Book Review: Why Does the World Exist?

eldavojohn writes "For quite some time humans have struggled to answer the question why there is anything rather than nothing. Jim Holt's Why Does the World Exist? tackles such questions in the form of a journey. After laying a brief groundwork, Holt travels from leading prominent philosopher to curmudgeonly physicist to reserved theologian, visiting each and relaying the juiciest parts of his transcripts to the reader. In doing so, this book takes on an interesting form with a meaty dense center to each chapter (the actual dialogues) surrounded by the light and fluffy bread of Holt's expert writing about the settings, weather and food of his travels. While this consequently lacks the characteristics of a heady hard hitting original philosophical work, these sandwiches should prove quite palatable for most readers. Why Does the World Exist? criss-crosses the etymological, epistemological, theological and philosophical aspects of its title while remaining a fairly easy read." Keep reading for the rest of eldavojohn's review. Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story author Jim Holt pages 320 publisher Liveright rating 9/10 reviewer eldavojohn ISBN 978-0871404091 summary An existential detective story. The book's first page is titled "A Quick Proof That There Must Be Something Rather Than Nothing, for Modern People Who Lead Busy Lives" (made for those of you who don't have time to read) and presents a very simple proof about the self-forbiddingness of nothing. The book starts off with a brief prerogative to drive the reader's thirst for why this question is important. Typical of the rest of the book Holt drops a lot of names so I'm not going to mention the names that are brought up in passing. The author tries to cover all his bases by bring up anyone from Roger Penrose to René Descartes to Woody Allen. The veritable name dropping proves Holt has done his homework but at times can be a little overbearing and, in my opinion, reaches borderline ADD-philosophy at a few points in the book. Be warned, you will find Tennessee Williams, John Archibald Wheeler, Marcel Proust, Albert Einstein, Baruch Spinoza and Georg Cantor all mentioned on the same page! The opening few pages select an interesting cast from history as the question arises: Why Does the World Exist?

Holt proceeds from baiting the reader to what he calls a "Philosophical Tour D'Horizon" and, as its name suggests, this chapter blazes through many names — big and small — throughout history that might have contributed to answering this question. I can say this effort is quite readable whereas a more serious effort to be completely comprehensive would be much more lengthy and tedious. I should disclose at this point that Holt played his cards well by mentioning and paying favor to perhaps my most favorite of polymaths: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (and he continues to do so throughout this book).

Following that, the next obvious step is to tackle a definition of "nothing" — our 'null hypothesis' of existence. We exist as something so we know that and so Holt begins by sampling what we have at our disposal to define nothing. Holt briefly recalls the advent of zero in mathematics and moves on to the more refined points of what nothing can be defined as in English, French and a number of other ways. This chapter struck me as needlessly tiresome as the author tackles the inane intricacies of natural languages applied to concepts like nothing. Heidegger's "nothing that noths" question struck me as merely a failure of natural language — not a deep and profound question. Holt correctly switches to logical methods like predicate calculus to better tackle this concept of nothing but this chapter left a bad taste in my mouth as the author never attacks the root problem. You can talk about how the word "nothing" operates in English or how "le néant" operates in French but these human invented definitions and grammars are buggy systems for the task at hand. Why do scientists prefer math to describe systems? Why do computers use true and false versus "maybe" and "probably not"? Logic, predicate calculus and math (although far from perfect themselves) are our tools to arm ourselves to better describe our surroundings and I feel like Holt wasted words on the shortcomings of "Does it make sense to say X about nothing?" Regardless this chapter does present mental exercises to the reader about what nothing truly is and examines the paradox of the null hypothesis in existence. Also, in so many ways nothing is nice and simple so why doesn't the law of parsimony dictate that there should have been nothing instead of what is?

The first person Holt visits in this book is Russian Physicist Andrei Linde (the same Linde that was awarded one of Milner's nin awards) and very little time is spent on Linde since the theory visited here is that we exist because our everything was created in a lab by a "physicist" hacker. The second person Holt interviews is a little more interesting and given many more pages. He also happened to be my favorite character in the quest and one with which I found myself most in agreement: Adolf Grünbaum. Holt calls this man "The Great Rejectionist" and I found that to be an adequate and fair title because their discussions make it clear that it is hard to start with base assumptions when debating this borderline hostile mind. Grünbaum, an atheist, had attacked Freudian psychoanalysis and served as an intelligence officer after escaping Nazi Germany. The one complaint I have of Grünbaum (that would be more prevalent with other philosophers) is that they took no sides on the debate of why there is something rather than nothing and instead required Holt to make statements that could then be either met with concurrence (ha!) or picked apart by someone armed with years of studying. There's a part in this chapter where Holt alludes to Grünbaum disagreeing to the statement that the Null World is the simplest possible outcome (I'm assuming in order to invoke the Law of Parsimony) and even allowing that to go forward Grünbaum says "Why should we think that the simple is ontologically more likely to be true?"

The way Grünbaum immediately rejected Holt's premises and the opening exercises discussing nothing led me to a problematic question about what exists outside our universe and what existed before the Big Bang. If it is indeed Nothing (with a capital N) then we mean there are no laws of nature, no Law of Parsimony, not even some semblance of cause and effect. So what particularly bothers me about all this discussion is that we're talking about Nothing using logic that has been developed and rooted entirely here in our world of something. Of course, this would circumvent any discussion or this book to be written so I assume that most philosophers in this realm largely set this aside for the sake of discussion and speculation.

Before jumping to the next stop, Holt arms us with the concepts of finite versus infinite and with good reason. Richard Swinburne is a philosopher of religion at Oxford and I found him to be the most disagreeable person encountered along the way in this book. Holt brings up many good points against the possibility of there being a God. The possibility of God explains away all of our aforementioned problems but I felt like he gave Swinburne a free pass on a lot of these points. I was disappointed that the author embodied an intellectual steel trap for everyone else while Swinburne, when cornered, wasn't pressed further. This chapter sets out to answer a lot of questions but I felt like Swinburne was reaching when he tried to explain that God is actually a very simple concept — maybe even simpler than you or I. And I just don't buy that. I also didn't think that Holt fully utilized the newly established definitions of infinity and nothing to pry apart Swinburne's position. As an example, Swinburne speaks of the "infinitely powerful" and "infinitely good" God but draws that as an analogy to parents watching children. He says that God keeps his distance and that's why we're not permeated with infinite goodness ourselves. I feel like Holt should be tearing this apart because this is illogical to me if I consider these two cases: Case 1) the universe is finite and there is Nothing outside of the universe so God does not exist outside the universe so he exists inside the universe. But if God is infinitely good, there would be no room in a finite space for evil — it would be completely packed with good. Case 2) God exists outside the universe (I believe this was Swinburne's suggestion) with the ability to influence inside the universe. However, we now find ourselves back to the issue that Swinburne and Holt addressed in this chapter and that is answering the questions, "What amount of power and good does God allow into the universe? And why that amount?" These two cases have plagued my mind since I was a child, E=mc^2 dictates that it takes a finite (though large to us) amount of power to create sustenance from nothing. The Christian God has an infinite amount of power and is infinitely good yet allows people to die when a finite amount of power would prolong their lives. From good people to bad people to people who have never had the chance to hear God's word, they die daily when a finite amount of power would save them. But I digress — suffice it to say this was a very disappointing chapter and this is why this book loses a point in my mind. I guess it was necessary to visit this possibility but it wasn't fair to let cordiality intervene with a philosophical swordfight.

On the heels of the visit to Swinburne, Holt discusses some of the finer points of proving God's existence through pure logic. I enjoyed his references to Bertrand Russell and Russell's fall to Anselm's ontological argument. Holt also relays Richard Dawkin's knee jerk dismissal of it and Gödel's more complete analysis of the logic. The next stop on the way is physicist David Deutsch of Oxford. The visit with Deutsch is relatively brief but he seems to maintain safe positions without venturing anywhere problematic. His interest is studying the mutliverse theory but he balks at any attempts to even suggest there might be a principle that explains the foundation of our existence. So there's not much to discuss but the opening of this principle of multiple universes is important to the rest of the possibilities presented throughout the book. Holt also looks at the possibility that our universe exists because of a "quantum fluctuation" as first proposed by Ed Tryon and later given more concrete possibilities by Alex Vilenkin. This leads nicely into Holt's next person to visit: Steven Weinberg.

Weinberg sheds a lot of light on the physical aspects with the question of existence. Weinberg provides a little discussion on string theory and how the scientific aspects might work. I was surprised to learn that Weinberg is disappointed at the slow rate of string theory development and he calls it "the best effort we've made to step beyond what we already know." There is, of course, a careful context to that statement with Weinberg explaining that it hasn't worked out how we initially thought it would. I found one of Weinberg's statements to be surprising when he calls Quantum mechanics an "empty stage" and he further says he thinks that "Karl Popper was wrong to say that a scientific theory must be open to falsification. You can't falsify quantum mechanics, since it doesn't make predictions." We don't have a final theory yet but Weinberg does a great job of explaining what finding one would mean and what it will never be able to answer. Holt follows this up with a lot of information and caveats about the multiverse/megaverse as he transitions to another popular scientist and writer.

I've read a number of Roger Penrose's books and was pleased to read his interaction with Holt. I was a little disappointed with Holt's treatment of Platonism in regards to mathematics — mostly because he treats it as borderline mysticism and I personally enjoy reading that kind of mathematical philosophy. While I feel like it has roots in mysticism, I have enjoyed Penrose's works that reference "Platonic contact." Penrose imagines that there are three worlds: the physical world, the world consisting of consciousness and the aforementioned Platonic world. A very brief explanation is that there is a mysterious connection between this physical world via our minds to the conscious world and in our minds there is now a small part of our conscious (the part dealing with mathematics) that connects us to the Platonic world. So I suppose that triples the question of this book and Holt isn't afraid to call these worlds "miraculously self-creating and self-sustaining." Penrose, calls the Platonic world "eternally existing", "profound" and "timeless" but what of the possibility of the Null World? What about outside our universe? How does it stand up to the Nothing? These questions are never really pressed for some reason. Holt briefly references an extreme Platonist by the name of Max Tegmark and I felt like Penrose didn't leave much progress in our quest to answer the question of why there is something rather than nothing. Instead, he offers that this Platonic world is prime and the other two exist in its shadows but I was never satisfied or understood why those shadows exist.

Holt transitions to the next pieces with a reference to John Archibald Wheeler's "it from bit." As a developer, this is an incredibly tantalizing possibility but I found it to be a bit misplaced in this book. I found the explanation of this to be less than satisfactory (similarly as in my review of Gleick's "The Information") and I wish someone would include more substance to this view of everything arising from information. Holt muddies up the water even a little further by examining the idea that our brains have this "mind-stuff" or property to them that is perhaps built on top of a quantum phenomena. While there are interesting thought experiments about this "mind-stuff" and consciousness, it seems a little out of scope from the grand purpose of this book. Nonetheless it's fun to think about.

One of the final realms to explore is John A. Leslie's own position of an almost "ethical requiredness" or a need for goodness. I found Leslie to be a sound and logical philosopher but I did not enjoy that the bulk of his explanations seemed to hinge on analogies. Perhaps this is far more prevalent in modern philosophy but something inside me objects to using paintings to explain how universes are enumerated. The example I'm talking about is the question of why, if goodness is a prerogative, would there be infinitely many universes conceptually available but only ours in existence (which is of some arbitrary goodness). And Leslie explains this by saying that the diversity of goodness in the universes is analogous to why the Louvre has paintings of various quality instead of having its walls packed with perfect replicas of the Mona Lisa. I understand his premises and his analogy but I don't see the value of arbitrary selection of a universe — this "axiarchic theory." Both Leslie and Holt reference Dawkin's response of calling goodness a piffling concept and noting that cosmologically it's as arbitrary as "Channel Number Fiveness." And this is the premise of Leslie's assertions: that "Goodness is required existence, in a nontrivial sense." Holt notes that Leslie is a sort of modern-day Spinoza.

The last philosopher on Holt's journey is Derek Parfit who, among other things, discusses the idea of a "selector" with Holt. Parfit breaks down our existence into how and why which is an interesting way to look at it when you consider the selector to be a mechanism that selects (or doesn't select) our universe out of all the possibilities. If the selector is something, then you have to explain the selector of the selector or the meta-selector. For example: The null hypothesis (the world of Nothing) has the selector of simplicity and no meta-selector. Also, by some sound logic and reasoning the two come to the conclusion that a selector can't select itself thus looping backwards and explaining its selection. Armed with this, the author tries his hand at proving which of these explanations and meta-explanations are valid and comes to a conclusion. Similar to my earlier complaints, the biggest problem I have with this is that his method is to rule out the combinations of meta-selectors and selectors until he is down to one or two. How does he know that the explanations for his options in this book amount to the entirety of the possibilities of selectors and meta-selectors? To rule out all possibilities but one in order to understand this seems futile since we may not be able to imagine all selectors and meta-selectors possible.

The very last person interviewed for the book is John Updike. Although he had some interesting things to say, this felt more like an intellectual artist's view of why there is something rather than nothing. Updike says he is part of the group that find this existence to be "a kind of miracle" and he calls this a "last resort, really of naturalistic theology." There's a bit of cute wordplay in this last chapter but it felt appropriate to read it near the end of this journey. Updike gets to weave characters into plots and embed the aforementioned logic and views into those stories. And given that background and his interest in this topic, he playfully left me with an "it's not so bad that we don't know" sort of lightheartedness.

The penultimate chapter of this book deals with the question of whether we seriously exist at all. I think it would have been better for Holt to approach this from a nurture versus nature standpoint that's already been heavily discussed before. He does pose some interesting thought exercises like a procedure that replaces diseased brain matter with healthy brain matter that has no recollection or memories but it only does it 1% of my brain matter at a time. At what point would I cease to be me? So there's some interesting ideas in here but the chapter is largely disagreeable with me. I know that every person I meet knows at least one thing I don't and I like to use such a basic pairwise comparison to justify unique existence. I don't find much value in considerations of the self on a transcendental level and that's probably why this chapter didn't have a lot of value to me.

Throughout the book, Holt has been relaying to us his day to day experiences including the death of his dog. He also noted that Updike died fairly suddenly months after he spoke with him. In the final chapter "Return to Nothingness," Holt does a little work of tying what this all means into the context of death. During the writing of this book, his mother passed away and the final pages are devoted to that account and his emotions. If Updike was a jocular relief about existence, this final chapter is a sobering reminder that ultimately we are all mortal. While well written and heavily symbolic, it is a depressing note on which to end this journey.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It's composition is a good mix of art and science making it a light read compared to others about the same topic. If you're looking for thought experiments or wish to further ply yourself with a good survey of the current armaments in this debate, you can buy Why Does the World Exist? from Amazon. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews — to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Comments

The Answer summed up:

[newcastlejon]

Because.

Re:The Answer summed up:

[dargaud]

I've heard theologians claim that scientists are arrogant because they want to know the world. But I find somthing a lot more arrogant: people who absolutely want a reason for their existence. You just happened by chance, get over it.

Re:The Answer summed up:

[Crypto Gnome]

If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.

Judging by the state of things (especially our relatively local state) I'd say that's someone's been FORKING THE UNIVERSE as hard as they can for quite some time now.

Re:The Answer summed up:

[khallow]

You just happened by chance, get over it.

Or happened on purpose as the case may be. Without evidence one way or another, there's no point to taking a stand on the issue.

Re:The Answer summed up:

[wonkey_monkey]

But I find somthing a lot more arrogant: people who absolutely want a reason for their existence.

Wanting a reason isn't arrogant; thinking you already know the reason is.

Re:The Answer summed up:

[slick7]

Because.

42. FTFY

Re:The Answer summed up:

[atlasdropperofworlds]

You mean, 'coz.

Re:The Answer summed up:

[John Allsup]

And where does chance get its random numbers from? Why is reality unreasonably well described by mathematical laws.

In summary, 'you just happened by chance, get over it' is no better than 'you exist because God created man in verse X of Genesis 1, and you have sin because of Eve's sin in Genesis 2-3.. get over it.' The point of this is that the 'get over it' attitude is unhelpful to those who are unsatisfied.

Consider:

Eventually if you don't get over it, if you chase back far enough, abstract enough, you will at least find something that you can label as the Divine (to give it a name other than God.) Either the 'this is the case because X, and X is the case because Y' chain goes back indefinitely, in which case you pick a point, any point, say X and say 'from X backwards we'll call everything divine, and label the totality of divine things The Divine, or God, or whatever name you choose' or else this chain terminates, and where it terminates is, again, the Divine.

I don't really see the point of this kind of reasoning anymore, but went along these lines in the past.

If you want to believe in God, there are rational reasons if you look for them, and likewise for if you don't. There is, for sure, never going to be sufficient philosophical foundations to decide. So choose your faith, be it materialistic or theistic or whatever wisely, and accept that you cannot know for sure. This latter point is the one thing where I would play the get over it card: we don't know intellectually, and we can't know intellectually, so get over it.

Re:The Answer summed up:

[fustakrakich]

Really, the real question is, or should be: Why ask why?

Life, just live it...

Re:The Answer summed up:

[atlasdropperofworlds]

What about assuming there is a reason in the first place? (I'm not talking about the usual, causal reasons here...)

Re:The Answer summed up:

[khallow]

Well, I already gave a partial answer to that. If there's no way to determine a purpose empirically, then there's really no reason to ask why.

Re:The Answer summed up:

[gmuslera]

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and purpose too, unless you are specifically speaking about the will of someone. Assigning purpose to something like the existence of the world or universe implies a creator, founder, or builder, with a will. So the question looks more like religious propaganda than worrying about causality, existence or physics. So the idea is to not discuss that there is a god (er... god forbid?), but once you define that must be a god because belgium, then what purpose it had.

Re:The Answer summed up:

[Anonymous Coward]

All evidence points to chance, not design. Everything from the big bang to evolution revolves upon randomness, and not direction. In fact, if you try to introduce intelligent design into it, the theories no longer really make sense. Every time you try to put an intelligent designer into science, you try to put a square peg into a round hole. It will fit if you force it, but it doesn't really belong.

Re:The Answer summed up:

[vigour]

If you don't already know, there's no point telling you.

(My wife....)

Re:The Answer summed up:

[Anonymous Coward]

So choose your faith, be it materialistic or theistic or whatever wisely, and accept that you cannot know for sure.

Unless you skip straight to agnosticism that seems like a pointless endeavour.

Re:The Answer summed up:

[canadian_right]

You just happened by chance, get over it.

Or happened on purpose as the case may be. Without evidence one way or another, there's no point to taking a stand on the issue.

Currently there is a LOT of evidence that we arose mainly by chance, and no evidence that anything other than natural processes lead to our existence. There is no external reason to your being. I'm quite confident, given our current knowledge of the world, that the only rational position is that we arose by the working of natural, often random, natural forces.

