Yeah. And the problem between you and me is you not only do not believe in God. You also do not believe in cause and effect — there is only "action and reaction" — which sounds like a total semantic quibble to me. (What is the effective difference between cause and effect and action–reaction?) Plus it appears to be your position that "patterns" that we think we recognize in Nature are simple constructions, "projections," of our own private minds, and not indicative in any way shape or form of universal processes occurring in Nature.
If the world is structured by universal law, by a "logos," an "arche," then we would expect to see "patterning behavior" at all scales. And I do believe this is what we do see.
Your quibble about cause and effect brings to mind a very great skeptic, David Hume (1711–1776), a Scot philosopher of the British Empiricist school, "...one of the greatest figures of the Enlightenment and possibly the most important of all British philosophers."
Hume paid very close attention to the problem of cause and effect. He wrote that "even after we have experience of the operations of cause and effect, our conclusions from that experience are not founded on reasoning, or any process of understanding." He implied that we never "see" causes, only "effects." We cannot observe what is going on at the effective nexus between them. What we see is the effect; and from the effect, we then infer the cause. And logically, this is the best we can do, because
...nature has kept us at a great distance from all her secrets, and has afforded us knowledge of a few superficial qualities of objects; while she conceals from us those powers and principles on which the influence of those objects entirely depends.That is, the immaterial, intangible, non-physical laws of nature are never direct observables. We "see them" only in their effects, as it were.
The skeptic Hume suggests the following is the best we can do with this situation:
I have found that such an object has always been attended with such an effect, and I foresee that other objects, which are in appearance similar, will be attended with similar effects.... From causes which appear similar we expect similar effects....Maybe! But then again,
[And yet] the particular powers, by which all natural operations are performed, never appear to the senses; nor is it reasonable to conclude, merely because one event in one instance precedes another, that therefore one is the cause, the other the effect. Their conjunction may be arbitrary and casual....
Suppose again that [the observer] has acquired more experience, and has lived so long in the world as to have observed familiar objects or events to be constantly conjoined together [i.e., patterning behavior]; what is the consequence of this experience? He immediately infers the existence of one object from the appearance [perception] of the other. Yet he has not, by all his experience, acquired any idea or knowledge of the secret power by which one object produces the other; nor is it, by any process of reasoning, he is engaged to draw this inference. But still he finds himself determined to draw it: And though he should be convinced that his understanding has no part in the operation, he would nevertheless continue in the same course of thinking. There is some other principle which determines him to form such a conclusion.At ths point, dear LeGrande, perhaps you are patting yourself on the back to find such an esteemed intellect as David Hume backing you up on your insight — that cause and effect is a fiction. But Hume never said that. What he was saying is that the linkage of cause and effect is not something discoverable by direct observation and/or rational analysis.
This principle is Custom or Habit. For whenever the repetition of any particular act or operation produces a propensity to renew the same act or operation, without being impelled by any reasoning or process of the understanding, we always say that this propensity is the effect of Custom. By employing that word, we pretend not to have given the ultimate reason of such a propensity. We only point out a principle of human nature, which is universally acknowledged, and which is well known by its effects. Perhaps we can push our enquiries no farther, or pretend to give the cause of this cause; but must rest contented with it as the ultimate principle, which we can assign, of all our conclusions from experience....
Custom, then, is the great guide of human life. It is that principle alone which renders our experience useful to us, and makes us expect, for the future, a similar train of events with those which have appeared in the past. Without the influence of custom, we should be entirely ignorant of every matter of fact beyond what is immediately present to the memory and senses....
But your preferred theory of action–reaction suffers from precisely the same difficulty. You may have "changed the language," but you did not thereby "change the problem."
The other major thing you may have missed is that Hume was saying that the search for the truth of reality is a common, universally human activity, unfolding from the very beginning of human historical records, unto now and presumably beyond the here and now.
Because Ptolemy [geocentric model] didn't get everything right with his theory, didn't mean he got nothing right. He did the best he could — and superbly, it seems to me — given the primitive observational tools he had at hand, in his day.
