cause-and-effect: "cause" require evidence too

[ChristineM]

Yes that's the old God of the Gaps argument I hear.



Saying I don't know but I believe one way or another is also honest.

Yes, the god of the gaps idea is still often used

Belief is fine, when people say they know the unknowable is the problem

 

[Brian2]

Why would that be the case?

Honestly now...other then you already believing it... why would you even suggest such a thing?

Yes because I already believe in a creator God. Just justifying that belief when someone was saying that the material of the universe was always there because of 'conservation of energy/matter".

 

[Brian2]

Here's the problem - some will ask 'How did it all start?'
and some might use this 'B model' and say, 'Well, space and time were always here... and within it the universe began.' (probably some virtual particle anomaly or whatever)
The B-Modle folks haven't answered the question.
How did it all start takes on board the question of 'all', as in space and time included.
Space is a Big Deal - it's a weird foam-like structure with particles popping in and out of existance - it's not just a 'nothing' sitting there forever.
So no, I don't accept B-models.

I don't know a lot about it. I keep hearing different things and so am getting my head around it still.
Certainly I see time as linear and so cannot have gone back infinitely into the past or we would not be here yet.
I think that Polymath is saying that space time exists in timelessness.
There is plenty of speculation about things around.

 

[Brian2]

Yeah, I mean even if and that is an if, the world is natural, it is a fact, that people believe in different Gods and thus I have never been able to figure of how that is wrong for how the natural world works, because it is a part of the natural world.
I really can't explain that other than wrong doesn't rely apply to that.

As in, "Things are what they are and have always been that way, and I'll just go with the flow and slot in somewhere without letting it worry me too much".

 

[Brian2]

Yes, the god of the gaps idea is still often used

Belief is fine, when people say they know the unknowable is the problem

Exactly, and when believers say such things they really mean they believe them imo
When atheists say such things I would say they also only believe them and that is what I try to show,,,,,,,,,,, that many atheists have religious faith.

 

[ChristineM]

Exactly, and when believers say such things they really mean they believe them imo
When atheists say such things I would say they also only believe them and that is what I try to show,,,,,,,,,,, that many atheists have religious faith.

I suggest you look up the definitions of religion and atheiem

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

...
True. I do have a problem with atheists saying that everything can be explained without the need for inserting a God into it. I see that life and existence have not been explained, the very things that God said He did.

Well, there is an aspect not of atheists, but a certain version of the world that hasn't to do with science, because you can do science without it.
The short version is the real world. The real word is independent of minds/brains. The problems are:
-You can't observe the world having the property of being real
-That is not really a problem because reason in men causes the world to be real, if we define it as real. That is the definition of the world as real causes the world to be real.
-That is not really a problem, because between different understandings of how the world is, if we define it as real, the other understandings are not relevant, because we decide for the world and all humans, what is relevant. That is because we hold authority over what the world is, what real is and what is relevant, because our method is the correct one.

That is how the real objective world objectivists do it, if you follow their words as how they function in the everyday world.
And yes, we have them here and it has nothing to do with atheism.

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

Exactly, and when believers say such things they really mean they believe them imo
When atheists say such things I would say they also only believe them and that is what I try to show,,,,,,,,,,, that many atheists have religious faith.

Correct, but their faith is that they can explain everything as relevant to being a human in the world using objective reason, logic and evidence.
The auxiliary ad-hoc is that they are the standard for morality for all humans, because how they do morality can't be done differently, because they say so.

 

[ChristineM]

the material of the universe was always there because of 'conservation of energy/matter".

Why do you have a problem with this? It is possibility although the first law of thermodynamics does not apply because that only deals with a closed systrm.

 

[leroy]

There can be any number of plausible causes. There are no gods known to exist so that one isn't plausible. the Big Bang could have been caused by its own instability. So the cause would be the state of the energy itself.

That is impossible and absurd. Any instability would have collapsed at past infinity (not 13B years ago)

1 God : // may or may not excist we dont know

2 your hypothesis// known to be impossible

therefore God wins

Balls and couches are known to exist, unlike gods.

Thanks for the information, but its irrelevant to the point being made

 

[leroy]

Well, you also need the law of gravity, the properties of the foam of the couch, etc.

And, of course, if the ball is replaced by something else, the curvature would still exist. so by your definition, the ball is NOT a cause of the curvature.

I think your definition needs serious work.

Sure I am not saying that the ball is the only cause , nor that there the ball could not be replaced by an other cause

Well what definition would you suggest ?

 

[leroy]

We can recognize a human designer because we have previous experience of human designers and can sometimes differentiate between natural processes and human designers.

