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@Athias
A "random" reality necessitates observation of the metaphysical...
No it doesn't. If you think it does, you need to do better than a bald assertion.
This is virtually no different from your argument six days ago.
Yes, and it makes the point that natural selection is non-random.
We've now come full circle.
Repetition is sometimes unavoidable when debating a repetitious person.
In this case it is. The criticism levied is one not against "Science" but a single theory. Your arguments are deflecting these criticisms with fallacies of division.
I never made the argument that the theory of evolution came about due to evidence because it is a branch of science. That would be a fallacy of division. What I said was the theory of evolution came about due to evidence just like other branches of science. Then I listed evidence.
All the evidence shows is that those exist. The rest is an assumption.
Are you really contending that the only thing we can reasonably infer from the fossil record, geologic formations and radioisotopes is that they exist?Really? We can't infer from the fossil record that species change over time? That most species are extinct? We can't infer from geologic formations that some places were once under water, or that an area underwent volcanism?
No, you've given four lines of description, not evidence.
This fossil record is evidence, it is not a description. Mendelian inheritance is evidence, it is not a description.
It is when you claim semantics is evidence.
Again, the fossil record is evidence, it is not semantics.
More sophistry. If evolution was mathematically demonstrable, then it would be by all scientific standards and definitions, a scientific law. (It would be the Law of Evolution rather than the Theory of Evolution.) And once again, the shift from orthogenesis to natural selection wasn't motivated by evidentiary discovery. The evidence didn't change because it was already there decades prior (Charles Darwin's conception and development of natural selection and Gregor Mendel's Laws of Inheritance.) Ronald Fisher synthesized the works of the two to create a new interpretation. That interpretation became popular among evolutionary biologists and changed the consensus. That wasn't "discovery"; that was an ideological shift.
Oh please. I never implied that evolution can be described by and obeys a concise mathematical equation, which would be required for it to be a law. What I said was that population genetics showed in the 1930's that natural selection combined with Mendelian inheritance over millions of years was sufficient to account for the variety of species in nature. Before then, most scientists did not believe that natural selection could act fast enough to account for such variety, which was why orthogenesis hung on so long. Fisher's interpretation became popular because it fit the facts better, not because Fisher persuaded people to change their values.
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@Mopac
Is it possible to observe everything all at once as it truly is?Of course not.You can't even see everything in the universe, how much less The Ultimate Reality.
Your just helping make my point that the observable universe is not contingent on observation.
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@Mopac
This is so obvious it is a wonder that anyone could question this.
Most people here don't question that there is Ultimate Reality. What they question is how anyone can know that observable reality isn't Ultimate Reality, how you can reliably know anything about something that is beyond observation, and whether it is appropriate or useful to label Ultimate Reality with the word "God."
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@Mopac
Observable reality is by definition contingent on observation, and therefore cannot be The Ultimate Reality, which is not contingent.
I don't think it necessarily follows that a reality that is observable is contingent on observation. Observability is a property. Reality can have this property regardless of whether there are any observers. It is not contingent on the property, or contingent on being observed, it just happens to have the property that it is observable.
After all, the Ultimate Reality must have certain properties. If observable reality by definition is contingent on observations, then precisely the same logic says that the Ultimate Reality by definition is contingent on there being no higher reality.
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@keithprosser
Essentially the Orthodox Church defines the Ultimate Reality as "the reality above which there is no other reality." They believe that the reality we observe has a higher reality above it.
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@Athias
Randomness is an epistemological insignificance. As I told @3RU7AL, it would require ontological statements beyond your pay-grade.
Models that incorporate randomness can closely match reality. I would not call that insignificant.
If you're asserting that it's decidedly "non-random," what is it? In other words, what significance is there in ascribing it the quality of "non-random"?
If you are as versed in evolutionary theory as you claim you ought to know this. For natural selection to be random it would have to select genetic variants purely by chance. But the theory says the opposite. Genetic variants are selected based on proclivity to produce viable offspring, not on chance.