Taking any other position requires ignoring a vast body of evidence.

Re:The Answer summed up:

[khallow]

All evidence points to chance, not design

Again. What evidence? Saying there's evidence is not the same as there being evidence.

Re:The Answer summed up:

[canadian_right]

Chance is involved, but if your referring to evolution, chance is only a small part of the process. Each mutation is random, but the harsh gate keeper of death filters out the mutations that don't work. The formation of stars, galaxies, and planets seem to be pretty mechanical and while some chance is involved the more we find out about other star systems to more common planets are.

There are no rational reasons that I'm aware of to believe in God. I'd be pleased if you'd share some.

Re:The Answer summed up:

[scottrocket]

What about assuming there is a reason in the first place? (I'm not talking about the usual, causal reasons here...)

You don't have to assume a reason, or lack thereof to be curious. I'm agnostic, but I find this to be an interesting series (intermittently found on PBS, at 4:30 am - way to hide the truth, PBS :) ).

Re:The Answer summed up:

[Anonymous Coward]

If by world, you mean the philosopher's universe (absolute everything), this is an unanswerable question, you can not explain the existence of something without starting with something else, science starts with a laws of physics that allow for the creation of our space and time (the physicist's universe), but why do we have these laws of physics, religion starts with a supernatural domain of the universe from with a material domain sprang but where did this original supernatural domain come from. The universe just is and there is nothing we can say about why, it just is. It like asking what is the first number.

Re:The Answer summed up:

[khallow]

Currently there is a LOT of evidence that we arose mainly by chance, and no evidence that anything other than natural processes lead to our existence.

Except, of course, that there's no natural explanation for existence. Or even a scrap of that "LOT of evidence".

Re:The Answer summed up:

[khallow]

The universe just is and there is nothing we can say about why, it just is. It like asking what is the first number.

Exactly. Except that asking what the "first number" is can actually be a well-defined question. You just have to establish the ordering.

Re:The Answer summed up:

[Genda]

The falling of the other shoe sounds a little like, we question for no reason. That is, we are survival engines, interacting with our environment, who at some point found survival value in being curious. Since that time, we have arrived at the place where it is an innate process for us to ask why. It is literally a developmental phase of our growing up. Often the questions themselves have more value than the answer (we are after all utilitarian by nature as well), and its important to remember that the striving to comprehend is an end in its own right.

This is a distinction from superstition. An attempt to explain that which we do not understand using made up explanations that bear no relationship to reality. There are in fact aspects of reality that cover so much time and so much space, that they exceed our capacity to grasp. Spirituality, is a viable means by which to hold these infinities. We simply need to be very careful, to weed our faith of superstitions and meaningless dogmas. The good news is that our body of comprehension grows exponentially. The bad news is that infinities remain infinities.

Re:The Answer summed up:

[Pseudonym]

There are no rational reasons that I'm aware of to believe in God. I'd be pleased if you'd share some.

It partly comes down to how you define "God". If you define "God" in terms of classical theism, then there's no reason to presuppose the existence of such an entity.

However, that's not the only type of deity that's been followed over the milennia. To a Sun worshipper, the Sun is "God". Moreover, by any scientific test that you care to name, the Sun exists. Therefore, a Sun worshipper has every reason to believe in "God".

Or suppose that you define "God" as "that which mystics experience". As there's plenty of indication mystics experience something, it's perfectly rational to believe in "God". For this definition, "God" may be (and, indeed, most likely is) nothing more than an artifact of our psychology, but as ESR famously pointed out, that doesn't mean it's not worth pursuing.

Re:The Answer summed up:

[Anonymous Coward]

So what came before the Big Bang? Nothing? Oh I see, first there was nothing and then it exploded! There are people that call that science?
  The question of “why” can only be asked of a person, that is someone who can make decisions to bring something into existence. You can ask a violin maker “why” he made the violin, but there is no use in asking the violin that question. The violin did not make itself, neither did we humans make ourselves. The violin did not evolve, neither did we human beings evolve. The only one who can answer the “why” question is our maker.

Re:The Answer summed up:

[grantspassalan]

In all our human experience, laws can only come from legislatures, from humans with minds. No human laws have ever arisen apart from human minds. Is it logical to postulate that all the complex laws of nature came from something other than a mind? The question is whose mind? The vast majority of people on earth believe in some kind of God that created things. Only a small minority of people believe that we are here by chance.

Re:The Answer summed up:

[Anonymous Coward]

This a a word play argument that I often see by people arguing for the existence of god, natural law and mans law are not analogous in the way you are trying to say they are, natural laws are just what every is possible it is not some arbitrary set of rule that things have to abide by, or get a ticket by god. If there is a god then he is just part of the "laws" of nature, if there are thing that only he can do that doesn't mean he is not bound by the laws of the universe, it means those laws include god as a variable.

"The vast majority of people on earth believe..."
The is an argument to popularity, there was a time when people believed the world was flat, does the universe reconfigure itself every time popular opinion changes to fit that opinion. The majority of people may believe in a God, but not one of them can give an explanation as to how they could know such a thing.

The supernatural is completely unknowable, there is no way to determine which supernatural things are possible and which aren't, there is no way of even determining which supernatural things are more likely. If I was to tell you I have a box on my desk right now, tell me it's contents, you wouldn't come up with some nice story to explain its contents and say that must be it, you would say I do not have a clue, and yet you have an infinitely better idea about the contents of my box than you do about the supernatural.

Re:The Answer summed up:

[khallow]

In all our human experience, laws can only come from legislatures, from humans with minds. No human laws have ever arisen apart from human minds.

Law comes from human minds. Ok.

Is it logical to postulate that all the complex laws of nature came from something other than a mind? The question is whose mind? The vast majority of people on earth believe in some kind of God that created things. Only a small minority of people believe that we are here by chance.

So you're saying that one or more *human* minds created the laws that the universe operates under. Do you happen to have a copy of the legislation? It'd simplify scientific endeavors a great deal.

Re:The Answer summed up:

[dryeo]

Legislatures only appeared relatively recently. Some laws always existed. The law of gravity states that if you step off a high cliff, you die. The law about swimming too far also can have death as a punishment. The law about poking a sleeping bear says you better have a good defence or you'll suffer.
The laws against murder and theft are similar, kill someone and their relatives will show up demanding punishment. Eventually wise people were asked to decide on the punishment, payment or even if the killing was justified, hence came common law. Finally legislatures wrote down the laws in statutes and then got carried away and invented more.
The point being that laws at their core are just cause and effect.

Re:The Answer summed up:

[Artifakt]

Science starts dealing with each phenomenon with the assumption that the phenomenon can be explained. It continues with an assumption that the researchers have a realistic chance of figuring out what that explanation is. By some models of science, at least, it then adopts the assumption that the explanation is a naturalistic one. Assuming that the whole universe (or its origin) fits these assumptions may be arrogant, but if so, then isn't it arrogant for a scientist to assume he or she is smart enough to deal with any scientific question? To determine if apples contain a chemical that may increase the risk of cancer, or why some variable star has a particular graph of the variation in luminosity, or what factors contribute to a person overestimating their own competency, seems by your definition to include that same arrogance.
        It's quite possible that the question why isn't there just nothing instead of something, is not a scientific question. I tend to agree with that. But is it outside the boundaries of science because the answer could stem from non-naturalistic principles? To grant that means the question of whether there is or is not a supernatural is also outside the boundaries of science. Is it possible the researcher (and all merely human researchers) is (are) simply not intelligent enough to deal with the question? Yes it's possible, but there are plenty of cases where a person gave up trying and then somebody else found an answer. Just look at all the researchers who decided we would never know anything more about the nature of the stars than we could see with regular telescopes - the persons who invented the various techniques of Spectroscopy are the ones who 'arrogantly' decided they could learn more. Even if humans are not intelligent enough to find answers to some questions, it would seem we should try, if only to be sure we didn't give up too early. In essence, you have a point - the only truly logical reason for excluding the origin problem from science is to do it at the very start - to say it's simple outside the very definition of things science can deal with. If we go as far as thinking that the origin problem might be shot down by some secondary rule of science, we are stuck trying to deal with it scientifically - we have to exclude it from the very beginning, by fiat.
          The trouble with this is, most of us don't want to claim that "It's just that way because it is, Dammit!" is logically better in any circumstances what-so-ever than "We can at least take a look at the question and see if there are any obstacles to learning more."

Re:The Answer summed up:

[postbigbang]

That would be the existentialist view. Yet, according to what you see, hear, smell, touch, taste, and grok-- there you are.

I vote for missing ingredients. Stuff not found yet. Not necessarily hope, not a tasty explanation, but perhaps a formula that explains it all.

It would seem that things that work are favored, over things that don't work. Our intelligence seems to be favored in this way, a long gestation and youth allows a longer accumulation of cognizance, and fun and mirth along the way. The program that we are, starting out as 23x2, goes through a cycle favored by environment, until we start to exhaust the program, and we go away. 100% of us end up this way. Not 99.9994, or 21.2%, but 100%.

Why does this happen? We were grunts 10K years+ ago. Only recently did we learn to write, then print, to carry intergenerational intelligence. Now it's all gained lots of energy, but only the science fiction writers have guessed at the endings, or the next steps in the evolution.

Are we not here? Are part of a Matrix? Are we puppets on a quantum string? Evidence doesn't say that, and evidence is something in lieu of nothing, giving weight towards: we got here. Let's see where we go. I'm hoping it's a "good" place.

Re:The Answer summed up:

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, do that. Then in the afterlife when you find out you're going to burn in hell for eternity, don't say I didn't tell you so.

Re:The Answer summed up:

[AK Marc]

I saw it as "There must be a God, because I prefer to think that my life has real meaning, and I can't get that by doing useless crap like trying to help people or such."

"I really really want there to be" seems to be the strongest "proof" ever given for God.

Re:The Answer summed up:

[AK Marc]

Without evidence one way or another, there's no point to taking a stand on the issue.

That's silly.

I have no evidence that while I was at work, a pink elephant didn't break into my house and crap in my toilet, then disappear before I got home (nor do I have any evidence against it). You are claiming that pro-pink is just as valid/reasonable as apinkism. That's so fair and balanced of you, but not a logical requirement, as you imply.

Re:The Answer summed up:

[TheLink]

It's even worse than that.
From the review:

We exist as something so we know that

That's skipping a big question there: "Why is there even this weird phenomena we call Consciousness?"

We're skipping the very first observation (Consciousness) that every scientist and person makes, and moving on to the second observation "The world exists".

Based on our current knowledge of physics, stuff can exist without this consciousness phenomena- we can do all the information processing without it[1]. If it weren't for our own personal observation of consciousness Occam's Razor would have cut it out long ago ;).

People who keep saying things are simple (both creationists and non-creationists) are ignoring a universe that keeps telling us that things get stranger the more we know. Not saying that simple = wrong, but to ASSUME the universe is so simple given so much evidence to the contrary (go ask the physicists- they keep coming up with more and more theories the more they figure things out), seems to be silly. Yes explanations should generally not be more complicated than they have to be, but being so sure "it must be random/chance" at this point seems wrong to me.

[1] Unless someone is claiming that the information processing (or certain forms) somehow _necessarily_ results in actual consciousness. Not sure how one would prove/disprove that.

Re:The Answer summed up:

[khallow]

And you'd have a valid point if one of the above scenarios were somehow much less likely than the other. In the case of the pink elephant, one scenerio is a lot more far fetched than the other.

But we don't know enough to even know if it would make sense to assign probabilities to the scenarios of this thread (the concepts may be ill-defined for reasons we don't currently understand), and it may well be impossible to know more about such things than we know now. Such are the limitations of human knowledge.

Going back to the original assertion of lack of evidence, where's the evidence that indicates a greater likelihood of the universe being created by chance rather than purpose?

Re:The Answer summed up:

[Boronx]

There aren't firm natural explanations for existence, though there are speculative ones. But the evidence is that humans came about by chance, whether or not the universe as a whole was purposeful.

Re:The Answer summed up:

[khallow]

But the evidence is that humans came about by chance, whether or not the universe as a whole was purposeful.

It is remarkable that I've received about ten direct replies to my post or followup messages, including several people claiming that such evidence exists, yet not one person has actually provided any of this alleged evidence.

So instead of just telling me evidence exists, give me this evidence so that I may judge for myself.

Re:The Answer summed up:

[Black Parrot]

Except, of course, that there's no natural explanation for existence.

Whereas there are as many supernatural "explanations" as you care to invent.

Re:The Answer summed up:

[Black Parrot]

So instead of just telling me evidence exists, give me this evidence so that I may judge for myself.

So what do you want? A single post that will dispel all your utter ignorance (whether real or feigned) of physics and biology?

You honestly can't think of one single thing that might make someone think you're here because of senseless natural processes?

What grade are you in?

Re:The Answer summed up:

[Black Parrot]

You're conflating two kinds of law: human law can be broken, laws of nature can't.

The vast majority of people on earth believe in some kind of God that created things.
And the vast majority of human males think they're well endowed. What's your point?

Re:The Answer summed up:

[khallow]

All equally valid and invalid. Which gets to the core of my original observation. The claims that the universe has a purpose to it or comes out of random chance both appear to be supernatural explanations. One needs some sort of evidence to make them something other than a whimsy of the moment.

Re:The Answer summed up:

[khallow]

So what do you want? A single post that will dispel all your utter ignorance (whether real or feigned) of physics and biology?

To be honest, I think it would be quite unique in the whole universe if you were able to dispel the particular ignorance which I readily admit to.

You honestly can't think of one single thing that might make someone think you're here because of senseless natural processes?

Honestly, no. Keep in mind that many senseless objects and natural processes have a purpose to them from our point of view, because we use them with purpose. Similarly, the cells of our bodies don't in themselves have any sort of sentience, but the whole does.

What grade are you in?

PhD in Mathematics.

Re:The Answer summed up:

[Barsteward]

"The claims that the universe has a purpose to it or comes out of random chance both appear to be supernatural explanations."

No, there is absolutely NO evidence of design or purpose but there is a growing body of evidence it was chance and luck. If you can't find the scientific evidence for the chance probability, then you are not looking.

Re:The Answer summed up:

[khallow]

No, there is absolutely NO evidence of design or purpose but there is a growing body of evidence it was chance and luck. If you can't find the scientific evidence for the chance probability, then you are not looking.

Again, no evidence provided, just assertions made.

Re:The Answer summed up:

[Boronx]

I'm confused. Do you think the evidence doesn't exist just because you don't know about it?

Anyway, there's lots of info about the origin of humanity out there just waiting for you to study it. I don't think you need me to help you find it, however I will recommend going to the nearest university and ask around there.

Re:The Answer summed up:

[marcello_dl]

"by chance" is a reason.

I don't even go further in this thread.
You don't even know if the world exists. All you know is "I exist".
The "why" is a concept tied to time, because cause and effects are. It is not a concept which is necessarily defined outside of it, that is outside of reality. The question and the answer is outside reality, in philosophy, in a meta world, in the decisions of a god. You are not able to tell it from the inside, not you, not the greatest minds in the universe.

Exercise for the Christians. When Pilate asks Jesus "QUID est veritas?", what does Jesus answer? He doesn't. The answer is correct.

Re:The Answer summed up:

[hvm2hvm]

I agree with your post but I am going to nitpick on one detail, that is regarding this "Not saying that simple = wrong, but to ASSUME the universe is so simple given so much evidence to the contrary". I see your point but I also give an example - before people knew the earth orbited around the Sun and that it did so in an eliptical path they tried to explain movements of sky objects with circles.

When those circles didn't work they used more circles and things got more and more complicated. But two new (I think basic) notions entered, Heliocentrism and the ellipse and things became simpler. I now look at the way quantum mechanics is defined and I think there has to a concept other than the particle that simplifies the QM model. I think that in the end the Universe is simple, not in the sense that a 4year old can grasp all of it but that there isn't a never ending complexity to it.

Re:The Answer summed up:

[hvm2hvm]

You had a pretty good argument up to this point: "The violin did not evolve, neither did we human beings evolve". That's where you turned into a troll.

We didn't make ourselves but it's pretty much settled that we did evolve from other life forms. Now you might start a debate on who or what made the earth, life and the laws that let evolution happen but saying we didn't evolve is stupidly ignorant.

Re:The Answer summed up:

[Anonymous Coward]

So clearly the answer to the problem of nothing then exploded is that a supreme being existed and he made everything :-)

Oh and the second part of this answer here is that you have to ban questioning it, yeah that'll work.

But what made the supreme being? Answer: Part II, don't question that.

Re:The Answer summed up:

[able1234au]

> So what came before the Big Bang? Nothing?

You are thinking in classical timelines. As time did not exist before the big bang then there is no "before the big bang"

> someone who can make decisions to bring something into existence

And the need to whip up the prior existance of an imaginary critter to create a big bang somehow puts your mind at rest. If there was an imaginary critter to "decide" to create the universe why would it use a big bang? Given how ridiculous that is.... perhaps that should reassure that no imaginary critter exists.

Re:The Answer summed up:

[able1234au]

imaginary numbers i can understand. imaginary beings i can't.

Re:The Answer summed up:

[AK Marc]

You don't know the number of pink elephant ninjas in my neighborhood. You take the simplest choice, with no justification other than "that's the one I prefer." A "faith" based decision based on your personal opinion.

Going back to the original assertion of lack of evidence, where's the evidence that indicates a greater likelihood of the universe being created by chance rather than purpose?

None. But that doesn't mean that they are equal likelihood.

Re:The Answer summed up:

[dargaud]

Exercise for the Christians. When Pilate asks Jesus "QUID est veritas?", what does Jesus answer? He doesn't. The answer is correct.

Amusing, but a perfect example of why the people who actually 'do' things lump theology, philosophy and a few other activities under the umbrella of 'bullshit'.

Re:The Answer summed up:

[dargaud]

Or happened on purpose as the case may be. Without evidence one way or another, there's no point to taking a stand on the issue.

What do you mean ? The uncertainty principle of quantum theory is not enough for you ? That's the root of all 'chance'.

Re:The Answer summed up:

[Rosy At Random]

Ah, but was the purpose on purpose, or by chance?

Re:The Answer summed up:

[dargaud]

The uncertainty principle is a very base of quantum theory and you cannot pretend it's not valid. It introduces random chance into every chemical process, hence into biology at every step. A direct consequence is that you have random mutations in DNA during meiosis. Hence individuals are slightly different from one generation to the next (your sons are not all identical, right?). Add to this natural selection which is just a fancy way to say only cells / organisms which do not have deleterious mutations survive. Lather rinse and repeat every 20 minutes for 2 billion years and you get dinosaurs, influenza, us and more. All the rest are just details. Enough evidence for you ?

