Is it rational to be a theist?

[harvey1]

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?

[QED]

This is still missing the point. In the case of a pot of boiling water, the reason for its boiling are due to the action of its molecular constituents which the boiling pot has no control over. Are you saying that you have no choice but to believe what you believe? Are you saying that every thought you have is a result of some biological determinism requiring you to think every thought? Surely you must have reasons for your beliefs which are not pre-determined by some biochemical causes.

No, it's you that's missing the point because you are under the impression that there is magic involved with being alive. I reject this notion as it is unnecessary given the different degrees of life seen in living things (remember the sea-squirt consuming its brain once it found a home?). As far as determinism goes, sure it looks like we have control -- but that's because we're running highly complex algorithms and alot of contingency is involved. But even in the face of this identical twins separated at birth end up marrying similar types of partner and all that jazz.

And, let's not forget the very basis of this argument. If there is no reason for any event, then there's no reason for anything. That is, it's a complete mystery why a next infinitesimal moment follows almost an identical version of the previous moment. Why not repeat the previous moment? How does information about the previous moment get transferred to the next moment?

Well I'm sorry to say that I just don't accept that you have a point here. I had hoped that there was more to it than you've said already which is why I asked for clarification. But now it looks like this is it. I can't find anyone else talking about this issue, and there certainly aren't any physicists that I know of scratching their heads over "How information about the previous moment get transferred to the next moment".

I don't see how you can offer an explanation in principle, and if you can't, then this kind of materialistic perspective would need to be rejected because it cannot answer such basic questions without appealing to magic.

This seems to me as if it could be one of those "when did you stop beating your wife" questions. Please link me up to somewhere that supports the issue you're raising as being a valid one. I'm quite sure that you have drawn this from respectable philosophy rather than coming up with it on the fly, but as I said I simply can't see anything to answer nor can I find others asking the question.

Why would I argue for ID when I support a theory of mathematical laws which bring about the world? In my view, theism is the correct and consistent perspective within the context of natural evolution, and thus I don't think ID is needed.

What a very confusing statement. All I have to do is add a single letter to one particular word and suddenly it makes much more sense:

Why would I argue for ID when I support a theory of mathematical laws which bring about the world? In my view, [a]theism is the correct and consistent perspective within the context of natural evolution, and thus I don't think ID is needed.

You can't back out of it that easily. To be consistent, you mustn't forget that your position demands a will to create, an intent to see the world unfold. This ultimately means the deliberate design of something -- even if it's an automated design producing system. This is the essential difference between our worldviews.

In fact, if the universe is continually popping a fresh from new with each previous moment magically being copied and slightly changed to reflect the changes from the previous moment, then it is material atheism that is relying on IDism. The difference is that material atheists are saying that instead of God making this IDism work, it is magic.

I thought you were above such lame strawmen.

How do you even know that time would stop? As far as I can Google, nobody understands what time is! Do you?

I don't have to understand what time is. All we have to do is do a simple exercise of continually slow the process of time down to whether we reach the discrete moment or indiscrete infinitesimal moment. Either way, we reach a point to where there is no explanation for the next moment. It must be at this point that the materialist waves their magic wand. Tsk... tsk...

So you don't understand time, you don't know what a 'moment' is nor do you know, therefore, what it means to slow down the process of time -- yet you can confidently insert god into the gap, just as anyone can when it comes to explaining any unknown. You could do the same for abiogenesis -- just how did those first few bits of RNA get together... oh that's easy; goddidit.

[Curious]

I don't see how you can offer an explanation in principle, and if you can't, then this kind of materialistic perspective would need to be rejected because it cannot answer such basic questions without appealing to magic.

This seems to me as if it could be one of those "when did you stop beating your wife" questions. Please link me up to somewhere that supports the issue you're raising as being a valid one. I'm quite sure that you have drawn this from respectable philosophy rather than coming up with it on the fly, but as I said I simply can't see anything to answer nor can I find others asking the question.

I think you are being a little harsh on Harvey1 here QED. Just because a question has never been asked before does not make it either invalid or beyond discussion. Thankfully, most people here are amenable to such "on the fly" speculative reasoning which, in my opinion, can only enrich the argument so long as it can be substantiated ,at least in principle.
I do see serious problems here though such as the transfer of infinitely small "packages" of information. As far as we know, information is not infinitely reducible. An equation for example can only be broken down into its constituent symbols and relationships. An equation that has been reduced to A+B=C can be broken into A , B and C but beyond this point no further reduction is possible. Finite "entities" such as magnitude, direction or position surely cannot be infinitely reduced and still contain meaningful information. Each moment would create a state in which the information it contained would be less than the information it contained owing to the fact that for an infinite possibility there would be a requirement that the first half-moment be less than the second half-moment. I cannot believe that a finite quantity can be reduced ( no matter how many times ) and still be considered anything other than finite or how any number (even an infinite number) of infinite quantities could possibly make a finite quantity.