So you are saying that an alien that has no prior knowledge of humans could not conclude that a watch was designed?

 

[Polymath257]

God says "universe come into existence" in a timeless realm and time and space come into existence when time begins. It all happens in the instant called the beginning.

Nice story. It seems to be simply special pleading to avoid the natural conclusion.

Is there any reason to think it does not make sense. If rationality exists here then it could exist elsewhere.

Yes, there is good reason to think that causality makes no sense 'outside of the universe' (which is a nonsense phrase): all natural laws deal with events within the universe. Causality is dependent on those natural laws.

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

Nice story. It seems to be simply special pleading to avoid the natural conclusion.



Yes, there is good reason to think that causality makes no sense 'outside of the universe' (which is a nonsense phrase): all natural laws deal with evens within the universe. Causality is dependent on those natural laws.

Reason can't tell you if there is more than the universe. Only observation can. What is this? Are you a strong epistemological rationalist and we can know about the outside of our mind simply be using reason.

 

[Polymath257]

Sure I am not saying that the ball is the only cause , nor that there the ball could not be replaced by an other cause

Well what definition would you suggest ?

A cause of an event B is a previous situation that, through the action of natural laws, gives the result B.

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

Reasoning alone on the “cause”, isn’t enough for science. Logic alone don’t satisfy science.

But that's all we can do at this time, and perhaps all we will ever be able to do. The only evidence we have is the universe itself, and so far, we have identified no feature of it that allows us to declare its history. We can only list all of the logical possibilities that we can conceive, and if that list is complete, recognize that if there will ever be an answer, it will be one of those.

The universe exists. It either has always existed or it had a first moment. If it had a first moment, that might have been caused or uncaused. If there was a prior cause, it might have been an intelligent agent or an unconscious substance. Have I left anything out? It seems to me that one of these MUST be correct if my reasoning is valid and complete, but presently, there is no evidence that rules any of them in or out.

And it's no good to pick one and call it ridiculous. They're all ridiculous. They all require that something has always existed and has already passed through an infinite number of nows to reach right now, or that something came into being uncaused and from nothing. None of those seem possible, yet it seems that at least one must be the case.

The adherents to the BB beginning of the universe are eventually obliged to explain either, what existed before, or how the nothing to something creation process works?

Not really. There are other logical possibilities as I just outlined, but we can stipulate to your requirement anyway. Empiricists would love to be able to explain the existence of the universe, but there may be no answers forthcoming, as they are not free to just guess and call it fact.

Do you have the same standard for theists? Are they eventually obligated to explain how anything that they believe could be the case, such as how it is possible for a deity to exist uncaused and undesigned, and how it can create universes, or is that just for empiricists?

So if religion says that the spiritual energy is omnipresent, and science says dark energy is omnipresent, is this not common ground.

Dark energy is proposed to account for an observable phenomenon, the acceleration of the rate of universal expansion. What is spiritual energy? What are its features? What does spiritual energy do? How does one detect it or measure its effect? What physical phenomena are accounted for by postulating its existence? I don't see any commonality between the two.

religion is relevant to understanding everything.

You must use a different definition for religion than I do, one closer to what I would call reason or philosophy. The supernaturalistic religions explain nothing.

Science is the path to duality, religion is the path to non-duality. Wrt duality, there is a mental separation between the thinker and the conceptualized reality, in the Nirvanic state, there is no duality.

And how is that better than being able to experience reality as a subject and an object with an understanding that the subject is part of the object? This concept is repeatedly offered as a worthy goal, but why? Why even be conscious at all if you can't experience

Yes, spirit can be realized, but you will need to devote your life to a very difficult religious practice to bring your awareness from its present dualistic relationship with the universe/existence to a non-dual awareness state. The process of developing your mind to transition from duality to non-duality requires the cessation of thought. All thought implies duality, the thinker and the conceptual thought, non-duality requires no thought, just a mind free from thought in a state of pure awareness.

Once again, you might consider offering a reason for doing that. Also, please explain how awareness without thought is desirable or even possible.

Cause and effect can happen at the same time.

Really? How would you decide which is which?

If a god is supernatural, above nature, always existing,,, space nor time nor space-time is of no meaning.

Existence outside of space and time is an incoherent concept, as is the supernatural. Whatever exists is part of nature, and it is all in spacetime. It is incoherent to postulate an undetectable realm of reality outside of time and space that is able to affect the rest of reality. Causality cannot be one-way. To be real is to exist in space and time and to be able to interact with other real objects and processes. Anything that can do that is detectable. To be nonexistent is to have none of those qualities.

