fine tuning is evidence against no creator 25% probability so:
20% x 25% = 5%
Prime mover is evidence against no creator 75% probability so:
5% x 75% = 3.75% chance of no creator god
It helps if you think about the probability space as a box. Let’s start with the proposition ‘the dog is nice’. Let’s assume you know nothing about this or any dog then the chance of the dog being nice is 50%. So imagine the probability space cut 50% / 50% ‘dog is nice’ / ‘dog is nasty’.
Now we can add a peice of evidence FOR the proposition. The owner says the dog is nice and we trust him 75%. So we already know that 50% of dogs are nice what about the 50% of dogs unknown? Well we can multiply that 50% by 75% and add it to the 50% we already had for dog is nice: 50% + 50% x 75% = 87.5%. Think of the original 50/50 probability space growing to 87.5/12.5 ‘dog is nice’ / ‘dog is nasty’.
So above is how you compute ‘evidence FOR’. ‘Evidence AGAINST’ is a different calculation:
Starting with dog is nice 50%
Now add a piece of evidence AGAINST: ‘the dog bit me’. 90% chance dog is nasty so that’s a 10% chance the dog is nice. So we take 50% x 10% = 5% chance dog is nice.
NOTICE THE CACULATION IS DIFFERENT DEPENDING ON WHETHER THE EVIDENCE IS FOR OR AGAINST THE PROPOSITION.
I think that perhaps the question of "why?" wasn’t even really articulated in such a bald form until the modern period. I don’t think culture was capable of conceiving of the question in the abstract until modernity - in fact I think that being able to frame the question in the abstract is one of the hallmarks of modernity.
There was a debate at a Buddhist forum I visit - about free will, which then spilled over into the question of meaning and purpose in this kind of sense. Someone posted a link to a Q&A with a Tibetan Rinpoche about this question. I had the distinction impression the Rinpoche had no idea what the question meant. He seemed to think it was a funny question, or perhaps a joke. In any case he wasn't the least interested in canvassing it. But I don't think that this indicates that the Rinpoche believes that life has *no* purpose or meaning; I think it's because Tibetan culture has not arrived at the point of considering the question of whether the Universe exists for no reason. I think the Rinpoche's outlook is embedded in a 'meta-narrative' as understood by Tibetan Buddhism - and that meta-narrative provides a background, the reason or rationale as to why one would commit one's life to the elaborate practices and disciplines associated with Tibetan Buddhism. (In fact the distinct impression I got from the Rinpoche's responses was: stop messing about, time's a'wasting!)
As I have an interest in Buddhism, I happen to know that 'the doctrine of fortuitous origins' is actually discussed in Buddhism, and categorised as an 'incorrect view'. (Doctrines of Fortuitous Origination (Adhiccasamuppannav?da): Views 17–18, in the Brahmaj?la Sutta.)
On the other hand, Buddhists don't believe in a creator. But their understanding is that the parameters of existence are the consequence of karma, so that current actions will determine the circumstances of your ongoing existence. So Buddhism actually avoids the 'two extremes' of, on the one hand, nihilism (of which 'fortuitous origins' is regarded as an instance), and 'eternalism' (which is a difficult idea to understand but which can be thought of as 'rebirth in perpetuity in favourable circumstances'.)
In any case, in Western culture, the idea that the Universe exists 'for no reason' is recent development, as I'm saying. Greek philosophy, for example, didn't entertain the notion, as the whole task of philosophy was the discovery of reason, in the sense of logoi, the ordering principles of the Cosmos, which actually were the origin of science itself, and all of the specialised branches ending in -logy (biology, psychology, etc). It wasn't until the beginning of modern secular culture, that the thought began to crystallise that perhaps there aren't any, as these might be somehow inter-subjective, cultural or social in origin, or at any rate useful adaptions which are once again the product of something that is ultimately fortuitous in origin. A lot of that is tied to the rejection of the Aristotelian 'telos', which is also 'the reason why something exists'. As is generally acknowledged, modern scientific method is generally dismissive of teleological thinking. So the absence of purpose is taken to be the finding of science, and as a consequence it certainly seems that for many of the inhabitants of modern secular- scientific culture, any sense of the Universe being 'animated by purpose' is regarded as a relic, and is generally associated with the Christianity that secular philosophy, 'the Enlightenment project', has generally defined itself in opposition to. It's an existential outlook, a way-of-being, which has been the subject of an enormous volume of literature in the 20th century.
[quote=Wikipedia]In social science, disenchantment (German: Entzauberung) is the cultural rationalization and devaluation of mysticism apparent in modern society. The concept was borrowed from Friedrich Schiller by Max Weber to describe the character of modernized, bureaucratic, secularized Western society, where scientific understanding is more highly valued than belief, and where processes are oriented toward rational goals, as opposed to traditional society, where for Weber, "the world remains a great enchanted garden".[/quote]
I suppose the question is, is it possible to retain any sense of the Universe being animated, so to speak, in light of the discoveries of science? I think so, but that it requires a new kind of imaginative synthesis. But in my view, a lot of what drives the debate is precisely un-belief - the rejection of the Western religious and cultural narrative, or rather its replacement with science as the arbiter of what's real, and the consequent assumption that meaning and purpose is at best subjective or culturally constructed.
I think this is probably right, and I think the reason for that is that humanity had not been able to extricate itself from unreflectively anthropomorphic thinking until the advent of modernity. You always seem to be saying that something has been lost or forgotten. I think, on the other hand, that something has been overcome, surpassed. Of course a loss of illusions will always be accompanied by its attendant traumas. Perhaps it could be said that humanity is in its adolescence. Should a return to the innocence/ ignorance of childhood be recommended?
No, I don't see it that way at all. What has been lost is precisely a sense of related-ness to the cosmos, and also a sense of purpose and meaning. This is writ large all over Modern Culture, and manifests in the form of many social ills and ailments, such as anomie, depression, addiction, compulsive consumption, and so on. This is how the belief that you're the outcome of an accidental collocation of atoms manifests, in my view. Now, I get, you don't feel like that at all, and I'm not wanting to suggest that you ought to. If you can get along without that sense of connected-ness, then good for you!
This is a strawman, though, because the feeling of connectedness is not dependent on any anthropomorphic, and much less any anthropocentric, worldview; in fact I would say it is quite the reverse now, once we have seen the lurking dualism that is inherent in such thinking, and since it is now impossible to authentically return to any such 'childlike' view. The challenge now is to go beyond simplistic 'subject/object', 'substance/ accident' and 'internal/ external' dualistic thinking and allow for the fullest feeling for the numinous, for art and spirituality as well as science, without returning to the ignorance that consists in reifying concepts or imagination.
The evidence indicates that the universe was created before human beings existed. If we accept that evidence then a human being could not have created the universe.
Quoting Janus
Wow, what an incredibly unphilosophical piece of writing.
The pre-modern view was animistic. The human social sphere included the whole of nature. The sun and stars were personified. So were the winds, the mountains, the rivers, the forests.
So what we have lost is that pan-spiritualism or pantheism. Organised modern religions reacted to philosophical inquiry by contracting towards a strong mind/body dualism. And in doing that, it shot right past the social sphere within which our individuated being - our personification - is constructed, to develop a mystic or supernatural realm that is supposedly the home to spirit or essence.
Science showed that this shrinking of personification or animation until it had shrivelled right out of material existence couldn't be right. There was no evidence that our essence sits outside nature. Science could see that life was a material process - an expression of a systems "four causes" ontology. And then even "mind" is becoming understood in the same naturalistic way through neuroscience and social psychology.
So we have this wild swing from a too generous pantheism to a too miserly religious dualism. One personified the whole of nature. The other withdrew personhood from nature entirely.
But science - of the holistic systems thinking kind - can locate humanity in humanity. It can identify the social and biological causes of being. That creates a sound natural metaphysics as our modern departure point.
Quoting Wayfarer
I agree that mechanical thinking about nature has bad results. But that is part of the overshoot story. We had to de-animate nature to the appropriate degree. Both reductionist science and organised religion took their halves of a shared dualism to unwarranted extremes.
So you are making the call to re-animate our understanding of nature. Again I agree. That is what scientific holism would aim to do. But how do you avoid overshooting the social sphere, and our biological heritage, as you make that violent course correction?
