Question about intelligent design theory

[DrPizza]

I'm not sure there is an inherent difference in the design of a house vs the design of the universe other than the complexity. I don't believe he we needed to "evolve" to perceive what is aesthetically pleasing; I think that's it's inherent in our makeup. When you see a sunset, or a mountain range, or hear the roar of the ocean, you have an intuitive sense of beauty and awe.

I disagree about what is inherently pleasing. I believe it's more of a cultural construct. Just as I view many approaching severe storms with awe at their "beauty", I'm pretty sure that many societies in the past with less safe dwellings to stay safe in and other securities afforded them by society, were terrified by such approaching storms.

Ditto other cultures - "red sky in morning, sailor take warning" - what some of us would view as a beautiful sunrise (at least the very small percentage of people here who get out of bed early enough), others view as a sign of danger.

Likewise, some people find fires beautiful. Others have an opposite reaction to seeing fires. Of course, this last example may have more to psychological aspects than cultural aspects related to it.

 

[MJinZ]

You don't get it etiher, free will is dependant on choice, if all choices are already known ahead of time you cannoth choose against what is already known, hence, you have no choice and no free will.

How people cannot get something as simple as that astounds me to this day.

What astounds me is that you call it a choice, yet you then call it something else.

The choice made is independent of the observer (call it God). The choice is still yours to make.

What you're espousing is the simplistic drivel that a determinist will argue with, but if you think about it, it actually doesn't make sense.

 

[sourceninja]

Does god know how I will die? If he does can I prove him wrong? If I can, he is not all knowing. If I can't then my actions are set and free will is an illusion. If free will is an illusion and god exists, how can he punish me for doing exactly what he knew I would do when he created me?

 

[MJinZ]

Does god know how I will die? If he does can I prove him wrong? If I can, he is not all knowing. If I can't then my actions are set and free will is an illusion. If free will is an illusion and god exists, how can he punish me for doing exactly what he knew I would do when he created me?

Obedience training at 6 o'clock.

 

[JohnOfSheffield]

What astounds me is that you call it a choice, yet you then call it something else.

The choice made is independent of the observer (call it God). The choice is still yours to make.

What you're espousing is the simplistic drivel that a determinist will argue with, but if you think about it, it actually doesn't make sense.

This is starting to look like the debate you had with Cerpin regarding atheism and agnosticism, you go by your own terms and fuck what things mean to everyone else in the world, you are simply incapable of logical thinking.

This is my last effort in this, if there is an omniscient god, he already knows everything and thus you cannot choose what he doesn't know you'll choose, so the only thing you can choose is what he knows you'll choose.

If you COULD make another choice, then god would be wrong and not omniscient since he didn't know that.

 

[Cerpin Taxt]

What astounds me is that you call it a choice, yet you then call it something else.

The choice made is independent of the observer (call it God). The choice is still yours to make.

The problem here is that you are hypnotized by the illusion of choice where no real choice exists.

What you're espousing is the simplistic drivel that a determinist will argue with, but if you think about it, it actually doesn't make sense.

No, it doesn't. What you are suggesting is that something can be simultaneously known and indeterminate, which is incoherent.

 

[DominionSeraph]

If meaning is the same as value, then they would be the same word. D:

Welcome to the English language.
Anything valuable is meaningful. Anything meaningful has some value.
Anything meaningless has no value. Anything with no value is meaningless.

Value is something prescribed by humans, meaning may or may not be independent of an interacter or observer. For instance, there is meaning to the way a protein folds, either through its hydrophobic, hydrophilic, or structural interactions.

Variation != meaning.
Mechanistic effect != meaning.

There is information without interaction with a valuer. But the data has no meaning attached.

There is meaning (our own made up ones) to favorite colors or favorite foods. There is meaning (taken or prescribed, intended or not) to language, art, music etc...

In all cases you have a valuer.

Value does not need to come into the equation, and when it does, it is often unrelated.

Without value there is no meaning.

Not sure what this is trying to refute...

That humans judging by our own rules allows us to judge a path generated according to no rules as though it was generated according to rules, and have it be right.

You are saying that if there is no purposeful design in a framework (Universe), then anything goes and nothing really matters because it's all arbitrary.