[harvey1]

3600 seconds is in fact 1 hour not 1 day, but that's ok as this is a philosophical rather than a mathematical argument.

Right you are here...

But this proper time would be measured according to this event. Time is relative, so whatever we are measuring should be measured according to it's relative time. The passage of time elsewhere is not even relevant... To allow an infinity of moments, like in Zeno's paradox, we must assume a given moment can be broken into it's half-way moments... This is not correct as you can see because the second half moment ( however small ) always equals more than all preceding half moments combined. To make the equation add up we must always add a finite moment and therefore make all other moments equally finite.

Mathematically, there is nothing wrong with what Zeno constructed. The problem is in his interpretation. For example, in the dichotomy paradox which is what you are referencing, the proposed solution to the paradox is able to arrive at a finite time.

In the case of dividing each moment into an infinitesimal, I don't see where you would have a problem with the mathematics involved. It is representing one second as an infinite set of infinitesimal seconds. This doesn't involve Zeno's paradox since adding infinitesimal seconds (i.e., the members of a set) takes the entire proper time duration (represented as a set) in order to add up to one second duration. One infinite set of infinitesimal seconds takes one second to be one second (by definition of an infinitesimal second!).

I'm not saying that this is a physical situation versus purely mathematical. I'm saying that whether we treat the problem as a finite set where the proper time duration is treated as a finite set of divisible moments (i.e., discrete moments), or if we treat the problem as an infinite set where duration is treated as an infinite set of infinitesimals, the outcome is the same.

You have to give me a reason why we are forbidden to treat indiscrete time as an infinite set of infinitesimal seconds. As I said in my previous post, the occurrence of these infinite number of infinitesimal seconds is not used to measure proper time; it defines the duration of a second for proper time. If your question is how counting the members of an infinite set results in reaching the infinite size of the set in a finite time, the answer is that this is how the duration of one second is defined!

However, my argument has nothing to do with whether there really are infinitesimal seconds. The argument is that even if there are infinitesimal seconds, the argument against material causation is not affected. Looking at the members of this infinite set, there is no cause that connects one member to the next (i.e., one infinitesimal moment to the next).

[harvey1]

Hello QED,

Well I'm sorry to say that I just don't accept that you have a point here.

I know you don't accept theism, but that's not the point of a discussion. You have to provide reasons why an argument is faulty, not just provide rhetoric in return.

and there certainly aren't any physicists that I know of scratching their heads over "How information about the previous moment get transferred to the next moment".

Peter Lynd's controversial 2003 paper mentioned this very issue (talking about treating the flow of time as an infinitesimal duration and/or discrete duration):

Regardless of how small and accurate the value is made however, it cannot indicate a precise static instant in time at which a value would theoretically be precisely determined, because there is not a precise static instant in time underlying a dynamical physical process. If there were, the relative position of a body in relative motion or a specific physical magnitude, although precisely determined at such a precise static instant, it would also by way of logical necessity be frozen static at that precise static instant. Furthermore, events and all physical magnitudes would remain frozen static, as such a precise static instant in time would remain frozen static a the same precise instant: motion would not be possible.

This is basically what I'm saying. Now, before you jump on Lynds' bandwagon and say that infinitesimals are just nominalistic interpretations of nature (i.e., there is no end to the divisibility of time--no static image of an event), there are deep paradoxes with his view. For example, he states:

As a natural consequence of this, if there is not a precise static instant in time underlying a dynamical physical process, there is no physical progression or flow of time, as without a continuous and chronological progression through definite divisible instants of time over an extended interval in time, there can be no progression.

So, Lynds must take on an extremely controversial position that there is no physical progression to time--no causality. I argued with one guy who had a similar theory for years about this, and he drove everybody nuts because his ideas contradicted himself dozens of time. In any case, Lynds published his paper in 2003 and from what I can tell, no one disagreed with him of the static paradox to infinitesimals and discrete time. And, even one respected logician responded to his views and also didn't criticize this view "no causality" of Lynds. In fact, the logician, Eric Engle, countered his view with one where motion is discontinuous:

Lynds fails to consider other possibilities than that motion be continuous and time discontinuous. What if motion were also discontinuous? Then Zeno's arrow could occupy locus l1 at time t1 and locus l3 at t2 without ever transiting locus l2. If motion were a series of very tiny (even infinitely tiny?) "jumps" (teleportations if you will). This in fact does appear to reflect sub-atomic physics where, as I understand, particles mysteriously appear and disappear as if teleported. If we presume motion is in fact discontinuous then we are in no way compelled to admit Lynds' arguement by reductio, that time cannot be divided into discrete elements.