Other branches of science are irrelevant. We are specifically discussing evolution. Your presumable lack of knowledge on the conception of modern evolutionary theory is leading you to generalize. Evolutionary theorists change the premise of their theory because their ideologies changed. Those are the parameters of this discussion, not once again, science in general. The evidence didn't change; the science didn't change. Only the consensus did. And I must stress this once more: evolution is not based on fact. Evolution is based on an assumption, especially of a past for which it lacks observable data.
Discussing how science in general works is hardly irrelevant when discussing a particular branch of science.
Your assertion that we have no observable data about the past is just flat out wrong. The past has left evidence all over the Earth, in fossils, geologic formations, and radioisotopes, just to name a few. We can figure out a vast amount about the past based on evidence it left behind.
No it does not. There's yet to be any observable data which informs either. Your statement is ideological projection. (Or delusion.)
Yes, it does. I've given four lines of evidence that support natural selection over orthogenesis, none of which you even attempted to address, merely dismissing them as mere "semantics". Sorry, but calling something "semantics" is not a refutation.
Population genetics wasn't discovered in the 1930's either.
"The field of population genetics came into being in the 1920s and 1930s..." (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/population-genetics/)
Population genetics signaled the final death-knell for orthogenesis. Up to the 1930's, the biggest weakness for natural selection was the lack of a mechanism for inheritance. It was only once population geneticists demonstrated mathematically that the variety in evolution could be accounted for with Mendelian inheritance that natural selection became the overwhelming consensus.
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@Dr.Franklin
YEC's would just claim that DNA decayed faster in the past, or that there is a flaw with how it is measured.
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@Athias
Yes, it does. Natural selection does this as well through a converse construction of the orthogenesis argument, but instead having "nature" as the designer--or as it's usually disguised, "randomness." Asserting randomness is also beyond the epistemological limits of science.
Just because we cannot know for absolute certain that randomness exists does not mean randomness is not a useful concept or an accurate way to describe some phenomena. If a process is indistinguishable from random, then treating it a random can provide an accurate model.
Also, while it is true that evolutionary theory treats genetic variation from mutations as random, natural selection itself is decidedly non-random.
Explaining how science "works" isn't necessary. We are not speaking to science in general. We speaking specifically to evolutionary theory.
My point was that evolutionary theory works just like any other branch of science. Theories do not ultimately change because people's ideologies change. Theories change to fit current evidence.
That's the exact reason it changed. Evolutionists were receiving criticisms of teleology until Ronald Fisher popularized "natural selection" despite Charles Darwin writing about it 70 years prior. The majority of evolutionary biologists still believed in orthogenesis until the 1930's. Once again, the shift was made through consensus, not evidence. Because the "evidence" which informs natural selection was there for decades before the shift.
Yes, orthogenesis was an entrenched idea, and it took decades for the consensus to shift to natural selection. But again, the shift did not occur because of ideological change. It occurred because it became increasingly apparent that natural selection more closely matches what we observe in nature.
The genetic code wasn't "discovered" until 1961.
Yes, I should have said population genetics.
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@Athias
Simply repeating that the shift from orthogenesis to natural selection is purely ideological does not make it so.
Science works by choosing among competing theories the one that best fits with observation. The shift from orthogenesis to natural selection occurred in exactly this way. It did not occur because people's values changed, which is implied by an ideological shift. It occurred for the simple reason that natural selection fits the evidence better. It better explains the chaotic branching of the fossil record. It explains why all attempts to find a mechanism for othogenesis have proven fruitless. And what sealed the deal was the discovery in the 1930's of the genetic code, the mechanism by which natural selection operates.
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@Athias
No, it is in fact quite true. Feel free to verify or falsify anything I state.
I did.
Four lines of evidence is hardly "semantics".