No, I'm saying that to break the infinite regression of frameworks required by the infinite regression of designers, you need a layer of arbitrariness. But in that layer of arbitrariness above the level of order it spawned, purposeful design cannot exist. You could have every piece of data possible floating around on that level, but without rules there's no way to differentiate between the pieces. You could have plans from A to ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ, but no plan could be called better than any other because that level has no metric by which to judge them.

Arbitrary level is arbitrary.

You'll have to convince that to the just about everybody who ever existed who has pondered the "Meaning to life".

It's their own time. They can go ahead and miss the ramifications of the bigger picture and retardedly contemplate their navels if they want. Doesn't matter to me.

Of course, there is a reason to ask, and since no one has figured out the answer to the question, your response is that it is an impossible question to answer, therefore it is not a worthwhile question to ask.

That would work, if we were robots or something. But humans can't help but be curious and ask anyway.

You can't help it BECAUSE you're a robot, silly. You're following a generic algorithm and can't get out of it even when the algorithm has gone outside the bounds of where it is doing anything useful.
You're like a rover told, "Engage your drive wheels;" and you still keep turning them even after you've run into a cliff face.
You're not getting anywhere, but you don't have the breadth of knowledge required to put things in perspective, recognize that the underlying point of the command is to move forward, recognize that continued efforts will no longer have that effect, and be smart enough to redirect your energies to a more productive path.

 

[DominionSeraph]

The choice made is independent of the observer (call it God).

Being independent of the observer is not the same as being independent of the particular nature of time required for that observation to be!

Knowledge of events requires time to be set.

"The North won the Civil War."
I can only know this if the past is set. If it's still up in the air because they're still back there in the 1800's fighting it out and the outcome can CHANGE, then I don't know a damned thing. Today the North might have won, tomorrow the South might have won it, then the North might have won it again next week.

To know the future requires the future to be set the same way the past is required to be set to know it.

Do you have free will over the the past? Can you change what decided on for breakfast yesterday? No. By the same token, if the future is set, you cannot change what you'll have decided to have for breakfast tomorrow.

If someone knows your story, it has already been written. If it's already been written, you are not in the process of writing it.

 

[sandorski]

What do you mean afraid of iron chariots? I don't know if you're just being random or if you have a specific reason for saying that.

Read the Bible verse by the chariot pic

 

[TastesLikeChicken]

You can be all powerful and do something without knowing what you doing that will cause, of course, being all powerful you can make it so that it won't cause that after the fact, if you were all knowing, you'd know what would happen before you tried it.

Then again, knowledge is power so omniscient is equal to omnipotent, right?

The truth is that god is nothing but impotent, he knows nothing and does nothing, for evidence of that, just look at this world.

Since knowledge is a form of power wouldn't not knowing something preclude an entity from being all powerfull? And if a being were all knowing shouldn't that be an avenue to be all powerfull?

If the above is untrue then it cannot be possible to be either omniscient or omnipotent. One begets the other.

 

[MJinZ]

This is my last effort in this, if there is an omniscient god, he already knows everything and thus you cannot choose what he doesn't know you'll choose, so the only thing you can choose is what he knows you'll choose.

Actually, this subject is a lot more extensive than is possible to explore in a simple post here, but here's a brief gist of my position:

I only brought up the relation between knowledge and choice, "God" is as relevant as you want it to be.

A choice can potentially exist independently in time of knowledge

How is this possible? Example:

Sally has a choice to make in the year 2010. She must choose between a Blue and Red sweater.

You can call this event whatever you want. You may even believe in the "illusion" of choice theories some will espouse, believing life is as simple as a domino effect.

Sidenote: until you have an advanced degree in Physics, I don't think you have the facility to claim such things. Just to start off: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copenhagen_interpretation

Back to Sally. If something knows the future, one would automatically assume that it can do so by deducing every probabilistic distribution function and the actual result of every single action. That would mean that everything is deterministic, no?

Consider the following thought experiment. If this "something that knows the future" called Mr. Seer flips a coin in a perfect environment where the results are guaranteed to be random (it's flipped by a magic hand), and the probability of heads vs tails is equally 50%. When Mr. Seer flips the coin, he *knows* (for the sake of argument) whether the coin will land heads or tails. However, for the sake of argument, nothing else has changed - the randomness of the coin flip remains random. The Seer has no power to influence the randomness of the coin flip and each flip ends in a perfectly random result. The results of the coin flip has no pattern, has no direction, no method, no consciousness - the perfect definition of "random". Neverthless, the Seer will always know what happens, even though the mechanism of each occurrence is perfectly random.

