There is no starting point.
Further, how do you get from ‘mystery’ to ‘god’?
That’s not the only option.
No, the current eye is much simpler. Optically, a second inline lens would be required to reorient the image upright, which would be very mechanically complex. Instead, the brain processes the data electrochemically to perceptually orient the image in proper context. You can wear image-flipping goggles to see the world inverted, and your brain will quickly readapt to process the image upright again.
Very impressive, and any good designer knows to code for revisable patchable software that can run independently of hardware configuration 
Why not just say that the part of the eye which light from the top of an image hits is the “Sense light from the top of an image” part of the eye, regardless of whether it’s actually physically located on the top of the eye? Why say the eye is processing information upside down and the brain is actively flipping it at all? If I was designed so that my left ear processed sound from the right and my right ear processed sound from the left, somehow, I wouldn’t say I was hearing sounds backwards and my brain was doing the work of correcting this first-stage backwards hearing; I’d just say my left sound sensor happened to be located in my right ear, and so on.
Though the fact that the brain will apparently re-orient itself if you wear image flipping goggles is impressive…
I disagree - I think that infinitely regressed forward-moving timelines are logically impossible, as they make reasonable questions like “How many causes have you had” have no answer. Remember, “infinity” is not a number.
Of course, all the same problems apply to any entity that has “lived forever”, only moreso - ask such an entity how many days they remember, and see what happens.
I don’t think that works. If the idea is to avoid illogicality, by presenting what would be an illogical act in an arena where logic doesn’t apply the same rules, then equally you can’t expect a cause to have an effect there. It makes no sense to talk about something being a mover, let alone an unmoved mover, in a plane where logic doesn’t hold.
I think you’re trying to get around the rules of a system by bringing in an outside source - that’s fine, but you can’t then apply those same rules to that outside source. The whole point of bringing it in is that the rules don’t apply in the same way.
By saying that the mover is “outside” of time, you just mean that it’s outside of our time, right? It must be experiencing its own time, becuase otherwise it would be incapable of action, because action is just change over time.
And since the diety has its own time, I don’t see what makes him any different from anything else - he exists in time, he has a location. If he gets to be uncaused, why can’t other things?
I do not see how the first part of your statement follows from the second. “How many causes have you had?” may very well be a nonsense question with no meaningful answer.
This, to me, serves as evidence against the “intelligent design” theory. This thing is clearly designed, but the designer is obviously an idiot.
Okay, remember that “long mess of a thread” that Indistinguishable mentioned a while back? I was the lone holdout on the side of reason that made it as long as it was. (I respectfully submit that I was not the lone contributor to its messiness.) Everything I might say on this subject is in there - repeated endlessly.
The short version is, I think that instantiated infinities are impossible, as in while there may be infinite integers in theory, you can’t actually count them all, or have lived through that many days, or have that many causes in your history. That is, “infinity” is not actually a number - when you see it written as one it’s basically a shorthand for limit notation.
The fact that reasonable questions suddenly start to ‘break’ when you start to treat infinity as a number is mathematics’ and logic’s subtle way of telling you you’re doing something wrong.
I will agree with that. However, although I still disagree with your position and agree with everything I said in that thread and which those such as Diogenes are saying in this thread, I will now return to bowing out of the thread since I have no interest in continuing vainly to attempt to win the argument. (Well, bowing out save for that business about retinas…)
It is. I’ve already explained why. If the present were the end point of an infinite causal chain, the present would never be reached. Go back a billion years. How long prior to that point, how much time would have to have passed to reach that point a billion years ago? Same answer, an infinite amount. Forever–you would never reach it. It is a paradox, an unresolvable syllogism, an impossibility. Unless you can explain how to overcome this obstacle, the infinite regression is impossible. Stating one more time, “yes, it is possible” isn’t a counter argument.
How do those concepts make possible an infinite causal regression in our universe?
That’s what it means in our universe. I don’t know what it means to an entity unconstrained by time or space.
Not following you. The entity is capable of triggering movement, but outside the constraints of entities that require movement; those are this entity’s “rules.” And it exists with that nature (if the syllogism is logical, and it seems to be) because it has to out of necessity–such an entity must exist or the moved movers in our universe are unexplainable.
The calculus resolves Zeno’s paradox. An infinite series can indeed have a finite sum.
Yes, mathematically, in the same way that a line segment has an infinite number of points. And yet the line segment is not infinitely long.
Exactly. So an infinite number of causes can occur in a finite amount of time. And here we are!
Or any universe, for that matter. The little matter of the big bang makes the question rather moot regarding the current universe - it has a beginning of time and (at least one) first cause, period.
That’s like saying you don’t know what swimming would be like on dry land.
Let’s be clear here - all concepts of change require time. If there is a change, you can tell it happened because you can compare and contrast the situations ‘before’ and ‘after’ the change occured - you can’t do this without time. Absent time everything is completely static, motionless, and inert, like a single frame of a paused motion picture.
I’d say that an entity that is not experiencing a unidirectional time flow like ours would be incapable of so much as thinking due to the limitations of his environment - much less anything complicated like creating other universes. Time is necessary.
Now, this doesn’t mean that he couldn’t exist outside of our time, in a manner akin to the way we exist outside of the timeline of that movie. We can fastforward, rewind, or skip around at will; we could print out each frame and wallpaper our house with them, effectively viewing all the different points of time simultaneously. But that doesn’t absolve one of needing their own timeline to do actions in.
So what started that infinite chain of causes, then? Presumably it’s on camera - what pushed the first domino?
(Unlike Indistinguishable, I’m perfectly willing to dive into this again. Despite the irrevocable distraction this might cause to the discussion about retinas.)
Damn you, stop hijacking the thread!