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@dustryder
You omit the best argument of all against evolution: the crocoduck.
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@Athias
The shift from orthogenesis to natural selection was not AT ALL based on new scientific evidence or information;
Patently untrue. It was based on observations by paleontologists that the fossil record had much more branching and complexity than would be expected if evolution proceeded only toward certain goals, on the discovery of genetics and mutations as the means by which natural selection works, on observations in nature and the laboratory of selective pressure altering traits, and on the complete failure to discover any plausible mechanism by which orthogenesis might operate.
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@dustryder
Evolution is a vile lie concocted by satan worshipping hippies. And it's sad how many people believe in it, because it can be disproven so easily.For example, have you ever seen an insect turn into a dog or a deer into a fish? Of course you haven't, because evolution is false.
To avoid looking woefully ignorant, I suggest you refrain from giving any further opinion on evolution until you actually understand it.
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@crossed
God choosing to create the apple to feed good germs and not bad germs is an intelligent choice
Wouldn't it have been more intelligent just to not create bad germs in the first place?
God creating olive oil to kill cancer cells and not normal cells is an intelligent choice.
Wouldn't it have been more intelligent just to not create cancer in the first place?
god creating the appendix as a safe house for good germs but not for bad is god making an intelligent choice. he is choosing between good and bad germs
Over 5% of people develop appendicitis at some point, and require surgery. How intelligent is that?
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@keithprosser
I think what kills you is the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
Naw. This is belied by babies. Babies demonstrate that it is possible to generate any part of a human, good as new, from a single cell. There is no reason in principle why you could not regenerate your entire body every few years and live forever.
It used to be that people thought aging and death was evolution's way of making room for the next generation. More recently, however, another explanation has gained traction. In nature, most organisms die before they reach old age. That means most members of a species are youthful. Evolution is not very efficient at filtering out mutations that are harmful in the old, because mutations that are harmful in the old do not much matter when so few members of the species are old. So mutations that are harmful to the old tend to accumulate.
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@RoderickSpode
Revered is probably a better word for it than deified.
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@Athias
Water's flowing down hill is a phenomenon, not a consequence. Consequence implies action; action implies agency. Even your statement "survival is a consequence of 'not dying'" implies a goal since it can be written as "to survive is to not die." To not die is the end of the effort to survive. Now if you're stating survival=not dying, that's another thing. But relating the two by incorporating the concept of consequence is counterintuitive.
Phenomena and consequence are not distinct things. All phenomena are consequences of something. Water flowing downhill is a consequence of rain, for instance. Or a consequence of whatever action put the water uphill.
Perhaps you mean that the tendency of water to flow downhill is a phenomenon? If that is the distinction you are making, then ok, but one can counter that by saying that the tendency of populations to evolve via natural selection is also a phenomenon.
And, in fact, evolution is a phenomenon, and is as inevitable as water flowing downhill. The first thing to realize is that it is not survival that matters in evolution. Rather, it is offspring production. Sure, organisms must survive to produce offspring. But they could survive forever and if they produce no offspring they are an evolutionary dead-end.
Once you realize that evolution is about offspring production, it becomes a simple math exercise. If you produce more than an average number of viable offspring for your species, then the gene variants you carry increase in frequency in the population. If you produce fewer than average viable offspring, then the gene variants you carry decrease in frequency. That is, in fact, the very definition of evolution: a change in allele frequency in a population over time.
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@Athias
If a theory provides testable predictive power and efficacy, then it is considered a valid theory.Or it's nothing more than a gambler's fallacy.
It's hard to take you seriously when you make statements like this that casually dismiss all of science.
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@Athias
More so than non-religious ideologies?
No idea. But so far your only example of a non-religious ideology has been evolution, which is not an ideology.
What does that have to do with anything? First, we are discussing exposure to information, not to people who's religious affiliation may or may not be made explicit. Do these children conduct daily sermons at school? No? Then your argument is irrelevant.