We celebrate Ptolemy, not for what he got wrong, but for what he definitely got right: That the universe is ultimately knowable by the human mind.
To conclude these remarks, IMHO the advancement of "science," knowledge, episteme, is not an individual project of this or that man, no matter how brilliant; ultimately, it is a social project that, at the end of the day, has to pass muster with the accumulated experience and knowledge of generations of human observers going back to Day One. (So to speak.)
For Hume quite clearly declares: "...causes and effects are discoverable, not by reason, but by experience."
With that in mind, I reprise the following from your last:
As I implied in my original post, ancients attributed to God what they didn't understand, which led to animal sacrifice and the eventual sacrifice of GOD himself. You seem to attribute everything to God too, is there a difference between the ancients and you?My answer is: YES, and NO. I am like the "ancients" (not to mention the "primitives" before them on the time line) in that I express that part of my human nature which "primes" me to acknowledge the presence of the divine in my life and the the world of nature, a "god" (or gods) which draws the human person into relationship with a world beyond himself, whereby the phenomena of the natural world find their fullest explication.
But you want to say folks of such imagination are (evidently) simply barbarous, superstitious savages, as compared with the likes of the splendor modeled by LeGrande, who is a "skeptic," and as already suggested, an anoiac who (seemingly) in his own estimation always knows better than the "stupid" people....
Oh, good night to all! And thank you for writing, LeGrande!
p.s.: All Hume quotes above from An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 1748.
Thank you.
Naturally, I have forgotten all that I wanted to say exactly except for two things. First, I thank you, dearest sister in Christ, for your continuing insights into the great philosophers - in this case, Hume.
And secondly, that causality is a fundamental principle of physics. This is certainly true in Newtonian physics.
It is only when time is understood as geometry (General Relativity, Vafa's f-theory, Wesson's 5D2T etc.) that the arrow of time can be disturbed in theory and thereby, causality.
If time is volumetric, then effect>cause is possible as surely as cause>effect, etc. And in the warping of space/time (General Relativity) it is possible for the space/time continuum to fold onto itself and hence, facilitate faster than light travel as well as time travel.
Obviously a prime objection to all such theories among physicists is precisely that, the principle of causality without which their investigations would be groundless.
The objection presumes that the observer (or investigator physicist) has an objective grasp of reality and/or truth.
I would say "not so" - that on principle an observer "in" space/time cannot know "all that there is" all at once. Even if his sensory perception would allow him, he would nevertheless be a part of his own observation.
Only God the Creator is not part of the Creation. He alone sees every where and every when. Only He knows objective truth. Only He speaks objective truth.
Indeed, He IS Truth. When He says a thing, it is. It is because He said it.
By the word of the LORD were the heavens made; and all the host of them by the breath of his mouth. - Psalms 33:6
To me, the following verse declare that God is not causally constrained or limited in any way by the dimensionality of time:
According as he hath chosen us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before him in love: - Ephesians 1:4
Let me quote John Wheeler, “Matter tells spacetime how to curve, and spacetime tells matter how to move”. It is incorrect to say that either 'causes' the other. Cause and effect only provides a circular argument.
Let me take another example, the old double slit experiment. The observer, by how they set up the detectors, determine what the results are going to be, particle or wave. Now here is the trillion dollar (inflation you know) question, does the observer 'cause' the results? This becomes even more interesting when time and nonlocality come into play. Future and/or past events can change the results, nullifying and changing the 'cause and effect' of the event. These paradoxes falsify 'cause and effect'.
In any case Aristotles (philosophical/religious) causes and effects;
The material cause is the physical matter, the mass of "raw material" of which something is "made" (of which it consists).
The formal cause tells us what, by analogy to the plans of an artisan, a thing is intended and planned to be.
The efficient cause is that external entity from which the change or the ending of the change first starts.
The final cause is that for the sake of which a thing exists, or is done - including both purposeful and instrumental actions. The final cause, or telos, is the purpose, or end, that something is supposed to serve.
Can obviously be seen as unscientific rationals unsupported by evidence. That is after all what Philosophy and Religion is.