Prof. Stephen Hawking: Great Scientist, Bad Gambler

astroengine writes "World-renowned physicist Stephen Hawking has announced that he was likely wrong about his view that the Higgs boson doesn't exist — an outcome he doesn't find very exciting — conceding that he lost a $100 wager. Speaking at the Beckman Auditorium in Caltech, Pasadena, Calif., on Tuesday (April 16), the British physicist gave a public lecture on 'The Origins of the Universe,' summarizing new revelations in modern astrophysics and cosmology. After the lecture, Caltech physicist and colleague John Preskill commented on Hawking's fondness for placing bets when faced with conflicts of physics ideas. Hawking lost a famous wager to Preskill in 2004 in a debate over whether or not black holes destroy information (theory suggests they do not, opposing Hawking's argument). 'To love Stephen Hawking is to not always agree with Stephen Hawking,' Preskill quipped. 'He's usually right, but he's not always right. Sometimes we haven't been able to resolve our differences and we've resorted to making bets it's sad to say that although Stephen Hawking is without doubt a great scientist, he's a bad gambler.'"

Comments

It's OK

[aglider]

As long as it goes to science advancements!

Re:It's OK

[Joce640k]

Maybe he plays to lose just to goad the other guy into finishing his research.

Re:It's OK

[wmac1]

He also has a view that God does not exist.

Re:It's OK

[DanTheStone]

http://xkcd.com/955/

Re:It's OK

[kilfarsnar]

Are those my only two choices? Can't I have a god that's nice to people?

Re:It's OK

[Brucelet]

Actually my recollection is that he often deliberately bets against his favored hypotheses so that in case he's wrong he still gets some reward. Hedging his bets with the universe, as it were.

Re:It's OK

[lorenlal]

That wouldn't surprise me.

He even made a bet saying that black holes didn't exist. It was a hedge because it would've blown up a bunch of his own research if he had won. I rather enjoy that he doesn't take himself too seriously when it comes to these bets.

Re:It's OK

[Zero__Kelvin]

When you use the term God, you give definite name and conceptualization to it that is statistically impossible to be correct. It is therefore not a view, but a fact that the God to whom/which you refer does not exist.

Re:It's OK

[ComaVN]

Can't I have a god that's nice to people?

Seriously, which one would that be?

Re:It's OK

[gman003]

He actually tends to bet *against* what he thinks the more interesting possibility is. That way, either he wins the bet, or he has some exciting new science going on. He wins either way.

Re:It's OK

[Dcnjoe60]

He also has a view that God does not exist.

Did he wager $100 on that, too? From the article, he is wrong more often than he is right.

Re:It's OK

[al.caughey]

Amen!

Re:It's OK

[Noughmad]

Gods were invented* for keeping the population in place. Gods that are nice to people are not really good for this.

*: This is, in my opinion, most likely not true. I believe that gods were invented because people did not know how to explain natural phenomena. (e. g. "Why does the Sun rise every day?" "Someone carries it"). However, they quickly became used as justification of power.

Re:It's OK

[alendit]

From "A Brief History of Time":

"This was a form of insurance policy for me. I have done a lot of work on black holes, and it would all be wasted if it turned out that black holes do not exist. But in that case, I would have the consolation of winning my bet, which would win me four years of the magazine Private Eye. If black holes do exist, Kip will get one year of Penthouse. When we made the bet in 1975, we were 80% certain that Cygnus was a black hole. By now, I would say that we are about 95% certain, but the bet has yet to be settled."

Re:It's OK

[Anonymous Coward]

God can be omniscient, omnipotent, or omnibenevolent: Select two, in order to have what most people see as God.

If he's all three, there's a paradox of an omnibenevolent God who wants the best for everyone, yet for some reason allows suffering and evil.

Rather than "We need those so we understand Good and Happiness" or whatever, I point out that God is omnipotent, and therefore could simply allow us to understand how good we have it without needing the suffering. If he didn't think of this, then he's not omniscient. If he can't do it, he's not omnipotent, and if he doesn't want to, he's not omnibenevolent.

Given the behavior assigned to God in the Old Testament and the overlap of omnipotence and omniscience, I suspect the explanation is a lack of omnibenevolence. (Were I omniscient, I would know how to make myself omnipotent. Were I omnipotent, I could simply will myself to be omniscient. Neither of those prescribe morality, however.)

I'd love to hear about alternatives that make logical sense.

Re:It's OK

[tnk1]

The Problem of Evil is only really a problem in the sense that you or I would not be able to understand how the world could exist in such a way, but still have both the best possible outcome, and also allow free will.

The fact that humans don't understand something, however, is simply a statement of our own ignorance, and not so much an actual indictment of the idea of an all powerful, all knowing, all benevolent entity. Needless to say, having all the knowledge and all the power would probably provide an understanding of the best possible scenario that we would probably not have any conception of at our level of understanding.

In short, you're assuming you know what true omniscience, omnipotence, and omnibenevolence looks like. Logic would indicate that actually, you'd need those characteristics to really make a judgement. We still don't even understand things that should be much easier to understand like Quantum Gravity, for instance, but we feel qualified to pronounce on omniscience? I just don't see how that follows.

Re:It's OK

[tnk1]

I would very much like to see a valid scientific experiment that proves that a Creator entity is statistically impossible. Then I would like to see your solution of some nagging physics problems that I have been having trouble with... like Quantum Gravity and the Theory of Everything.

Re:It's OK

[Anonymous Coward]

Some day we will be gods. At some point we will create a micro universe that to us will expand and collapse in a split seconds or less. In that time whole galaxies will form as the universe expands around it stars will be created emitting great light to which they will collapse and breed new stars and black holes sucking at the outer edges for which nothing should return. Perhaps perchance in those millions of galaxies which must relatively seem infinite there will be a plant or planets that will be infected with a virus that will grow as it's star burns brighter and burns out blinking into an existence no one remembers or even cares about. Time will roll on and maybe another planet will become infected just in time to see the last suns lights burn dim and the truth of the last black hole created. Everything will be sucked in and collapse as all mass is sequentially sucked back together into a debilitating small area only to collapse into finality and never to have existed outside of observations by us. The gods, who created worlds, cities, people, places, and who never had the chance to help the weak, had people curse us, kill for us, love us and die for us. All never knowing that we couldn't possibly do anything to help them nor could we do anything to save them, because we never even knew they existed in a bubble so small and insignificant.

We will be the gods that will watch a universe come and go and then go for coffee and talk about our own gods, and how childish it is to believe or not to believe.

Re:It's OK

[Zero__Kelvin]

I made no such claim. The statement I made is that if there is a creator it does not exist as conceived by you (or me, or Christians, or Muslims, etc.).

Re:It's OK

[slinches]

Interesting, that may be the inspiration for this: xkcd.com/955

Re:It's OK

[schlick]

Cygnus was the name of Dr. Hans Reinhardt's ship in the 1979 Disney movie 'The Black Hole'

Re:It's OK

[jellomizer]

So you choose to disbelieve in the idea of God, because your limited view on religions, doesn't align with your moral value.
A typical straw-man argument from atheist.

Religions are a philosophy to try to understand God. All religions can be wrong, but still have a God.
There is no solid proof the God does or doesn't exist. God can just be a human made construct to make us feel less isolated in the universe, and as a way to deal with some of the randomness in the universe. Or God can exist outside nature, thus undetectable by scientific methods, the only evidence of its existence is a desire to find it.

If you are an Atheist I am cool with that. However stop acting just as bad the evangelicals and trying to convert everyone to your way, with bad argument to counter the other sides bad arguments to make you seem like you are that much smarter then the guy who decides to believe in God.

When doing proper science God is not a variable, and it shouldn't be, otherwise it is just a lame shortcut to doing real science.
But because we shouldn't use God as a variable it doesn't mean that it really is one or not, but if you come to that conclusion you will just need to dig further.

Re:It's OK

[CannonballHead]

So you are arguing that humans cannot fully accurately conceive of the "Creator entity," as the GP referred to "God." Ok, fine. Couldn't I make the *exact same argument* about basically all of science? How can humans, as non-creators, actually fully accurately understand any physics? So I guess we should pretty much throw out all science, because, after all, if we're not 100% certain that it is 100% accurate, then the entire thing is worthless.

Or perhaps it's possible to have a "reasonably accurate" conception based on what we are reasonably sure of knowing?

Really, this is getting into epistemology arguments. How do we know that we know ANYTHING accurately?

I would also questions how you are saying that it is statistically impossible (which implies that you can mathematically prove it is impossible) that, regardless of revelation, knowledge, etc., we can have a correct conception of God. You seem to be implying that we can mathematically prove that we CANNOT know something? Not that it's difficult or improbable, but that we CANNOT know ... by definition, somehow? Would this be a similar argument to me saying it's statistically impossible for you to know whether or not the reality, as perceived by you, is actually real?

Re:It's OK

[Zero__Kelvin]

"Or perhaps it's possible to have a "reasonably accurate" conception based on what we are reasonably sure of knowing?"

OK, Pastor Einstein. Go ahead and tell us everything you know about God.

As far as the statistically impossible part, it is simple. Pick a concept of God. Out of the infinite possibilities, what are the chances that you picked the right one?

Re:It's OK

[AlecC]

Like many things that have evolved over time, the God concept has several uses, and it is not possible to say which is the one it was invented "for". As a vehicle for explaining morality (Why not kill? God says not), as a means of keeping people under control (do what the priest says, or God will punish you), explaining the unexplainable (God makes the sun rise), palliating the fear of death (God will take me to heaven, if...), providing a mechanism for attempting to solve the unsolvable, or at least doing something (prayer), providing a forum for happy singy dancy ceremonies (worship). It serves all these purposes separately, and which is the most important varies between people.

Re:It's OK

[johnjaydk]

He also has a view that God does not exist.

Chanting every morning with my head in an arbitrary direction:There is no god and Richard Dawkins is his prophet!

Re:It's OK

[CODiNE]

How about able to look into the future and know things, but choosing to sit back and let things play out at times.

Re:It's OK

[johnjaydk]

Were I omnipotent, I could simply will myself to be omniscient. Neither of those prescribe morality, however.)

Are you sure god isn't just impotent and pissed off because he can't get any?

Re:It's OK

[tnk1]

If you mean that I am unable to pick out the exact characteristics of a deity myself, and get them all right... sure, I suppose you're right. Considering that there are actually orthodoxies out there, however, I'd say that for the most part a lot of people can agree on the broader outlines. There are actually a lot fewer choices out there than you think. And I mean *serious* choices, not just theoretical thought problems where the characteristics of a god can be put in a hopper. People may develop Flying Spaghetti Monsters to illustrate that point, but no one has actually ever actually believed in one, which is why it is a flawed argument.

Further, a religion based on a god or prophet revealing those details is likely to provide insider information as to specifics. And I should note, where there are many confusing or contradictory specifics, many of those specifics are actually irrelevant. Are there seven choirs of angels? Does it even matter? Not particularly. Many of the details that you may be thinking of are what I could call theological OCD. Does Jesus care if you make the sign of the cross with your right or left hand? I'd say probably not. Does he care if you make the sign of the cross at all? Again, since I never saw it referred to in a gospel, probably not. Still, if you adhere to Roman Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy, and it so happens that the Christian God is real and did lay down some laws, you're probably going to get close enough to have an acceptable idea of what you need to do. There's a billion people on Earth who at least identify with those faiths, so there is not some sort of infinite variety of deities in any meaningful sense.

Re:It's OK

[ultranova]

The statement I made is that if there is a creator it does not exist as conceived by you (or me, or Christians, or Muslims, etc.).

It is unlikely that your concept of any entity - even yourself - is entirely accurate, so your argument seems rather like splitting hairs.

Re:It's OK

[CannonballHead]

I am not the one claiming the statistically impossible (or, in my case, statistically certain) part.

So... pick a concept of reality. Out of the infinite possibilities, what are the chances you picked the right one?

