I'm a Physicist, and it's not 'nothing'. :) Lawrence is engaged in a metaphysics program. He wants to show that atheism is intellectually justified as to the origin of the Universe, as they feel it is with the darwinian theory of origin of species.
Making the positive statement that the 'Universe is uncreated', is just as intellectually justified as saying 'The Universe is created'. Not very justified, if you ask me, but just as much in both sides. One can only get subjective if saying that their hypothesis is more justified, although unverified.
> Making the positive statement that the 'Universe is uncreated', is just as intellectually justified as saying 'The Universe is created'.
No, because the statement "The Universe is created" demands that the person stating it demonstrate the existence of the creator in a way that rules out the likelihood of that creator not existing.
And the statement 'The Univers is uncreated' demands a proof that there is no creator. And it's generally accepted fact that you can not prove the inexistence of something.
Of course you can prove the non-existence of something. For example, when the existence of a thing entails certain other things being true, and they are shown not to be true, then it is also shown that the thing of that description does not exist. For another example, you can show that a certain description is self-contradictory and cannot have any referent.
Though it may sound trite, you aren't going to get anywhere on this argument until you figure out what you mean by 'universe' and 'created'.
Very good point. But I'm afraid I don't have the time to go now into all the subtleties of the theological and philosophical definitions of created/uncreated, ontological dependence, being, person and so on. There's a rich literature on this.
As point, you have to make supplementary assumption as to what the existence of a being entails. And that follows from the definition for that thing. But when it comes to the created/uncreated distinction, I can not 'a priori' make any other assumption than the fact that God has the power to create things different from Himself. That's it.
Some find it, for instance, contradictory that a loving God allows suffering in the world. It's not my intention to go into that argument now because there's a lot to say, and has been said by many, about love, suffering, evil, freedom etc. At each point, and with each added concept, chances are that people will find contradiction just because they don't agree on the same definition.
Hence it's difficult sometimes to rule out the existence of an object on the basis of an apparent contradiction.
There's a rich literature in physical cosmology too... and I suspect that a difference between the operational definition used there and the traditional Christian definition is causing a lot of crosstalk.
I'm puzzled about why you think you can make certain assumptions about God but not anything else. It seems to me that you are in just as much of a fix to make assertions about God as you are to make assertions about time, or Dunkin Donuts Inc.
I appreciate that you conceded the possibility of showing that one thing or another doesn't exist - my concern was really for that general principle and not any specific application (e.g., to the unceasing arguments about God)
You don't prove the null hypothesis. But you might not have enough evidence to rule it out.
I don't honestly know how to apply this kind of t-test logic to the question of whether gods exist, but I think we have fairly adequate evidence that dodo birds do not exist any more, and we haven't even tried that hard. If you try very very hard and in good ways to find something which by all rights should be there, and don't find it, it's just basic honesty to say you 'failed to reject the null hypothesis' than to make plausible excuses about how it really must exist despite the dearth of evidence.
If you have an idea about how to really find it, then it's up to you to make a better methodology and then use it to find the thing. And you can keep coming up with better and better methodologies around all the excuses for as long as you want to. Everyone can.
But the more sustained and general the failure to see expected evidence, the less likely the basis of the expectation. So rational people will give up on Eldorado and Shangri-la after many attempts fail to find any evidence for them. Shangri-la might be hiding behind a cloud, sure, but that doesn't mean that every claim is equally credible. A million excuses for lack of evidence are more likely a product of human frailties than of the claim actually being true after all that failure to support it.
I agree. People often mistake the two domains of reality. Just because the physical reality is given and closer to us, we can't rule out other forms of existence.
And say that, somehow, a percentage of humans had some sort of experience of the supernatural. Then they pass on that information. Some believe them, some don't. It's a matter of confidence. Some of the ones that just believed in the first place, eventually get to also have those spiritual experiences.
One could also make conjectures about the nature of those spiritual experiences: that they were illusions, hallucinations, or real experiences. But it can not be objectively verified.
And there will always be a percentage of people what will not believe.
Taking the exigence of objective, material verification of experiments in Physics to a field of subjective, psychological/spiritual experiences, seems to me to be a mistake.
> Just because the physical reality is given and closer to us, we can't rule out other forms of existence.
We can to the same extent I can rule out the existence of one million dollars in my bank account right now.
> And say that, somehow, a percentage of humans had some sort of experience of the supernatural.
If this is distinguishable from schizophrenia, they should be studied in earnest and learned from.
> But it can not be objectively verified.
Yes, it can.
> Taking the exigence of objective, material verification of experiments in Physics to a field of subjective, psychological/spiritual experiences, seems to me to be a mistake.
No. All reality is founded on the same laws. If there was something special about consciousness, it would have repercussions on every other facet of existence, and it would need to be studied on those terms.
There is at least one obvious kind of existence which isn't physical, which is the sort of existence which the things studied in math have got. That isn't particularly controversial because the 'existence' of even numbers is logically a very different thing from the 'existence' of dodo birds, or 500-foot-tall Schwinn bicycles, or Inspector Gadget.
The question of whether mathematicians are schizophrenic or mathematics represents some massive failing of science just doesn't arise because it is already well understood what is being talked about. Often the problem with theology is that we don't understand and even refuse to get clear on what it is we mean to be talking about; maybe we are just so hot to reach emotional and political conclusions...
"That isn't particularly controversial because the 'existence' of even numbers is logically a very different thing from the 'existence' of dodo birds, or 500-foot-tall Schwinn bicycles, or Inspector Gadget."
That's a concept, what do you mean by existence? Does that mean Harry Potter and Inspector Gadget exist? I don't think you're using the word "existence" correctly. I may be wrong in knowing what you're arguing as it was hard for me to parse what you wrote. I'm sorry if I misunderstood it.