You want a personified cosmos. And you accept that would have to take the vaguest or most ambiguous form. Yet isn't the danger that you then still want to wind up with some kind of ultimate binary victory that puts you on the right side of the conventional dualism? The cosmos must be ultimately mind-like or divine in some fashion?
So I do think it is a pendulum story. We went from extreme animism to extreme dualism. Science de-animated the material world, and religion said that was OK as the divine realm stood quite separate at the back of all that ... with its super-animate powers to compensate.
But the human is to be found in the humanity of our biological and social development. Then animism reaches as far as organisms in general - life and mind as a semiotic form of complex order. And the Cosmos is nature understood at its most general or undifferentiated level possible. That is yet another story - possibly pan-semiotic according to modern physics. So re-animated to that degree - the one that sees the universe in properly organismic terms as a structure serving a (thermal) purpose.
We have many points of agreement but that we're coming at the issue from different perspectives - you through bio-sciences, me through spirituality. So my orientation is indeed more religious - perhaps you could say first person rather than third. But I think the aim of philosophy - love~wisdom - is a sense of unconditional relatedness and compassion - in the sense intended by the Christian agap?, or the Buddhist bodhicitta. How to realise that, is the question. I don't think that biology really answers that question - I think the wisdom traditions of the world have found a higher source and how to tap into it. It's an anthropological question - what is the human being, really? Just 'a species'? I think something more than that.
But I think a lot of what you write, is indicating that culture and science are moving in that direction. As you say, science itself is much less mechanist now than it used to be. So there's a new synthesis arising, maybe, and I think it can indeed incorporate the 'system science' and holistic view that you're advocating. But there's something else that has yet to be realised. 'The old is dying, the new is struggling to be born'.
The point is that you cannot say anything positive about what is indicated by the feeling of the numinous. You yourself refuse to say anything definite about it, so how is your position really different than mine? I acknowledge that the feeling of the numinous may have been lost to many people in modernity; but I also wonder how many pre-moderns actually had such a sense anyway.
Phenomenologically speaking, we know that the sense of the numinous is a powerful affect, as such, why should it need to be justified beyond itself? We also know that people who have such feelings often cleave to the religious symbolisms that they were born into in order to lend structure and context to the feelings, but this does not demonstrate anything in particular about metaphysics.
If mystical or religious experience were taken to demonstrate anything particular about metaphysics, then there would indeed be a problem, since the different metaphysical conceptions associated with the major religions disagree with one another. Any attempt to draw any metaphysical conclusions from mystical experience is an attempt to objectify the experience, something which, by your own lights, it seems you should be opposed to.
And here is a more comprehensive definition from Merriam Webster;
[i]Definition of numinous
1 : supernatural, mysterious
2 : filled with a sense of the presence of divinity :holy
3 : appealing to the higher emotions or to the aesthetic sense : spiritual[/i]
I highlighted the three categories to show that only the second one is essentially the way you want to interpret the term.
4: sense of scientific and mathematical wonder that the structure of reality has intelligible form
Yes, that seems right to me, I think the intimation of a pervading immanent order that is invoked by mathematical intelligibility and applicability, and the general intelligibility of nature, definitely evokes another dimension of the sense of the numinous.
It would seem to be the most purely intellectual. The others are more based in simple affect. A sense of the mysterious, a sense of the holy and a sense of the beautiful, senses that require no particular knowledge or intellectual mastery to drive them.
I'm tempted to draw attention to the lack of intellectual mastery here. :naughty:
But instead, I think all three of yours require quite sophisticated cultural training. And that itself should be telling. We have to learn the general attitude - mystic, religious, aesthetic - which then allows us to perceive the affective state in a noumenal fashion. As a feeling painted across the world itself.
So we likely disagree deeply here. You seem to think the sense of the numinous is something simple, direct, unmediated. I reply that it seems very much the product of cultural learning, a sense of awe and rightness that can be reliably evoked from within a well-developed conceptual frame.
And as such, it stands on the side of the phenomenal. The brain needs feelings of certainty and uncertainty, salience and irrelevance, attention and disinterest, just to navigate life with pragmatic efficiency. Ultimately I am sure when I feel sure. Unsure when I feel that.
To be simplistic, the brain is designed so that the ability to recognise the familiar, recognise the unfamiliar, are emotionally rooted at a very basic level in the brainstem and limbic system. It is a basic dichotomy being imposed on the ever present flood of life so as to create an intelligible divide on experience from the get-go.
So a generalised sense of awe or salience is not difficult to explain. We would even know all the sympathetic nervous system hallmarks to look out for - the physiologically-appropriate orienting responses like widened pupils, quickened heart-beat, sweaty palms, paused digestion, etc.
Thus it can all be explained away. But then it also seems a marvellous thing to me ... that everything makes natural sense when looked at with a dialectical or dichotomistic logic. Makes me tingly all over again. ;)
The Universe was not created in the first place it just exists we humans have a string tendency to think that the Universe was created but it was not it just exists think about it i will clarify my answer if someone is interested
Well, it's a good thing you didn't succumb to that ill-informed temptation! :lol:
The fact that there obviously have been sophisticated religious, philosophical and aesthetic practices and systems of thought that have grown up around these senses of the numinous does not entail that an unsophisticated individual cannot experience a sense of mystery, or of beauty or of the holy. I can remember having such feelings in early childhood, at a time when my knowledge was much less even than it is now, and my intellectual mastery was negligible. Jacob Boehme, considered by some to be the greatest of the Christian mystics was a shoemaker when he experienced his visions; he had no formal education at all.
Your thinking is reductionistic, not in the atomistic materialist sense, but in the sense that you want to objectify and reduce everything to being understood by science and mathematics. I think this is probably due to the fact that you lack a feel for the other three senses of the numinous, you have a kind of 'tin ear', I think. What we are at root is all about what we feel, not what we think. (Although I am not suggesting that we should not develop a good comprehensive intellectual understanding based on that essential affective life, if we feel so moved).
Sure. I am reductionist in the sense of reducing things to models. In this case, a general holistic model of causality that stands in self-conscious contrast to the atomistic/materialist one.
So that means I see structure or form as an element of reality. I don't eliminate them. Modelling is reductionist only in homing in on what matters in having explanations.
Quoting Janus
Unfair. I have a highly educated aesthetic response. And you seemed to agree that an appreciation of the structure of nature can be a numinous feeling.
It is true that I don't feel any generalised thrill contemplating the kind of mystic and religious social constructs you might have in mind.
Quoting Janus
I've taken the opposite message. It is so easy to socially construct our states of feeling that one has to accept a post-modern absurdism about them. We have to wear our emotions lightly because they are not authentic in that root Romanticist sense.
But you previously said that:
Quoting Janus
?
Quoting Janus
But woe betide anyone who does ;-)
Quoting apokrisis
There is a debate in religious studies regarding whether there are any 'unmediated experiences' or whether they're a product of cultural conditioning. But I believe that reference to 'the unconditioned' and 'the immeasurable' do indeed refer to those realities. And sure they're at the outer edges of human experience, but I don't buy that they're social constructs. Social constructs are made around such insights - perhaps to wall them off, like a tokomak reactor!
Actually where I first read about 'the numinous' was in a book that is well-known in comparative religion, 'The Idea of the Holy', by Rudolf Otto.
But, where have I said there is anything wrong with studying religious systems. or systems of mystical symbolism or poetry or the arts?
And where have I suggested that Boehme's visions and writings demonstrate anything about metaphysics?
I welcome reasoned critique of anything I have said but it should be well-aimed.
it is only on account of the primacy of our affective life that the kinds of influence of our states of feeling that you allude to are possible. The point is that our affective responses do not tell us anything about the objective nature of the world, but they may certainly tell us about the objective nature of affective subjectivity.
Well, the universe was either created by a rabbit or it wasn't, so 50% chance rabbit, 50% not rabbit. I get you don't think it was a rabbit, but please don't ridicule my belief in a rabbit diety because my chances of being right are equal to yours. Quoting Devans99
The problem with this complex math equation you've devised is that the chance of it being random chance is also 75%. We would have to add the 25% chance of the Big Bang being correct to the initial 50% as well. Both your possibilities are going to approach 100% the more you add to this, making the likelihood of either equally likely.
