What the God debate is really about

[Neo-Scholastic]

…what we're discussing here are only the metaphysical presumptions both atheists and theists are to some extent forced to make at the very bottom level of reasoning, or as their called, "first principles." What religion does from there is try to blur the lines between our subjective philosophies and objective facts about the world. …they can only argue that this extends beyond their own unsubstantiated…opinion, that is, their subjective experiences…by meeting the reasonable demand of empirical evidence...

[emphasis added)

Whoa, whoa, whoa! Religion is not the only culprit here. Atheist members blur those lines all the time.
Knowledge comes from reason applied to experience. People need first principles in order to gain knowledge. First principles include:

1) There is only one reality.
2) Our senses do not deceive us.
3) Sound reasoning yields truths about reality.
4) Truths about reality are universal; they do not vary between individuals
5) Knowledge requires someone that knows.
6) Something that is cannot also not be.
7) Out of nothing, nothing comes.
8) That which does not begin cannot have an end, i.e. infinite regress.

Counterfactuals of the above refute themselves. Therefore any line of reasoning that concludes by denying one or more of these principles is both absurd and nihilistic. It is an unfortunate fact that, many AF members, all atheists, are so hell-bent (pun intended) on winning debates that they willingly promote incoherent ideas, like eliminative materialism and subjectivism.

[Mudhammam]

I won't deny that secular philosophies can sometimes have more in common with religious belief than rational or scientific models of reality. But religious belief is by nature inherently counterproductive to rational or scientific approaches. By rational I mean logical deductions that are both necessary and corroborated by experimental or experiential evidence. And the assertion that our senses do not or cannot deceive us, unless I misunderstood, is demonstrably false.

[MindForgedManacle]

[emphasis added)

Whoa, whoa, whoa! Religion is not the only culprit here. Atheist members blur those lines all the time.
Knowledge comes from reason applied to experience. People need first principles in order to gain knowledge. First principles include:

1) There is only one reality.
2) Our senses do not deceive us.
3) Sound reasoning yields truths about reality.
4) Truths about reality are universal; they do not vary between individuals
5) Knowledge requires someone that knows.
6) Something that is cannot also not be.
7) Out of nothing, nothing comes.
8) That which does not begin cannot have an end, i.e. infinite regress.

Counterfactuals of the above refute themselves. Therefore any line of reasoning that concludes by denying one or more of these principles is both absurd and nihilistic. It is an unfortunate fact that, many AF members, all atheists, are so hell-bent (pun intended) on winning debates that they willingly promote incoherent ideas, like eliminative materialism and subjectivism.

Aside from the underlined, I pretty much agree here, I think. The underlined are really assumptions that are ultimately unprovable in the way you assert.

---

@MFM – Please correct me if I am wrong, but your position sounds like the idea that an infinite number of monkeys at typewriters will eventually write Macbeth, Borges’s Library of Babel, or similar metaphors based on the idea that an infinite universe will eventually exhaust all possibilities. I get the sense that you believe order can be explained by local patterns, like long runs of ‘heads’, within an infinity series of coin tosses. In response to this, Rayaan might say that you only get a series of head or tails from someone flipping a 2-sided coin.*

*As opposed to a mysterious 1-sided coin.

Must correct you. No, what I'm saying is not like the monkey typing scenario. What I'm saying to Rayaan is that the only reason there are complex things are because of entropy and statistics, as revealed by modern physics, since it is a statistical fact that there is innumerably more ways to be more disordered than to be ordered. The Big Bang was an inflation from a comparitively much more ordered state, and the only reasons very complex things like life or consciousness can exist in our unuverse is because of the high entropy of the universe and its [current] lack of thermal equilibrium.

[Angrboda]

Whoa, whoa, whoa! Religion is not the only culprit here. Atheist members blur those lines all the time.
Knowledge comes from reason applied to experience. People need first principles in order to gain knowledge. First principles include:

1) There is only one reality.

The counter-factual to this, unless stated as a form of the non-contradiction principle, includes the many worlds hypothesis.

2) Our senses do not deceive us.

The counter-factual of this is not self-refuting. Our senses deceive us. Nothing contradictory there.

3) Sound reasoning yields truths about reality.

The counter-factual of this is paradoxical, but not self-refuting. It's a variant of the liar's paradox.

4) Truths about reality are universal; they do not vary between individuals

Arguably acceptable. (What it means for something to be a truth about reality is important; in the many-worlds hypothesis, this may not hold.)

5) Knowledge requires someone that knows.

Heavily dependent on what you mean by knowledge and someone. Is a valid sentence in a hypothetical interpretive system knowledge?