Can't this sort of epistemology game go on more or less forever on any given topic?

Re:It's OK

[ShanghaiBill]

Some day we will be gods. At some point we will create a micro universe that to us will expand and collapse in a split seconds or less.

Maybe this has already happened, and we are living in one of these micro-universes. Logically, this is almost certainly true: There is only one top-level "real" universe, but over time there may be billions of simulated universes. So the odds of our reality being the "real" universe are pretty low.

Re:It's OK

[HeckRuler]

Historically?
No, not really.

Re:It's OK

[LordLimecat]

Pick a concept of computer. Out of the infinte possible concepts of computer, what are the chances that yours is correct regarding how to connect to the internet and post on slashdot?

Your argument makes no sense, it attempts to use hypotheticals to disprove reality. If God exists, and he has communicated what he is like, Id say theres a pretty good chance that those he communicated to got it right; yet in that circumstance your argument would still insist that it could not be so.

Re:It's OK

[Zero__Kelvin]

"Considering that there are actually orthodoxies out there, however, I'd say that for the most part a lot of people can agree on the broader outlines."

Even if everyone agrees that the world is flat, it is still spherical. I'm sorry you are having trouble understanding this simple concept. OTOH, I'm not about to waste more time trying to explain it to you, so HANL.

Re:It's OK

[Zero__Kelvin]

It's not an "argument". I'm simply pointing out a simple fact. There is no hair splitting. You are on the verge of understanding it, though. All that is necessary for you to do now is to openly admit that it is a fact that God doesn't exist.

Re:It's OK

[Zero__Kelvin]

If it can, would that make it useless? Are idea that apply everywhere and forever not valid because they do?

Re:It's OK

[tnk1]

The spherical shape of the Earth is a falsifiable hypothesis within the realm of the scientific method. Thus, it can be tested and it's factual basis established objectively which allows it to stand against consensus. The existence of a deity is not falsifiable, and therefore normal scientific inquiry is not sufficient. Popular agreement doesn't make it true either, but it certainly doesn't make it false.

In any case the point I was addressing is that you're stating that everyone is wrong about God. And my point was that while you're almost certainly right, the granularity at which we have to have the exact parameters of the divine to properly identify with them is probably not really a big deal.

In other words, stop being pedantic.

Re:It's OK

[Anonymous Coward]

Thoth. He gave people writing, ergo indirectly he invented Slashdot.

And how exactly does this make Thoth a nice god?

Re:It's OK

[Rakarra]

Given the behavior assigned to God in the Old Testament and the overlap of omnipotence and omniscience, I suspect the explanation is a lack of omnibenevolence. (Were I omniscient, I would know how to make myself omnipotent. Were I omnipotent, I could simply will myself to be omniscient. Neither of those prescribe morality, however.)

I believe that it's even canon in the Old Testament that God is not omnibenevolent. He is benevolent... to a degree, but not an infinite degree like omniscience and omnipotence is supposed to be. He's described as a jealous god on more than one occasion, a human emotion that we often consider to be a flaw. The Flood is another occasion where he's clearly not omnibenevolent, enough that he makes a new covenant afterwards to never do that sort of thing again.

Really, the Old Testament God has many of the features of an abusive spouse who loves you so very much but sometimes has to beat you for your own good.

Re:It's OK

[CodeBuster]

Incidentally, Kip did indeed receive a one year subscription of Penthouse to the "outrage of his liberated wife", as Hawking describes it.

Re:It's OK

[shadowofwind]

I don't understand this discussion at all. Statistics has to do with events that can be usefully modeled as random. Beliefs about god are not even remotely random, they are strongly correlated and biased by reasoning, experience, and all kinds of things.

I would argue that the 'consensus' ideas about god are largely wrong. But not because they're a vanishingly small random sample of some much larger set of falsehoods that contains only one vanishingly small truth. They're wrong because they're inconsistent with experience and internally inconsistent with themselves. They're as wrong as Aristotle's ideas about motion. It doesn't at all follow though that no knowledge of god is possible just because people haven't brought it very well into focus yet.

Re:It's OK

[Zero__Kelvin]

"Out of the infinte possible concepts of computer, what are the chances that yours is correct regarding how to connect to the internet and post on slashdot?"

100%

Re:It's OK

[Zero__Kelvin]

It sounds like you understand this discussion almost perfectly.

"Statistics has to do with events that can be usefully modeled as random. "

Are you certain God cannot be usefully modeled as random?

Re:It's OK

[wisnoskij]

I hate this argument.

Disproving God, since God is supposed to be omnibenevolent. And since you know exactly what is best for the entire universe, and what is actually happening, you know that God obviously cannot be benevolent; Therefore does not exist.

Re:It's OK

[shadowofwind]

Are you certain God cannot be usefully modeled as random?

Are you certain God cannot be usefully modeled as random?

I'm certain that people's beliefs about the nature of God can not usefully be modeled as random.

I'm certain that not all results commonly attributed to God can accurately be modeled as random.

And I'm certain that its not useful to conflate the two, unless the goal is to reach a desired conclusion using a false argument.

Its quite reasonable not to believe in God if you do not have evidence that God exists. It is not reasonable to believe strongly that all results that can in some context be usefully modeled as random are also random in an absolute sense, or that its impossible to discover them to be not random just because they can't be controlled easily enough to be studied effectively in a laboratory setting.

Re:It's OK

[Zero__Kelvin]

"Are you certain God cannot be usefully modeled as random?"

Why are you asking me the question I asked you? Are you a psychiatrist?

"I'm certain that people's beliefs about the nature of God can not usefully be modeled as random."

Great. Now what did that have to do with what I wrote? (Answer: Nothing) The rest of your post is just babbling to try and posture yourself to believe you are in some way smart. Just accept the fact that you aren't very smart and move on with your life.

Re:It's OK

[kilfarsnar]

Can't I have a god that's nice to people?

Seriously, which one would that be?

The one I believe in! My god does not smite people or condemn them for their actions; even bad ones. My god gave us free will (or some semblance of it) and is letting us play it out. If we can work out our differences and learn to get along, great. If we can't, and end up destroying ourselves, that's fine with my god too. The universe is a big place, and my god is not too invested in one small corner of it.

I'm a bit of a Deist. I think god created the universe and is letting it run. It may help us if we ask, but even then it is up to us to take action. It certainly is not so insecure as to need to be worshiped or to play referee. Hell, my god doesn't even care if a lot of people think it doesn't exist!

Re:It's OK

[shadowofwind]

The double quote was a cut and paste screw-up after I had to log in again.

Fitting that you dismiss my other statement as meaningless or irrelevant when you don't immediately understand it.

Re:It's OK

[Dextrously]

Or perhaps it's possible to have a "reasonably accurate" conception based on what we are reasonably sure of knowing?

$string = 'It is statistically impossible';
do {
    $string .= ' for it to be statistically impossible';
} while (true);

I think Zero's thought is unrefined, but touches on a valid point. It isn't possible to prove that any speculation about God is accurate. You can guess on it all you like, and you might get lucky, but without some evidence to test your speculations against, it will never be certain. I would say that we are certain of knowledge that is reproducibly and demonstrably true within our current scope. Even if our universe existed inside of another universe where the laws of physics for example were no longer true, the laws of physics would still be true in our universe for as long as it can be shown that they are true and certain. What a loopy loop!

Re:It's OK

[Zero__Kelvin]

I understand the second part perfectly. Hanging around with your median intellect buddies has given you a false sense of the level of your intelligence. When your buddies say something correct and you don't want to admit your wrong you spout some stuff they cannot understand and they just assume you must be right. It doesn't work with people who are smarter than you.

I recommend that you master the complexities of the Slashdot posting system before you move on to significantly more complex philosophical debates that are beyond your level of intellect.

Don't feel bad...

[Black Parrot]

The Higgs boson was also wrong in its view that Stephen Hawkings doesn't exist.

Re:Don't feel bad...

[Anonymous Coward]

To be fair, it took many years of physicists being supercollided against each other before a trace of Stephen Hawking was even detectable.

Re:Don't feel bad...

[Sulphur]

The Higgs boson was also wrong in its view that Stephen Hawkings doesn't exist.

Interesting bet. The only way to win is not to wager.

FTA

[MyLongNickName]

Hawking honed-in on the question “why something rather than nothing?” reasserting his point of view that a supernatural “god” is not needed to create the universe — quantum fluctuations helped shape our evolving universe at the Big Bang, adding the conditions were “just right” for life (and therefore us) to be asking these profound questions.

This is what I don't understand about these intelligent people. They answer why there is something rather than nothing by talking about how quantum fluctuations work. The existence of quantum fluctuations results from energy existing in the first place. So we have a rather circular argument being made. Essentially it boils down to "there is something because there was something".

There are only two possibilities: 1) there has always been something 2) there wasn't always something. Neither can be true, ergo we don't exist.

Re:FTA

[Joce640k]

There are only two possibilities: 1) there has always been something 2) there wasn't always something. Neither can be true, ergo we don't exist.

Things can change form, eg. energy->matter.

All you need to create all the matter in the universe is a single photon with a wavelength of 10^95Hz, then convert energy->matter.

Re:FTA

[Anonymous Coward]

This is what I don't understand about these intelligent people. They answer why there is something rather than nothing by talking about how quantum fluctuations work. The existence of quantum fluctuations results from energy existing in the first place. So we have a rather circular argument being made.

He's not arguing that 'something' exists because of quantum fluctuations, he's merely asserting that they replace the need for an intelligent design to explain our existence.

Essentially it boils down to "there is something because there was something".

There are only two possibilities: 1) there has always been something 2) there wasn't always something. Neither can be true, ergo we don't exist.

Besides being a gross (and I mean huge) oversimplication of the facts I fail to see why 'Neither can be true'.

All in all I don't know what you're trying to prove but whatever it is you aren't quite there yet.

Oh, and 'these intelligent people' as you so disparagingly call them are extremely dedicated people that have worked years to reach the pinnacle of human understanding. You don't have to agree with them but a little more respect might suit you.

Re:FTA

[MozeeToby]

Quantum fluctuations are energy neutral, they don't require there to be existing energy to create, at least not beyond the vacuum energy. Of course, then the argument becomes where did the vacuum come from? Where did the laws of physics come from? But what Hawking is saying is that given an empty universe, the laws of physics, and lots and lots and lots of time (though in an empty universe time is pretty meaningless) quantum fluctuations will eventually produce a full universe.

Re:FTA

[khallow]

Entropy doesn't prohibit the universe from always existing or being created, or other priors. It plus the laws of thermodynamics merely constrain how the universe evolves.

Re:FTA

[Sockatume]

It's not a circular argument, inasmuch as the fields that fluctuate to allow a big bang to happen are not the fields that exist after the bang. They've moved the issue back one stage further in time, and in doing so created an intellectual space in which one might begin to address the validity of various models.

Re:FTA

[Luna Argenteus]

Yeah, and my height would then be 1713099.76 Hz.

Re:FTA

[BitZtream]

He's not arguing that 'something' exists because of quantum fluctuations, he's merely asserting that they replace the need for an intelligent design to explain our existence.

And that would make him rather stupid then wouldn't it? Why do the quantum fluctuations exist, what do they exist in, what created them? Now we're right back where we started aren't we? This is one of those examples of people worshiping a scientist like he himself is a god. You've got some sort of ignorant blind faith in him for no logical reason as even his logic ... well, isn't.

He doesn't seem to be able to understand the question in the first place judging by his answers. He is too focused on whats at the end of his theories rather than what he can actually observe.

He may be the most intelligent person on the planet, but tunnel vision is clearly holding him back.

Re:FTA

[shadow_slicer]

There are only two possibilities: 1) there has always been something 2) there wasn't always something. Neither can be true, ergo we don't exist.

According to the big bang theory, there has been "something" as long as there was "time" and "space". This means it would actually be accurate to say that there has always been something. Talking about things before the big bang makes about as much sense as asking what is east of the north pole.