It seems straightforward to me, that the sense of living a purposeful existence ought to be an antidote to anomie, depression, and so on. So, if it doesn't seem obvious to you, then maybe I'm just wrong. I'm not trying to publish a paper on it.
I write a fair bit on this forum, I create fairly detailed posts, often cite sources. I could try and respond to your questions above, but going on our previous interactions, I don’t think you will have the least interest in what I have to say. I started off this last interaction in response to another poster, and a fairly specific point, I will wait and see if anything is forthcoming from that.
Well, a philosophy forum is mainly engaged with ‘abstract theorising’, but what I was referring to was the existential implications of the falling away of religion in the secular world. So this was summarised like this:
Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (New York, Free Press, 1973]. And that is not a religious book, by the way, but a sociological analysis of religion. But I hope it conveys in a little less abstract terms, what it was that was lost, or went missing.
What evidence is there for a lack of human beings before the universe began, or outside of the observable universe?
You are not doing the math correct, I get:
96.25% chance of an abstract creator for universe
0.0009625% chance of a Rabbit creator for universe
The calculation is the same until the end when we allow for an extra peice of evidence against the Rabbit:
Rabbit lacking intelligence and capabilities to build universe 99.999%
Chance Rabbit built universe: 96.25% x 0.0001% = 0.0009625%
(Note same additional predicate cannot be applied to abstract creator as we know nothing about abstract creator’s intelligence and capabilities).
Quoting Hanover
You have not read all my math; I do both calculations; you must of just read the start. The chance of the universe being random was calculated as 3.75%
Cards and dice are manmade and not natural. A six sided dice is equally weighed on all sides. Each side only differs by a superficial facade that is subjective. Nature does not work this way. Nature assigns different quantum potentials to each side. In nature, all the sides are loaded differently and are not the same as a dice. The first six energy levels of the hydrogen atom dice have a different physical value on each side. Under different conditions certain sides will be favored. Statistics does not operate like nature. Statistics should be limited to manmade things where facade sells better than potential.
The question is did God; natural, or manmade; statistics, create the universe? Based on the models that exist, I would say manmade has fabrictd the current perceived universe.
If you look any gambling casino, these are not rational places. People go there to escape reality and live a fantasy. Nature is not composed of dice and cards. You need a manmade place to find that. That is how casinos make money. We should ask Donald Trump since he made money with casinos.
Drawing a distinction between religious (or better, spiritual) experiences, and religious (or better, theological) concepts, and religion itself; religious beliefs and narratives are human universals (Brown, 1991). And the content of those beliefs and narratives concerns the metaphysical.
Because of its subjective and intersubjective aspects, I agree that generalisations regarding the spiritual/theological/religious may be problematic.
That you have linked the spiritual to affect (an aspect of responsiveness, or corporeal condition), and @apokrisis has linked it to cognition (an aspect of awareness, or mental condition), thereby linking spiritual to different aspects of consciousness (mass noun), I find new and interesting.
The question I posed, the answer is unknowable in a boolean sense would you not agree?
But I’d like an answer to the question: statistics and probability can at least give an approximate answer. There is no other approach.
It seems to me you are trying to use a shovel to cut wood. Your tool does not fit the job.
There are 3 ways we can come to believe something to be true, and act accordingly.
Fact, Reason or Faith. Many arguments of this nature's core difference is that someone is arguing something is true from a basis of faith, and someone else is saying it is false from a basis of fact.
Fact is the realm of science, its truth is based on its observations being confirmed by reality. Its truth claims are verifiable, measurable, and conform to an observable reality. It can not make, or deny any truth claims outside this realm.
Reason is truth based on logic, its truth is based on a set of observations or believes that taken together point to a truth that is reasonable. This belief can not be in conflict with an observable fact. It can not make truth statements that are the in the realm of fact, however it can not make, or deny any truth claims based on faith.
Faith is truth outside of fact or reason. It is a truth one chooses to believe. It can not be in conflict either fact or reason. It is the realm of theology.
You are trying to answer a truth claim by reason with the tools of science.
The question I asked was in the realm of science rather than faith: ‘was there a creator of the universe’- that is not a faith question - did I mention religion anywhere in my post?
The question in the realm of science is "how was the universe created" - and we all await an answer. The lack of a scientific answer so far, is factual proof of nothing, other than the statement "we don't have a scientific answer for how the universe started"
You addition of a prime mover, is an argument based on reason, not science. And your use of probability analysis to quantify the likelihood of a "creator" is , using the wrong tool for the job.
Why?
If I know nothing about the proposition, then I cannot assign a probability value to it.
Again, why? Where is this 60% number coming from? Why not 30%? Or 0%? Or 100%? Or 75%?
Annnndd... same question.
Yup.
The thing is, you're just pulling numbers from your intuitive feeling for them. There is no reason to accept your probabilities. For some proposition 1 has a 0% probability of being true, and for some it has a 100% probability of being true. And, in the end, you have to have some kind of knowledge of the world to reliably assign a probability -- so in the case of a evenly weighted coin we know that we will get heads 50% of the time, over the course of infinitely many coin-flips, because we know things about the coin. Same goes for card games or pulling different colored balls out of bags.
But we know nothing about God, so we cannot assign a probability to his existence or not aside from our intuitive feelings on the matter, which diverge wildly because of extra-probabilistic reasons.
- You can. A little bit of common sense and statistics tells us, on average, the answer to yes/no questions (for which nothing else is known) is 50% yes, 50% no.
Quoting Moliere
- The actual % I’m using are rather arbitrary; just concentrating on the general method at this point, will refine the estimates as I learn more science and philosophy.
Quoting Moliere
- Sure people can pick a number like 0% or 100% based on intuition or faith, but that’s not very scientific. Prefer a meta-analysis using probability and science.
Quoting Moliere
- By his work he shall be known to us.
I'd say that common sense, in this case, is misleading. How many yes/no questions are there? I don't think there is any reasonable way to count. Language is often characterized as a system of expression which uses finite resources to express infinite possible sentences. That's because we simply do not know how many sentences there may possibly be -- it basically looks like infinite to us. So there is no way of knowing if 50% of yes/no questions are yes or no. We simply lack the ability to count. Just because there are two answers that does not mean that both answers are weighted the same. Take a look at the colored ball set-ups for probability. If we have 5 red balls and 20 blue balls in the same bag, then the probability of drawing a red ball is 20 percent. There are only two possible outcomes, but the outcomes have different probabilities because of how many of each there are.
In the case of God there really is only a probability of either 0 or 1, because existence does not admit of degrees. At least not without some fairly strange notions about reality that are clearly not going to be shared by everyone.
I might modify this a bit though and say there is no non-arbitrary way to assign a probability. Clearly you can just pick a number.
- Do we go for the midpoint on a normal probability distribution or one of the end points?
- We will be more correct in a statistical sense if we pick the midpoint of normal distribution - 50%
That is only the case for phenomena which follow a normal distribution, though. To pick the normal distribution is an arbitrary assumption. There are plenty of pheneomena for which this assumption doesn't hold -- non-normal distributions. And in the case of Yes/No questions, without a method of counting, we simply do not know what kind of distribution holds.
if you are looking for some semi- scientific based argument for the God as creator, with a bunch of math and probabilities - The fine tuning argument by design works pretty well - See Dr. Hud Hudson's lecture attached.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6qWzxKVBko
I'm not sure how your first statement links to your second one. And picking a distribution you can do -- but it's pretty arbitrary. What's to stop me from saying that the statistically most likely distribution is exponential? Especially given that you've said we know nothing about the external world?
Why not?
I would put it like this. The x-axis is the number of yes/no questions asked. So we don't have to worry about infinity, we can look at the tendency. The Y axis is percent of questions whose answer is no. We have the ability to generate all kinds of no questions -- like "Is the desk brown?" Now supposing that the desk is indeed brown, we can say yes. But then we can also ask "Is the desk green? Is the desk gray? Is the desk blue?" and so on, for all the colors that it is not. We can ask "Is the desk three feet tall?" -- and, again, supposing that it is, we can also ask "Is the desk four feet tall? Is the desk two feet tall?" and so on.
