Science, Worldviews & Society, 1: An argument from necessary (thus, eternal) truth to the reality of God as eternally contemplative . . . and, designing . . . Mind
| March 1, 2014 | Posted by kairosfocus under Logic and First Principles of right reason, Mathematics, Philosophy, Science, worldview issues/foundations and society |
This past month has been quite busy, and I have had but little time to respond to some questions on foundations of reality and modern theistic arguments from a budding young philosopher. (BTW, his 3 month post op check up has been positive I take occasion to publicly thank St. Georges Hospital, London and others.)
A watch movement may be accurate, but not truthful; as a watch COMPUTES, it does not CONTEMPLATE . . . much hinges from this [HT: Toff’s World]
Where, we can draw a pivotal lesson from say a watch, which may be accurate but is not truthful, as it computes, but does not contemplate. Minds contemplate, machines only compute, blindly carrying out designed movements constrained by the GIGO principle . . . garbage in, garbage out.
U/D: In honour of UD’s inimitable, indefatigable . . . and too often underappreciated . . . BA77, I add this web clip on an Omega Watch movement:
embedded by Embedded Video
YouTube Direkt
I have pulled together some thoughts in light of an argument from Gordon Clark, with inputs from Nash, Maverick Philosopher and sometime UD commenter Ilion over at Reppert’s Dangerous Idea blog. BTW, there is also a side-light from the Nye-Ham debate.
I am not really comfortable laying out such in detail at UD, as it is more theology-Philosophy than science, but think it relevant enough to post beginnings and an onward link:
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>>Friday, February 28, 2014
Rom 1 reply, 47: In light of Gordon Clark’s argument in brief, an argument from necessary (thus, eternal) truth to the reality of God as eternally contemplative . . . and, designing . . . Mind
In Faith and Reason, pp. 162 ff, the late Ronald Nash summarises an argument to God by Gordon Clark that apparently traces to Augustine, that we may cite and slightly adapt following bloggist and commenter Ilion (HT):
P1. Truth exists.
P2. Truth is immutable (unchangeable).
P3. Truth is eternal (–> without beginning or end; lasting for ever).
P4. Truth is mental (pertaining to mind or minds).
P5. Truth is superior to the human mind
________________________________
So
C6. Truth is God
[–> or, perhaps:
C6‘: The Truth Himself is the Infinite-Personal Mind we commonly call God, who eternally contemplates necessary — thus eternal — Truth and truths.]
This and similar arguments have been batted around in academic fora, apologetics exchanges and of course on the Internet. Generally, in a somewhat dismissive cast of mind and heart.
But, I think there is something there and we should not toss out baby with bathwater.
More broadly, I think . . . MORE >>
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Okay, what do you think? END
PS: First UD post with a new Win 8 machine. Win 8 is a work in progress. The old machine refuses to go into retirement, though.
PPS: Just to underscore a point of correction in reply to malicious trollery, a screenshot from Crick’s The Astonishing Hypothesis:
![A screen-shot from Crick's The Astonishing Hypothesis, p. 3 [HT: Google Books]](http://www.uncommondescent.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/GBks_asthypclip_Crick.png)
A screen-shot from Crick’s The Astonishing Hypothesis, p. 3 [HT: Google Books]
14 Responses to Science, Worldviews & Society, 1: An argument from necessary (thus, eternal) truth to the reality of God as eternally contemplative . . . and, designing . . . Mind
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Why is it that — as the blogger Maverick Philosopher pointed out aptly — while a watch can be accurate, it is not truthful? What does this tell us on the difference between computation and contemplation, thence the deep roots of reality?
The existence of truth is problematic for the materialist/atheist.
For him, truth must evolve. But how can truth evolve?
And if it really evolves, can it be truth?
Here is an excerpt from crev.info dealing with this point:
http://crev.info/2013/05/how-s.....vicij.dpuf
The problem with this premise is that it is false. The existence of lowercase-t truth is no problem at all in materialism, although I prefer the term naturalism.
The other problem with the premise is its vagueness, as terms such as “existence,” “truth,” and “problem” could mean most anything.
Everything after the first premise cannot be dealt with at all. It’s not even false.
What can you do to make the naturalist position clearer?
(1) Concrete definition of terms.
(2) Real-world examples of the problem under scrutiny.
(3) Direct quotations (in context, no ellipses or alterations [as some folks at UD — you know who you are — are know quote-miners]) by proponents of naturalism.
