Yes. From your Physicalist perspective, "God" is No-Thing. But in my Enformationism view, G*D is Every-Thing, and is necessarily self-existent. Even a...
As usual, your material-mind arguments are reasonable . . . from the classical Physicalism perspective. Through that ground-glass lens, only the physi...
Yes. Like the Quarks of sub-atomic theory, the First Cause is logically necessary, but known only by rational inference. Some people claim to "know" G...
Physicalism is indeed a fairly common philosophical position among Materialists. But Quantum & Information Theories have undermined the confident assu...
Are Love & Hate included in the "human condition"? Can you show me a picture of such "physical" things? Are questions about the "human condition" limi...
Yes. For brevity, in my writing I sometimes refer to Eternity & Infinity as "Enfernity" : similar to Einstein's "Block-Time" or "Space-Time", but in a...
True, but trivial. What we dialog about on The Philosophy Forum is literally "non-sense" and "beyond physical". Look at the topics --- how many are ab...
Throughout history, and probably pre-history, humans have generally agreed that the notion of a Creator makes sense. What they argued about was specif...
It's not just "religious thinkers" who extend their inquiring minds beyond the limited scope of space-time. Many non-religious scientists are also not...
Will you give me some examples of those Metaphysical rules? I was not familiar with Collingwood, so I googled and scanned the Stanford biography. I di...
Exactly! Before the Big Bang Theory, most scientists, including Einstein assumed that the physical universe had always existed ; although perhaps cycl...
There are few things in life that are exactly what we want them to be. So philosophers, unlike Scientists, tend to adapt the Self to the Situation (Et...
Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea : The Babylonians invented it, the Greeks banned it, the Hindus worshipped it, and the Christian Church used i...
Good question. The FTL Inflation Theory (from almost nothing to everything in an immeasurable fraction of time) is either super-natural or magical, or...
Yes. Do you have a better explanation for a palpable universe from who-knows-what? Multiverse theories, infer that an unknowable eternal universe has ...
Drivers on speed-limited highways "break" the law by exceeding the posted limit. Nature has imposed certain limits on its creatures (Natural Laws), bu...
My worldview acknowledges the imperfections of our beloved world, and offers a rationale for a less-than-ideal creation of a World Creator : it ain't ...
Is anything in this world perfect? My religious up-bringing repeatedly pointed to the imperfection of humans, and human logic. But then, it pointed to...
As a philosophical hypothesis, I would use the term "inferred". In my Enformationism thesis I provide the factual basis and the reasoning. "To Deem" i...
True, but trivial. Everything in the world is "natural". But only one species of natural beings has gone beyond the limitations of Natural Laws, to be...
Bird's nests are Natural, because they are "designed" by evolution. Buildings are Cultural because humans take control of plodding erratic Evolution, ...
That may be true of empirical Science. But not of theoretical Philosophy. Yet, the best they could come up with is a mysterious hypothetical First Cau...
That was indeed my choice, many years ago, when I decided that my Back-to-the-Bible religion was no longer believable. However, I had no answer to mor...
So you say. And that's a true statement . . . in the physical Real World. But, the metaphysical Ideal Realm may not be bound by the physical rules of ...
Yes. As a Catholic theologian, his philosophical definition had to resemble the official Bible-God, which is described both as an eternal principle (s...
I agree. That's why I define my personal First Cause simply as BEING : essential existence. Aquinas defined his God as the Necessary Being, without wh...
OFF TOPIC : My internet connection is slow & erratic today. Anybody else notice the slow responses? A Google search didn't find any experts blaming it...
A couple of years ago, I posted a review of The Feeling of Life Itself on my blog. I am generally interested in his ideas, but I can't say that I'm "p...
That appears to be the reasoning of some Cosmologists, who propose that Something (matter-energy) emerged from No-thing (which was nothing-but formles...
That would be true if the First Cause or Prime Mover created something new from pre-existing raw material as human creators do. Humans are able to cre...
The all-encompassing Vacuum, with un-bounded creative energy, that is capable of creating a world from "nothing", sounds like a modern version of an a...
That's the problem with Krauss' theory of a "Universe From Nothing". His so-called "nothing" paradigm omits the metaphysical Bible-God, but retains su...
Ironically, we now have access to a zillion libraries of information on the internet. But there's also a lot of "fake facts" mixed in. And, in the Tru...
Actually, as you indicated later, "reality" is an observation. It's an inference from a variety of independent observations, that there is some object...
Yes. Insightful book. And Harari is just one of many modern Jews, who acknowledge the assimilated, rather than revealed, regional & mythical foundatio...
Yes. Like most cultural traditions, the origins of Yahweh myths fade away into pre-history. Some refer toYahweh as a storm god, similar to Greek Zeus,...
Taken as a whole, the Old Testament presents at least two, maybe three or more, different models of deity. Among Hebrews, their tribal-god was merely ...
That's why Bishop Berkeley argued for an outside Observer, who is always watching what goes on in the world. Of course, his "Observer" was not visitin...
OK. So what's your Causal Model or God Metaphor? I'm only superficially familiar with the "vague" vocabulary of Peircean or Postmodern Semiotics or Se...
That was a poetic expression of the theological "Problem of Evil", not a statement of fact. I agree. That all-in-one understanding is the core concept...
Yes. But it was anathematized presumably, not because un-scriptural, but because It allowed direct contact with God, and bypassed the Church as mediat...
"Unbound = eternal?? . . . ." Agreed. Potential : Unrealized or unmanifest creative power. For example the Voltage of an electric battery is its poten...
Yes. The "problem of evil" remains to this day the primary argument against the omnipotent & loving Bible God. Even so, I still infer, from the off-se...
I apologize, if the cartoon was not an accurate portrayal of the disagreement. As I said, I had just copied the Dilbert for future reference, since na...
I thought I would have to think about your "erudite" post over the weekend. I'm only vaguely familiar with Semiology. But, I couldn't resist digging i...
Wow!! I didn't expect such an expanded & erudite response to my open-ended question. Since my brain is also a "dissipative structure", it may take me ...
Pardon the intrusion, but I just copied this Dilbert cartoon from Steven Pinker's Rationality, and was looking for a place to put it. Just kidding! :j...
For me personally, I have only an archaeological interest in popular (of the common people) world religions --- including that of my own culture --- w...
Comments