But you know me. With respect to things like God and religion, I am less interested in what folks tell me they believe and more interested in how they can actually go about demonstrating to others that what they claim to believe is true is true not only because they, well, claim to believe that it is.
And then I like to link that to the God, because if He does in fact exist then stuff like immortality and salvation may in fact exist too.
And that has always seemed better to me than, say, oblivion.
There would be no need to try and prove the existence of a monotheistic god by verbal sleights of hand if he actually existed, for if he did, it would be obvious.
I think there’s a problem with your second premise. You defend it on the grounds that an infinitely divisible substance can’t have a quantity of zero, because that’s an inverse of an infinite. But isn’t an infinitely divisible substance with a quantity of zero merely such a substance that doesn’t exist? I can think of a lot of infinitely divisible substances that don’t exist, like mana, or The Force, or ether or whatever. Maybe your argument shows that a substance, once confirmed to exist, can never be reduced to zero, but not only does that seem implausible (anything that can experience a linear decrease in quantity should be able to decrease to zero), but it also doesn’t serve your argument which seems to be that something must always have existed. So you’re left with no answer for why some substances like energy exist while other substances like ether don’t, or why, if ether doesn’t exist, it couldn’t have been the case that energy and everything else didn’t either.
You are proposing that you can think of an imaginary substance (“Y”) that doesn’t exist but is divisible. How can it be divisible if it doesn’t exist? You can imagine that it would be divisible if it did exist, but you have already specified it to be something that doesn’t. Therefore your substance isn’t divisible.
If Y doesn’t exist, “Y/2” is an oxymoron. Reach into an empty bucket and pull out only half of the apples from within. You cannot divide zero. But if you want to say that “0/2 = 0” (as they use in math despite the irrationality of it), you have still merely said that you have the same amount as you had before, not half of it. So you still haven’t actually divided it.
That is what has been confusing Man for so long. It is not true that anything that can be infinitely divided can get to zero. One can have a quantity of something with defined limits on its size, such as a penny, and easily prove that he has zero quantity of them in his hand. And that thought leads to the idea that one could have zero of anything. But the problem is that there is a difference between something with limits to its size and something that doesn’t, such as energy. Energy is a property and substance that has no limits pertaining to its size. Thus it can be divided forever without ever getting to zero. And then because of its particular property (the property of being able to have affect), if it ever became zero, you would merely have non-existence (non-affect). How can one have non-existence? What would it even mean “to have truly absolutely nothing”? So you cannot say that you have zero of it, else there would be no you to be saying it.
Not exactly true.
If something has affect, it exists (that is what having affect means and vsvrsa). In science, the potential to have affect is called “energy” (specifically electric potential). By definition, anything that exists has energy.
If you propose a substance that has no affect whatsoever, you have already specified that it does not exist. And then because it does not exist, you cannot divide it infinitely (nor at all).
Existence is made of the infinitely divisible quality of potential to affect, “energy”.
That is what I am asking people to find. I don’t believe there is one other than perhaps to use different words for the same ideas or perhaps add a step somewhere for clarification.
Well, that’s a separate argument, but is easily resolved.
There is no geometric shape that can symmetrically fill space. You can image that perhaps energy comes in little bubbles, as is proposed by the Quantum Magi, but if that were true, space would have an interesting problem.
Trying to “fill space” has been an intellectual art for millenia. There are shapes, such as a cube, that can be used to completely fill space. But the problem is that if you measure from one cube to the surrounding cubes, you will not be able to get a equal number of cubes at all angles for any given distance (radius). And what that means is that light traveling at one angle would necessarily take longer than at a different angle. And then in addition, which direction would they be aligned?
Three dimensional symmetric space, cannot be filled by ANY shape whatsoever (mathematically proven long ago). Thus to propose that energy itself comes in the form of tiny indivisible bits is to propose that space is not symmetric and also that it has an inherent “up and down”, “right and left”, and “back and front”. Experience tells us otherwise.
So those proposed tiny bits of energy could have no consistent shape. As that shape changed, the size of it changes as well. And there would have to be an infinite variety of such shapes in order to fill a symmetric space. And even then, that space would be grainy. And if you can have an infinite variety of shapes, why can’t you just have an infinitely divisible substance?
The burden of proof is far greater for such a theory than for the theory of an infinitely divisible substance.
