Because they asked me about it. What should I have done, told them it’s none of their business?
Have you, uh, ever done a formal symbolic argument before? Which false assertions did you write down?
And you presume to imply I’m not literate? After I wrote that monolithic post? Hahahahahahahaha. Golly gee, I’m sure everyone will be convinced!!
…regardless. What we now have is my word against your word with regarding to knowing what the hell is going on with a logical argument. (Plus my irrefutable proof in the summation of point 2 that God doesn’t exist, which eradicates all other arguments you could possibly make. :D) I know you are wrong about the requrements to rebutt premises. I leave it to others to draw their own conclusions based on the evidence you and I have each presented, and whatever other sources of information they have available. For myself, I have demonstrated to my satisfaction that you either don’t know how logic is used, and/or are not interested in honest debate. Consider your logical argument argument a big pile of slag in my opinion. Even if it’s valid, you have proven to me not to have the tools to use it.
Oh, and
No, like I said in the following paragraph, you may witness, there’s nothing wrong with that. But, as I said, if that fails to convince, you must abandon the disputed premise and try other tactics to make your point.
How far into these posts do you read before replying, anyway? I can sort of understand you failing to complete reading that monolithic post, but my response for Kalhoun? Come on!
was this meant to say the only value a premise can have is the value True?
can’t you write a negative? Like: if it is not raining then I will go out? It is not raining. Therefore I will go out.
would be
P1: ~R->O
P2: ~R
C: O
with the statement “it is raining” (R) having a value of F, but the premises including ~R having a value T?
~R being true means “R” is false, which would seem to contradict “the only value that a statement in the argument can have is the value True.”
At any rate, I think that particular wording was ambiguous. The full post is good but I’d agree that that particular sentence is, at the very least, oddly worded.
@Liberal: you seem to have attacked odd wordings in his post right up to where he actually makes the point that he wanted to make: Namely, that while in YOUR system, you may be able to accept your premises as true due to experience, premises are not immune to challenge as “true”. Einstein may have made an assumed premise, but scientific inquiry seems to back it up. Mathematicians start with an assumed premise, and one can empirically test the conclusions drawn from them and think it reasonable to assume those premises. You can’t assume a premise and draw a conclusion when a vast majority of the people you are arguing with have no empirical reason to believe you, and can’t test the validity of the conclusion outside of “your personal experience”. We therefore have no reason to accept the premises you posit (which was begbert’s point right after you stopped arguing with his post.
Gods are product, manufactured and packaged by those who invent religions in order to fleece the suckers who believe in them.
Well, I have to admit that I’m not following all this. Perhaps you will indulge me in a “lightening round” that might help me (and others) better understand your beliefs. It occurs to me that the following might have a superficial resemblance to an incoherent and rambling proof. That is not what is intended. Also, I don’t think that you hold all of these statements to be true. Indeed there are some obvious contractions here. These are merely stream-of-consciousness impressions from your last response and the thread in general. Where you see contradictions and circularity you will see my confusion. Would you mind giving a quick agree/disagree to each statement (where possible) and briefly clarify where you think it might help?
We are both body and spirit.
The spirit is supernatural.
The spirit has a set of aesthetics. (Or maybe is a set of aesthetics.)
The spirit has free will. (Or maybe is a free will.)
The spirit is a free moral agent.
Morality is an aesthetic.
The spirit is not bound to follow its own aesthetics.
The brain deterministically decides how to execute the spirit’s free will.
The body cannot help but follow what the spirit is drawn to.
The spirit cannot help but follow what it is drawn to.
One’s aesthetics are unchangeable.
One’s aesthetics exist before they do.
One’s spirit exists before they do.
God’s aesthetics are unchangeable.
God’s aesthetics existed before he did.
God’s spirit existed before he did.
God is a spirit.
An aesthetic is what one is uncontrollably drawn to.
An aesthetic is what one uncontrollably values.
