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Originally Posted by Oregon Elephant
The implication that God has to be the most complex thing is your implication. As such as there is no evidence for God, there is also no evidence for his level of complexity.
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I'd suggest that the notion that an omnipotent, omniscient creator of a universe is less complex than the universe is a silly bit of philosophical gymnastics designed to avoid an argument.
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A natural process is a creation and has a creator. You can't just say that "small" increases are okay, but not "large" ones since "small" and "large" are subjective terms and vary from person to person. But it would seem that you've already accepted the notion that something complex can come from something less complex.
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"small" and "large" are absurd oversimplifications. I'm saying that gradual changes via an undirected natural process is something which we have evidence for in other areas of the physical sciences.
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I'm not excluding him, only going with the option that has the fewest elements.
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No, you aren't. "The matter which composes the universe existed prior to the big bang" has infinitely fewer elements than, "the matter which composes the universe was magicked into existence by an all-powerful deity who existed prior to the big bang"
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It makes the assumption that there was nothing, that everything was created in the Big Bang, because there is no way for everything to get there, it must have started there.
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This is simply false.
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Just running with this. What if the deity is simple and creates something at the beginning of the universe's birth (the universe) that is really simple, and over the last 12 or so billion years, has slowly become more complex thanks to entropy and energy?
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Entropy does not have a tendency to make things more complex. Quite the opposite. Gravity is what has caused the formation of 'heavenly bodies'. The really poignant questions are why the fundamental constants of the universe are what they are: gravity, electromagnetic force, etc. The problem with the "god tuned them" approach is, again, that it begs the question of how god came to be.
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What is "dieing" for a brain cell? The cell shuts off and cannot be turned back on. It is not phycially broken, it is not chemically altered. It is just no longer sending or recieveing signals.
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Uhh. You've got some odd notions about death. Are you also of the opinion that our physical bodies do not decay? You think if you cracked open a 17th century coffin, there'd be a perfectly preserved brain inside?
On the contrary. Cell death is medically referred to as 'necrosis,' and the cell does indeed break down, the cell wall collapse, and its contents disperse.
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The brain is no more than a tool, when given the same question but with different tools, you may have to use a different process and give a different answer.
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You may view it as you like, but this implies that your personality, rather than being nebulously deposited into a soul, is expressly accessed through a tool, and one which is not homogenous. All of your mental faculties are dependent upon different parts of your brain.
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If I made you chuckle at all, that was actually my only goal with that part of the post. That and to show that it is not posible to "prove" something like that. It too is no more than a belief.
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It's not possible to 'prove' anything outside of mathematics. It is possible to consider the evidence and weigh the probabilities. Your contention that an ultimate answer is impossible does not make your conclusions immune from comparison to available evidence, nor does it suggest that an arbitrary conclusion is acceptable.
If your contention is that there's no evidence to consider, then the only acceptable answer is, "I don't know."
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There is a distinction between:
inherent omniscience - the ability to know anything that one chooses to know and can be known
and
total omniscience - actually knowing everything that can be known.
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This is a logically inconsistent position. Omniscience means "all knowledge." Omniscience which is not "total" omniscience is not omniscience.
05-20-2008, 08:21 AM
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