I am an orthodox Christian, ask me a question!

[Jon Paul]

You don't shy away from dishonest methods to sustain your special plea. First you give me the link to the David Quinn site and then you edit your post and remove the link. It seems you are not quite sure about who you should quote.

I haven't changed anything, the link is still there... here is the exact quote in your own post:
(quote='Jon Paul') (url=http://members.optushome.com.au/davidquinn000/Quality%20Posts/Quantum01.htm)Here(/url) are some statements of scientists concerning whether quantum mechanics is "in essence" acausal.

That depends on your definition. Yours was: "dependence of one set of parameters, A, on another set, B" which is very vague again. With this definition one can claim that the weight of a grain of sand on the beach causes the earth to rotate around the sun since the grain adds to the mass of the earth. The rotation parameters of the earth around the sun thus is dependent on the mass of the grain of sand. You can fit the vacuum cleaner in too: my vacuum cleaner causes the earth to rotate around the sun. I can even fit my grandma in, no matter that she is dead. So you have showed that you can define causality wide enough to contain anything you like. You show no interest in the empirical characteristics of it as science would test its models. You are simply special pleading again.

No. I have provided an academic source for this definition.

And that's the trouble over and over again with your aguments. You claim to be interested in the fundamental characteristics of nature and that your falsifiable model is based on empirical observation, but you show no specific interest in striking empirical results that counter your claim that everything is caused.

I have never claimed that 'everything is caused'. And you have given nothing which counters my claims.

[quote='Jon Paul'][quote='Purple Rabbit' pid='24103' dateline='1248643957']
The other options compromise other aspects of your model. At the moment as a result of the problem of interpretation of empirical results from QM competing interpretations of QM are around that indeed are at the moment are empirically undistinguishable. That's why I mentioned the Bohn interpretation of QM. It allows backward time travel. Any idea what the implications are for causality and your notion of time (time ~ "fundamentally a part of causality/impure actuality, just like space")? I am not asserting that science has definitely nailed these fundamentals but only that it is too easy to claim that empirical evidence leads to your model with its ancient notions on time, causality, space and identity. QM shows that we have to be careful with such claims.

QM still doesn't do anything to compromise that which the fundamentals of my argument relies on.

Yes it depends on definition. If you define a tree as a light bulb you'll find that forests grow in houses. That's why I asked your definition of causality to begin with. Also you have shown that you can choose a definition of causality to fit your grandma in. That does not mean that you are touching upon a fundamental characteristic of nature. Once again, you are not interested in empirical phernomena from which you can learn something about the meaning of causality, you are interested in defining the term wide enough to fit your claim. This is special pleading.

Again, it's no special pleading. I provided an academic source for my definition of causality. Cause simply means that which something else depends upon, and hence the definition of causality as depence of one set of things, A, on another set of things, B.

Uranium changes spontaneously into lead through decay. There are statistical laws that describe the phenomenon. But you cannot predict for an individual atom its decay.

You cannot predict it, no. That is called indeterminacy, not acausality. You are confusing determinacy and causality, the very thing you accused me of.

Some decay sooner, some decay later. No one knows why they do what they do. So empirical evidence to sustain the claim that this phenomenon is causal is absent.

Radioactive decay has a clear cause - the potential barrier transparency.

Indeed the pattern of decay for a group of atoms follows the characteristcs of a random process. There is evidence for randomness, there is absence of evidence for the claim that these events are caused. Yet you here claim again from ignorance that they are caused. This is special pleading to support your model which is so crude that not a single prediction on a natural phenomenon or a single explanation of such a phenomenon can be made.

It is caused, as I've just said. That doesn't mean we have enough observational and predictive capabillity to predict single events. Just like you can't predict what a human is going to do next, or where a bird just came from before it sat on the roof of your house.

It was Kant who proposed that causality may be nothing more than a notion of the human mind that does not exist in reality.

Indeed, you are basing your notion of acausality on Kantianism.

The scientific consensus at the moment is that some events are uncaused. Tunneling of particles through a barrier is one. Another uncaused phenomenon is the random creation of virtual particles from the vacuum (vacuum fluctuations). Virtual particle pairs are predicted to have a calculable effect upon the energy levels of atoms. The effect expected is minute - only a change of one part in a billion, but it has been confirmed by experimenters. In 1953 Willis Lamb measured this excited energy state for a hydrogen atom. No doubt remains that virtual particles are really there.

There is something else which the phenomena and particles depend upon for whatever action they are in. The state at time t and the underlying reality cause the state at time t+1. Otherwise, it would be impossible to make even probablistic predictions involving multiple events.

Your model has no predictive or explanatory power whatsoever

I would not say my model should make predictions; perhaps it should make postdictions. But in any case, that is irrelevant to whether it's logically sound or not. It makes no difference if a hypothesis makes a prediction or not. For instance, the hypothesis that "I just coughed" may be true, but that doesn't mean it makes any predictions.