Re:The Answer summed up:

[Rosy At Random]

What makes more sense: that 4712784365435.36354231641801...32132132 is the only number that *really* exists, or that it exists as part of the Real numbers - a bigger, more inclusive but definitely much simpler entity?

Anything complex looks unlikely, arbitrary and absurd just by itself. Some people think the MWI is unjustified because it requires all these extra universes, but to me you still only have the one universe; it's just bigger, simpler, and makes much more sense.

With reality, I suspect the same principle applies. Everything that can exist does so, as it has no reason not to. Nothing makes sense without everything else, and any single thing *implies* everything else.

Does that make us here by chance, or by necessity? Both, I'd say. We are a roll of the dice that had to happen somewhere.

Re:The Answer summed up:

[DeathToBill]

You are right that this sort of reasoning is pointless - because there is no religion that makes this sort of claim anyway. None of the theistic religions conceive of a God that is everything from X backwards, they all make claims about a personal God who is (or perhaps who are) interested and involved in the world in some way. Faith in this sort of personal God is very different from, and much harder to accept than, an intellectual acceptance of the existence of "the divine."

Re:The Answer summed up:

[enickel]

And where does chance get its random numbers from?

The same place we all do http://xkcd.com/221/

Re:The Answer summed up:

[Anonymous Coward]

Where were you going with this?

Re:The Answer summed up:

[sg_oneill]

Except, of course, that there's no natural explanation for existence. Or even a scrap of that "LOT of evidence".

The thing is though theres no equally plausible reason why we shouldn't exist. It might puzzle us that stuff should exist, but the chain of logic for any explanation you put in front of it doesn't improve by adding more first causes on.

What caused the big bang? Well god did. Right what caused god? Seems a pointless step when we cant really find any evidence of god, but we can point a radio telescope at the sky and hear a big old wad of background radiation pointing to a big bang.

But more to the point, if time *starts* at the moment of inception, then there is logically no time before it, and if there is no time before it, then there is no "before it" at all. And if there is no "before", nothing could have caused it. Meaning that it has no cause.

In fact arguably we might even say that even if theres no explaination as to a cause, its because there was no cause. Shit just is.

Re:The Answer summed up:

[Anonymous Coward]

I think that in the end the Universe is simple, not in the sense that a 4year old can grasp all of it but that there isn't a never ending complexity to it.

Do you have proof of your assertion though?

Re:The Answer summed up:

[khallow]

The uncertainty principle is a very base of quantum theory and you cannot pretend it's not valid.

That phenomena says nothing about how the universe exists or possibly came about.

It introduces random chance into every chemical process, hence into biology at every step.

From our limited, classical viewpoints. It doesn't similarly introduce random chance for purely quantum objects (there's no quantum version of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle). A corresponding viewpoint from the quantum level is purely deterministic.

Neither is it evidence that the universe came about through random chance rather than purpose since the principle has nothing to say about that matter.

Enough evidence for you ?

I'm sorry, but it's not evidence of what you want.

Re:The Answer summed up:

[khallow]

What makes more sense: that 4712784365435.36354231641801...32132132 is the only number that *really* exists, or that it exists as part of the Real numbers - a bigger, more inclusive but definitely much simpler entity?

The correct answer is "neither". Numbers do not have an existence in themselves.

Anything complex looks unlikely, arbitrary and absurd just by itself. Some people think the MWI is unjustified because it requires all these extra universes, but to me you still only have the one universe; it's just bigger, simpler, and makes much more sense.

As a possible model of reality, it has some parsimonious features, such as simplicity of overall description. But it also has features which aren't, such as the need for structure (the "many universes") which from our current point of view, do not exist in any sense of the word. We then have to describe the effects of that structure in terms of our universe, as observable internal structure rather than unobservable external structure.

With reality, I suspect the same principle applies. Everything that can exist does so, as it has no reason not to. Nothing makes sense without everything else, and any single thing *implies* everything else.

The only problem is that it doesn't make sense to say things exist which we can't observe either directly or through their effects on our observable universe.

Re:The Answer summed up:

[psiclops]

Why ask why?

because it's fun and interesting........

Re:The Answer summed up:

[khallow]

What do you mean ? The uncertainty principle of quantum theory is not enough for you ? That's the root of all 'chance'.

Of course not. It's an aspect of classical observation of a quantum system with noncommutative observables.

From a purely quantum viewpoint, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle simply doesn't exist and the system is purely deterministic, though perhaps not in a way that a purely quantum component can arbitrary predict (say due to complex chaotic behavior in the quantum system requiring more quantum information/structure to predict than a component of that system can have).

Re:The Answer summed up:

[Rosy At Random]

Well, you can look at existence as being domain-specific, so that different local systems don't exist with respect to each other... but this is just jargonisation. And, besides, that way lies a weird kind of solipsism.

As to the structural requirements of the MWI, well, I'd favour a Kolgmorogov complexity approach -- something is only as complex as the simplest way it can be described/produced. I don't think the universe becomes any more existentially burdensome just because it's bigger, or because its nature is best expressed as a small, incidental, corner of something larger and simpler. Size is not everything.

And as to numbers, in a kind of Platonistic way, I'd say they do exist. Everything is Ideal and everything is a shadow. There's no true base level of reality, just ways of getting from one place to another.

Re:The Answer summed up:

[Anonymous Coward]

Altho we cannot know, we can easily see that something purposefull would require much more explaining than just randomness.
Purpose requires reason, so by stating purpose you need something that can reason and acts on that reason.
It also implies planning and a keen sight.
So, basicly, purpose needs a special kind of control structure (since control structures are the only known entities that can act purposefully).
You'd need to explain what outside the known universe is being purposefull and why.
And then you still have the open question of what started the process that purposefully acted on the known universe to be what it is.

Randomness is just something we find in our environment. Explaining it would not require a loop through concepts that normaly only apply to humans or other life on earth.

The problem with this kind of philosophical bullshit is that it too often hangs on the arbitrary definition of codes humans use to communicate.
Way too self-referential if you ask me.
You cannot just project a human internal process to the outside of the universe. There is no valid logical reason for it unless you want to deny a lot of things that seem to be coherent.

Leave human thought out of the loop and you have a subset with a winner in it.

Re:The Answer summed up:

[Anonymous Coward]

"If you want to believe in God, there are rational reasons if you look for them," No there aren't...

Re:The Answer summed up:

[Anonymous Coward]

Confusing natural laws with human laws never got anyone anywhere....

Natural laws are found, human laws are created.
Big difference and makes your argument mook. ...otherwise i would vote for the party that would reduce gravity.

Re:The Answer summed up:

[Anonymous Coward]

Everything seems to be driven by a random process.
If you wanted to fit design into it you would have to live with a design that works by chance.
So is that still a design?

Re:The Answer summed up:

[Anonymous Coward]

"Why is reality unreasonably well described by mathematical laws. "

Because mathematics is realy a way to describe relations.
And our universe and everything in it is defined by relations.
So, automatically, mathematics will have the ability to describe our universe.
In fact, you can think of things in the universe purely as relations.
In that respect, exisiting is nothing more than relating.
For relating you only need difference.
So, maybe, at the core of existence is the posibility to differentiate.

Re:The Answer summed up:

[dargaud]

That phenomena says nothing about how the universe exists or possibly came about.

That wasn't your question. Any anyway, yes, it does. Random fluctuation in the base state of the vacuum are suspected in the birth of the universe. Well, a bit more complicated than that. The rest of your post is troll level 5.

Re:The Answer summed up:

[jc42]

Then in the afterlife when you find out you're going to burn in hell for eternity, don't say I didn't tell you so.

Except that the real problem is that we have so many religions that have their own models of heaven and hell, all of them incompatible, with no evidence to tell us which one to believe. So even if we pick one, there's a chance approaching certainty that we chose the wrong one, and we're doomed anyway.

And it's possible that all our religious leaders got the details wrong. It'll turn out that when we die, we'll face a god, and find that She hates all creatures with only two legs and no exoskeleton.

So we're better off picking one of the gods that just wants us to live a good life. Then, when it turns out we were wrong, at least we'll have had a few years of life as an independent, thinking creature. And if we do have to face whatever actual god exists, we'll have good grounds for condemning it to its face for denying us the facts we needed to make the right choice.

Re:The Answer summed up:

[die standing]

"When you ask God how it all began, he'll tell you so far as you are concerned, he forgot."

Re:The Answer summed up:

[marcello_dl]

Your statement is illogical, since I actually 'do' things too.
If you bothered with these things, your mistake is called false dichotomy.

Re:The Answer summed up:

[gewalker]

On the contrary, there is lots of evidence. You compare the qualities of the source material, e.g., the Bible vs. Quran, etc. -- the quality that you are looking for is complete and unerring truth. Likewise, review the testimony of witnesses to the writers of the source material, are they credible, intelligent, etc. Do they back the claims of the writers. You compare the hostile testimony, with special emphasis on the hostile testimony to those that were witnesses of the original writers. In other words, you treat the claims of religious authority just like you would that of any other subject.

You will discover find that some writers have little credibility, others have more. You may eventually conclude that none of them are credible or you may eventually conclude that one source is credible, but you should do so based on the evidence. If you don't care what the evidence shows, that is your choice. But there is evidence that would allow you to decide if you considered it carefully.

Re:The Answer summed up:

[Anonymous Coward]

The World exists because our feet need someplace to stand on.

Re:The Answer summed up:

[Anarchduke]

once you define that must be a god because belguim, then...

That kind of language is simply inexcusable. No one should use that word.

Re:The Answer summed up:

[Anarchduke]

you are absolutely right, there is no use putting Descartes before the horse.

Re:The Answer summed up:

[Wandering Idiot]

PhD in Mathematics.

So did you not have to take any basic biology courses along the way, or did you just ignore them because they conflict with your theological preferences or something?

All known organisms have DNA or RNA, evolution (including speciation) is an observed fact... the "proof" you're asking for is the evidence gathered from the past several hundred years of life sciences. You're in front of a PC, go Google some answers.

Unless you're playing some silly semantic game with the meaning of "proof" and "purpose", in which case you're merely really annoying, rather than extremely ignorant.

Re:The Answer summed up:

[Wandering Idiot]

The vast majority of people used to think the stars were all much smaller objects than the Sun too, what's you're point?

Re:The Answer summed up:

[Creedo]

At which point, if you are honest, you would have thrown away both the Bible and the Quran. They are rubbish.

Re:The Answer summed up:

[david_thornley]

Why do we have to ask "Why consciousness?"? All of us who make conscious observations observe it, so (unless we go completely off into left field) we know it exists. We can reason from that without knowing why.

Re:The Answer summed up:

[david_thornley]

IANAP, but it looks to me like the laws of physics cannot be expressed in any system simpler than one containing arithmetic and logic, and that's enough to cause Goedel-incompleteness. If that actually applies here, we can never know the laws of physics, and there will always be things we don't understand.

Re:The Answer summed up:

[khallow]

That phenomena says nothing about how the universe exists or possibly came about.

That wasn't your question.

Or happened on purpose as the case may be. Without evidence one way or another, there's no point to taking a stand on the issue.

Random fluctuation in the base state of the vacuum are suspected in the birth of the universe.

We see random fluctuations because of the way we see the universe. Those random fluctuations don't exist in a purely quantum viewpoint.

Further, suspicion isn't evidence.

Again, where is the evidence?

Re:The Answer summed up:

[khallow]

And as to numbers, in a kind of Platonistic way, I'd say they do exist.

The only problem with that is that Platonic existence is not existence.

Re:The Answer summed up:

[khallow]

So did you not have to take any basic biology courses along the way, or did you just ignore them because they conflict with your theological preferences or something?

Well, what part of basic biology is relevant to the discussion? I'm open to suggestions.

All known organisms have DNA or RNA, evolution (including speciation) is an observed fact...

Does that indicate that the universe has purpose or does it indicate the opposite? It's not clear to me why that should be evidence for either claim.

Unless you're playing some silly semantic game with the meaning of "proof" and "purpose", in which case you're merely really annoying, rather than extremely ignorant.

I'm not. I'm merely pointing out the futility of making claims about the supernatural.

Re:The Answer summed up:

[hvm2hvm]

That says that proving theorems in complex enough systems is not guaranteed to be possible. It doesn't have anything to do with creating physical models and testing them through experimentation. Also, arithmetic and logic are certainly used when describing and using those models but are not relevant to the issue I was referring to.

Re:The Answer summed up:

[jc42]

You're conflating two kinds of law: human law can be broken, laws of nature can't.

Actually, this is one of the examples that has been used to support what linguists call the "Sapir-Whorf hypothesis" (or Whorfianism for short). This is the idea that your language has either influence (in the "weak form") or control (in the "strong form") over your cognitive abilities, your beliefs, and your behavior.

There are languages that use different words for these two concepts, and the fun part of this linguistic analysis is that, while statements such as "The universe obeys laws, and if there are laws, there must be a law-giver, which we call God" can be translated into such languages, the results doesn't make sense. But a native speaker of a language such as English which conflatest the two concepts is likely to accept such statements as logical and valid.

It isn't all that hard to explain the situation in English, though, at least to someone able to follow basic mathematical-style reasoning. We just define two marked versions of the word, for example:

Llaw (legal law): A statement of what people should or shouldn't do. Nlaw (natural law): A statement of how something in the physical universe works.

I've also seen it described as: Llaws describe what what we think should happen; Nlaws describe what actually does happen. But English uses the same word for both.

The above proof-of-God argument now may be rewritten as "The universe obeys Nlaws, and if there are Nlaws, there must be a Llaw-giver, which we call God" . This replicates the problem of translating into languages that use different words for the two concepts.

For people who can't follow that, we might further comment on the reaction when we discover someone violating a Llaw. They are typically arrested, tried, and punished for the violation. In the case of something found violating an NLaw, however, we react by deciding that the Nlaw was wrong, and finding a way to revise it so that the new observation is "legal".

For example, suppose we observe a violation of the Nlaw of Gravity. Would we react by punishing the object that was doing it? Probably not; we'd more likely study it and learn to build an anti-gravity drive. But suppose we observed someone committing a murder. Would we say "Hmmm; it looks like murder isn't against the Llaw after all; how can we rewrite it so that this murder becomes legal?"

If someone can't handle the logic of this, they're probably hopeless. Or maybe they can be used as a real-life example of the Whorfianism at work. ;-)

In any case, the serious suggestion that the existence of natural laws proves the existence of a god or gods is a classical example of what amounts to a pun in English (and French and German, and dates back to Latin) that has historically been viewed as a valid argument for an ultimate creator and law-giver. It's easy to argue in this case that a bug in the language has had a strong influence on the concepts and beliefs of at least some speakers of that language.

And the existence of explanations like the above is a counter-argument that, with a bit of thought, people can understand and resist this sort of trick, counteracting the strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in at least one case.

Re:The Answer summed up:

[Rosy At Random]

Is it not? Convince me :-)

Re:The Answer summed up:

[mcswell]

I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of this, which the margin of this post is too narrow to contain.

Re:The Answer summed up:

[Golddess]

I must say, this is the first time I've heard of Belgium used as proof that there is a god. Actually, a quick google of god belgium shows that if there is a god, then god isn't too fond of Belgium.

Re:The Answer summed up:

[TheLink]

Well the story is "Why does the world exist?" But all of us who make conscious observations obeserve it. We know it exists. We can reason from that without knowing why.

So why does this Slashdot story and the book exist?

Go figure ;).

Re:The Answer summed up:

[khallow]

Convince you of what? Shouldn't someone have to actually define Platonic existence first?

Re:The Answer summed up:

[Rosy At Random]

Convince me that there's a fundamental difference between the way we exist and the way abstract concepts do.

Re:The Answer summed up:

[khallow]

I'm confused. Do you think the evidence doesn't exist just because you don't know about it?

Well, my thinking here is that we have the more general case where nobody here happens to have such evidence. That indicates to me evidence that there may well not be evidence whether the universe has some universal purpose or was created through chance.

Anyway, there's lots of info about the origin of humanity out there just waiting for you to study it.

And how does that provide evidence for the questions above? I don't see the connection.

I don't think you need me to help you find it, however I will recommend going to the nearest university and ask around there.

Again. No evidence.

Re:The Answer summed up:

[khallow]

abstract

There's the difference. We aren't abstract, but concepts are by definition abstract. Looking up the relevant first definition of "abstract":

thought of apart from concrete realities, specific objects, or actual instances

We are an actual instance, part of a concrete reality.

But take an abstract concept, such as "three". We never observe three. Instead, we observe three things. It has no being in itself, but provides part of a framework for understanding and manipulating our reality and ideas.

For example, knowing that we have three things in a group, then we can do basic arithmetic manipulation of that group. We can add another thing to make four things in the group. We can take one thing away to make two things in the group. We can double the number of things to get six things in the group or add this group to another group, and so on.

From a mathematical point of view, I distinguish between the concept and a representation of of that concept. "Three" is a concept. "Three things" are a representation of the concept of three. The concept doesn't exist, the representation does and can do so even if one didn't intend for it to be a representation of three.

Even if one considers concepts to exist because their representations exist, this has a profound effect on what concepts are considered to exist. For example, not every concept was, is, or will be represented in our universe, not even as an idea in our heads or in some computational machine). There's too many concepts (an uncountable number of them), and too little space (a countable amount in an information sense). In fact, if one somehow able with a suitably powerful "oracle" machine to randomly pick out concepts from the pool of potential concepts, one wouldn't ever pick out a concept that would manifest in our universe.

Re:The Answer summed up:

[Boronx]

And you'll never look for yourself.

Re:The Answer summed up:

[khallow]

And you'll never look for yourself.

I believe in comparative advantage here. It's simply not a good use of my time or resources to answer such questions when there are people brighter and a whole lot better funded to research such issues.

Plus, it's just not that simple a question to answer. For example, we can observe the processes that lead to humans, and those appear to be random to a high degree. There's no real harm in treating such processes as random.

But to go from that to assume without evidence that the universe is similarly created by random processes is an unscientific leap of faith.

Re:The Answer summed up:

[khallow]

So, basicly, purpose needs a special kind of control structure (since control structures are the only known entities that can act purposefully).

That's an interesting take. One might never be able to discern purpose, but existence of possible control structures or means for control may be a different matter.

Re:The Answer summed up:

[grantspassalan]

"The supernatural is completely unknowable,..."

