A comment...

...if an infinite number of other possible universes exist then why is it not also infinitely possible for a infinitely powerful God to exist? Using the materialist same line of reasoning, if it is infinitely possible for a infinitely powerful God to exist then He, of 100% certainty, does exist no matter how small the probability is of his existence in one of the multiverses, and since he certainly does exist, according to the strict materialistic reasoning you gave me, Then all possibilities by default become subject to Him since He is by definition Omnipotent. As well logic dictates there can only be one infinitely powerful “Lord” of the multiverses. As well, the “recycling universe” conjecture suffers so many questions from the second law of thermodynamics (entropy) as to render it effectively implausible as a serious theory. The only hard evidence there is, the stunning precision found in the universal constants, points overwhelmingly to intelligent design by an infinitely powerful and transcendent Creator who originally established what the unchanging universal constants of physics could and would do at the creation of the universe. The hard evidence left no room for the blind chance of natural laws in this universe. Thus, naturalism was forced into appealing to an infinity of other untestable universes for it was left with no footing in this universe.

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bornagain77, 11/30/2007 (Uncommon Descent)

If you like The Office...

...then you should probably see this movie:
The King of Kong

Occasionally I had to remind myself that it was a documentary and not an episode of The Office.

The Multiverse

Those who argue that science must methodically build a philosophy of naturalism seem to eventually conclude that an infinite number of universes can be proposed scientifically while an infinite Creator of numbers must always be denied, naturally. The little question of whether or not there actually is a Creator is excluded by stigma words and rules which naturally lead to philosophic naturalism, yet then those who begin to adhere to such a philosophy claim to have overwhelming evidence against that which they already decided that they must be blind to as a matter of principle.

That pattern of thinking is like saying that because your brain is all that seems to matter, therefore you must be blind to any notion of your mind governing it. Then you look at the evidence with that conclusion in mind and conclude that the mind is an illusion brought about by brain events in different regions and so on. The problem is this, the brain is all that you decided to see before looking at the evidence so the question of whether or not there actually is a mind actually wasn't even being dealt with in a reasonable manner, instead it will always be imagined away by definition. It was already excluded, yet if it was not then fact of the matter is that there might be a great deal of evidence that the brain is an interface between mind and body. No matter if there were a great deal of evidence it will not be seen as long as scholars studying the issue are systematically conditioned to be close-minded to any possibility of such evidence. If you cannot think of such evidence for your Self then there is nothing more that can be said. (But I may write a little about the evidence later for those who already know that they can think about it.)

Similarly multiverse hypotheses seem to be based on little more than the same type of conditioning through the use of negative stigma words like "magic" as opposed to positive words like "natural" and so on instead of facts, logic and evidence. After all, based on logic and reason one has to wonder just how natural the notion of many universes is, for couldn't one Nature be logically defined as unnatural to all the rest? Or isn't evidence for a multiverse excluded as a matter of principle given that any evidence has to be of this universe by definition? Etc.

Logically the notion may be defined as odd in other ways:

...I did not find the multiverse alternative very helpful. The postulation of multiple universes...is a truly desperate alternative. If the existence of one universe requires an explanation, multiple universes require a much bigger explanation: the problem is increased by the factor of whatever the total number of universes is. It seems a little like the case of a schoolboy whose teacher doesn’t believe his dog ate his homework, so he replaces the first version with the story that a pack of dogs—too many to count—ate his homework.

(There is a God: How the world's most notorious atheist changed his mind, by Antony Flew and Roy Abraham Varghese :136-137)


In the end it seems that those who dislike how the verses of the universe were written will always imagine that if only there were enough verses then they could write themselves.

A philosophy of death?

I'm not sure why a misanthropic pattern keeps emerging in biology but history shows it.

One of the latest examples:
Telic Thoughts: Scientist looking forward to human extinction

Archive

This is called an argument by poverty of the imagination. I find it easy to imagine…

Is that what it’s called? Imagine that.

It seems to me that you can call imagining things whatever you like and it will still be one of the lowest forms of knowledge imaginable. Yet those who engage in Darwinian reasoning claim very high levels of knowledge, sometimes equating their reasoning with Newtonian reasoning or even basic empirical facts. They seem to claim the highest yet when it comes down to it they are engaged in the lowest. Oddly, there is a form of safety in being able to crawl back into hypothetical goo at any given time. One can propose a specification as if it is so, yet given the nature of human imagination it will comport with and “explain” all observations with respect to biological form and characteristics. That’s because it was never a specified form of reasoning about form leading to knowledge about reasons for the formations of things and how form comes into being. For example, if squirrels have a flap of skin which is functional then then that is explained, if they do not then that is also explained just as the whole form labeled “squirrel” is explained no matter what its form is. Or, if you ever stop imagining things, you could try thinking of it this way, what form could squirrels possibly fit which would fall outside of Darwinian “explanation”/imagination. Perhaps if they had a little horn on their head which seemed to be formed exactly like that of another organism? Or perhaps eyes just like a chameleon’s? For how would such a convergence in the form of an eye be created by being blindly filtered by natural selection? And how do you imagine that blindly filtering and preserving fit forms, creates forms and their recognition by sight at any rate?