Many people value themselves less because of what they are drawn to.
Many people value themselves less because of what they value.
The above is where moral choice comes in.
A moral choice is an aesthetic choice.
So one’s reaction to one’s own aesthetics is yet another aesthetic.
It is possible to lack a free will and be drawn to something.
It is possible to lack a free will and have an aesthetic.
It is possible to lack a free will and have a morality.
The fact that nearly every big brain in the field of physics agrees with Einstein makes me confident that he’s probably right. I don’t even see a handful of people in your camp having so much as a vigorous exchange regarding the validity of your logic. Are the people of the world jumping up and down over your great discovery? Have you answered the Big Question that man has been asking for all these years?
There is no double standard. I rely on the general concensus of the scientific community, just as most of the world does. That’s not to say there isn’t room for differing opinions, but with regard to your exercise, where’s the brouhaha? You say this has convinced you and turned your life around. Who agrees with you? Where are the headlines? Where’s the Nobel Prize? Where are your colleagues lining up in support of your work? It looks less like proof and more like grasping at straws, to me.
I get that. What I don’t get is why you present this as fact when it is anything but.
Way up thread, you said:
With that statement, you are saying that you have evidence to support *your * belief in and definition of god. However, your exercise, by your own admission, doesn’t provide evidence; it simply “makes sense” to you. You are beginning your logical statement with a premise that presumes a god. The rest of your work from that point on is pointless because we don’t presume the existence of a god, in this or any possible world.
Yeah, well I’ve already established the fact that I don’t know much about logic. However, that doesn’t make me wrong. Besides, pointing out that you’re passing your work off as proof, based on an an experience that cannot be corroborated (though could probably have been explained as some sort of mental glitch or hallucination, had anyone investigated), strikes me as somewhat less ignorant than you give me credit for.
But I had already said that myself. I said it four (or five — the oldest threads are archived) years ago, when the whole topic emerged. I’ve said it ever since. And I’ve said it in this thread more than once. And I’ll say it again: if you want to deny the premise(s), you are perfectly entitled to do that. For you, the premises will be false, and the argument therefore valid but unsound.
And with respect, let me say this. What I attacked were not odd wordings. I attacked the notion that a proposition in a bivalent system may have one of three values. I attacked the notion that Godel’s paper applied to all logical systems. I attacked an outright contradiction. Those are not odd wordings; they are epistemic disasters.
Hey, I never claimed I was great at phrasing things: I certainly will never be a great public speaker or technical writer. Heck, “oddly worded” could probably be my catch phrase.
However, my statement though it sounds odd, is true: the key phrase here is “in your argument” You’ll note, in your argument, that the statement ‘R’ never appears. The only three statements that are in your argument are “~R->O”, “~R”, and “O”. The first are premises which presumably are true, and the third is the conclusion that we know is true, assuming all the premises are, by virtue of the argument.
You see, once you burn all the words off and get down to symbols, logic is basically a symbol replacement system, in which you take statements (accepted sequences of symbols), apply certain specified replacement rules to them, and as a result of the replacements create more statements. That’s all there is to it. Start with some statements, and make more statements from them. More and more and more. You start with a handful of statements, and end up with a bigger handful of statements. In the middle: nothing but statements.
Now, since you’re using a limited set of rules to do these replacements, and only have a limited set of initial statements to start with, you can’t create all possible sequences of symbols via these replacements. Some are syntactically incorrect, like “A & & & B ->”; it doesn’t mean anything. If we manage to create one of these, we either botched something up or there’s a pretty bad flaw in the design of the logic system we’re using. There are others, like “A & ~A”, that you simply can’t get to, even though they are syntactically correct and do have meaning.
In a formal symbolic logic system, a statement that can be created via applying the rules to existing statements is referred to as “True”. A statement that cannot be created in this manner is referred to as “False”. You’ll note that this means that if you can create a statement logically, if you can ‘write it down in the argument’, then it’s not False. By definition.