I agree with you and so is the existence of God unknowable. However, my dislike of liver and the fact that I love my wife and family is also unknowable, unless I reveal that fact to you. Even then, there is no way that you can check this out scientifically, but you simply have to believe me or not. So the existence of God and what he is like can only come to us by revelation we have to believe or not. You can choose whether to believe me concerning my aversion to liver. Similarly you also can choose to believe whatever God tells you. God has left a written record of his dealings with man in a collection of 66 books written by 40 different authors over about 1500 years. This collection of books is commonly known as the Bible. Again, you have to believe or disbelieve that these men heard from God and correctly transmitted the information that God wanted to pass on through them. You have to choose to believe or disbelieve. It is not that you can verify everything you are told or read. I happen to choose to believe what has been written down in the biblical records and you don't. That's all.

Re:The Answer summed up:

[grantspassalan]

Obviously the laws of nature existed long before any human being. I am saying that the mind of God, being far superior to any human mind, came up with the laws of nature. Laws can only come from a mind. Human laws come from humans and natural laws, from the maker of nature, namely God in whose mind they all originated. Only a mind providing information together with energy can create order out of chaos.

Re:The Answer summed up:

[grantspassalan]

There are 2 kinds of laws. You mentioned the law of gravity. Humans have no choice about that. There is an immediate built-in punishment for those that flout this natural law given by God. Punishment for murder, theft or of the moral laws of God is not always immediate, but just a certain. Sometimes violators get away with it for a whole lifetime. This causes the rest of us to think that they have gotten away Scot free forever. No one can repeal the law of cause and effect, no matter how long the delay may take. Murderers, thieves, liars and other violators of divine law will be punished even if the punishment is not instant, such as it is for most natural laws. My main point was that all laws, whether human or natural, arise either in human minds or in God's mind respectively.

Re:The Answer summed up:

[grantspassalan]

You're conflating two kinds of law: human law can be broken, laws of nature can't.

In any case, the serious suggestion that the existence of natural laws proves the existence of a god or gods is a classical example of what amounts to a pun in English (and French and German, and dates back to Latin) that has historically been viewed as a valid argument for an ultimate creator and law-giver. It's easy to argue in this case that a bug in the language has had a strong influence on the concepts and beliefs of at least some speakers of that language.

And the existence of explanations like the above is a counter-argument that, with a bit of thought, people can understand and resist this sort of trick, counteracting the strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in at least one case.

I am in no way trying to prove there is a God, because that cannot be done in any language or human endeavor. Like a jury, you can only consider evidence. There is never any proof except perhaps in mathematics.

There is solid evidence of all human laws are 1st formulated in human minds. It is logical that this evidence can be extended to the existence of laws of nature originating in the mind of God. Like a jury, you can accept and believe the evidence, or you can refuse to. When someone violates a law of nature, the consequences are usually instantaneous. God's moral laws are different in this respect. Humans can seemingly with impunity violate God's moral laws, often for a whole lifetime, and seem to get away with it. This is because God has chosen to not give us human beings a direct instantaneous glimpse into what happens after physical death.

For this information, we have to depend on what God has revealed in the Bible. We have to believe this information, because we cannot independently verify it. We have to believe that the 40 different authors that wrote the 66 books of the Bible were truthful and reliable. If you choose not to believe these writings, they nevertheless apply to you. In these writings it is recorded that “it is appointed unto men once to die, but after that comes judgment”. I don't think that you disbelieve the 1st part of the sentence about dying, but you may disbelieve the 2nd part about judgment. You may freely choose to disbelieve the 2nd part, but after you die, you will find out whether it was true or not. Unfortunately for you, it will be too late then. While you are still here on Earth, you can escape this judgment, if you believe that Jesus Christ suffered the judgment for you on the cross.

Re:The Answer summed up:

[grantspassalan]

That the laws of nature came from the mind of God.

Re:The Answer summed up:

[grantspassalan]

Confusing natural laws with human laws never got anyone anywhere....

Natural laws are found, human laws are created.
Big difference and makes your argument mook. ...otherwise i would vote for the party that would reduce gravity.

Natural laws are found only because humans were not around when God created them. The point is that natural laws came from the mind of God.

Re:The Answer summed up:

[grantspassalan]

The vast majority of people used to think the stars were all much smaller objects than the Sun too, what's you're point?

My point is that you have to believe there is a God. There is no proof, except in mathematics may be. Human laws come from human minds and natural laws came from the mind of God. In either case, laws only originate in a mind. This does not “prove” that there is a God, but the laws of nature provide evidence through their complexity, that a great mind is behind them. These laws of nature did not come into being by chance any more than human laws come into being by chance.

Remind me, please,

[Black Parrot]

why you would consult a theologian regarding questions about reality?

Re:Remind me, please,

[Anonymous Coward]

Because, regardless of what the Slashdot community may think, theology is enjoying a renaissance in the past 20 years or so. Philosophy of Religion is enjoying an influx of young, intelligent people who are producing new and interesting works and God isn't going anywhere any time soon.

Re:Remind me, please,

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting, so you think young philosophers of religion should be equated to young bath salt abusers?

Re:Remind me, please,

[Black Parrot]

Interesting, so you think young philosophers of religion should be equated to young bath salt abusers?

The analogy was to pushers rather than to users. But either way the answer is yes, in terms of being experts on the nature of reality.

Re:Remind me, please,

[Anonymous Coward]

If true, the "renaissance" is only occuring because of the expansion of media conduits over the last 30 years. All types of religion, especially radical Christianity, are now available via 24 hour cable channels and the internet. Megachurches like the type we see today could not have existed before the Reagan era. They flourished during the Bush Jr. regime mainly due to 9/11 and the cable news channels, coupled with the massive political/religious agenda pushed by Ralph Reed, et. al. in the late 90's.

Re:Remind me, please,

[atlasdropperofworlds]

Odd, all the data I've seen has pointed to a global decline, led by western nations, for the last 30 years.

Re:Remind me, please,

[canadian_right]

Theology has been on the decline since the 1600's. Excepting a few small schools in the USA and Madrasah's in the muslim world, theology is a minor subsection of the philosophy department of any good university.

Re:Remind me, please,

[Pseudonym]

Oh, please.

In the Stone Age, "music", "art", "culture", "religion" and "medicine" were not distinct concepts, and were often practiced by the same people. These started splitting off into distinct fields during the Classical era. But we wouldn't say that music has been on the decline since the Stone Age just because there's very little medicine in it these days.

Of course theology is a minor subsection of the philosophy department. Philosophy, like everything, is becoming more specialised as time goes on.

And for the record, theologians study all sorts of things, including the culture, linguistics, history and anthropology of the Ancient Near East, or the history of Christianity. If you ignore those useless North American "bible colleges", the majority of this is good, solid research. There is more theology happening today than there has ever been. Hell, you don't even have to be a theist to be a theologian these days.

Re:Remind me, please,

[LordLimecat]

Anyone seriously pursuing a degree in theology generally isnt going to go to Berkeley's theology department; theres this thing called "Seminary" for those who actually want to study it seriously.

Re:Remind me, please,

[AK Marc]

Megachurches like the type we see today could not have existed before the Reagan era.

I had a number of HS classmates go to Oral Roberts University (enrolled 1991 as freshmen). For some reason, that name rings a bell. Or a Steve Martin movie around that time (1992) making fun of a faith healer based on Reagan-era televangelists. There were plenty of magachurches on TV in the 1970s and 1980s.

Re:Remind me, please,

[Boronx]

I am sad to hear that the youths of today wasting their lives.

Re:Remind me, please,

[bigbird]

You think it's a waste to study some of the big questions about life but your sig points to a gaming site??

Re:Remind me, please,

[Boronx]

"Meaning" is something minds give to events. God either doesn't exist or is not yet knowable, so there's no knowable purpose to anything except what we can give. There's no such thing as a soul.

These are not just my opinions, they are the current state of knowledge. These questions used to be big in the same way that "If the Earth is moving, how come the speed of light is the same in every direction?" is a big question. That is, until you stop looking at the problem all wrong.

Anybody studying theology, I mean, seriously trying to understand the world from a religious perspective, is wasting their time. Christian philosophy, like any philosophy that adheres to Platonic notion of ideas, is totally incapable of dealing with what we're finding out these days.

Re:Remind me, please,

[tchi.keufte]

following your way of thinking, the same question applies to a philosopher or a logician, don't you think ?

Re:Remind me, please,

[alexgieg]

There's no such thing as a soul.

It depends on how you take the word. If one means some kind of intelligent smoke embedded in the body, which, granted, is probably how many people visualize it, sure, it doesn't. But then you have from its original, quite concrete linguistic meaning of "that which makes something move", for which a dictionary could provide "soul: n. any kind of power source", to Aristotelian-derived positions in terms of body shape, for which it would be something like "soul: n. (math, logic, biology) an equation or logical description of the disposition of atoms required so as to obtain a functional organic body; syn. with: molecular formula, DNA, proteinomics, ecology, biography etc."

Christian philosophy, like any philosophy that adheres to Platonic notion of ideas, is totally incapable of dealing with what we're finding out these days.

The original version, sure. But it's been expanded quite a lot. Take the DNA, for instance. If you consider it as a logical problem, you have a open bound set of possible DNAs: A, C, T, G, AC, AT, AG, CT, CG, TG, ACT, ACG... up to and including every single organism that ever lived or will live, plus a much more gigantic set of ones which never did and never will. The listing is open bound and purely logical, no different from any math sequence, and like them it doesn't depend on any living being with one or other of these possible DNAs actually existing, only on pure logic for the formal definition and, if one so desired, a computer to go about listing them. So, if you take the position that math conclusion are true, not a mere invention of the human mind, you have the quite interesting consequence that any living being is an instantiation of an archetypal DNA sequence that's existed since forever in the realm of math truths. Plus: there's no limit on how many instantiations of that same exact sequence can exist (twins, clones, fully lab-engineered etc.), and that each one eternally outlives their instantiations. And presto: here's your Platonic ideas vindicated and well, within biology of all things.

By the way, this approach works quite nicely when one wants to make Christian notions compatible with evolution. Just say God created all "species" (DNAs) ideas "in the beginning" (of forever), while their method of instantiation is mostly evolution, which goes around causing a few among that infinite set to actually appear, but not actually creating anything new, since the whole set is logically predetermined. Easy enough! :-)

Re:Remind me, please,

[Forty Two Tenfold]

Philosophy of Religion

... is a contradiction in terms.

Re:Remind me, please,

[Boronx]

That's exactly what I mean by Platonic ideas not being adequate to our level of understanding. We're finding that genetic information exists beyond what's coded in DNA. The map is not the territory. It's our concepts of the world that are pale shadows of reality, not the other way around.

More than just discrete sequences, but any system at all may have been imagined "in the beginning" by God. This adds nothing to help our understanding of the system. It also does nothing to help our understanding of God since theologians have no way of finding out whether God really did imagine such things.

Re:Remind me, please,

[alexgieg]

We're finding that genetic information exists beyond what's coded in DNA.

That trivial to solve. Add as many parameter as you need and iterate over them. Let's say you want to add proteinomics to the problem. You've just expanded the mapping to (set of all possible DNAs) * (set of all possible proteins). Suppose the environment is important too. Then you expand it again, to ((set of all possible DNAs) * (set of all possible proteins)) ^ (set of all possible interactions). And so on and so forth, all of which still neatly delimited to cardinality Aleph-0.

The map is not the territory. It's our concepts of the world that are pale shadows of reality, not the other way around.

True enough, but even so, mapping helps our understanding. Without them we're reduced to what passed for science in the 15th century, i.e., go around personally experiencing lots and lots and lots of individual things because anything else, including trying to apply math or logic to reality, is mere Platonism. After all, numbers aren't real, only concrete stuff you can hold in you hands devoid of all conceptual frameworking, is real.

... theologians have no way of finding out whether God really did imagine such things.

But they can propose the question. We know, from the platonic mapping, that the existent, even if infinitely complex, is but a small subset of the domain of possibles. So a lot of questions arise on, for example, what exactly is this larger domain, if it has limits and of which nature, what might encompass it, how is it that we can even imagine it, be it real or not, etc. The usual pattern is to name encompassing totality "god", but there's no need to use this term if one thinks its other, more mythological meanings, can cause issues.

Such mappings' main utility isn't in providing answers. The answers, if any, are usually the uninteresting part, specially because they're always lacking. The ability serious theologians and philosophers have to point inconsistencies in any deeply held belief system, including materialist ones, is what's really fun in all of this. The questions, and the attempts to cope with them, are the awesome part.

Re:Remind me, please,

[Boronx]

In the previous posts you wrote about God as being able to conceive of the universe, essentially a being whose map is the territory. But in the third paragraph of the last post you describe a god that is the conception of the universe (or all possible universes). Or perhaps better, a god that is the range of all possible states in the state-space of the universe. The second version of God is just a mental construct and is pretty far afield from any Christian theology, since Christians at least postulate a god that exists. To label such an idea "God" and call the study of it theology makes no more sense than to label Obama "God" and call the study of American politics theology.

OTOH, your first description of God ... what conclusion can you draw from such an idea of God that advances knowledge in any way? How can it improve the quality of our maps? It's good to poke holes in other people's ideas, but that's just wielding logic. A theologian must do more than apply logic. He must build his own beliefs upon a theory of God, or else he is merely a philosopher. There are not many lessons from history that bear out 100%, but no advancement in the understanding of the universe has rested on a theory of God. Most often people have to step away from theology in order to get anywhere.

Numbers are also just mental constructs. So why is theology a waste of time when mathematics isn't? Mathematicians are zealous about identifying their assumptions and eliminating unneeded assumptions. A Mathematician would never want to shoehorn in an assumption for cultural reasons. This commitment and the associated rigor that goes with it are essential to the value of Mathematics, which is that complicated intellectual structures can be safely constructed, their use can be properly defined, and their correctness can be easily communicated. But shoehorning in assumptions and multiplying assumptions are a theologian’s bread and butter.

Re:Remind me, please,

[Black Parrot]

following your way of thinking, the same question applies to a philosopher or a logician, don't you think ?

Yeah, I wouldn't go running to Penrose with questions about life, the universe, and everything either.

Shame.

[gallondr00nk]

I first read that as "Ask Slashdot: Why Does The World Exist?"

Imagine my disappointment.

Re:Shame.

[Kittenman]

I first read that as "Ask Slashdot: Why Does The World Exist?"

Imagine my disappointment.

Would be an interesting poll. Especially the CowboyNeal option.

Re:Shame.

[Anonymous Coward]

I first read that as "Ask Slashdot: Why Does The World Exist?"

Imagine my disappointment.

Would be an interesting poll. Especially the CowboyNeal option.

Breasts.

Re:Shame.

[AK Marc]

I first read that as "Ask Slashdot: Why Does The World Exist?"

Imagine my disappointment.

Would be an interesting poll. Especially the CowboyNeal option.

Breasts.

Pics or it didn't happen.

Re:Shame.

[Anonymous Coward]

Would be an interesting poll. Especially the CowboyNeal option.

Breasts.

Pics or it didn't happen.

It did happen.

Re:Shame.

[ignavus]

I first read that as "Ask Slashdot: Why Does The World Exist?"

Imagine my disappointment.

Without the world, there would be no basements.

Without basements, there's be no Slashdot readership.

Without Slashdot readership, there'd be no Slashdot.

So, without the world, there'd be no Slashdot. That is why the world exists.

Re:Shame.

[Anonymous Coward]

I first read that as "Ask Slashdot: Why Does The World Exist?"

Imagine my disappointment.

Hey, wait! Please tell us!!!

Where's Step 1

[MightyMartian]

I think we need a prequel, where the question itself is studied, and reasons provided for why it is a sensible question to even ask.

Re:Where's Step 1

[John Allsup]

When we get to the prequel to the prequel to the prequel to the prequel to the...

When does this stop?

We may as well stop where we are now and answer the question posed without worrying about foundational prequels.

Re:Where's Step 1

[Black Parrot]

I think we need a prequel

We live in Existence IV. IMO the more recent Existence I-III were real disappointments. Most people seem to like Existence V the best.

Re:Where's Step 1

[Black Parrot]

When does this stop?

It's prequels all the way down, of course.

Re:Where's Step 1

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

As I read once, a "quantum potential" is still a darn sight away from nothingness.

Given they can't even tell what happens very near the big bang, much less "before" it, if there even was a before, such speculation on our part is currently ludicrous. If "stuff" currently eternally existed, perhaps going through astounding transformations via big bangs, crunches, or the occasional new universe from a quantum fluctuation, that would resolve the issue...somewhat.

Re:Where's Step 1

[Artifakt]

Your last two sentences are equally accurate if we substitute "Star Wars" for "Existance".

Re:Where's Step 1

[ArsonSmith]

quite simply because it can.

Re:Where's Step 1

[ArsonSmith]

Your oblivious reply really did make his lame joke much funnier.

Re:Where's Step 1

[Anonymous Coward]

I think we need a prequel, where the question itself is studied, and reasons provided for why it is a sensible question to even ask.

Maybe we can build a huge planet-sized super computer to figure this out.

Pure Intellectual Masturbation?

[gagol]

Did anyone read the book yet? It seems to me to be a huge exercise in intellectual masturbation... As much as I can enjoy philosophy, I am more interested in what I can do to make our world a little bit better. I for one will not finance the lifestyle of the author. Too many people are still hungry around the world to invest in this. And the answer is 42, every geek knows that!

Re:Pure Intellectual Masturbation?

[Crypto Gnome]

Pure Intellectual Masturbation?

You Say That Like It's A Bad Thing - Let me just remind you where you are posting, sir.

- This Is Slashdot!
- We're all intellectuals (of one sort or another)
- if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself

Re:Pure Intellectual Masturbation?

[Black Parrot]

Did anyone read the book yet? It seems to me to be a huge exercise in intellectual masturbation

It's a matter of supply and demand: There are thousands of books that are huge exercises in anti-intellectual masturbation, so they're not newsworthy..

Re:Pure Intellectual Masturbation?

[Anonymous Coward]

And as this is a public showing of someone else's intellectual masturbation, does that make it a kind of intellectual pr0n?

Re:Pure Intellectual Masturbation?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, for true intellectual masturbation we have the bogroll that makes up much of the academic literature. Really, now that research funding is critical and short term contracts the norm, the need for writing whatever will satisfy the pen pushers in the funding bodies has decimated the true spirit of intellectual endeavour that was the academic world of old. People have less time for proper research than they did because of targets to publish.

Re:Pure Intellectual Masturbation?

[Anonymous Coward]

What do you have against masturbation?

"You have the luxury of not knowing what I know... My masturbation, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives*. You want my sperm on that wall, you need my sperm on that wall..."

*less time to kill people

Re:Pure Intellectual Masturbation?

[Anonymous Coward]

This being slashdot, maybe they thought a change from regular masterbation might break the monotony?

Re:Pure Intellectual Masturbation?

[canadian_right]

A Universe from Nothing is a book from a physicist that covers the same ground from a purely physics point of view.