At any rate, I don’t know who started the “argument by summarizing arguments” but it isn’t actually much of an argument itself. For example, in one of his books Dawkins goes on about the “argument from personal incredulity” as if the mere fact that he can summarize an argument or point out that arguments are created and supported by persons does away with the notion that some things are incredible, improbable or impossible. Ironically, improbability and things of this sort can be measured and logically transferred/communicated to other persons given a philosophy of transcendence, while the way he engages in imagining things in subjective ways based on a philosophy of immanence that seems natural to him cannot be. Ironically, summarizing the other fellow’s argument and imagining that it is a “personal” matter seems to apply to him and his immanent brain events more than anyone else. At any rate, some things are actually incredible and can be objectively specified to be impossible even if those who are credulous and gullible enough to believe in mythological narratives of naturalism make a habit of imagining otherwise.

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Readability?

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Occasionally I get comments from people claiming that they don't understand what I write based on some bit of text that is written incorrectly or perhaps too densely packed with information. But it's always seemed to me that they actually understand enough to understand that they don't want to.

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I think I may not be allowed to comment on a fellow's blog anymore. I'll save this here and try again later. If it's not a technical issue it would be odd for a fellow that talks of how much he values reason to refuse to try to reason things out.
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Really... you come to sit at my feet and absorb my wisdom?

I'm merely accepting your argument about all that I do not know.

I don't think there is a thing in the world you can learn from me. But you already knew that.

Your original argument was based on all that I do not know which I should know and so on, so I would think that you had some knowledge in mind that I do not know.

The old argument from incredulity revisited.

I didn't say that the use of language was necessarily all that incredible. After all, marginally intelligent people can use language in incredibly credulous ways in order to cite their own gullible credulity as evidence as many Darwinists do. On the other hand one ought to admit that some uses of codes, like DNA, are rather incredible.

You can't understand how science could say language and genetic codes could evolve without at sentient force so you don't accept it.

There is no reason to deny that codes and languages evolve, many can be observed to do so. There is reason to deny that change is the reason for reason or that meaning is some type of illusion which emerges from meaninglessness. There is reason in Aristole's philosophy when it logically leads to some type of unmoved Mover but we have no reason to try to trace cause and effect back to an imaginary oblivion.
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f objective evidence were made available to demonstrate this point, then the presence in the religioous text would neither negate nor prove the point.

The religious text would be a form of evidence consonant with that type of evidence but history shows that a harmony between different forms of evidence would tend to be denied for that very reason. For example:

..in the late 1960s, I audited a course in cosmology from the physics Nobelist Steven Weinberg. He told his class that of the theories of cosmology, he preferred the Steady State Theory because “it least resembled the account in Genesis” (my emphasis).
[…]
But as he himself points out in his book, the Big Bang Theory was an automatic consequence of standard thermodynamics, standard gravity theory, and standard nuclear physics. All of the basic physics one needs for the Big Bang Theory was well established in the 1930s, some two decades before the theory was worked out. Weinberg rejected this standard physics not because he didn’t take the equations of physics seriously, but because he did not like the religious implications of the laws of physics.

(Uncommon Dissent: Intellectuals Who Find Darwinism Unconvincing
Refereed Journals by Frank Tipler :124)

Genesis is not in and of itself observations of the objective world.

Neither is anything you write here, whatever it is you think that the excretions of your random brain events in your text means, it may as well be excrement if philosophic naturalism is true.

At any rate, why should the Genesis somehow be “purely” objective? As the most objective and geometric language we have, mathematical logic speaks to and refutes the modernist myth of perfect objectivity, as subjects our knowledge of the world will always be subjective. Yet in postmodernist times most of us could stand to be much more objective and aware of a divine Logos that pervades all logic, all the ratios of rationality, all cause and effect and therefore laws and justice, etc.

As Galileo said, “The holy Bible and the phenomena of nature proceed alike from the divine Word.” and he also noted that, “The laws of Nature are written in the language of mathematics.” And what does mathematics do but make invisible realities visible? Kepler, Galileo and many modern scientists believe that they are studying the Mind of God through the language of mathematics, a view that is not “proven” by but is consonant with the Bible being of the same type of Word: “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.” –Paul, emphasis added

Note that to those with a Nature based/pagan urge to merge the notion that invisible realities can be clearly seen makes as much sense as claiming that unicorns, etc., exist and can be “seen.” Yet no sooner have they made typical atheistic arguments associating invisible realities with childish imagination than they fly off on flights of imagination about chimeric ancient ancestors or carve a graven image which seeks to symbolically blur known forms and so on and so forth.

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Are you saying Hitler was a biologist?

