The bottom two aren’t the same. If the statement “Everything is eternal” is true, for example, then the statement “Some things are eternal” will be true, and “Some things are eternal” will be false. Conversely, if the statement “Nothing is eternal” is true, then “Some things are eternal” is false, and “Some things are not eternal” is true.
i haven’t taken the time to think this through very carefully, but a couple of points spring to mind.
First of all, the Universe is under no obligation to conform to the arguments we derive from pure reason. Whether or not something is eternal (whatever that means) is something we need to discover empiricaly. Right now, judging from what we know about the universe the answer is no. However if some of what string theory says is true (and all i really know about this is what I’ve learned from Brian Green’s Book and NOVA special 
) there may be some sort of eternal multiverse of which our universe is only a small part.
Her argument seems to be “If nothing is eternal, then life is meaningless.” For heavens sake, Why?? 
I assume she’s talking about God here. Other wise the converse (or is it the inverse) of this statement, If something is eternal than life may have meaning, makes no sense. Suppose there is a chunk of “eternity matter” a cubic yard in volume, floating betweeen here and the andromeda galaxy. What possible difference could this make to our lives.
In any event what does the ephemerality of existence have to do with the meaning or lack thereof of life. Hell, I have a hard enough time planning for next week, let alone the next few trillion years Life’s meaning arises from the choices we make, not from some presumed eternity which probably doesn’t exist.
I addressed this in the OP, then again in post #4, then again in post #16 and it’s still what some of you are hanging on to.
I’ll say it one more time: According to her, to abandon reason is to lose meaning in your existence. To disagree with this argument is to abandon reason.
To say that a chunk of “eternity matter” wouldn’t effect your life tells me that you really don’t understand the point she’s trying to make.
I don’t necessarily agree with her argument, but that’s it.
Reason in the sense of reason for being, or reason in the sense of rationality? It also seems a bit arrogant to say that if you don’t accept her (rather weak) argument you are not rational and your life has no meaning - if I am interpreting things correctly.
There are things that are impossible - squaring the circle, for instance. But you need to prove that something is impossible, and time and time again somethings thought to be impossible because of lack of scientific knowledge (like transmutation of metals) turn out to be doable. The something out of nothing argument seems to be the “impossibility” here that can happen. Conservation of mass and energy is true, but it appears that the universe has zero net energy, so the universe popping out of nothing violates no physical laws.
The thing that ticks me off about philosophers (and I’ve read quite a bit) is that they can clearly and persuasively “prove” something that can be shown to be false by experiment. Aristotle did it all the time, and it is still happening. This is not limited to theists - George Smith in “Atheism - The Case Against God” gets around the first cause argument by proving that matter hs always existed. Whoops.
Ok, she says (1) “to give up reason is to lose meaning in your existence.” I’ll buy that more or less, since I certainly value reason.
What I don’t get is the second part. (2)“To disagree with this argument is to deny reason.”
First does “this argument” refer to sentence (1) or to the “something must be eternal.”
If one, OK, sure. But if “this argument” refers to her eternity argument, then Hell, no!
Her “argument” is nothing more than a series of assertions. Why can’t being come from non-being. What is “being” what is ‘non-being.’ There are a variety of well thought out empirically based arguments on the origin structure and fate of the universe. trying to figure these things out using pure logic. is something reasonable people have stopped doing since the time of Galilleo.
Logic is useful to check the structure of our thoughts and to help prove some propositions in pure mathematics. To use it to “prove” things in external reality isn’t going to get you very far.
Which is just what voyager said.
Sorry for the messy post. :smack: I was typing very quickly
I don’t quite understand the God part of this argument. That is, okay, say we showed to some stuff is eternal. For example, the fact that the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides of the right triangle is pretty eternal. What of it?
As a side note, I’m pretty sure life is meaningless whether or not you accept some philosophical arguments or not.
An assertion is not proven simply by its assertion. If she’s got nothing more than this, then she’s got nothing at all.
Feeling grumpy coz there is going to be a late meating at work…
It’s the typical stupid error of thinking of ‘Nothing’ in terms of things. ‘Nothing’ is not a ‘thing’ but an absence of any ‘things’.
Saying nothing is eternal does not mean that a thing called ‘nothing’ exists eternally, such semantic tomfoolery is what annoys the bejeezus out of me in some otherwise intelligence arguments/discussions.
I am particularly stumped with how “meaning” ever got involved in the discussion at all. Otherwise I don’t see any crushing blow to the argument, unless you can somehow discount the “being doesn’t come from non-being” assertion. As it is an assertion, you are free to assert the opposite, but she’d probably just ask for proof and honestly, you probably got nothing there (I don’t think quantum physics offers an escape if that’s what you’re thinking).
But yeah, that meaning thing. Can’t see how that fits into the discussion at all.
Am I the only one who reads this and think of Ecclesiastes?
I read this, and I think, “Nice word-salad”. I’m just having an awfully hard time distinguishing this from random gibberish.
[QUOTE=Cisco]
That’s not what she’s saying. She says reason gives us meaning and makes us human. To give up reason is to give up meaning. To deny this argument is to give up reason.
Ok, I’d like to take a stab at this:
So, is what she is essentially saying is that reason by it’s effect on our perception of life would compell us as humans to conceive of a god? Therebye giving our life meaning?
Or could she actually mean ‘reason’ is that which is eternal?
And on kind of a tautalogical tangent: isn’t this square a form of argument which uses it’s own rules to prove it’s own existence? And therefore it’s own meaning. Even taking the proof so far as to bestow value upon itself?
