Posted on 01/23/2014 9:19:28 AM PST by Heartlander
Spirited: Honesty at last! How refreshing. Men dream dreams, even terrifying nightmares. And though they know not where these unseen entities come from, or why they experience them, foolish men will nevertheless teach that life and consciousness emerged from chemicals, laws are physical entities, and dreams and terrifying dreams, visions and voices speaking into minds are hallucinations caused by chemical imbalances. They teach this superstitious nonsense because the alternative is much too frightening for them to contemplate.
I've been saying that all along, you little weasel.
I'm not at all sure what you are saying there. All physical laws of which I am aware can, by using A-G's "unreasonable efficacy of mathematics", be "observed and demonstrated" with high precision, by treating one variable as an unknown to be calculated, and by observing and measuring the other variables.
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For example, the simple equation or relationship,
"R= V/I" or, by simple transposition into its alternate forms, "I=V/R" or "V=IR"
is known as "Ohm's Law".
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It can be "measured", (or derived) in all its alternate forms, by establishing a simple series battery and resistor circuit, and measuring (observing) the variables on the right -- and then, calculating the unknown on the left.
Furthermore, actual measurement of the unknown variable is always identical with the calculated value. It works, in all three forms -- every time it is repeated.
Unless your "Not everything that exists can be directly 'observed and measured.' specifies exclusion of the use of mathematics, I don't see how it can be valid.
But, "physical laws" are inherently mathematical. (Ohm's law is an equation.)
Are you saying that mathematical relationships (i.e. "physical laws" aka "equations") cannot be "directly observed and measured."?
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Are you being "overly 'philosophicky'", Dear Sister, or is this old physical scientist being overly dense?
What am I missing here?
¡No comprende...!
I suppose you would categorize me as a "Platonist".
My life has been filled with the "Joy of Discovery" -- and awe at the magnificence of the One proclaimed by His works that I was discovering!
You have FReepMail...
I personally believe that there is a gap between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2. I believe that God's initial creation in Genesis 1:1 was perfect. But as we know God delegates stuff to his created beings who have free will.
I think the "gap" between verses 1 & 2 is where in the ageless past after God's perfect initial creation in Genesis 1:1, a high ranking angel chose to rebel against God taking a bunch of angels with him. Science and physical reality attest to the darkness in the universe and "the big bang". I believe that big bang was the catastrophic fall of the angel Lucifer (Satan) (Isaiah 14:12-15 "son of the morning"; Ezekiel 28:13-19 "the anointed cherub that covers") (note: cherubs are mighty angels, not the cartoonist chubby things in pictures) that brought darkness and death and hell into God's creation. I also believe this period between verse 1 & 2 was when dinosaurs roamed the earth.
Hence in Genesis 1:2, some eons later, we see "darkness" and "the deep" as God went about to bring light and life into the lifeless darkness. God doesn't focus much on this stuff - not much explanation in the Bible. This is because His main activity then and now is redemption, accomplished by Jesus Christ on the cross. All of time and eternity turns on the cross of Christ. The rest is just interesting side stuff.
You “read much more into” Scripture than I do. There’s no way that I, as a scientist, feel qualified to “tweak” Scripture to accommodate things like angels, gaps, dinosaurs, and Lucifer — especially since I find no mention of them in the first four verses — which is all I’m addressing...
It is interesting stuff which God seemed to purposefully leave open to different ideas because these things take a back seat in the Bible to the centerpiece of the redemption of mankind by Jesus Christ. But to curious minds like ours, I find this as the most plausible so far.
Well, there is always that risk with me, dear brother in Christ LOL!!! Though I just try to be the best "generalist" I can be, the fact is my intellectual foundations were laid in ancient Greece — by the great pre-Socratics, e.g., Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Anaxagoras, Parmenides; and the great classical philosophers Socrates/Plato and Aristotle.
I do not believe you are being "overly dense" here.
The idea I was trying to get at was far better expressed here:
For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse: [Romans 1:20]The LOGOS of God is never a direct observable, nor can it be. It can only be seen in its effects.
I daresay this observation supports your own cosmological findings....
Thank you so very much for writing, dear brother in Christ!