I’m saying that you’re easily taken in by pseudo-scientia/knowledge and the notion of scientific consensus, therefore if you had lived in Germany when German biologists were preaching the scientific racism of their day you would have supported it based on little more than the “overwhelming numbers” typical to scientific consensus. It takes a severely limited intellect to point to scientific consensus as if it is the equivalent of facts, logic and evidence, yet apparently you’re up to the task.

implying that Genesis is objective scientific evidence shows…

I didn’t say that Genesis is scientific evidence. Apparently you believe that science can answer all questions, ironically that would only show that your grasp of science is poor given that science itself speaks to its limitations.

The objective world is defined by and understood scientifically by observation not a religious text.

Your scientism isn’t born out by science itself. For example, note that the conceptual language of mathematics and geometry on which much of science rests speaks to its own limitations in a systematic way:

Hilbert’s Programme was doomed in that it was unrealizable. In a piece of mathematics that stands as an intellectual tour-de-force of the first magnitude, Gödel demonstrated that the arithmetic with which we are all familiar is incomplete:

…that is, in any system that has a finite set of axioms and rules of inference and which is large enough to contain ordinary arithmetic, there are always true statements of the system that cannot be proved on the basis of that set of axioms and those rules of inference. This result is known as Gödel’s First Incompleteness Theorem.
Now Hilbert’s Programme also aimed to prove the essential consistency of his formulation of mathematics as a formal system. Gödel, in his Second Incompleteness Theorem, shattered that hope as well. He proved that one of the statements that cannot be proved in a sufficiently strong formal system is the consistency of the system itself. In other words, if arithmetic is consistent then that fact is one of the things that cannot be proved in the system. It is something that we can only believe on the basis of the evidence, or by appeal to higher axioms. This has been succinctly summarized by saying that if a religion is something whose foundations are based on faith, then mathematics is the only religion that can prove it is a religion!

(God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God
by John Lennox :52)

Every time one introduces Genesis one also by defintion is removing oneself from the scientific argument.

And? Your lack of awareness of the limitations of science that science itself speaks to and lack of focus on pursuing true and total forms of knowledge indicate why you believe in pseudo-science. It’s important to point out that the form of pseudo-knowledge that you derive from your attempts at defining science could easily lead people to deny the truth. For instance, note that if a people incorporated a historical event in their mythology (Perhaps by saying that “gods” came from across the seas born on creatures with huge white wings and a god gave them the gift of agriculture and so on and so forth.) then you’d have us deny it as a matter of principle simply because it was incorporated in a culture’s folklore. (If another civilization had come across the sea on ships with sails/”huge white wings” and so on then you would be denying important historical truths that shaped entire civilizations, technology, etc. And ironically you’d probably have to imagine some pretty inane mythological narratives of naturalism of your own to “explain” things that were actually the result of civilization.)

The natural reaction of those who venerate science and turn it into a creation myth, guide to progress, religion, etc., will be to argue that it somehow an “attack” on science to point out its limitations instead of admitting that science itself indicates its limitations.

It’s also important to point out that wisdom from the mouths of babes and common experience as a sentient being already points to limitations. E.g.

Perhaps a simple illustration will help convince us that science is limited. Let us imagine that my Aunt Matilda has baked a beautiful cake and we take it along to be analyzed by a group of the world’s top scientists. I, as master of ceremonies, ask them for an explanation of the cake and they go to work. The nutrition scientists will tell us about the number of calories in the cake and its nutritional effect; the biochemists will inform us about the structure of the proteins, fats etc. in the cake; the chemists, about the elements involved and their bonding; the physicists will be able to analyze the cake in terms of fundamental particles; and the mathematicians will no doubt offer us a set of elegant equations to describe the behaviour of those particles.
Now that these experts, each in terms of his or her scientific discipline, have given us an exhaustive description of the cake, can we say that the cake is completely explained? We have certainly been given a description of how the cake was made and bow its various constituent elements relate to each other, but suppose I now ask the assembled group of experts a final question: Why was the cake made? The grin on Aunt Matilda’s face shows she knows the answer, for she made the cake, and she made it for a purpose. But all the nutrition scientists, biochemists, chemists, physicists and mathematicians in the world will not be able to answer the question — and it is no insult to their disciplines to state their incapacity to answer it. Their disciplines, which can cope with questions about the nature and structure of the cake, that is, answering the ‘how’ questions, cannot answer the ‘why’ questions connected with the purpose for which the cake was made. In fact, the only way we shall ever get an answer is if Aunt Matilda reveals it to us.

(God’s Undertaker:
Has Science Buried God?
by John Lennox :40) (Emphasis added)

And if we quibble over the term science or pull at its definition and limitations all that should happen is that we move on to some of the best truths having to do with the transphysical and symbolic nature of information and communication. If we call such things science or no it matters little, they are true just the same and matter much more to us than the little matter of matter that more limited forms of scientia/knowledge deal with.