So an exponential distribution even makes sense in the case of yes/no questions -- there are surely more "no" answers than "yes" answers. And the more questions we ask, because we can also ask different questions that are about the same object, and there are more no's for any given object, the more no questions there are.
- so you ask the question ‘is the desk brown?’
- so we already know the probability distribution of brown / all the other colours is not normal
- so the question ‘is the desk brown?’ we already have evidence for
- so it is not in the set of questions for which we have no evidence for
- so we can’t assign 50% / 50% as an outcome
In contrast the question ‘is there a creator?’ has no in built evidence so the 50% / 50% is the statistically correct answer.
I do not know what you mean by evidence being built into a question. The primary difference I see is that you're asking about existence, whereas I had questions about properties. But I have evidence that the desk exists. I see it right here. So I don't see how existence is somehow different, or how a creator is somehow different from questions about properties of things. The more questions we ask, the more "no" answers we will have.
So I'll ask again -- what is this graph that you propose? What is on the x-axis, and what is on the y-axis? And what would a normal distribution look like for questions of the sort that can only be answered in two ways?
Some questions that don’t have evidence baked in:
‘Is there a creator god?’
‘Is the dog nice?’
‘Is the frog fat?’
So questions can be about existence or boolean valued properties only. All of these types of questions are statistically best answered 50% / 50%.
I'd say that it depends on the domain under consideration, and so evidence is a part of such things.
"Is the dog nice?" -- the weight given yes or no would depend upon the percentage of nice dogs there are. So, like the ball example, if we just chose some random dog from the set there would be a percentage assignable based upon what so far has been observed.
But if you just mean to restrict questions to boolean values, 0 or 1, then OK.
If mathematical objects are allowed then it could be demonstrated that there are more "No" answers, as well -- 2 + 2 = 4, but it does not equal any other number. The "ball" you'd be picking out is the predicate, some number, and only one such number exists for which the answer to the question "Is 2+2=x?" is yes.
If not, then you'll have to further restrict what you mean by the relevant domain. Because at this point your domain is any question for which there is a yes or no answer, and which there can only be two possible outcomes for the object under consideration.
You are displaying a gross misunderstanding of probability. Either the creator exist or it does not and that has nothing to do with probability.
Possible outcomes refer to a random event. If you flip a fair coin, on the flipping, it has a 50% chance of being heads or tails, but after it lands it is either heads or tails.
For example, say we flip a fair coin and it lands on heads. Now after the flip but before it lands there was a possible outcome of heads or tails; however, once it landed on heads there is no possible outcome tails. Probability is removed from the picture, it is heads and no matter how many times you check the coin it will not come up as tails.
- It depends how you do the math, I am starting with a question like ‘is the dog nice?’ which has no evidence built into it, so I start 50% / 50%
- then as a separate step, I allow for any evidence I had about dogs:
- say I had a survey saying 70% of dogs are nice, 30% are unknown temperament
- then I have 50% + 50% x 70% = 85% dogs are nice
- the math works the other way round too. Starting with the survey we know 70% of dogs are nice, that just leaves the 30% unknown of which we assume half to be nice IE:
-70% + 30% x 50% = 85%
If the survey is correct, then 70% of dogs are nice. 85% of dogs are not nice just because you tacked on an arbitrary 50% to some unknown quantity. The 30% who are unknown could all be mean. There is literally no reason to assume 50% of the unknown quantity are one of two values. They are simply unknown, and if you were to choose a random dog then, given the evidence that you have, you'd be making a good bet by saying the dog is nice.
What do we assume for the 30% unknown? We have no evidence either way so the best assumption statistically is 50% of them are mean. IE we don’t know the distribution so we assume the statistically most likely distribution of 50%/50%
if you believe your survey, as a basis of assigning probability, the other 30 percent may be some other adjective, but what they can not be is nice.
- We could assume 100% of then are mean
- We could assume 0% are mean
- We could assume 50% are mean
The 3rd answer is best because the normal distribution is the most common distribution. Distributions where 100% or 0% is the best choice are much rarer.
You've got it bass-ackwards. Which distribution just depends upon the phenomena under consideration. It's not like all phenomena are linked together, and a distribution is picked because most phenomena follow such-and-such a distribution. That's just goofy. Besides you still haven't spelled out what your graph is measuring, so I don't know if it even matters all that much.
Assuming the survey is correct then 70% of dogs are nice. That's it
The best thing you can say about what you do not know is that you do not know. So if the survey was not done well, if there is a subset of dogs to which the survey does not apply, then the best thing you can say is that you do not know if they are nice or not -- it would be premature of you to say "Well, it is the best guess that half are one way and half are another way"
I'm not quite sure what you are saying here. Is it that particular beliefs and narratives are universals or that belief and narrative in general are universal?
Quoting Galuchat
I think it's interesting to consider how religious (spiritual, mystical) experience has been considered historically. Has it predominately thought to be cognition or affection based? It's also instructive to think about this question with the arts in mind.
Of course there are both affective and cognitive elements inherent in such experiences (and in aesthetic experience in general) and what is "revealed" in or by such experiences has obviously been culturally enshrined in symbolic systems and then worked over and greatly elaborated by discursive intellects. I think it basically comes down to one question: Is there reliable intellectual intuition? In relation to what is being considered here, this is to ask whether the intuitions accompanying religious (and poetic) experiences tell us anything determinately substantive about the metaphysical nature of reality.
For example, if many people throughout history have reported having profoundly moving experiences that lead them to believe that there is a God who loves us, then ask if precisely this experience is universal across cultures, and if not what are the differences and what are the commonalities. Then ask whether the commonalities should that be taken, intersubjectively speaking, as good evidence that there really is whatever the commonalities would seem to reveal, if anything.
Even if the answer to the question of whether the experience of a loving God is universal were 'Yes', (which I actually don't think it is) then ask whether there might be other more or less plausible explanation for the universality of this kind of experience. And there would seem to be some such explanations, even if such a kind of experience were universal. My point here is that there doesn't seem to be any way to justify a belief that what is intuited as a discursive or narrative dimension in such experiences could give us any reliable evidence as to the metaphysical nature of reality.
But I also think this does nothing whatsoever to diminish the affective value of such experiences to those who have them, because if they are convinced, and such conviction may be life-changing,in a very positive way, it is on account of their own personal experience. If they choose to have faith, though, they should be educated enough to realize that their convictions really are nothing more than personal faith, which means they have no justification for objectifying whatever symbolic narrative or allegory they have placed their faith in, and universalizing it, and then seeking to force it on others. If the tendency to project personal faith is intelligently curbed then such experiences can also have great social value, as the general trend seems to be that the authentically faithful become less concerned about themselves, and more compassionate, helpful and even loving towards others.
The latter.
I read all your post and that is more then enough to know you are completely clueless.
Right. So then there is the further question of whether there are universal elements in these beliefs and narratives. I think this is where it becomes a matter of interpretation. Campbell's Hero With a Thousand Faces comes to mind. Any thoughts?
You are making up numbers off the top of your head from an imaginary sample space which is not based in empirical evidence at all and yet you are still doing it wrong. You multiple when they are mutually exclusive events otherwise you must use conditional probability.
When you update a prior with only one sample then the influence of the prior is overwhelming. You are limiting the influence of new data and maximizing the influence of your opinion.
That is not a meta-analysis. Furthermore meta-analyses are controversial as people tend to pick and chose the data they include rather then it being selected through an unbiased random approach.
When dealing with binary outcomes you could use a Bernoulli distribution. You should not use a normal distribution unless you have enough data. If you don't want to use a Bernoulli distribution and don't have enough data for the CLT then you should use a nonparametric approach or if your assumptions are met you can use a student t distribution.
Not that using a distribution would apply here, as it is distribution of the population or sample.
But metaphysical questions are not answerable by empirical means. That is what makes them ‘metaphysical’.
I agree.
I've not read it, but it appears to be highly relevant. Also, @Wayfarer would be a good source of information, since he studied Comparative Religion.
My current working definition of religion: a set of beliefs concerning the cause, characteristics, and purpose of the universe, especially when considered as the creation of a superhuman agency or agencies, usually involving devotional and ritual observances, and often containing a moral code governing the conduct of human affairs.