Re:Pure Intellectual Masturbation?

[Anonymous Coward]

"nothing" isn't what it used to be.

Re:Pure Intellectual Masturbation?

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't existence just a long drawn out session of mental and physical masturbation?

Re:Pure Intellectual Masturbation?

[Black Parrot]

"nothing" isn't what it used to be.

Nothing is.

Re:Pure Intellectual Masturbation?

[Anonymous Coward]

"We're all intellectuals (of one sort or another)"

Yes, it seems that some are anti-intellectuals.

Obvious

[fm6]

If the world didn't exist, nobody would be asking why it did.

Re:Obvious

[Crypto Gnome]

If the world didn't exist, nobody would be asking why it did.

Oddly enough people have made careers discussing the implication of that observation.

- Does The World Exist so that someone could ask why?

- or Does The World Exist because someone asked why (insert schrodinger-eqsue thought experiment and collapsing waveforms here)

Re:Obvious

[fm6]

But somehow, they never seem to ask the most important question of all: Does anybody give a shit?

Re:Obvious

[Anonymous Coward]

If the world didn't exist, nobody would be asking why it did.

Gratz, you have discovered the anthropic principle.

Re:Obvious

[Black Parrot]

If the world didn't exist, nobody would be asking why it did.

Unless they thought it existed, and wondered why.

Re:Obvious

[RicktheBrick]

I thought there would at least mention the big bang theory. Did the big bang create the universe? Was it the very first time and only time that the big bang occurred? Will the universe end in the big chill? Will the universe use up all the energy in existence? What is time and did it exist before the big bang? Will time ever cease to exist? As for death, there was an atheist who ask if anyone was worried about the 13 billion years prior to there existence so why worry about the time after death? I did not have anything to worry with during those times but somehow I received the gift of life. I would think that if there is any intelligence behind my receiving the gift of life it would not be so cruel to allow any life to cease to exit, And if there was no intelligence behind existence than how did such a complicated universe come into existence? Stephen Hawking writes that the force of gravity created everything out of nothing but if there was nothing how did the force of gravity exist?

Re:Obvious

[artor3]

While that's true, it's not an answer.

If you wake up one morning and there isn't a cast iron statue of a giraffe in your yard, you wouldn't ask why not. But that's not a reason for the statue to be there.

Re:Obvious

[fm6]

I'm pretty sure that people who don't exist don't think about much of anything.

Re:Obvious

[fm6]

That's a bad analogy,. People are not the product of cast iron giraffes. A better analogy is to pretend that you are a cast iron giraffe. So tell me, why are you a cast iron giraffe and not a glass frisbee?

Re:Obvious

[vmaxxxed]

You are very right, but you need to say it this way:

We all agree that nothing does not exists (If you don’t agree, don’t bother reading the rest and go buy the book.), then, thinking what would happen if the universe didn't exist is absurd.

So, we exist. Then, the real question is: Why does the universe and us exist as we are, and not otherwise ?

From there we can also ask: On what does it depend, or whom ??

-Alex

Re:Obvious

[Anonymous Coward]

That's even better than "god did it":

Q. Why did the civil war start?
A. Because I wouldn't exist otherwise.

Re:Obvious

[artor3]

Your analogy doesn't fit.

The question is "Why does the world exist?" not "Why is the world able to support life?"

There is a real answer to question of why the world exists. We don't know it, and it might not be possible for us to know it, but there is a reason. And that reason is most certainly not "Because humans exist to ask about it!"

The second question, which is the one that the anthropic principle is meant to address, is down to chance. There was a chance that the universe ended up with the right parameters to support conscious life, and since we're here, this universe obviously hit that chance, no matter how remote the odds were.

Re:Obvious

[Khashishi]

This merely shifts the question to: why is somebody asking why the world exists. It's a step in the wrong direction.

Re:Obvious

[LordLimecat]

Gratz, you discovered Decartes "I think, therefore I am."

Re:Obvious

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, that's an easy one. I live, therefore I shit.

Re:Obvious

[fm6]

I didn't say that people who think exist. I said that people who don't exist don't think.

I've always thought that Rene should have said, "I think I think, therefore I think I am." I mean, if you're not going to postulate that you yourself exist, why should you postulate that you think?

Re:Obvious

[LordLimecat]

As I understand it, he was questioning whether he existed, or alternatively douting his existence. But the way out of that little mind virus is thus: The very fact that he doubted, proved that he existed, for actions require an actioner, and certainly "to doubt" was an action. You could try to doubt your own doubt, but youre back where you started-- who is doing the doubting, if noone exists?

Your ending statement is practically a tautology: you cant get away from the problem by essentially saying "why should you think you think", because "thinking you dont think" involves yet more thinking.

Re:Obvious

[fm6]

I'm not arguing the thinking about thinking is not proof that you're thinking. I'm arguing that it's silly to be and not take that as proof of being.

Re:Obvious

[Boronx]

Discovered ... or applied?

Re:Obvious

[Boronx]

Or perhaps all possible universes exist so we were bound to exist in one of them.

And it's conceivable that the universe is not caused by anything and therefore doesn't have a reason.

To my untrained brain, we aren't able to explain the reason for even the smallest events. It could be that such reasons are not to be found.

Re:Obvious

[Boronx]

One implication of this is that you will never die.

Re:Obvious

[bigbird]

Obviously, this is trivially correct - the world existing is a prerequisite to asking about anything. But it says nothing about why we exist.

Re:Obvious

[fm6]

Huh?

Re:Obvious

[Black Parrot]

If the world didn't exist, nobody would be asking why it did.

Oddly enough people have made careers discussing the implication of that observation.

In Chicago people make careers out of hanging around busy sidewalks drumming on big plastic buckets.

In both cases, whether it's a worthwhile career is a matter of opinion.

Re:Obvious

[ArsonSmith]

or how will this knowledge get me laid more? Ohh wait slashdot...how with this knowledge get me laid?

Re:Obvious

[Boronx]

Ok, I'm taking a liberty by assuming infinitely branching universes.

In such a system, you will find yourself at every point in time in a universe such that you're still alive. You're more likely to find yourself in worlds where you had the highest probability of survival.

If you played Russian Roulette 100 times, you would survive. I do not recommend this, since you'd probably survive with some horrible freak injury rather than by never being shot in the head.

Think of it as survivors' bias except with the tail wagging the dog.

And I'm not quite right to say you will never die. You will only live as long as there is some possible future universe where you could live. If it becomes absolutely physically impossible for you to survive, then you'll die.

BTW, your probability of survival goes up if you consider this post nonsense, so you will most likely find yourself in a universe where you hold that opinion.

Re:Obvious

[fm6]

OK, first of all, many worlds interpretation: makes good science fiction, but not that popular among real scientists.

Anyway, infinitely branching universes means infinitely many ways to die, And that's excluding the simple fact that every universe has entropy, which gets us all in the end.

Re:Obvious

[Anonymous Coward]

I didn't say that people who think exist. I said that people who don't exist don't think.

The two statements are logically equivalent.

Re:Obvious

[Boronx]

The I've been misinformed. I thought Many Worlds was still a legitimate view. Of course there are infinite universes where you die off, but this doesn't matter as long as there're some universes where you don't. And yeah, entropy will probably make all universes unlivable at some point.

Re:Obvious

[Anonymous Coward]

The contrapositive of a thing is equivalent to the original thing.

Re:Obvious

[NotReallyComplex]

Which is wrong. The only thing you can conclude from 'I think' is that there are thoughts.

Re:Obvious

[NotReallyComplex]

Neither? :)

Re:Obvious

[LordLimecat]

Think is a verb; verbs a gramatical subject, that is one who performs them. In this case, the subject is "I", who must necessarily exist in order perform the verb "think". You can doubt that you are in fact thinking, but doubting is just another kind of thinking.

To put it simply, the existence of thoughts requires a thinker.

Re:Obvious

[LordLimecat]

*verbs require a subject

Pop Philosophy, Horray?

[narcc]

This will be fun. A discussion about pop philosophy centered around a book written for the casual reader presented to an audience that, history has shown, knows absolutely nothing about the subject, yet assumes that they know everything.

I expect the quality of comments here to be on-par with those found on rapture ready and world net daily.

Re:Pop Philosophy, Horray?

[Anonymous Coward]

World Net Daily and Rapture Ready have some of the best satire on the net. They both put The Onion to shame.

Obviously

[Anonymous Coward]

So we can all be Apple customers.

Something always arises from nothing

[Anonymous Coward]

Where else would you put it?

Perhaps I Didn't Explain the Opening Well Enough

[eldavojohn]

I think we need a prequel, where the question itself is studied, and reasons provided for why it is a sensible question to even ask.

I grew up with the mindset that all questions are valid although some are more pragmatic than others. Surely such a question that has caused so much discussion and elicited statements from so many of our greatest thinkers has some value in being asked?

I bought the book and, obviously, I enjoyed the book so I think it's a sensible question. I also think that the beginning of the book does a decent job for setting the stage for the question and driving the question without need for a prequel that looks at whether or not it is valid to study.

I guess I would answer your statement with the following (found throughout the book): Is Nothing simple? Would ours be a simpler universe if nothing existed? Then why doesn't the Law of Parsimony (alias Occam's Razor) dictate that a Nothing be in our place instead of our something?

That line of thought doesn't pique your interest in the least?

Like many others...

[Anonymous Coward]

I honestly wish I knew. It's something that I think about almost every day and I find that I don't get any closer to answering the question. I only find myself asking more questions.

Meanwhile, everything continues unabated.

Why does The World Exist

[Anonymous Coward]

Why does the world exist? To determine the "question" to life the universe and everything. To which already know the answer to be 42.

Sure Why Not?

[eldavojohn]

Did anyone read the book yet?

Reviewer here and yes, yes I did read the book. I guess you are suspicious that I made all that up on the spot and submitted it to Slashdot so I'll try to make my reviews a little lengthier next time :-)

It seems to me to be a huge exercise in intellectual masturbation...

Hmmm, well, I think that some of the topics covered in the book have great worth to society. If you think that Roger Penrose and Steven Weinberg amount to intellectual masturbation then I guess we would find ourselves at odds. Nevertheless, the subject of this book has troubled a great many people and providing a completely sound answer to this question would at the very least make our world a little better in providing knowledge to people who yearn for this answer.

The worth of this book is best measured by the amount of groundwork that is laid and examined by the author without having to read tome after tome in encyclopedias of philosophy. This particular topic interests me and so I purchased this book.

I for one will not finance the lifestyle of the author. Too many people are still hungry around the world to invest in this.

Too many people are still hungry around the world for you to be writing on Slashdot instead of helping them! Burst forth! Run to your nearest soup kitchen and volunteer! Do you own a TV, computer or pay for an internet connection?! Why are you not fencing your unnecessary belongings and helping the poor starving people? Your argument could be used to halt any sort of hobby or interest -- is that a valid position?

Re:Sure Why Not?

[gagol]

It was not a critic of your review, well written and all, I was simply looking forward for other opinions. And yes, I own a small netbook with Internet Access but that's it. Not TV, no big stereo systems, and I do volunteer work at soup kitchens and donate largely to various charities. The big questions are of some interest to me, however I am more interested in fundamental scientific research about what we know about the universe. This book seems to be metaphysical at best, and of no help to me.

This does not mean other people can be interested in the topics covered, but I would probably not have a beer with them since we probably don't share much interests. The best thing about our world, is our freedom to form opinions and I highly cherish the variety. Otherwise the world would be so boring, humanity would have stagnate a long, long ago ;-)

Looking forward for your next book review.

Re:Sure Why Not?

[colinrichardday]

If you think that Roger Penrose and Steven Weinberg amount to intellectual masturbation then I guess we would find ourselves at odds.

Penrose and Weinberg may be brilliant, but that doesn't mean that this particular question is worth pursuing.

Why are you not fencing your unnecessary belongings and helping the poor starving people?

Because you can only fence stuff that you stole.

documentary

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone know of a documentary on this topic? Just curious.

Obviously Nothing is Imposible

[stkpogo]

That's what some say...

Citation?

[deanklear]

Is that a faith-based fact?

According to Gallup, American confidence in organized religion is at an all time low. Also, 7 out of 10 Americans see religious influence declining in America.

Re:Citation?

[CRCulver]

Your poll speaks of "organized religion". Interest in philosophy of religion doesn't necessary imply belief in organized religion -- many philosophers of religion are content to examine questions of the existence of a deity without any belief in the doctrines peculiar to any particular religion. And although the West sees declining support for organized religion, belief in the supernatural remains predominant even in highly secular places like the Nordic countries.

Re:Citation?

[Black Parrot]

Is that a faith-based fact?

Which brings us back to the point: why ask a religious authority about reality? There's an infinite variety of faith-based "facts".

Re:Citation?

[grantspassalan]

Is that a faith-based fact?

Which brings us back to the point: why ask a religious authority about reality? There's an infinite variety of faith-based "facts".

If someone tells you they like sliced tomatoes and sour pickles with their ice cream, you only have 2 choices. You can believe them or disbelieve them. There is no way for you to verify whether they indeed have those preferences. They have revealed this information to you, but there is no way to scientifically verify whether this revelation is correct or not. Therefore, what they have revealed to you is a faith-based fact.

The Bible is a collection of 66 books written by 40 different authors. A repeated phrase therein is, “thus says the Lord God...”, or “God said...”. All those different writers are either wrong, self-deluded, or God did indeed speak to them. There is no way to verify this, except to choose to believe or choose to disbelieve what these different authors repeated hundreds of times.

In the end, it is not nearly as important WHAT you believe, rather than WHOM you believe. Do you believe modern atheistic writers and skeptics, or do you believe that God has expressed himself in these ancient written records that have endured thousands of years? The Bible is filled with “faith-based facts”.

Re:Citation?

[LordLimecat]

Theres an infinite variety of "science" based "facts"; for every theological loon you pull up I could probably pull up 2 scientific quacks (I have a large selection to choose from: anyone who backs homeopathy, for one).

The fact that some people are "wrong" doesn't mean you get to label EVERYONE wrong. SOMEONE is right about religion.

Re:Citation?

[AK Marc]

There is no way to verify this, except to choose to believe or choose to disbelieve what these different authors repeated hundreds of times.

There have been more reports of alien abductions than seeing Jesus after the resurrection. If simple repetition by unrelated persons was sufficient for "truth" then aliens visit the Earth and abduct people, and Jesus didn't rise.

Re:Citation?

[Black Parrot]

Is that a faith-based fact?

Which brings us back to the point: why ask a religious authority about reality? There's an infinite variety of faith-based "facts".

If someone tells you they like sliced tomatoes and sour pickles with their ice cream, you only have 2 choices. You can believe them or disbelieve them. There is no way for you to verify whether they indeed have those preferences. They have revealed this information to you, but there is no way to scientifically verify whether this revelation is correct or not. Therefore, what they have revealed to you is a faith-based fact.

The Bible is a collection of 66 books written by 40 different authors. A repeated phrase therein is, “thus says the Lord God...”, or “God said...”. All those different writers are either wrong, self-deluded, or God did indeed speak to them. There is no way to verify this, except to choose to believe or choose to disbelieve what these different authors repeated hundreds of times.

In the end, it is not nearly as important WHAT you believe, rather than WHOM you believe. Do you believe modern atheistic writers and skeptics, or do you believe that God has expressed himself in these ancient written records that have endured thousands of years? The Bible is filled with “faith-based facts”.

Well, given that some of those records are factually wrong, you've got to conclude either that God was lying (or deluded) or else that the writers were lying (or deluded) about what they said God said.

As for who to believe, you should always go for the one who deals in facts, unless you wish to be deluded.

Re:Citation?

[Barsteward]

"And although the West sees declining support for organized religion, belief in the supernatural remains predominant even in highly secular places like the Nordic countries." - you'll need to provide a citation for that proposition

Re:Citation?

[ThatsMyNick]

and they are happy about it or sad about it?

Re:Citation?

[deanklear]

The difference is that a scientist makes falsifiable assertions, so if someone is a quack, they are quickly disregarded as a poor scientist or just a lunatic. Their ideas cannot become science until someone else can independently verify their hypothesis. That's why all of the millions of calculations that allowed you to post your message ended up with a satisfactory result: it was based on science.

Supernatural claims cannot be scientific, otherwise they wouldn't be called supernatural. Since religious people refuse to submit falsifiable hypotheses, it is impossible for their views to leave the realm of quackery in any scientific sense.

Is it possible for religious traditions to provide insights on human nature? Of course -- it's one of the reasons I'm an admirer of Christ as a philosopher, and many thinkers who existed within the church, including people alive today such as Desmond Tutu.

However, that is where the utility of religion ends. The very nature of its asserted belief system leads to division, rancor, and violence, because there is no way to reconcile opposing viewpoints through rigorous experimentation. That's why there are tens of thousands of religions and largely one set of accepted scientific theories and laws. That's why in states with the necessary resources, such as America, even the most devout individual will forsake the advice of their religious texts for that of a doctor. The reason is because the doctor has the shared knowledge of millions of ideas based on what does exist, and their religious text can only contain asserted knowledge of what the writer hoped to exist.

Re:Citation?

[sonamchauhan]

> Well, given that some of those records are factually wrong, you've got to conclude either that God was lying (or deluded) or else that the writers were lying (or deluded) about what they said God said.

Or that your "given" is wrong, and that the records are accurate.

Re:Citation?

[LordLimecat]

When someone claims "Thoreau wrote this", they are making a claim that can be falsified. If they are doing literary interpretation it becomes trickier, but generally even there you can look at what Thoreau wrote and determine whether their interpretation fits with the genre, context, and writing style, as well as any tropes that he is wont to using.

It is much the same with theology. It is generally a historical fact that the Bible was recognized as the source of authority. Even in the RCC, as I understand it, church tradition is itself subordinate to the properly interpreted Bible (though I may be wrong on this). That being the case, there is no reason to treat it differently: someone makes a theological statement while claiming to be Christian, their claim can be evaluated by the Bible.

- it's one of the reasons I'm an admirer of Christ as a philosopher,

Im particularly fond of the way a few people have sumed up logical views of Christ:
"Christ either deceived mankind by conscious fraud, or He was Himself deluded and self-deceived, or He was Divine. There is no getting out of this trilemma. It is inexorable."
If not the Lord, then a liar; and if not a liar, then a lunatic. The only way out is to start throwing away those historical records which displease you. I suppose that would put you in the company of men we have considered great, of course.

even the most devout individual will forsake the advice of their religious texts for that of a doctor.

I am not aware of any place in the Bible that it suggests you should forego the use of a doctor, so this seems to be a bit of a non sequitur.

