God and Free Will

[chezlaw]

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It's a concern that if this cover gets blown we could fall back on god existing outside of the space and time that's outside of this space and time, and if that's fails then...

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Its not a concern for me because its not about belief. Just trying to understand what's possible.

Doug - why is it inconsistent?

chez

[luckyme]

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Its not a concern for me because its not about belief. Just trying to understand what's possible.

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I was building on Bunny's comment -
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I think it is impossible for us to conceive what it would be like to experience time like this. Nonetheless, I think the theist has to believe God exists outside of time or will run into paradox after paradox

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This isn't like the wave-particle duality where we have the evidence we just can't conceptualize it's actuality. Here, we don't have any evidence and even have counter evidence, nor can we grasp how it would manifest or the implications of it. We just 'need' it. It's like, "I know pigs can fly, but they only do it when we're not looking".

Is there any criteria for 'possible' that would help get us into this besides just pointing to a curtain?

luckyme

[bunny]

My point is I believe in God (for whatever reason some would say irrational although I wouldnt). I still subject my beliefs to rational scrutiny and as such - if they lead to a logical inconsistency I must amend them. That is all I meant - I have to believe God is outside space and time or my beliefs are a nonsense. This is no different from a mathematician accepting proof by contradiction.

[Copernicus]

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My point is I believe in God (for whatever reason some would say irrational although I wouldnt). I still subject my beliefs to rational scrutiny and as such - if they lead to a logical inconsistency I must amend them. That is all I meant - I have to believe God is outside space and time or my beliefs are a nonsense. This is no different from a mathematician accepting proof by contradiction.

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I'm not at all uncomfortable with things existing outside our realization of space and time, by analogy with a Flatland creature or similar construct.

For example take a sentient wood eating "worm" that is confined to a plane, and who's only senses are vision which is very limited distance wise, sees no color, and can only see straight ahead, and feel that is limited to feeling his own heartbeat.

Every 12,000 beats of his worm heart the "sun comes up" and during the next 12,000 beats of his worm heart he must find food that at first seems to be randomly located on his plane, however over time he begins to discover a pattern to the placement of the food that is related to its prior position in an imaginary grid he visualizes his plane to be marked in. His metabolic rate (and correspondingly all bodily functinons) is very fast relative to a human's.

To him, time is measured in sequential light and dark periods and heartbeats that he perceives to pass very slowly (relative to a humans perception) due to his high metabolic rate. Space is measured by his plane and the grid that he has discovered during his search for food.

The human that is turning lights off on every minute or so, and is moving a wooden chess knight in accordance with chess rules on a chess board is easily concepetualized to be in a different "space" because of the added dimension which the limited vision of the worm is unable to see.

Different time is somewhat dodgier since it still sequential, but as you speed up the worms metabolism to infinity and decrease the human time between worm heartbeats, all of the worms time exists in a very brief period of the human's time, so he sees the worms "past, present and future" so rapidly that in "worm time" the human is seeing it all at once.

(Its been 30+ years since I read Flatland..if this is a direct ripoff, my apologies!).

[chezlaw]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Its not a concern for me because its not about belief. Just trying to understand what's possible.

[/ QUOTE ]

I was building on Bunny's comment -
[ QUOTE ]
I think it is impossible for us to conceive what it would be like to experience time like this. Nonetheless, I think the theist has to believe God exists outside of time or will run into paradox after paradox

[/ QUOTE ]

This isn't like the wave-particle duality where we have the evidence we just can't conceptualize it's actuality. Here, we don't have any evidence and even have counter evidence, nor can we grasp how it would manifest or the implications of it. We just 'need' it. It's like, "I know pigs can fly, but they only do it when we're not looking".

Is there any criteria for 'possible' that would help get us into this besides just pointing to a curtain?

luckyme

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This is metaphysics, the curtain stays.

It seems untroubling though, isn't it necessary that a being that creates something exists outside the thing it created.

chez

[guesswest]

And isn't such a being then not omnipresent?

It seems like in order to make these meanings sensible we have to redefine them in such a way that they no longer mean anything like the same thing. If you take the 'omni' away from any of these characteristics they no longer bear much resemblence to the original characterization. I can define omnipotent and omnipresent as meaning 'plays the banjo and forecasts the weather' but I'm not sure there'd be any value in conclusions drawn from those premises.

[alThor]

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There is no God people wake up.

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Lucky for some of us.

[luckyme]

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This is metaphysics, the curtain stays.

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Ok, in those terms we are into "beyond metaphysics". Doesn't metaphysics stop at the logically coherent( not merely the physically possible)? Everyone seems to be saying we haven't a clue how this conceptualized condition 'omnipresence' would play out, so how can we discuss it's logical coherence?

In any way I've seen it expressed, I can't distinguish it from "..and then magic happened". There's no problem if we want to suspend all the known laws of nature and substitute new ones. But to stay in the bounds of metaphysics don't our new ones have to be internally consistant, which we can't state in this case?

All we've done is say "there is this strange situation behind the curtain and THAT is what allows this strange event on this side of the curtain" ... where's the gain?

chez, you seem to have a grasp of this... where am I going wrong in my understanding of metaphysics?

thanks, luckyme

[luckyme]

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It seems untroubling though, isn't it necessary that a being that creates something exists outside the thing it created.

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Wouldn't the possibility that the creation is a expansion of the initial state make more sense? or a nanotechnology situation where the creation creates itself? Your conditional seems designed to support a specific outcome rather than a review of all logical possibilities, and has the further problem that it's not just 'outside', there seems no conceptual way to grasp the interaction. A super version of 'how does Caspers hand go through the wall but pick up the phone?"

In prinicple, we could explore it as one possibility, but there is no evidence to weigh even if it is conceptually ungraspable. We can deal with one or the other but not both ??

luckyme

[bunny]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
This is metaphysics, the curtain stays.

[/ QUOTE ]

Ok, in those terms we are into "beyond metaphysics". Doesn't metaphysics stop at the logically coherent( not merely the physically possible)? Everyone seems to be saying we haven't a clue how this conceptualized condition 'omnipresence' would play out, so how can we discuss it's logical coherence?

In any way I've seen it expressed, I can't distinguish it from "..and then magic happened". There's no problem if we want to suspend all the known laws of nature and substitute new ones. But to stay in the bounds of metaphysics don't our new ones have to be internally consistant, which we can't state in this case?

All we've done is say "there is this strange situation behind the curtain and THAT is what allows this strange event on this side of the curtain" ... where's the gain?
thanks, luckyme

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I dont think there is any "gain" but I am not trying to persuade you it is true. My claim about theists needing to claim that God exists outside of time and space was that this was essential to maintain logical consistency. I'm not making any kind of testability claim merely that if God exists this must be a characteristic or else the theist position is untenable. (There may be other reasons it is untenable, of course, but if you believe God exists at a particular point of time or space you will run into a contradiction).

I think what I'm actually saying is that there is a strange event on this side of the curtain - in order for the world to be sensible, the following strange event must occur on the other side.