As Barry Arrington notes , Isaac Newton candidly admitted that his laws of motion were more of a description than an explanation of gravitational phenomena:
Then from these forces [of gravity], by other propositions which are also mathematical, we deduce the motions of the planets, the comets, the moon, and the sea. I wish we could derive the rest of the phenomena of nature by the same kind of reasoning from mechanical principles; for I am induced by many reasons to suspect that they may all depend upon certain forces by which the particles of bodies, by some causes hitherto unknown, are either mutually impelled towards each other, and cohere in regular figures, or are repelled and recede from each other; which forces being unknown, philosophers have hitherto attempted the search of nature in vain; but I hope the principles here laid down will afford some light either to this or some truer method of philosophy.Both Newton and Einstein’s equations ‘describe’ the way objects behave in space-time - they do not ‘explain’ – the observation is contingent.
- Preface to Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica
Jesus is now dimensionally much more than just our three of space and one of time. We can surmise this because He can walk through walls, appear and disappear, and travel in Time, to visit Moses in the Burning Bush, speak to Daniel beside the River Chabar, etc.
As a student of the Bible, I can say with personal certainty that Jesus is making those who believe on Him (that is faithe in Him as their Soter) joint heirs in this greater dimensionality, for when we see Him, we shall be like Him. To see Him in His fullness requires that we have the greater dimensionality very nearly to His limits, but not quite, for He is The Great I Am. Perhaps we will be ten dimensional; He will be eleven dimensional ... Nachmonides in his 1263 text on Genesis tells us there are at least ten dimensions. Modern Physicists have discovered this, too. Swift, in Gulliver's third voyage, speaks of the two little Moons of Mars, and that 151 years before these were discovered telescopically. There is more under Heaven than we know, Brother in Christ.
YAY!!!!!!!! Welcome to the club!!!! That would place you in excellent company! [See A-G's commentary on this, here.]
Just a couple stray thoughts: (1) I gather most of the research into artificial intelligence/artificial life is being conducted by mathematical formalists. Somehow, I do not find that particularly encouraging....
(2) Ayn Rand has popularized the notion that Plato and Aristotle were somehow fundamentally opposed to each other. And finds that Plato is really the "bad guy," a socialist, maybe even a communist. Aristotle is the "good guy," because he is always guided by the Light of Reason.... And that a condition of animosity existed between them. Her argument on the basis of actual evidence is underwhelming. Nonetheless, so many people have been persuaded by it.
Yet these two guys were closely associated for some 27 years, at first in the Teacher/Student relation, and later, as close colleagues. It seems to me that the only "dispute" between them was where to locate the formal cause of the existent things in the world.
Plato located this cause in a divine Beyond, in the divine Idea — a wholly transcendent cause that does not rise in any way shape or form from material existence. It arises from beyond the Cosmos, not from within the Cosmos (a/k/a the "Universe"). In short, Plato's formal cause transcends the world of human experience.
Aristotle, on the other hand, had the idea that the formal cause of any particular entity resides within the entity itself. That is, an entity's formal cause is immanent to itself; which is to say, it rises from within the Cosmos.
Two most excellent points of view, I must say!!! And Aristotle's accomplishment has IMHO justly earned him the title of founder of the natural sciences. Yet to this day, no one has been able to show which of these two positions is necessarily correct such that it excludes the other.
To me, bottom line, these do not look so much like mutually-opposed points of view; rather, they look like astounding complementarities.
But either way you slice it, God is still in charge....
Thank you ever so much, my dear brother in Christ, for sharing your thoughts with me!
No different then, than gravity, or magnetism, or electrons, or a whole host of other things that scientists accept as fact based not on direct observation but the effects these things have on other things.
There is one difference. The effects of those things can be quantified.
God created evolution.
"For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse:"
[Romans 1:20]
In the hundreds of times I have read that scripture, I have always couched my understanding in it in terms of how our Creator reveals Himself through His creation.
Now, through what I believe to have been the moving of the Holy Spirit in you to point it out, I finally see it as direct embodiment of my "marching orders", received "'way back when' -- on the staircase"...
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What blindness! Had I understood that Scripture -- as just revealed to me, through you -- earlier in my career, I would have had it as an etched plaque, hanging on the wall of my office.
What a witness it would have been to point to it and say to my fellow scientists,
"There is why I 'do science' -- and how I go about it: I search through the evidence He embedded for us in His Created Universe, to discover the wonders of it -- and to reveal and understand His designed-in principles and the awesome grandeur of The One Who did it all..."
Now, I regret all the missed witnessing opportunities...
But -- it is certainly not too late!
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Again, Thank you! Today, you, Dear Sister in Christ, IMHO, have been an instrument of God's grace!!
(Look for Romans 1:20 to be featured prominently [frontispiece, perhaps?] in my "presentation a-building!!)
But, let's not stop now! Wonderful truths are being revealed in all these comments!!
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