Logical systems are created very, very carefully, and the ones in common usage (which I would not say includes modal logic, but what do I know) are very carefully crafted such that the statements that they can create and can’t, the True and False statement, are very closely analogous* to reality. In large part this is because the rules of basic logic are very close analogues to what we consider basic reasoning.
You see now why I say that all of the statements in a valid logical argument are True. It’s becuase that’s the way truth is defined for a given logical system!
You can also see how allowing False premises into the argument would screw things up. If you introduce a False premise into an argument, then you can naturally derive other statements from it. This expands the set of possible created values, and therefore changes, ie breaks, the definition of True in our argument. The argument can and likely will claim that things are true that are not, since we lied to it about what is true to start with. This is called being unsound, and it’s why we have to be very very careful to ensure the truth of all our premises.
Now, about this “Don’t Know” truth value thing.
When you’re sitting down at your table doing a logical proof, you’ll find that you just can’t calculate and write down all deducable (ie True) sequences of symbols. For one thing, in any logic system as powerful as or more powerful than standard basic logic, there are an infinite number of such sequences! You’d never finish writing them. This necessarily means that just because you haven’t got a statement deduced in your proof, that does not necessarily mean that that statement is not True; you might just not have deduced it yet. The statement has* some specific truth value, but you the arguer don’t know what it is. Unless you can deduce it, of course, then you know it to be True.
We as clever humans recognize that the statement that is the negation of any True value is False; so if we can logically show a statement to be True, then we have automatically shown the negation of that statement to be False, pretty much by the defintion of negation. But the logic system can’t do this; that’s not how it’s designed. When we deduce that something is False by proving its negative, we’re stepping outside the bounds of the logical argument and thinking with our own brains, not the logical system. The logical system does not recognize the False statement at all.
So in review: In reality all syntactically correct logical statements are either True or False. In our arguments, however, all statements are either True or Not Known, due to our limited ability to deduce all possible True statements in our argument.
Hopefully this has expanded somebody’s understanding of how formal symbolic logic, and by extension ordinary formal logic, functions.
- back in 1931 Godel went and proved that all logical systems at least as expressive as our mathematical system fail to deduce all true statements. That is, there are statements that are True that you cannot prove to be such. (You can’t prove their negation, either.) If I recall correctly, the proof is based at least in part on coming up with a way of translating the statement “this statement is not true” into symbolic mathematical/logic. (Sorry for the vagueness, it’s been a while since I read up on this.) I gather that Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem was recieved with something akin to panic in the mathematical/logistical world, since he’d basically kicked the blocks out from under their trust in their deductive systems. Still, we seem to have recovered, and still use math; and besides which I’m fairly sure that symbolic logic is too unexpressive a system to suffer this flaw. So you needn’t worry about it for most practical purposes, for example this discussion.
On review: Hmm; amusing double-post with Liberal there.
The first on topic post in a while. Thank you! 
Let me tell ya… you respect and thoughtfulness has been such a breath of fresh air that I’ll be more than happy to do that for you.
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We are both body and spirit. Agree.
The spirit is supernatural. Agree.
The spirit has a set of aesthetics. (Or maybe is a set of aesthetics.) Spirit is the name I use for the “atoms” of the supernatural. It is a metaphorical term that means the stuff God (and we, as a part of our dual nature) is made of. Used with an article or qualifier (a spirit or the spirit or every spirit) it signifies an individual made of this stuff. And so, I would word what you wrote as, “Each spirit makes aesthetical evaluations”. That statement would be identical in meaning to “Each spirit makes moral choices.”
The spirit has free will. (Or maybe is a free will.) Each spirit has free MORAL will. And I would add that whether brains (physical man) have free will is uninteresting and unimportant.
The spirit is a free moral agent. Each spirit is, yes.
Morality is an aesthetic. That wording is just a bit ambiguous out of context. If I were stating it for the first time, for clarity, I would word it as “Morality is essentially a matter of aesthetics (as opposed to ethics).”