Logically, can such a being exist? For the sake of argument, assume Mr. Seer exists (something or someone that reads Time like a book) and that true randomness also exists. These two statements do not appear to be incompatible with each other in any way, aside from the obvious suspension of disbelief in Mr. Seer, of course.

Back to the choice of a Red vs Blue sweater. If a person has an equal preference for both colors, he may decide to flip a coin. In reality, the coin flip here is not completely random, so he decides to use this device: a true random number generator:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v464/n7291/full/nature09008.html

Relying on the randomness of a quantum scale, the decision of whether he chooses RED vs BLUE comes down to TRUE randomness.

The fact that the hypothetical Mr Seer can still *know* what color of sweater Sally decides to wear remains independent of the true randomness of the decision. The CHOICE was Sally's to go with a random colored sweater. By definition of randomness however ultimately, the fact that she is wearing a RED sweater (for example) could not have been predetermined but was chosen by Sally through the randomness of the event.

Here, I will quote you again, but let's replacement Omniscient God with Mr. Seer:

This is my last effort in this, if there is a Mr. Seer he already knows everything and thus you cannot choose what he doesn't know you'll choose, so the only thing you can choose is what he knows you'll choose.

The independence of Mr. Seer's knowledge of what Sally will wear does not invalidate the choice that Sally made. Sally chose by its nature, uncertainty. Is there a difference between choosing uncertainty and the "illusion of choice" of Sally's own decision to choose uncertainty? You can argue that Mr. Seer knew that Sally would leave it up randomness, thus, Sally had no free will or choice in the matter of which sweater she wears. However, by definition of "choice" (more specifically free choice or free will), Sally has broken causality, the defining factor of determinism.

If causality is the force behind determinism, then the opposite - true randomness, must logically force non-determinism.

We know randomness exists in the Universe. We know that people will often choose semblances of randomness (if they can not find a spare true random generation device).

This doesn't translate 100% into a proof for free will or choice, of course, but it seems obvious to me that Science has come a fairly long way of moving away from simple domino causality. Perhaps the truth is somewhere in between, but as the answer to the question of "Knowledge" and "Choice", they are not incompatible.

If you COULD make another choice, then god would be wrong and not omniscient since he didn't know that.

Mr. Seer knows that Sally chose to leave it up to the Universe, and the Universe was going to be pick Red sweater or Blue Sweater. Mr. Seer also knows that the Universe goes with Red Sweater... this time. Mr. Seer, by definition of his omniscience as Mr. Seer, knows what the Universe goes with every time in the whole expanse of Time itself (which is funny to be talking about like we know all about it because it's still a mysterious construct). For the sake of argument, Mr. Seer knows what will happen but can not influence the randomness of the Universe.

Here's the kicker, Mr. Seer, like an omniscient God, is a pretty damn ridiculous idea. But a hypothetical and realistic thought experiment is still able to beat Mr. Seer.

What does that say about Mr. Seer or ... "God". Yes, I agree that an idea of an Omniscient God is pretttty damn ridiculous.

 

[MJinZ]

The problem here is that you are hypnotized by the illusion of choice where no real choice exists.

That's an antiquated thought and advances in science tells us that is logically unsound.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will#Free_will_as_a_combination_of_chance_and_determination

No, it doesn't. What you are suggesting is that something can be simultaneously known and indeterminate, which is incoherent.

This is coherent when you suspend your disbelief in a magical being like a Seer or something Omniscient.

It's not likely, of course, but ironically, what you believe here may actually translate into an argument FOR free will.

You either believe in the possibility of an Omniscient God (unlikely) or something indeterminate (Choice!). You can not believe in both (Right right?). So which do you believe in? By believing in determinism, you open yourself up to the possibility of an Omniscient being, not that I'm saying you believe in one. By disbelieving an Omniscient God, logically, that also opens up the possibility of Free Will.

Though you don't believe in either, which is logically fine too.

 

[DominionSeraph]

What if the framework itself IS god.

What if these Altec Lansing speakers sitting on my desk are god?
Then god is a pair of speakers.

Renaming something doesn't change it.

A form of existence unimaginable and unfathomable by our mental limits.

You can't project anything meaningful into such a space, and we have ways to skirt along the edges of the unknown that allow just fine for the internals to be unknowable. So that's an utterly useless concept.