Donald E. Brown also considers morality to be a human universal. Albeit subject to interpretation, an investigation of the moral codes of the world's major book religions and systems of moral philosophy reveals similarities (i.e., universal elements).
I think a fair number of people here would naturally be of the view that the change in mentality or outlook that characterises the modern and post-modern world represents progress. In fact I’m regularly accused of falsely idolising ancient philosophy, as if there is anything they could possibly know, which we with our advanced technology and scientific genius don’t. Just the other week, one of the participants in this very thread expressed exasperation, that I thought the Platonic dialogues could have much of value to say about the mind, when they knew nothing of modern neuroscience. I encounter this attitude a lot, but I don’t think it understands the sense in which the Socratic dictum, ‘man know thyself’ cannot be something dependent on science and technology. People in Socrates’ day were still h. Sapiens, they eat, breathe, sweat, and die, the same as we do now. Sure we have huge benefits from medical technology and the rest, but self-knowledge can’t be reliant on externals, in my view.
So my considered view is that materialism whether it be scientific, neo-Darwinist, Marxist, or any other variety, is a mistaken worldview. It’s really a type of false consciousness. So I’m interested in analysing how it came to be, if not dominant, then at least extremely influential in modern culture. And my view is that in this transition, something of great importance that had been understood by classical philosophy has indeed been forgotten. It doesn’t mean that I think modern culture and philosophy don’t have any value, and that medieval and ancient philosophy were panaceas. But insofar as philosophy has become materialist, then I see that as a corruption of the original intent of philosophy proper. I don’t think there is any issue with science per se, but only science viewed as the source of wisdom, rather than practical power.
Philosophy does have a spiritual side to it - or rather, many of the influential schools of philosophy did, because there always were materialist philosophers as well. But the classical tradition of philosophy was not materialist; actually I am forming the view that Christian Platonism was the mainstream, or one of the main currents. So my view is that, during the medieval and early modern periods, in the debates over philosophy, religion, and culture, there were some influential views formed which have massive consequences for how humanity understands itself. But then, saying that, it is obviously an enormous topic, and so breaking it down into bite-size chunks is difficult, maybe even impossible. That is why, I suspect, much modern philosophy concentrates on some very specific or minute aspect of a philosophical technicality; differance, or whatever. The last ‘great synthesiser’ was Hegel, and his philosophy collapsed under the weight of its own verbiage [apart from indirectly giving rise to Marxism].
But if I were asked to try and articulate what exactly I think has gone missing from modern philosophical discourse, the answer I would give is: the vertical dimension. The ‘vertical dimension’ refers to the axis along which what used to be understood as wisdom and the grasp of higher truths used to lie. It is ‘the domain of value’, the source of real value. I can’t the use word ‘objective’ because it’s not objective, it transcends the objective. How it can transcend the objective, and yet still be real - this is precisely the kind of thing that has been forgotten. As a consequence, nearly everyone will reflexively, instinctively say that truth is what can be established or known objectively. If it can be known objectively, then it can be measured; if it can’t be measured, then it’s subjective, or social, or cultural, or personal; but it can’t be considered real. That’s the issue in a nutshell.
Here are some of the blog posts and web essays that I refer to from time to time which provide some background.
Review of The Theological Origins of Modernity by Michael Allen Gillespie - important recent book on the ascendancy of nominalism and voluntarism in medieval culture.
What’s Wrong with Ockham, essay on the ascendancy of nominalism and the consequences in the degradation of metaphysics.
Radical Orthodoxy
The Cultural Impact of Empiricism Jacques Maritain.
I’m also currently reading Charles Taylor’s massive book A Secular Age and McIntyre’s After Virtue.
By purpose.
Among the infinity of systems of inter-referring abstract-facts, and among the infinite subset of those that are life-experience possibility-stories, there's a life-experience possibility-story about the experience of someone just like you...you, in fact.
This physical universe is the setting for that hypothetical life-experience story.
That's the metaphysical explanation. We needn't get into matters beyond metaphysics..matters that aren't really discussable, describable, assertable or provable anyway.
You brought God into the discussion, and you must know that that's a meta-metaphysical matter, not subect to description, complete discussion, assertion, or proof.
Many agree with your impression that there's good intent behind what is. ...a meta-metaphysical matter.
I've read that Aristotle said that Good is the basis of what is.
Michael Ossipoff
This physical universe's physical history and physical mechanism, or even metaphysical origin, have nothing to do with the matter of meta-metaphysical origins, which is the "creation" that the OP is referring to. Speaking for myself, I say that the word "creation" is unduly anthropomorphic.
Religion is meta-metaphysical, and is quite outside the applicability of physics, cosmology, or metaphysics.
Michael Ossipoff
It's a matter outside of the applicability of logic, proof and words.
Michael Ossipoff
That is an extremely long sentence that I like even though I do not care for long sentences because they contain multiple ideas and I am not so good at following multiple ideas because they have a tendency to confuse me and be exceptionally hard to follow for people that. . .
But I do agree.
:smile:
I like that.
And I agree.
Quoting Wayfarer
I agree, that's an interesting question.
Quoting Wayfarer
We ought to evaluate the effects of such progress. The ideas of the modern world are based on the foundation of ancient metaphysics. The scientific progress brings into the realm of knowledge all kinds of new information, and this new information exposes and makes obvious, the deficiencies of ancient metaphysics. The progression of knowledge actually undermines the principles upon which it is supported. In this way, knowledge actually destabilizes itself. This cannot be avoided, because the foundation is the oldest, and cannot completely account for new developments which were not evident when the foundation was established. The result is that the fundamental principles must be re-worked to account for the issues encountered by the progress.
So the entire structure requires dismantling in order to rebuild.. It is not an easy task to study and understand fundamental ontological principles, but this is required. The modern tendency is to ignore ancient principles as outdated, and propose new, unsupported principles, which are really fictions, fantasies which are not supported by a thorough analysis of existence. That's the problem, ontology must reflect the true nature of existence, not just existence in the sense of the way that I like to think of existence. This means that it requires a complete understanding of things like matter, space, and time.
Quoting Wayfarer
Ancient Greece went through a very similar experience. At this time, the knowledge of natural philosophy had advanced quite rapidly. But fundamental principles from a more ancient time, such as the geocentric cosmology were being undermined and demonstrated to be inadequate descriptions to account for the reality which was exposed by mathematics.
"Self-knowledge" involves understanding the cyclical nature of the evolution of knowledge, which we can find within each individual each one of ourselves. We learn a system which works, taught from childhood, or developed on our own. It works, so we adhere to it, satisfied, and comfortable in our successes. But failure can never be eliminated absolutely, so the possibility of failure is always real. In our smugness we may be inclined to deny the possibility of failure, and so we sometimes blame our own failures on others, and other things. But this is only to ignore, or deny that our mistakes are our mistakes. There comes a time when we are forced to admit that our mistakes and failure are our own, and we must face the fact of having been wrong. That's reality, it is very important to be able to recognize when you have been wrong, mistaken, and face this instead of glossing over it, hiding it behind exceptions, other principles, as if the mistake isn't really a mistake. At this point, when we acpet the mistake, we can seek the reason for, and the source of the mistake.
Quoting Wayfarer
This "vertical dimension" I believe, actually involves the analysis of mistakes. That's why it is very important to recognize a mistake as a mistake; I have done wrong, I am guilty, etc.. (Confession, and consequently forgiveness, is at the heart of Christianity). By recognizing that I have made a mistake, I am inspired to look for the higher principles, higher than the one's I held when I made the mistake, in order to avoid the mistake in the future.
Modern epistemology gives the "mistake" an odd description. If one is correctly adhering to the principle, mistake is impossible, by definition of "correctly". So mistake involves incorrectly applying the principle, misjudgement by the subject. Principles which are to be followed are designated as objective, and mistake involves what the subject does with the principle. There is no room here for the possibility that the principle itself is wrong, as its usefulness has earned it the assigned designation of "objectivity". If similar mistakes are recurrent, then exceptions are made to the principle, variations, to minimize the possibility of mistake. This turns a very simple (wrong) principle into an extremely complicated principle which works, but is still inherently wrong.