Re:FTA

[NatasRevol]

That photon would be the actual God particle then.

Re:FTA

[The_R_Meister]

So, given some things (vacuum, the way we understand vacuum, time), other things may come into being. Still "there is something because there was something", with possibly the added twist that "there always has been something, there never has been nothing."

Re:FTA

[sunsurfandsand]

Why do the quantum fluctuations exist, what do they exist in, what created them?

Implicit in your argument is the assumption that if something exists, then it must have been created. If that assumption is correct, then if the Universe exists, it must have been created. What created the Universe? Some people, perhaps including you, would answer that God created the Universe. Does God exist? If so, what created created God? Now you have the problem of an infinite regress.

If, however, the assumption is incorrect, then the Universe can exist without having been created. If the Universe can exist without having been created, then your criticism of Hawking's logic is poorly supported.

Re:FTA

[iMadeGhostzilla]

But vacuum is far from nothing, from what I've read: it has infinite energy and a very complex structure, in terms of quantum physics. What we call "matter" is also a manifestation of energy (literally). So the universe is never empty, energy-wise, it just always appears differently.

Re:FTA

[DigiShaman]

And where did those fluctuations come from? Either you stay at 0, or you move from 0 to 1. Perhaps the universe is one giant paradox and the loop closed in on itself creating infinity. But even if that were the case, something created the paradox to begin with. So, you still have to answer for the starting "Event".

"I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, saith the Lord, which is, and which was, and which is to come, the Almighty." - Revelation 1:8 (KJV)

Re:FTA

[tyrione]

Instabilities between changes in state produces wave fluctuations, which produces expansion with each change in state that turns into trillons of trillons of fluctuations and eventually an immeasurable number of state changes eventually leading to expansion. It is ironic people of Faith don't question where God comes from as they accept infinite existence and presence as the answer. But ask for an infinite sequence of connections to prove where the Universe came from if not from God.

Re:FTA

[amorsen]

There are only two possibilities: 1) there has always been something 2) there wasn't always something. Neither can be true, ergo we don't exist.

Time, as we know it, seems to have begun at the Big Bang. Hence, "always" does not really mean anything useful. Of course it is likely that the current understanding is very incomplete.

Re:FTA

[DigiShaman]

And where did those instabilities come from? What caused the first instability and why?

Re:FTA

[gottabeme]

"What caused God?" This is an irrelevant question. If God is real, and if he is God, then, given that we don't even know how the universe--what we can directly see--was created, how could we possibly understand how or if God--what we cannot directly see--was created? It's a question that is impossible for us to answer scientifically or empirically. All the question does is distract us from more important, actually relevant questions--such as, "Is God real?"

Quantum fluctuations are a more satisfactory explanation. They're extremely simple; it's more likely that something simple can be uncaused and can just exist, and have always existed, than that the same is true for something complex, like a god. And this simple thing explains how more complex things can jump into existence by random chance.

Uncaused? This is a meaningless, made-up word. We cannot explain how something can exist without having been caused to exist, because we cannot comprehend what could have come before or after what we understand as time, because we are completely within it and unable to see beyond it. Your reasoning based on this is fundamentally flawed.

Who are you to say what is simple and what is complex? If God is real, only he can say how complex he is; only he truly understands how the universe works at all levels. You're constructing God in your own image, complete with your finiteness of ability and understanding. We don't even understand ourselves, much less an omnipotent, omniscient creator of the universe.

Besides, you're comparing apples and oranges: quantum fluctuations exist in the physical universe. If God is real, he exists outside of the physical universe. Reasoning about the complexity or probability of one does not transfer to the other.

Your presuppositions are blinding you to possibilites of truth. The worst is when we aren't aware of our presuppositions, when we're deluding ourselves. I encourage you to open your mind and reevaluate your thinking.

Re:FTA

[gottabeme]

Implicit in your argument is the assumption that if something exists, then it must have been created. If that assumption is correct, then if the Universe exists, it must have been created. What created the Universe? Some people, perhaps including you, would answer that God created the Universe. Does God exist? If so, what created created God? Now you have the problem of an infinite regress.

This is only a problem if you make it one. If God created the universe, then he exists outside of it, and it is unreasonable for us to expect to comprehend the nature of existence in a realm outside of and above our own.

If, instead, you admit that some questions are not answerable in this realm, then such problems cease to be problems, and you can move on to relevant questions.

Re:FTA

[daveime]

quantum fluctuations exist in the physical universe. If God is real, he exists outside of the physical universe.

If a "god" exists outside the physical universe, then he can have no influence upon the physical universe, and is therefore irrelevant to us stuck here IN the physical universe.

It's absurd that you would attribute such sheer power to a being that can only exist outside the laws of space and time, and then spend half your life praying to him for good things to happen to you. Like he *cares* what one being on one planet wants, in a universe of billions or galaxies each with billions of suns and planets, and presumably billions of "intelligent" lifeforms.

If "a god" does not or cannot exist within our physical universe, then really, what if he good for anyway ?

Re:FTA

[daveime]

Especially someone who couldn't even spell his damn name correctly.

Re:FTA

[sunsurfandsand]

Implicit in your argument is the assumption that if something exists, then it must have been created. If that assumption is correct, then if the Universe exists, it must have been created. What created the Universe? Some people, perhaps including you, would answer that God created the Universe. Does God exist? If so, what created God? Now you have the problem of an infinite regress.

This is only a problem if you make it one. If God created the universe, then he exists outside of it, and it is unreasonable for us to expect to comprehend the nature of existence in a realm outside of and above our own.

If, instead, you admit that some questions are not answerable in this realm, then such problems cease to be problems, and you can move on to relevant questions.

Or, to put it another way, if I accept your conclusions a priori, then logical argument is a waste of our time.

Note that my prior comment did not argue for or against the existence of God. It was, instead, questioning the validity of BitZtream's criticism of Hawking's logic.

Moving on, then, to relevant questions: if there is, as you asserted, a realm "outside of and above our own" that is "unreasonable for us to expect to comprehend", is it reasonable to declare, as you did, what exists in such a realm?

Re:FTA

[gottabeme]

No, you're either misunderstanding me or are limited by your own presuppositions.

I never said that God exists only outside of our universe. If he created our universe, then it makes sense that he should be able to interact with it at-will.

The point is that his nature of being is not of our universe. If he created everything--all matter and energy and laws of nature--then how could we possibly propose to comprehend him, his nature, his existence? How could he explain to us how he created the universe? Why would he be limited by that which he created?

So, again, you are presupposing that God can only exist within one realm. What if he can exist in one and also exist in or interact with another? What if you're wrong? And given our finiteness and inability to comprehend the nature of reality or of other realities, how could we reasonably say what God's limitations are? It does not follow.

Finally, your last statement is telling. "What is he good for anyway?" Well, whether he is good or useful to you depends on what you want. If you want things like worldly wealth or knowledge, power or popularity--if you want things he may not give you--then you probably won't find him to be good for much. If your interest in God is limited to what you will get out of him, you will be disappointed. This is, of course, a very selfish, short-sighted view of life. On the other hand, if you seek truth, whatever that truth may be, if you admit your limitations and are willing to humble yourself, then you may find that he answers many questions--at least, the questions he has chosen to answer.

The problem with many people is that they insist on God meeting their demands, answering their questions, doing what they want or what they think he should do. This is creating God in one's own image and with one's own limitations. But if anyone knew what truly should be done, he would be God. Genesis 3 even alludes to this when God says, "Behold, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil." But our knowledge is imperfect by nature, so we are not God.

Re:FTA

[gottabeme]

I don't pretend to know what God's realm (whether you want to call it eternity, heaven, the spiritual world, etc) is like. I don't claim to be able to describe it or understand it in human terms.

Note that my comment did not declare what exists in such a realm. It was, instead, simply asserting that a being which created our universe must be greater than our universe, and therefore beyond our comprehension.

If you are arguing that by extension I am declaring what exists in such a realm, I would argue that, since we can't even understand the nature of our universe or of human consciousness, it would be unreasonable for me to expect to comprehend the nature of existence in such a realm. Who am I to say what exists there, much less to say what the concept of existence would be in such a realm?

Re:FTA

[sunsurfandsand]

Note that my comment did not declare what exists in such a realm.

I think that you did. Don't take my word for it, though. Here are your own words:

If God created the universe, then he exists outside of it, and it is unreasonable for us to expect to comprehend the nature of existence in a realm outside of and above our own.

God, you said, exists in a realm outside of the Universe.

If you are arguing that by extension I am declaring what exists in such a realm

I am not arguing anything by extension; I'm quoting you. Other than God, you have not declared that anything else exists in that realm, but you did clearly declare that God does.

Who am I to say what exists there...?

That, I suppose, is the next "relevant question".

Re:FTA

[gottabeme]

We're talking past each other. Yes, I claim God exists in a realm outside our own--I declare who exists there. I reason that he must, since the one who created the universe must be greater than it and outside of it. I don't claim to know the nature of that realm or what else exists in it.

Arguing by extension is exactly what you did--that, or you totally missed my point. It seems that your point was that, by saying God exists in another realm, I'm declaring that something exists in it, and therefore declaring "what exists in it." That may be a literal interpretation of what I said, but surely you understand that I meant that I wasn't declaring what else exists in it--I was not declaring the entirety of what exists in it.

So, who am I to say what exists there? Again, I am a finite human being, so I cannot. I can only reason that, since I think the universe was created by an intelligent being, that being must exist on such a higher plane. Then I can only evaluate what is claimed to be his inspired word, and if I believe it to be true, to interpret what it means. Beyond that, I cannot lay any claim to such knowledge. If you do believe the Bible's message is true, that still does not answer all questions we have about this life or the next. Many people lose faith because they are unwilling to accept that God didn't give us all the answers we want. But being finite beings, I don't see how we could handle "all the answers" without being God himself.

Re:FTA

[khallow]

Yep. The other AC replier nailed the core problem: don't meet the conditional, then the conclusion doesn't follow. And the talk of "quantum fluctuation" is a natural way to have local (but from our limited point of view, universal) fluctuations that appear to violate thermodynamics, but only because they occur in a larger infinite space.

We can't rule out such things because we don't know enough to do so.

Re:FTA

[sunsurfandsand]

Yes, I claim God exists in a realm outside our own

Alright then, we agree that you said God exists in a realm outside our own. Good so far.

Arguing by extension is exactly what you did

I remind you, I made no argument whatever. I quoted you. That is not an argument.

I asked you a question about your statement. As you have confirmed that you did in fact claim "God exists in a realm outside our own", and as you previously stated "it is unreasonable for us to expect to comprehend the nature of existence" in that realm, I will reiterate my question: if there is, as you asserted, a realm "outside of and above our own" that is "unreasonable for us to expect to comprehend", is it reasonable to declare, as you did, what exists in such a realm? No argument yet; just a question.

From the indirect answer you gave, "So, who am I to say what exists there? Again, I am a finite human being, so I cannot", I could infer that you think it is not reasonable to declare what exists in an incomprehensible realm outside the Universe. However, I do not want to put words in your mouth. I would like you to answer the question directly; a simple yes or no will be appreciated. Is it reasonable to declare what exists in an incomprehensible realm outside the Universe?

Re:FTA

[gottabeme]

You sound like a lawyer, friend. Am I on trial here?

I submit that you are intentionally framing the question to make it appear that I'm contradicting myself. You're ignoring the clarification I gave of my answer: that there's a difference between declaring the entirety of what exists in such a realm (which is unknowable, and not my claim) vs. declaring a portion of what exists in it based on the presupposition that our universe was created by a higher being (which is reasonable, and my claim). You're not seeking truth right now; you're merely seeking to make me look foolish. This is just like a trial in which a lawyer is not seeking truth but victory for his client.

I decline to play this game.

Re:FTA

[sunsurfandsand]

I decline to play this game.

He said, ironically, while taking his final shot from the free throw line.

Self-contradiction appears to be a habit with you.