 

[MJinZ]

Welcome to the English language.
Anything valuable is meaningful. Anything meaningful has some value.
Anything meaningless has no value. Anything with no value is meaningless.

Anything valuable has some meaning by definition of value.
Anything meaningful is independent of value by any stretch of the imagination.

I already gave an example, but here's something more concrete:

Gold = value due to meaning (shiny and rare and properties).
DNA construction = meaningful but without an independent appraiser, value does not come into the equation... at all.

The word "value" is predicated on finiteness and concreteness, even usefulness. Meaning does not.

Variation != meaning.
Mechanistic effect != meaning.

There is information without interaction with a valuer. But the data has no meaning attached.

The entropy and enthalpy of the Universe would beg to differ. Whether you understand Chaos and Order as meaningful aspects of Physics is irrelevant, of which is apparent that you do not. Neither can particularly be prescribed a "value". Whether you exist to ponder the significance does not affect the meaning (hidden or otherwise) of these mechanisms in our Physical Universe.

In all cases you have a valuer.



Without value there is no meaning.

Oh, a Capitalist. I got it.

That humans judging by our own rules allows us to judge a path generated according to no rules as though it was generated according to rules, and have it be right.



No, I'm saying that to break the infinite regression of frameworks required by the infinite regression of designers, you need a layer of arbitrariness. But in that layer of arbitrariness above the level of order it spawned, purposeful design cannot exist. You could have every piece of data possible floating around on that level, but without rules there's no way to differentiate between the pieces. You could have plans from A to ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ, but no plan could be called better than any other because that level has no metric by which to judge them.

Arbitrary level is arbitrary.

I posted this before on this thread and I'll post it again.

" Point source progression seems to create a conundrum - can an original design be inherently meaningful?

Infinite and cyclical progression should and can not be categorically dismissed just because it is both a difficult and enormous concept to grasp. In fact, in consideration of huge expanses of time, both relative and absolute, there is no reason why one should dismiss it. "

You are approaching the issue here linearly - A to Z. Consider the problem cyclical, within an infinite dimension.

Can an arbitrary level recreate itself in a non-arbitrary way?

Dismissing this and other possible ideas is too ... linear.

You can't help it BECAUSE you're a robot, silly. You're following a generic algorithm and can't get out of it even when the algorithm has gone outside the bounds of where it is doing anything useful.
You're like a rover told, "Engage your drive wheels;" and you still keep turning them even after you've run into a cliff face.
You're not getting anywhere, but you don't have the breadth of knowledge required to put things in perspective, recognize that the underlying point of the command is to move forward, recognize that continued efforts will no longer have that effect, and be smart enough to redirect your energies to a more productive path.

Um, speak for yourself?

 

[JohnOfSheffield]

Actually, this subject is a lot more extensive than is possible to explore in a simple post here, but here's a brief gist of my position:

I only brought up the relation between knowledge and choice, "God" is as relevant as you want it to be.

A choice can potentially exist independently in time of knowledge

How is this possible? Example:

Sally has a choice to make in the year 2010. She must choose between a Blue and Red sweater.

You can call this event whatever you want. You may even believe in the "illusion" of choice theories some will espouse, believing life is as simple as a domino effect.

Sidenote: until you have an advanced degree in Physics, I don't think you have the facility to claim such things. Just to start off: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copenhagen_interpretation

Back to Sally. If something knows the future, one would automatically assume that it can do so by deducing every probabilistic distribution function and the actual result of every single action. That would mean that everything is deterministic, no?

Consider the following thought experiment. If this "something that knows the future" called Mr. Seer flips a coin in a perfect environment where the results are guaranteed to be random (it's flipped by a magic hand), and the probability of heads vs tails is equally 50%. When Mr. Seer flips the coin, he *knows* (for the sake of argument) whether the coin will land heads or tails. However, for the sake of argument, nothing else has changed - the randomness of the coin flip remains random. The Seer has no power to influence the randomness of the coin flip and each flip ends in a perfectly random result. The results of the coin flip has no pattern, has no direction, no method, no consciousness - the perfect definition of "random". Neverthless, the Seer will always know what happens, even though the mechanism of each occurrence is perfectly random.

Logically, can such a being exist? For the sake of argument, assume Mr. Seer exists (something or someone that reads Time like a book) and that true randomness also exists. These two statements do not appear to be incompatible with each other in any way, aside from the obvious suspension of disbelief in Mr. Seer, of course.