Of course, if you like Engle's argument, then why does it make these jumps? Engle alludes to physical law, and that would be fine by me if we are talking about nomic relations as we discussed.

So, QED, I think materialism does have a problem here. Lynds paper doesn't solve the problem of causality, it simply has to take an even bigger leap into very bizarre notions of reality. They might be right, but even if they are, it still doesn't explain why there is reason to phenomena in the world. What is easier to discount, materialism or causation? I think materialism, especially given the success of quantum theories, has outlived its purpose. These paradoxes show that it is time to go.

To be consistent, you mustn't forget that your position demands a will to create, an intent to see the world unfold. This ultimately means the deliberate design of something -- even if it's an automated design producing system. This is the essential difference between our worldviews.

My stance is very sensible when viewed from the nature of propositions that exist in themselves. True propositions "create" by their nature. They add knowledge to the world, and they actualize worlds. I think you may not understand my general view and philosophy well enough yet.

I thought you were above such lame strawmen.

I wish you didn't see it as a strawman, it's not. Whenever you avert causal processes (as materialism must do, I think), you are advocating magic. What causes X to be Y? Materialism says it just happens. How is that not equivalent to magic?

So you don't understand time, you don't know what a 'moment' is nor do you know, therefore, what it means to slow down the process of time -- yet you can confidently insert god into the gap, just as anyone can when it comes to explaining any unknown. You could do the same for abiogenesis -- just how did those first few bits of RNA get together... oh that's easy; goddidit.

There's a huge gap between biological processes where hundreds of factors can contribute to organic development with lots of time and chances for change, and a basic philosophical paradigm. If we have to throw our hands in the air because every philosophical paradigm that is in error may someday prove right, then we lose the very basis of rationality in our approach to understanding the world. That's a principle that is hard to communicate, but I must try anyway.

[QED]

I don't see how you can offer an explanation in principle, and if you can't, then this kind of materialistic perspective would need to be rejected because it cannot answer such basic questions without appealing to magic.

This seems to me as if it could be one of those "when did you stop beating your wife" questions. Please link me up to somewhere that supports the issue you're raising as being a valid one. I'm quite sure that you have drawn this from respectable philosophy rather than coming up with it on the fly, but as I said I simply can't see anything to answer nor can I find others asking the question.

I think you are being a little harsh on Harvey1 here QED. Just because a question has never been asked before does not make it either invalid or beyond discussion. Thankfully, most people here are amenable to such "on the fly" speculative reasoning which, in my opinion, can only enrich the argument so long as it can be substantiated ,at least in principle.

It seemed to me that harvey1's assertion should at the least be presented a little more tentatively. Remember, it wasn't me berating you for your theory about the crests of waves breaking-off when we were talking about virtual particles. On the contrary, I'm very fond of inventive new ideas -- so long as they are presented with a degree of humility. Harvey1 has alighted upon this single issue about what joins one moment to the next and is attempting to use it to 'prove' that the material realists approach amounts to nothing more than mysticism.

In this debate "Is it rational to be a theist?" there is a great deal of pressure being applied to hinge it on the single issue of causality. This strikes me as being a sort of 'trick' because it takes the discussion into an area which is not yet properly understood by science. Now it's pretty obvious that "just because science doesn't have all the answers" it mustn't be concluded that it's rational to be a theist. God could be non-existent and still science could be missing many pieces of a wholly natural puzzle.

But harvey1 claims that there is an objectives answer to this question and hence claims that it is not a god-by-default argument. The problem that I see with this is that the subject is so poorly understood that we can't even tell if the question is valid -- let alone any answer offered for it. It wouldn't be right if rock-solid answers to ficticious questions were used as foundations for other arguments, so we should all be keen to see that there is something to answer in the first place.

[QED]

Well I'm sorry to say that I just don't accept that you have a point here.

I know you don't accept theism, but that's not the point of a discussion. You have to provide reasons why an argument is faulty, not just provide rhetoric in return.

I'm not sure if you're trying to be funny here, but as I explained to curious, I am referring to your question of what makes one moment morph into the next. Thanks for the links, I'll see what I can make of them.

[Curious]

You have to give me a reason why we are forbidden to treat indiscrete time as an infinite set of infinitesimal seconds. As I said in my previous post, the occurrence of these infinite number of infinitesimal seconds is not used to measure proper time; it defines the duration of a second for proper time. If your question is how counting the members of an infinite set results in reaching the infinite size of the set in a finite time, the answer is that this is how the duration of one second is defined!

However, my argument has nothing to do with whether there really are infinitesimal seconds. The argument is that even if there are infinitesimal seconds, the argument against material causation is not affected. Looking at the members of this infinite set, there is no cause that connects one member to the next (i.e., one infinitesimal moment to the next).