6) Something that is cannot also not be.

This is not self-refuting under dialetheism.

7) Out of nothing, nothing comes.

There are multiple counter-factuals here, none of them self-refuting.

8) That which does not begin cannot have an end, i.e. infinite regress.

Unclear; "that which did not begin has an end." At the least, it's not obviously self-refuting.

Counterfactuals of the above refute themselves.

False.

[MindForgedManacle]

Damn, well Rasetsu made me reconsider a bit. Despite often bringing it up, I'm surprised I didn't note dialetheism in response to Chad's #6. However, I think by #8 he means that if a series has no beginning, there is therefore an infinite number of members in that series, so there is no end since at any particular point you still have an infinity prior to it, hence infinite regress and no end. Of course, there is the infinitist position in response to Agrippa's Trilemma so yeah.

[Rayaan]

Must correct you. No, what I'm saying is not like the monkey typing scenario. What I'm saying to Rayaan is that the only reason there are complex things are because of entropy and statistics, as revealed by modern physics, since it is a statistical fact that there is innumerably more ways to be more disordered than to be ordered. The Big Bang was an inflation from a comparitively much more ordered state, and the only reasons very complex things like life or consciousness can exist in our unuverse is because of the high entropy of the universe and its [current] lack of thermal equilibrium.

So you're saying that it is the high entropy that leads to the emergence of very complex things.

But in my opinion, it sounds highly counter-intuitive that the concept of entropy (i.e. the tendency to go from being orderly to disorderly) is the source of complexity, considering the fact that there is innumerably more ways to be more disordered than to be ordered as you just wrote above. I just don't understand how that makes sense. And secondly, to my knowledge, scientists don't actually know what exactly causes complexity to arise. Complexity is still a mystery which many scientists are investigating and thinking about.

Now the coolest thing is ... well, I don't know if you'll believe what I'm about to tell you, but I have a severe form of "hand tremors" which sometimes cause my fingers to move up and down like crazy: I just sat and I simply put my hand on top of the keyboard, and then my fingers started moving up and down on the keyboard. Somehow the chaotic movement of my fingers produced all the words that you see in this post right now. Amazing, right?

I mean, it's a statistical fact that there is innumerably more ways for this post to have been a meaningless string of letters than to be coherent. But, apparently, it turned out to be the exact opposite. Can you believe that?

^ The improbability of that happening is too ... damn ... high!!!

:S

[MindForgedManacle]

So you're saying that it is the high entropy that leads to the emergence of very complex things.

Yep.

But in my opinion, it sounds highly counter-intuitive that the concept of entropy (i.e. the tendency to go from being orderly to disorderly) is the source of complexity, considering the fact that there is innumerably more ways to be more disordered than to be ordered as you just wrote above. I just don't understand how that makes sense. And secondly, to my knowledge, scientists don't actually know what exactly causes complexity to arise. Complexity is still a mystery which many scientists are investigating and thinking about.

Lots of things are counter-intuitive. The philosophical stance by te physics community that absolute simultaneity is bunk is perhaps more counter-intuitive, yet well-evidenced vis-a-vis Special Relativity and the Michelson-Morley experiment.

But think about it. If I remember correctly, current cosmological models say that that the elements created at the Big Bang were just Hydrogen and Helium, the 2 most atomically simple elements. We didn't get the heavier elements until they were forged in the cores of massive stars and expunged via supernovae. So amongst this entropically increasing system, we get the more complex elements as entropy increases (which itself is how time's "arrow" is determined) and only then. So I think scientists would give the rough answer I have.

Now the coolest thing is ... well, I don't know if you'll believe what I'm about to tell you, but I have a severe form of "hand tremors" which sometimes cause my fingers to move up and down like crazy: I just sat and I simply put my hand on top of the keyboard, and then my fingers started moving up and down on the keyboard. Somehow the chaotic movement of my fingers produced all the words that you see in this post right now. Amazing, right?

Sure I guess. :p

I mean, it's a statistical fact that there is innumerably more ways for this post to have been a meaningless string of letters than to be coherent. But, apparently, it turned out to be the exact opposite. Can you believe that?

^ The improbability of that happening is too ... damn ... high!!!

:S

Because living beings, given the capability of intentionality, can lower the entropy of some particular area, while still increasing the total entropy overall. And in fact, physics defines information as a decrease in the entropy of a particular system (or thereabouts), which creating messages like you did does.

[Mudhammam]

My original question from another angle: Does the fact that our observable Universe apparently looks something like this...

