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>>And if He is, he may not. And if He is not, you could
>easily
>>misinterpret something else.
>
>God loves gamblers. Wager like Pascal.
Great! I guess I'll put my money on that Bodhisattva dude.
>>What is "causation" other than an ordering? You need to
>think
>>more abstractly.
>
>Maybe I do. But let me see. It didn't seem apt, because
>whereas I'm speaking of "material causality", you seem to be
>comparing it to mere numerical order. It's hard to conceive
>of 3 being caused by 2 in the sense we speak of "you being
>'caused' by material causes prior to you". No?
Well, 2 and 3 aren't material entities, but neither is the universe itself, and neither, once you look closely enough, are those things within the universe which we refer to as objects. You have said yourself that an object is nothing other than a bundle of attributes. A number is also a bundle of attributes, there are simply fewer to keep track of.
>But maybe you're right, maybe I'm not thinking abstractly
>enough. I just don't think it's quite apt because the type of
>causation I have in mind is the Aristotlien notion that a
>"potential" thing requires an "actual" thing in order to come
>about,
Don't forget the danger of these Aristotelian notions! The vast majority of them have become hopelessly outdated.
>always, and that if you follow this causal chain all
>the way back you must needs arrive at a thing which is
>"nessessary" rather than contingent, and that thus has no
>"potentiality", rather only "actuality".
>
>Otherwise, you're essentially saying that there can be a
>series of boxcars moving along on a train track, but no engine
>either pulling or pushing them. It's movement without a
>mover. Causation without a cause. That seems absurd. I
>don't see a way around that.
Okay, now you're making an analogy that may not be apt! Your train has a mathematical representation as well, in the so-called natural numbers, which do have a minimal element.
The point is that we're dealing with fundamental questions here, and that we can't rely on common sense! It's failed us many times in the past (Aristotle made a career of it). I can argue that your analogy is ill-conceived (even perhaps unintentionally dishonest), in that it is built entirely on visual imagery and intuition related to objects drastically different than the actual elements at hand, but chosen nonetheless, one could assume, to stealthily beg the question. But I can't argue that your analogy is not apt any more than you can argue that mine is not apt. The only way we could do this is if we knew the answer, or at least had some evidence of the answer, and we don't. (you will say that you have evidence, but even if that were true, you are not we)
>>Indeed, but in order to exist, I don't need the matter which
>>forms me to have been "created." I merely need it to exist
>as
>>well.
>
>And what does "it" require? A cause. And what did "that"
>cause require? A cause. And what did "that cause" require?
>A cause. On and on. According to you, all box cars, no
>engine. It seems, no?
Exactly, and I see no reason to be troubled by this, except perhaps old-fashioned Aristotelian naivite.
>> God is a broken
>>symmetry.
>
>Only if God is finite. But then, if that were so... if the
>thing you thought was God turned out to be merely finite, He
>wouldn't be God, and you've have to keep following the
>causation backward till you arrived at a "necessary being"
>rather than a "contingent being". Without a necessary being,
>there could be no contingent beings. You wouldn't have
>reached the engine yet, just another box car.
Again, what I'm saying is that this "necessary being" is not necessary, and is in fact an extra structure with no apparent relevance.
Let's get back to your train for one moment. Any high-school physics student can tell you that the only cars being pulled by the engine are those in direct contact with the engine. All other cars are actually pulled by their neighbors. Now obviously, if I took a bunch of ordinary boxcars and connected them only to each other, all the way around a circular train track, they could not (practically) power themselves enough to overcome friction and ride around in the circle. This is due to arguments of statistical mechanics, which underlie the laws of thermodynamics.
If, however, the USS Enterprise came across a train, made up entirely of unpowered boxcars and extending all along a track which traverses the entire observable universe, the situation changes. It has been argued that such a train could indeed transcend the laws of thermodynamics.
Now, obviously, this argument is ludicrous from a practical standpoint, but that's the point! Your intuition about trains might not apply to a train which crosses the observable universe. While this situation is completely irrelevant to ordinary experience, we aren't talking about ordinary experience. We're talking about regimes of experience that are ludicrous even related to this already ludicrous situation.
>---And here is a PS that should almost be a whole post in
>itself.----
>
>What do we have in the Big Bang?
>It seems that we have the beginning of "movement", no?
Not necessarily, no.
>I mean if there is no three dimensional space prior to the Big
>Bang, it hardly makes any sense to say that anything could
>"move" before-
>A) there was anything, and
>B) there was extension (three dimensions)
>
>But now here's a problem:
>
>"Time" itself is merely an accident of "movement".
Maybe. This is referred to in the quantum gravity literature as the "thermal time hypothesis." Of course, it can also be said that "movement" is an accident of "time." That, in fact, is a more common view. And of course there are many other views.
>So if there could be no time before there was any movement,
>and there could be no movement before there was the Big
>Bang... then...
>
>Whatever caused the Big Bang was eternal.
What do you mean, "caused"? Maybe "causation" is merely an accident of "time."
>just a thought.
This reminds me of some recent papers which announced a very interesting result. Some guys calculated the dimension of spacetime in their preferred quantization of gravity. Their result is that the number of dimensions in spacetime depends on which distance scales one is probing! At long, that is, macroscopic, distance scales, the number of spacetime dimensions is some number between 3.92 and 4.12. This agrees quite nicely with our experimentally measured value, 4 (3 space and 1 time, you might say). At short distance scales (or also a short time after the big bang), the number of spacetime dimensions is between 1.55 and 2.05. So one might infer that at short distance scales, the universe is two-dimensional! But it may be even crazier than that. It may be that the number of dimensions is not even a whole number! What would this mean?! Nobody knows. It's not intuitive, but there's no reason to expect it to be.
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