Re:FTA

[gottabeme]

No, I commented on the "game", exposed it if you will, but I did not play it, because I refused to answer his question with a simple "yes" or a "no". If you want a basketball analogy: he wanted me to shoot from the free-throw line, but I refuse to limit myself to that option when I can shoot a 3-pointer. But he refuses to acknowledge the existence of the 3-point line. He wants to change the rules of the game, but I refuse to play by his rules.

You haven't explained how I have contradicted myself, so your assertion is unfounded. Nice ad hominem, though.

Re:FTA

[sunsurfandsand]

You complimented me on my "nice ad hominem". Thank you, but I get no credit there. My saying "Self-contradiction appears to be a habit with you" is not an ad hominem. An ad hominem is an argument in the form "my opponent is bad (or good), therefore my opponent's argument is bad (or good)". An observation of a person's behavior is not an argument at all, and therefore not an ad hominem. Had I said "dressing well appears to be a habit with you", the form would have been identical, but you would not likely have mistaken it for an ad hominem. The complimentary antecedent would not have blinded you to the absent consequent the way the unflattering one did.

My assertion that self contradiction appears to be a habit with you was a statement of fact, not an argument. You, however, disagree with the truth of my asserted fact. What can we do to resolve whether the fact is true or not? Argue from evidence! Here is my evidence:

1. Writing "I decline to play this game" as your move in the game is a self-contradictory statement. You made the statement; therefore, you contradicted yourself.

2. You wrote "If God created the universe, then he exists outside of it, and it is unreasonable for us to expect to comprehend the nature of existence in a realm outside of and above our own." Then you wrote "I claim God exists in a realm outside our own....I reason that he must". The second statement contradicts the first. If it is unreasonable, you cannot reason it. If you can reason it, then it is not unreasonable. You made both statements; therefore, you contradicted yourself.

3. and 4. You wrote "I decline to play this game" early Tuesday morning. But, by Tuesday evening, you played your next move, saying, among other things, "I commented on the "game"...but I did not play it". Given that commenting is the game, you contradicted yourself twice. First by playing after saying you decline to play, and second by making the self-contradictory statement that you played it (by commenting) but did not play it.

If the four examples attributed to you were made by you, then you contradicted yourself at least four times in our very brief acquaintance. Therefore, my assertion that self-contradiction appears to be a habit with you is not only not an ad hominem, but also not unfounded.

Gambler?

[Culture20]

He backed his scientific hypothesis with money and his hypothesis was wrong. How does that make him a great scientist or a poor gambler?

Re:Gambler?

[PolygamousRanchKid]

Who cares if he is a great scientist or poor gambler? At least he makes the topic amusing by betting on it. That raises interest in the general public about it.

Re:Gambler?

[gutnor]

He is a great scientist in his own right. You won't dismiss his entire career because he lost 2 bets ... also let's keep that in perspective, scientist are wrong all the time and argue all the time, the sentence is obviously only meant at poking fun at S Hawking and nothing else.

Re:Gambler?

[egcagrac0]

scientist are wrong all the time and argue all the time

Exactly. You don't learn new things when you're right.

Re:Gambler?

[NatasRevol]

You don't learn new things when you're right.

What? If you're right about a future particle, you learned something.

Re:Gambler?

[Anonymous Coward]

He is a great scientist in his own right.

He's a fairly competent scientist, but mostly he's just known because he's a quadriplegic. The "point buy mentality" makes people think that he must be twice as smart as the next guy because he has pathetic physical stats and a handful of massive flaws. (what they fail to realize, while being swayed by it, is that he dumped all the points into charisma)

Re:Gambler?

[Sockatume]

That would explain his popularity with the general public but it hardly accounts for the huge esteem with which his work is held in cosmology. You can bullshit your fans but you can't bullshit your colleagues.

Re:Gambler?

[nametaken]

Indeed. And I'd think everyone would realize that a $100 bet for Stephen Hawking is not an "all in" proposition, meant to force a weak position.

It's obviously just the sort of more-or-less inconsequential thing they do for giggles.

Re:Gambler?

[Firethorn]

If you're right, you simply gain verification. Great. If you're wrong, well, it's back to the drawing board because it means there's something off with your model, and sort of like the ancient mystery of how a bumblebee flies, it probably opens opportunities to do something amazing.

It's sort of like how you tell the difference between a bad scientist as a good one. Expose the former to 'real magic', something physics breaking, and they'll be pissed(and ignore it, degenerate it, etc...). A good scientist will be elated even as they try to disprove it, and in the process develop rules about the phenomenon.

God doesn't play dice

[Anonymous Coward]

...and neither should Stephen Hawking

The Controversial Side

[invid]

Hawking tends to bet on the more controversial side of a scientific debate, and thus the less likely side. He does not play it safe. Of course, statistically he's going to lose. But when he wins ( Hawking Radiation ) he gets stuff named after him.

Re:The Controversial Side

[Dcnjoe60]

Hawking tends to bet on the more controversial side of a scientific debate, and thus the less likely side. He does not play it safe. Of course, statistically he's going to lose. But when he wins ( Hawking Radiation ) he gets stuff named after him.

Out of curiosity, why is he going to lose statistically? He isn't picking one side of an argument or another just for the sake of picking. He does his research and forms his hypotheses others do theirs. One may be right or they all may be wrong, but it's not like flipping a coin. Where does statistics come into play?

What is missed in all of this is why he doubted the Higgs boson -- because, as has now been shown, it is incompatible with our current understanding of how particles formed after the big bang. So, if what we now know or think we know about the Higgs boson is correct, we now have to go back to the drawing board on how matter formed in the very early universe. When Hawking made his $100 bet, that theory was well accepted, now it is wrong and another is needed to account for HB.

Re:The Controversial Side

[Sockatume]

I recall that at least one of his bets was an insurance policy against the possibility that his favourite theory was false. If it was disproven, at least he'd have the consolation of (IIRC) a year's supply of Playboy magazine.

Re:The Controversial Side

[invid]

Given two conflicting theories, is it more or less likely that the one that most scientist agree with will be correct? Now apply this to multiple instances of conflicting theories. I hope that statistically, the majority of scientists are correct most of the time.

Re:The Controversial Side

[houghi]

I do the same. I bet I won't sleep with Megan Fox this year.

Re:The Controversial Side

[dkf]

The bet only counts if you find someone to bet against you. Good luck with that in your case!

His "bad" bets spark innovation

[Quick Reply]

He isn't offering the money as a token to indicate how strongly he believes in an idea. $100 isn't going to break the bank for him.

What is he really doing is offering the chance to boast "I won a bet against Stephen Hawking" (You know... The guy who is regarded by most people to be the smartest person in the world) as the prize for some very extreme research.

He is giving the encouragement to push the boundaries of what we know about science in the quest of knowledge, and this is exactly what science is about.

So even when he "loses" the bet, he wins, because he has helped science go further by challenging everything that we know, instead of just following what the "smartest" people think,

Re:His "bad" bets spark innovation

[Daithi_c]

I have to agree with this comment.

It may be wrong, but didn't Albert Einstein challenge people who questioned his ideas to go ahead and prove him wrong, just to get people working on finding stuff out rather than simply challenging some theory that was proposed.

Kudos to Prof. Hawking for stimulating research, and having some fun at the same time!

Perhaps the writers of The Big Bang Theory could use the idea to have Prof. Hawking make a bet with Sheldon Cooper about a particular theory. I heard he really enjoyed his appearance on the show and it would be great to see him as a guest star again.

Re:His "bad" bets spark innovation

[gl4ss]

100 is a lot cheaper than paying a researcher to write a paper. he should be making a lot more bets.

Re:His "bad" bets spark innovation

[artor3]

That's a nice thought, and likely a side effect of his wagers, but is it really his intent?

I attended a guest lecture by Kip Thorne several years ago, and he made it seem that one of the early bets between him and Hawking (on the existence of black holes) was just a friendly wager between colleagues, the way you might bet a coworker a beer on the outcome of the Super Bowl, not some open challenge to all comers. The bet with Preskill regarding information loss in black holes seems similar - the prize was a book about baseball, after all.

Maybe this latest wager is different, but I doubt it. People were hard a work looking for the Higgs boson before Hawking offered his bet. I think a more likely explanation is that Hawking just does this for fun. Scientists are people, after all. They hang out at the water cooler, talk sports, complain about the weather, etc, just like any other office. Not everything they do needs to have some deeper purpose.

Re:His "bad" bets spark innovation

[dywolf]

in essence he's supporting the scientific ideal of "question everything, even me".
you may (even likely) be wrong...but you may be right.

and if you are, oh how interesting it is to pursue a brand new avenue of research that turns all of "accepted" science on its head.

Re:His "bad" bets spark innovation

[oreiasecaman]

Stephen Hawking is not the smartest person in the world. He isn't even that great a scientist. More just a great communicator.

says who?

Re:His "bad" bets spark innovation

[Tyler Durden]

I could rattle off 50 physicists from the last century that were more influential.

How many of those 50 are still living?

Re:His "bad" bets spark innovation

[Tyler Durden]

Don't forget to add Murray Gell-Mann to your list.

Still, Hawking was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge for a long time, so he is highly intelligent. I don't think of him as that great of a communicator, honestly.

Let the Grammar Nazis Loose! No, wait, lose!

[jchap]

I bet I'll lose this bet.

Poker

[karmawhore]

He is a pretty good poker player, though.

Re:Poker

[Rakarra]

Note that the holo program ends before Hawking can collect. Reportedly, he once greeted Brent Spiner at a convention by asking "Where's my money?"

Just As Well

[Greyfox]

It'd suck having to put up with trash talk from Stephen Hawking after he won a bet with you.

Re:Just As Well

[kruach aum]

Not really, you could just turn off his speaker.

Re:Just As Well

[rwise2112]

It'd suck having to put up with trash talk from Stephen Hawking after he won a bet with you.

Like this from Big Bang Theory: "Professor Hawking: What do Sheldon Cooper and the black hole have in common? They both suck."

Re:Just As Well

[Leif_Bloomquist]

It'd suck having to put up with trash talk from Stephen Hawking after he won a bet with you.

Yeah, he's pretty good at the trash talk, especially in rhyme.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MC_Hawking

Re:His wheelchair uses my HOST file... apk

[kilfarsnar]

I've been hanging around this site for a while, and I don't understand why this gets posted so much. And I even used to use a custom hosts file!

Button misconfigured

[YoungManKlaus]

Every time he wants to select "You are right" the darn computer just says "Lets make a bet" ;)

Depends on point of view surely

[TonyJohn]

If I owned a casino, I would consider him to be a good gambler. Not a great gambler, because his wagers are relatively modest. Seriously though, he appears to be perfectly willing to concede defeat so I can only see benefits: it motivates further research into the topic, and it adds a bit more interest (for lay people) to a potentially niche subject. You could almost think that he deliberately arranged to lose.

Obligatory STTNG clip:

[BForrester]

He's a better gambler than two other famous physicists and an AI from the 24th century
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mg8_cKxJZJY

He does give in easy

[mbone]

Of course, this is a way of concentrating people's minds, and getting attention to the subject. He is a theoritician, not an experimentalist, so he gives in fairly easily.

Hawking lost a famous wager to Preskill in 2004 in a debate over whether or not black holes destroy information (theory suggests they do not, opposing Hawking's argument).

The theory that made him give in is "M-theory," which has absolutely no experimental evidence in favor of it. He decided he lost the wager; the debate itself is very much still open, and was even in the news lately (search on "black hole firewall").

Re:He does it on purpose

[Sockatume]

Maybe I have a later edition (or I'm thinking of a different book) but I recall him writing about Kip Thorne's wife's reaction to the payment of the bet.

Re:and so the argument continues to circle...

[kvothe]

Right, all you need is for something to exist in the first place, which can then be organized into other things... So, where does the photon come from?

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

MC Hawking, trash talking

[naroom]

I believe we know exactly what that sounds like.

