Why did God create us

[Aupmanyav]

How do you know it is pink?
What God has done and said in Jesus does prove that we are more significant than our eyes and logic tell us however. That is because the creator has shown that He loves us.
All continents.

The same way you know about your God, human imagination.
Not every one believes in your Bible stories. His love comes only after death, before that he is a sadist.
Then for a beginning, let him stop Covid-19 and Monkeypox, and the Ukraine war.

 

[Notthedarkweb]

Udayana did not know about Quantum Mechanics.

I mean, neither did Sriharsa (or even Sankara). That'd be physically impossible. The things that they were concerned with are way different from what contemporary science is concerned with. And the Nyaya cosmoteleological argument, even if I don't particularly find it convincing, doesn't really seem to negate anything in QM? Cf. William Lane Craig's Kalam cosmological argument. It's related to the transcendental conditions of causality, which is a philosophical concept not prima facie linked with QM.

my position is that of an advaitist and a strong atheist (i.e., 'even the possibility of existence of God or soul does not exist'). That is not the usual advaitist position.

I see. That does sound more akin to traditional Buddhist (especially Madhyamika) positions on deity and the soul than not. Though I don't think the general critique would differ a whole lot, since the Nyaya critique of Vedanta builds upon their critique of Yogacara Buddhism.

Madhvacharya (my homage to him) was the strongest reaction to Sankara

Jayatirtha (the primary interpreter of Madhvacharya's work in the tradition) actually was heavily influenced by the Nyaya misidentification theory of perceptual illusion, where error in cognition didn't mean ordinary perception was indeterminate (as argued most famously in Advaita by Citsukha) and therefore in requirement of sublation into higher cognitive forms, but that it was the misapplication of some other natural kind than the one instantiated in the cognitive object (pramana) due to similarity between kinds and a defect in the cognizer. Where they differ is that Jayatirtha, pace the old Nyayaikas, claims that the object that the cognizier misidentified the real object as doesn't actually exist in memory, but is an actually non-existent entity, a real absence.

Nyaya-Vaisheshika' in their current form or 'Dvaita' do not constitute the understanding of all Hindus about God question (that will be a huge claim).

Right, I wouldn't claim otherwise. Navya-Nyaya is primarily found in the Sanskrit universities and the work of Indians (and some of their western colleagues) working in the analytic tradition of philosophy due to its complexity and generally rarefied method of philosophical analysis. A lot of it seems to have tenuous connection with soteriology, which is why its hardly popular among any lay people.

After all, Samkhya had its 'nireeshwaravad' position. I beg Sri Madhva's forgiveness

Right, yeah, that's my point. Samkhya was atheist insofar as they believed that their philosophy didn't need God, but at the same time they weren't Advaitins (if you see Vacaspati Misra's commentary on Samkhya, one understands the differences fairly clearly, since he's medieval Indian thought's best exegete as well as a Vedantin).

 

[Aupmanyav]

It's related to the transcendental conditions of causality, which is a philosophical concept not prima facie linked with QM.
I see. That does sound more akin to traditional Buddhist (especially Madhyamika) positions on deity and the soul than not.
"Jayatirtha (the primary interpreter .. and a defect in the cognizer."
A lot of it seems to have tenuous connection with soteriology, which is why its hardly popular among any lay people.
Right, yeah, that's my point. Samkhya was atheist insofar as they believed that their philosophy didn't need God, but at the same time they weren't Advaitins (if you see Vacaspati Misra's commentary on Samkhya, one understands the differences fairly clearly, since he's medieval Indian thought's best exegete as well as a Vedantin).

