FAITH — Falsehoods Assumptions Innuendos and Treasonous Hypocrisy.

HOPE — Having Optimistic Patience Everyday.

rmfr

Jo, Jo, Jo

***shaking boughs in utter disbelief***

I have read this whole thread (hours I'll never get back, thus you owe $500 for my free time) twice. TWICE!

Why don't you just give up. Everything you have posted has done nothing but show how much knowledge you do not have. Go back to school. Actually learn something. Then come back in ten years.

You have had your arse and head both torn off, chewed up until they look like hamburger, then left for the vultures. C'mon dude. You have had everything completely debunked.

Give it up. You do not have the knowledge to refute our debunking of your bullshit and horse hoowhee.

Or are you masochistic?

rmfr

Sadly, pressing errands mean I have to defer my latest contribution for a little while, but rest assured, it should prove suitably entertaining once I return. Especially as it has interesting ramifications for the whole god business. :)

Jo Tue, 04/16/2019 - 18:55
"If an atheist said "God is not real and I can prove it" The atheist has an impossible task and the theist an easy one."

This is an argumentum ad ignorantiam fallacy, nothing is validated because it cannot be disproved. The theist task would remain unevidenced, just Google common logical fallacies, and argumentum ad ignorantiam.

The more you ignore this simple fact about informal logic, the more dishonest your position appears.

Tue, 04/16/2019 - 21:10 (Reply to #64)Permalink
Jo " If I looked for intelligent life outside of our solar system using a microscope, I would get a negative answer."

Obviously, you could try using a telescope though.

Having whetted the appetite of one or two people with my earlier announcement, it's now time to try and live up to the billing therein. I'll begin by announcing that what follows is, by my own admission, a speculative piece, but one that is grounded in current cosmological physics, and on that basis, stands more chance of becoming reality than any number of fantastic and absurd mythological assertions.

One of the perennially observed features of supernaturalists, is that they never consider any candidates for the 'god' role, other than the candidate they favour from their particular choice of mythology. None of them ever ask themselves the question "What if the god that actually exists, is something different from the one I favour?" One of the hilarious ironies of the entire business of interacting with supernaturalists, is that I've probably asked myself a variant of this question (said variant taking into account that I don't have a candidate pre-selected for the role), more often of late than practically every supernaturalist I've encountered has asked said question in their entire lives. One of the more interesting hypothetical scenarios arising therefrom, I shall now present.

For the purpose of this hypothetical scenario, I shall refer to the exposition I gave in another thread on two papers published by Paul Steinhardt & Neil Turok, in which they presented a possible testable natural process for the instantiation of the observable universe and its contents, and which has observable consequences in this universe once said process has launched its instantiation mechanism.

In that post, I briefly explored the possibility of some future physicists being in a position to test the mechanism contained in those papers experimentally, but in that post, I was primarily interested in such experimentation being a "Game Over" moment for supernaturalist assertions, courtesy of the fact that the moment testable natural processes are demonstrated to be sufficient to explain a given class of entities and phenomena, supernatural entities become superfluous to requirements and irrelevant from that point on. Here, however, I want to explore an entirely different set of concepts.

Let us hypothesise, for this scenario, that the following have been established:

[1] The evidence for the Steinhardt-Turok mechanism described in those papers is, in the future, alighted upon by gravitational wave detectors;

[2] In that future, progress is made with respect to the relevant physics, to the point where the Steinhardt-Turok mechanism becomes directly testable in the laboratory;

[3] In that future, the requisite effort to build a laboratory to perform that experiment is exerted, the laboratory is constructed, and becomes operational.

So, the grand day arrives, when the laboratory becomes operational, and the scientists staffing said laboratory prepare for their grand experiment - the instantiation of an entirely new universe in the laboratory. The requisite experiment is run, and in a very short space of time, the data returning from the laboratory instruments indicates that the experiment has been a resounding success.

At this point, several ramifications are immediately brought home. The first being that, if one defines a 'god' as 'any entity capable of instantiating a universe', then that laboratory, its apparatus, and its scientist staff, treated as a single entity, are, in effect, the god of that newly instantiated universe. That this fact would probably cause a good few supernaturalists reading the news headlines to blow an artery the moment they woke up to this, is irrelevant to my point. The moment that experiment is successfully concluded, we would have hard evidence that the laboratory in question, its equipment and the scientists deploying said equipment, have collectively become the god of a new universe. Leaving aside for a moment any jokes about a universe produced by a committee that might spring to mind here, that hard evidence would naturally lead to the question of whether our universe had a similar origin. Of course, the scientists in that facility would simply point to their experiment, as hard evidence that our universe was the product of the same testable natural processes, and any speculation on whether those processes operated in a natural, unguided manner, or were pressed into service by like experimenters in a different universe, would probably remain unanswerable for a very long time.

