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To: Fester Chugabrew
You've suggested the following as a "mechanism" for consistency in the universe, namely, "Conservation laws arising from symmetries born of the balancing act of particles and forces in the beginning."

Later you debunk ID insofar as it presents an "immaterial cause."

I do not debunk ID, I am a proponent of ID. I merely recognize that the flavor of ID arising from immaterial causes is a peak unassailable by science, due to fundamental epistimological constraints on the power of reasoning from evidence. Namely, the need for evidence that can be disambiguated by further observation.

May I ask how your suggestion qualifies as a "material cause?"

All theses that attempt to explain the world by examining material, or relationships between material with an investigatable causal connection are, by philosophical definition, material. To students of philosophy, material only means excluding immaterial explanations, it is not confined to tangible, touchable physical entities.

In the modern world, trying to adhere to such a strict regimen regarding materiality would leave you gasping for intellecual air--you would have to exclude, for example such tools of inferencial observation as the oscilloscope, the electron scanning microscope, and the spectroscope.

Abstract theories about how the universe operates are built into our modern fundamental scientific instruments. No one has ever seen or felt a radio tuning crystal oscillate, we can only observe secondary effects, and infer the cause. Just as astronomers and physicists do in trying to peer back into the Big Bang.

2,881 posted on 01/05/2003 9:27:20 AM PST by donh
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To: donh
...material only means excluding immaterial explanations...

That sounds pretty circular. For my part energy and eletric fields, let alone quantum probability amplitudes, are no more material concepts than God. Every theory must have undefined terms. It seems reasonable to call them immaterial.

The difference that most deevos don't grasp is the structure in which these immaterial terms are embedded. Their behaviors are described and constrained by theory and connected to reality in a tangible way. To most deevos, doing such with God would be blasphemy and, since it's all about feelings, missing the point.

2,963 posted on 01/05/2003 1:57:40 PM PST by edsheppa
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To: donh
"Conservation laws arising from symmetries born of the balancing act of particles and forces in the beginning."

The questions still remain: given the "balancing act bewteen particles," was the resulting universe as we know it a predicatable result? Was this "arising" of conservation laws completely unguided? If so, does it remain this way to this day?

2,990 posted on 01/05/2003 2:29:25 PM PST by Fester Chugabrew
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