Originally posted by Ghostavo
I'll try to go through this once more, but more organised:
1 - The universe could exist without time. Time is merely another dimension. To say god doesn't exist in time is to say that the god doesn't exist in the universe. You may argue that that is true with your beliefs but that will leave problem, because then how could god "interact" with the universe without making "contact" with it?
The Christian understanding is that God created time and is able to reach into in and interact with us. Most technically, it isn't that God doesn't exist within time, it is that he is not contained by time. He is bigger than time, both in it and out of it.
YOu will recall that I said "God by himself is timeless" Once he has created a universe that has time, he is no longer by himself, so now the situation is more complex--he is both in time and out of it.
2 - I'm not going to discuss what came before the big bang because no one on earth knows it and I'm no exception.
Exactly. No one knows what came before because there was no "before". That is the moment when time starts. The question is only whether God was "just there" at the first instant, or not.
3.1 - I said everything in the universe was/is caused by something (the else I put earlier is wrong... something can be caused by itself). If you knew the exact position and velocity of every particle in the universe you would know everything the universe has experienced, is experiencing and will experience. If there is free will (according to those guys you mentioned) then this theory couldn't even have surfaced. If there is free will then common physics is all wrong and you cannot fly planes nor drive cars. If there is free will... noone's alive.
Ah, I see what you mean now. I do, however, disagree.
Before I get to my objection, I would also like to make one small point on the side as well: to say that something caused itself technically doesn't make sense. It strips the word "cause" of its meaning--if something is causing itself, it has to already just be there in order to cause itself, and that means it really isn't being caused at all, because it is already "just there." If someone says that some things can cause themselves, what they are really saying is that some things are "just there."
But now for my actually objection:
You say that if free will exists, then physics is all wrong. This claim is based on the idea that if things happen without causes, then we cannot investigate them using the scientific method (because the scientific method can only investigate things related by cause-and-effect). But the scientific method works, so things must be related by cause-and-effect.
The problem I see is fairly simple. It is as simple as replacing the idea of "some" with the idea of "all."
We start by saying 1) that science is good at investigating things related by cause-and-effect. Then we note 2) that science is really good at telling us things about the world. Then we say 3) that if everything can be explained by science, then 4) the whole world must be subject to cause-and-effect.
The problem lies in the jump from 2 to 3. It is one thing to say that science tells us some things about the world. It is a whole different thing to say that it tells us everything about the world. In our minds it is an easy slide to make, but that easy slide is actually a fantastic leap across a huge chasm.
How on earth did we go from saying that some things in the world can be explained by science to saying that everything in the world can be???!! Science is only one method of knowing things. There are many others. History, philosophy, literature, art, emotional relationships, physical experience (e.g. learning to ride a bicycle), and more are all ways in which we come to understand this world better. History doesn't use the scientific method at all. History uses empathy and imagination to arrange random facts into a meaningful story. There are no experiements, no unbreakable laws of cause-and-effect, and yet history is an important and vital way of understanding the world. It really does explain things.
If some parts of the world really can be explained without making reference to cause-and-effect, what reason is there for insisting that everything has to be explained by cause-and-effect? Why can't we be more reasonable and say that those aspects of the world that are explained by cause-and-effect are explained by cause-and-effect, and those aspects that are not are not?
Here's a simple illustration to show what I mean:
Imagine a pool table with a bunch of pool balls on it. Now let's say that we understand all the rules that govern how the pool balls will behave if you hit them with a cue, and that we know where all the balls are on the table and how they are moving at the moment. Once I find out how hard you decide to hit the cueball with your cue, I should be able to say what the effects will be on all the balls. But first I have to know how hard you are going to hit the cueball. All my knowledge of the rules governing the pool balls and their positions and velocities tell me nothing about what you are going to decide to do, and not knowing what you are going to do doesn't make my knowledge of the rules and positions and velocites invalid.
In the same way, the possibility of sources of causation (independent free will) outside of the system of cause-and-effect (the material world) in no way invalidates the rules of the system.
4)First you said that thought is not a "product" of the brain and then you said it is. What I meant to ask is if thought is not what the brain "produces" then what does it do? (crude question... can't "refine" it).
Ah, I see, I misunderstood you, and so then you thought I was answering a different question than what I thought I was answering. No wonder we are so confused on this point.
Okay, so to answer the question you were really asking: in essence, it isn't that the firing of the brain's synapses produces thought, but that the mind causes the firing of the brain's synapses.
To go into a little more detail, let me just show you three different models for understanding the relationship between the mind and the brain: the Greek model, the modern materialist model, and the Hebrew model.
The Greek model is the easiest one to start with. Basically, the Greek idea was that there are two separate entities, the mind/soul, and the body. The soul lived in the body, but the two were basically different things. In this model, the connection between the soul and the body was always a difficult thing to explain.
We in Western culture inherited this idea from the Greeks, but over the last few centuries as the dominant understanding of the universe has shifted to belief that the material world is the only sort of reality there is, our understanding of the mind/body relation has changed too. Basically, since we only believe in material reality, we took the Greek idea and cut off the soul part, leaving only the body. When we do that, we have to think of the mind as just a side-effect of the brain, a sort of secretion of our nerve cells.
The third model comes not from the Greeks but from the Hebrews (from whom Christianity comes). In the Hebrew mind, the universe is not devided into these two different material and spiritual realms, but both material and spiritual are together part of one reality. In this understanding, the two cannot be separated, but neither is the mind just a side-effect of the brain's operation. The human being is one whole being, both physical and spiritual at once.
If we use this model (which is a bit difficult to get used to if you come from a materialist perspective), then what we have is the mind controlling the brain, not the brain producing the mind. In other words, the brain provides the means by which the mind is manifested in the world, rather than being the source of the mind.
If all that seemed too convoluted, just go back to the essential point.
5) So according to this, the choice itself the imperfection? You realize that by saying this nothing can become perfect if it wasn't perfect since the beggining... of the universe or... another thing I will refer later. If it wasn't perfect since the "beggining" then the being that it is now is suffering from imperfection of it's earlier state and doesn't become perfect.
Simple Example (I'm not going to take this till the beggining of the universe for logical reasons):
- Bob kills dude. Bob behaves "perfectly" afterwards. Bob is not perfect because he killed dude.
Either that or... that means that if the choice itself is imperfect, everything is perfect in almost every "frame" in time.
Essentially, what I am saying is that the moment they made the bad choice is the moment at which the imperfection starts. The choice is the source of the imperfection, which will continue on ever afterwards until God fixes us on the "Last Day".
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