Back to the choice of a Red vs Blue sweater. If a person has an equal preference for both colors, he may decide to flip a coin. In reality, the coin flip here is not completely random, so he decides to use this device: a true random number generator:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v464/n7291/full/nature09008.html

Relying on the randomness of a quantum scale, the decision of whether he chooses RED vs BLUE comes down to TRUE randomness.

The fact that the hypothetical Mr Seer can still *know* what color of sweater Sally decides to wear remains independent of the true randomness of the decision. The CHOICE was Sally's to go with a random colored sweater. By definition of randomness however ultimately, the fact that she is wearing a RED sweater (for example) could not have been predetermined but was chosen by Sally through the randomness of the event.

Here, I will quote you again, but let's replacement Omniscient God with Mr. Seer:



The independence of Mr. Seer's knowledge of what Sally will wear does not invalidate the choice that Sally made. Sally chose by its nature, uncertainty. Is there a difference between choosing uncertainty and the "illusion of choice" of Sally's own decision to choose uncertainty? You can argue that Mr. Seer knew that Sally would leave it up randomness, thus, Sally had no free will or choice in the matter of which sweater she wears. However, by definition of "choice" (more specifically free choice or free will), Sally has broken causality, the defining factor of determinism.

If causality is the force behind determinism, then the opposite - true randomness, must logically force non-determinism.

We know randomness exists in the Universe. We know that people will often choose semblances of randomness (if they can not find a spare true random generation device).

This doesn't translate 100% into a proof for free will or choice, of course, but it seems obvious to me that Science has come a fairly long way of moving away from simple domino causality. Perhaps the truth is somewhere in between, but as the answer to the question of "Knowledge" and "Choice", they are not incompatible.



Mr. Seer knows that Sally chose to leave it up to the Universe, and the Universe was going to be pick Red sweater or Blue Sweater. Mr. Seer also knows that the Universe goes with Red Sweater... this time. Mr. Seer, by definition of his omniscience as Mr. Seer, knows what the Universe goes with every time in the whole expanse of Time itself (which is funny to be talking about like we know all about it because it's still a mysterious construct). For the sake of argument, Mr. Seer knows what will happen but can not influence the randomness of the Universe.

Here's the kicker, Mr. Seer, like an omniscient God, is a pretty damn ridiculous idea. But a hypothetical and realistic thought experiment is still able to beat Mr. Seer.

What does that say about Mr. Seer or ... "God". Yes, I agree that an idea of an Omniscient God is pretttty damn ridiculous.

I'm not going to read more than the last few sentences because quite frankly, the explanation how to beat an infallable god is like the explanation of how to bathe and not get wet.

You can be clever to any degree you want but to beat a god that sets the very rules of the universe?

It's actually very simple, if god says that you'll die 13.55 tomorrow by getting on a bus that will stall on a traintrack then that is what will happen and you can not do anything about it, see, god knows it and he's never wrong.

Or even simpler since you seem to have at least a (small) grasp of physical science, you do understand the definition of absolutes? Well everything god knows is an absolute. It cannot be changed.

 

[DominionSeraph]

Logically, can such a being exist? For the sake of argument, assume Mr. Seer exists (something or someone that reads Time like a book) and that true randomness also exists. These two statements do not appear to be incompatible with each other in any way,

What are you smoking? Of COURSE they're incompatible! For an event to be random it MUST be unpredictable.

Consider the following thought experiment. If this "something that knows the future" called Mr. Seer flips a coin in a perfect environment where the results are guaranteed to be random (it's flipped by a magic hand), and the probability of heads vs tails is equally 50%. When Mr. Seer flips the coin, he *knows* (for the sake of argument) whether the coin will land heads or tails. However, for the sake of argument, nothing else has changed - the randomness of the coin flip remains random. The Seer has no power to influence the randomness of the coin flip and each flip ends in a perfectly random result. The results of the coin flip has no pattern, has no direction, no method, no consciousness - the perfect definition of "random". Neverthless, the Seer will always know what happens, even though the mechanism of each occurrence is perfectly random.

Nope. With a truly random event, there is no guarantee that any future will come about. Your Seer knows nothing, because even with the EXACT SAME starting conditions, the result may change.
That he saw one timeline where it came up heads doesn't mean that it won't come up tails when you run this "universe that allows for true randomness" forward again.
If the Seer could see HIS future, he'd know this. He would see himself seeing heads. Then see himself re-seeing the same flip and seeing tails.
Each re-seeing would be a new seeing because the flip doesn't give a damn what he saw before. It's operating by true randomness -- beholden to no laws.

