what would it coincide with in that case?

( Moon Girl Technologies horrendous beanbag, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 0:23, archived)

A million other universes that aren't being experienced, purely by virtue of the fact nothing is alive within them to experience it.
I doesn't really solve the problem of deciding how the universe/s came about but I like to think of it as almost an infinite evolution of universes exploding into being and wilting out of existence until eventually one came along that produced life, or this is one instance of one that produced life.
( mike woz ere 7442200 & 7696970 getter, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 0:29, archived)

how can they be meaningfully be said to exist if no-one experiences them?
tree falling down in woods etc. But see Berkeley on this point.
( Moon Girl Technologies horrendous beanbag, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 0:34, archived)

I've always found the whole 'if it can't be experienced then it doesn't exist' thing to be incredibly arrogant.

( BraynDedd Natasha Kaplinsky's labia majora, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 0:37, archived)

Yet that one statement completely undermines MGT's argument for God.

( mike woz ere 7442200 & 7696970 getter, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 0:40, archived)

God experiences God.
He is "always about in the quad," of course.

It's this faith in the independent existence of physical matter that baffles me, when all we really have is sense impressions, which are a sort of thought.
( Moon Girl Technologies horrendous beanbag, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 0:47, archived)

So you don't believe in evolution?

( mike woz ere 7442200 & 7696970 getter, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 0:48, archived)

I don't know how that follows.
At least, no more so than that I don't believe in gravitational force, or electrons. The history of reality is what it is. The question is what reality is.
( Moon Girl Technologies horrendous beanbag, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 0:52, archived)

'independent existence of physical matter '

( mike woz ere 7442200 & 7696970 getter, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 0:54, archived)

Wait...you don't believe in gravity?

( mike woz ere 7442200 & 7696970 getter, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 0:54, archived)

Physical matter is an artifact,
it is our own human interpretation of sense data. So is gravity. The sense data is consistent in certain ways, is all we can say. We label where it comes from as "physical matter" but that is just a metaphysical brick wall.
( Moon Girl Technologies horrendous beanbag, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 1:01, archived)

Is this not sort of turning into the question of 'what is consciousness' rather than a discussion about religion?

( mike woz ere 7442200 & 7696970 getter, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 1:03, archived)

"What is consciousness" is a vital question in religion.
But "self reference" is a central concept. Or to put the problem concisely, "how does reality bootstrap?"
( Moon Girl Technologies horrendous beanbag, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 1:09, archived)

Can we come back to the initial question of whether or not you believe in evolution?

( mike woz ere 7442200 & 7696970 getter, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 1:18, archived)

Believe is too strong a word.
I don't doubt it. But it doesn't have a great deal of impact on my theology. Although I've lately started to come round to the idea that evolution is theologically significant in a positive way.
( Moon Girl Technologies horrendous beanbag, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 1:23, archived)

So you don't believe God created man in his own image and all that?
How old do you believe the Earth to be?
( mike woz ere 7442200 & 7696970 getter, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 1:25, archived)

We are created in God's image,
this gets complex. I fear it may be beyond the remit of the side of the page.
( Moon Girl Technologies horrendous beanbag, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 1:32, archived)

That's why I put the links up the top.
If we are created in God's image, why do we have so many imperfections? Surely God is perfect and therefore so must we be?
( mike woz ere 7442200 & 7696970 getter, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 1:37, archived)

And in what image is every other animal created in?

( mike woz ere 7442200 & 7696970 getter, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 1:39, archived)

I wonder,
at this point, whether by "image" you are thinking "physical appearance". This is not the case. It is the mental image I speak of, such faculties as powers of reason and creativity, which beasts may possess in some small measure but reached increasing fulfillment as evolution progressed.
( Moon Girl Technologies horrendous beanbag, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 1:43, archived)

In that case, why would God have given me the means to reject the idea of him?
That doesn't sound like something an intelligent designer would do.
( mike woz ere 7442200 & 7696970 getter, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 1:46, archived)

An existence doesn't have to be meaningful for it to be an existence.
That doesn't sound like a very religious sentiment.

Also, is God watching over the whole universe or just one planet in it?
( mike woz ere 7442200 & 7696970 getter, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 0:39, archived)

Existence is meaningful,
that is a religious sentiment.

It exists precisely because God "watches over it".
( Moon Girl Technologies horrendous beanbag, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 0:51, archived)

Yet there is no proof for this and quite a lot of proof to the contrary.

