RE: I am a Catholic, ask me a question!
July 26, 2009 at 2:35 pm
(This post was last modified: July 26, 2009 at 2:45 pm by Jon Paul.)
(July 26, 2009 at 1:41 pm)Purple Rabbit Wrote: Enough words, what is your answer to my question? To be more precisely what occured in reality which you can substantiate with clear evidence that connects the biblical god to omniscience, omnipotence, omnibenevolence, and to the whole of non-contingent actuality?I believe I have already anwered this question sufficiently. Since you posite a need for "clear evidence" and since it is subjective what this means, there is no point in going more into it anyway.
Jon Paul Wrote:OK, let's do this step by step. Your claim is that the physical concepts you are presenting here as facts are verifiable from empirical observation in nature and from natural reason and that they fit your model of pure and impure actualities and potentialities. This implies you have deep knowledge of the concepts of space, time and causality. I therefore need to know exactly what you mean with your answer.No, it does not imply I have deep knowledge of space time and causality. It implies we can observe what happens in reality without having deep knowledge before hand; otherwise it would not be aposterioritic.
(July 26, 2009 at 1:41 pm)Purple Rabbit Wrote: 1. How would you define causality? Are you referring to accidental causality, essential causality or stochastic causality?These distinctions are not of any consequence to my claim as they all involve causality at the root of the universe we observe, even if our information of specific causal processions within the universe in its totality is incomplete. I have already defined causality several places, as well, but causation always means means dependence of one set of parameters, A, on another set, B.
(July 26, 2009 at 1:41 pm)Purple Rabbit Wrote: 2. You say causality implies change. IOW, if there is causality there is change. Do you mean there can be no uncaused change? And is this verified by empirical observation in nature?I don't know what you mean exactly with uncaused change. What I have said is rather that causation is a process which inherently involves change. For me to answer more specifically, you'd have to define "uncaused change". A change with no cause? A change in what?
(July 26, 2009 at 1:41 pm)Purple Rabbit Wrote: 4. You say causality implies division. IOW, if there is causality there is spatial and temporal division. Can there be no division without causality? Does this mean that simultaneous events cannot have a causal relation?No, it doesn't mean that simultaneous events can have no causal relations. What I meant was not just spatiotemporal division, but division at the very root of the thing: cause and effect, dependent-upon and depended-upon.
(July 26, 2009 at 1:41 pm)Purple Rabbit Wrote: 5. When observing the motion of a binary star system, which is the causing event and which is the resulting event?This is a physical question of observing specific celestial objects and the nature of their gravitation which is irrelevant to my claim, as my claim does not deal with such specific physical phenomena of celestial objects in the spatiotemporal realm.
I am rather dealing with the general phenomenon of our realm in itself.
And as I've said, whether we have complete information about the instances of causal processions or not is irrelevant to whether we know that causation happens even if we don't have the data of the totality of the information that can exist about the universe.
In the case of stochastic causality, there is no denial that causation is absolutely happening without any ambiguities, only that our information of specific instances of such is limited. But we can observe and understand the general fact of it, and additionally understand specifities in great detail even though we are not omniscient and don't have all the information of the totality, which is what probabilistic causality is all about when it comes to understanding specific physical phenomena within the universe.
The people who are the most bigoted are the people who have no convictions at all.
-G. K. Chesterton
-G. K. Chesterton