Re:Say that to my face fucker not online... apk

[kenaaker]

"I don't want to talk to you no more, you empty headed animal food trough wiper. I fart in your general direction. Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries.

.. now go away or I shall taunt you a second time."

Re:and so the argument continues to circle...

[Anonymous Coward]

In the beginning, God said "let there be light," and there was light.

Happy?

Obligatory XKCD

[nephilimsd]

http://xkcd.com/955/

Re:Obligatory XKCD

[RockDoctor]

Savage!

Well up to XKCD's normal standard. Or "well down ..."

Truth simply is

[gottabeme]

Your reasoning is based on several presuppositions:

1. That you know what omnibenevolence actually is, from a universal, absolute perspective. We humans have such limited perspectives. What may seem benevolent to us might actually be harmful in ways we aren't aware of or can't comprehend. Helping one person with a problem might end up hurting many more people.

2. That you know what is actually good for anyone. This is not the same as the previous item. We humans often think we know what we need, what is good for us, but quite often we are wrong, and we do things that are not good for us. How could we make this judgment for others if we can't even make it for ourselves?

3. That you know what it would be like to be omniscient, omnipotent, or omnibenevolent. Frankly, this is absurd. It's easy to say, "I'd know everything and could do everything!" But you've no idea what knowing everything would actually be like. To see how every single minute particle is connected, how the tiniest action leads to another and another, to see and understand time, to understand at once the enormity of the universe and the smallest subatomic particle, to see inside people's hearts and minds... To actually understand what that would be like is incomprehensible to us, because we are markedly finite. Therefore, to say what you would do if you were any of these things is equally absurd.

You think you're being logical, but your logic is founded on unprovable assumptions. While you criticize others for making God in their image, you are doing the same thing, constructing a God that you can comprehend. This is exactly why people throughout history have made idols and worshipped them: it's easier to comprehend something you can see and touch, something made by human hands. But in so doing, one is simply worshipping an artificial construct, which is by definition more limited than the one who created it, i.e. even lower than humans. And any God that is wholly comprehensible by humans is by definition not God. There is a fundamental arrogance in believing that nothing is beyond one's own understanding, but this is precisely what people do when they delineate God's boundaries according to their limited perceptions. In the end, this results in idol worship in the form of self-worship, believing that we can reason our way to all truth, while in reality many things are simply beyond our reach.

Truth is truth whether or not we believe it, understand it, or agree with it. If God is real, then he is real and he is who he is, regardless of what we think, feel, or believe about him.

Re:Truth simply is

[firewrought]

I reject that idea that any attempt to reason about god ultimately equates to arrogance and self-worship. Geeze. Rationality is ultimately about doing the best with the evidence and information we have.

Re:Truth simply is

[HeckRuler]

If God is real, then he is real and he is who he is

Popeye is God?

I get what you're saying, but there are some things which are REALLY good bets. I mean, 1+1=2. PROBABLY. Boil it down, and it depends on things like the null set axiom. But, on a philosophical level, you're right. If 1+1=42, then that's the way it is and we have to accept that. It also means that we have to accept that all of mathematics is built on a lie and most of our understanding of physics is balls-to-the-walls wrong.

Mathematical axioms, like our views of omni-fillintheblank, are unprovable assumptions. But so far they look like a good bet. To take a cue from the professor, I'm willing to bet you $200 that the null set axiom is true... as long as I get to hold onto the wager money.

Re:Truth simply is

[gottabeme]

That's not what I meant. I meant that, to assume that we can reason our way to understanding the nature of God, the nature of what he is and how he created the universe, is arrogant in that it fails to recognize our finiteness--this is a form of self-worship, as it places oneself at the highest level of understanding.

We should certainly use reason! But doing so includes recognizing our limitations and the limitations of reason, given our limitations.

Re:Truth simply is

[gottabeme]

Who said that our history represents a cosmos which is the best of all possibilities? Who said it's guided--implying that it is to the extent of being directly controlled--by an omnipotent being? These are presuppositions that may not be true. If you submit to these presuppositions, you limit your reasoning to that which they do not exclude. If these presuppositions are false, you have prevented yourself from arriving at the truth.

I don't propose that those are true--that is, I don't propose that God directly controls everything in the world, or that our history represents an optimal outcome. I propose that we seek truth, whatever it may be, using our ability to reason and the evidence we have, while at the same time being diligent to recognize our limitations and admit that which we cannot answer.

Re:Truth simply is

[gottabeme]

But in so doing, one is simply worshipping an artificial construct, which is by definition more limited than the one who created it, i.e. even lower than humans.

You argue for a universe of progressively diminishing complexity. That pretty much throws evolution (as we understand it) out the window, since according to your definitions, new life forms must be more limited than their ancestors. By your logic, we "devolved" from gods.

No, you misunderstand me, or you conflate two separate matters. If we assume for a moment that God created the universe we see, and also that evolution is a real process that exists in our world, then they are two separate processes; God creating from nothingness is completely orthogonal to a self-sustaining biological process within the universe which does not create from nothingness but alters what already exists. The former creates matter and energy and the nature of existence out of nothingness, while the latter only "creates" in the context of our perception of biological traits; all it really does is rearrange matter which already exists.

Also, evolution is a biological issue, while God's creating the universe is far beyond the scope of simply biology, rather being about the nature of time and existence as we know it. This is a case of a presupposition about one matter being projected upon other, unrelated matters.

So while biological evolution might lead to more complex organisms--for whatever definition of complexity--such organisms are not being consciously created in a purposeful manner. On the other hand, God creating the universe is a purposeful action, with deliberate choices being made.

It could be likened to the difference between our inability to control genetic transfer in human reproduction vs. our ability to create machines, computers, and A.I. The former is a natural process out of our control, while the latter is an artifical construct of our deliberate choice; and we cannot--at least, it has yet to be demonstrated that we can--create sentient beings with abilities of reasoning and understanding superior to our own.

But let me point out something significant you said: that it would throw out evolution as we know it. Indeed, if you assume that we do understand completely and accurately what we call evolution, that could be a problem for this reasoning. On the other hand, if you admit that we may not fully or accurately understand that which we think we do, then you must admit the possibility that we are wrong, and that our wrong presuppositions are leading us to wrong conclusions.

And any God that is wholly comprehensible by humans is by definition not God.

So what you're saying is that God is no true Scotsman?

P.S. Your views on god are very Abrahamic. You assume a number of attributes of god (omniscience, omnipotence, [omni?]benevolence) that are neither necessary nor likely. Is an understanding of Thor really beyond our reach?

I'm assuming that the universe was created deliberately. If so, whoever did it must exist outside the universe and be far beyond our comprehension--this is a necessary inference. If you don't assume that the universe was created deliberately, then it isn't necessary to assume that a creator exists, and you can imagine any kind of advanced lifeform you wish which exists within our universe and call it a "god."

But I think it's silly to use Thor as an example; he's a comic book character and an awful movie character.

Re:Truth simply is

[gottabeme]

1+1 does equal 42...if you divide those 2 into 21 parts each. Sure, I left out the "* 21", but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. But seriously, what is your point here?

Mathematical axioms, like our views of omni-fillintheblank, are unprovable assumptions. But so far they look like a good bet.

This is illogical: mathematical axioms and concepts of omniscience and omnipotence are completely unrelated--you can't get any more apples-and-oranges than this. Mathematics we can attempt to prove, and philosophy we can muse on, but omnipotence and omniscience are concepts which, if they exist in any form of being, are wholly beyond our comprehension. Mathematical principles "looking like a good bet" say nothing about the validity of one's opinions about metaphysics. This is another case of projecting ideas in one field onto another, completely unrelated one, and it is fundamentally irrational.

Re:Truth simply is

[david_thornley]

You're not just talking about the limitations of reason, you're rejecting it. There's a real contradiction between the usual descriptions of God and the perceived world. This isn't a case of somebody taking reason too far, but trying to apply it at all to a very obvious issue.

You believe God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent because you were told so. You're then willing to abandon reason in favor of believing what you were told, based on authority. Instead, you're willing to say that those properties don't mean what they say, or that SIDS is some sort of spiritual blessing, anything to avoid just facing the contradiction and acknowledging it. If you can't do that, then you can't think effectively about religion, and are doomed to wilful gullibility.

Truth is truth, as you say, but you do not know it directly. Since reason is our best way of understanding things, and you deny it, you refuse the ability to learn more about God.

Re:Truth simply is

[Flere Imsaho]

There is a fundamental arrogance in believing that nothing is beyond one's own understanding.

I think there's a fundamental arrogance in believing in an afterlife. People can't comprehend that they will cease to exist. From this comes the need to believe in a deity and/or an afterlife. I'd like to be wrong, and I'm open to the idea, but I don't think I am. YMMV, etc.

Re:Truth simply is

[gottabeme]

You're not just talking about the limitations of reason, you're rejecting it. There's a real contradiction between the usual descriptions of God and the perceived world. This isn't a case of somebody taking reason too far, but trying to apply it at all to a very obvious issue.

I don't understand you at all. I'm not rejecting reason. I'm simply saying that there are some questions which we cannot answer by simply thinking and speculating. We cannot prove whether there is an afterlife; we cannot prove there is a spiritual realm.

Who cares what the "usual descriptions of God" are? What if the usual descriptions are wrong? A theory or belief is not correct because of how popular it is.

You know what? You're right: there is a real contradiction between the usual descriptions of God and the perceived world. Therefore there are two possibilities: either the usual descriptions of God are wrong, or our perception of the world is wrong--or perhaps some of both.

You believe God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent because you were told so. You're then willing to abandon reason in favor of believing what you were told, based on authority. Instead, you're willing to say that those properties don't mean what they say, or that SIDS is some sort of spiritual blessing, anything to avoid just facing the contradiction and acknowledging it. If you can't do that, then you can't think effectively about religion, and are doomed to wilful gullibility.

I'm a bit astonished at the depth and breadth of your assumptions about me. You think you know what I believe, why I believe it, what I've been taught, but you don't actually know any of those things. And you accuse me of rejecting reason. The irony...

I don't know what you're reading. I didn't say that SIDS or any other kind of sickness, suffering, or death is a spiritual blessing. If you want to get theological (which, if God is real, is a field just as important as science), the reason suffering exists is a very tough question. The basic answer is that we live in a fallen world. Sin exists. And God has chosen to give us free will, the ability to choose between right and wrong. Why exactly he allows our bodies to degrade and get diseases, I cannot say, other than that, when sin entered the world, it changed many things. And why that changed things, I can't say, either. I don't have all the answers, because God hasn't told us all the answers.

The fallacy that many people operate under, perhaps including yourself, is that we must have all the answers to all our questions, or else God is either a liar or a fake. This is not logical. Just because we do not understand or agree with something does not change whether it is true.

If you think God doesn't exist, that's your decision. I can't prove to you that he does. What may be evidence of his existence to me may seem to you to disprove his existence. It's all a matter of interpretation.

Or if you think God does exist, but you think that because suffering exists, he's evil and not worth listening to, that's also your decision. But if this is the case, I challenge you to humble yourself and reevaluate your beliefs. Yes, it's hard to understand how a God who's claimed to be benevolent allows suffering to exist. But again, just because we don't understand or agree with something does not mean it is false, nor does it mean that God is evil because he allows it. If God really is God, then his understanding is so far beyond our own, that it's ludicrous to put ourselves in his place and pass judgment on his choices.

Some would say that if one is forced to love someone, he doesn't really love the person at all. The same could be said about God: if he forced us to love him, would it really be love? And if we are free to choose whether to love, we must also be free to choose our other actions and beliefs.

So maybe you think God is not actually good. But maybe you're just putting God in a box

Re:Truth simply is

[gottabeme]

You're absolutely right: our teachings, learnings, and intuitions about God are most definitely limited. Were they not, we would be gods ourselves.

I didn't claim otherwise, so I don't see how that is a problem.