Ontology is a branch of metaphysics.
Quoting tim wood
If your intent is, as it seems, to separate "fundamental ontology" from the ontology which is understood to be a branch of metaphysics, then you'll have to make a case for this.
Your claim is that ontology is prior to metaphysics, but what do you mean by this? Ontology is a Latin, Christian study, metaphysics was taught by Aristotle before this.
Quoting tim wood
I think that what you consider to be "fundamental ontology", I consider to be ontology. But I believe metaphysics to be more than this, because it includes cosmology as well. And I don't think that one can adequately study fundamental ontology without studying cosmology as well. That is because "being" means nothing without context. One, ontology, looks to the internal, the other, cosmology, to the external. But neither of these has any meaning except in relation to the other. That is why metaphysics must consist of both, and it doesn't make sense to say that fundamental ontology is prior to metaphysics.
To answer your question, metaphysics seeks first principles, while epistemology follows the principles of knowledge established by metaphysics in an attempt to determine what does and does not qualify as knowledge. I agree that epistemology doesn't really touch on understanding, and that is an issue for some epistemologists who think that epistemology ought to establish the principles of knowledge. But understanding is the way that knowledge comes into existence, and metaphysics has an approach to this through "becoming" which is understood from cosmology. That is why metaphysics must establish the principles of epistemology, it reaches beyond the distinction between being and not being (knowing and not knowing).
Quoting tim wood
So metaphysis must do more than asking about first principles, it must establish them. Perhaps this is what you mean by fundamental ontology. The problem which I described, is that as much as we seek to produce the best first principles, they will inevitably become outdated. So they must be produced in a way which will express to the best of our capacity, a clear understanding, yet allow themselves to be superseded, acknowledging that this understanding is not completion. This is how we might define "the ideal", it's always sought but never obtained. We can proceed for now, under principles which are to the best of our capacity, assuming that they are still not the ideal.
I don't know what you mean by "presupposes" here, and why does such presupposing produce the conclusion you declare. I agree that metaphysis will always be error ridden, that's exactly what I said. The first principles established by metaphysics must be written in such a way that they may be rewritten when the errors are disclosed. That's exactly what the post which you original replied to was about, errors in such principles. As I said last post, the ideal is striven for, but not obtained.
Quoting tim wood
I don't agree that it's easy to argue Heidegger, because his terminology is vague and difficult to understand. That's why I think it's more likely that you don't understand what you wrote, than that I don't understand what I wrote.
Quoting tim wood
I don't think that this is right. Aristotle established metaphysics. He said, that prior to him the metaphysical question was why is there something rather than nothing. He explained why this is the wrong approach, and then went on to introduce the appropriate question for metaphysics as "why is there what there is, rather than something else". So you're right in the sense that the principal metaphysical question involves "what" there is, but it is really a "why" question rather than a "what" question.
Quoting tim wood
I disagree with this completely. Analysis of beings is the work of science not metaphysics. Metaphysics takes for granted, a separation, a distinction between what a thing is said to be, and what it actually is. This is the source of human error which I referred to. We, as metaphysicians do not seek to rectify this, it is taken for granted as inevitable due to the failings of the human mind, and science is left to analyze these things.
But you conflate two distinct things here, and that is why I disagree. The "analysis of beings", and "what it means for them to be that" is two distinct things. The former being science, the latter being metaphysics. The analysis of beings determines what they are. But "meaning" involves "why", as it generally relates to human intention. So when we ask "what it means for them to be that" we put "what they are" into the context of intention, asking "why". At this point, we must respect the division which I say the metaphysician takes for granted, between what the thing actually is, and what it is said to be. And we are faced with a huge division. One fork takes us towards what it means to us, what we say the thing is, and this is epistemology. The other fork takes us toward why the actual thing is actually what it is, and this is metaphysics.
No creation, No magic.
I would vote for option 3 or something very similar. I would like to believe however that some kind of cosmos could be created, I just find it hard to believe there was ever a time before anything existed.
But this is not necessarily the case. You cannot start with the thing, unless you take it for granted that "the thing" is something real. But taking 'the thing" for granted doesn't give you a real ground. That's the point Descartes was making, skepticism disallows you from taking the thing for granted, then all you have is thoughts and the appearance of a thing, and there isn't any point to asking what the thing is or is not until you give some reality to the thing. So we have the Kantian division right here, what are you handing reality to, and asking "what is it?", the appearance, or the thing itself.
Quoting tim wood
I don't think "the person asking" is missing. It is already implied, and taken for granted in the questioning, that a person is asking. So if any "thing" is to be taken for granted, it is the thinking thing, as Descartes claims. That is why we get that Kantian division. Are we asking about being as it is, or being as it appears to us.
So if we proceed to ask about "what" there is, we must distinguish between what we say a thing is (describe it based on how it appears to us), and what the thing is, in itself. Prior to proceeding to the latter, we must get beyond the Cartesian skepticism, and validate the existence of the thing itself. This is where metaphysics must establish principles. Kant asserted the real existence of the thing itself, but denied the possibility of knowing it. This is to deny the capacity of metaphysics to have any real impact. Accordingly, metaphysics cannot establish any principles of relation between the appearance and the thing. Berkeley was more skeptical and questioned whether the thing itself, as "material thing" was even real.
Quoting tim wood
Of course it's meaningful because there is a person asking the question. Unless the person is being completely self-deceptive and asking something which one has absolutely no interest in, then the question is meaningful to the person. What is "presupposed" is simply that the person is living, sensing and experiencing, and is interested in the nature of this experience.
Quoting tim wood
I really don't know what you mean by "fundamental ontology". This is the problem I find with Heidegger in general. He uses many terms in a vague and obscure way, which upon interpretation by different people creates ambiguity between the different interpretations. So discussion is fruitless because of this ambiguity, and it ends up appearing like Heidegger never really said anything important.
t \in \mathbb{R} if latex would work here.
No beginning and no end, the cosmos is created and destroyed everyday.
We have preconceived notion of a time interval of beginning and end, but then how can existence pop out of nothingness? You need to assume that something has always existed, may it be God, Universe, quantum fluctuations or what you have not.
From absolute nothing, nothing can come to be, and that's pure logic, no magic!
Where I take nothing as the absence of something, your mind cannot even imagine a situation of absolute nothingness, we always think of something, even when I stare at the thin air I think of something, I mean there's space between me and the air.
I agree that there's no room for dialogue, as in everything in philosophy, these matters have been discussed endlessly, I believe there's no room for creation because that would say that there is room for magic. When I find something in math, I don't create from nothing, I have a preconceived notion of arithmetic and geometric ideas.
How did anything come to be from nothing?
There's a universal mind that imagines everything, but he doesn't create anything, they are all part of him.
If something were to come from absolute nothing, then we should equation them the same.
Perhaps this is the barrier of the language that doesn't let us go beyond our limitations of communication.
dunno...
that all sounds very much like turning science into religion.
I was taught, science knows what it knows, and that is all that it knows. Said differently - science only makes truth claims about things science knows to be true. And it does not make any other truth claims.
I see no philosophic difference in a belief based on faith in an un-created creator, or a belief based on faith that science will someday know the answer to how the universe came to be.
As an atheist, I consider the divide between the existence of a deity and its worship to be stark. I do not worship any such entities, real or imagined, and I would study any such being from an artistic and scientific perspective. I have long been avid for knowledge upon the most exotic strains of the multiverse, and I have been perplexed by the Big Bang. In the awe of the awareness which has proceeded my studies, I have craved to exhume more and more information. In every such tormented or reeling knowledge of fallen need, farrow ideals of unrelenting height becoming as a beeling, I have not found the solace of a God.
Some bias emerges from my own hope of lethe in quietus. I cannot imagine the noxious emergence into an eternal suffering which would inevitably consume me in the thrall of an omnipresence which would be my fate. Such a trial of eternity propels my hope for oblivion.
