Is it rational to be a theist?

harvey1 · Post by **harvey1** » Sun Jul 31, 2005 10:01 am

According to an atheist, there are few, if any, reasons to believe that God exists, and the God belief has been passed down from pre-scientific times in the guise of religion. The atheist often believes this in itself is good reason to reject the existence of God. The atheist might even say it is not rational to believe in God. Is it rational to be a theist?

harvey1 · Post by **harvey1** » Fri Aug 05, 2005 7:43 am

QED wrote:I don't mean to make you mad, but the words "statement", "meaning", "interpretable" and "mind" are all so loose that I simply can't get a strong enough grip of the question in order to answer it.

That would never make me mad! You'd have to insult me or do something rude to make me mad.

QED wrote:Well by now I should have cleared things up for you. The random configurations of energy would be like random configurations of childrens building blocks which while being infinitely configurable nonetheless display regularities and laws through their natural structure. This of course leaves you to enquire of the nature of energy as a naked fact, but I dare you to hang your god label on it.

Then, that just gets us right back to those IM and FM moments. How do answer me when I say that there is nothing to connect two IM moments or two FM moments? Those connections are without reason, hence you cannot explain why the universe acts with cause, especially mental phenomena where we know that we act with good reason many times.

QED · Post by **QED** » Fri Aug 05, 2005 9:41 am

harvey1 wrote: Then, that just gets us right back to those IM and FM moments. How do answer me when I say that there is nothing to connect two IM moments or two FM moments? Those connections are without reason, hence you cannot explain why the universe acts with cause, especially mental phenomena where we know that we act with good reason many times.

I fail to see anything to answer to here. Outside of invoking a god to fill these gaps, as far as I'm aware there are only descriptions of time and causality. Not only has nobody described a mechanism, it is not even known if there need be a mechanism. I'm only half-way through Brian Greene's book "The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality" which is giving a pretty good account of this subject so far. Maybe you could enlighten me further.

harvey1 · Post by **harvey1** » Fri Aug 05, 2005 1:09 pm

QED wrote:Outside of invoking a god to fill these gaps, as far as I'm aware there are only descriptions of time and causality. Not only has nobody described a mechanism, it is not even known if there need be a mechanism. I'm only half-way through Brian Greene's book "The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality" which is giving a pretty good account of this subject so far. Maybe you could enlighten me further.

I don't think string theory can answer the philosophical questions dealing with causation. Firstly, strings and branes travel through space and time, so you still have the same issue. If you slice up time into discrete slices or infinitesimal discrete slices, what causes one slice of time to jump to the next slice of time? If you advocate magic, that is, they just "do," then there is no reason for anything. If there is no reason at the base of reality, then you have no reason for any action, even our own thoughts. This seems to be silly since you responded to my post due to some reason, did you not?

ST88 · Post by **ST88** » Fri Aug 05, 2005 2:23 pm

harvey1 wrote:Firstly, strings and branes travel through space and time, so you still have the same issue. If you slice up time into discreet slices or infinitesimal discreet slices, what causes one slice of time to jump to the next slice of time? If you advocate magic, that is, they just "do," then there is no reason for anything. If there is no reason at the base of reality, then you have no reason for any action, even our own thoughts. This seems to be silly since you responded to my post due to some reason, did you not?

This strikes me as an extension of Xeno's paradox. How can you slice time into discrete pieces that have no relation to either side of the slice? Surely objects that are slaves to the progress of time do not themselves change, rather they are directed by various forces that are themselves slaves to the progress of time. Causality is a direct result of the existence of this process we've decided to call "time". But this doesn't mean that "time" can be bottled & digitized at some razor-point such that there are no pieces between one "moment" and another. The fact that we can conceive of "slices" of time in no way reflects how it actually works. The universe is analog. How does the concept of a slice of time survive relativity, for example? At which line of gravitational demarcation does the progress of time shift from one recognizable, measurable number to another?

harvey1 · Post by **harvey1** » Fri Aug 05, 2005 3:33 pm

ST88 wrote:This strikes me as an extension of Zeno's paradox. How can you slice time into discrete pieces that have no relation to either side of the slice?

I'm strictly talking conceptually.

ST88 wrote:Surely objects that are slaves to the progress of time do not themselves change, rather they are directed by various forces that are themselves slaves to the progress of time.

