Mormonism Live on Free Will

[huckelberry]

In my view it is our body, nervous system and brain working together that makes thinking and consciousness happen.

Then we completely agree. I just think that even though we don't have a *complete* understanding of the process, doesn't mean that DCP gets to insert God there in that gap. First of all, which God would you insert? Which of the unlimited possibilities could it be? He has no idea, and just inserts the God he happens to have grown up believing in. That's not science, and that's not even good reasoning.

Drumdude, I am not aware of DCP being involved in this discussion. I do not know what Gap he might be concerned with and how he sees God as involved. I think in terms of this discussion god is referring to the creator God . I guess one can see other gods and relate to them in kind. I always remember the claim that Eric Clapton was god. He bridged the communication gap with Marshall amplifier as I remember.

[drumdude]

Then we completely agree. I just think that even though we don't have a *complete* understanding of the process, doesn't mean that DCP gets to insert God there in that gap. First of all, which God would you insert? Which of the unlimited possibilities could it be? He has no idea, and just inserts the God he happens to have grown up believing in. That's not science, and that's not even good reasoning.

Drumdude, I am not aware of DCP being involved in this discussion. I do not know what Gap he might be concerned with and how he sees God as involved. I think in terms of this discussion god is referring to the creator God . I guess one can see other gods and relate to them in kind. I always remember the claim that Eric Clapton was god. He bridged the communication gap with Marshall amplifier as I remember.

He's been on a bit of a bender the last couple months on his blog about materialism which is why I assume others of us are familiar with his arguments on the subject.

Creator God can mean anything, from an a 12 dimensional monster to a physical man standing on the planet Kolob. It's just that all of this is so poorly defined as to be nearly meaningless... bad arguments created to provide hope for believers that this world isn't all there is and death is not final.

[Rivendale]

Drumdude, I am not aware of DCP being involved in this discussion. I do not know what Gap he might be concerned with and how he sees God as involved. I think in terms of this discussion god is referring to the creator God . I guess one can see other gods and relate to them in kind. I always remember the claim that Eric Clapton was god. He bridged the communication gap with Marshall amplifier as I remember.

He's been on a bit of a bender the last couple months on his blog about materialism which is why I assume others of us are familiar with his arguments on the subject.

Creator God can mean anything, from an a 12 dimensional monster to a physical man standing on the planet Kolob. It's just that all of this is so poorly defined as to be nearly meaningless... bad arguments created to provide hope for believers that this world isn't all there is and death is not final.

And don't forget. Hitchens is still in shock and awe.

[doubtingthomas]

But science can’t observe the actual feeling the person is experiencing. And the only objective evidence science has that feelings even exist is the fact that “something” must be causing the changes in behavior we see in the body and brain. But that tells science nothing about the nature of what that “thing” is.

Maybe feelings are simply chemical reactions. How do you know feelings are a "thing"? We don't know.

My point is. science is limited in what it can observe, and science has no way of knowing how limited it might be - because it doesn’t know what it doesn’t know.

But you can make predictions and replicate the results of an experiment. What can you do with theology?

Suppose that in the future we will be able to fully observe every action of every particle of the brain, and suppose that what we find is that some processes start and stop suddenly, with no observable explanation. That would be evidence that something else is involved (like spirit).

Sure, why not?

The laws of nature as currently understood do not actually suffice to explain everything, because they say absolutely nothing whatever about the initial conditions. The God who sets the initial conditions is not just a God of the gaps, but really the God of The Gap, because saying nothing at all about initial conditions has been the unchanging ground rule of science ever since Isaac Newton discovered calculus.

Can you explain what you mean by "initial conditions"? Perhaps the universe is simply infinite. Thousands of models describe the singularity or the time before the Big Bang.

[Physics Guy]

Lots of cosmological models propose to remove the Big Bang singularity somehow, but so far no such models have actually been made to work well—in the judgement of anyone other than the ones who have developed the models. There are bloggers like Ethan Siegel, who has been touting an eternal inflation scenario for at least ten years as if it were the accepted standard hypothesis now, when in fact it's a bizarrely inconsistent scenario that asks us to ignore the gravitational effects of ordinary matter, and consider only dark energy, precisely in the very-early or pre-Big-Bang era when dark energy is very weak and ordinary matter would make a huge difference. Don't buy into cosmology hype. Cosmology is a weak scientific field in which speculation runs rampant because there is little hard data. Every few years somebody gets some attention from popular science journalists by talking as if they've made a revolutionary breakthrough, but the field hasn't actually gone anywhere much in about thirty years.

Anyway the problem of initial conditions doesn't really have anything to do with the Big Bang. The same problem is still there if the universe is eternal, because the problem is really not about initial conditions in particular, but just about conditions at some point in time.

