It should be pointed out, incidentally, that this is not a new idea. The idea that time is itself part of the Universe, and that there was therefore no time at which the Universe did not exist, dates back all the way to Augustine (though of course he didn’t have the detailed mathematical description that modern cosmologists have).
I’m not certain precisely the distinction you are drawing. To call a system deterministic is to say that system operates according to a finitely-specifiable set of rules, and so, if one were given all the pertinent data regarding the state of the world at time t, one could calculate the state of the world at any future time. The feasibility of this isn’t really an issue.
The contention that components of the system (human brains) are changed by the operations of the system doesn’t make it any less deterministic, so long as these changes occur according to the system’s rules.
This might be a bit of a red herring though. Just because strict incompatibilist determinism prevents the existence of free will does not mean the “opposite” of it, usually taken to be randomness, means free will would exist. Randomness is just as injurious to free will, which is after all a consequence of the mind’s ability to translate mental intentions into physical manifestations within the real world. If the real-world is not rule-governed, an explanation has to be provided as to how the mind is able to effect its intentionality in a physical world that works randomly.
Briefly on the moral responsibility bit for now: the possibility of moral responsibility is usually thought to turn on the agent’s ability to have done otherwise. So we are not talking about moral agents (if, indeed, “moral” is necessarily a good descriptor for compassionate, other-regarding behavior) but rather morally responsible agents.
Indeed. (Of course, these edifices are also pretty darned amazing too!)
So, presumably, termites, beavers, chimps, Eric Erectus and even early Sally Sapiens didn’t and don’t, in your opinion, get a piece? (Again, understand I’m not trying to give you the full hostile witness treatment here – I’m genuinely interested in even your vaguest guesses.) And the sperm, egg or DNA in a watery bubble – does that get a piece, or is it withheld until later in gestation or childhood?
Quite so – that’s why I made so much of fields in my OP. Another one I like is “Quantum Mechanics: The Dreams Which Stuff Is Made Of.”
OK, but I’d suggest that all kinds of important phenomena, including human cognition, are subject to an effectively infinitely specifiable set of rules, ie. they cannot be reduced in the way you’re suggesting.
Agreed. And as a supervenience physicalist, of course I hold that mental intentions are effectively physical entities any old how, just as the “intention” of the computer game monster to kill the first-person shoot-em-up character most certainly supervenes on the computational processes going on in the hardware.
And if you rerun the “Moral Computer 2.0” programme, you do find different decisions when faced with the same situation if there are slight changes in the history database, expectation algorithm or random inputs. We still hold aberrant pets, programmes and diminished capacity humans “responsible” insofar as we provide consequences for their actions (as you can tell, I’m a consequentialist too).
In any case, I’m not sure you can really say I, or even my more dualist friends here of either theist or atheist persuasion, are really positing free will (or its illusion) as an example of creation ex nihilo, which is what the thread is about. Sure, there are even phenomena which emerge very suddenly, such as “matter” from symmetry-broken fields, supernovae from hot dense stars, catalysts from the primordial soup around an undersea vent, or consciousness from a dose of smelling salts after a general anaesthetic. But these are still gradual, incremental emergences, if admittedly for small values of “gradual”.
Thank you for that! Wonderful indeed!
It is my opinion, based upon the teachings of Jesus as revealed by the Beloved (or whoever it might have been) that it happens to the human at birth, because Jesus taught Nicodemus (a Pharisee, who was sympathetic toward Him) that man is born of water and of the spirit. Whereas mainstream Christianity interprets “born of water” to mean baptism, I interpret it to mean childbirth, as when a woman’s water breaks and a child is born. I believe Jesus was teaching that man is a dual creature; i.e., that he is both physical and spiritual — born of water (physical) and born of the spirit (spiritual).
I hope that helps you to understand my point of view.
Ha! 
My very favorite of favorites (since we’re sharing these) is a quote from the famous astrophysicist, Arthur Eddington, who said, “Something unknown is doing we don’t know what.”
Brave as ever to actually have a go at responding to my pedantic picking, and to furthermore base your guess on something non-arbitrary. Thanks.
You would have been executed for heresy almost any time before you were actually born, mate. But hey, so was Jesus.
I don’t think this is true at all. From what I’ve read–my knowledge comes primarily from Justo L. Gonzalez’s The Story of Christianity and A History of Christian Thought there were Christian thinkers on both sides of the issue from the Middle Ages onward.