The spirit is not bound to follow its own aesthetics. No spirit is bound to value aesthetically that to which he is drawn. But what draws him defines the bounds of his aesthetical essence much in the same way that necessary existence defines the bounds of God’s ontologocal essence.
The brain deterministically decides how to execute the spirit’s free will. It decides, yes. Whether it decides deterministically is pretty much irrelevant. There may be cases in which a brain is incapable of carrying out the decisions of the spirit. A person may be brain damaged, mentally or emotionally retarded, incapable of giving meaningful consent (as with a child, for example), under coercion, or any number of other things.
The body cannot help but follow what the spirit is drawn to. I wouldn’t say that the body follows what the spirit is drawn to. I would say that the body is essentially a vehicle for carrying out the will of the spirit, but it can (and often does) malfunction.
The spirit cannot help but follow what it is drawn to. I disagree. The spirit can resist (and even be ashamed of) what it is drawn to. That is precisely why we are precluded by Jesus from making moral judgments, and why He and His father make none Themselves.
One’s aesthetics are unchangeable. There seems to be some confusion between what draws us and what we value. We are drawn to our own identities, but we may or may not value them. By analogy, the serial killer is drawn to killing serially, but even though most may be sociopathic, one or more individuals may hate what they do, or even hate themselves for doing it.
One’s aesthetics exist before they do. I wouldn’t say “exists” because the term masks the copula. I would use the Socratic phrase “[is] what it is to be”, translated by the Romans as “essentia” (from which we derive “essence”). Essence precedes existence.
One’s spirit exists before they do. Rather, “One’s spirit is what it is to be before one emerges into existence.”
God’s aesthetics are unchangeable. I would say that His identity is unchangeable (as is ours) but His moral choices comprise the bounds of His aesthetics.
God’s aesthetics existed before he did. This is an interesting one because of God’s eternal nature. By now, you’ve already figured out that “identity” is a more proper term here (if I understand your line of questioning correctly). But God has never not existed. Remember, His existence is necessary. It was in the spawning of free moral agents besides Himself that our existences began. And our identities were what they were to be (essentia) before becoming physical. A materialist will often conflate physicality and existence.
God’s spirit existed before he did. “Before” is not defined in that context. And “existed” masks the copula. Plus, He and His spirit are one in the same in the sense that an animal (including the physical side of man) and its body are one and the same. Thus, all that can be said in that regard is that “God’s spirit is eternal.”
God is a spirit. Agreed.
An aesthetic is what one is uncontrollably drawn to. No. An identity is what one is uncontrollably drawn to; an aesthetic is an evaluation of what one encounters, whether by chance, by draw, or whatever. Consider the painting we discussed previously. We were drawn to it, not because we first valued it. After all, we could not even make an evaluation until we had identified it. We were drawn to it because we saw ourselves in it. It would be the Perfect Painting if it perfectly exressed our essential selves. We did not choose to like it (to be drawn to it), but we chose what value we placed upon it.
An aesthetic is what one uncontrollably values. No. Evaluations are completely controlled by moral will. (Physical will, whatever that may be, is trivial.)
Many people value themselves less because of what they are drawn to. Agreed.
Many people value themselves less because of what they value. I’m not sure whether that’s a tautology or a contradiction (:D), but no. I disagree.
The above is where moral choice comes in. Moral choice comes in when we make an aesthetical evaluation.
A moral choice is an aesthetic choice. Agreed.
So one’s reaction to one’s own aesthetics is yet another aesthetic. I’m not sure that I even understand that. So, I’ll disavow it just in case. What I would say is that one’s evaluation of someone else’s aesthetics is a meta-aesthetic, and is judgmental in nature. It is pretty much a moral corruption. His evaluation of his own aesthetic is morally irrelevant, much like it is irrelevant whether data in a database are stored relationally or hierarchically. The metadata characteristics have no effect on the values of the data elements.