The very nature of its asserted belief system leads to division, rancor, and violence, because there is no way to reconcile opposing viewpoints through rigorous experimentation

You have a far higher view of humanity than I do if you think you can pin its violence on anything other than humanity itself. It seems to me for every instance of religiously motivated violence in the past century, I could come up with two that were not so motivated. People have no problems killing those who stand in their way, and are all too happy to latch on to whatever justification is most convenient.

Many people have postulated along those lines, and in the past century a few of them (to the horror of the surrounding world) have attained power. One would have hoped that under their iron reign that violence would cease, but alas it never does.

Please be very careful of any thought process which leads you down the path of "we could have utopia, if only we could get rid of that group of people", it does not lead to a world that you want to live in.

Re:Citation?

[deanklear]

When someone claims "Thoreau wrote this", they are making a claim that can be falsified.

That is a gross misrepresentation of the claims of religion. If Thoreau had claimed to have seen a dead man rise from the grave, ascend to heaven, and further assert that the individual was also born to a virgin and the son of an eternal, omniscient, omnipresent deity, then there would be some similarities. Thoreau never claimed his fiction was reality.

If they are doing literary interpretation it becomes trickier, but generally even there you can look at what Thoreau wrote and determine whether their interpretation fits with the genre, context, and writing style, as well as any tropes that he is wont to using.

Again, you're side-stepping the meat of your own argument. Attributing certain gospels to historical individuals does not mean that their words have any truth or value.

It is much the same with theology. It is generally a historical fact that the Bible was recognized as the source of authority. Even in the RCC, as I understand it, church tradition is itself subordinate to the properly interpreted Bible (though I may be wrong on this). That being the case, there is no reason to treat it differently: someone makes a theological statement while claiming to be Christian, their claim can be evaluated by the Bible.

There is every reason to treat it differently: the claims of a philosopher and the claims of a supernaturalist are two entirely different issues. One is observing human behavior and attempting to understand the underlying motivations of easily observable behavior, and the other claims that a Deity exists, and the Deity can be known, and they have proof of what the Deity knows as well as the values of that Deity.

If not the Lord, then a liar; and if not a liar, then a lunatic. The only way out is to start throwing away those historical records which displease you. I suppose that would put you in the company of men we have considered great, of course.

Even if one assumes that Jesus lived, and he was born of a virgin, and that he died and rose out of the grave, that does not mean that his teachings have moral value exceeding that of any other philosopher. If Lazarus had said that murdering Romans in their sleep was God's will after he was raised from the dead, the fact of his resurrection wouldn't make his statement true. In the modern world, no one follows survivors of technical death around with a notepad and assumes every word out of that person's mouth to be the truth.

I am not aware of any place in the Bible that it suggests you should forego the use of a doctor, so this seems to be a bit of a non sequitur.

"And these signs will accompany those who believe: In my name they will drive out demons; they will speak in new tongues; 18they will pick up snakes with their hands; and when they drink deadly poison, it will not hurt them at all; they will place their hands on sick people, and they will get well."

If God wanted to heal sick people, why didn't Jesus talk about germ theory instead of faith healing? Why did Jesus tell his followers that they had the power to drive out devils instead of informing them that the diseases which terrified the whole world were merely bacterial and viral infections that could often be treated with simple, natural remedies? Why does the old testament tell lepers to sacrifice birds in a specific manner instead of telling them how to research treatments for the bacteria that cause it?

Either God didn't know about germ theory two thousand years ago, or God thought it would be just for billions of people to die miserably of easily preventable diseases in order to preserve the rules that he forced upon himself and his creation, or Jesus was yet another individual claiming to be the Messiah who was completely ignorant of incredibly important facets of re

Re:Citation?

[LordLimecat]

Again, you're side-stepping the meat of your own argument.

No, you simply misunderstood what my argument was. My argument was focused on the fact that you can be dealing with interpretation, and still judge whether someone gets it right or not.

If you want to focus on "is the book itself historically reliable", that is a longer conversation and not generally one Im going to discuss over the internet-- it just ends up being a waste of time if its not face to face.

There is every reason to treat it differently...

Regardless of the subject of the text you are looking at, you generally bring the same skills (critical thinking; deductive reasoning; context / audience / genre) to bear on it. I would hope you do not use rationality for one subject and irrationality for another; though the knowledge used may differ, the basic approach should not.

that does not mean that his teachings have moral value exceeding that of any other philosopher.

You here (and in the paragraph that followed) seemed to imply that we can know Jesus lived, but that his words are untrustworthy; and yet they are worth treating as philosophical truth. I have trouble reconciling those.

It also doesnt answer the question of why on earth you would take the words of a lunatic or liar as any kind of moral guide-- for that is what Jesus must be if not the Christ.

"And these signs will accompany those who believe: In my name they will drive out demons; they will speak in new tongues; 18they will pick up snakes with their hands; and when they drink deadly poison, it will not hurt them at all; they will place their hands on sick people, and they will get well."

1) Disregarding the below, thats not an imperative statement (command) by any stretch of the imagination; its a "this is what you shall see". If we assume for the sake of argument that this was scriptural, a plain reading of the text is that "you will see various miracles accompanying believers." It doesnt specify which believers, whether all or some, when, etc. It CERTAINLY is not a command to try to realize those miracles as some way of demonstrating your faith-- which AFAICT is simply a way of testing God, which is to say sin.

Am I saying I think Appalachian Snake handlers are in gross error? Yes. Am I saying I think their testing God is sin? Yes. Does that passage say what you assert it says? Not without some severe twisting of the words, and ignoring grammatical syntax.

2) More to the point, basically every modern translation marks that as "We're pretty sure this isnt scriptural"; It is not in the most trustworthy and reliable manuscripts. Im not going to go into great detail here, but its pretty easy to look up if you need more information. The one other passage bearing that footnote is the passage in John were Jesus supposedly remarks "let he who is without sin cast the first stone". Theyre both kept in, footnoted and offset, because whether they are or are not scriptural is more a matter of authorship / accuracy than one of doctrine-- nothing in them affects doctrine or the message of the bible in any appreciable way, and they are of interest as they certainly are historical writings from that period. The chapter numbers reference them because those were set quite some time ago, and renumbering everything would create more confusion than anything.

If God wanted to heal sick people, why didn't Jesus talk about germ theory instead of faith healing?

Because the POINT of Jesus ministry was not to heal sick people. He healed sick people as part of his ministry and out of compassion, but thats not what the incarnation was about.

Your question belies a biased attitude anyways: It regards sickness as some malevolent force inflicted on an innocent populace, which is directly counter to the message Jesus taught. Sickness is a symptom of a world that has rejected God; if

Re:Citation?

[LordLimecat]

Just as a point of clarification: I am aware that A cause of much disease is bacterial. I dont believe things are as simple as a 1:1 relationship of cause to effect. Bacteria can cause sin, but the existence of malignant bacteria itself can be an effect of some prior cause (sin).

Re:Citation?

[deanklear]

No, you simply misunderstood what my argument was. My argument was focused on the fact that you can be dealing with interpretation, and still judge whether someone gets it right or not. ...
Regardless of the subject of the text you are looking at, you generally bring the same skills (critical thinking; deductive reasoning; context / audience / genre) to bear on it. I would hope you do not use rationality for one subject and irrationality for another; though the knowledge used may differ, the basic approach should not.

You can judge, but you can't arrive at a reproducible answer, because everyone will have their own biases and assumptions. That's the whole point of the enlightenment: to ignore those sort of activities for what they are, which is largely a waste of time and a waste of resources.

You are essentially arguing about what the ultimate truth is that exists in God's consciousness. The only problem is that depending on the answer and the person asking the question, it's possible that they will consider it moral to kill and/or harm others and themselves because they believe our lives are pit stops on the road to eternal bliss. There are virtually no other arguments about historical documents that can lead to such consequences.

You here (and in the paragraph that followed) seemed to imply that we can know Jesus lived, but that his words are untrustworthy; and yet they are worth treating as philosophical truth. I have trouble reconciling those.

I have the same opinion as Thomas Jefferson: picking out the philosophical observations of Christ out of the supernatural nonsense of the Bible is like picking diamonds out of a dunghill.

It also doesnt answer the question of why on earth you would take the words of a lunatic or liar as any kind of moral guide-- for that is what Jesus must be if not the Christ.

Newton was a genius and a complete crackpot. I can accept Newtonian physics and discard his belief that alchemy was possible.

(As an aside, your conclusion is what happens when supernaturalism infects a person's mind. It demands the individual discard basic rationality when it conflicts with superstition.)

its a "this is what you shall see"

Okay, where are the True Christians drinking poison, handling deadly snakes, and healing people with faith? How does one detect a demon? How does one drive a demon out?

If these claims weren't in the Bible, you wouldn't be wasting any time thinking about them. That's why you haven't spent any time at all examining the historicity and claims of Zoroaster, Mithras, Dionysus, Osiris, or Zeus.

More to the point, basically every modern translation marks that as "We're pretty sure this isnt scriptural"

So, I'm not the only one being picky about what to believe in the Bible, eh?

It regards sickness as some malevolent force inflicted on an innocent populace

Yes, all of those generations of infants dying of preventable diseases must have really deserved it. What kind of sick morality are you investing your time in?

Re:Citation?

[LordLimecat]

to ignore those sort of activities for what they are, which is largely a waste of time and a waste of resources.

So it is your opinion that any task which requires literary interpretation / analysis is a waste of time? What about discussions, which similarly rest on biases and assumptions--certainly you do not seem to feel that THIS is a waste of time, or you would not be discussing at all.

You are essentially arguing about what the ultimate truth is that exists in God's consciousness.

I was not arguing that at all, but I DO believe that some portion of "the ultimate truth" has been made known through a book and that an informed reading of it will increase one's understanding of the truth; like with any reading material it is possible to misinterpret it of course. The fact that others will draw faulty conclusions from the book doesnt impact that in the least, any more than the existence of homeopathy supporters damages the credibility of modern medicine.

There are virtually no other arguments about historical documents that can lead to such consequences.

Baloney. Wars are fought over historical facts. You can try to phrase it in such a way to place the bible in some unique category in that regard, but its just not true. Wars have been fought over Torah vs Quran, the writings of Karl Marx, various Intolerable Acts issued by British Parliament, and one could even argue that the Civil War was partly about what a historical document (constitution) said about states rights.

People love to inflict their will on other people, and they love to use whatever they can as a justification for it. You can try to make this unique to religion, but you have to turn a blind eye to huge swaths of history to do so. For the record, for the first 400 years or so it was Romans killing Christians because of their beliefs (either in favor of paganism, or state worship-- not sure if it was ever in favor of atheism).

I have the same opinion as Thomas Jefferson: picking out the philosophical observations of Christ out of the supernatural nonsense of the Bible is like picking diamonds out of a dunghill.

Im not going to deny that Jefferson was a clever man, but this idea of his was utterly absurd. So you question the reliability of the document, but then decide for yourself that some of the bits are reliable based on.....what?

If you trust the historical records, and just think Christ was mistaken about his own deity, thats great, except what do you do with all of the places where the writers affirm his claims? And what do you do with this Christ who is now reduced to a delusional false prophet-- why are is philosophical teachings to be trusted? What on earth is left to study after you arbitrarily strip out the bits you dont like?

The whole endeavor is like rewriting the napoleonic wars in a way you find more exciting (adding and removing battles), and then asking "What can we learn from what I have written?" Nothing, is the answer, because what you have left is based on fantasy and speculation.

I can accept Newtonian physics and discard his belief that alchemy was possible.

Newton's belief in physics was not resting on his belief in alchemy. All of Christ's claims center on his own divinity and authority, so to discard them places all the rest in serious jeopardy.

Okay, where are the True Christians drinking poison, handling deadly snakes, and healing people with faith? How does one detect a demon? How does one drive a demon out?

See below. Also, the way those NON BIBLICAL sentences were written seems to hypothetically indicate an immediate audience-- this is something THEY would see. All irrelevant, because again, NON BIBLICAL.

If these claims weren't in the Bible, you wouldn't be wasting any time thinking about them.

Theyre not, and I d

Re:Citation?

[deanklear]

So it is your opinion that any task which requires literary interpretation / analysis is a waste of time? What about discussions, which similarly rest on biases and assumptions--certainly you do not seem to feel that THIS is a waste of time, or you would not be discussing at all.

A task to examine a document that presupposes as true that people can rise from the grave, and presupposes that a human can drive demons out of the sick into pigs, is a waste of time. Again, you don't spend any time on the divinity of Zeus because we know that lightening bolts aren't thrown by some guy living in a cloud. I don't waste time squabbling over the specific pettiness of trinitarians vs non-trinitarians, or whether transubstantiation really exists, because it's quite obvious that they don't. Otherwise you would gladly show me how to detect a demon inside of a sick person and drive that demon out. Otherwise you would turn water into wine on television, because that would obviously bring more people to believe that the Bible has some truth to it. But you can't do those things, because those acts are not possible in the reality that we live in.

The fact that others will draw faulty conclusions from the book doesnt impact that in the least, any more than the existence of homeopathy supporters damages the credibility of modern medicine.

Homeopathy is not part of modern medicine because there is no science to support it, not because people draw faulty conclusions from the scientific method.

Wars have been fought over Torah vs Quran

Are they not religious documents?

People love to inflict their will on other people, and they love to use whatever they can as a justification for it. You can try to make this unique to religion, but you have to turn a blind eye to huge swaths of history to do so. For the record, for the first 400 years or so it was Romans killing Christians because of their beliefs (either in favor of paganism, or state worship-- not sure if it was ever in favor of atheism).

Right... for the first 400 years people continued to fight about whose opinion was correct concerning their guesses at the Gods who ran the world. It was a time of violence and widespread ignorance, which was not cured with more guesses on the motives of God or Gods, but by the practical realization that the only knowledge worth knowing was knowledge that could be shared and experienced by everyone, regardless of their political or religious affiliation.

In tens of thousands of years of religious nonsense, human mortality and quality of life rarely improved. Only with the introduction of the sharing of information and the wholesale rejection of faith acts in favor of practical acts did we get increased yields in crops, or better medical outcomes. Some of that knowledge was contained in religious documents, because that was our first attempt at passing on important information, but only after the arrival of the demands of reproducible results were we able to discard the true from the untrue.

So you question the reliability of the document, but then decide for yourself that some of the bits are reliable based on.....what? ...
See below. Also, the way those NON BIBLICAL sentences were written seems to hypothetically indicate an immediate audience-- this is something THEY would see. All irrelevant, because again, NON BIBLICAL.

You are arguing with yourself on that point.

Ill note that we generally try to be as "picky" with any important document, like the Constitution.

In the two hundred and thirty odd years since that document was written, no one has claimed that a part of it was not a part of it. That sort of foolishness is reserved for communities of faith.

Trying to get my theological answer to a question while assuming those two

Re:Citation?

[LordLimecat]

A task to examine a document that presupposes as true that people can rise from the grave, and presupposes that a human can drive demons out of the sick into pigs, is a waste of time.

You are begging the question. There is no point in discussing religion if you have presupposed the answer.

Otherwise you would turn water into wine on television, because that would obviously bring more people to believe that the Bible has some truth to it.

There is no claim anywhere in the bible that we see ANY of the things you mentioned; youve created a strawman. Just because the

But you can't do those things, because those acts are not possible in the reality that we live in.

To claim that our inability to do something makes it impossible is a bizarre claim indeed. Certainly that is neither supported by reason nor by science.

Homeopathy is not part of modern medicine because there is no science to support it, not because people draw faulty conclusions from the scientific method.

It is backed up by bad science in the same way that many religious claims are backed up by bad theology. In neither case is the bad usage a case against the good usage.

Are they not religious documents?

You ignored the several non-religious ones I listed, and your claim was quite specific about the christian text.

Only with the introduction of the sharing of information and the wholesale rejection of faith acts in favor of practical acts did we get increased yields in crops, or better medical outcomes.

Like in Soviet Russia! Oh wait.

You are doing a gross injustice to history if you want to pretend that Roman violence against christians was about religion. It was about culture and submission; the Romans did not like that Christians refused to bow to the Roman traditions, and that they set themselves apart. To call it a war about religious truth is utterly ridiculous.

Your view of history is grossly revisionistic if you want to lay all progress at the feet of the embrace of atheism and the rejection of faith. The official stance of Cuba, Soviet Russia, and China were / are all to reject faith like nowhere else, and it has not yielded the utopia your statements would lead us to expect.

You are arguing with yourself on that point.

Only if you are being willfully ignorant here. I am saying that those writings are generally agreed to have been inserted at a later time as they are not in the VAST majority of the scriptures we have, especially the best preserved / most reliable ones. This isnt arbitrary in the way the Jeffersonian Bible is; historians are generally agreed on this point, and while you can argue it, you would be wrong. Jefferson on the other hand ripped out any reference to the supernatural regardless of whether it made historical sense to do so.

In the two hundred and thirty odd years since that document was written, no one has claimed that a part of it was not a part of it.

This isnt true at all. At least once a week on slashdot I see people claiming "the bill of rights says this or that" when in fact it does not (ie, "the right to free speech", which isnt what it says). The Supreme Court came up with a "right to privacy" in the constitution, which is hotly debated as that simply isnt there.

Regardless of that the point stands, the Supreme Court is quite "picky" on the issue of "what is in the constitution"-- it is in fact their job. The fact that we have an entire branch of government devoted to being "picky" in that matter just backs my point up.

So, you can't prove God exists, but that must be my assumption if I am to believe your supernaturalist nonsense.

If youre going to invalidate all of my points on the grounds that "but that cant be true because God doesnt exist,", then yes, I will cry "Circular logic!"

Re:Citation?

[deanklear]

You are begging the question. There is no point in discussing religion if you have presupposed the answer.

That's not presupposing. Let's say you claimed that unicorns existed, and I said there's no evidence to suggest that they do. That's not begging the question. That's observing our known reality and giving your theory equal weight as I would to any other fantastic claim you could make.

I am taking the very falsifiable position that the existence of God is not provable in our reality, because by your own definition you assert that his existence cannot be proven. It may be terrifically convenient for you to fall back to the theology of unobservable magic, but that doesn't make it true.

To claim that our inability to do something makes it impossible is a bizarre claim indeed. Certainly that is neither supported by reason nor by science.

I don't understand your point here. If I tell you that a human being cannot lift a semi truck, it is absolutely supported by reason and science. If I tell you that a human being cannot rise from the grave after being dead for three days in tomb without any modern medical equipment inside of it, that is absolutely supported by reason and science. If I tell you that praying has zero effect on sick people when the sick person is unaware of the prayers, that's absolutely true and supported by reason and science.

It is backed up by bad science in the same way that many religious claims are backed up by bad theology. In neither case is the bad usage a case against the good usage.

You're failing miserably here. There have been reproducible studies demonstrating the null effect of homeopathy.