No atrocities befell any who dared to question it.
Yes it can. You seem to have an exaggerated picture of the importance of that question of creation (or any aspect of creation) in Christianity. The central tenets of Christianity are the Incarnation, the Trinity, and the Resurrection.
This question has been asked and answered. I don’t know whether is was covered by Aquinas & co. but it has certainly been answered by more recent philosophers.
There can’t be an infinite series of causes and effects leading up to us because of the definition of infinity. Children generally think that infinity is a very large number; if they count for long enough they’ll eventually reach infinity. But this conception is wrong. Infinity is a concept, and no number equals it or approaches it. Now matter how far you move along the number line, you never reach infinity. In more formal terms, you cannot transcend the infinite.
Now look at it from the opposite perspective. If you are at an infinite position, no one can ever reach you. Or in relation to this debate, if the current universe followed after an infinite series of causes and effects, it would have transcended the infinite, which is impossible. Hence there was no infinite series of causes and effects prior to the present moment.
(William Lane Craig wrote a much clearer explanation of this argument in one of his books.)
Especially the Resurrection. I believe that Jesus died, was buried, and rose from the dead. I think that salvation might be listed also as a central tenet. I do believe that Jesus has saved from death all who will but believe in Him — that is, those who will trust in, rely on, and cling to Him. But I do not believe that physical death is the demarcation point. In other words, I believe that some will not trust in, rely on, and cling to Him until after they die and meet Him face to face, as it were. That is in part due to the fact that He is unfortunately presented as some heinous monster Whose sole purpose is to cast people into lakes of fire. I am reminded of the Pharisees whom Jesus said would search the ends of the earth for a single convert, and then turn him into twice the sons of the hell they were themselves. People who have turned against Christ because of moralistic and bombastic preaching can hardly be blamed for their point of view. If it weren’t for my person epiphany, I would feel much the same way. But upon seeing Him “for real”, I would know that He is what I have searched for my whole life.
Greatly honored. Thank you.
Succinctly, “followed after” != “transcended”.
See, for example, Cantor’s diaganol.
Hi ITR, glad you resurrected this thread!
Really? That would be very interesting. If you could tell me any medieval (scholastic or otherwise) Christians who advocated an infinite regress, or even the pantheism of some Islamic sects, I’d be fascinated.
That’s a very strong claim to make, given the character of the medieval Inquisition. Calling into question the miracles of God as set out by orthodoxy would most certainly be considered a very grave heresy. I had hoped this thread would not become a cite-fest detailing the horrors of the Inquisition, but it can if you like.
Agreed, but the Fall (which the Resurrection is surely all about) is a major part in this story. And how can there be a literal Fall if man evolved gradually?
If you could make it clearer still I’d be very grateful - I don’t understand this at all. It seems to be “If the universe was endlessly cyclical, that would transcend the infinite”. My question would, again, be so what?
On holiday this week - apologies if there’s no web access.
Damn, I should be working on my own thesis, but this thread is interesting. I must, with greatest respect, disagree that the Resurrection is all about “the Fall”. The Resurrection is not about eternal physical life, which would contradict nearly every physical law we know of, unless God Himself provided a source of eternal energy of some kind, which doesn’t sound like something God would do to me. No point in it. The Resurrected body of Jesus was of another kind. He was not even recognized, at first, when the women saw Him near the tomb. His body had transmorgrified — a sort of shape-shifter for Star Trek fans — such that he could summon the elementary particles into any form he pleased, and house His spirit therein. His ascension was miraculous, of course, but certainly involved some physical law about which we are not yet familiar — some kind of anti-graviton or something. Or perhaps even something as simple as an electro-magnetic force that simply overcame gravity. Or whatever.
Plus, the “Fall” thing. Assuming there was a Fall (which I do not), there is no reason that the allegory could not reference a tribe of people, newly cognative of His existence, but failing to follow His instructions. I have never found a case in which evolutionary theory contradicted necessarily the central tenets of Christianity. That’s because Christianity is about love, not the ascent of man. Even Christs’s miracles can be explained by a means of controlling the quantum world, which we do not yet understand. It is a simple matter to turn water into wine when you can summon sub-atomic particles to do your will, or other feats that might have a near — emphasizing *near *— zero possibility or occurring naturally or spontaneously.
