h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Mox. Nobody claims that infinity has to have a beginning or an end. A *potential* infinite has to have a beginning. That is why there can't be anything that is *actually* infinite. Hence time can't be actually infinite, only potentially so.

To put it another way: if time had no beginning, we'd still be waiting for 'now' to arrive, and we would have to wait an infinitely long time for it. But 'now' *has* arrived, therefore time has a beginning.

toxx

<... when we realize that we are not the thinker.>

Who is this 'we' that does the realizing? Surely realizing involves thought - so how can it be that 'we are not the thinker'. Bit of a contradiction there, mox.

toxx

Esty and Coren

>>Well, I want to believe in a creator because it makes more sense than the Big Bang theory (at the moment).<<

Why stop at one creator? Why put creation in the distant past?

Once you bring in an omnipotent being, then creation could have been seconds ago.

Once you bring in the idea of a being who would want to make a universe, then why should he/she not want to create another like him/herself? Makes more sense than making a few planets to play with. More of a challenge, as well.

If I were a triple O god, and all on my own, I have made a companion, not a pet.

And before you come back and say that mankink are meant to be companions, I will point out that a horde of seething humans is not the same as a triple O god. A companion should share an outlook and be able to hold a conversation which is interesting on both sides. And not be dependent on the other partner for everything, including life itself.

Jez

There are so many good points being made here I haven't been able to read them all. I just hope i'm not repeating something that was just said.

I don't believe in God. This is not to imply that I think I know alot, but from personal experience 'he' doesn't seem to care much for those who devote their lives to him. I also feel that religous institutions can tend to be power hungry and corrupt if not thoroughly evil.

I enjoy science and philosophy. I feel that science is incomplete, while fully capable of proving 'truth'. The fact is that answers sow the field for more questions, and so on. A question that is compatible with the scientific method can usually be answered. The problem is that there is no recognizable limit, prodding the question: Is there a limit to scientific knowledge? I think not. Cost and presicion are the factors that should be more carefully considered. Amazing amounts of money are spent building elaborate equipment for research that has no practical use. Meanwhile people are starving, literally and figuratively.

I think part of the dilemma is that people need problems to solve. Religion gives people answers that can relieve this drive and make them feel more comfortable about the unknowns of this world. There are still unanswered questions however. One major one is; where did god come from? Any creation scenario has the same result, including the big bang.

One may as well ask what is the unanswerable question?

It is simply irrelavent. It defys its own being. Will understanding the complex chemical working of the brain and optic system help a mechanic find a broken wheel spoke? I doubt it. Knowing is nice. Thinking that knowledge equals truth is falasy.

If a spoke is broken this is undeniable. The spoke is made of molecules of Iron etc, the bonds which held them in the form of a spoke have been seperated, but yet the Iron etc has not been damaged. Knowing this does not make the spoke any less broken.

I don't however believe that it is impossible that we were created by another being (as opposed to spontaniously via chemical and geothermal reactions over a long amount of time). There are numerous possibilities, but given present knowledge they seem unlikely.

We are here, now. Look at nature, find your answers there.
Enjoy and Protect it.

<>

Brilliant, Toxxin! I hadn't thought of this, but it is a wonderful idea!

I think that, for God, loving is part of His nature - not a reaction to something else.

toxx, if God loves evryonr, not an option not to, whatever theyre like and whatever they do, it makes the word meaningless doesn't it? what meaning does it have, if its not a positive reaction to another individual's existence?

"Out there" is a void. With whatever we call God, plural, or even not at all, and in partnership, we create whatever we can as the void nibbles and swallows in whirlpools and eddies the chunks and morsels of our disbelief, disbelief in our innate creativity. There is no right or wrong, only an experience of the interface twixt creativity and the void, (nothingness), Ultimately we can learn what it is like to master the void, then we, i,e. those who "create" a God or his eqivalent, will no longer need to do so.

I may be completely up my tree, but this is the notion that carries me forward.

God bless you all for your creative thread!

ed.

Hi Toxx, thanks for the infinity explanation, I see the point.
Re my point about the realization that we are not the thinker. I don’t see this as a contradiction, to the contrary the realization that I am talking about, does not involve thought at all. Call it a kind of enlightenment if you like, a knowing which I believe many people experience. Because language is limited, it can not adequately describe this state of being. I reckon that it is when thought processes intervene that we feel we must find some kind of explanation and so begin to attach religious labels to it.
This leads me to your statement about emotions being a reaction to something outside ones self. I disagree, emotions are a consequence of thoughts. This is why people may respond differently to different circumstances. Their emotions are an expression of their individual or group perception of situations which they have first had thoughts about.



Mox

"It occured to me some time ago in the light of the above that when thought is viewed as Real in the way I outlined above, then the possibility exists that thoughts in essence have a life of their own, and possibly even will. "

SD
You are describing an egregore. See:
http://www.houseofthehorizon.org/public/documents.php?id=162

"'Timeless', the way I prefer to use the term, just wouldn't be meaningful at all, and certainly would not be equivalent to 'instantaneous'."

toxx, you may have gathered by now that I'm not much good with philosophy. But I understand where you're coming from, and I do do poetry (though this is not mine, but that of a master who wrote the best lines I ever read on the subject of time):

"At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.
And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time."

"Though I do take more care around trolls"

EVERYONE takes care around trolls!!!

Glubb. God made us so that we would be loved by Him. In this, He had much more control over what we would be like than a good human father who loves his children. Yet you surely wouldn't say that those children's lives are meaningless because their father loves them unconditionally! God does react in forgiving and wanting us to be nice to one another. However, He loves us whatever we do.