How could you construct a reproducible study of bad theology? The simple answer is that you can't, because the whole foundation of theology discards rationality and reality off the bat. You're arguing about the opinions of an invisible sky god who doesn't answer prayers. Like I said in my first post, there's no way to reconcile that with shared observation because there is nothing to observe.

Like in Soviet Russia! Oh wait.

The famines in the USSR are a direct result of discarding science. Just because they were forced to worship the intellect of the Party instead of God doesn't make the effect of irrational planning any less disastrous.

You are doing a gross injustice to history if you want to pretend that Roman violence against christians was about religion. It was about culture and submission; the Romans did not like that Christians refused to bow to the Roman traditions, and that they set themselves apart. To call it a war about religious truth is utterly ridiculous

I'll gladly concede that point if you'll admit that the formation of the canonized Bible was directed by the political desires of Roman Emperor and not by God, and that the content of the Bible was therefore an accident of history.

The official stance of Cuba, Soviet Russia, and China were / are all to reject faith like nowhere else, and it has not yielded the utopia your statements would lead us to expect.

There isn't much difference between religious faith and political faith. They're both based on assumptions and assertions instead of facts and mutually observable results. I'm not a Utopian, but I don't think that it's an accident that nordic nations have the least amount of fundamentalist religious ideas and the best quality of life if you value things like longevity, low crime rates, low violence rates, inexpensive and effective health care, the virtual elimination of poverty, good education systems, and charity per GDP that exceeds most other countries.

In my opinion, that is the result of sane policy based on science inst

Re:Citation?

[LordLimecat]

Let's say you claimed that unicorns existed, and I said there's no evidence to suggest that they do.

But if I were to show you a unicorn foal, and you responded "that CANT be a unicorn, because unicorns dont exist", then you would be begging the question. Your claim in your previous post was specifically that the Bible cant be true because the things in it (man rising from grave, etc) cant be true. If thats not circular, then I dont know what is.

because by your own definition you assert that his existence cannot be proven.

I am not aware of making or implying that claim in any of my posts. Just because miracles may not be falsifiable, does not mean there is not compelling evidence for the existence of God.

If I tell you that a human being cannot lift a semi truck, it is absolutely supported by reason and science.

There are hidden assumptions and conditionals: "The laws of physics remaining as they are and without outside forces intruding, a human being cannot lift a truck unaided". The claim about a man rising from the grave is specifically that he did NOT do so unaided. When we speak of a "miracle", we are speaking of a supernatural suspension of the normal order of things.

It would be accurate for you to say that "men rising from their graves" isnt the "normal order of things"; the Bible's claim is that it happened and will happen again. The two are not in conflict-- unless you presuppose that the Bible is wrong because there are no miracles. How you would prove the absense of miracles, im not sure. Certainly you are right that THAT is not falsifiable; that doesnt make it wrong.

The famines in the USSR are a direct result of discarding science [wikipedia.org].

Your post was specifically about how discarding faith in favor of "practical acts" was the way to increase prosperity, which I believe Soviet Russia did despite not being prosperous in the least. Certainly what Soviet Russia did was "practical" in the extreme.

I'll gladly concede that point if you'll admit that the formation of the canonized Bible was directed by the political desires of Roman Emperor and not by God, and that the content of the Bible was therefore an accident of history.

This is inaccurate. I suggest you read this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_the_Christian_Biblical_canon#Development_of_the_New_Testament_canon
In a nutshell, there was a pretty firmly established canon by the end of the second century. What you bring up is a myth.

How could you construct a reproducible study of bad theology?

Someone declares "The new testament God is all about love, not judgement!" I point to Revelation, the sermon on the mount, any of Jesus interactions with the Pharisees, the entire book of Romans.....

Someone declares "If your faith is strong, God will give you your best life now." I point to Paul's tribulations (2 corinthians, also the whole "executed in Rome" thing), Peter's execution, John's exile, Jesus' own words "If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross and follow Me", etc etc.

Its not much different than if someone were to say "I know that Napoleon conquered eastern Mongolia". By what you seem to be saying, you could not disprove him. But of course we have historical documents which prove him wrong.

There isn't much difference between religious faith and political faith. They're both based on assumptions and assertions instead of facts and mutually observable results.

Im gonna disagree: they can be, but do not have to be. And the implied dichotomy is that "others" do NOT base their beliefs on assumptions, which is just false. Every bit of science is based on ass

Re:Citation?

[deanklear]

But if I were to show you a unicorn foal, and you responded "that CANT be a unicorn, because unicorns dont exist",

If you showed me a unicorn foal, you'd have a unicorn, and I could see if the physical properties of the animal indeed made it a unicorn.

then you would be begging the question. Your claim in your previous post was specifically that the Bible cant be true because the things in it (man rising from grave, etc) cant be true. If thats not circular, then I dont know what is.

No, I said there's no evidence to support the assertions in the bible. That's not circular reasoning. That's a statement of the facts of our mutually observable reality.

If you have any falsifiable hypotheses that can be tested in a mutually observable way to prove the existence of supernaturalism, feel free to provide it.

I am not aware of making or implying that claim in any of my posts. Just because miracles may not be falsifiable, does not mean there is not compelling evidence for the existence of God.

That's exactly what it means. Just because you wish the opposite were true doesn't make it so.

How you would prove the absense of miracles, im not sure. Certainly you are right that THAT is not falsifiable; that doesnt make it wrong.

It's logically impossible to prove the absence of something, since the entire universe can never be known from one point of observation. There are two ways of dealing with that reality: one is to pretend that the natural order can be suspended in your favor based on millennia old religious claims, despite all of the recorded video evidence in world history that says otherwise. The other is to accept the more likely answer that the claims of the bible are false.

Your post was specifically about how discarding faith in favor of "practical acts" was the way to increase prosperity, which I believe Soviet Russia did despite not being prosperous in the least. Certainly what Soviet Russia did was "practical" in the extreme.

Discarding the scientific method by choosing unproven farming methods that had already been discarded by the vast majority of agriculturalists is not practical, it's political.

In a nutshell, there was a pretty firmly established canon by the end of the second century. What you bring up is a myth.

Constantine's legalization of Christianity and eventual persecution of previous religions is the accident of history that led to the canonization of the Bible. Without his dogged unification efforts -- even referring to the Arian controversy as "trifling" -- it's unlikely that Christianity, or the Christian canon, would exist as it does today. Just listen to the man himself:

FORASMUCH, then, as it is no longer possible to bear with your pernicious errors, we give warning by this present statute that none of you henceforth presume to assemble yourselves together. We have directed, accordingly, that you be deprived of all the houses in which you are accustomed to hold your assemblies: and our care in this respect extends so far as to forbid the holding of your superstitious and senseless meetings, not in public merely, but in any private house or place whatsoever. Let those of you, therefore, who are desirous of embracing the true and pure religion, take the far better course of entering the catholic Church, and uniting with it in holy fellowship, whereby you will be enabled to arrive at the knowledge of the truth.

Constantine wiped out all competing sects of Christianity. We can debate about whether he was or was not influential on what dogma was -- of course the Church and Constantine's admirers in the Church would claim otherwise -- but there can be no doubt that without him, Christianity in its current form would not exist.

But I suppose now you will subm

Re:Citation?

[grantspassalan]

In either case, you have to believe whether in alien abductions or in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. You cannot independently, scientifically verify either one. Juries have to believe what they are presented with in court. There is no proof. Your only choice is to believe that the men who wrote the Bible correctly reported on what they saw and heard, even if what they report it goes against human experience. You can choose to believe or disbelieve, that is all.

Re:Citation?

[grantspassalan]

Give me just one FACT that is wrong about the biblical record. Remember I want a fact, not a theory. Take for example the account of the flood of Noah. Noah was there and wrote down what happened. None of the present scientists espousing the theory of evolution or modern geology were there to see what really happened. Oh yes, they have theories, but no actual facts. There is plenty of evidence that there is no spot on earth whatsoever that does not show the action of water. Is that because there was a flood that covered the whole earth, or is that because the mountains bounced up and down as modern theory tries to tell us.

The centerpiece of Christianity is the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Just because people don't rise from the dead today, does not mean it could not really have happened. Like I said, in the end you have to believe or disbelieve. For someone who does not want to believe, no amount of evidence will be sufficient.

Re:Citation?

[AK Marc]

And what are you if you choose to not choose? In my book, that makes you an atheist. Even if you assert you can never know, and choosing is irrelevant, that's still atheist. Because the choices are "choose to believe" or "don't choose to believe", even if the second also includes choosing to not choose.

Re:Citation?

[grantspassalan]

And what are you if you choose to not choose? In my book, that makes you an atheist. Even if you assert you can never know, and choosing is irrelevant, that's still atheist. Because the choices are "choose to believe" or "don't choose to believe", even if the second also includes choosing to not choose.

By choosing not to believe God, you have chosen to call him a liar. According to what Jesus Christ said, God will then choose to let you go as far as it goes possible to go away from him. That place is called hell.

Re:Citation?

[AK Marc]

Sounds like you are agreeing with me in a disagreeable manner. And my point was that you were wrong. So you are arguing with yourself. So you are both winner and a loser at the same time.

Wow

[rudy_wayne]

visiting each and relaying the juiciest parts of his transcripts to the reader. In doing so, this book takes on an interesting form with a meaty dense center to each chapter (the actual dialogues) surrounded by the light and fluffy bread of Holt's expert writing about the settings, weather and food of his travels. While this consequently lacks the characteristics of a heady hard hitting original philosophical work, these sandwiches should prove quite palatable for most readers.

Wow.

Just wow.

That is the biggest steaming pile of shit I've ever read.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Bullshit, or as I more politely put it, Alternative Dairy Produce (i.e. that stuff that comes out of a cow that isn't milk) can make excellent fertiliser. Really, you can grow the most beautiful roses in a pile of bullshit. If this is not bullshit, take it on board, else grow roses in it and smell them.

Re:Wow

[John Hasler]

That is the biggest steaming pile of shit I've ever read.

Well, he did say that it should prove palatable to most readers. "Most readers" watch TV, read bestsellers, watch movies...

Our universe

[colinrichardday]

what exists outside our universe and what existed before the Big Bang.

Are you using "universe" as a synonym for "spacetime"? Wouldn't something outside of our spacetime still be in the universe?

Re:Perhaps I Didn't Explain the Opening Well Enoug

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you sure that this is actually something...? You know what the Buddhists would say, tsk, tsk... ;)

Re:Perhaps I Didn't Explain the Opening Well Enoug

[mdenham]

I guess I would answer your statement with the following (found throughout the book): Is Nothing simple? Would ours be a simpler universe if nothing existed? Then why doesn't the Law of Parsimony (alias Occam's Razor) dictate that a Nothing be in our place instead of our something?

Thermodynamic argument against Nothing (and, for that matter, the production of Something from Nothing): the entropy state for Nothing is infinite. (Specifically, negative infinity. It's based on the logarithm - in this situation, it doesn't matter what base you use, though 2 is traditional - of the number of possible states that are identical to the current state based on macroscopic properties, or of the number of bits of information needed to describe the system.)

Clearly, an infinity is a more complicated state than any other number, because you can produce any real number out of it without changing it. (That is, the solutions of "-infinity + x = -infinity" are... well, all real values of x.) Since x in the parenthetically-noted equation corresponds to the entropy of any given subset of existence, it therefore becomes possible to produce Something (an object with 2^x states) from Nothing (an object with 0 states).

The next step is determining what the simplest state is, and proving it, which will be left as an exercise for the reader. (I suspect that the simplest state is "an infinite number of objects at maximum entropy, such that the distribution of object sizes is itself at a state of maximum entropy" - but proving that is liable to be an absolute mess at best. The net result is an infinite multiverse where the component universes are of varying properties, including at least one flat universe with an infinite number of dimensions.)

Re:Perhaps I Didn't Explain the Opening Well Enoug

[tulcod]

What do you mean by "in our place"? I mean, sure, I know what you intuitively mean, but, what does it /really/ mean, metaphysically? You cannot define "place" outside of a universe, because outside of a universe there are no laws, let alone geometry. The problem is that many important philosophical questions are very hard to make precise, and /this/ is the reason some questions are not "valid" in a logical sense. Disclaimer: I'm a mathematician, so I'm probably pedantic about these things.

42

[Anonymous Coward]

320 pages, really?

Grammar

[TemperedAlchemist]

It's "god" not "God," unless you wish to specifically refer to the Christian deity by name as a proper noun. It is mildly upsetting to see, "Do you believe there is a God?" when the intention is to mean any deity because it can leave the reader confused.

Or, we can keep the rule, and capitalize Spaghetti in every use of the word, even if the intent is not to mean our Great Noodle Overlord the Lord of Pasta.

Re:Grammar

[Anonymous Coward]

You could always Duct Tape your ass shut if you are tired of being violated.

Re:Grammar

[Black Parrot]

It's "god" not "God," unless you wish to specifically refer to the Christian deity by name as a proper noun.

"God" isn't that particular deity's name to begin with. It's a germanic word.

Re:Grammar

[Anonymous Coward]

Can I be the one to rip it off??? Juicy!

Re:Grammar

[riverat1]

Better stand to the side when you do.

That word, arrogant.

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think it means what you think it means.

The simplest answer: it doesn't

[WrongMonkey]

The world, as we know it, does not exist. What we are experiencing is an illusion or a simulation. The parameters have been set up in such as way that we lack the necessary information to answer some of the deeper philosophical questions.

Not at all a new issue

[dkleinsc]

Any claim that the universe exists has to contend with the solipsist argument, exemplified by Douglas Adams' Ruler of the Universe: "What world outside? The door is closed." Of course, the best counter to this is Rene Descartes' argument: Something exists that could reasonably be called "Rene Descartes", because otherwise there would be nothing thinking that they were writing a book.

Re:Not at all a new issue

[LordLimecat]

Any claim that the universe exists has to contend with the solipsist argument, exemplified by Douglas Adams' Ruler of the Universe: "What world outside? The door is closed."

Noone actually believes that, or they would never leave the house.

There is no why

[Anonymous Coward]

That fact of our pointless existence and our questions is a mere side effect of the world. The world isn't asking the question and has no cares about our existence.

the answer is

[Anonymous Coward]

42

My review

[frovingslosh]

A book about everything that tell you absolutely nothing.

"Why is there air?"

[John Hasler]

Hadn't most of us dealt with this sort of superficially deep question by the end of our sophomore years?

Oh. Wait.

Re:"Why is there air?"

[Boronx]

The only things my hands can't touch is themselves.

The Spaghetti Monster

[Anonymous Coward]

... used a gigantic 3D printer. So why do you need 320 to write this one sentence? Don't complicate simple things.

Ah, a question no ONE can answer.

[VortexCortex]

"Why?", is typically considered a religious question. Science yields better and better deductions about how everything came to be, but when you start asking "Why?", you must answer the question yourself, that is your prime function: To experience and react.

There are two prime "forces" acting in reality -- Chaos and Order. The Universe is both Order and Chaos, and life is the ultimate expression of Order within the Universe. It is the nature of matter that a replicating process can form, and in the right circumstance such replication will out compete random distribution forces -- The order will create more order, structure will form more complex structures using bits of the chaos. I have witnessed this in my own quantumly randomised automata experiments -- From random bonds and repulsions a chain reaction that feeds on the surrounding units to duplicate can emerge. Once this occurs it will dominate the environment. Such reactions require external forces, heat, radiation, etc to fuel the reaction: Food. The most basic chain of replicating amino acid "eats" the environment to produce more of itself. Mutations lead to competition and natural selection among the chemical chains, thus life begins to evolve -- I have witnessed it countless times under a myriad of parameters, albeit a simplified simulation Life happens within it: I believe this tells me something of the nature of the Universe itself.

I am made of the Universe, and I control much more of it than merely my body. My self does not end at my skin, I can sense and affect action far beyond my body: Behold my mind control powers as I duplicate these thoughts into your own brain... Now that part of my order is inside you, you must react to it. My function is to improve existence and create even more significant and stable types of order from the chaos that has birthed us. This world is a collective extension of our selves; It exists for the purpose we all give it. Currently that purpose is to expand experience and order as much as we possibly can. Why? Because that is our nature -- We were born of the copy, the most fundamental and basic property of life; We mutate and improve copies. But Why is that the nature of the Universe? It must be so in order for us to exist within it.

All worlds harbouring life for a significant number of generations have the above purposes. However, I feel that this world, Earth, has a much different purpose than all others. I think the Earth is unique in that it exists to test the utmost extreme limit of irony possible in the Universe: Arising from chaos We are the Universe experiencing itself purely via reaction and replication, and yet we continue to increase the restrictions of our own freedom to duplicate ideas and information. Hence my understanding of the saying, "Life is a Joke", is quite literal.

Sometimes I fear that if we were to ban artificial scarcity of information, and abolish copyrights & patents our great hilarious experiment would be over. We could then either join the ranks of the other worlds and their higher order beings, or the simulation may be turned off...

In conclusion: That we have not seen aliens and that we yet exist while ridiculous ideas are wide spread, such as the restriction to spread an idea or data, leads me to believe that irony must actually be Why this world Exists.

Re:Ah, a question no ONE can answer.

[Genda]

We are children decrying the silliness of being a child. We are at our social infancy, barely toddling out of own gravity well, and still dumping in our ecological diapers. This is not deep. We have all the complication of an 18 month old and our species has barely distinguished itself from others that still walk on their knuckles. If we haven't seen extraterrestrial life, its because they don't want to shatter our cultural evolution.

Among galactic civilizations (and they almost certainly exist), we rank a zero, we haven't even mastered the planet, let alone the star, wormholes and femtotechnology or large singularities. We are just this moment worth talking to... at least the bright among us. You can criticize the race, it would be silly, I mean infants soil themselves, drool, snot, fill their diapers. Its what they do. I'm certain there's a brilliant being watching us going "Oh, aren't they just precious. So cute and pink. You just wanna run up and pinch one on the cheek. And those religions... aren't they just the silliest little beings... boogie, boogie, boogie.

Ask these questions again in about half a million years. When we've grown up a little, bet we have some interesting things to say by then.

Re:Ah, a question no ONE can answer.

[grantspassalan]

"Chaos and Order. The Universe is both Order and Chaos..."

Chaos and order can only exist because there is this thing we call “time”. All actions in this universe are bounded by a finite amount of time. Whether we call these actions “chaos” or “order” is immaterial. If you can tell what time is, only then can you define chaos and order.

The beginning of the collection of 66 books written by 40 different authors, commonly known as the Bible begins with this majestic sentence:

Genesis 1:1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

Here we are told that the God who created everything first made time (beginning), then space (heavens) and then matter–energy (Earth). So before there was time there was neither chaos nor order.