I wonder because of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. It has been accepted and proven; I’m not a physist, but does’nt the principle ‘trump’ physics theory by introducing confounding variables upon predicted outcomes.
So, if the logical reasoning behind the square is going to lead to explainations on being and matter and eternity (time) what we have here is an a priori explanation of physical phenomenology. One which doesn’t incorporate an element of uncertainty. Is that a ‘deal breaker’?
I don’t know, but that’s my 2 cent’s.
Or in other words, the notion that something must always come from something else, and not from nothing, implies an infinite regression into the past, i.e., an eternity.
Or in yet other words, it’s illogical – or as she would say, a denial of reason – to hold both that something cannot come from nothing, and that the universe had a beginning in which it came from nothing.
Well big freaking deal.
To conclude from this that something is eternal does not answer the question; it simply evades it. Because there isn’t an answer to the question of where everything “came from,” it removes that property entirely; i.e. it says that the thing in question simply does not “come from,” that such a property is irrelevant. That doesn’t tell us anything or get us anywhere.
This argument is meaningless.
I dunno about a defeater, but a workable response is to just smile and nod, take lots of notes, write as many buzz-words as you can on the final in order to get a passing grade, graduate, then go get a job somewhere in the real world.
Now, personally I’ve always had a bit of a problem with v. It does appear that being-from-non-being doesn’t occur in our world, but I’m not sure that we can be certain that it’s impossible under all circumstances. If we imagine an empty universe in which nothing exists at all, then being-from-non-being would only have to happen once in eternity to get the being-from-being ball rolling. This doesn’t seem very likely, but I don’t see how we can be sure that it didn’t actually happen. None of us have any experience with empty universes.
Still, being-from-non-being hasn’t been proven to be possible, and may be unlikely enough that we can safely reject it for discussion purposes. The real problem with this argument is the list of implications under iv. Being temporal doesn’t require having a beginning, it only requires having an end. If we reject being-from-non-being (and accept that there are things in the universe now which really exist!) we have to believe that the universe was never empty. We have to believe that something has always been there. This does not, however, require us to believe that there is a first “something” that continues to exist.
“There has always been something in the universe” doesn’t mean that there is anything eternal in the universe any more than “This apartment has always had a tenant” means that there’s an immortal renting the room. It could mean that, but it could also mean that there’s been a continuous succession of temporal inhabitants of the universe/apartment. None of these inhabitants were eternal, and the succession might someday end. Where did the first of these temporal inhabitants come from? Well, where would the first eternal inhabitant have come from? If we can accept that some things don’t need beginnings, there doesn’t seem to be any logical reason to insist that there must have been a beginning for the first temporal “something”. It was just there, and it always was there…until it ended.
Think of “some” as meaning “at least some, and possibly all.” This is the usual meaning of “some” in formal logic, although people frequently use it in ordinary conversation to mean “some but not all.”
I think the teacher is probably full of it, but I can’t say why without being given a precise definition of “eternal”, “reason”, and “life has no meaning.” What the teacher means by these isn’t clear to me (and it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that it’s not completely clear to her, either.)
For example: I could define “eternal” as meaning there is no time at which the thing in question did not exist. However, if time itself has a beginning or an end, then the thing might only exist have existed for a finite length of time, or might only being going to exist for a finite length of time.
On the other hand, I could define “eternal” by saying something has existed for an infinite amount of time. Mathematically speaking, that’s a pretty loose statement. A more precise statement would be: Pick any number of years. If, regardless of how many years you pick, you could go forward or backward that number of years, and it would be guaranteed that the thing in question would still exist, then it must be eternal.
These two definitions don’t agree in all cases. If time started 15 billion years ago, then something 15 billion years old might be eternal by the first definition, but by the second definition it wouldn’t be because a necessary condition for something being eternal is that it existed 20 billion years ago, and in this case 20 billion years ago is a meaningless statement.
Well to be technical about it she is wrong about matter. The gross arrangements of matter that we observe are absolutely irrelevant to the permanence of matter itself. That things break down, disassociate with one another, turn into energy, and so on doesn’t mean matter is non-eternal. It just means that matter does not often take forms that endure forever.
Also if you look at the smallest bits of matter you do have things seemingly vanishing into thin air and returning again. Given that I’m not a physicist I have only the vaguest technical understanding of this. Regardless the argument is out of touch with physics. I favor the first paragraphs line of argument, if only because it makes better rhetoric.
I suspect she may want to have eternal be static as well. This produces problems for what she wants to do later on (the whole God/meaning thing), and I don’t think that the eternal thing’s arrangement need be static, even if the fundamental thing itself is static in a way that satisfies her particular criteria.
Having no beginning and no end.
On Reason:
Reason in itself:
-Laws of thought:
i. Law of identity - “a” is “a” (a thing is what it is)
ii. Law of contradiction - not both “a” and “non-a” in the same respect and at the same time
iii. Law of excluded middle - either “a” or “non-a”
Reason it its use:
-Formative - for concepts, judgements, & arguments
-Critical - test for meaning. Meaning is more basic than truth as basic belief is more basic than experience
-Interperative - Interperet experience in light of basic belief
-Contructive - Construct a coherant world & life view
Reason in us:
-Natural - Not cultural or conventional; universal in all thinking beings
-Ontological - reason applies to being, as well as to though. No uncaused events.
-Transcendental - it is authoratative and self-attesting, it cannot be questioned but is what makes questioning possible
-Fundamental - basic to other aspects of human personality (i.e. feelings and will), its use is the source of man’s greatest good. Its neglect is the source of man’s deepest misery.