And there are other problems, such as “Where did those bits come from?” Somethingness from nothingness?
I’m taking it for granted that ‘a substance that doesn’t exist’ and ‘a substance that there is zero of’ are the same thing. So if your argument is that a substance that doesn’t exist can’t be divisible, then fine, but now you no longer have an argument for why it couldn’t have been the case that some substance or another would have never existed in the first place. In other words, there is some particular number of divisible substances that exist- 1 or 2 or 3 probably. It could have been some other number, like zero.
So either everything exists, including weird clearly fictional stuff from various religions, fantasy novels, and video games, or else you still need to explain why the quantity of some of these things are in fact zero.
But you’re trying to assert that it must have been the case that something exist! If nothing existed, then matter and energy would be as hypothetical as mana or ether, and none of the above would have affect.
The list of omnis is common, your definition are definitely not. Besides, there is a huge problem with your definition of omnibenevolent. One can’t support the existence of all things because some things are contradictory and one will just end up supporting nothing. It’s like not being able to decide for which of the 5 candidates to vote and then voting for all of them, ultimately you supported none of them as your votes canceled each other out. A god that supports the existence of evil as much as the existence of good ultimately supports none of those. However, for that to be a precise analogy one would have to quantify evil and good and find that they’re equal in measure, which would be silly. Though I think we can agree that there is evil and there is good and god does nothing to prevent or induce more of any of them, he lets both of them be without doing anything.
How can God support Hitler as much as Gandhi? One must really not give a shit at all to support those 2 equally, given how different they are.
This is just another god of the gaps, trying to fill the gaps in human knowledge with god. The truth is that even the greatest scientists of today admit that we don’t yet know exactly what happened and how everything came to be, but that that doesn’t mean god is the default answer, you have no empirical or rational basis whatsoever for making that claim. When talking about the existence of something you don’t give arguments, you give EVIDENCE.
Well no. You can only have one fundamental substance in a universe.
For a universe to exist, anything and everything in that universe must have the property of affect, else it wouldn’t exist in that universe. So we can call that property substance “A”. If we propose that there “could possibly be” a substance “B” as well, substance B would also have to have the property of affect, which means that our substance B is actually substance A.
And if we propose that there is another parallel universe made of substance B, all substance B in that universe must affect substance B, else it wouldn’t exist in that universe. But if it has affect, then it is substance A, the property of affect. And then because it has that same property, it is in reality, the same universe, not independent or parallel.
A non-existent thing cannot be divided at all. And an existent thing has affect and being a quality rather than a mere quantity, can be divided infinitely and thus can never be at zero.
Everything that exists is necessarily substance A, else it could not be said to exist.
For anything to be a hypothetical existence, it must have affect. And it cannot have a property that isn’t affect, else that proposed property wouldn’t exist. And then if it has affect, it is substance A, affect itself. You cannot propose that something “could exist” unless you propose that it has the property of affect because that is what is meant by something existing. Affect is the one property that cannot be left out of any proposed existent thing. And any other proposed property cannot be anything but affect, merely more or less of it in differing arrangements.
Enjoyed reading the thread. So you are a subjectivist? “Experience tells us…”? Experience is often informed by prejudice, false intuitions and the limitations of POV. Science has repeatedly shown that experience is wrong or relative as, for example, when it is based on perception at human scale whereas things work differently at other size scales.
If you’re supporting both, Hitler and Gandhi, you’re supporting 2 contradictory viewpoints (which boils down to supporting none, unless you support one more than the other, in which case I’d argue you aren’t supporting the other at all).
JSS according to your definition an omnibenevolent being would support the existence of smallpox and plague. That’s ok with your idea of omnibenevolent?
That is the degree to which it fits. If you want to limit benevolence only to what you believe to be good and wholesome, that would be a different God.
The God of Aristotle and Aquinas supports all that exists, existence itself. That doesn’t mean that such a God will continue to support anything in particular. That is the God that I am talking about.
So every even theoretical substance is the same? This seems pretty counter-intuitive to me. It seems at least possible that there could be such a stuff as ether, and that it is distinct from energy in some fundamental way. Sure, they might both have the properties of infinite divisibility and and affect, but why does that mean they are the same substance? I don’t at all follow your reasoning that if two substances have 1 property in common, they are the same substance.