Jay !!

[Robbo]

Reb, I genuinely believe discourse such as this provides the opportunity for us all to learn, it really doesn't matter who's right and who's wrong, what matters is .. you put your thoughts down on paper [as it were] and allow the post to be picked apart and rebutted where necessary .... as long as you stick to the points made, everybody's a winner.
We had a guy called nick brockdorrf on here a few years back and whilst an intelligent guy he lacked humility and with that lack came an intransigence that was defined by the limit of his intellect.

When he realised he had been rebutted into a corner with nowhere else to go, he used to come back at you and never mention the points you raised but would author a post that circumvented the real points whilst introducing other points to aid with his deflection .... he was hard going because it was like debating with a parsnip and in the end he had to go

Luckily, we still have some real smart cookies on our site, and brockdorfiaism hasn't returned to reinfect us.

 

[Duncan Berry]

Robbo mate the guy your reffering to i think was me , and we came to the conclusion that in that circumstance then god could undo do it but it would be pointless as he would know he had so would become a moot point.

 

[Buddha 3]

Reb, I genuinely believe discourse such as this provides the opportunity for us all to learn, it really doesn't matter who's right and who's wrong, what matters is .. you put your thoughts down on paper [as it were] and allow the post to be picked apart and rebutted where necessary .... as long as you stick to the points made, everybody's a winner.
We had a guy called nick brockdorrf on here a few years back and whilst an intelligent guy he lacked humility and with that lack came an intransigence that was defined by the limit of his intellect.

When he realised he had been rebutted into a corner with nowhere else to go, he used to come back at you and never mention the points you raised but would author a post that circumvented the real points whilst introducing other points to aid with his deflection .... he was hard going because it was like debating with a parsnip and in the end he had to go

Luckily, we still have some real smart cookies on our site, and brockdorfiaism hasn't returned to reinfect us.

The guy would be insanely good as a politician though.

 

[Bambulus]

I will of course return with a worthy response once I manage to get my head together and a good period of time!

Hopefully won't be too long Pete

 

[Robbo]

I will of course return with a worthy response once I manage to get my head together and a good period of time!

Hopefully won't be too long Pete

Jack, whatever you do mate, please don't rush, I'm still trying to recover from answering that last one of yours .. if we spend much more time on this thread it won't be long before we've cracked the meaning of life .... if we get Jay, Reb and even Missy Q involved, I'm damned sure we could crack the Holy Grail of all questions ...

 

[Bambulus]

Jack, whatever you do mate, please don't rush, I'm still trying to recover from answering that last one of yours .. if we spend much more time on this thread it won't be long before we've cracked the meaning of life .... if we get Jay, Reb and even Missy Q involved, I'm damned sure we could crack the Holy Grail of all questions ...

Implying, of course, that there is one

 

[Robbo]

The guy would be insanely good as a politician though.

I kinda miss Nick because he was always value for money and sorta fascinating in a train crash sort of way ... as a psychological exercise his case would prove truly enlightening if not a little disturbing.

Nick must have some deep-rooted psychosis that surfaces every time he has to consider climbing down and the reason I suspect this is because I also suffer from the same condition to some degree.
The only difference between myself and Nick is, I was usually right whenever me and him got into it and so I didn't have to climb down
And so Nick's real problem was his intellect never quite matched his psychosis and so was always gonna come a cropper if the discussion got too deep.
Sad but true ........ I miss him so !

 

[Robbo]

Implying, of course, that there is one

Jack, there just has to be, to consider the alternate is to consider total oblivion for the human race and our existence can't be that arbitrary surely?

 

[Rebel Tackleberry]

Jack, there just has to be, to consider the alternate is to consider total oblivion for the human race and our existence can't be that arbitrary surely?

Ah, you see, that one is a matter of personal faith and belief.

Why does there have to be a why?

Maybe what is, just....is.

Although I'd love to be proven wrong, I personally don't believe we have any special place in the universe or part in a greater plan. The universe (or universes) just is and we happen to be an insignificant product of it.

Although I'm perfectly happy for other people to believe whatever they wish, as long as they don't push those beliefs on others (don't get me started on religious indoctrination of children), surely it can't be disagreed that the argument for a Theistic god gets weaker and weaker as more scientific discoveries are made of how the universe appears to work?

To me personally, the only room that seems left is an argument for a Deistic god and that is purely on the ground of 'you can't prove he doesn't exist so there' kind of reasoning. As soon as one tries to use a rational argument you end up with an Intelligent Design 'defence' and 'what else created the universe' counter argument.

Evolution answers the Intelligent Design lobby, but just because we don't have the answer to the 'what and why' answer to creation doesn't mean it has to be some higher sentience. By the same argument you could put forward an infinite number of currently, or forever, non-provable hypotheses.

M theory is even coming close to the 'how' of creation, with that theory looking at how space-time could comprise of 11 dimensions, with the 7 we don't perceive being curled up too small and providing 'internal spaces' that determine the constants that we measure in the laws of physics.

In that model we have Gravity as a negative energy (it takes positive energy to seperate two bodies gravitationally bound) and the, as yet, unidentified Dark Energy/Dark Matter. Gravity shapes space and time, allowing space-time to be locally stable, but globally unstable. On the large scale of the universe the negative energy of Gravity and Dark Energy can balance out with the positive energy of Matter to provide a net sum of zero energy, and so there is no restriction on the creation of a whole universe from nothing. Because of this the universe can, and will, spontaneously create itself from nothing.

The major difference between scientific led belief and faith led belief is that the former is usually open to change at the presentation of new and stronger evidence. Faith led belief is often unswayable, despite any evidence. Should a personal God show himself to me in the next 10 minutes and carry out some act that is blatantly against the laws of physics (say turn the sun off for 5 minutes then back on again) I'd be perfectly capable of accepting that entity as a truth and discard what I believe at this moment due to my own reasoning from examination of multiple different theories and evidence. On the other hand, just as the expansion of an Earth centric worldview gave way to the universe we now accept, if aliens landed tomorrow and proved the existence of other (maybe radically different) forms of sentient life, I suspect that religion would simply adapt to integrate that and say it changes nothing.

 

[Robbo]

Robbo mate the guy your referring to i think was me , and we came to the conclusion that in that circumstance then god could undo do it but it would be pointless as he would know he had so would become a moot point.

Hi Dunc, apologies for not remembering, I should of course have recollected your name seeing as you were the first one who did get what I was struggling to explain.
I haven't seen that particular problem voiced anywhere else and so I'd like for some philosopher or logician to wrestle with it and hopefully give me a back door to jump through.
I find all paradoxes extremely frustrating [which of course is their nature] and they only serve to indicate the lack of clarity when looking at the connection between language and reality ... it seems as though our minds are bound by these limitations and I suppose the only language we can look toward for greater clarity and meaning is mathematics.

The ability of mathematics to go further than language along is due to the concise relationship between mathematical functions [and numbers] to the world around us.
But even then it doesn't take too much digging to come up with mathematic's own limitations when we consider black hole singularities.
These singularities blow a hole straight through the notion of mathematics' ability to explain everything in our universe; it seems there are discrete limits to everything which is a sobering thought for any scientist.
That alone should provide sufficient humility for anyone who believes we can crack every nut we care to ponder.
After all, I'm grateful we can understand what we do but expecting to understand everything is tantamount to believing we can unravel the nature of God and that ain't gonna happen during this particular galactic expansion cycle ..