Mythology is a question of who. Many modern persons now accept the impersonal explanations of thunderstorms, of the changing seasons, and of the final days. In numerous cultures, these subjects were more commonly accepted as being manifestations of divine will. These times, in technologically advanced states, are of the enlightenment, and governments fund institutions such as space programs in order to gather empirical evidence. When we turn from the question of who, and conclude that much is caused by a what, then we begin to see a divergence and divestment from anthropocentrism. In the eventual discovery, we are forced to acknowledge the unreal rescarciation between our former inquiries and the notions of our existence, and the rimestock which has given way to empirical data. I do not know how precise are the most widely accepted models of genesis, but, based upon decades of peer reviewal, experimentation, and mathematical proofs, the scientific method offers a minimalistically biased tool for creating models of the universe.
As God is frequently cited as a noumenological being, it is arduous to offer an empirical rebuttle. However, it would be incredibly fallible to open oneself to these hordes of noumena- for any number of non-emperical ideas and concepts to exist- and thus deprive oneself of the observable. Why should we believe in any one noumenon when all are, according to belief by faith, equally plausible or intangible? For myself to function with any degree of rationality, I must make my decisions through deduction and analysis.
In such austere efforts to discover a perfected course for optimal logic, I have found that my bias occludes every conclusion. Therefore, I must venture more analysis and comparison to attain a sound conclusion. In my paradigm, mere faith only opens a series of convoluted pratfalls which are forever at the fore of any imagined obstacle to the world of coherence. While I adore the coalescence of falderolical conflicts and awful forces of the outside, such demesnes hold no place within my own sanctity. My own created universes must be kept to their pages.
Presuppositions are exactly what the skeptic questions. Descartes for example questioned the real existence of the material world, something which was taken for granted. The fact that something is taken for granted, is what leaves it open to skepticism.
Quoting tim wood
OK, suppose this is the case, what you describe (though I don't understand your analogy, of how the best criminal would not be a criminal at akk, because that's contradictory and exactly what we're trying to avoid). You seem to be arguing that "fundamental ontology" avoids this problem of not being grounded, and this is how it differs from metaphysics. Yet you describe fundamental ontology as being grounded in its presuppositions, so it's really nothing more than a form of metaphysics. The type of metaphysics you adopt depends on the presuppositions you employ, and these are the "principles" I referred to. The principles however, are open to skepticism and that's why we have a variety of metaphysical positions.
Quoting tim wood
Oh come on, you can't say that it's useless to debate this principle. There are two glaring holes in this, which when analyzed create contradiction. First, what is "here"? We could say that "here" marks a point in space. Second, what is "we"? "We" marks a unity of people. Now we have a huge problem, the contradiction. A unity of people is composed of a number of distinct people which as distinct entities cannot exist at the same place. So it is inherently contradictory to say "we are here". "We" implies a plurality of entities, and a plurality cannot exist at the same place at the same time, which is what "here" implies.
What is evident is that by taking this principle as a presupposition, you are avoiding the issue of unity. You are taking unity for granted, saying that a group of individuals are parts of a whole, we, and this whole exists in one place, here. But the nature of unity is a fundamental metaphysical question, such that we cannot simply take unity for granted, we need to describe what it is. Otherwise we are not accounting for, in our "fundamental ontology", whatever it is which unites parts into a whole.
Quoting tim wood
You have a glaring problem in grounding metaphysics in dasein. You have assumed a unity which is not real. There are no principles which unite the individual parts into a whole, the whole is simply assumed, presupposed. A real being, as a unity of parts, must have something which unites the parts to make it a unity. We cannot simply assume that there is something there which is doing the act of unifying, without understanding what that something is, because perhaps it's not even there. Perhaps the assumption of unity is just a fantasy, a fiction.
Quoting tim wood
No, I do not distinguish between fundamental ontology and metaphysics. Fundamental ontology, as described by you, is just a deficient metaphysics. It is a metaphysics which takes unity for granted, and this produces the contradictory fundamental principle of "we are here". Unity cannot be taken for granted because it is inherently contradictory to say that a number of distinct individuals exist at the same place. Therefore we must dig deeper into the nature of reality (metaphysics) to find principles to avoid this contradiction. We need to establish principles which allow distinct entities, parts, to exist together as a whole.
I don't think the question 'What came before time?' is important. As Keith Ward mentioned, God is behind ALL points in time. The essential argument here is that, because the universe is contingent (meaning, in this context, a collection of properties) it must be dependent on some necessary substance because you cannot have properties without some sustaining substance to keep them in existence.
Perhaps the closest we can come to this substance is the ontology of space itself; space is a real existence. That space, at least from a geometric point of view, did not always exist hardly matters because space can be a temporal instance of whatever substance it is that ultimately supports the properties of the universe.
So, the answer to your question comes down to the nature of this substance; is it Mind? Is this substance unaware that it is becoming a universe or is it doing this deliberately?
Oh, you had said that presupposing is the same as taking for granted. But "grounds" I take to be the evidence for something. When we take something for granted, our reasons for doing this, is other than evidence. So I understand "presupposition" to be completely different from "grounds"..
Quoting tim wood
But "grounds" is how we distinguish between right and wrong. So if it's not the function of a presupposition to be right or wrong, then clearly a presupposition cannot be the grounds for anything. If the function of a presupposition is simply to be presupposed, then how is the presupposition of any use?
Quoting tim wood
Actually, what is nonsense is to even presuppose any presuppositions, in the way that you describe. If the presupposition cannot be used to help distinguish right from wrong, then it is completely useless as one could presuppose any random thing whether its right or wrong. And the presupposition, as you describe it, is absolute nonsense.
Quoting tim wood
Metaphysics can be bad, and metaphysics can be good, there's no doubt about that because it's supported by evidence. But your "fundamental ontology", is grounded by presuppositions, which as you say cannot function to distinguish wrong from right. Therefore the metaphysics which you propose is clearly a bad metaphysics because it provides no principles for distinguishing correct from incorrect. And since it provides no such principles it cannot adequately support any type of epistemology. Epistemology being grounded in the presupposition a real distinction between correct and incorrect. That epistemological presupposition is grounded in good metaphysics, not presuppositions.
Quoting tim wood
So far, your description of "presupposition" is pure nonsense, a grounding which cannot function to distinguish right from wrong. What more ought I review?
Quoting tim wood
I cannot see that a presupposition, as you describe it, has any function at all within any metaphysics, whether you call it ontology or whatever.. I think that there is no place for any presuppositions in any metaphysics whatsoever. The purpose of metaphysics is to approach the nature of reality with an open mind, and that requires the exclusion of any presuppositions.
Quoting tim wood
I'm sorry to disillusion you, but that's just how the words are used. If the words are used, to refer in this way, then how can it be otherwise, unless you desire to use the words in an obscure way. Yes I know, you take this lead from Heidegger, but we need to see through these deceptive ploys.
Quoting tim wood
We already went through this. You're just defining terms in an obscure way. That's unacceptable, and pointless to me.
Quoting tim wood
Unity isn't resolved in your "fundamental ontology", it is presupposed. And presuppositions are nonsense to any good metaphysician. So your "fundamental ontology" needs to be dismissed as bad metaphysics.
Metaphysics. But let me be clear, as it appears like you misunderstood. It is not that the presuppositions are not there, or that they are not "involved", but that they are recognized as ungrounded, unreliable, and are therefore dismissed. Presuppositions are not accepted for the reasons I gave in the last post. They are prejudices, biases, and therefore unacceptable to metaphysics and the pursuit of truth.
I could start with the first principle established by Aristotle's cosmological argument in his "Metaphysics" Bk.9. This principle, produced from a combination of empirical evidence, and logic, is a demonstration that if anything is eternal, it must be actual. As interpreted by Christian theologians this principle is represented as a priority of "actual" over "potential", such that there is a necessary actuality, God, to account for the reality of contingent existence.
Could you explain this? I don't see your argument.
Quoting tim wood
I never claimed the principle is free of presuppositions. As a principle, established before my time, if I accept it as a principle, it is a presupposition and therefore cannot be free of presupposition. What I said is that if one is to properly carry out the activity, metaphysics, whereby such first principles are established, one must free oneself of any such presuppositions. So I gave that as an example of a first principle, not an example of the activity, metaphysics, whereby first principles are established.. It cannot be "my" first principle without being a presupposition
So this is not "my principle", and I do not presuppose it, or any of the ideas which lead to it, when I practise metaphysics. It was an example of a first principle. Do you recognize the difference between a principle, and the activity of thought which leads to the existence of a principle? Metaphysics is the latter, the activity. Since it seeks "first" principles, to presuppose any principles would contradict this. Any principle which was discovered could not be a "first" principle if it relied on any presupposition. the presupposition would render it a "second" principle. The practise of metaphysics is to rid oneself of all such presuppositions, and seek a "first" principle. But metaphysics deals with first "principles". Notice the plural. That is because the first principle for me, if I practise metaphysics, will not be the same as first principle for you if you practise metaphysics. Do you recognize that this difference is the result of excluding presuppositions?
