Kipping does it again! Why is there something rather than nothing? LDS Apologists suggest time is nonlinear

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huckelberry
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Re: Kipping does it again! Why is there something rather than nothing? LDS Apologists suggest time is nonlinear

Post by huckelberry »

dastardly stem wrote:
Wed Mar 29, 2023 2:41 pm
His ending quote:
If I can only make dear this one thing, it will give us a basis on which to build. Man cannot discover God or his ways by mere mental processes. One must be governed by the Jaws which control the realm into which he isdelving.fo become a plumber, one must study the laws which govern plumbing. He must know stresses and strains; temperatures al which pipes will free1.e; Jaws which govern steam, hot water, expansion, contraction, and so fort...One might be the best of bookkeepers and yet not know anything of electricity...One might be a noted theologian and yet be wholly untrained in watchmaking. One might be the author of the law of relativity and yet know nothing of the Creator who originated every law....

Any intelligent man may learn what he wants to learn. He may acquire knowledge in any field, though it requires much thought and effort. It takes more than a decade to get a high school diploma; it takes an additional four years for most people to get a college degree; it takes nearly a quarter-century lo become a great physician. Why, oh, why do people think they can fathom the most complex spiritual depths without the necessary experimental and laboratory work accompanied by compliance with the laws that govern it? Absurd it is, but you will frequently find popular personalities, who seem never to have lived a single law of God, discoursing in interviews on religion. How ridiculous for such persons to attempt to outline for the world a way of life!

And yet many a financier, politician, college professor, or owner of a gambling club thinks that because he has risen above all his fellowmen in his particular field he knows everything in every field. One cannot know God nor understand his works or plans unless he follows the laws which govern. The spiritual realm, which is just as absolute as is the physical, cannot be understood by the laws of the physical. You do not learn to make electric generators in a seminary. Neither do you learn certain truths about spiritual things in a physics laboratory. You must go lo the spiritual laboralory, use the facilities available there, and comply with the governing rules. Then you may know of these truths just as surely, or more surely, than the scientist knows the metals, or the acids, or other elements. It matters little whether one is a plumber, or a banker, or a farmer, for these occupations are secondary; what is most important is what one knows and believes concerning his past and his future and what he does about it.21
"his ending quote"
Stem, this bunch of words sound very very Mormon though they do not specify any Mormon specific. You have given no clue as to who spoke them or why.
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Re: Kipping does it again! Why is there something rather than nothing? LDS Apologists suggest time is nonlinear

Post by dastardly stem »

huckelberry wrote:
Wed Mar 29, 2023 5:23 pm
dastardly stem wrote:
Wed Mar 29, 2023 2:41 pm
His ending quote:

"his ending quote"
Stem, this bunch of words sound very very Mormon though they do not specify any Mormon specific. You have given no clue as to who spoke them or why.
Sorry, huckelberry. he was quoting Spencer W. Kimball to close his piece. "In 1977, Spencer W. Kimball said," he says.
“Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos
huckelberry
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Re: Kipping does it again! Why is there something rather than nothing? LDS Apologists suggest time is nonlinear

Post by huckelberry »

dastardly stem wrote:
Wed Mar 29, 2023 2:21 pm
Whenever people set out to describe God it sounds to me like a bunch of nonsense--often a perfect description of nothing. A God who is outside of time or linear time, whatever that goofy concept amounts to, sounds about like nothing to me.
Because we mortal humans think only in terms of linear time, the idea of the. Fall being applied to the future and the past seems strange. But, is this tactic strange to God who is not limited by time (see Alma 40:8)?
There's nothing strange in applying the fall to the future and past. If it happened and there's a God who cares about it, then it happened and the God who cares applies it. There are no spooky thoughts inherent here. But that's not the explanation of the fall in the word of God. Of course trying to explain the inconsistency as described in scripture by using some mental gymnastics about "it could be" doesn't give much reason to accept the notion. It's only a slimey way to escape the incongruity and thus pretend it's not there. Was death introduced as a result of the fall or not? "Well yes, but you see, since death came before the fall that just means God is outside time and the fall applies before it happened, because God isn't stuck in linear time...or something".

Are you sure? Why twist it if you can't even know?

