RE: I was interviewed by a world religions class student
October 12, 2015 at 10:40 pm
(This post was last modified: October 12, 2015 at 11:15 pm by The Grand Nudger.)
If some first, un-caused cause were so easy to establish, why haven't we seen any of that? Hell, you could have handled that in your post......right? In the meantime........
Suppose I could provide you with a valid statement that implied a future event could be the cause of a past event, would you accept this as likely to be true? What if I could -also- show the statement to be sound, particularly in the light of the "first cause" claims inability to do so? That would make it an even more compelling argument than the first cause argument, yes? You would have better reason to believe that the arrow of time (and causality) flowed symmetrically than you would have reason to believe in asymmetric time (and with it goes the very -notion- of a "first cause"). Correct? But.......would you?
There's a problem with the system (many, actually, the above is another), which is infinite regress. But the system is -not- the thing it describes, the seeming behavior of the universe. Infinite regress makes it difficult to generate an answer, but it doesn't have -anything- to do with what the correct answer is or might be..perhaps it all does regress infinitely, but it would be -impossible- for our system to work with that, to produce the goods. A problem of the system is not a problem of the universe. The universe can regress infinitely, classical logic cannot. It's a mistake to confuse one for the other.
Suppose I could provide you with a valid statement that implied a future event could be the cause of a past event, would you accept this as likely to be true? What if I could -also- show the statement to be sound, particularly in the light of the "first cause" claims inability to do so? That would make it an even more compelling argument than the first cause argument, yes? You would have better reason to believe that the arrow of time (and causality) flowed symmetrically than you would have reason to believe in asymmetric time (and with it goes the very -notion- of a "first cause"). Correct? But.......would you?
There's a problem with the system (many, actually, the above is another), which is infinite regress. But the system is -not- the thing it describes, the seeming behavior of the universe. Infinite regress makes it difficult to generate an answer, but it doesn't have -anything- to do with what the correct answer is or might be..perhaps it all does regress infinitely, but it would be -impossible- for our system to work with that, to produce the goods. A problem of the system is not a problem of the universe. The universe can regress infinitely, classical logic cannot. It's a mistake to confuse one for the other.
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