It is possible to lack a free will and be drawn to something. Agreed. (Otherwise, it wouldn’t draw.)
It is possible to lack a free will and have an aesthetic. I disagree.
It is possible to lack a free will and have a morality. I disagree.
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I hope those comments help!
I hope you don’t mean the MOP, because as much as I’d like to take credit for discovering it, I didn’t. Godel discovered it. Hartshorne polished it up. And Plantinga made it rigorously valid.
What this? Where is your antecedant? Do you mean my epiphany? My theories on morality? What?
I have no idea what you’re even talking about.
No, I didn’t. That was Left Hand of Dorkness.
Yes, thank you doing for that for me. I’ve just returned from a family gathering and read through your responses. It seems I need to be a bit more diligent with the terminology. I promise to give this more deserved attention in the morning.
I’ve been lurking on this thread for a few pages (missed all of what happened before and not inclined to fill the gap). I’m posting now to make only two limited comments. Frankly, I have neither the time nor the logic background to do more.
First, to begbert2, I like your development of the argument a lot, especially Post #356. But, I take issue with your assertion that Liberal doesn’t know how to do logic. I have just enough background in the subject to conclude from observation that both of you do. In particular, I observe the Lib has several times conceded the main point of your argument, viz, that his proof is only as sound as its premises. If you had left out the ad hominems, he might have engaged you on substance. Yeah, I know, he’s done it too. Discipline, man.
Second, to Liberal, I notice a key acknowledgement (Post #358) “that I take it as axiomatic that the supernatural exists based on my experiences,” from which you proceed to prove ontologically that God exists. Well, sure. But, I have to say the proof doesn’t add anything that I can see.
Finally, as my own small contribution to the debate, I will mention two interesting articles on the subject I found while trying to get up to speed on what this is about. One is specific to Kurt Gödel’s Ontological Argument. Another is the Stanford Encyclopedia article on Ontological Arguments. Perhaps I’m missing something, but I read both of these to support my personal position on the issue, which is that logic can neither prove nor disprove the existence of God. Rather, one accepts or rejects the premise, from which the rest either follows or not.
No, those are two different things. One does not procede from the other. And quite honestly, how can you possibly assign knowledge of logic to someone who says, among many other errors, that a bivalent proposition can have one of three values? You do understand that “bi” means “two”, right?
I mean about it being applicable to the existence of god, an entity whose existence and attributes you are assuming. Also, others seem to be saying your logical approach is faulty.
Your epiphany that nature is not all there is.
Your presentation about how you’ve proven the existence of a god who shares in everyone’s life based on evidence. A psycho-emotional experience is not what most people use as evidence. If that’s your take on your experience, fine. But it strikes me as a “personal god”; not a universal god, which makes it irrelevant to the rest of us. Also, you are applying christian traits to that god, which you said make sense to you. Millions of jews, muslims, atheists and the rest would have a different take on that. Yeah, I know…many paths and all that, but all that does is personalize it even more.
Sorry. My bad. I was posting on the fly.
Kalhoun, I must ask you, only because this is the second time in about as many posts that you’ve made it known that you depend, for your information, on what you hear from others, why you don’t choose your others with more discernment. Hold on, don’t respond yet. I’m just saying that if you do that, you must (or you ought to) make sure at the very least that the people you’re listening to know what they’re saying, especially if you’re going to confine your listening to people here while ignoring every specialist in the field from Ockham to Plantinga.
Which is more dependable to you, the member who authored and moderated this series of threads, or a member who doesn’t know two from three and calls Stanford University a “disreputable” source? Do you ignore the former, an atheist who examined the argument and determined it is valid, simply because he agrees with the specialists and me? (Incidentally, note that the Stanford article supplied by PBear is written by Graham Oppy, a renowned proponent for atheism, and he says the argument is valid.) You complain about sleeping in the bed you make, and yet you make beds like these. Educate yourself and remake it, or else stop complaining.