In a response to a similar argument, Chesterton said:
The doctrine that humanity is sinful is one part of Christian doctrine that can be verified empirically. If anyone thinks that it’s false, all they have to do is produce a grown person who never does anything wrong. But in the absence of any such person, the doctrine is sound. Moreover, events in human history make it even more sound. One could easily name a long list a tyrants who thought that they were so good that they weren’t sinners and had no need of redemption, yet such people committed the worst crimes in human history. Meanwhile the most admired people in human history are generally well aware of their failings.
So sin is a fact of life; it doesn’t become less of a fact of life just because we can’t pinpoint the exact moment when it started occurring. After all, we don’t know when, where, or why humans first talked, or wrote, or did math, yet that doesn’t change the fact that we do all those things.
Back from holiday in beautiful Pembrokeshire.
Lib and ITR, yes, you’ve both picked up on a throwaway line in my last post, regarding the Fall and Resurrection. Of course western religion no longer posits anything but an allegorical Fall, if any. (At least, reasonable theism doesn’t: in my dealings with Young Earth Creationists I’ve gleaned that it’s not so much a literal 6 days that YEC’s are unwilling to divest themselves of, but the story of the Fall.) Still, I don’t think you could argue that the Fall wasn’t traditionally central to western religion, despite the ease with which theists can now rather sweep it under the doctrinal carpet.
As for my other points to you ITR, I must say I’m a little disappointed that you chose to ignore them completely. Nevertheless, on holiday I read an excellent little Penguin Classic: “Medieval Thought: St Augustine to Ockham” by Gordon Leff (Lib in particular would appreciate it I think, and you could probably pick it up Used on Amazon for literally a dollar) and it provided some fascinating examples of western (ie. west of, say, India) philosophers who did indeed reject creation-from-nothing. The Arabic philosophers Avicenna and Averroes favoured an eternal model, the latter very strongly, and both were highly influential in medieval theology. The 12th Century saw William of Conches take a strongly Averroist position, as did Sigler of Brabant in the 13th. And the grandfather of science himself, Roger Bacon, was indeed a Latin Averroist who took matter to be eternal and approached pantheism closely.
So there were, in fact, a few prominent philosophers who questioned creationed ex nihilo. However, one could not by any stretch say that they did not endure atrocities for doing so. All three died in atrocious medieval prisons, the last two after the Paris Condemnation of all things Averroist in 1277, and the torture and burning of later Averroist heretics is well documented.
But all this is by the by, really. If ITR says creation-from-nothing isn’t very important to western religion, I’m happy to take his word for it. What is far more interesting to me, ITR, is the argument you put forth against an eternal universe (of either cyclical universes or “timeless” fields), because I simply don’t understand it. You say that the “infinite regress, so what?” question has been answered many times – I’d say it’s been avoided many times, and hope that you don’t here. You mention transcendence of the infinite as a reason why the universe can’t be eternal – I simply can’t see what that’s got to do with modern cosmology and theoretical physics. So, please forgive me pestering you, but:
- How does an eternal universe “transcend the infinite”, exactly?
- Even if it does, so what?
I can’t access the book you refer to. If you could summarise the argument I’d be very grateful.
Chesterton is right in that a fall wouldn’t show up in a dig, but he did not know that we can prove that there was no Adam and Eve - at least not 6K years ago.
Whether people are sinners depends strongly on what you define as sin. It is not just doing wrong - a guy can do wrong by throwing to the wrong base, but I trust he isn’t sinning. The existence of evil hardly proves the nonexistence of a person without sin, whatever that means.
Sin, however you call it, wouldn’t start the first time a person did something sinful - it would start the first time a person realized that he or she did something sinful. When we were only animals did we sin? Plus, do you think all sins began at the same time? If nudity is a sin, was it before clothes were invented? Sin is also a function of which religion you follow, clearly.
So, sin as the absolute you seem to consider it is quite problematic.
I have to say that I think ITR’s central point is sound. Christianity is about Jesus, as described in the New Testament. The Muslim faith is about Allah and his laws, as revealed to Mohommed in the Koran. Those are the central precepts. The story of creation is almost trivial theologically, except insofar as it points to the great power of God/Allah. It’s main appeal is that it fills a gap, where did we come from? For whatever reason, most people apparently want a beginning. But that doesn’t make it a linchpin belief for religion. As an atheist and a materialist, I have no illusion that proving gradualism would disprove religion. And, please, let’s remember the universe-without-boundaries conjecture isn’t proven. Or, if it has been, I missed the memo.
