Argument from Absoluteness

[bennyboy]

Right. If, from God's point of view, time is like an extra physical dimension, along which objects are oriented, then God is timeless and absolute, and absolutely unable to change or to judge anything.

The Christian mess is in trying to reconcile an unchanging God with the capacity to have emotions and to take actions.

Well, the problem is that Christian apologists will rarely, if ever, accept this view of time which is called th B-theory. Accepting the B-theory (which is supported by the usual interpretation of Relativity) entails that there is no priviledged frame of reference. Now, apologists can't have that, because among other things it means that the universe can't have, even in principle, begun its existence, because on this view there is no "temporal-becoming", to use the retarded jargon.

I think you'd need another dimension, call it "meta-space-time" or whatever, in which an entire universe, including its 4-dimensional framework, could be created, positioned, etc. But then God would just be whoever made THAT framework, and it's either philosophical theosophical nonsense or a more direct "Whoah, dude, circles in circles in circles. Pass that here!"

[max-greece]

Kind of on the spot, and sort of inspired by another argument I made a little while back, namely this one:

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1) God is the omnipotent, omniscient paradigm of moral goodness itself. [From typical apologist response to the Euthyphro Dilemma]


2) The existence of moral evil in the world is the necessary result for God to actualize the best of all possible worlds: a world with creatures possessing free will in the libertarian sense and thus the only possible world with moral goodness. [From the Free Will Defense]

3) Either #1 is true or #2 is true.


4) If #1 is true, then the existence of moral evil in the world cannot be explained by an appeal to the intent to actualize the only possible world with moral good (#2), because the thing which can properly be called 'morally good' is God himself. [Necessary consequence of the Platonic answer to the Euthyphro Dilemma]


5) If #2 is true, then God cannot properly be called the paradigm of moral goodness because then true moral goodness is then possible by agents whom are not God.


C) Therefore, if God exists either #4 is true or #5 is true, but both cannot be.

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So basically, the inspired argument goes something like this:

P1) To be absolute is to not exist in relation to anything else.

P2) If God exists, he exists in relation to his creation. [Both in terms of the properties he possesses (i.e his omnipotence vs. our impotence) and in terms of his wanting us to have a personal relationship with him]

C) Therefore, if God exists he cannot be absolute.

Might be a crap argument, but it came to mind as vaguely interesting.

This rather reminds me of a reverse ontological argument I posted on these forums a few months back.

Just to re-cap:

The original Ontological Argument:

Imagine the perfect entity, AKA God. The thing that would make that entity more perfect is if it existed. Therefore God exits.

My reverse (slightly improved from last time):

From observation we can deduce that nothing that exists is perfect. God is perfect. Therefore God doesn't exist.

As was pointed out in the original thread its not a particularly good argument. It is, however, IMHO a better argument than the original, if for nothing else, in that it does not contain the word imagine in a proof.

I have never seen any other proof that uses "imagine". Explanations of proofs may, but not the proofs themselves.

[Anomalocaris]

Well, the problem is that Christian apologists will rarely, if ever, accept this view of time which is called th B-theory. Accepting the B-theory (which is supported by the usual interpretation of Relativity) entails that there is no priviledged frame of reference. Now, apologists can't have that, because among other things it means that the universe can't have, even in principle, begun its existence, because on this view there is no "temporal-becoming", to use the retarded jargon.

I think you'd need another dimension, call it "meta-space-time" or whatever, in which an entire universe, including its 4-dimensional framework, could be created, positioned, etc. But then God would just be whoever made THAT framework, and it's either philosophical theosophical nonsense or a more direct "Whoah, dude, circles in circles in circles. Pass that here!"

The concept that there could be multiple orthagonal dimensions of time is not new to physics. But seem to have received little development or support.

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Right. If, from God's point of view, time is like an extra physical dimension, along which objects are oriented, then God is timeless and absolute, and absolutely unable to change or to judge anything.

The Christian mess is in trying to reconcile an unchanging God with the capacity to have emotions and to take actions.