Your complaint is that I present what I learned from my epiphany as fact? Then let me soothe your concern. I don’t present it as fact; I present it as a premise. That doesn’t make it a fact, and you are free to reject it. I used to reject it myself. Every materialist rejects it. That’s why they’re materialists.
I haven’t done anything based on “evidence”. You have me confused with a lawyer, perhaps?
You truly do not listen; else, you would have known that I have always said (including in this thread) that faith is a subjective matter, that what I believe about God may not apply to another living soul, and that every person is free to make his own moral choices. Remember saying how you didn’t like that because it made you feel like you had to lie in the bed you made?
You sound almost… jealous. Certainly irrational.
Apology accepted, but I’m afraid that hasn’t been your only careless observation. I’ve provided a wealth of information and citation in this thread. I’ve taken pains to express myself as precisely and thoroughly as possible. I’ve answered all your questions (or at least all the ones I could possibly get to while also getting to other people’s). Why you cannot be satisfied with what I’m giving you is a mystery, but I assure you that it is all I have to give.
I’m frankly tired of reminding you of what I said and what I didn’t say, especially given that you essentially believe I am a delusional idiot who deliberately obfuscates and deceives people while you yourself give no more effort to this discussion than, as you put it, “posting on the fly”. If you think I’m a troll, then Pit me. If you want to oppose me, then do it as SentientMeat, The PC Ape Man, and Voyager do — with respect, and without all the dramatic and absurdly irrelevant “where is your Nobel Prize?” crap. If your next post to me doesn’t impress me as sincere and respectful, then good bye. Have the last word, and go joyriding on Begbert’s three-wheeled bicycle.
I’ve been following this thread with great interest. Wish I had some insights to offer. Ah well … the point of my post is this:
Lib, thanks for that link. A quick browse of those threads tells me I’ve got some fine reading ahead of me.
Carry on.
Liberal, I couldn’t say this exchange is moving my beliefs any. But I am truly interested in understanding your beliefs. Perhaps mine are a handicap in doing that. I still have this nagging feeling that I’ve somehow inserted a contradiction or circularity. Frustratingly, I am having a hard time pinning it down with words. Where am I going off the rails here:
An identity is what one is uncontrollably drawn to
We are drawn to our own identities
one’s identity = what one is drawn to
what draws [a spirit] defines the bounds of his aesthetical essence
one’s identity = what one is draw to = the bounds of one’s aesthetical essence
[God’s] moral choices comprise the bounds of His aesthetics
(Here may be the problem, I’ve made several assumptions in getting to…)
one’s identity = what one is draw to = the bounds of one’s aesthetical essence = one’s moral choices
And all this is fixed. The individual is forever stuck with his lot and it may be an unfortunate circumstance:
I would say that [God’s] identity is unchangeable (as is ours)
No spirit is bound to value aesthetically that to which he is drawn.
Is there more to a spirit than an identity? I’m guessing you might say yes, there is also a free moral agent. How is that part of the spirit separate or free if its choices are part of the fixed identity? For example, being drawn to goodness is part of a certain identity. Valuing goodness would seem not to be. The evaluation is done aesthetically and yet is not within the bounds of that aesthetic essence. Or if it is part of the essence, then the evaluation must be fixed and not free. Gah!
PS. Besides once not existing and likely being drawn by different things, what differences are there between the spirit that is God and our spirits?
PPS. A sidebar that amuses me: Does the painting have an essence? If not, does the painting exist? Is essence dependent on perception?
You do indeed. SentientMeat is quite simply an amazing individual. His insight, his brilliance, his sincerity, his almost boundless patience and good nature serve as an example to us all, theist and atheist alike. I hope he returns soon. The board is profoundly poorer in his absence.
You aren’t really going off the rails, you’re just not seeing all the switches. 