Of course my believing in something doesn't make it true--God is not Santa Claus.

Re:Truth simply is

[gottabeme]

That's an interesting idea. I haven't heard that before. I can see how one could interpret it that way, but I disagree--or, at least, I don't think it's so simple. To me, arrogance is thinking more highly of oneself than one ought. You may argue that by thinking we're important enough to merit an afterlife, we are thinking too highly of ourselves. Well, I can't prove otherwise--it's a matter of opinion. I wonder, though, if you have been influenced by anti-humanity rhetoric, the kind that says that we are evil while "nature" is good, that we are an unnatural blight that will be reabsorbed and corrected by the planet.

Anyway, if there is no afterlife, then I suppose one could say that we are arrogant to think that we are important or valuable. But if there is an afterlife, then it doesn't matter what you think: it just is. And if there is, then we really are valuable and important to some extent. Personally, I can comprehend just fine the idea that we would simply cease to exist. I don't agree with it, but I can comprehend it just fine. It would be a mistake to assume that anyone who believes in an afterlife is incapable of considering the alternative.

I simply encourage you to be aware of the "lenses" through which you see, to correct for them when thinking so as to not be unduly influenced or restricted by them. There is no more important question in life than that of God's existence--that is, if he is real, nothing is more important. There are no greater stakes.

Re:Truth simply is

[shadowofwind]

Hi. If you haven't exhausted your enthusiasm for arguing about this, maybe you'll find me more entertaining than the other guy....

If God is real, then he is real and he is who he is, regardless of what we think, feel, or believe about him.

I'm not sure this is completely true. Certainly there is truth to it, but there is also a lot in my experience that says that what god is can not be completely decoupled or separated from what we think about god. In other words, god isn't totally distinct from our thoughts about god.

Obviously we can't just make up anything we want to about god and expect it to make sense. And maybe almost as obviously, we're not presently capable of making up anything about god that does completely make sense. But I'm not sure that the question "what is god like?" has an answer that's completely distinct from "what is god like ,for us?", and the answer to the second question is interdependent with our thoughts about god. It doesn't seem to me that there is a completely clean distinction that can be made between 'god' and 'idol'. Most people assume, for instance, that scripture is either inspired by god or not, and if it is inspired by god, then any problems it has must be errors in interpretation. This assumption doesn't not fit my experience and observation well at all.

the reason suffering exists is a very tough question. The basic answer is that we live in a fallen world.

If you look at the hunger, violence and fear that afflicts men, it has very deep roots in the natural world. One way to try to square that with the idea that "the fall" is something that man did, is to make a fetish out of moral ignorance. In other words, assume that these afflictions are problems for us only because of our thoughts about them and our capacity to grapple with them. Or another approach is to assume that "the fall" has retroactive effects, that natural history looks a lot different post-fall than it would otherwise. This seems to me to be a reasonable thought. However, if history is greatly changed, then man is greatly changed too. In which case the thought that it was 'man' as we conceive of ourselves who fell is a bit of a fallacy.

Clearly our perceptions are colored by our 'fallen' condition. So is the perception that any other condition is possible also a result of our condition? In other words, maybe there's no internally consistent way to make an ecosystem work without misery. And one form that takes is a mistaken belief that something better is possible. Is the possibility of redemption one of those things we are mistaken about? For all the talk of man's arrogance, it seems awfully arrogant to me to call something The Truth because we have written it down in a black bound book with really thin paper. The universe is very, very big, apparently, and very old. Is it reasonable to suppose that nature works in a radically different way on countless other worlds, and that only our world is fallen? And if other worlds are fallen too, is it not arrogant to suppose that after a few thousand years of puzzling on the problem our prophets know the solution? If there were a solution, would not the problem have already been solved, with our world healed from the end to the beginning? You and I do not choose this, the condition we were born into. We can pretend, but it clearly is not a matter of exercise of free will, not for us, not now. Who do we call those who do have that free will, in whatever scope that they reside in? In what sense can they be thought of as 'us', and in what sense are they gods?

Its clear to me that the ways in which people think about the world, and the way that nature appears to work, is very limited in comparison to what it is potentially. But are fundamentally different moral dynamics possible? I think so. Are they common? Maybe we have no way to know that. There does seem to me to be some cause for optimism though. Its pretty clear to

Re:Truth simply is

[david_thornley]

I don't understand you at all. I'm not rejecting reason. I'm simply saying that there are some questions which we cannot answer by simply thinking and speculating. We cannot prove whether there is an afterlife; we cannot prove there is a spiritual realm.

We're in agreement on that. I can't prove there is a God or an afterlife, and I can't prove the reverse. Therefore, believing in them is not contrary to reason (unless you have other assumptions, such as a faith in strict materialism). However, an omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent God who allows us to perceive reality through our senses does run into a contradiction. Either one recognizes that and changes one's beliefs, or one rejects reason as pertaining to religion.

I made some bad assumptions about you personally, and I apologize for that. I was projecting what I've seen in others onto you.

However, upthread you were arguing that we didn't now what omniscience would be like, and I find that puzzling. I'm clearly not omniscient, and don't know what it would be like. I do know that the effect would be knowing everything. Omnipotence is similar. These are fairly simple concepts, overall, even if we can't possibly apprehend them in detail. They would mean, making common assumptions, that everything is in accordance with God's will.

Omnibenevolence is subject to more debate. In context, it means that everything that happens is for the best. It's certainly arguable that much suffering is a consequence of free will (another metaphysical concept that can't be proven), and I shouldn't have used waterboarding as an example, but it's obvious that much suffering has no direct or apparent indirect connection with human moral decisions. It appears that animals can suffer unnecessarily, and I don't see that they're capable of sinning in the human sense, so it looks to me like there is unnecessary suffering that has nothing to do with sin. Therefore, either God doesn't know about it, or God can't do anything about it, or it's in accordance with God's will (or God doesn't exist - I'm not arguing for or against the existence of God here). At this point, it looks to me like people are making things up in support of certain principles they've adopted.

Unless I've missed something, you don't get this sort of theology in the Bible, or any other reasonably primary source. People read certain things into the Bible (and other sacred literature), and sit around making stuff up to make it sound authoritative. A whole lot of Christian theologians have spent a whole lot of work on the Problem of Pain, and the problem simply goes away if you assume God isn't completely omnipotent, that God cannot just mandate a perfect world even independent of human free will.

I don't have direct and detailed insight into God, and I don't think anybody else alive does. Certainly I haven't seen objective evidence of it (partly because such evidence is impossible). Therefore, if I want standard theology, I'm taking a lot on faith from other people, and I'm twisting my thinking around to avoid contradicting things that people just tell me. I don't like arguments from authority when I can't find evidence that the arguer is authoritative. I'm certainly not going to distrust my own senses and my own reasoning because of questionable authority.

Re:Truth simply is

[HeckRuler]

There is nothing that philosophers can't waste time on. Omniscience included.

And you can't prove axioms.

So you suck at math just about as much as you suck at philosophy.

Try to get a grip. Your arguments do so many mental backflips that I dissuaded from believing anything you say simply by it's association with you.

Re:Truth simply is

[gottabeme]

Hi. If you haven't exhausted your enthusiasm for arguing about this, maybe you'll find me more entertaining than the other guy....

I'm always interested in truth and the idea of it. :)

If God is real, then he is real and he is who he is, regardless of what we think, feel, or believe about him.

I'm not sure this is completely true. Certainly there is truth to it, but there is also a lot in my experience that says that what god is can not be completely decoupled or separated from what we think about god. In other words, god isn't totally distinct from our thoughts about god.

Sorry, but you're presupposing that God only exists as a concept in our minds. This is not logical. For example, there may be planets orbiting other stars which we have not detected. Whether we know of their existence does not change whether they exist. If we do detect them, whether we detect their characteristics accurately does not change their actual characteristics. In the same way, if a supernatural creator being does exist, he exists independently of our realization, understanding, or acknowledgment. For God's existence or characteristics to depend on our thoughts would make us the creators of him, would make us God. Since we are unable to create matter or energy from nothing, we are not supernatural creator beings, and not God.

Obviously we can't just make up anything we want to about god and expect it to make sense. And maybe almost as obviously, we're not presently capable of making up anything about god that does completely make sense.

This raises the question of what "makes sense." Makes sense to who? If God exists or has attribute A, but we don't think he exists or don't think he has attribute A, that doesn't change whether he exists or has attribute A--whether something "makes sense" to anyone doesn't change what actually is the case.

But I'm not sure that the question "what is god like?" has an answer that's completely distinct from "what is god like ,for us?", and the answer to the second question is interdependent with our thoughts about god.

You're basically arguing here that we can't really "know" anything; that there is no reality other than our own perception of it. This is not logical, however: while two people may perceive a certain wavelength of light as different colors, the fact that the light exists and has a certain frequency doesn't change.

It doesn't seem to me that there is a completely clean distinction that can be made between 'god' and 'idol'.

This statement depends entirely on your definitions of the terms "god" and "idol." When I say, "God," I refer to an almighty creator being. When you say, "god," I don't know what you mean--perhaps some ideas influenced by mythological characters and polytheistic religions. When I say, "idol," I refer to a concept, object, or being, real or imagined, which is worshiped, other than God. When you say, "idol," I don't know what you mean--apparently the same as when you say, "god."

Most people assume, for instance, that scripture is either inspired by god or not, and if it is inspired by god, then any problems it has must be errors in interpretation. This assumption doesn't not fit my experience and observation well at all.

Other potential problems include transcriptional and translational errors. It's entirely possible to believe that the original writings--which we do not have--were inspired by God and still recognize the potential for mistakes in the human preservational processes. It has been argued that God, rather than handing down already-written documents, purposely worked within humans and human processes to communicate his message. As to why, this is debatable. One possible reason is to prevent the documents themselves from being worshiped as

Re:Truth simply is

[gottabeme]

We're in agreement on that. I can't prove there is a God or an afterlife, and I can't prove the reverse. Therefore, believing in them is not contrary to reason (unless you have other assumptions, such as a faith in strict materialism). However, an omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent God who allows us to perceive reality through our senses does run into a contradiction. Either one recognizes that and changes one's beliefs, or one rejects reason as pertaining to religion.

I honestly don't understand the contradiction you are referring to. If it's what you refer to later about omnibenevolence, I'll answer that later.

But one thing you haven't mentioned is the question of reason itself. I would submit that, if a supernatural being did create the entire universe--matter and energy and physical laws--from nothingness (as best we can imagine true nothingness), then our concept of reason would by definition be limited compared to his, and our efforts to apply reason to him for the sake of understanding him, however diligent and fair, would necessarily fall short. Therefore we should admit that, simply because we cannot reasonably understand something doesn't mean it is invalid or untrue or non-existent. Please note, however, that this does not require "rejecting reason as pertaining to religion," but simply recognizing our human finiteness. Just as modern medicine cannot heal all diseases, it is still useful; just as science cannot completely explain all natural processes or laws, it is still useful. We simply must humbly remember our limitations.

I made some bad assumptions about you personally, and I apologize for that. I was projecting what I've seen in others onto you.

Thank you for admitting that.

However, upthread you were arguing that we didn't now what omniscience would be like, and I find that puzzling. I'm clearly not omniscient, and don't know what it would be like. I do know that the effect would be knowing everything. Omnipotence is similar. These are fairly simple concepts, overall, even if we can't possibly apprehend them in detail. They would mean, making common assumptions, that everything is in accordance with God's will.

I find your arguments puzzling. Logically, since we cannot know everything, we cannot know what it would be like to know everything. It's easy to say, "the effect would be that I would know everything," but it's impossible, by definition, to know what the effect of knowing everything would be--so it's impossible to know what it would be like to be omniscient. A poor analogy would be to say, "If I knew how to play the piano, I'd know how to play the piano." (A Yogism if I've ever heard one!) But unless one actually knows how to play the piano, one cannot explain to someone else what it is like to play the piano; one cannot know or even truly imagine the ideas and "worlds" that would then be open to one's mind and abilities. It is one thing to listen to someone else express certain musical ideas on the piano--it is another thing entirely to be able to express certain ideas yourself, and greater still to be able to create and express new ideas. But unless you know how to play the piano, you can't even know what the piano is capable of expressing--or, at least, you only know what you have heard so far, and you can't even investigate it yourself.