Now we know that causality in intricately connected with QM.
Yeah other than Gaudapada and Sankara, I consider Buddha to be my guru; though I differ from all of them somewhere or the other.
That (" .. ") is beyond the capabilities of my simple mind. For me 'the finger under the electron microscope'. It is nothing like a finger, therefore it is 'maya'.
I do not have a soul, and therefore would not worry about soteriology. Then, I am none other than Brahman (as all things in the universe are - 'Sarvam Khalu Idam Brahma'), I do not need any salvation.
Yeah, Samkhya is not advaita because they believe in two, Purusha and Prakriti.
For me, 'Eko sad, dwiteeyo nasti; nasti, nasti, na nasti kinchana' (What exists is one, there is no second; no, no, no, not in the least)

 

[Notthedarkweb]

Now we know that causuailty in intricate connected with QM.

I think you are misunderstanding what I'm trying to say. QM makes theses about possible causal chains from the perspective of the observer. It's probabilistic indeterminism need not necessarily apply to already existing events that have occurred before the present moment in time since those are already settled events. The Nyaya cosmoteleological argument is related to analysis of already settled events, which means that even if QM would posit that a particular quantum state is indeterministic in the future from the perspective of the observer in the present, its eventual collapse when that future becomes the present would be casually linked with a chain of events that occur in the past and have already collapsed into static states, and it is concerned with analysis of this preceding chain of events back to the beginning.

 

[Aupmanyav]

I think you are misunderstanding what I'm trying to say. QM makes theses about possible causal chains from the perspective of the observer. It's probabilistic indeterminism need not necessarily apply to already existing events that have occurred before the present moment in time since those are already settled events. The Nyaya cosmoteleological argument is related to analysis of already settled events, which means that even if QM would posit that a particular quantum state is indeterministic in the future from the perspective of the observer in the present, its eventual collapse when that future becomes the present would be casually linked with a chain of events that occur in the past and have already collapsed into static states, and it is concerned with analysis of this preceding chain of events back to the beginning.

You are correct. QM is 'that', indeterminate and probabilistic, as far as we know. Our information is from the time of 'inflation' and nothing beyond that. Beyond that is all guess work, whether in Nyaya or in science.

 

[Notthedarkweb]

You are correct. QM is 'that', indeterminate and probabilistic, as far as we know. Our information is from the time of 'inflation' and nothing beyond that. Beyond that is all guess work, whether in Nyaya or in science.

I don't think so. Is the point here that you are denying the existence of causality? Because the philosophical arguments in favour of it are pretty strong, even if its only a transcendentally ideal category of pure reason a la Kant. After all, in our ordinary perceptual experience, we do seem to posit causality as a basic category, and causality is a basic category for even QM theories to make sense, lest all explanatory value for anything be ceded.

 

[Aupmanyav]

I don't think so. Is the point here that you are denying the existence of causality? Because the philosophical arguments in favour of it are pretty strong, even if its only a transcendentally ideal category of pure reason a la Kant. After all, in our ordinary perceptual experience, we do seem to posit causality as a basic category, and causality is a basic category for even QM theories to make sense, lest all explanatory value for anything be ceded.

I deny existence in the Advaitic terms (Jagan-mithya). I do not deny existence of Brahman / physical energy which is at the base of all things. That I consider to be eternal. Although I guess that it may have a non-existent phase. It cannot be eternal and always existent, because that does not solve the problem of 'Where from God / physical energy arose?' Basically, I think 'Ex-nihilo' by far is the best answer. In the words of 'Nasadiya Sukta':

Rig Veda Book 10 Hymn 129
नासदासीन नो सदासीत तदानीं नासीद रजो नो वयोमापरो यत l किमावरीवः कुह कस्य शर्मन्नम्भः किमासीद गहनं गभीरम ll
न मर्त्युरासीदम्र्तं न तर्हि न रात्र्या अह्न आसीत्प्रकेतः l आनीदवातं सवधया तदेकं तस्माद्धान्यन न परः किं चनास ll

nāsadāsīn no sadāsīt tadānīṃ nāsīd rajo no vyomāparo yat l kimāvarīvaḥ kuha kasya śarmannambhaḥ kimāsīd gahanaṃ gabhīram ll
na mṛtyurāsīdamṛtaṃ na tarhi na rātryā ahna āsītpraketaḥ l ānīdavātaṃ svadhayā tadekaṃ tasmāddhānyan na paraḥ kiṃ canāsa ll

THEN was not non-existent nor existent: there was no realm of air, no sky beyond it. What covered in, and where? and what gave shelter? Was water there, unfathomed depth of water?
Death was not then, nor was there aught immortal: no sign was there, the day's and night's divider. That One Thing, breathless, breathed by its own nature: apart from it was nothing whatsoever.