I think it's about 1/1 000 000 that a benevolent god would force us all to claw and chomp the raw bit of reality in such a harsh world filled with things like child leukemia and the Ebola virus.
Factoring this in to your maths: .9375 x .0000001 x 100 = .0001 (rounding up).
That's a one in ten-thousand chance in my estimation.
I don't question the existence of presuppositions, I recognize that they are common place.
Quoting tim wood
My claim is that no matter how deeply buried the presupposition is, or if it is merely implicit (as most are), the task of the metaphysician is to root them out and determine the validity of each. Therefore the attitude of the metaphysician is that nothing ought to be presupposed.
Quoting tim wood
That science is based in presuppositions is irrelevant to whether or not metaphysics is.
Quoting tim wood
I already answered this. The thought procedure of metaphysics is free from presuppositions, or else it would not be "metaphysics" by definition. This is because metaphysics is a thought process which aims at determining first principles where "first" means free from presuppositions.
If it is your argument that there is no such thing as "metaphysics" as defined, as the search for "first" principles, free from presuppositions, and that pure metaphysics is impossible, then that's a different argument. However, we could take the definition as an ideal. We, as metaphysicians are always trying to free ourselves from all presuppositions, to search for the first principle in the most unbiased way possible, but like all ideals, it is something striven for but never obtained in an absolute way. Nevertheless, the attitude of the metaphysician is to reject all presupposition which become evident as presuppositions, whether explicit or implicit. Epistemology and science on the other hand accept presuppositions and use them as foundational.
No, (b) is not what I meant at all. When I uncover a presupposition, I said I seek to validate it. I do not mean to "prove" it, but to uncover the further presuppositions which support it. Then I need to investigate those presuppositions, etc.. In this way we seek a first principle, one which is not grounded in any presuppositions. So (a) is a correct representation of what I am saying, we seek to disclose presuppositions. But the second part (b) is what you are not seeing in the same way as I. The second part as I see it, is to "create" a principle which is not based in any presuppositions, and this is the first principle.
Quoting tim wood
This is where we really go our separate ways on this subject. The "absolute presupposition" you refer to, I assume, is what I called the first principle. The problem is that the way I understand it, it is not a presupposition at all. It is created then and there by the thinking mind which apprehends it, so it is not something presupposed. Once the thinking mind gets past all the presuppositions, it is free to create whatever principle it wants, and this is not a presupposition, nor can it be said to be based in presuppositions. It is new, original, first.
Further, you say that it is useless to try and prove this "absolute presupposition", which I say is not a presupposition at all, but a first principle. But I think that it is necessary to prove the first principle. This is because it is a principle created by the free thinking mind of a metaphysician, free from any presupposition, so the metaphysician must necessarily prove it, to distinguish it from some random thought. So the metaphysician must prove the first principle to others, and the proof will be very simple and acceptable because it will be produced from empirical evidence rather than presuppositions. Then it may be accepted as an axiom, a self-evident truth, a simple principle which is immediately accepted due to the evidence.
Quoting tim wood
So to take your example of God, let's assume that a metaphysician came up with "God" the creator
as a first principle. This would mean that prior to the conception of God, a metaphysician went through all the existing presuppositions to get to the bottom. Suppose there were numerous gods, one god for this, another god for that, etc., and these were the existing presuppositions. The metaphysician goes through, and dismisses these presuppositions, and creates a new first principle, God, the creator of everything, which is a completely new principle, not based in any existing presuppositions. Then the metaphysician needs to prove this principle in order that it be accepted by others. so a simple proof is offered such as, we see that there are existing things, and we see that there is a cause of existence of things, and this cause is God, or something like that, so that people accept God as the creator of existence. Remember, the argument at that time would not need to be complicated because the people were already predisposed, by the existing presuppositions concerning gods, to accept that gods are responsible for the existence of things.
Quoting tim wood
This is not metaphysics at all. What you have described is the history of philosophy. What would make you think that this "historical science" is metaphysics?
It's a political presupposition, not a metaphysical principle, therefore not a "first" principle. So what am I supposed to try, to turn it into metaphysics? To approach it as a metaphysician would require that I deny it as a presupposition, and seek the further presuppositions which ground it. What makes you think that democracy is the best form of government possible? Plato described democracy as the worst, other than tyranny, but explained how democracy inevitably degenerates into tyranny. I can't remember exactly why he said this would occur, but I think it's the result of democracy allowing the rulers to be the people with the strongest desire to rule. In reality, the task of being a good ruler is the most difficult job, so the ones most fitted to be good rulers recognize this and want the job the least, while those who want the job, generally want it for reasons other than to be a good ruler.
Quoting tim wood
We did an example, the example of "God". But as I said, "free from presuppositions" is the ideal which is striven for. It will probably be never be completely obtained. That's why later metaphysicians who turn to earlier first principles, will discover presuppositions underneath those first principles, and need to discard them in search of the true first principle.
Quoting tim wood
I don't agree with this one right off the bat. We very often make statements simply to inform people of things we know, which others do not know, without being questioned. These statements are not made in answer to questions. I walk in the door and say to my wife, "it's raining out". That statement is not made as an answer to a question.
When we deny the truth of 1) we introduce a completely different way of looking at the world from the one described by those numbered statements. From this perspective, when we make a descriptive statement concerning the world, like the one in my example, it comes from a desire to describe the world, not from a question about the world. This better represents the philosophical attitude which is more of an attitude of wonder rather than of questioning. So a philosophical "inquiry" is recognized as an investigation toward describing and understanding rather than as an interrogation.
This is key to understanding the rejection of your described role of presupposition. The question is particular, and pointed in a specific direction, by the presupposition. Wonder and inquisition is general, not necessarily directed in any particular way by any specific presuppositions.
You know, that just because it's written in a book doesn't make it true. Didn't I just demonstrate the first principle of the book to be wrong? Why would I want to read what follows?
Quoting tim wood
The point is, that after a statement is made, we can think up a question which the statement is an answer to, but this does not mean that the statement is made as an answer to a question. This is alluded to here: "In our least scientific moments we hardly know that the thoughts we fish up out of our minds are answers to questions at all, let alone what those questions are." If an individual who makes a statement does not know that the statement is an answer to a question, then it is impossible that the statement was made as an answer to a question. The intent, in making the statement, was something other than to answer a question. So to represent that statement in this way, as an answer to a question, is a false representation. Notice that he calls this being unscientific, and of course metaphysics is unscientific. And the metaphysical statement therefore, does not require a presupposition as per 3).
The rest is an unanswered question. Is God separate from us planning and designing our life and the universe? We need more facts to find the answer.
There is one more fact that is overlooked, it is the elephant in the room. In our conscious state we ask and inquire and don't get solutions so we suppose or calculate probabilities but it is just the mind that is puzzling over these questions and we can see the mind puzzling and then identify with it. The result of identification is to pronounce 'I am puzzled'. whereas in fact it is not 'I' the witness that is puzzled it is the mind that is puzzled and I am conscious of the puzzled mind.
If I know that the mind is puzzled, if I know that the mind is sad, if I know that the mind is cheerful and energetic then the mind is the object and I am the witness of the mind. This I is consciousness, a unique human quality.
Consciousness must be included in the logical arguments for creation because consciousness has content, it is not just an ability to know, it holds the seeds of creation or unmanifest desires.
So now the question of creation goes deeper. Where did consciousness originate from? This is definitely unanswerable until we can fine tune our consciousness to be able to see it. Then the next question arises. Can consciousness see itself? Also is consciousness and all its content God?
I don't think the term 'chance' has any practical significance. Isn't it a word we use to describe things we don't know or fully understand yet?