If I'm using the word "exist" wrong (which I am happy to admit) then I certainly want to learn how I should be using it, for sure.
For the record and hopefully to reduce confusion, I don't think that Inspector Gadget (the man) exists. But there is still something it would be for him to exist, presumably; it just doesn't happen to be true.
Suppose I tell you there is (exists) a cheeseburger in the bag. You want to know if that's true, so you look in the bag. What do you look for? Depends on what you expect a cheeseburger to look like: probably you expect a physical object within a certain range of sizes, with certain parts of certain compositions, etc.
Now same story but meatball sub. Well, the things to look for are different in some ways.
Now same story but even number greater than 10,000. There isn't a bag you can look in for this. etc.
Dodo birds used to exist, don't any more. Checking for them is pretty different from checking for numbers or cheeseburgers in a bag.
Sherlock Holmes never existed. But you probably have at least some idea what it would mean if he did, and this is tied to how you'd check to see if he did exist.
The idea here is that 'exists' doesn't seem (to me) to be one operator which always does the same thing; it seems to be very well bound to whatever it is we are talking about the existence or nonexistence of.
> There is at least one obvious kind of existence which isn't physical, which is the sort of existence which the things studied in math have got.
I'm a formalist, so I think things studied in math are purely mental and do not necessarily have any connection to anything in the physical world beyond human mental states.
So the set of the reals is well-defined, useful, and interesting, but it isn't something you can point to any more than a unicorn is something you can point to. A thought about a unicorn is perfectly real, as is math, but that doesn't go for the concepts math involves.
> Often the problem with theology is that we don't understand and even refuse to get clear on what it is we mean to be talking about
The problem with theology is that it's philosophy with people claiming absolute truth based on nothing at all. They 'refuse to get clear' on some things because if they did, we could test their statements and demonstrate them to be wrong.
"Exists" doesn't necessarily mean "you can point your finger at it."
You can't point your finger at these nebulous "thought" things, either.
Surely one can say something like "there exists a number such that ..." and proceed to give conditions. For example, even numbers exist (8, for example). Is this some kind of erroneous use of the word "exists"? Of course not.
It's just that "exist" is a pretty generic operator - the conditions for one thing to exist can be radically different from the conditions for another thing to exist; they don't have any clear shared "flavor of existing"
> "Exists" doesn't necessarily mean "you can point your finger at it."
I agree with this if you allow mathematicians to use the word 'exists' in their usual way.
> You can't point your finger at these nebulous "thought" things, either.
Again, largely correct, in much the same way you can't really point at a specific wind.
> It's just that "exist" is a pretty generic operator - the conditions for one thing to exist can be radically different from the conditions for another thing to exist; they don't have any clear shared "flavor of existing"
And this leads into a massive philosophical issue that we've probably been going around and around with since even before the Ancient Greeks.
My point, though, is that saying "the supernatural exists" is either a null statement (because the "supernatural" being talked about doesn't do anything) or demonstrably false (because someone makes a testable claim and it's proven that the phenomenon under discussion has a natural cause).
If God exist(s|ed) then all the observable parts or effects of God (are|would be) natural, 'by definition'. And in that case the supernatural existence of God is totally pointless if it is even an issue. And it wouldn't work to disjunctively define 'caused by God' as meaning 'no natural cause' because some or all natural causes would be from God.
I suspect that the insistence on words like 'supernatural' is an insistence on an honorific, and on a social attempt to suspend the use of reason and evidence as they pertain to specific topics. Theists who don't insist on this kind of artificial isolation between talk about God and (say) talk about numbers or ethics or physics necessarily become more heavily engaged in the messy details. For similar reasons, dismissing the supernatural is quick and satisfying for skeptics in a way which extended theological arguments are not
> or demonstrably false (because someone makes a testable claim and it's proven that the phenomenon under discussion has a natural cause).
Beware that you actually test the claims and not necessarily the existence of that 'supernatural' object.
People make all kind of claims about the supernatural, often contradictory to each other. Proving one wrong, doesn't make the other ones wrong. You still have to prove each individual claim (statement within a system of beliefs) to be wrong.
Saying that an entity S is X and Y, and given that claim X contradicts fact F, doesn't yield that S is not Y (unless X and Y are dependently bound), or that S doesn't in fact exist(ed).
One can claim about Aristotle that he had blue eyes, or red beard. If these claims are false, does it mean he didn't exist?
Suppose that we strip Santa of all his characteristics: we say that Santa's age, weight, beard, gender, personhood, personal history, powers, acts, etc. are all irrelevant.
Now what meaning is there in discussing the existence of Santa? None. Because (I submit) what it means for something to exist is completely different for each thing.
Discussions about God constantly founder on this point - at the outset, when discussing the mere existence of God, it seems almost inevitable that every single characteristic is removed from the table until there is nothing to say about him.
But if his existence seems to be proven, then a massive conjunction of claims about him (indeed, a great number of claims specific to a religion) tends to spring up out of nowhere, as if these did not need to be specifically shown.
This shouldn't be surprising, since many specialists in apologetics have admitted openly that their purpose is not to zero in on the truth through reasoning and discussion but to try to use reason as a weapon against itself to clear the way for adherence to some specific religion.
"I'm trying to figure it out" isn't a religion, unfortunately.
> Proving one wrong, doesn't make the other ones wrong. You still have to prove each individual claim (statement within a system of beliefs) to be wrong.
Right. However, as humans are allowed to reason statistically, proving most of the claims of a given religion wrong will make it very unlikely that any of them are all that accurate.