What I have noticed with anti religious polemicists here (Not all), and the internet (again, not all) don't seem to gather that scientific evidences are not in the realm of metaphysical arguments.

Really? Empiricists would be the first to tell you that metaphysical statements aren't scientific and can neither be shown to be correct or incorrect. They're "not even wrong." What I have noticed about theists is that this doesn't matter to them, and they expect the same respect for their pronouncements about the metaphysical as scientists get, wanting religion to be seen as an alternate path to truth that science just can't get to. Except that no metaphysical statement could ever rise to the level of truth if that word is to mean ideas that describe reality accurately.

natural science cannot engage with supernatural.

That's because it doesn't exist. It meets all of the requirements to be nonexistent. It can't be found anywhere at any time and is undetectable, that is, doesn't affect reality - just like every other imagined thing that doesn't exist.

IMO, the best evidence for God is the Bible, because the Bible does not just provide a revelation of God's relationship with lsrael and the faithful through time, it points the way to personal experience of God through Christ.

But the Bible is not evidence for a deity. It is evidence that people believed one existed and wrote that down. To be evidence of a deity it would need to be something that a deity is required for it to exist. And there needs to be a second person to have a personal relationship with someone. You can no more have apersonal relationship with Christ than you can with Euclid or Shakespeare.

IMO, it's a fool [Psalms 14 and 53] who cannot see that the visible world comes from the invisible Spirit of God!

Really? I see it the other way around.

To say, as l think Bertrand Russell said, that the universe 'just exists' is not an explanation for the ever changing nature of the universe.

 

[Polymath257]

And would it be that outside this geometry there is no time space?

There is nothing outside of this geometry. If there was something outside, then the geometry just needs to be extended.

I suppose this time space universe could exist in a bigger time space universe and timelessness might be outside that.

Sure, that is essentially the multiverse model. But why introduce something outside?

So is part of the B model the idea that our future and past self and the events we will and have done, actually exist now?
Is so, why?

It exists. The term 'now' represents a point in the geometry.

 

[Polymath257]

So you are saying that an alien that has no prior knowledge of humans could not conclude that a watch was designed?

I think it might be very difficult, especially on a new planet where it isn't clear what sorts of things can be naturally produced.

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

A cause of an event B is a previous situation that, through the action of natural laws, gives the result B.

That is idealism. There are no natural laws. There are models but they are not objective reality. Your true colours are showing. Are you a non-religious idealist of some kind?

 

[Polymath257]

How did you come up with such assumption? It’s totally false/illogical.
Don’t get me wrong; my intent is to clarify the matter, not to be critical.

Cause and effect are inseparable. Your argument that we need evidence for both is an oxymoron, simply because the effect itself is the evidence for the cause. You don’t prove each one separately. Don’t jump to conclusions without making an effort to understand the subject matter, let me explain further.

No, the effect is the reason we hypothesize a certain cause. We then need to independently verify that cause.

Scientifically, the most abundant existence in our universe by far is the dark matter/dark energy, which constitutes about 96% of what’s out there in the universe.

This is a double hypothesis: one that the cosmological constant is the best explanation for the universal acceleration of expansion and second that it should be interpreted as an energy density.

In the standard model, it is difficult to say that dark energy is a 'substance' since it is simply an energy density of the vacuum.

What, if anything, it is made of is pure speculation and needs independent verification.

Observations of astrophysical effects are what caused the inference of the abundant presence of something completely invisible of a totally unknown nature that can’t be understood or observed. You cannot argue that dark energy, as a cause of astrophysical effects needs independent evidence of its existence, it’s an oxymoron since the effects itself is the evidence of the cause.

Yes, absolutely it does. At this point we have a mathematical description of the accelerating expansion, but no details past that. In essence, dark energy is simply the energy density of the vacuum--no 'substance' is postulated.

Anything past that does, in fact, need separate evidence (maybe more detailed evidence).

Similarly, Newton inferred the existence of gravity because of the effects of gravity. You don’t need separate evidence of gravity as the cause of observed effects. It’s an oxymoron. Effects (of gravity) are the evidence of the cause (gravity).

No, he *defined* gravity as the force that gives the observations and *hypothesized* a formula for that force. That formula definitely required confirmation by further testing.

The observations are what confirm that he got the formula correct (well, until they showed otherwise).

In most cases, effects are directly observed, IOW, its evidence is simply the fact that we observe it, on the other hand, causes may not be observed, yet it can be scientifically/logically inferred through the observations of its effects. The effects itself are the evidence of the causes.

That said, I’m not here for an argument but rather to clarify some facts, you may accept it or reject it. It’s your call.

Causes are hypothesized and need further confirmation.