Omnibenevolence is subject to more debate. In context, it means that everything that happens is for the best. It's certainly arguable that much suffering is a consequence of free will (another metaphysical concept that can't be proven), and I shouldn't have used waterboarding as an example, but it's obvious that much suffering has no direct or apparent indirect connection with human moral decisions. It appears that animals can suffer unnecessarily, and I don't see that they're capable of sinning in the human sense, so it looks to me like there is unnecessary suffering that has nothing

Re:Truth simply is

[gottabeme]

Your arguments do so many mental backflips that I dissuaded from believing anything you say simply by it's association with you.

Well, at least you admit your logical fallacy, but that doesn't excuse it, nor your ad hominems. You could try to argue rather than making assertions and insults...couldn't you?

Re:Truth simply is

[gottabeme]

If it's so clear, friend, why don't you explain it instead of asserting it? Or are you playing semantic games by missing my intended meaning? I guess if you can't figure out what I mean then maybe you shouldn't listen to me...or maybe you should keep trying to understand me so we could both come to knowledge of the truth.

Re:Truth simply is

[shadowofwind]

Sorry, but you're presupposing that God only exists as a concept in our minds.

I'm not presupposing that and I don't believe that either. I'd go so far as to say that I know that God exists as more than a concept in our minds. And I don't presume to know very much, most things are working hypotheses for me.

Likewise with pretty much everything else you said in response. I appreciate the time you took, but its like we're having two different conversations. You don't seem to be speaking to any of my thoughts, you seem to be addressing other thoughts that you posit that I have but which I don't have. I don't think that's necessarily your fault, maybe our experiential background is just too different, and of course I didn't express myself perfectly. I may also speculate that you have an ideological ax to grind which only permits me to have one of a selection of possible viewpoints, so you've tried to shoehorn me into the one that I appear to fit most closely. That would just be speculation, and I'm sure it wouldn't be entirely accurate. It does seems rather presumptuous to me though for you to judge my thoughts as promising or not promising, or confused or not confused, when I've attempted to express only a tiny, tiny portion of the thought I have on this subject, without much explanatory context, and none of it appears to have made much sense to you. Generally speaking, in my experience, when someone else says something that doesn't appear to make complete sense, its as likely that you haven't understood them as it is that their thought doesn't actually make sense. Usually its a mix of both. Part of communication and part of learning is teasing out the gem of what makes sense from all the confusion and misunderstanding. I don't see much if any of that happening here though. Not enough to give me hope that trying harder would yield better results at this point anyway.

Re:Truth simply is

[gottabeme]

I probably did misunderstand you. Like I said, your words were quite vague, and sometimes contradictory or incompatible. I tried to point out how you were vague and how you could be more specific in your thinking or writing. You are free to perceive my attitude as arrogant, but I said that your thoughts are promising simply because I can tell you have thought about this a lot, but you haven't expressed your thoughts clearly; there is much potential for you to do so. Until you have articulated your own point of view clearly, I can't accurately evaluate it and respond to it. I tried to do what I could with the picture I tried to piece together.

Re:Truth simply is

[shadowofwind]

I think you're guessing about what's contradictory or incompatible based on a fairly narrow set of possible word definitions. Most words on these subjects have a variety of closely related meanings, often none of which are quite adequate. I agree that you lack context to make more sense of that without me writing pages and pages of explanation though.

The reason I used the word god in many places instead of God, is I was trying to avoid connotations of the word God which are outside of what I experience.

If you think that there is unlikely to be anything of interest to learn from me, then it seems to me very unlikely that I can explain my thoughts to you or learn much from you either. If you're not very interested in understanding anything from me that's outside of what you already understand, you can't see the questions and issues that I actually have and find new relevant insight. Hence my reluctance to launch into a massive explanation of things that weren't clear. Based on past experience, its pretty much hopeless if there isn't that kind of openness on both sides. That's why I didn't post in response to "Lord Kelvin", for instance, though he responded to one of my posts anyway, and it went pretty much as well as you'd expect. Maybe I'm wrong about the nature of your interest, that was just my guess based on your first response, that you were approaching this mostly as someone would would teach other people, and the gap is just too big to overcome that.

Re:Truth simply is

[gottabeme]

You are indeed wrong about the nature of my interest. :) I do have an interest in teaching, but any teacher who doesn't learn from his students isn't worth listening to. But anyway, I wouldn't call you or anyone else a student of mine; I don't think so highly of myself that I would think I have more to teach than to learn. My primary goal is seeking truth, learning about it, and sharing it with others. I'm very interested in what you think, whether or not I end up agreeing with you.

Re:Truth simply is

[shadowofwind]

You are indeed wrong about the nature of my interest.

Fair enough. I'll try to tackle the first bit then.

If God is real, then he is real and he is who he is, regardless of what we think, feel, or believe about him.

I'm not sure this is completely true. Certainly there is truth to it, but there is also a lot in my experience that says that what god is can not be completely decoupled or separated from what we think about god. In other words, god isn't totally distinct from our thoughts about god.

Sorry, but you're presupposing that God only exists as a concept in our minds.

You characterized my thought as "God only exists as a concept in our minds". What I said was that god can't be completely separated from what we think about god, and isn't totally distinct from our thoughts about god. Right or wrong, that isn't the same as saying that God is nothing more than a thought in our minds, and I took care to make that distinction.

The reason I don't regard God to be totally separate from people's thoughts about God, is it appears to me that people's thought's about God collectively have power such as they would attribute to God. But those thought-gods also lack the infallibility that people attribute to God. In other words, people's thoughts about God are not private mental models disconnected from the wider world, those thoughts actually influence destiny and can precipitate miracles. If we assume that all miracles must be either works of God, or else works of wholly evil demons, or else unreal hallucinations or fabrications, then that doesn't fit my experience or observation of other people's experiences at all well.

Let's posit that there is a perfect, infallible, universal God that is wholly independent of people's thoughts about God. I'm on board with that, at least as a reasonable hypothesis. But there are still also all these other thought-gods we deal with, and we make poor choices about them if we try to regard them as God. And yet God works through these mental gods, apparently, just as God often seems to work through events in general.

Jesus or Mary can't fairly be regarded as idols just because people pray to their images as they would to idols. In other words, when people relate to what they think of as God they are all to some degree relating to idols, but that's not all that they're doing.

You're right that my view on this has strong similarities with past semi-polytheistic views about God and gods. But I don't think you have the right impression if it seems that my view is "influenced" by those ideas, as if its purely an abstract, intellectual thing, or I found them more pleasing because I felt they allowed a desired degree of moral license or something. For me this is a matter of trying to make sense of my own experiences. I've had thousands of intuitions having to do with my own spiritual development, hundreds if not thousands of accurate premonitions, and have experienced numerous objectively verifiable miracles of various related types. This isn't academic, its an unavoidable part of my life that I have to deal with as intelligently as I can. The model in which my thoughts are internal and personal, and God is perfect and completely distinct from those, fails to accommodate my experiences. It just doesn't work. Moreover, when I look at the behavior of other people who have experiences similar to mine, and who try to interpret every mystic experience either as a message from God, a trick by the devil, or a meaningless random event, this has bad results. When the latter two hypotheses fail, they start regarding themselves as Chosen, and do conflate their thoughts with God, because of the god-like qualities that are present in many of those thoughts. They try to explain their mistakes in terms of "misunderstanding" a presumably perfect message from God. But this doesn't really work very well, because

Truth just is

[gottabeme]

Your reasoning is fundamentally illogical, yet you tout it as provable. How ironic and sad that someone would insist on his infallible logic when it's fundamentally flawed.

1. You are presupposing you know what others mean when they use the term "God." What you're actually doing is reasoning based on your own conception of God.

2. God is, by definition, above and beyond and outside of us and our universe. Statistics is a human-created field. It cannot prove anything which is by definition outside its realm.

You are simply creating God in your own image. You are delineating his boundaries according to your finite, human perception. What if you are wrong? Are you so arrogant as to assume that you cannot be wrong? Such would make you God--but self-worship is not uncommon among humanity.

Truth simply is, whether or not we believe it, understand it, or agree with it. If God is real, then he is real and he is who he is, regardless of what we feel, think, or believe about him.

Re:Truth just is

[Zero__Kelvin]

My reasoning is perfect, and your assertions about my claim show a basic inability to read and understand what you read. For example, I never once presupposed that I know what they are thinking. I merely stated that whatever it that they are thinking, they couldn't possibly get it right.

" If God is real, then he is real and he is who he is, regardless of what we feel, think, or believe about him."

And yet I can easily deduce you think it's a "him", thereby making you a pretty serious moron.

Re:Truth just is

[LordLimecat]

My experience is that those who insist that something they have done or concieved of is perfect, it usually is not.

In fact, most maxims about "wisdom" I have ever seen or read tend to indicate that wisdom consists in large part of recognizing your flaws, rather than engaging in hubris.

Re:Truth just is

[gottabeme]

Your hypocrisy is remarkable.

You don't know what "they" are thinking, yet you know that what they are thinking cannot be true. This is a non sequitur; each statement disproves the other. Are you really so lacking in the ability to think clearly?

And yet I can easily deduce you think it's a "him", thereby making you a pretty serious moron.

You are blinded by your presuppositions:

1. You are assuming that God is not male. What if he is?
2. You are assuming that God even has gender. What if he doesn't?
3. You are assuming that my use of the word "him"--which has historically been used as not only the male pronoun but in gender-unspecific contexts--is even relevant. What if I don't mean what you think I mean?

For a finale, you retreat to name-calling. Do you expect anyone to take you seriously?

Re:Truth just is

[Zero__Kelvin]

Time to get some more experience.

Re:Truth just is

[Zero__Kelvin]

No. You are lacking in intellect. I don't know what a baby is thinking about how a radio operates or what it does, but I know that whatever it is, it isn't true.

" You are assuming that God is not male. What if he is?"

Your question represents a basic lack of understanding of the male/female dichotomy.

"You are assuming that God even has gender. What if he doesn't?"

I have never assumed such a ridiculous thing, and in fact if you were paying attention, I made it pretty clear by not using He or Her at all, since any single creator who is at the top hierarchy of existence must necessarily have no gender.

"You are assuming that my use of the word "him"--which has historically been used as not only the male pronoun but in gender-unspecific contexts--is even relevant"

As I said, you used him, which assumes some kind of gender, however unspecific it might be, ergo you got it wrong already. I don't need to know anymore about your concept to know it has to be wrong.

"For a finale, you retreat to name-calling. Do you expect anyone to take you seriously?"

You've got me there. One of my biggest concerns is that morons take me seriously.

Actually, no...

[denzacar]

1. You are presupposing you know what others mean when they use the term "God." What you're actually doing is reasoning based on your own conception of God.

"God" is pretty well defined. Really. Some people out there have been doing nothing but that for millennia now.
You seem to be confusing "God" for a "deity". Now THAT can mean a lot of different things.

2. God is, by definition, above and beyond and outside of us and our universe. Statistics is a human-created field. It cannot prove anything which is by definition outside its realm.

By definition, "God" is exactly opposite of that.

He is inside all of us and everything else in the universe, omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent and omni- everything else.
You seem to be confusing a "God" with a mere "Creator" or "Experimenter".
Which is akin to defining Superman as "a man wearing red underwear".

Also, statistics is just mathematics. I.e. A study and use of a set of rules that work across the entire universe the same way.
Universal language and all that...
Humans or Vulcans or Thinking Mushrooms of Jenny 867-5309 - statistics would work for all of them the same way.

Re:Actually, no...

