Keeping Faith whilst accepting rational evidence.

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Faith is the ability to believe without needing proof. It is perhaps the chief "advantage" of organic thought processes.

If we could only believe in what could be proven, we couldn't really accomplish anything. Even evolution is not 100% scientific fact, and science is prone to "reinvent" itself once it finds something it assumes is true actually is not.

A machine/computer couldn't and likely wouldn't do something if it figured the probability against success was too high. People can see impossible odds and CHOOSE to do it anyway...often with success. They don't let reason or logic dictate what's possible. They believe it is possible and find a way to make it happen...in spite of the odds.

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We can't prove God does not exist. Supposedly, God will not allow people to have scientific proof of His existence (the reasons for which I will save for another discussion). Hence, lack of proof does not = no God. Indeed, science itself says it's pretty much impossible to prove something DOES NOT exist because failing to find proof doesn't mean it's not out there waiting to be found.

Faith is also a choice. Any time you are asked to believe something that can not establish itself as 100% fact, you are making a choice to exercise faith. Hence, everyone has faith. Science rests on many "rules" and "laws" that we can't prove are 100% fact. They only hold up in so far as we can test them. If a key "law" of science proved to be invalid under certain circumstances, it would upend everything we know about the laws of nature once we enter those circumstances.

Again the topic I was trying to explore is a person holding onto faith whist accepting the evidence that pretty much proves the belief wrong or at least shows the causation of the belief to be firmly man made. In the example I have been citing; the trinity, to the best of my theological knowledge, no-one ever claimed a message from god telling them about the trinity. This is quantifiable historical knowledge, the decision to invent the Trinity is recorded, Christians who delve into the history surrounding this concept can see quite clearly how it was arrived at, can see clearly that it is demonstrably wholly a man made concept.

This is not the same for a belief in God where, however implausible, people claim to have had contact with this entity and claim to be the conduit for messages from Him to Humanity, This belief, although neurological understandings can give a plausible account of these interactions eg hallucination, cannot be disproven by science or at least, not yet.

We know of extreme conditions in the universe where common sense does not apply in any way. Yet you want to apply it to the most extreme circumstance that we know of? And then invoke special pleading for your sky daddy? Look, have faith all day long. Worship three purple unicorns if you like. But try to understand the magnitude of the problem. It's not some "gee whiz, I reckon" kind of issue and it likely never will be.



No christian has ever disproven Allah or Azura Mazda, that's true. They've failed to disprove a thousand gods. Yet they still don't believe in them. They make an exception for one because of their geographical proximity to a church that promotes that one. That's about as insightful as an ant following a chemical trail.

Best thing I've read today.

When I was doing my physics degree 30 years ago, one of the profs drew a graph on the whiteboard of velocities against distances. It had a logarithmic scale and went from 0 m/s to the speed of light and the plank distance to the size of the universe. Human common sense only applied to a tiny area on the chart, yet humans tend to extrapolate their common sense to distances and velocities well outside of their daily experience and somehow expect common sense to still hold, when in reality if fails and fails very badly. The only way to describe these areas outside human common sense is by using mathematics.

What does that mean? The wager is about believing vs not believing. If you exclude disbelief in the first place, there?s no argument.



I wasn?t talking about what you do, but about how the argument works.



A model of what?



An almighty God can do anything He wants, whether it makes sense to you or not.



Just because He punishes believing humans, He doesn?t need to disbelieve Himself. He could simply not like people who believe things without evidence, and He?d be well aware He?s giving us none about His own existence. As a Christian, I suppose you?re familiar with the idea of God having motives inscrutable to mere mortals?a useful device to stifle critical thinking about the matter, but it can also be used to support belief in a God who acts in direct opposition to the way Christianity says He does.



Not any more than the inability of the Christian God to disbelieve in Himself. The concept of omnipotence isn?t all that watertight. Can God create a boulder so big He can?t lift it Himself?



The argument was about believing there is a God vs not believing so. Pascal?s wager works if you only consider the possibilities that a) there is a God and He rewards belief in His existence (belief in other qualities of His is beside the point), and b) there is no God. If you consider the possibility that there is a God but He punishes belief in the existence of a God (again, regardless of what you think that God is like), which there is no more reason to exclude than the other two, the wager argument is no longer valid.

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/_/dict ... e+behavior

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http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faith

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http:// http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/God

My point wasn't a common-sense argument, anyway. It took someone explaining the concept of a Uncaused Cause v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y for me to understand exactly what that meant. A first cause can logically be infinite and itself uncaused. I think we all agree that everything we know that ever began to exist had a cause. We all agree that the universe began to exist. Science may not be able to assess what the first cause might have been or speculate about its nature. But it can provide evidence that leads us to conclude that everything that begins to exist is caused by something. It would take a smarter person than me to represent that mathematically, but I figure someone out there could do it.