If you are walking on a beach somewhere and find a magnificently constructed watch, you can take that watch part and determine its construction and function in intimate detail as to HOW it works. What you never can do however is determine WHY it exists unless you find the watchmaker and he decides to REVEAL the answer to that question to you.

I wrote an essay earlier this year on the “why” question that is the topic on this forum. You can download it from here if you wish:

http://www.waterfreeclean.com/forms/why-of-creation.pdf

Re:Ah, a question no ONE can answer.

[narcc]

Science yields better and better deductions about how everything came to be

Deduction, eh? Not big on this science thing, are you?

Re:Ah, a question no ONE can answer.

[Anonymous Coward]

What the hell are you talking about?

Thus proving

[Anonymous Coward]

There is, indeed, such a thing as a stupid question.

Why indeed?

[__aaltlg1547]

It seems to me that when people ask why the universe exists they are using the word "why" in a unique and problematic way and that the reason we have so much trouble answering it is that it's not clear to the asker what he means when he asks the question.

The prequel

[Anonymous Coward]

"In the beginning, the universe was created. This made a lot of people very angry, and has been widely regarded as a bad idea"

God...

[Anonymous Coward]

...needed a show place for His creation. (Yes, I'm serious.)

Nonsense

[eulernet]

This approach is completely theoretical and thus useless.

I believe in non-duality.
In fact, the reality is just an illusion, and there are ways to experience it with certainty, but the experience cannot be shared or described.
I'd like to recommend this simple approach (which doesn't rely on God):
http://www.sriramanamaharshi.org/downloads/who_am_I.pdf

Re:Nonsense

[rajafarian]

Aye. Fellow non-dualist here, although Buddhist.

Re:Nonsense

[VortexCortex]

In fact, the reality is just an illusion, and there are ways to experience it with certainty, but the experience cannot be shared or described.

Incorrect. Imagine a neural network more complex than your own made of machines... Now, that mechano-electric being creates a replica of itself. Then it copies the structure of its electrical states into the other machine mind. Tada! You're wrong.

Re:Nonsense

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.sriramanamaharshi.org/downloads/who_am_I.pdf

I read it and didn't see anything of value (to me), sorry (no disrespect intended).

Re:Nonsense

[narcc]

Your nonsense relies on the unfounded (and unsupportable) assumptions that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon, arising naturally from certain kinds of complex systems and that the content/nature of subjective experience is objectively determinable from the physical state of such a system.

The first point is just hand-waving, completely lacking evidence, supported only by a set of metaphysical assumptions. The second is pure conjecture, grounded in nothing.

There is an additional consequence here: that consciousness is epiphenomenal -- which is obviously ridiculous. (If that were true, it would be impossible for the you/your brain to report on the content of subjective experience. An additional system would be necessary to examine the state of the system to determine the content of subjective experience. Of course, such a system can't evolve as any selection mechanism would first need access to the content of subjective experience in the first place!)

It doesn't look like you've thought this through. You can do better, this is simple stuff.

Re:Nonsense

[eulernet]

I think that you are missing a few points.

First, you have the irrational belief that reality is as you think, and you think it's confirmed because others perceive it too.
This is absurd, and it's easy to realize that when you dream, you are unable to realize that you dream: you are taken by the reality of your dream.
Since you are unable to be aware of your dreams, how could you be aware of the reality ?

Secondly, you believe that all experiences could be understood by your mental.
I did some psychoanalysis, and also believed that I could understand my subconscious with my mind.
In fact, I realized that trying to understand a few seconds of my life could take a few hours of analysis, so this method is impractical to understand who you are, because you cannot treat all the amount of data every day, it would need a life to analyze just one day of your life.

Finally, I understood recently what Buddha meant by finding happiness.
You may believe that happiness is easy to find.
But in fact, happiness depends on your thoughts:
you are happy when you think that something is pleasant, and you are unhappy when things don't go the way you want.
So basically, happiness depends on your own thoughts.
Buddha explained that to find true happiness, the only mean is to make the thinking process disappear, so that you'll stop judging if a situation is good or bad (note: this is not blindness !).
The problem is now: how could I stop my thinking process ?
Frankly, I'm thinking all the time, and my mind is always searching for more challenges, so my mind wanders from a thought to another one, and it's endless.
Another difficulty is that it's impossible to stop thinking.
Meditating only stops the flow during the time you meditate, but it starts again when you stop.
This is an open problem for me right now.

I'll wait for the sequel

[Anonymous Coward]

Why doesn't the world exist.

No answer.

[anwyn]

No one knows the answers to questions like this.

Philosophers and theologians prove exactly what they assume, no more.

These questions are a complete mystery.

Get Used to it.

Re:Perhaps I Didn't Explain the Opening Well Enoug

[MightyMartian]

So I'm assumInv the book doesn't actually broach the subject as to whether the question is even meaningful? I might be interested in the book, but if it is just a rehash of world views I'm already familiar with, then I have a good many other books I would prefer to read first.

Re:Perhaps I Didn't Explain the Opening Well Enoug

[MightyMartian]

Thermodynamics explains certain facets of the universe. It may or may not have a damned thing to do with the initial state of the universe (if that is even a meaningful statement).

For what purpose?

[Shempster]

We evolved from primordial goo; were the first to evolve a self-aware intellect that allowed us to dominate all species and become a geophysical force that now threatens its own existence by short-sighted foolishness. Countless non-human sentient beings, with complex nervous systems, with brains, have suffered unspeakable torturous existence, and demise, due to human activity, most notably the harvested factory farm animals to feed our rapidly growing, expanding biomass. From science, with its observations, experiments, hypothesis & assertions, people with empathy want to preserve humanity's existence well into the future by preserving a biosphere with robust intact ecosystems, while at the same time, minimizing suffering of all lifeforms. From fanatical evangelical theologies, people apparently selfishly only care for their (hypothetical) next world "heaven". To them, this world, with all its pressing issues means nothing. These useless bastards need to GTFO of the way of progress. We all have less and less time to keep fucking around.

Re:Perhaps I Didn't Explain the Opening Well Enoug

[Anonymous Coward]

Occam's Razor doesn't dictate anything, it just says which is more likely, and so you should assume the simplest given no other information. We have enough information to rule out nothing.

Because

[Greyfox]

If the world didn't exist, I'd have nowhere to keep all my stuff!

u don't

[Anonymous Coward]

even make urself
u can clone only
thus, we all have no authentic answer

Who made your maker?

[dgharmon]

> The violin did not evolve, neither did we human beings evolve. The only one who can answer the âoewhyâ question is our maker.

Too much magic woo-ism ..

[dgharmon]

I regret to inform you that the why of "creation" doesn't involve humans and when we've exausted this planets resources, there'll be no-one left to wonder why ...

Re:Too much magic woo-ism ..

[grantspassalan]

I regret to inform you that the why of "creation" doesn't involve humans and when we've exausted this planets resources, there'll be no-one left to wonder why ...

Since you could not possibly have verified this statement independently, it is a statement of faith. If someone tells you their likes or dislikes, there is no way to independently determine whether these are true or not. If you trust such a person, then you are likely to believe them. If they have lied to you before and you don't trust them, you will probably not believe them. God has never lied to me and the things in the Bible are true, because I believe that God and the writers he commissioned to write down his thoughts are reliable and truthful.

Why are we here?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because we're here.
Roll the bones. Roll the bones.
Why does it happen?
Because it happens.
Roll the bones. Roll the bones.

It's not the question...

[MindPrison]

...but it's chasing the answer that IS the answer to that question.

I have been asking myself, why am I here every time I get bored, and when these thoughts arise:

- Has everything interesting been invented already?
- Why should I do this, it's been done already...
- There's too much to learn to invent something revolutionary...
- Is this it? I'm getting older, seeing kids make the same mistakes I did, making the mistake of trying to tell them that...
- Been there, done that. Yes....I'm old.

But so many has been old before me, so many lives has been lived. What if we accumulated ALL of that knowledge, put it into ONE mind, would we have the answer? 42.... no, I do like his books though, but joking aside, have YOU lived today?

And more importantly, how do YOU chose to live the rest of YOUR life? What do you intend to do?

Why not start with this day, what if this day was your last, what would you do today?

Re:Perhaps I Didn't Explain the Opening Well Enoug

[shadowofwind]

As I understand it, Occam's Razor says that if X and Y are sufficient to account for Z, then its better not to posit W, X, and Y to explain Z. In the context of algebra, this means you don't want more equations than you have unknowns. It doesn't say that everything in nature must be as simple as superficially conceivable. (It also doesn't say that the most unremarkable and widely accepted explanation should be preferred, though that's what most people seem to mean when they invoke Occam's Razor in philosophical arguments.)

In electromagnetics, minimal energy states are often non-zero, and the reason for this can be derived mathematically. Something is more stable than nothing. I don't see a reason to assume that this isn't likely in other areas of physics as well.

I'm not arguing that everything owes its existence to random chance though. And I think that to gain further understanding on this question it isn't necessary to have 'faith' in any undemonstrable assertions, or to give up on objective honesty. What is necessary is to relax one's faith in already having the solution, or one's faith that no further answer is possible or meaningful, and to keep asking questions. That opens the door for new insights and recognizing new possibilities that we are oblivious to otherwise.

I think that the anthropic principle is usually a cop-out. Where we don't currently understand the reason for some natural fact, and our existence is even plausibly dependent on that fact, it is assumed every possible alternative must happen somewhere else. The idea of randomness is like this also. Scientists currently understand the reasons for very many things that our existence depends on, and which from certain standpoints can be modeled well statistically. Its a good thing that 20th century scientists didn't just declare those things inherently random or invoke the anthropic principle and stop. Phenomena that can't be decomposed neatly into cause/effect and well defined probability distributions are commonly declared to be effectively unreal. But just because such things are really hard to study using existing mathematical tools, it doesn't follow that they don't have real and significant effects on reality. New ideas, like statistics, or negation of the parallel postulate, had to be invented for past scientific theories to be developed. Now we've reached a point where its hard to go forward with existing tools, and no additional tools are easily at hand. It requires a leap of faith though to assume that this is because we're near the end. The reason that existing theories seem to account for nearly everything is things they don't account for are rarely scientifically considered. If something can't be controlled well enough to be established and reliably repeated in a conventionally defined experiment, nobody wants to wreck their research career by running after it. At best only strawman stand-ins for these types of questions are studied, since it is assumed a priori that if the phenomena is real it must be amenable to conventional techniques. I guess this will change when enough people tire of feeling like masters of everything, and batting the same old theist vs atheist ball back and forth, and want to play in a bigger sandbox.

Because of us!

[Anonymous Coward]

The world exists because we are here to observe it.
Theologians exists because even scientists like to laugh a lot :D

This means scientific insight

[Anonymous Coward]

"These two cases have plagued my mind since I was a child, E=mc^2 dictates that it takes a finite (though large to us) amount of power to create sustenance from nothing."

LMAO !!

Already: Lee Smolin "Why the world exists"

[Anonymous Coward]

see:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/images/3423330759/ref=dp_image_0?ie=UTF8&n=283155&s=books

German Title: "Warum gibt es die Welt" => "Why the world exists"

Should probably have been mentioned.

Silly question

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems to me that we have no evidence that the concept of anything at all being created exists. Everything around us simply transformed from something that already existed before, so why the pressing need to ask what created us as the question itself is invalid.

Stop asking stupid questions ....

[jopet]

but since you did anyways, here you go: nobody knows and nobody will ever know.

Yes, as sad and humiliating for the human intellect this may be, there are questions where nobody knows the answer and where it is very unlikely that anyone will ever know the answer.
If you go around asking such questions you will find lots of people who claim that they have answers -- most of which involve some fairy tale about some "god" or similar chidlish stuff. Preserve your sanity and avoid doing this.

Philosophical reviews by non-philosophers

[DeathToBill]

While the review gives an interesting summary of the arguments in the book, I was disappointed by the simplicity of the reviewer's own thoughts and the contradictions inherent in many of them.

The reviewer objects to the discussion of natural language expression of nothing because "these human invented definitions and grammars are buggy systems for the task at hand" while preferring math and predicate logic, apparently on the assumption that they are not equally "human invented definitions and grammars." He appears ignorant that all three are human invented languages for expressing concepts.

For someone who insists on math and logic, then, it is disappointing that he dismisses the existence of God on a flimsy, emotional argument - something that has "plagued my mind since I was a child." The inference from mass-energy equivalence to the proposition that "a finite amount of power would prolong their lives" seems... well, novel at best. Even supposing that the application of a finite amount of energy could prolong life, the continual application of this principle necessarily leads to infinite life - which would, presumably, require infinite energy. And one could just as well argue from ergodicity of physical systems that finite prolongation of life would require infinite energy. The fundamental fallacy, however, is the attempt to apply natural laws to their own creator.

However, the details of the reasoning around energy and goodness is irrelevant, because the same form of argument also leads to the opposite conclusion. The choice of God's goodness as the quality under test is arbitrary. God is also supposed to be infinite in justice. It is much clearer that the destruction of a person requires only a finite expenditure of energy, and so any offence against his justice ought to result in instant destruction. Why does the person who cheats me, or hurts me, or exploits me, not immediately suffer the justice of a supposedly infinitely just God? Moreover, when I am selfish and unjust, why do I not immediately suffer this justice? This makes the underlying emotionality of the original argument clear - the same form of argument leads to the conclusion that an infinite God ought to immediately destroy all people - and I don't like that, so I can find a way around that argument. Yet any way around it also applies to the argument from God's goodness.

The reviewer treats other theories emotionally in the other direction - Wheeler's it-from-bit theory is only described as "tantalising" because the reviewer is a software developer.

Lastly, the reviewer suffers from an inherent logical contradiction throughout the review. He objects to the use of any form of reasoning from within the universe to explore what lies outside of it - and then proceeds to write this review. He is right to make this objection. The only possibility for knowing something outside the universe is if the universe was created by that something - because anything else accessible to us is, by definition, part of the universe. We therefore have to accept either that the universe was created by something (to which we might give the label God) or that we can't know anything about it.

ummmmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

gravity

Re:ummmmmm

[Forty Two Tenfold]

Magnets.

We know nothing

[readin]

The way Grünbaum immediately rejected Holt's premises and the opening exercises discussing nothing led me to a problematic question about what exists outside our universe and what existed before the Big Bang. If it is indeed Nothing (with a capital N) then we mean there are no laws of nature, no Law of Parsimony, not even some semblance of cause and effect. So what particularly bothers me about all this discussion is that we're talking about Nothing using logic that has been developed and rooted entirely here in our world of something. Of course, this would circumvent any discussion or this book to be written so I assume that most philosophers in this realm largely set this aside for the sake of discussion and speculation.

This is a problem I have with philosophy, and is related to a problem I have with people who seem to have religious faith in math and their own logic (these people are often found on slashdot). We're stuck using a logic system that we are unable to independently verify. We don't know if it has some fundamental flaw that we don't see because it works good enough for what we use it for. "Good enough" like Newton's laws were good enough, but even more difficult to find the flaw in because we don't have a separate tool to work with. We used logic to find the flaws in Newtonian physics but what tool do we have to find any flaws that may exist in our sense of logic?

The one complaint I have of Grünbaum (that would be more prevalent with other philosophers) is that they took no sides on the debate of why there is something rather than nothing

Of course they don't take a side in the debate. They have realized that the tools we have are inadequate to job. It would be irresponsible of them to give out reasons that others would take as authoritative due their expertise when in fact they know they know nothing about the reasons.

This is why I find it so difficult to deal with people who strenuously oppose religious beliefs. Many of the questions religious beliefs address are questions that exist beyond the scope of science and logic. Science and logic can tells us a lot of about the world, but it can't tell us the full story of how we got here (evolution, but how did the matter get there - the big bang, but how did the big bang get here - membranes colliding maybe, but how did the membranes get here - and how did the laws of logic and math get here?) Religion of course has similar issues from a logical perspective (a god created us, but how did the god get here?)

Grünbaum says "Why should we think that the simple is ontologically more likely to be true?"

I would like to know more about why the review that claims Grünbaum is an "atheist" - why would he think no god is more likely to be true than one or many gods? Agnostic would seem to match his philosophy.

A most thorough and wonderful review!

[sldahlin]

Superlative review! Though now I am left with a quandry. I have read some snippets and some discussion elsewhere of the book and was drawn to picking up a copy. But after the review I am not sure. I think that philosophers have been trying, desperately at times, to keep themselves relevant in an age when mathematics and science have taken over. His review of the book indicates some of the verbal gymnastics that philosphers engage in just to try to be on the same playing field as the physicists. But to quote an old saw I think they are whistling in the dark as they pass the grave of philosophy. Thank you for the review and continue please to enlighten us.

Consciousness

[Anonymous Coward]

Some ideas in the book (e.g. the Penrose ones) can be rebutted by neuroscience experiments. For a very good overview of the materialistic worldview that neurobiologists neccessarily have, I recommend "A Very Short Introduction to Consciousness" by S. Blackmore.

We're not gonna get an answer that makes sense...

[cundare]

...until we ask a question that makes sense.

It seems to me that we don't yet have the theoretical foundation to know how to even ask about whatever it is we really want to know. Despite all we've learned over the last 150 years, humans still mostly approach cosmology like Newtonians.

Actually, the reviewer lost me when he started asking about what happened "before the Big Bang." If the "arrow of time" started pointing at the BB, what does "before" even mean in such a context?

What's a nin award?

[Anonymous Coward]

Something to do with Anais Nin?

Re:Who made your maker?

[Anarchduke]

In that you are wrong. The violin DID evolve. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_violin

Obligatory quote.

[Anarchduke]

“The story so far:
In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”

Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

Re:Obligatory quote.

[Anonymous Coward]

Genisis 1:1 "In the beginning God created the heavens and earth". John 1:1+ "In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made ... He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. ... grace and truth came through Jesus Christ."

Why We Exist

[IsoQuantic]

It is no mystery why we exist:

Man's chief and highest end is to glorify God, and fully to enjoy him forever.

For more see, http://www.reformed.org/documents/fisher/index_fish.html

I'm just sayin'.

Give Them A Sandwich

[Baby Duck]

With the odd sandwich analogy in the book review summary, I couldn't help think of the "give them a sandwich" advice on public speaking from Community.

Why Does X?

[Anonymous Coward]

Any question that starts off with "Why Does" typically does not have a finite answer, for example
Why does Poo Stink???

All Of Us Are Unique

[webfactorshq]

We do have different principles and beliefs... The World simply because of two reasons: scientifically speaking and divine faith as well... You choose on what to believe in - then move on...:)

5 second skim and I'm ready to vomit

[Anonymous Coward]

"But if God is infinitely good, there would be no room in a finite space for evil — it would be completely packed with good"

OMG too stupid. Help please.