[gottabeme]

He is inside all of us and everything else in the universe, omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent and omni- everything else.
You seem to be confusing a "God" with a mere "Creator" or "Experimenter".

You are either confused or misunderstanding me. I do not propose that God exists solely outside of our universe, unable to interact with it. I propose that he exists outside the limitations of and nature of the physical universe as we know it. Having created the universe, he can interact with it however he chooses. Yet existing outside of it, he is not subject to its limitations and laws, and is therefore not subject to our finite comprehension.

An analogy--imperfect, of course--is that of a fish in a fishbowl. It exists within the limitations of its fishbowl, its universe. It can see a vague, blurry glimpse outside of it, but it cannot participate in it. Those outside the fishbowl can reach into the fishbowl, but they do not exist merely inside the fishbowl, and are not limited to it. (This implies, of course, a lid on the bowl preventing the fish from jumping out of it; since we are unable to leave our universe at will, it is reasonable.)

Also, statistics is just mathematics. I.e. A study and use of a set of rules that work across the entire universe the same way.
Universal language and all that...
Humans or Vulcans or Thinking Mushrooms of Jenny 867-5309 - statistics would work for all of them the same way.

Statistics does not prove anything about metaphysics. Statistics cannot reach outside the universe within which it was devised. You're still not grasping the fundamental issue here.

And tossing around terms and phrases doesn't prove anything.

Re:Actually, no...

[denzacar]

You are either confused or misunderstanding me. I do not propose that God exists solely outside of our universe, unable to interact with it. I propose that he exists outside the limitations of and nature of the physical universe as we know it. Having created the universe, he can interact with it however he chooses. Yet existing outside of it, he is not subject to its limitations and laws, and is therefore not subject to our finite comprehension.

Again...
He is inside all of us and everything else in the universe, omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent and omni- everything else.
And he MUST be subject to the conditions inside the universe (i.e. limitations and laws) - or the prayers wouldn't work.
Prayers don't work? Not The God. Omni-whatever... But not The God.

Fish(bowl) analogy kinda misses on that whole thing where The God chooses and favors certain people or fish and grants them wishes and requests if they complete certain rituals.
Fish would have to be able to make people outside feed it - in essence it would have to be able to CONTROL the people outside the bowl.

Statistics does not prove anything about metaphysics. Statistics cannot reach outside the universe within which it was devised. You're still not grasping the fundamental issue here.

Oh... We're going into that territory.
Where imaginary is real because it can't be proven, but real is worthless because it is a part of the reality. Riiiiight...

There's a nice bit about philosophy in History of the World, Part I.
It pretty much sums up where your "fundamental issue" lies.

Now, if you'd actually opened your mind for a moment and gave it a thought or two, you'd realize that statistics which is mathematics is nothing more than the code of the universe, and that any "external" actor or creator which interacts with the universe is in fact a part of it - as they are both in the same universe.
Bowl and the fish and those outside it are still SOMEWHERE ELSE TOGETHER.
And the same rules apply in the bowl and outside it - they have to or it wouldn't be a bowl nor would any interaction be possible.
To reach inside the bowl you must have a hand that is as real as the bowl and you must occupy the same place at the same time - somewhere.

And all that again makes the one interacting with the bowl or universe an "Experimenter" but not The God.

In fact, you can never have The God as it is a paradox.
Being omni-everything and yet easily swayed and controlled by a primate, who practically doesn't exist compared to the entirety of the universe's span of existence in time and space, uttering a couple of words or holding his/her hands in a certain way.
Or him/her doing something "bad", thereby making the omni-creature angry.

A microbe sneezing away a galactic cluster is not even close to how ridiculous that is.

Re:Actually, no...

[gottabeme]

I'm simply astonished at the number and magnitude of your presuppositions. You are arguing against popular notions of who God is and what he is like--but what if those popular notions are wrong? What if you are knocking down strawmen and missing the point entirely?

Again...
He is inside all of us and everything else in the universe, omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent and omni- everything else.
And he MUST be subject to the conditions inside the universe (i.e. limitations and laws) - or the prayers wouldn't work.
Prayers don't work? Not The God. Omni-whatever... But not The God.

Where did you get these ideas? You're arguing as if prayer is supposed to be a magic ritual to control God. That's not prayer--that's animism. Prayer is simply communication. It may include petitions and requests, it may include praise, it may include confession, it may include simple conversation. It is up to God how he responds to prayers.

What does it even mean for prayers to "work"? Does it mean that everyone gets what he prays for? That's not prayer--that's a list for Santa Claus.

Why do you assume that either God must give us whatever we pray for or else he isn't God? What if he answers a prayer with a "no"? Who are you to say what God is supposed to do? That is simply creating God in your own image, putting him in a box of your own design. If God created the universe, if he created matter and energy and natural laws, how could he be bound by your ideas?

Fish(bowl) analogy kinda misses on that whole thing where The God chooses and favors certain people or fish and grants them wishes and requests if they complete certain rituals.
Fish would have to be able to make people outside feed it - in essence it would have to be able to CONTROL the people outside the bowl.

Your presuppositions are blinding you, friend. Who says that God chooses and favors certain people? Who says he grants them wishes if they complete rituals? These are popular ideas, but what if they are not accurate? Your idea about the fish controlling people outside the bowl is simply a manifestation of your strawman that God is a puppet pulled by strings of prayer.

What if your ideas about what God is supposed to be are wrong?

Oh... We're going into that territory.
Where imaginary is real because it can't be proven, but real is worthless because it is a part of the reality. Riiiiight...

I think you're putting words in my mouth. I didn't say God is real because he is unprovable. If that were my argument, then the Tooth Fairy would be equally real.

My argument is not that statistics are worthless--it's that they are irrelevant to metaphysical questions. One cannot statistically prove or disprove God's existence. One may interpret a result either way--it does not prove anything. The whole point of there being a supernatural creator and an afterlife is that he is supernatural, and that the afterlife is an afterlife. Who are you to say that something of this universe, like statistics or any kind of math, would apply? If God exists, and if there is an afterlife, they are by definition outside your realm of understanding.

Now, if you'd actually opened your mind for a moment and gave it a thought or two, you'd realize that statistics which is mathematics is nothing more than the code of the universe, and that any "external" actor or creator which interacts with the universe is in fact a part of it - as they are both in the same universe.

I'm not claiming that God does not or cannot interact with our universe--quite the opposite. But what does it mean to be a "part of it"? I argue that a being who created the universe and its rules is by definition not limited to them.

Bowl and the fish and those outside it are still SOMEWHERE ELSE TOGETHER.

I honestly have no idea what you mean by this.

Re:Actually, no...

[denzacar]

I could go through your entire shotgun argument, but I'll just concentrate on the following in order to save time, since you have already excluded yourself from any conversation on The God topic.

You are simply creating God in your own image. You are delineating his boundaries according to your finite, human perception.

Who are you to say what God is supposed to do? That is simply creating God in your own image, putting him in a box of your own design. If God created the universe, if he created matter and energy and natural laws, how could he be bound by your ideas?

So, not only is The God beyond your "finite, human perception" (end of any conversation on this topic - with you), you want to "seal the deal" by piling reverse appeal to authority on top of that?

See, there are couple of problems there.
Not only is your opinion that you have no idea what you are talking about ("finite, human perception", God unknowable, goodnight) and that anything you say on the topic of The God is essentially bullshit (i.e. talking about something you no nothing about - as it is beyond your "finite, human perception") - you are somehow an expert on what the omni-doubleplusgoodwitheverything-creature is NOT supposed to do.

Who are you to say what God is supposed to do?

Who are you to QUESTION what The God is supposed to do? Are you saying The God is NOT omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent and benevolent?
If The God is all that - then it is supposed to be doing good things all the time - or the benevolence goes out the window.

And you actually dare to question others, with your "finite, human perception" of the subject, as if there is some objective authority on the subject of The God, and you are in possession of said authority?

What's next? You're gonna say that The God talks to you?
Sure it's not The Dog? One CAN easily confuse them.

Feel free to keep on arguing. I'm gonna go sleep instead.

Re:Actually, no...

[gottabeme]

You are simply creating God in your own image. You are delineating his boundaries according to your finite, human perception.

Who are you to say what God is supposed to do? That is simply creating God in your own image, putting him in a box of your own design. If God created the universe, if he created matter and energy and natural laws, how could he be bound by your ideas?

So, not only is The God beyond your "finite, human perception" (end of any conversation on this topic - with you), you want to "seal the deal" by piling reverse appeal to authority on top of that?

See, there are couple of problems there.
Not only is your opinion that you have no idea what you are talking about ("finite, human perception", God unknowable, goodnight) and that anything you say on the topic of The God is essentially bullshit (i.e. talking about something you no nothing about - as it is beyond your "finite, human perception") - you are somehow an expert on what the omni-doubleplusgoodwitheverything-creature is NOT supposed to do.

You're creating a false dichotomy: that either we can know everything about God or nothing about God. This is not logical. Having a finite, limited perception precludes us from having a complete understanding of him, but it does not mean that we cannot understand anything about him. This is especially so if one believes that God has chosen to reveal certain aspects of himself to us; this is only admitting that we can know what he has made known.

Who are you to say what God is supposed to do?

Who are you to QUESTION what The God is supposed to do? Are you saying The God is NOT omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent and benevolent?
If The God is all that - then it is supposed to be doing good things all the time - or the benevolence goes out the window.

Again, you have not answered my argument, and you have simply reasserted that God is supposed to do what you think he is supposed to do--that you are the judge of what is benevolent. I question these assumptions you are making, but you are accepting them without question. Ironically, you imply that I am the naive one.

And you actually dare to question others, with your "finite, human perception" of the subject, as if there is some objective authority on the subject of The God, and you are in possession of said authority?

What's next? You're gonna say that The God talks to you?
Sure it's not The Dog? One CAN easily confuse them.

I guess you are misunderstanding me, and I think you are projecting on me ideas and beliefs and arguments from other people. I have the impression that you are angry as well, perhaps at people who believed in God yet treated you badly.

I think it's very important to question everything you believe. If you don't know why you believe what you believe, do you really know what you believe? Is your faith strong?

Please do not misunderstand me, friend: I do believe there is an objective authority on God, and I believe that authority is solely himself. I do not possess such authority. I only possess what I believe to be the words which he inspired and intended to be passed on to us today, words which I can interpret and comprehend only in accordance with my limitations as a human being. I don't claim that he speaks to me in visions or dreams or anything like that. You're absolutely right to be skeptical of anyone who makes such claims--they could simply be hearing what they ate for dinner that night.

Feel free to keep on arguing. I'm gonna go sleep instead.

Sleep well, friend! I hope you wake up with renewed passion for seeking truth, casting aside the shackles of ideas that others try to impose on you. Don't take my word for anything! Investigate the truth yourself and make up your own mind. The stakes are too high to rely on anyone on earth!

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Lesson 47

[Tablizer]

"My money got sucked into a black hole!"

Sure he loses or does he?

[boddhisatva]

The bets he has lost have all been ones in which the monetary amount has been small and the outcome of the proof has enormous implications for physics. Winning a bottle of Scotch or something from a great physicist and making a huge contribution to knowledge. His gambling losses have paid for tremendous breakthroughs in science. That's a bet I would love to lose. I think he likes to lose too.

Re:Sure he loses or does he?

[KramberryKoncerto]

Indeed. In "A Brief History of Time", he says he likes to make bets against his own theories, as a kind of insurance for when they go wrong. He'd definitely like to bet against what he would like to believe.

Re:His wheelchair uses my HOST file... apk

[Rakarra]

I've been around long enough to remember the Slashdot memes of Natalie Portman (naked and petrified), Oog the Open-Source Caveman, and hot grits down your pants.

This apk thing seems to have come out of nowhere. It has a vague sense of being modeled after the TimeCube arguments, but could just be the Crazy talking.
I don't know if it's just crazy, or Crazy Awesome.

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