True, but we still take slow motion video of these processes and we see very gradual change. If time is discrete (a very real possibility) then there are finite moments that exist. If time is indiscrete (also a real possibility) then we are dealing with infinitesimals to reach our perfect slice of time.

ST88 wrote:Causality is a direct result of the existence of this process we've decided to call "time". But this doesn't mean that "time" can be bottled & digitized at some razor-point such that there are no pieces between one "moment" and another.

Why not? Even if time is infinitely indiscrete, an infinitesimal will mean that the beginning of a frame is infinitesimally different than the end of the same frame (or slice). That's fine if we consider it that way since it still doesn't tell you why the next frame as it "occurs" is continuous with the previous frame. There would be no reason for this continuous flow of time if there are no laws that act upon (or limit the structure) of those frames in some way.

ST88 wrote:The fact that we can conceive of "slices" of time in no way reflects how it actually works. The universe is analog.

It might be analogy, but we have concepts that can divide up analog wholes into discrete pieces, and this is the concept of the infinitesimal.

ST88 wrote:How does the concept of a slice of time survive relativity, for example? At which line of gravitational demarcation does the progress of time shift from one recognizable, measurable number to another?

I'm talking about doing this splicing of the moments within the same frame of reference that the object is travelling within. So, I don't see how SR would affect us in reaching this result. Even with relativity you either have a discrete flow of time or an indiscrete flow of time. The question is how can you explain causality if you dismiss laws that connect one moment to the next like a string connects a necklace of beads.

QED · Post by **QED** » Fri Aug 05, 2005 3:51 pm

I don't get this at all. As far as all material interactions go everything comes down to Quantum Electrodynamics. It's all a dance of photons. So if you're asking what joins one event to another, it's the exchange of a photon in a relativistic framework. I'm sorry to be so dim, but if you want to get any further you'll have to break it down a bit more than this.

harvey1 · Post by **harvey1** » Fri Aug 05, 2005 4:12 pm

QED wrote:I don't get this at all. As far as all material interactions go everything comes down to Quantum Electrodynamics. It's all a dance of photons. So if you're asking what joins one event to another, it's the exchange of a photon in a relativistic framework. I'm sorry to be so dim, but if you want to get any further you'll have to break it down a bit more than this.

QED, QED is still a time-dependent theory. The interactions happen in time according to quantum electrodynamics. My question has to do with this fact. If you slow down time, even in a quantum scenario, you get to a point to where time is either discrete or is infinitesimally indiscrete. If infinitesimally indiscrete then treating an infinitesimal slice has the same effect as if time were discrete. Each "moment" would be followed by another "moment." What I want to know is why does that "followed by" occurrence happen? What reason could there be for a sequence of moments followed by another sequence of moments? It's either because there is a reason (i.e., there is some law that exists), or there is no reason (i.e., no law exists). If you are not accepting laws as something that exists, then it would seem you need to say that there is no reason one moment follows another, it just does. If you take that reasoning though, then you need to explain how it is that we can have a reason for anything if every event occurs for no reason.

Curious · Post by **Curious** » Fri Aug 05, 2005 8:09 pm

harvey1 wrote:
What I want to know is why does that "followed by" occurrence happen? What reason could there be for a sequence of moments followed by another sequence of moments? It's either because there is a reason (i.e., there is some law that exists), or there is no reason (i.e., no law exists). If you are not accepting laws as something that exists, then it would seem you need to say that there is no reason one moment follows another, it just does. If you take that reasoning though, then you need to explain how it is that we can have a reason for anything if every event occurs for no reason.

I think that QED's position is not that there is no reason but that there is no underlying intent.

harvey1 · Post by **harvey1** » Fri Aug 05, 2005 10:23 pm

Curious wrote:I think that QED's position is not that there is no reason but that there is no underlying intent.

Be that as it may, I think the question must be addressed. Bertrand Russell raised this surrounding issue 90 years ago, and it still hasn't been answered.

Curious · Post by **Curious** » Sat Aug 06, 2005 12:05 am

harvey1 wrote:
Curious wrote:I think that QED's position is not that there is no reason but that there is no underlying intent.
Be that as it may, I think the question must be addressed. Bertrand Russell raised this surrounding issue 90 years ago, and it still hasn't been answered.

Then perhaps Mr Russell would care to rephrase the question.