He exclaims:
What physical observation indicates or could indicate that God was the Creator? would that observation need to show something that could not be explained by natural means? That seems to be the assumption of creationists, atheist evolutionists, and Intelligent Designers. is that premise legitimate? Why could God not apply natural means to create the world? That would still take great skill and knowledge!
I don't understand why arguing that GOd is an unfalsifiable concept helps the case. The issue is not can God hide from everyone and we'll never be able to find him unless, of course, we assume our "spiritual experience" somehow is more important and informative than everything else? This puts God exactly nowhere but in the imaginations of believers. We can't know otherwise. Why is that rational, which was the point he was trying to argue for the whole time.

I think he's mischaracterizing what an atheist position would be. Its not that God couldn't hide himself from us tricking us in every way possible along the way, unless of course we somehow assume there's a spirit world. It is simply that the proposal of God as an explanation for everything is for one, not an explanation at all; and for two, is simply adding an extremely complex unnecessary idea to the whole equation, which I'd argue is more complex than anything ever and so complex it's basically incoherent. There's nothing rational there.
Stem, thoughts about God have never sounded like nothing to me so I find myself unsure what you might be thinking of. Perhaps I am more puzzled by your choice to fallow the characterization,nothing, by calling the the idea really complex, too complex. I do not know what you are considering with that characterization.

I think the death before fall is made unnecessarily difficult. People have speculated there was no death before the fall but that is not in the Bible to the best of my recollection. Perhaps tangles about that make the idea of God outside of time overly tangled.
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Re: Kipping does it again! Why is there something rather than nothing? LDS Apologists suggest time is nonlinear

Post by doubtingthomas »

huckelberry wrote:
Wed Mar 29, 2023 5:57 pm
Perhaps tangles about that make the idea of God outside of time overly tangled.

Christian apologists argue that God is timeless. A Mormon apologist points out an interesting problem with that idea
Further, if God is timeless, then God cannot change in any sense. Everything that is true of God is true of him in the single nontemporal instant of the eternal now.
https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/msr/vol8/iss2/10/

What's your opinion?
"I have the type of (REAL) job where I can choose how to spend my time," says Marcus. :roll:
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Re: Kipping does it again! Why is there something rather than nothing? LDS Apologists suggest time is nonlinear

Post by dastardly stem »

huckelberry wrote:
Wed Mar 29, 2023 5:57 pm

Stem, thoughts about God have never sounded like nothing to me so I find myself unsure what you might be thinking of. Perhaps I am more puzzled by your choice to fallow the characterization,nothing, by calling the the idea really complex, too complex. I do not know what you are considering with that characterization.
It seems like we've talked about this before, but I could be wrong on that. I'd say "God" as a concept is generally a poorly defined idea. As a piece to a hypothesis--like He created the world--I often do not understand what it is that created the world because God seems so poorly defined. I think Mormonism tends to define the concept a little better than say traditional Christianity. To traditional Christians He seems to be most often defined as a tri-omni being, which is actually a non-being as I'd define being, that is a brainless mind, not found anywhere in particular who supersedes all time and space. That sounds like nothing to me. Indeed a mind without matter is an incoherent concept since it seems the only example of mind we have requires a body. I don't know what something that is timeless or spaceless is, particularly if it's tagged as also having being. Ideas are spaceless, i guess we could say. But if so, then is God simply an idea? What would it mean that he exists if that is so? Anyway, it seems questions are endless and unanswerable as I see it. On Mormonism God has a body and is somewhere, which I suppose is something...but He's still so hidden the only way we'd ever really know is in our dreams or thoughts. So I'm not sure how Mormonism's definition helps.
I think the death before fall is made unnecessarily difficult. People have speculated there was no death before the fall but that is not in the Bible to the best of my recollection. Perhaps tangles about that make the idea of God outside of time overly tangled.
Yes. That's kind of what I mean too.
“Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos
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Re: Kipping does it again! Why is there something rather than nothing? LDS Apologists suggest time is nonlinear

Post by Physics Guy »

huckelberry wrote:
Wed Mar 29, 2023 5:15 pm
If I could go back to yesterday that would change how I think of things.
Yep, me too. Subjectively it sure seems as though the future is uncertain while the past is a done deal. I remember yesterday, at least partially; I can't remember tomorrow. I can't explain why not, though.
I was a teenager before it was cool.
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Re: Kipping does it again! Why is there something rather than nothing? LDS Apologists suggest time is nonlinear

Post by huckelberry »

doubtingthomas wrote:
Wed Mar 29, 2023 6:08 pm
huckelberry wrote:
Wed Mar 29, 2023 5:57 pm
Perhaps tangles about that make the idea of God outside of time overly tangled.

