The Appeal to Order and Intelligent Agency

[Alien826]

Marbles clattering down an inclined plane with a grid of pegs inhibiting their course. When one of the marbles encounters a peg with the forces influencing it's travel to one side or the other of the peg being close enough to equal that the gravity pulling it downward overwhelms the influences moving it to one side of the peg or the other, it will fall to either side with equal likelihood. Chance will then dictate to which side of the peg it drops.

That's interesting. Wouldn't it balance on the peg? We're talking about a mathematically described situation where everything can be perfectly described, like the peg would be exactly round, there would be no outside influences like air movement, and so on.

I'm not sure about this, just inviting discussion.

 

[Alien826]

The only exception to that, which I've seen in common use, is when faith is used synonymously with trust. If that's the sense you mean by faith, then you're probably correct: the majority of people have some degree of trust in something. I just don't see how you're getting from that to believing in God.

I'm not sure that many if any religious believers would admit to having blind faith. It's always some level of trust based on some perceived evidence. For example, they will quote the Bible as evidence and have reasons why the Bible is trustworthy. Whether that trust is justified is of course debatable.

 

[Ella S.]

I'm not sure that many if any religious believers would admit to having blind faith. It's always some level of trust based on some perceived evidence. For example, they will quote the Bible as evidence and have reasons why the Bible is trustworthy. Whether that trust is justified is of course debatable.

I've met quite a few religious people who openly admit that they believe based on faith and that there isn't enough evidence for their beliefs. I don't know how representative that is because I've never done a census on the subject, but I've even seen the more erudite Christians lament that most of the people they know rely on faith and can't defend Christianity with argumentation.

In some of theology, faith is treated as a conviction blessed upon someone by the Holy Spirit itself that allows someone to believe even when they can't articulate a good reason why they believe. It can be treated similar to a form of revelation.

This is actually why so many Christians assert that everyone must have some sort of faith in something, from what I've witnessed. It's a kind of projection. They know that their faith isn't based on reason, so, to resolve their cognitive dissonance about that, they have to assume everyone else suffers from the same intellectual pitfall, too. But we don't.

 

[Ella S.]

Oh yes.

What I was saying is that when we talk about perfection, we have to specify in what respect it is perfect. The circle is a good example. A perfect circle would be perfectly round. I'm sure there's a better way of saying that mathematically, but that will do. And as you say there can be no object in the real world that achieves that perfection, though we can specify it mathematically.

Or can we? Would we need a perfect value for π? Maybe one of our resident mathematicians can answer that.

The problem I see with creating a physical perfect circle is in defining what a perfect circle would look like if it were a physical object.

Key to the idea of a circle is that all of its points are equidistant to its center. There's the main problem. A "point" is a mathematical abstraction and, unless you're a mathematical realist and ascribe to some sort of Platonism, it is not a "real" thing. So what would a "point" be in a physical sense?

It might be better to think of a physical circle in terms of precision rather than perfection. To what degree of precision should a circle be a circle to be considered perfect? All the way down to the molecular level? All the way down to Planck length?

We can mass-produce circles which were designed by engineers using geometry, with points being precise to a level of centimetres. We do this every day. If we define a point as a square centimetre region of space, then these circles would be considered perfect. However, this is a far cry from how a point is actually defined in mathematics itself; this is an application of mathematics to engineering.

So it's unclear what a perfect circle in reality would look like.

 

[Alien826]

The problem I see with creating a physical perfect circle is in defining what a perfect circle would look like if it were a physical object.

Key to the idea of a circle is that all of its points are equidistant to its center. There's the main problem. A "point" is a mathematical abstraction and, unless you're a mathematical realist and ascribe to some sort of Platonism, it is not a "real" thing. So what would a "point" be in a physical sense?

It might be better to think of a physical circle in terms of precision rather than perfection. To what degree of precision should a circle be a circle to be considered perfect? All the way down to the molecular level? All the way down to Planck length?

We can mass-produce circles which were designed by engineers using geometry, with points being precise to a level of centimetres. We do this every day. If we define a point as a square centimetre region of space, then these circles would be considered perfect. However, this is a far cry from how a point is actually defined in mathematics itself; this is an application of mathematics to engineering.

So it's unclear what a perfect circle in reality would look like.

Yes. A perfect circle would have an infinite number of points on its circumference (a point has zero size) so we would never stop measuring it (or drawing it).

Precision is a good suggestion, but it's defining something that is nearly a perfect circle no matter where you limit the point size.

To generalize though, can we claim that nothing can be perfect in the physical world? I'm thinking about it.