I don't mean to overstep, but I'd venture a guess that ex nihilo existence probably could be proven mathematically--everything that is came from a causal chain all the way back to the Big Bang, itself having been caused by some, I dunno, singularity(?), before which only energy existed. Even that energy would require a cause to come into being. We know energy cannot be created nor destroyed, so if energy itself is the penultimate end to the causal chain, then what cause preexisted energy? Nothing we're yet aware of. If, indeed, there really was nothing preexisting energy, then you have?well?nothing. IF that's the case, ex nihilo is, I suppose, supported mathematically.

I'm not the physics expert, so I admit I'm just flailing around in the dark on this one, i.e. exactly how it all works. All I know is it isn't logically necessary for a primary Cause to itself have a cause nor for it to be a part of the physical universe itself.

Without GOD, then one must believe in randomness as the cause. However, science shows us how fantastically ordered the universe is, so it would seem to be the less likely alternative ? One would have to believe randomness created order.

I suppose you could invoke a QM paradigm that says everything is probabilistic if that is what you believe, then such a view would seem more consistent. I am in agreement with Einstein that the "old one" does not "throw dice".

Last edited by LoveNotHate on 27 Jul 2014, 2:58 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Randomness does create order?you just have to repeat the experiment enough times.

But I?d still like to know what you all mean by cause, and why you are supposed to believe in one.

"Emergence" is a relatively new area of science that shows us that from randomness and chaos, extremely organised complex systems can and do emerge. Examples include relatively simple organization such as snowflakes and various other physical phenomenon right up to living organisms.

Simple. Everything in the physical universe that ever began to exist was caused by something. When mommies and daddies love each other very, very much...and the stork comes and brings the baby. And before that the stork brought mommies and daddies to THEIR mommies and daddies, and so on (I'm assuming all the grownups here know how this works).

At some point, there weren't even mommies and daddies. Supposedly some proteins bounced into each other and ended up inside soap bubbles, probably on a chunk of rock flying through space that had the good fortune of crashing into Earth at exactly the right time in Earth's history to kickstart abiogenesis. Waaaaaaay before that the chunk of rock was stardust, and before that it was part of a large star that fused together some particles or atoms that made the building blocks of amino acids and lipids. And waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay before that it was all a dense mass of energy just before it exploded in the Big Bang. And before that there was...well, as far as we're concerned there is no "before."

At a certain point in the future, all the stars are going to burn out because their fuel is finite. If the universe was infinite, we wouldn't be here...our sun would have burned out a long time ago. It is easy to show evidence that our universe at some point began exist.

Because we can also observe things beginning to exist, we can demonstrate that things that begin to exist are caused by something else. Since the universe is not infinite but rather has a beginning, it's theoretically possible to follow a causal chain back to a beginning point. Because ex nihilo existence is physically impossible, it is necessary for a First Cause or a Prime Mover to initiate that causal chain. Science doesn't draw conclusions on what that first cause was or its nature. Christians call it God, but we presently do not have an empirical resolution for it. Concluding that there is a First Cause, though, is reasonable based on available evidence.

Like I said, I'm not an expert on physics and this is all a crude oversimplification. My apologies to Tallyman for making an utter mess of it. The main point is that belief predicated on a first cause isn't an unreasonable conclusion.

Unless "emergence" is part of the physical universe by design!

Repeating the experiment enough times doesn't work. That would remove the random element. You would be imposing a purpose on experimental conditions and the experiment would be biased to produce results by default.

That is the point, we don't all agree on this, like I said earlier, there is work being done that suggests the universe has existed infinitely Rainbow Gravity

Again you are applying common sense to concepts that you think must be self evident when they are not. When you get into the area of particle physics the researchers have discovered that "self evident" simply does not apply.

You are making the same incorrect assumptions about the Universe as early humans made in attributing natural events to Gods. Had you tried to explain to them about Climatology or Geology they would have looked at you dumbfounded and said 'no the hot red stuff coming from the ground and the massive storm were the result of not praying to the correct God'.

Some areas of physics once thought bizzarre are becoming so pervasive that we are now very comfortable with them, for example Gravity or more recently Light Years, Other concepts such as the absence of absolute time or absolute space (it was once 'self evident' that the opposite was true) are becoming increasing understood by the general public, as is electromagnetism. As our knowledge grows our idea of what is "common sense" expands. It is wrong to extend common sense to things we do not yet understand.

Emergence has nothing to do with luck or repeating something a number of times. In a nutshell, emergence is the way more complex behaviours or properties start to appear from chaos. There is nothing magical about it nor anything "by design" about it. A simple example of a type of emergence is the formation of crystals from a solution containing a solution of a particular chemical as the (chaotic) mixture cools. The shape of the crystals is determined by electrostatic attraction and repulsion between the different parts of the molecules - order emerges naturally from chaos.

Another example of an emergent property is the sense of consciousness. This is a much more complex emergent property arising from the way neurons fire in a sort of chorus. We have a lot further to go yet though to fully understand it.

Emergence is a really fascinating field and touches every aspect of the physical world (and universe). Everything from weather systems to the formation of planets and stars to life itself.

I'd meant to respond to the whole bit about "repeating the experiment." I wasn't trying to link the two together. That was my mistake in not being very clear.