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A eternal universe is one that has existed for an infinite amount of time. Hence any object in such a universe must have existed for an infinite length of time. In other words, if you take any fixed time step, any object in an eternal universe must have existed for an infinite number of those time steps, and that’s transcending the infinite. In other words, it’s moving through an infinite sequence of events that are all distinct from each other, and are all in order.
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Transcending the infinite is impossible. This follows directly from a correct understanding of what the infinite is. No matter how long you count, you never get to infinity. Yet a hypothetical observer in an eternal universe who counted the passing time would do exactly that, leading to a logical contradiction.
I’ve always found infinite regress to make much more sense than creation ex nihilo myself.
Agreed. (Note that it might not have undergone change for that infinite amount of time, however. The universe might be infinitely old but has undergone change for only 13.7 billion years.)
Hang on, what? The Earth is only 4.5 billion years old. It formed from dust from supernovas coming together under gravity. It is an example of an object which has not existed for an infinite length of time (although the fields whose broken symmetry lead to the emergence of the “matter” Earth is made of have existed forever.) If you could clarify your premise in light of this example I’d be grateful.
This still makes no sense. A year, say, is a fixed time step (assuming we’re not invlving relativity here, or are we?) Are you saying that if the universe is eternal, any object in it (eg the Earth) must have existed for an infinite number of years? That’s clearly a false premise, surely?
And that’s also a very screwy definition of transcendence in any case - did you mean in the medieval sense, (opposite to “immanence”)? Surely an object that has existed for an infinite number of years (or whatever) is merely infinite?
What? You seem to be saying “If, hypothetically, you could count to infinity, you would contradict the rule that says you can’t count to infinity. Therefore the universe can’t be infinite.” Can you just clarify that you are seriously presenting this as an argument?
Ah, Here we are.
This is an article in the “Truth Journal” by William James Craig arguing that the universe must have begun to exist. (No surprise you mangled his argument a bit in summary, ITR – he mangles it himself quite admirably!)
This is all rather linguistical smoke and mirrors in which he pulls out arbitrary and highly questionable assertions to counter the perfectly reasonable position that an eternal universe is ∞ (ie. potentially infinite), not א (actually infinite), as held by Aquinas et seq. The difference between past and future may be a particularly human illusion, such that “now” has no genuine actuality. Indeed, his entire argument contradicts itself: If the series of past events is continually growing, how can it be actually infinite??
In any case, the entire argument reminds me of one of Zeno’s paradoxes, given that Achilles does actually catch up with the tortoise eventually. Either the universe is actually infinite or it is not. Craig seems to go to some effort to show that the universe cannot be merely potentially infinite (a task which IMO he fails – he merely asserts such, which is no better than simply asserting that an infinite regress is absurd in the first place.) Then the conjurer reveals his other empty hand, telling us that actual infinities are impossible, too. He concludes, therefore the universe must have a beginning! I could just as easily conclude: therefore the universe doesn’t exist, therefore the world is 6000 years old, or therefore David Icke was a better snooker presenter than David Vine. (I think there’s a phrase for such an A & ¬A -> C fallacy, but I can’t remember it.)
Amazing – I see that you were actually repeating his argument pretty accurately, ITR (with “traversing” replacing your “transcending”). He is seriously proposing this as an argument!
The whole point of an eternal universe is that there is no starting point, any more than the surface of the Earth has a starting point. That’s why it’s called an infinite regress. Again, he is not making any further argument here beyond:
As for his first and second scientific confirmations, well, my OP bemoaned the carelessness with which even great scientists throw around terms like “began”, “came from”, “created” etc. I repeat: the fields or previous universes which gave rise to “our” expanding fireball were not nothing. And of course the thermodynamical tendency towards equilibrium only applies to “our” expansion: it is the relationship between said fields that determines the entropy of the initial point or points of expansion in the first place.
Nevertheless, this was a good effort at answering my “so what?” even if, in the end, I feel he’s just taken the avoidance of the question one step back, so thanks for drawing my attention to it ITR.