I think you used an assignment function at the end of it all, when an implication function was demanded. We’re okay through here:
That all makes sense. We are what we are, and aesthetically, we are bounded (and therefore identified) by our aesthetical essence. Logically, a neat package.
But the essence of aesthetics, I would argue, isn’t choice; it’s value. And so, I would change this…
…to this:
one’s identity = what one is draw to = the bounds of one’s aesthetical essence -> one’s moral choicesThe separation between what we are drawn to and what we value hinges upon that implication because, as you will notice, it is not biconditional; i.e., it doesn’t go both ways. Just to refresh your memory, A -> B is a conditional implication, but A <-> B is a biconditional implication. Concluding that B::A (B, therefore A) from A -> B is a logical fallacy called “affirmation of the consequent”.
Thus, one may choose to value or not to value himself or that to which he is drawn. We cannot judge people based on the moral choices they make because the implication does not hold in reverse. Their moral choices do not necessarily tell us who or what they essentially are.
Back to our painting again. Suppose you are participating in an auction for it. You will bid everything you have because you value it so much. Now, suppose another man outbids you, and in doing so is forced to sell his home and everything he owns to buy it. You may be inclined to conclude that he values the painting as much as or more than you do. But maybe not…
As it turns out, it is his dying mother who values the painting, and what he values is her. His moral choice, in fact, is not to buy the painting, but to make his mother happy. He wants to give her a few months of joy because he values her happiness more than anything else in the world. The painting may mean nothing to him in se. He is drawn to it only because he believes it would make his mother happy.
Jesus once addressed this issue with a parable that said, basically, “a man found a great pearl in a field, and sold everything he owned to buy the field”. As anyone not metaphorically impaired can see, the field was nothing to him. It was merely a means to get to the pearl.
And so that’s why this isn’t right:
Instead, what we have is that these two statements…
…are true, but unrelated directly. God is what God is, but He is not bound to value goodness simply because He is good. There is no reason why He may not hate himself for being drawn to goodness just as the serial killer may hate himself for being drawn to murder. But it simply so happens that He is both drawn to goodness and values it above all else.
That, as I said earlier, I take as axiomatic from a thorough study of the teachings of Jesus.
Hopefully, the above clears that up. We are free to make aesthetical evaluations (moral choices) outside our aesthetical essence. And, as we ponder it, we can think of innumerable handy examples that we witness on a daily basis. For example, the soldier who gives his life to safe his friends is drawn to life and does not value death, but he values his friends above his life. But we cannot conclude anything about him based on no more knowledge than what he did. He might have done it, for all we know, in spite of trying not to.
As it happens, you’ve hit upon an area of study that is currently underway for me. I am inclined to say, tentatively, that spirit is all one, and that we are, in effect, “pieces” of God. Our creation is almost analogous to an asexual reproduction of a sort. But I haven’t firmed things up sufficiently to comment with confidence on the matter at this time. If you would be interested in a participatory role, I would be more than happy to discuss it openly so that you, or anyone else, can see the process. My approach is always methodologically the same, and I always go wherever the logic leads me, and so I would have nothing against doing it rather naked in front of God and everybody as it were, except for one thing. It is difficult enough, just from the sheer logistics, to cover what I already have established confidently because of repeating myself over and over and constantly correcting misquotes, bad information, and outright errors from a dozen different sources that are determined before the fact that I cannot be right. I suppose I could ignore everyone in such a thread except for you, but the mods might not consider that to be in the spirit of the forum. Who can say. (Gaudere once indicated that such a one-on-one debate/discussion would be okay, but she has moved on to the greener pastures of administration, and Tom and Buck may feel very differently.)
The painting is essentially a set of molecularly bonded electromagnetic seizures suspended in a field of gravity — i.e., the collapse of a probability. Until and unless a free moral agent evaluates it aesthetically, it will have no significance whatsoever.
“The atoms or the elementary particles are not real; they form a world of potentialities and possibilities rather than one of things or facts.” — Werner Heisenberg