 

[JohnOfSheffield]

That's an antiquated thought and advances in science tells us that is logically unsound.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will#Free_will_as_a_combination_of_chance_and_determination

This is coherent when you suspend your disbelief in a magical being like a Seer or something Omniscient.

It's not likely, of course, but ironically, what you believe here actually translates into an argument FOR free will.

You either believe in the possibility of an Omniscient God (unlikely) or something indeterminate (Choice!). You can not believe in both (Right right?). So which do you believe in? By believing in determinism, you open yourself up to the possibility of an Omniscient being, not that I'm saying you believe in one.

This has nothing to do with the discussion WHAT SO EVER!

The point is that an omniscient god cannot be wrong and therefore you cannot have free will, now you are trying to weasel your way out of your previous argument.

Because that is all you are a fucking weasel. It was the same damn thing with the agnostics - Atheists argument.

 

[MJinZ]

What are you smoking? Of COURSE they're incompatible! For an event to be random it MUST be unpredictable.



Nope. With a truly random event, there is no guarantee that any future will come about. Your Seer knows nothing, because even with the EXACT SAME starting conditions, the result may change.
That he saw one timeline where it came up heads doesn't mean that it won't come up tails when you run this "universe that allows for true randomness" forward again.
If the Seer could see HIS future, he'd know this. He would see himself seeing heads. Then see himself re-seeing the same flip and seeing tails.

This is a thought experiment. You have to assume both conditions are true, because the experiment dictates it. And one shared universal set timeline (we're not arguing time here), which I should point out is necessary because we are not talking about hypothetical futures, but absolute past, present, and future. The point is that even if the Seer could absolutely read the future, if he remains independent of it, the choice remains Sally's.

Of course, the difficulty in reconciling the two leads to some conclusions - obviously - such as the disbelief in an omniscient being.

 

[MJinZ]

This has nothing to do with the discussion WHAT SO EVER!

The point is that an omniscient god cannot be wrong and therefore you cannot have free will, now you are trying to weasel your way out of your previous argument.

Because that is all you are a fucking weasel. It was the same damn thing with the agnostics - Atheists argument.

Uh, Cerpin is discussing Choice/Illusion of Choice here.

I've already argued that a hypothetical omniscient God (that can not be wrong) is theoretically COMPATIBLE with choice. Cerpin is arguing that the two can not be compatible (or incoherent), which I already explained is coherent given the thought experiment (through suspension of disbelief, as I've already explained), and I further point out the logical exclusions of the two beliefs if he in fact believes they are incompatible.

Is this too much for you to handle?

 

[JohnOfSheffield]

This is a thought experiment. You have to assume both conditions are true, because the experiment dictates it. And one shared universal set timeline (we're not arguing time here), which I should point out is necessary because we are not talking about hypothetical futures, but absolute past, present, and future. The point is that even if the Seer could absolutely read the future, if he remains independent of it, the choice remains Sally's.

Of course, the difficulty in reconciling the two leads to some conclusions - obviously - such as the disbelief in an omniscient being.

Ok, i get where you flipped out of your fucking mind in the long explanation, mostly because true randomness cannot be known per its very definition and if it was known by the seer that it would always be heads, then it would always be heads, the knowledge precludes the action, you get that i'm sure.

Now, Sally doesn't really get to choose her sweater (and it's fucking funny that you should use the name Sally, THAT is a random choice that you made that actually involves a name that has a great deal of meaning to me) she can't choose blue if it's known that the sweater she'll be wearing is red and it's an omniscient (all knowing) being knowing so before she even puts it on.

Random situations and absolute knowledge of futer cannot mix, it is explicitly impossible, which you would know if you were the physics wiz you claim to be. 1+3 doesn't randomly become 8 because it's known to become 4, that knowledge precludes the number of presented reality.

 

[02ranger]

Read the Bible verse by the chariot pic

I've never seen that before. I wonder what he'd do with the "iron chariots" of today? Especially the ones with the "turning stick shooting fire."

 

[DominionSeraph]

This is a thought experiment. You have to assume both conditions are true, because the experiment dictates it.