LT:
1: To me it looks uncommonly like you have restated the problem and presented it as if it were a solution. And,
2: FYI, LT you just made an accusation of dishonesty by deliberate misrepresentation, in a thread I host and in a further context where someone from the Web’s fever swamps has been targetting me specifically with that false accusation, as I showed here and up in the linked thread . . . just about two WEEKS ago. So, you are hoist on your own petard, in a context where your error DOES misrepresent, mine demonstrably did not. (FYFI, a minor error in a cite that does not change its meaning, especially as copiously amplified from career-long context as well as the immediate context, is not a deceitful misrepresentation. I know a lot of folks over in the fever swamps of the Internet love to smear people, but in the end that goes to character. Strike 1, LT.)
KF
KF, I join you in rejoicing over the outlook for your budding young philosopher.
F/N: Had LT troubled to read the main discussion linked from the OP, he would have seen one of many ways that the materialist problem with truth crops up.
For, as a watch demonstrates, it can be accurate but not truthful. (Cf. onwards Maverick Philosopher’s linked discussion. And no, I am not going to give the link again here.)
That is, a watch is an analogue computation in action, not a contemplation with intentionality and moral capacity to address duties of care to truth, fairness and more. Minds are truthful, not material mechanisms, and it is a major commitment of evolutionary materialist, lab coat clad “scientific” naturalism, that the world is based on material entities, and that which points beyond such is routinely scoffed at as “supernatural,” or dismissed as a “ghost in the machine,” or is mocked as the demonic superstition, or irrationality or delusion. Occam’s razor is often called into play to try to dismiss.
All of this, LT full well knows, but here wants to play at backing up false accusations so he pretends that it does not exist or if cited, it is a suspected misrepresentation sight unseen.
In my native country we use a word for such an attitude: MALICE.
Just for completeness, let me actually cite a Nobel Prize holder, Crick in his The Astonishing Hypothesis, 1994, as linked from here in the Google Books result, Ch 1 Introduction, p. 3, namely . . . and I deliberately use a leading ellipsis to underscore the malice in LT’s words . . the astonishing hyp addressed by Crick is:
To this, ID Thinker Philip Johnson aptly replied in 1995, in Reason in the Balance. Namely, that Sir Francis should have therefore been willing to preface his works thusly: “I, Francis Crick, my opinions and my science, and even the thoughts expressed in this book, consist of nothing more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.”
Johnson then acidly commented: “[[t]he plausibility of materialistic determinism requires that an implicit exception be made for the theorist.” [[Reason in the Balance, 1995. And though RIB is sitting on a shelf nearby I refuse to get the copy, LT needs to learn a lesson about citation and its legitimate uses and why he should not treat others with malice.]
GEM of TKI
PS: For starters, take truth or even Truth as the name of the abstract entity, the set that collects truths. Truths, in turn being assertions or contemplated assertions whether or not put in verbal or symbolic form, that accurately describe reality. Which set, I assert is impossible to empty of members, so that Truth necessarily exists, it is not a synonym for the empty set. Of which, of course, there is but one such, symbolised { }. And, as a necessarily existent entity, Truth is eternal, having no beginning, no end and is present in all possible worlds. In the case of mathematical truths starting with natural numbers and extensions thereof, they are embedded in the design of our fine tuned cosmos.
BA: Thank God. He is not what he was three months ago, and will never be the same again physically; the post op X-rays we looked at this week were heart-wrenching in one sense . . . though in another we must be thankful. But, that is much better than where he was headed. And, he is working on an argument from ability that I look forward to hosting when it is ready. KF
kf a few clock video you may like:
OMEGA Co-Axial Chronometer – The perfect mechanical movement – video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctj-RDbTBMU
related:
A Surreal Look at Time – video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDnt-JnatxY
The Mountain – Inspirational video
http://video.yahoo.com/editors.....60678.html
BA77: Thanks. In your honour, I have updated the OP with your first clip. KF
If there be any such creature as unchangeable, eternal, truth (small t) in the Naturalists’/Materialists’ worldview, then that creature would have to, because of the Big Bang, of had a ‘random’ beginning. Eddington puts the problem that ‘truth’ presents to the Naturalists/Materialists like this:
The “way out of the dilemma” that Eddington references, and which he rejects, is: “If we have a number of particles moving about at random, they will in the course of time go through every possible configuration, so that even the most orderly, the most non-chance configuration, will occur by chance if only we wait long enough.”