...have anything to do with our models of reality emerging from a thought process that physically and mechanistically resembles this? (This, of course, being a model as well).

Or is it vice versa?

[Rayaan]

Lots of things are counter-intuitive. The philosophical stance by te physics community that absolute simultaneity is bunk is perhaps more counter-intuitive, yet well-evidenced vis-a-vis Special Relativity and the Michelson-Morley experiment.

But the example you gave has been demonstrated/proven to be true, whereas your assertion that complexity is a result of increasing entropy is just a hypothesis. And if it is counter-intuitive then it means that it does not have a reasonable explanation as to how exactly that happens.

But think about it. If I remember correctly, current cosmological models say that that the elements created at the Big Bang were just Hydrogen and Helium, the 2 most atomically simple elements. We didn't get the heavier elements until they were forged in the cores of massive stars and expunged via supernovae. So amongst this entropically increasing system, we get the more complex elements as entropy increases (which itself is how time's "arrow" is determined) and only then. So I think scientists would give the rough answer I have.

Then do you know of any citations or sources which actually indicate that scientists give roughly the same answer as you did? Or did you just think that?

Because living beings, given the capability of intentionality, can lower the entropy of some particular area, while still increasing the total entropy overall. And in fact, physics defines information as a decrease in the entropy of a particular system (or thereabouts), which creating messages like you did does.

So now you're saying that the lowering of entropy (which means greater order) is possible because of the existence of intentionality. Intentionality creates a decrease of entropy, right?

I don't disagree with that ... but now, given what you said above, wouldn't the same idea apply to things like the earth, the human body, animals, plants, and all the other low-entropy/orderly systems in the universe? Don't all of these things require intentionality as well in order to be in a state of low entropy, even though the overall entropy may increase?

If you think that a decrease of entropy in some particular area suggest the capability of intention, then why isn't the same true for all low entropy systems in the universe?

[Neo-Scholastic]

Should there be a thread just for axioms?

I knew my list of first principles would arouse the contrarian impulses of some members, even though each item seems obvious and uncontroversial to me. For the sake of clarity I have added the needed qualifications and a brief summary of what makes each point true:

There is only one reality.

Only two alternatives present themselves: a) There is no reality OR b) There is more than one reality. Anyone can see that (a) is absurd. Someone might suggest that if people live in a Matrix or as brains in vats, then nothing is real. But all such scenarios only mean that people’s knowledge of reality is limited. If (b), then the sum of the various alternative realities would be in fact the whole reality. The point holds apart from any specific cosmology. For example, if the multiverse theory is correct then the total of all multiverses would be included within one reality. On the other hand if there were both a physical and non-physical world, the two together would also constitute one reality.

Our senses do not deceive us.

Technically, this one is not self-evident; however, further reflection reveals that it must be the case for there to be knowledge. Since all knowledge comes from reason applied to experience, it follows that no knowledge could be gained if sense data did not correspond with reality. Illusions happen when people misinterpret what their senses tell them. For example, everyone knows a straight stick looks bent when placed halfway into water. Someone could interpret this sense data to mean that the stick is actually bent. The sense data is not wrong; the viewer is merely mistaken about what he thinks he sees. By adding his store of sense data he can come to know about light refraction. If sense data was deceptive then he could not compare former experiences with current and future ones to distinguish between how things appear and how they actually are. Illusions also tell us not only about what we see, but how our brains interpret what we see. A correct interpretation of sense data, one that accounts for how things appear AND the viewer to which things appear gives us knowledge about both.

Knowledge, justified belief (whether true or not), requires someone who knows [i.e. an intellect].

Suppose the opposite were true, that knowledge does not require someone who knows. That notion would mean that beliefs could exist outside the mind, which is clearly false.

Sound reasoning yields knowledge. (slight modification from how earlier presented)

The counterfactual to this is: sound reasoning does not yield knowledge. If that were the case then no one could in any way justify their beliefs and there would be little point trying to understand anything at all. If reason was not available to us then we would have no means by which to interpret sense data.

Facts cannot be true and false at the same time.(modified from earlier)

The point as written above stands as self-evident. Facts refer to how reality actually is. This excludes self-referential propositions like, “This sentence is false.”

Facts are universal and do not vary between individuals.

Knowledge of fact is imperfect. Opinions about what is or is not true can indeed vary, but without facts against which to compare, the beliefs could not be justified and no knowledge would be possible.

Sorry, but I didn’t have time to get to the most contested first principles on my list: “Out of nothing, nothing comes” and “That which does not begin cannot have an end, i.e. infinite regress”.