Well, an easy retort would say god might be static in a realm permanently and fundamentally inaccessible to us. But he is fully dynamic in every sense we can access. Is god that is not all mighty, but whose power in fact extends beyond all we can ever think to test, really the total equivalent of all mightiness within the context of our full realm of experience, past, now, or ever?

[Angrboda]

@max-greece:

The problem with your argument is that one of the premises rests on an inductive inference. A deductive proof argument cannot rest on an inductive inference because it makes the deduction invalid because inductive inferences do not have a 'necessary' truth value. It's like oil and water, you can't mix the two, inductive and deductive inferences. It could be reformatted to be a valid deductive argument, but doing so would require restating the conclusion to be that God probably does not exist, with the probability governed by the inductive inference. Unfortunately, there's no deterministic way to set those probabilities, and so the conclusion becomes highly controversial, and justifiably so.

[max-greece]

@max-greece:

The problem with your argument is that one of the premises rests on an inductive inference. A deductive proof argument cannot rest on an inductive inference because it makes the deduction invalid because inductive inferences do not have a 'necessary' truth value. It's like oil and water, you can't mix the two, inductive and deductive inferences. It could be reformatted to be a valid deductive argument, but doing so would require restating the conclusion to be that God probably does not exist, with the probability governed by the inductive inference. Unfortunately, there's no deterministic way to set those probabilities, and so the conclusion becomes highly controversial, and justifiably so.

You are so far beyond my understanding of the nature of philosophical arguments that I have to accept that as is, without actually understanding it fully.

Seemed sound logically to me is all I can say in defence.

Thanks.

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Actually, as an afterthought, if the last line read "So we can presume God does not exist," would that fix the problem?

It seems to me that the argument now strongly resembles the basis for the majority of scientific enquiry.

[Angrboda]

@max-greece:

The problem with your argument is that one of the premises rests on an inductive inference. A deductive proof argument cannot rest on an inductive inference because it makes the deduction invalid because inductive inferences do not have a 'necessary' truth value. It's like oil and water, you can't mix the two, inductive and deductive inferences. It could be reformatted to be a valid deductive argument, but doing so would require restating the conclusion to be that God probably does not exist, with the probability governed by the inductive inference. Unfortunately, there's no deterministic way to set those probabilities, and so the conclusion becomes highly controversial, and justifiably so.

You are so far beyond my understanding of the nature of philosophical arguments that I have to accept that as is, without actually understanding it fully.

Seemed sound logically to me is all I can say in defence.

Thanks.

To try to bring it into your ken or knowing, it faces the infamous black swan problem. The black swan problem is so named because prior to Europeans coming to knowledge of the existence of black swans (if I remember rightly), the syllogism that "all swans seen so far are white" therefore "all swans are white" was a commonplace idiom. Unfortunately for the idiom, black swans do exist, and the generalization that all swans are white simply did not hold. Now if you put yourself in the shoes of a logician, examining a deductive argument from before the existence of black swans was acknowledged, you might encounter this assertion about white swans, and note that it seems true enough from that perspective, but ultimately the truth of whether all swans are white or not depends only on whether all swans are in fact white, not on what the composition of the swans you've seen is, nor how many swans you've seen, nor how confident you are that you've seen enough white swans to conclude that they are all white. All that the person having seen a bunch of white swans can say is that, a) so far I haven't seen any non-white swans, and b) the probability of a non-white swan existing is low (though exactly how low, is, very difficult to determine without complete knowledge of just how many white and non-white swans there in fact are).

So, translating this to your argument, you're stating that you've never seen any perfect things in the world (ie. non-white swans), therefore, there are no perfect things in the world (ie. non-white swans). That assertion is incorrect, as rigorously speaking, all you can conclude is that the probability of there being a perfect thing in the world (a non-white swan), given the number of not perfect things seen, is such and so a probability. From that point, since one of your premises results in an assertion which is only probabilistically true, any conclusion cobbled together from that premise and any others together cannot rise above that degree of certitude; that essentially puts a brake on how strong your conclusion of the whole can be.

[max-greece]

Right - got it now.

Great explanation BTW.

Thanks again.