 

[Notthedarkweb]

I deny existence in the Advaitic terms (Jagan-mithya). I do not deny existence of Brahman / physical energy which is at the base of all things. That I consider to be eternal. Although I guess that it may have a non-existent phase. It cannot be eternal and always existent, because that does not solve the problem of 'Where from God / physical energy arose?' Basically, I think 'Ex-nihilo' is the best answer. In the words of 'Nasadiya Sukta':
.

Surely this is a philosophical claim that's different from saying QM says causality isn't real, no? Because the latter claim would require reconciling with general relativity, which has an extremely strong and deterministic notion of causality in the form of light cones.

 

[Aupmanyav]

Yeah, we are searching for the missing link, Theory of Everything.

In the observed world, QM and relativity work well in their own spheres, macro and micro. What we do not know are the rules when 'physical energy' may be in its non-existent phase.

Surely this is a philosophical claim that's different from saying QM says causality isn't real, ..

Does QM say that? I believe in causality exists unless science proves it otherwise. Not knowing its ways is something else - something to be researched.

 

[Notthedarkweb]

Yeah, we are searching for the missing link, Theory of Everything.

In the observed world, QM and relativity work well in their own spheres, macro and micro. What we do not know are the rules when 'physical energy' may be in its non-existent phase.Does QM say that? I believe in causality exists unless science proves it otherwise. Not knowing its ways is something else - something to be researched.

But the Vedantin (and as I can see, yours) claim is that the perceptual world is an illusion, an ontological degradation that needs to be sublated into a higher form. The distinction between macro and micro would be similarly not perspicacious because its exactly the sort of indeterminacy that Citsukha rails against in his classic formulation of the perceptual illusion. It seems incoherent to posit the existence of ontological pluralism on the level of the perceptible world when the thrust of the argument is a monist metaphysics where such distinctions fail to operate.

As for the rest, sure. But as I pointed out, the notion of causality being employed by physics and the notion of causality being employed by philosophers is linked, but aiming at different ends. It isn't apparent to me how physics can empirically show that temporal causality doesn't exist without negating its own foundations of system causation of particular states.

 

[rational experiences]

Living loving. A true loving human has never believed in any other human term evil...as you're just a human who theoried God terms or stories. By humans ..just humans. Who love hate are meek or angered yourself.

No matter what human status you infer.

Today I say what b.s. Artists most of you are. Storytellers.

I knew that a loving being has never agreed to destruction nor suffering or to tell a human your suffering is karmic.

Seeing that a human hurt didn't invent a planet it's heavens nor a humans machine sciences personally. As a victims clause.

So I rationalised human advice. A man adult father who believes in human family said to the adult man destroyer theist scientist his living life equal..life owner.... he said as a human..the human caused our life's attack.

Of course a human innocent or not as ...the human. Would be forced to suffer those human choices.

Innocent or not. You know common sense.

Common sense says the basis of a human being a human is the exact same advice for any human being...human.

Hence not being a whole higher human body type origin now meant human choices on earth had changed by human life. Choices.

So don't go blaming a loving humans advice for that choice scientist theist.

As God O earth and heavens in science terms are both naturally reactive in cosmic terms. Can kill us all off anytime.

Common sense.

To quote a humans question. If I can be so innocently loving how could a greater loving being cause my hurt?

I learnt it hadn't. It didn't expect change nor did it idealise new change.