( mike woz ere 7442200 & 7696970 getter, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 0:52, archived)

absolutely to the contrary,
the Enlightenment with all its self-declared "rationalism" stated that space and time were absolute, that the laws of nature were entirely deterministic, that phenomena were all explainable in terms of this substance called "matter". All of this science has shown to be wrong. Space and time are relative, matter and energy are equivalent, particles are waves and vice-versa, and that with no medium to propagate them. It took decades for them to finally get over the results of the Michelson-Morley experiments, Atomism was finally proven and destroyed the idea of the continuity of matter, Kurt Godel brought logical positivism to a sorry end. Quantum Mechanics requires that the outcome of quantum events are not decided until someone observes them - and cosmology has declared that the universe is the result of a quantum event. Science can only comment on the utility of all this in terms of the predictability of phenomena. Metaphysically we are left with an enormous mystery, greater than the one that the Enlightenment originally set out to dispel.
( Moon Girl Technologies horrendous beanbag, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 0:58, archived)

Ergo, God exists?
Science is humble about what it knows and doesn't know. It disproves itself often, that is its point. Do you not think it's a bit of a cop-out to just attribute everything we are yet to discover to a divine creator?
( mike woz ere 7442200 & 7696970 getter, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 1:01, archived)

Except post-normal science, which is a more polite term than "self-serving propaganda".

( The Mock TurtIe ™ --- Thinks you are a cunt, on, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 1:06, archived)

I hope science is humble now,
it certainly doesn't seem to have been to some people in the 18th century.

Yes that is a cop-out but that is not where I'm coming from. It's not just what's left unsolved so much as what has been solved and what it points to. Quantum Mechanics et al makes so much more sense when the Universe is conceived in terms of a sort of fiction inside the divine mind than it does in terms of absolutist material substance, this latter assumption having led so many astray and continues to do so.
( Moon Girl Technologies horrendous beanbag, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 1:07, archived)

It was probably due to the repercussions of not believing in God that Science wasn't so sure of itself back then.
Doesn't religion also lead many more people astray in making them ignorant to science? I can't defend people who come to inaccurate scientific conclusions more than to say at least they are trying to come to a rational conclusion rather than substitute their ignorance for belief in a higher power.
( mike woz ere 7442200 & 7696970 getter, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 1:15, archived)

Various religions are guilty of various things,
but on the whole the case stating religion deliberately tries to obstruct science is massively overstated. Some fringe fundamentalists do that, on the whole most people don't take much notice, although I'm disturbed by recent developments in the U.S. as well the recent Muslim uptake of creationism.

I'm going to call you on your narrow definition of "rational conclusion" though. It seems to you it is necessarily only a rational conclusion if God isn't in it. Or "begging the question," to use the phrase properly.
( Moon Girl Technologies horrendous beanbag, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 1:20, archived)

I'm not saying it deliberately tries to obstruct science but it nevertheless obstructs science.
And, to me, religion and God are fairly irrational so any conclusion would never include God, unless someone proved the existence of God.
( mike woz ere 7442200 & 7696970 getter, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 1:24, archived)

It doesn't obstruct science in principle.
Sometimes it morally disapproves of some kinds of experiments, and rightly so in my opinion. That doesn't make it opposed to knowledge of the natural world. On the contrary, quite a lot of good science was done in the Islamic world in the middle ages because of a Qur'anic commandment to "observe nature and learn", they were well ahead of the West in the field of optics, these are the unacknowledged Giants upon whose shoulders Newton stood.

But if you're going to decide that God is irrational from the outset then how am I to proceed? I can only say that it isn't really very scientific, or like the way philosophers tend to carry on. But Godel published a proof of God if you want to look at that.
( Moon Girl Technologies horrendous beanbag, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 1:31, archived)

I'm of the opinion you really can't believe in both science and religion completely.
Eventually, one will clash with the other. I also don't believe you should be able to pick and choose which parts of a religion you believe in. Either you're all in or all out. Disregarding one aspect cheapens a belief in another aspect.

I can only say 'fair play' to anyone religious who helped to observe and learn nature but I don't doubt those conclusions would have been reached at some point, maybe even sooner than that if people weren't immediately attributing the existence of things to a higher power.
( mike woz ere 7442200 & 7696970 getter, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 1:36, archived)