And indeed we find this ‘randomness generates truth’ postulate of Naturalists/Materialists every where we look in physics that gives us strong evidence for God. i.e. Why did the universe come into being with such finely tuned initial parameters and constants? Well, the Naturalist responds, there is this undetectable infinity of randomly generated multiverses, and we just so happen (lucky us) to live in right one.,,, Why is the Cosmic Background Radiation extremely homogenous? Well you see, the Naturalist replies, there was this initial rapid inflation of the universe that created a infinity of other bubble universes that we cannot detect, and that, you see, is what ‘smoothed out’ the Cosmic Background radiation to be so homogenous.,,, Why does the wave appear to collapse upon conscious observation in the double slit? Well, the Naturalist replies, there really is no wave collapse, it is just that every time you try to observe a particle it will create a quasi infinite number of other universes just like this one, except for the fact that one of your other quasi infinite selves, which ‘split off’ in these other undetectable quasi infinite parallel universes, sees the particle in another position than the position you see.,,, And that is the Naturalists main modus operandi when confronted with ‘truth’. Confronted with unchangeable, eternal, truth, as with the creation of the universe and the fine-tuning of the universe, they throw a random infinity at it. And when confronted with consciousness having anything to do with quantum mechanics, Naturalists threw another random infinity at it. (As well Feynman ‘brushed infinity under the rug’ but that is another story). Naturalists are not ever really seeking ‘the Truth’ (capital T) so much as they are trying, for whatever severely misguided reason, to avoid ‘the Truth’:
Of note: If we allow that ‘God can play the role of a person’, (for who could deny Him that possibility “IF” He exists), as even the author of the incompleteness theorem himself allowed that God could do,,
,, ‘if’ we allow that possibility that ‘God can play the role of a person’, (and how could a person who believes in the absurdity of infinite multiverses deny at least that possibility?), ‘if’ we allow that possibility then we find a very credible reconciliation between the finite world of the 4-D space-time of General Relativity and the infinite world of ‘timelessness’ of Quantum Mechanics. A very credible reconciliation that does not wind up in the ‘anything goes’ epistemological pit of logical absurdities as string theory, m-theory, parallel universes, and the multiverse does,,,
,,,in fact, unlike all these outlandish multiverse scenarios which have no empirical support (and which undermine our ability to rationally practice science in the first place), we find a reconciliation between General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, in the resurrection event of Christ, that has a surprising amount of empirical support. For instance, it is now shown that the process in which the image was formed on the Shroud of Turin had to be a ‘quantum process’, not a classical process:
Verse and Music;
Also of important note is the fact that physics reveals two very different ‘eternities’ to us. An orderly ‘eternity’ for Special Relativity and an ‘Infinity Chaotic’ eternity for General relativity:
i.e. Black Holes are found to be ‘eternal’ singularities of destruction and disorder rather than singularities of creation and order such as the extreme order we see at the creation event of the Big Bang. Needless to say, the implications of this ‘eternity of destruction’ should be fairly disturbing for those of us who are of the ‘spiritually minded’ persuasion!
In light of this dilemma that these two very different eternities present to us spiritually minded people, and the fact that Gravity is, in so far as we can tell, completely incompatible with Quantum Mechanics (Bohemian Gravity, Sheldon), it is interesting to point out a subtle nuance on the Shroud of Turin. Namely that Gravity was overcome in the resurrection event of Christ:
Personally, considering the extreme difficulty that many brilliant minds have had in trying to reconcile Quantum Mechanics and special relativity, i.e. QED, with Gravity, I consider the preceding nuance on the Shroud of Turin to be a subtle, but very powerful, evidence substantiating Christ’s primary claim as to being our Savior from sin, death, and hell:
Verse, Apologetic, and Music:
So far, it looks like LT may be doing a smear and run troll raid. Let’s see if he will come back and set things right. It’s a pretty serious thing for him to be spreading false accusations. KF
Let’s highlight a main point: as the watch shows, computation is not contemplation, where from common experience, we know design to be characteristic of the contemplative mind, AND to result in characteristic empirical signs such as functionally specific, complex organisation and associated information. Signs that on search space challenges, are not plausible as results of blind searches relying on chance and necessity without design. In the case of the fine tuned cosmos, much of that information is mathematically precise, raising issues of the contemplation required to do mathematics: programmers program, machines compute based on programs. So, what best explains a cosmos like that? KF
As to ‘mind’, the following is an interesting talk on,,,
The Mystery of Perception During Near Death Experiences – Pim van Lommel – video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avyUsPgIuQ0
Looks like a definite snipe and run rather than face and resolve by LT. KF