Therefore what happened in created creation burning blasting cooling burning blasting evolved naturally of any thing.

Owning no purpose except one law....changed.

Is how it was spiritually consciously explained. Owned no retrospective purpose as Idealised by a loving being.

Knowing love myself.

By simply using common sense logic by rationalising loving human feelings

 

[Aupmanyav]

Vyavaharika is illusion, Paramarthika exists all the time (even in non-existence). A finger is an illusion, the 'physical energy' that appears as atoms is not. There is no indeterminacy involved. The division is clear-cut. (Sorry, I do not follow some of the English philosophical terms. I have studied neither philosophy nor English. Just picked up a few things).

 

[Notthedarkweb]

Vyavaharika is illusion, Paramarthika exists all the time. A finger is an illusion, the 'physical energy' that appears as atoms is not. There is no indeterminacy involved. The division is clear-cut. (Sorry, I do not follow some of the English philosophical terms. I have studied neither philosophy nor English. Just picked up a few things).

I'm sorry, I don't see how this is positing anything close to a Vedantic ontology? All objects including material objects are abstract objects in Advaitin vedanta. Vyavaharika is explicitly empirical, intersubjective reality that is discovered and confirmed through the use of the perception and inference pramanas and this includes anything that can be objectified e.g. atoms. The Advaitins are pretty clear on this, and they heavily criticize the Nyayikas for having an atomistic ontology (in fact, Advaitin critiques of atoms was probably one of the motivators for Raghunatha Siromani making the primitive ontological object in Nyaya metaphysics the perceptible as opposed to the atom.) Anything to which can be attributed an absence of particular properties, like atoms, or any notion of energy in physics is explicitly non-dual for Sankara, because Paramarthika serves as the locus for all other properties (including the property of possessing a form, which atoms have) due to it being fundamental ground.

In fact, your claim is much closer to some sort of idiosyncratic Indian idealists like Jayarasi.

 

[Aupmanyav]

Don't know about Jayarasi, but if I am accepting only Brahman / physical energy to exist and nothing else, then I am an 'advaitin' (following non-duality); irrespective of what views the other 'advaitins' may have or may have had. Vyavaharika seems to be empirical, but in reality it is 'maya'. You may say that I am an 'atomist advaitist'.
Even Brahman has properties. Is it not eternal? is it not changeless? Is it not formless? is it not what constitutes all things in the universe? Is it not unattached to what happens in the universe?

 

[Notthedarkweb]

Don't know about Jayarasi, but if I am accepting only Brahman / physical energy to exist and nothing else, then I am an 'advaitin' (following non-duality); irrespective of what views the other 'advaitins' may have or have had.

I don't know if its fruitful to attribute views to Advaitin Vedanta when Sankara's fundamental ontological ground is pure being whereas your ontological ground is something that is other than pure being i.e. a materialist ontology.

Also, there's non-dualist traditions that are not Vedantin cf. the Recognition school of Kashmir Shaivism, the Carvaka who were materialist monists, Jayarasi who was a skeptic about the existence of any concrete or abstract object.

 

[PureX]

I'm not sure if there's any need to posit an entity outside the world (which constitutes the absolute horizon of our phenomenological experience either way)? Like, why does it need to be a mystery? Why can't it just be a brute fact? After all, what's the counter-factual to the world existing as it does exist? That it would not? But nothing is parasitic on existence in the first place (Carnap's Uberwindung illustrates this neatly). After all, the sense of the term "there is rain outside" and "there is nothing outside" is quite distinct. In the first proposition, you can describe the fact in various different ways. In the second proposition, you literally can't describe it in any meaningful way since existence isn't a property of nothing. Nothing cannot be something. To put it pithily, the descriptive value of the concept "nothing" as opposed to "something" is nill. It's nonsense.

And yet it's absolutely necessary for the human mind to cognate 'something'.