I tire of saying that this seems to me to be standard Theism/Christianity and not necessarily my personal view.

toxx

"The monotheist religions have to invent a second 'god' to explain misery, as they cannot accept that a good god (and their god is, after all, by definition good) can have made a 'bad' world."

This all sounds remarkably like the psychological defence of 'splitting' discovered by Freud and most famously reinterpreted by Bettleheim in his excellent work "The Uses Of Enchantment" in which he disects fairy stories and folktales. According to Bettleheim, the wicked stepmother of so many fairy stories is the 'bad' mother i.e. the child's mother when she denies the child something the child wants, or punishes the child etc, whereas the 'real' deceased mother is the mother when being good and giving the child what he wants. So the fairy story is the tale of the horror world where the 'good; mother has died and there is only the 'bad' mother.

Now, adults use this mechanism and it gets transferred. the more damaged the adult, the greater the 'goodness' or 'badness' as the personality of the person is emphasised. So, a spouse may be regarded as completely 'good' while they let the adult have what they want. But the moment they stop doing that the damaged adult switches to seeing his/her partner as completely evil. This can result in dramatic overreactions or the complete breakdown of relationships.

And here, in Christianity, we have the Gnostic/Manichean/Freudian splitting view of an entirely 'good' and spiritual god, and an entirely wicked 'Lucifer' who tempts people towards the pleasures of the body.

Hi Mox. I admit that I'm not much of a one for mysticism although I don't dismiss it out of hand. From a philosophical point of view, if we can't say it, it's difficult to believe that we're really thinking it. But then, 'we are not the thinker'. So we can't think about whether or not we are the thinker. It just doesn't seem coherent to me!

As for your point about emotions: I have to confess to being principally a psychologist by qualifications. Therefore I know that emotions are cognitively penetrable, but even that involves information coming in from the outside before we have the relevant thoughts. We don't just get angry over nothing whatsoever unless we're suffering from delusions!

There is also a theory that we react first and decide what to think afterwards. The James-Lange hypothesis, if memory serves. Surely emotions are there to nudge us into appropriate ways of reacting to events in the environment. That's the inevitable result of evolution.

toxx

"And I like the landwights and trolls! Your description strikes a chord somewhere. It has a Tolkeinish feel to it... actually, I suppose it's the other way around(?)"

Very much so! In his youth, C S Lewis fell in love with the pre-Christian world of Scandinavia, Germany and England, and loved Wagner's works. He shared this love with his best freind Arthur and, later, with Tolkien, in the Inklings. Tolkien drew virtually all of his inspiration from the ancient Anglo Saxon and Scandinavian works he taught in his classes on Old English and Old Norse. Lewis learned Old Norse, IIRC, inspired by Tolkien. The Inklings, of course, were the group to which each of the participants read out the latest chapter of their work in progress, or their latest poem (in the case of Campbell or Eliot), so it was they who first heard The Lord Of The Rings, long before it obtained publication.

BTW, most of the names of the characters in LOTR are combinations of Anglo Saxon or Old Norse words. IIRC, 'Gandalf' means staff (gand) and elf (alf). Tolkien's elvish lettering is based on the runic letters of Old England, Scandinavia and Germany.

HS. I believe that many Christians takes the view that Satan is a personification of their own antisocial tendencies. Psychologically, there is clearly a tension between self-interest and shared group ideals. The self-interested part doesn't have to be characterised as a sort of anti-god. Neither, of course, do the shared ideals have to be characterised as directly God-given. There is a better case for saying that they are ultimately God-given, however.

toxx

"toxx, if God loves evryonr, not an option not to, whatever theyre like and whatever they do, it makes the word meaningless doesn't it? what meaning does it have, if its not a positive reaction to another individual's existence?"

toxx, the next question is: what do you mean by love? What is the effect of this love? And, before anyone jumps in with the 'God gave his only begotten son' bit, that implies that:
(a) god's love means getting the chance to do what other people say god wants people to do, and
(b) love doesn't mean e.g. taking away freewill, even if that would make everyone's life on earth happier

"I believe that many Christians takes the view that Satan is a personification of their own antisocial tendencies."

Interesting, toxx, as this seems to be a matter of reification of an aspect of self. And, if Satan is only that, why do they not regard god in the same way: as a reification of their social tendencies? What is the justification for deciding to reify one and not the other?

It also presents the problem of changing social attitudes. Just to take one example, the social attitude to homosexuality has altered significantly in the last 50 years. Does this mean that Satan is relative, or that the nature of 'evil' changes? How, in either case, can any individual be sure what is 'Satanic' and what not?

" Neither, of course, do the shared ideals have to be characterised as directly God-given. There is a better case for saying that they are ultimately God-given, however."

Cultural ideals also change. Again, if we are to say that the Childrens' Crusade was percieved at the time as god-given, and is not so now, what does that say about this form of Christianity?

<>

Without some examination of the structure of the relations that are perceived by us as Euclidean time and space, this strikes me as so much hand waving. To be in a causal relation (capable of affecting), is to be in the same spacetime as the affected object. If "eternal" is a possibility, it is *necessarily* a property of the material universe.

Noggin

Hi Noggin.



This seems to me to be one ginormous assumption, Nogg. God doesn't have a spatial location, yet He can act anywhere at will. That doesn't seem to me to be incoherent.



I would have said that 'eternal' is a property of the meta-universe or maybe even of God alone - sui generis, after all. Why should the material world have primacy?

toxx