It is not irrelevant at all. You seem to have a conception of public schools as places where kids sit like drones all day being force-fed information. It's not that way at all. In fact, I would argue that kids take in more information from their peers than they do from teachers.
Let's apply a simple calculus: the first eight years of a child's life are its formative years. Let's say it's exposed to religious information once a week as is typical. That means that over its first eight years, that child is exposed to religious information during 416 days of his or her life. Now let's be generous and presume that children typically begin state-sponsored schooling at the age of five for five days a week. That means over the first eight years of that child's life, he or she spends 780 days exposed to state sponsored ideologies, much of which occurs over a three-year span.
This is so overly simplistic as to be useless. For one thing, it assumes religious families only get a dose of religious information once a week when they go to church. For another, it assume kids get no exposure whatsoever to religion on days they go to school. Both are ridiculous assumptions and render the entire exercise moot.
What fact about evolution do fossils, DNA, Vestigal Organs, or shared genes inform?
Species change over time. Traits are inherited. Species have common ancestors.
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@Athias
Where did I say it was "anti-religion"?
Call it non-religious then.
What does this have to do with the information to which a child is exposed?
You said the resources of the state far outweigh the resources of a single church, implying that government resources are being used to promote non-religious ideologies. The truth is, many government resource go toward promoting religion.
It refutes nothing; 91% of children go to public school typically for five days a week, as opposed to the 75% you claim who typically go to church for one day a week.
Yes, and in those public schools they are exposed to other students, 75% of whom are Christian, and teachers, 75% of whom are Christian.
That can mean anything. I, too, grew up in a religious home.
It means that the first, most formative years of children's lives are spent being exposed to religion.
Evolution is an ideology. It's one on-going teleological argument without a single fact as its premise. It's a series of presumptions based on assumptions (e.g. orthogenesis, and genetic traits.)
This is astonishingly ignorant. Not one single fact, really? No fossils, or DNA, or morphological similarity, or vestigal organs, or shared genes? None of these are facts? Genetic traits are an assumption??? I guess the fact that some people have blue eyes and children tend to look like their parents are just assumptions. And orthogenesis, really? It is not even part of mainstream evolutionary theory.
Scientific theories are not ideologies, but with such profound ignorance, it is not surprising that you think so.
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@Athias
I see no evidence of a state-sponsored anti-religious marketing campaign in the U.S. Quite the opposite. Religious organizations receive huge government subsidies, not the least of which is tax exemption. And the fact that 75% of people in the U.S. are Christian refutes your contention that young people are exposed more to anti-religious ideologies than religious ones. Most of those young people grew up in a religious home, after all.The mention of learning evolution should be the glaring factor. A child is taught a process of his environment which is different from the one he learns in church. Not to mention, he's exposed to the ideology of evolution far more than he is to his own religion. It's not a difference in "rational thought;" it's a difference in marketing and exposure. And given the resources of the state when juxtaposed with the resources of a single church, the state can sponsor any ideology with efficacy. It's like comparing NIKE to Sketchers.
Also, evolution is not an ideology any more than atomic theory is an ideology. There is nothing about evolution that inherently precludes religion.
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@Outplayz
It might save you two a lot of back and forth if you refer to the following webpage, which is the Orthodox Church's own explanation of their view of heaven and hell.
In a nutshell, the presence of the returned Jesus is both heaven and hell--heaven for those who love Him and hell for those who hate Him.
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@Polytheist-Witch
Thanks for the suggestion. I will give it all the consideration it deserves.
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@RoderickSpode
For what it's worth, in Europe, Australia and New Zealand it is common to name streets on university campuses for famous scientists. Here in the U.S., it is more common to name them for athletes and coaches.
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@Mopac
It is relativistic reality, it is reality that is contingent. In the case of reality we observe, it is contingent on observation.
Are you saying that reality would not exist without observation? How could this possibly be determined?