(It doesn't even have to be the same point in time all at once everywhere in the universe; it just has to be a space-like hyper-surface, meaning that the special times at all points in space are close enough to each other that there is not enough time for light to travel between any two of them. I don't think this is an important distinction for this discussion, though, so I'll just talk naïvely about "times".)

The laws of nature only pin down the state of the universe once conditions are given at any one time (that is, on one space-like hyper-surface). Sufficient conditions at any one time then imply everything that will ever happen at any later time, and also everything that has ever happened at any earlier time. So any sufficient set of conditions, at any time, is equivalent to a set of initial conditions. Since it also seems easier for humans to think of deterministic causality as running forward in time from initial conditions, the issue is normally discussed in terms of initial conditions. Messing around with the Big Bang doesn't remove the issue at all, however, because exactly when the conditions are applied doesn't matter at all.

[dastardly stem]

In one way it's quite true that adding God to physicalism is arbitrary. On the physicalist hypothesis, whatever the particles and fields are doing now was entirely determined by what they were doing a few instants ago, whether God had anything to do with it or not. In two other senses, however, I think it's not just arbitrary.

First of all there is the good old First Cause issue. Causality means differential equations, to which the solutions always depend on initial conditions. Insofar as God has something to say about initial conditions, God is not a superfluous comment on what was already determined without God, but rather a genuine answer to an otherwise unanswered question. The laws of nature as currently understood do not actually suffice to explain everything, because they say absolutely nothing whatever about the initial conditions. The God who sets the initial conditions is not just a God of the gaps, but really the God of The Gap, because saying nothing at all about initial conditions has been the unchanging ground rule of science ever since Isaac Newton discovered calculus.

Secondly, larger scale descriptions of things that are already determined microscopically can also be facts. Fluid dynamics, for instance, is supposed to be nothing but a condensed summary of classical molecular dynamics, which is itself a condensed summary of quantum many-body dynamics.

It's perfectly true that wetness and buoyancy and viscosity are nothing but properties of large numbers of H2O molecules jostling together. If you understood with perfect clarity all the details of all those bazillions of molecular trajectories, then wetness and buoyancy and viscosity would be entirely superfluous. If all you understand is the vague and qualitative fact that molecules bump and cling, though, then explaining what wetness and buoyancy are is a profound revelation.

Sure, maybe you get some sports commentator interviewing LeBron James and asking about positional strategy and it's all nonsense, James just says Dude, you put the ball in the net. Or a chess commentator asks Magnus Carlsen about the value of passed pawns compared to a bishop in the late middle game, and Carlsen just says Dude, you put the king in checkmate. But maybe what makes LeBron LeBron is that he knows all the strategy and that's how he thinks. Maybe he doesn't even think about putting the ball in the net, because he takes that for granted. Maybe Carlsen hardly even sees the squares of the chessboard because that's all muscle memory for him.

To bring the two points together: the author is on the one hand the person who wrote every letter of every word, but on the other hand the author is also the person for whom the whole book began as a big idea.

While I appreciate the points you're making, I also must point out, God is a tough add still. The problem with the God proposition, it seems to me, is he's basically indefinable. He's basically said to be everything and yet nothing all at the same time. That makes him so dynamic you can stuff him anywhere and make him fit. But being unfalsifiable is a problem and is the marking of a insufficient explanation.

For instance on the first cause issue. As I've understood theologians and others who have argued for him being a first cause, he's said to be a timeless, spaceless unembodied consciousness. That's basically nothing, since as it is, we have no way to know how nonmaterial thoughts cause something like an eyebrow raise. All we do as add a nothing to the cause of a first cause, as if there is something greater than the universe (whatever greater means--another indefinable quality of God).

YOu say:

God is not a superfluous comment on what was already determined without God, but rather a genuine answer to an otherwise unanswered question.

It seems to me sticking God in as the answer to the unanswered question, re-raises the same question. If there is a god who started it all, who started him? If we say "He's defined as non-started" then he's basically an undefined nothingness. Because what is unstarted? An uninterested nothingness or everythingness? I don't see an answer to the question. It's basically a shrug suggesting "we don't know, therefore hidden behind it is all is undefined something". As you say a God of the gaps. Or an argument from ignorance added to an argument from silence.

To bring the two points together: the author is on the one hand the person who wrote every letter of every word, but on the other hand the author is also the person for whom the whole book began as a big idea.

It's a thoughtful analogy. But it feels to be simply an assumption that it had to all start with a bid idea. And, whose making the big idea? An indefinable everything and nothing? It seems simpler to think there was no big idea from an undefined nothingness that doubles as everythingness, but it all started without someone's idea. As Dawkins puts in the God Delusion, "The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference." God, as the universe is, as what is real is, doesn't really fit with what we observe.