Duh, the conditions are mutually exclusive.
The prerequisite for your Seer is order, contradicting that the flip is random. If the flip is random NOW, your Seer cannot exist.

You can't get both to work at the same time. That's what "mutually exclusive" means. Each excludes the other.

And one shared universal set timeline (we're not arguing time here), which I should point out is necessary because we are not talking about hypothetical futures, but absolute past, present, and future.

Then the flip is not random. The probability that a set occurrence occurred is 1.
Your Seer has no problems with his vision working under that condition.

See? Mutually exclusive.

 

[JohnOfSheffield]

Uh, Cerpin is discussing Choice/Illusion of Choice here.

I've already argued that a hypothetical omniscient God (that can not be wrong) is theoretically COMPATIBLE with choice. Cerpin is arguing that the two can not be compatible (or incoherent), which I already explained is coherent given the thought experiment (through suspension of disbelief, as I've already explained), and I further point out the logical exclusions of the two beliefs if he in fact believes they are incompatible.

Is this too much for you to handle?

No, it isn't, what you have done is that you moved the goalposts to score your goal while not living up to the premise of the dialogue.

See, omniscient doesn't imply random, it implies that all that has happened from the beginning of time and all that will happen until the end of time are absolutes that are already known, there is no question when you flip a coin, it's already known at every single flip and thus it is NOT random, it's predicted and nothing predicted and absolute can ever be random.

I'm fairly certain you get that. Now you went through a lot of work to prove yourself wrong but that doesn't really matter to me, because this is like mathematics, what is known IS known and if god knows you are going to wear pink tights tomorrow, he cannot be wrong...

But whatever you do, don't post a picture of him not being wrong, all the closeted christians would love it and i would puke over the laptop.

 

[02ranger]

OK, on the choice debate. I don't have all the physics knowledge to properly say what I'm about to say, so bear with me as best as you can please.

What if we actually have the ability to choose, but god still knows what we're going to choose. Maybe he is outside of time, outside of the normal rules of the universe. He knows what we'll choose but only because he's able to know all things all the time. We still have the ability to choose whatever we want. For instance, writing this post. God knows I'm going to write it, knows exactly what I'm writing, and even how everybody will respond. However, I still had the choice of whether or not to write it.

I guess it's all a matter of perspective. From god's perspective we don't have free will because he already knows what we're going to do. We look like a bunch of computer programs running their course. From our perspective, we do have free choice because we're still in the moment that the choice is being made. It goes back to the civil war argument. Back then nobody knew who would win the war, so anything that anybody did had the potential to change the outcome of the war. Now we all know how it happened so nothing can be changed. We're looking at it from god's perspective and the ones alive during the civil war looked at it from the human perspective.

BTW, this thread is miles from where it started. :thumbsup:

 

[JohnOfSheffield]

OK, on the choice debate. I don't have all the physics knowledge to properly say what I'm about to say, so bear with me as best as you can please.

What if we actually have the ability to choose, but god still knows what we're going to choose. Maybe he is outside of time, outside of the normal rules of the universe. He knows what we'll choose but only because he's able to know all things all the time. We still have the ability to choose whatever we want. For instance, writing this post. God knows I'm going to write it, knows exactly what I'm writing, and even how everybody will respond. However, I still had the choice of whether or not to write it.

I guess it's all a matter of perspective. From god's perspective we don't have free will because he already knows what we're going to do. We look like a bunch of computer programs running their course. From our perspective, we do have free choice because we're still in the moment that the choice is being made. It goes back to the civil war argument. Back then nobody knew who would win the war, so anything that anybody did had the potential to change the outcome of the war. Now we all know how it happened so nothing can be changed. We're looking at it from god's perspective and the ones alive during the civil war looked at it from the human perspective.

BTW, this thread is miles from where it started. :thumbsup:

I am not in your general area, you can choose to hit any key on your keyboard and my knowledge is absolut, it will be j.

Now, either my knowledge isn't absolute (i'm not omnipotent) or i am and that is the only key you can possibly push.

You can't have it both ways, either god is omniscient and that means absolutes, that is, you cannot choose what he does not know you will choose, or he isn't.

I don't get how that is about perspective, what is known is always known to be true by god and he cannot ever be wrong, so you cannot choose what he doesn't know you'll choose, how is that choice.

It's like asking what the difference between a this hand.

And yeah... lol, mostly because everyone got bored with phillipines whoopsie or whatever her name is.