If it doesn't fulfill the definition, it cannot be what we are talking about.
But how do you know whether or not it fulfills the definition? Given a reality, how do you know whether there is another reality over it? How do you determine whether it is contingent on anything?
Theoria, ascetic practices and such. It is good to have guidance, because pride is the easiest way to fall into prelest. Isolation is also pretty dangerous in that regard, except in the case of those who are particularly advanced. Even monastics usually need a special blessing.
So one can discover things about an unobservable Ultimate Reality through contemplation, prayer, fasting and the like, preferably at the direction of a church leader?
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@RoderickSpode
Are religious people not leaving you alone?
For the most part I have no issue with religious people. I am a firm supporter of separation of church and state, however. When religious people attempt to cross that line, I take issue. When they attempt to corrupt science with religious doctrine, that crosses the line. When they attempt to force religion into schools in order to indoctrinate my children, that crosses the line.
Do you think theories like the multiverse should be mentioned in public science classes, or should that be taboo?
I have no problem with mentioning such conjectures, as long as it's made clear that it is sheer conjecture. In fact, I have no problem mentioning ID, as long as it's made clear that it is pseudoscience. In fact, it might be instructive to spend class time showing what pseudoscience looks like, to help reinforce what true science is. In high school, though, there are probably better uses of limited class time.
You have it a bit mixed up. Whether or not ID is science is definitely a side issue. The court of law cannot make decisions on what is and isn't science. The judge is not a scientist. The court case was about whether or not teaching ID is constitutional. So yes, whether or not ID is a religion (or a religious argument) was the central issue.
Whether or not it is science is crucial to whether or not it is religion. If it is science, then it is not religion.
And because it was judged as unconstitutional, placing it in a philosophy class is unconstitutional as well because it's still in a public school. How then can that be a different matter? If teaching ID in a public school is unconstitutional, why would you think that it would be okay in the philosophy department?
Because then ID's proponents would be claiming that ID is part of philosophy, and you would have different arguments and counter-arguments.
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@RoderickSpode
You missed my point. The article doesn't give an exhaustive list of why people leave the church. You pretty much claimed it does, and that any other reason provided is a misunderstanding.
Where did I ever imply the article gives an exhaustive list? I said it describes the real reason most young people are leaving the church. Most does not mean all.
But your topic is not really about why people leave the church. You like that particular article because you feel it bests promotes the real idea you want to convey that humans are leaving the church due to progressive intelligence, critical thinking, etc. And then everything else is some misunderstanding.
I posted the article because it points out something that many theists can't seem to wrap their heads around--most non-believers don't have some ulterior motive for their non-belief.
Are you still talking about young people now, or including everyone? It might be the case with young people because they're the most impressionable. If you're talking about everyone, that's a different story.
I'm talking about the young people, the subject of the article.
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@Mopac
The Ultimate Reality by definition cannot have a reality over it. If there is a reality over it, that reality would be The Ultimate Reality.Sorry you don't find that a satisfactory answer.
I don't, really. But it begs the question, if you define the Ultimate Reality to be that reality over which there is no other reality, then how do you know the reality we observe is not the Ultimate Reality? How do you know whether or not there is a reality over it?
Our discipline can be summed up as follows..."Blessed are the pure in heart, they will see God."And so that is our approach. The purifying of the heart, or to use a more technical term, the nous. Our discipline is about purifying the nous.
So to discover anything about the Ultimate Reality, one needs to purify their nous--nous being the part of the soul most connected to the Ultimate Reality. Is that about right? If so, you can anticipate my next question. How does one go about purifying their nous?
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@RoderickSpode
Whether ID is science or religion was not at all a side issue in the Dover trial. It was the central issue. Mandating a particular religious view be taught alongside actual science in a biology class is clearly unconstitutional. If ID's proponents had instead wanted it taught in a philosophy class, that would be an entire different matter.