[dastardly stem]

Also, adding God to the equation sounds eerily like we're all just playing out a game in his own imagination. If God is some un-entity as is most often proposed, then He's everywhere, but nowhere, and everything that we think happens, that which we observe, is simply a thought he has while hooked up to his imagined virtual reality console. Our thoughts only come along because he conceived of them first. If that's the case we're all just pieces of him, summed up we barely make a blip on his radar. Interestingly on that thought, we are, after all, just a tiny spec on a insignificant seeming spot in a vast universe. So if God, then we're all just specs of nothing. If so, then why do we care about him?

To me this notion of God is meaningless. If he does exist, then we're not really here. If he does exist, then we're simply figments of his imagination that disappear faster than an electron reasonably should.

[Physics Guy]

We've only ever seen one universe, and only a tiny bit of it, at that. Whether this universe was made for some purpose by a creator, or whether it is a meaningless universe, either way, we haven't seen the other kind of universe, so we have no idea how different the two kinds of universe ought to look. Claiming that the universe looks just like a Godless universe is merely stating a personal hunch based on no evidence.

Falsifiable hypotheses are good. It would be nice if every question that we couldn't resolve with high confidence also happened to be meaningless or unimportant. It would be nice to have cookies, too. So I don't see how it's supposed to be any kind of argument, to point out how hard it is to falsify the existence of God. To me that's just a complaint about life being hard. Why, yes, so it is.

I think it is indeed a pretty inevitable conclusion in traditional theology that we are extremely inconsequential compared to God. As I once put it, we are not to God as characters are to an author. We are not even to God as semicolons are to an author. We are to God as semicolons are to God.

A God who made this universe must have an awfully high boredom threshold for tiny details, however, because we sure have a lot of them. Perhaps God is somehow attached to us, anyway, in spite of our tininess.

[dastardly stem]

We've only ever seen one universe, and only a tiny bit of it, at that. Whether this universe was made for some purpose by a creator, or whether it is a meaningless universe, either way, we haven't seen the other kind of universe, so we have no idea how different the two kinds of universe ought to look. Claiming that the universe looks just like a Godless universe is merely stating a personal hunch based on no evidence.

Falsifiable hypotheses are good. It would be nice if every question that we couldn't resolve with high confidence also happened to be meaningless or unimportant. It would be nice to have cookies, too. So I don't see how it's supposed to be any kind of argument, to point out how hard it is to falsify the existence of God. To me that's just a complaint about life being hard. Why, yes, so it is.

I think it is indeed a pretty inevitable conclusion in traditional theology that we are extremely inconsequential compared to God. As I once put it, we are not to God as characters are to an author. We are not even to God as semicolons are to an author. We are to God as semicolons are to God.

A God who made this universe must have an awfully high boredom threshold for tiny details, however, because we sure have a lot of them. Perhaps God is somehow attached to us, anyway, in spite of our tininess.

Well, yes, if you're wanting to suggest its still possible God exists, I'd agree. It's possible. The only contention I'd offer is all the arguments for God aren't demonstrating a God, they amount to faulty arguments. For instance, even though Dawkins suggests "the universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference", its still possible there is a God and we wouldn't know what a godless or god-created universe would be because we have no comparisons. Well, sure. But that doesn't argue for God, it argues either way (god or no god). That suggests if we want to say this is an argument for God we aren't really being reasonable. Its either/or. And, as it turns out, God is simply an added proposition we don't need (that is Dawkins' point). And, since he's completely undefinable, as is most often presented, it's really a bad argument--as Sean Carrol suggests in his book the Big Picture.

But, I hate to try and be all dogmatic about this, because as you suggest even with all our objections to arguments for God its still possible he's there. To me it simply means, its less likely he's there. (and calling him "he" is just a stupid tradition anyway, at this point).

[huckelberry]

Also, adding God to the equation sounds eerily like we're all just playing out a game in his own imagination. If God is some un-entity as is most often proposed, then He's everywhere, but nowhere, and everything that we think happens, that which we observe, is simply a thought he has while hooked up to his imagined virtual reality console. Our thoughts only come along because he conceived of them first. If that's the case we're all just pieces of him, summed up we barely make a blip on his radar. Interestingly on that thought, we are, after all, just a tiny spec on a insignificant seeming spot in a vast universe. So if God, then we're all just specs of nothing. If so, then why do we care about him?

To me this notion of God is meaningless. If he does exist, then we're not really here. If he does exist, then we're simply figments of his imagination that disappear faster than an electron reasonably should.

dasterdly stem, No theist believes god is nowhere(or your cartoon of god)You are simply restating that you do not believe in God. I can understand your statement that you do not believe.