Christian apologists argue that God is timeless. A Mormon apologist points out an interesting problem with that idea
Further, if God is timeless, then God cannot change in any sense. Everything that is true of God is true of him in the single nontemporal instant of the eternal now.
https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/msr/vol8/iss2/10/

What's your opinion?
Thomas, I do not find the phrase out of time as very clear. Well I know what it means when trying to make music and ones timing gets off. In fact that is really the only meaning for being out of time that I can see. I can view God as having an unchanging eternal core , central being but I do not see that as having any relationship to being in or out of time. Unchanging would be a characteristic independent of relationship to time.

here are some thoughts I can have some sympathy with without committing to them.
https://reknew.org/2016/09/god-exist-outside-time/

Once upon a time I read book one of Aquinas Summa, Pretty elaborate construction of the God and time thing. I remained unconvinced. It makes reality too close to being a simulation I thought. Well I do not know for sure if Aquinas was right or not. He focused upon the complete knowledge of cause and effect that God would have making time completely known to him all time.

One might say God is in all time.
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Re: Kipping does it again! Why is there something rather than nothing? LDS Apologists suggest time is nonlinear

Post by Rivendale »

Physics Guy wrote:
Wed Mar 29, 2023 9:52 pm
huckelberry wrote:
Wed Mar 29, 2023 5:15 pm
If I could go back to yesterday that would change how I think of things.
Yep, me too. Subjectively it sure seems as though the future is uncertain while the past is a done deal. I remember yesterday, at least partially; I can't remember tomorrow. I can't explain why not, though.
Promoters of quantum woo use this often. Making statements that in the world of QM there are instances of effects preceding causes. While being used to demonstrate prophecies or omniscience....it is a death spiral for arguments like the cosmological argument.
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Re: Kipping does it again! Why is there something rather than nothing? LDS Apologists suggest time is nonlinear

Post by doubtingthomas »

Physics Guy wrote:
Wed Mar 29, 2023 7:16 am


The mysterious puzzle isn't how causality could work in both direction like that. Causality obviously has to work in both directions, because cause-and-effect is a one-to-one relationship. The big mystery that physics still hasn't solved is why we don't naturally think that way, but instead always tend to think forwards in time, wondering what will happen tomorrow and taking yesterday for granted.
Interesting.

Let me ask, why do you think there's something rather than nothing?
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Re: Kipping does it again! Why is there something rather than nothing? LDS Apologists suggest time is nonlinear

Post by Physics Guy »

I don't know why there is anything rather than nothing and I don't believe anyone knows.

So much stuff does exist. Moreover things are just as they are, although they seemingly could have been different in so many ways. If reality were an argument it would seem to be a vast begging of the question. One has to assume so much, just to get started. In physics and elsewhere it is considered more reasonable to make fewer arbitrary assumptions, but reality itself seems to violate this principle so badly that it shakes my faith in the principle. The most reasonable, undemanding assumption would be that nothing should exist. That's so wrong that for me it takes the shine off the whole strategy of making undemanding assumptions.

The hardest thing to understand, for me, isn't why we have something rather than nothing, but why we have something in particular rather than anything else. The main thing that nothing has going for it is that it avoids having to pick any one thing in particular. As soon as you have anything at all, rather than just nothing, you're faced with this enormous choice among all the possible somethings. How did the one thing that we do have get picked?

One possible answer is that nothing got picked, because every possible reality is in fact real, somewhere. The various "multiverse" theories all go in this direction. I'm not impressed. Having to imagine so many perfectly undetectable additional universes, without even the possibility of any evidence at all for them, just leaves me cold. It answers the question so perfectly that it doesn't even feel like an answer at all, just a dismissal.

The multiverse may be dressed up in language about quantum mechanics and inflationary cosmology but it walks and talks exactly like the turtle theory of Russell's crazy old lady, or the hypothesis that everything was created ten seconds ago including all of our memories, or that I'm a brain in a vat. I can't refute it but I also can't take it seriously. If you really don't want to think about the question, fine, don't—but don't kid yourself that you have a good scientific answer to it. Scientific answers are things you can work with. Physics talks and papers almost always end with an "Outlook" discussion about what to do next. Often there is no obviously winning next move, but at least there are some suggestions. The Outlook statement from the multiverse is that there can't be possibly be anything at all to do next.

What I believe is that there exists a good answer of some kind for why we have, not only something rather than nothing, but the particular something we have rather than other somethings. And I suspect that this belief, vague though it may sound, is tantamount to believing in creation by God, whether or not one uses those words.
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