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@RoderickSpode
This article doesn't describe the real reason. It gives partial reasons. Some of the other reasons include those you're claiming are not reasons.
What are you talking about? Of course the article gives the real reason, plain as day. It couldn't be simpler.
"...most “nones” said they no longer identified with a religious group because they no longer believed it was true."
Saying that they are mad at God is absurd, since they don't believe in God.
There's always been young people leaving the church in the U.S. What the article isn't telling you is that many people return to church, particularly the one's who grew up in the church. Not all people in general have left the faith when they left church. Some who have come back have stated they've just found their faith that they didn't have before they left.
Not all have left the faith when they leave the church, sure, but it is clear that most have, unless you think no longer believing a faith is true is somehow different than leaving the faith.
Militant atheists (the Oh my God, someone placed "The footprints in the sand inspirational" on government property" atheists) are stuck on the idea of recruiting the youth away from religion. Not through force, but through restrictive education. It's ironic since they often criticize Christian parents for teaching their children the Bible.
Militant atheists are a small minority of all atheists. Most atheists just want to be left alone by religion, and that includes teaching pseudoscience to their children in a thinly veiled attempt to indoctrinate them.
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@Mopac
The Ultimate Reality is singularity. It is true in itself. All other truths or realities are contingent on other realities. This is one of the defining differences between creation and The Uncreated. Created things are contingent existences. The Uncreated is not contingent. The Ultimate Reality exists in itself. Yet, nothing else exists without it.
I don't know what you mean by "singularity." As far as "contingent", yes, I got from your previous posts that reality is contingent on this meta-reality you call the Ultimate Reality, in that it cannot exist independently. My question of how you know this remains, however. How can we know anything about an unobservable Ultimate Reality? How do we know this Ultimate Reality is not itself contingent on an even more ultimate reality? Simply saying "it's defined that way" isn't a satisfactory answer.
The essence of God is unknowable. Our theology has more to with HOW God is rather than WHAT God is.
That is very close to what physicists say about physics, that we cannot say what anything is, only how it behaves.
But again, how can you discover anything about how God is, when God is unobservable? By what method do you reach the conclusion that the Ultimate Reality is a Trinity as you describe?
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@crossed
if there was not a heaven or hell. even i would choose to live choose to live a care free evil life and die happy.
Have you ever thought about what this says about you as a person? You are saying that you live morally only because of the promise of divine reward or the threat of divine punishment.
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@disgusted
Thinking that raping children for any reason other than fun is objectively moral proves you are a sick fuk with moral standard at all.
Your wording makes it sounds like you think raping children for fun is objectively moral, but doing it for any other reasons is immoral.
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In post #62 in this thread you said:
...we certainly believe that The Ultimate Reality precedes all existence, even time, and that it is The Ultimate Reality gives the universe its existence.
So yes, you said it, whether you intended to or not. I even quoted it and took issue with it in post #65. But ok, we will assume that you misspoke.
The Ultimate Reality is literally existence in the truest sense of the word. It is the most real.
In logic, propositions are either true or false. There is no concept of one proposition being truer than another. So it is hard to know what is meant when say that the Ultimate Reality is reality in its truest sense. It's like someone being the most dead, or someone being the most absent from a room right now.
What I am saying is that all OTHER existences have their existence from it, and there is no OTHER existence that came before it. Time itself is an existence that comes after The Ultimate Reality. That being the case, time can exist within God though God does not change. God exists in time through the incarnation, but the incarnation does not mean God ceases to exist outside of creation.
It sounds like you are describing a meta-reality, a reality above observable reality. If so, I can go with that as a plausible conjecture. I don't see how the nature of such a meta-reality could ever be more than conjecture, however. How could we possibly discover anything about it? After all, by definition it is not observable.
I think it is important to note that the incarnation itself is what gives reality to created things.
If we can't observe this meta-reality, how can we know this? On what basis can we ascribe divisions to it, as in the Trinity? How can we possibly know that it has any theistic attributes?