For one finite second to be capable of being divided into an infinite number of infinitely small moments then each finite second must be exactly divisible by each infinite moment. If this is not the case then either every moment is not infinitely small (and so every moment is not) or each moment is finite. If the second is divisible then each moment is, by definition, finite.

[Curious]

I think you are being a little harsh on Harvey1 here QED. Just because a question has never been asked before does not make it either invalid or beyond discussion. Thankfully, most people here are amenable to such "on the fly" speculative reasoning which, in my opinion, can only enrich the argument so long as it can be substantiated ,at least in principle.

It seemed to me that harvey1's assertion should at the least be presented a little more tentatively. Remember, it wasn't me berating you for your theory about the crests of waves breaking-off when we were talking about virtual particles. On the contrary, I'm very fond of inventive new ideas -- so long as they are presented with a degree of humility. Harvey1 has alighted upon this single issue about what joins one moment to the next and is attempting to use it to 'prove' that the material realists approach amounts to nothing more than mysticism.

In this debate "Is it rational to be a theist?" there is a great deal of pressure being applied to hinge it on the single issue of causality...

But harvey1 claims that there is an objectives answer to this question and hence claims that it is not a god-by-default argument....

I see your point. While Harvey1 might show a lesser or greater degree of rational thinking concerning this point, I doubt very much that the majority of theists have come to their own particular belief because of such a consideration.
As I have said, a finite moment can only be divisible by other finite moments. An infinite number of infinite moments is infinite, an infinite number of finite moments is infinite and a finite number of infinite moments is also infinite.
Of course, if we are to say that an infinite number of infinite moments could exist simultaneously with a finite moment then this would be true if the event or moment was coincidental with other relative events and moments but which were separate from the event or moment in question.
The point I make here is that an infinite number of observers could theoretically observe an event but each moment IN ISOLATION would appear finite to the actual event. If the original event were to observe the second event (or observer), so long as there was no stasis in time (such as the event travelling at light speed) then this event would also become finite. Such light speed travel would seem to exclude the transfer of any information from one event to the next.
I think this argument would be more productive if used in respect to the percieved POE where finite good (ie. the POE) might be infinitely applied to reach a theoretical outcome of infinite good.

[The Happy Humanist]

OK, Harvey, I'm slowly getting caught up on this thread, which you've suggested I jump in on. Pardon me for jumping in on an early post, but I'm a bit constricted for time.

So far I'm not impressed. You have raised a straw man, "Why do atheists call theism irrational?" Let's state the proposition more fairly and with less emotionalism. Atheists think theism less rational than atheism. It's a comparative thing. The answer is simple: parsimony. There's less mental gymnastics involved in atheism.

This is key. What I want to know is what causes IM1 to become IM2 to IM3, etc. (or what causes FM1 to become FM2, etc.). If there is no causal interaction to the particle at any moment, then why does the particle persist? If the particle persists for no reason, then this would seem to say that there are no laws between IM1 to IM2 (or FM1 to FM2), since there is nothing that keeps the persistence going unabated (i.e., it just does that). If there are no laws, then that would suggest that the particle moves through space without reason.

This is the principle. You have no causal tie-in between one event to the next. And, in addition, in the case of animals and people, we can choose our actions and therefore we have reason for our actions. How can you explain this if the ultimate behavior of one moment to the next is due for no reason?

This would seem to rule out atheism to me.

This is the crux of your argument? First of all, what does a hypothetical one-particle universe have to do with reality? You propose a hypothetical, claim that we cannot explain causality in that hypothetical, and then say that atheism falls because of it?

Then there's this:

There's just no reason to why persistence happens unless you advocate laws (God) that exist to make the persistence have a reason (e.g., conservation of energy, conservation of momentum, etc).

There's that Laws = God stuff again. If laws apply in such a universe, and there's no reason to think that they wouldn't, then those laws will be nothing more than a natural, immutable consequence of that universe's existence. I can think of a law that explains the particle's persistence:

In a one-particle universe, persistence is a given.

There. Settled. Prove otherwise.

[harvey1]

For one finite second to be capable of being divided into an infinite number of infinitely small moments then each finite second must be exactly divisible by each infinite moment.

It is divisible by an infinite number of infinitesimals. In other words, it takes an infinite number of infinitesimals to equal one second (or any other finite duration of time).

If this is not the case then either every moment is not infinitely small (and so every moment is not) or each moment is finite. If the second is divisible then each moment is, by definition, finite.

No. Each infinitesimal moment is not finite. If you add an infinitesimal moment to other infinitesimal moments, it will never equal a finite moment unless we add it an infinite number of times. Therefore, it is plain incorrect to think of the infinitesimal as a finite number.