It's a function of how the brain works; compare/contrast/repeat. In the binary nature of how the mind thinks, the 1 needs a 0 even if the 0 is otherwise meaningless. 'Here' can't occur to us without 'not here', even though 'not here' is an empty set of information. A "lack" as opposed to a presence.

Whatever state occurred before and/or beyond the Big Bang would be by definition "supernatural" just because nature as we know it is contained by and contains everything that occurred after and within that event. So that by the way the human brains recons, the "supernatural" must exist. Though we cannot possibly fill in that empty information set from within existence as we know it. So we imagine that we will be able to fill it when we cease to exist as we do. Or we simply imagine a 'filling' and pretend it's knowledge. (We humans don't like not knowing. It makes us vulnerable.)

"God is" because we are what we are and where we are. Yet we cannot know what God is because we are what we are and where we are.

 

[Notthedarkweb]

And yet it's absolutely necessary for the human mind to cognate 'something'.

"God is" because we are what we are and where we are. Yet we cannot know what God is because we are what we are and where we are.

I'm not going to answer the rest of this, because its an oddly confused argument (in fact, a lack of it) that would require an incredibly long comment to unpack, but your claim that human phenomenology requires a concept of "something" is expressly what I called tautological. Of course human cognition is intentional and is always about a thing, it's exactly for that reason I was saying that the concept of nothing standing for itself is unclear and lacks semantic content because by definition anything with semantic content is identical with the proposition that it is about something.

Edit: I am not denying some concept of nothing encoding the absence of any entity or property here. What I am denying is the claim that it is possible to make sense of this absence without presence existing in the first place, which would exactly restrict our phenomenological experience of the world to the horizon of experience itself i.e. about-something-ness.

 

[Aupmanyav]

I don't know if its fruitful to attribute views to Advaitin Vedanta when Sankara's fundamental ontological ground is pure being whereas your ontological ground is something that is other than pure being i.e. a materialist ontology.

Also, there's non-dualist traditions that are not Vedantin cf. the Recognition school of Kashmir Shaivism, the Carvaka who were materialist monists, Jayarasi who was a skeptic about the existence of any concrete or abstract object.

I have already mentioned that I consider Guadapada, Sankara and Budddha as my gurus but differ from all of them.
Yes, I am a total materialist, 'physical energy', with no mysticism. Every thing is pure, because everything is Brahman, none is impure. Yeah, I have read the Wikipedia articles on Kashkmir Shavism and Charvakas, but that is not my line.
See my signature: "Advaita (non-dual) Hinduism is a 'no nonsense' philosophy."

 

[PureX]

Apparently you do make an assumption that there was/is a source….
Since you admit;

Why not just accept it as a mystery
and say “I don’t know”?

Humans are afraid of not knowing. So much so that they will invent an illusion of knowing things that they don't know to avoid feeling that fear.

I see this as a form of dishonesty, or self-delusion that I do not wish to adopt if I am able to avoid it. Yet I understand that "God" is a mystery to us all. And I can see that most religions acknowledge this. So in my language, that is the common word to use to refer to this great existential mystery source. Even is a lot of my fellow humans choose to deny the mystery with fantasies or delusions of knowledge that they don't really possess.

 

[Aupmanyav]

We humans don't like not knowing. It makes us vulnerable.

I do not think that is correct, PureX. I like 'not knowing' just a much or more than 'knowing'. Accepting 'not knowing' is a strength. It gives us fuel to proceed further. Those who 'know' everything are dead-wood.

I was saying that the concept of nothing standing for itself is unclear and lacks semantic content because by definition anything with semantic content is identical with the proposition that it is about something.

The concept of 'nothing' and 'absolute nothing' is very clear. Absence of 'physical energy', space, time, and what we know today as fundamental forces of nature. That is a non-existent phase of 'physical energy'. We cannot cannot even elaborate upon what it could be. Leave it aside for a few hundred years - in the meanwhile we should not try to fill up the gaps.