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@Polytheist-Witch
Who are you replying to?
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@3RU7AL
If you are really curious about critical thinking, you can find sources that describe it. I would agree with most of them. If I tried to go into details, it would turn into a treatise. Let's just say that critical thinking is the conscious attempt to reason and evaluate information in an unbiased, logical manner. Many things go into it, including a balance between skepticism and open-mindedness, knowledge of the methods of reasoning (deduction, induction, abduction), use of logic, ability to recognize and avoid formal and informal fallacies, willingness to follow evidence wherever it may lead, and ability to communicate precisely.
So what makes you think a person "can reach the same conclusion that would be reached by someone who was truly objective" if you have no way of verifying such a statement? Is this a purely faith-based opinion?
I did not say there was never way to verify such a statement. There are many cases where observation verifies a conclusion. We conclude that a certain man committed a murder based on circumstantial evidence. Later, this is verified when a video surfaces of them committing the murder. We conclude that a person missing in the Antarctic for a month is dead. Later, it is verified when we find the body.
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@zedvictor4
Agreed. If we have the capability to do something, someone will eventually do it.
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@Snoopy
Look up "being" in the dictionary and the first definition is "existence". So if you use to to mean something different, you should be careful to define the words in a way that makes the difference between them clear.
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@Mopac
I attempt to practice critical thinking when evaluating arguments. Part of that is playing devil's advocate and attempting to pick apart and refute said arguments. It's not dishonesty, it's healthy skepticism. Solid arguments should welcome such scrutiny.
That said, I'm not going to pretend that you have much chance of converting me.
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@Mopac
But earlier you said that the Ultimate Reality precedes existence. Something preceding itself is what I find incoherent.The Ultimate Reality is by definition existence
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@Mopac
It is incoherent for the two reasons I gave, neither of which you have reconciled.
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@Mopac
Giving it a name doesn't clear anything up. It is still incoherent.
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@Vader
It's a peculiar kind of love to say that you love someone but think one of their inborn traits is a sin.
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@Mopac
... we certainly believe that The Ultimate Reality precedes all existence, even time, and that it is The Ultimate Reality gives the universe its existence.
This is what doesn't make sense, so anything that comes after it is moot.
First, "precede" means "come before in time." It is therefore incoherent to say that something precedes time.
Second, it contains a glaring contradiction. If the Ultimate Reality precedes all existence, that implies that the Ultimate Reality is not itself contained in existence. (Otherwise the Ultimate Reality would precede itself, an absurdity.) But if something is not part of existence, then by definition it does not exist. That means that the Ultimate Reality does not exist, which means God does not exist.
Maybe you can reconcile these fatal flaws, but I doubt it.
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@Mopac
I didn't mean it to come across like that. I meant to merely ask if you meant something besides "the universe" by "creation".
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@Mopac
Deism: belief in the existence of a supreme being, specifically of a creator who does not intervene in the universe.
Now, what does functionally equivalent mean?
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@Mopac
How does asking you to use precise, well-defined terms imply that I think I know it all?
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@Mopac
@3RU7AL
He didn't say it was. He said deism is functionally equivalent to atheism.
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@Mopac
Your first few lines amount to "everything that exists has reality, and God is reality, therefore everything that exists has God." Well, ok, but I don't see how that gets you anywhere.
The Truth is in creation, so it is incarnate in creation.
"Creation" is a loaded word. Use "the universe" instead, unless you mean something different than "the universe." Also, you have not established any difference between truth and The Truth.
Though God is Uncreated, God is still present in creation.
If God is reality, and God is uncreated, it would seem to follow that reality is uncreated. Is that what you intend?
All of creation is tied to divinity through the fleshly nature of The Son.
You haven't defined "divinity" or "The Son", much less shown how they logically follow from anything you've said above.
Does this make sense to you?
Not really. It's missing key logical connections.
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