But apart from destroying pretensions arising from mythological assertions wholesale, it would have a serious impact on the philosophical question of what sort of god, if any, actually exists out there. The moment some of our physicists become a de facto god for a new universe, it will only be natural for the philosophically inclined to ask whether our universe was the result of a similar past experiment by beings unknown.

Now, at the moment, the current state of knowledge in physics suggests that the moment a new universe is instantiated by this mechanism, it becomes detached from its origin in the requisite metric space, and causally disconnected therefrom. Which means that whilst those future scientists may be able to launch that new universe on its path, they are prevented by the laws of physics from finding out, from that point on, what is happening inside that newly launched universe. It becomes forever observationally sealed off from us. Which means that our new gods find themselves in the unusual position of being able to create a universe, but forever forbidden to observe its internals, let alone manipulate said internals. They would not merely be 'deist' gods in the sense of choosing not to intervene, but would be 'deist' gods in the sense of having no choice but to stay out of that universe's afairs - if you like, 'super-deist' gods.

As a corollary, if that newly launched universe evolved in such a manner as to produce within its confines, intelligent life forms conceptually akin to ourselves (even if the physical details are radically different), any generation by those beings of mythologies akin to those our species has produced, along with assertions to the effect that typical mythological gods exist, will be known to us in advance to be a futile exercise. We, the species whose efforts launched that new universe on its way, will know what the inhabitants thereof cannot for a long time even fantasise about. But, we will also know that our causal disconnection from its point of origin of our universe, forever prevents us from knowing if our universe arose by unguided natural occurrence of the requisite process, or occurrence guided by sufficiently sophisticated experimenters. That causal disconnect is a barrier never to be crossed - at least, this is the current view arising from the requisite cosmological deliberations.

This also opens up a veritable supertanker load of ethical questions, but I do not consider myself qualified to give these even the most cursory of treatments at this stage, other than perhaps to present a small sample of the relevant questions, but that is a topic for its own thread methinks.

However, even if the new physics allowing the hypothetical experiment presented above to become an engineering reality, also provides a means of overcoming that causal disconnect, and allows us to observe or even manipulate the contents of that universe to further our knowledge, there's an immediate problem to be faced. As fantastic and magical as such a capability will seem - possibly even to some of the scientists who have just performed the experiment - the scientists in question will still be constrained by whatever laws of physics are in operation in the requisite realms. As well as the laws of braneworld physics, they will be constrained by whatever variation of the laws of physics is in operation in that newly instantiated universe. 'Miracles', in the sense of suspending those laws whenever it is administratively convenient, will be out of the question. They might also find themselves having to contend with a newly launched universe, in which the internal physical laws thereof are sufficiently different to those in operation here, to make even elementary observations and manipulations a formidable task. In short, those scientists will, if this scenario is ever realised, discover that being a god is monumentally hard work, and not something that any sensible individual would undertake lightly.

I'll leave aside for the moment the interesting questions that arise, the moment one realises another very real possibility within this scenario. Namely, we know that the scientists operating that laboratory will eventually die. Chances are, that laboratory itself will only be a temporary affair, superseded by newer, better, more refined establishments. That universe launched by said laboratory will have been "created" by a temporary god. I'll let that one sink in for a while.

Now some here might think I've compiled this exposition, in part at least, as a juicy schadenfreude dig at supernaturalists, but while my exposition makes such sport possible, that's not the point. The point is, quite simply, that the world of ideas is as boundless as our imaginations, even when those imaginations are tempered by scientific knowledge, and exploration of the farthest reaches of the realm of ideas has been a defining characteristic of our species practically since the arrival thereof. Of course, care should be exercised to avoid nonsensical trajectories within that realm, but here lies two of my principal sources of exasperation with supernaturalists - one, the complete absence of any concern to avoid nonsensical trajectories within the space of ideas, if said nonsensical trajectories happen to be emotionally comforting, and two, the complete absence of any desire to explore speculative but essentially sensible trajectories that deviate from their current choices. Out of the myriad possibilities awaiting discovery by humans exerting at least some level of diligent effort, why should we be constrained by senile mythologies?

Indeed, the thought arose as I was writing this, that as well as validating the multiverse hypothesis, such an experiment would point to another conclusion. Namely, that any god genuinely responsible for the untold trillions of instantiated universes within the multiverse, would be far too busy being occupied as a full time research scientist tracking the diversity of behaviours of its products, to be in the least concerned with our petty obsessions with genitalia and doctrinal conformity.

Enjoy.