@Andrew I understood your intention, and took it as a compliment, given that I had not so far shown any interest in the question. Anyone who thinks I have 'understanding' is a friend for life :)
@Andrew Yes, IMHO the last suggestion, above, might work - although remember you are asking another question, again ...
@Andrew That would be better now. It's too broad at the moment. And it's also based too much on personal practice. It would be much better to focus on the arguments of whether to understand the use of יַהְוֶה in the OT as the whole God or just the Father
Can God change, if he wanted to, the mathematics ?
If so, how ?
(I'm not sure if it is more adapted to here or to a philosophy forum, since it would be logical that the question has already been asked a long time ago, say for example by Descartes, or by Thomas Aquinas. So I hoped to have both ...
@AthanasiusOfAlex Even in mathematics, truth and contradiction are relative. In this case, to the axioms (first principles). The idea of the divinity of numbers is Pythagorean- I would shy away from making absolute statements about the existence of numbers.
@Flimzy I am educated in mathematics, and I teach mathematics. I am intimately familiar with the foundations of mathematics, and I am happy to moderate or take part in such a discussion.
@user1952009 Would you like to continue your discussion about mathematics here in chat?
I've recently read this BBC article which makes the claim that Judaism originated some time around 2000 B.C, if not earlier. I've seen a number of sources which make similar claims (Source 1, Source 2). Perhaps I'm mistaken, but don't all surviving Jewish texts date back to the Hellenistic peri...
@Andrew That's entirely up to you. I think he's just an ill-informed troll. If you think something can be gained from a conversation, knock yourself out. But I'm done with it.
@Flimzy Yeah well . . . I probably shouldn't have even started. But these smart-alecs that come in thinking they're so smart in "discovering" the "flaws" in the "logic" of God and religion usually don't have the slightest notion of what they're talking about, or of the entire history of philosophy and theology that led to the various beliefs about God and the created universe.
Not that I think all of those philosophies and theologies are correct, mind you. But if you're going to say how stupid God is, you should at least have some notion of what you're talking about.
@Flimzy So . . . I unloaded on the guy just a little bit in his chatroom lol
@LeeWoofenden The material universe contains non-matter, though... including energy. And, depending on how you want to define things, things like gravity, magnetism, etc.
So, matter, energy, and "forces", I guess.
the forces being, possibly, properties of matter (and energy?) rather than existing in their own rights.
The dimensions, including time, seem to be (at least by my understanding) a unique class of "thing".
@Flimzy Yes, you're right, of course. But given Einstein's most famous equation, I tend to think of matter and energy as interchangeable. I was including energy as part of "matter." But yes, that's speaking a bit loosely.
@Flimzy Abstractly perhaps. But in reality, they have no existence apart from the physical matter (and energy) that they are properties of. That, to me, is one of the seminal insights of Einstein's theories.
It would be like saying that a thing's shape is a unique class of being. But a shape has no reality apart from some thing, or substance, that takes that shape. IOW, without substance, form is a mere abstraction. Ditto, I think, for time and space.
And not at all incidentally, this is precisely how Swedenborg describes the threefold nature of God. None of the three are distinct entities, or "persons," to use traditional language. Rather, they are different properties, or "essential components" (a rather poor translation of his Latin essentialia) of God. And they are the source of substance, form, and function--which can exist only when all three are present.
So although we can think abstractly about any one of them by themselves, they don't actually exist as a distinct class of being. They are, rather, three different properties of any class of being that exists in actual reality.
I believe time, space, and matter/energy form a similar "distinguishably one" "trinity" that has reality only when all three of them are together.
@El'endiaStarman The whole concept of "mass" gets a bit tricky when it appears that everything that seems solid to us is actually interacting forces. But I still think that's at the essence of the E-MC^2 equation. Matter and energy are really just different manifestations of the same underlying reality.
@Flimzy You're probably right lol. But I can't always restrain myself from giving these dolts a rhetorical slap upside the head. ;-)
@LeeWoofenden Note, there's a fuller version: E^2 = (mc^2)^2 + (pc)^2, where the p stands for momentum. This covers the fact that photons too have energy despite being massless. So really, matter is a form of energy, and not 100% the other way.
@El'endiaStarman Also incidentally, in Swedenborg's pre-theological scientific work The Principia, he proposed a system in which all of material reality exists from a complex amalgamation of "first finites," which he defined as dimensionless, massless particles. He later more-or-less retracted the idea that there could be such a thing. But it's interesting that he was grappling with something like what we're now grappling with in trying to define what an electron is.
@El'endiaStarman I still find it hard to accept that anything can have any real existence without having some sort of substance--i.e. some "mass" of some sort. But I'm still trying to sort out how energy fits into that whole picture, given that there is at least some sort of interchangeability between the two.
Is energy really energy if it doesn't have some interaction with a mass that it accelerates?
@Flimzy In my mind, based on Swedenborg's theology, it all goes back to love, and in particular, divine love, being the basic substance (or is it energy?) of the universe.
@LeeWoofenden Hmmm. Photons only need space to travel through; they don't need any matter to interact with, though they can indeed impart momentum and thereby accelerate a mass. I think a stronger counterexample would be dark energy, which I believe is currently thought to be responsible for the expansion of the universe, which would imply that this dark energy is acting only on space-time, and not on matter.
Not easy stuff to conceptualize. But we certainly do experience reality as being solid, and having mass. That suggests to me that having mass of some sort is a key property of reality.
@El'endiaStarman Perhaps. But it seems to me as if science is getting into "God of the gaps" territory here in positing all sorts of things about something that it doesn't really understand and hasn't even definitively detected.
I think the key distinction between scientific hypothesizing and "God of the gaps" is that the latter pretty much shuts down all understanding, or even attempts to understand.
What gets me is that atheistic/agnostic scientists ridicule religion for going beyond what can be demonstrated, and yet science itself regularly charges into realms of almost complete unknowns, and spins various theories and hypotheses based on something that hasn't even been shown to exist.
@El'endiaStarman I was going more for the idea that we can fill in what we don't know about the universe by assuming some entity that we as of yet have no evidence for, but that would very nicely account for those pesky unknowns.
@El'endiaStarman And what gets me more than that is that materialism, too, is based on non-demonstrable assumptions, such as the assumption that reality is not simply a product of consciousness, but exists independently of consciousness. There's simply no way to demonstrate that. Yet the materialists dance blithely on, ridiculing those "illogical" theists who assume without evidence that God exists. It's laughable how unaware they are of the non-evidential nature of their own basic assumptions.
@LeeWoofenden We have evidence that the universe is expanding, beyond the efforts of normal matter to contract it through gravity. Dark matter is already being hypothesized as a substance that, among other things, keeps galaxies together even though they should be spinning to pieces. There must be some sort of energy that propels the expansion of the universe, hence, dark energy.
@El'endiaStarman I know the general theory. And I'm not necessarily saying that dark matter doesn't exist. Just that an awful lot of scientific theory goes well beyond any actual evidence that we have. The evidence suggests that something we don't know about is operating. The idea that it is "dark matter" so far has no actual evidence to support it, to my knowledge.
Until we can somehow detect this dark matter, it is merely a theory, similar to theories that there was a Planet X causing particular perturbations in the orbits of the known planets. So far we have not found any such Planet X.
@LeeWoofenden Yet. There's a lot of work being put towards detecting and/or figuring out exactly what dark matter is. And besides, we had no direct evidence of a number of things, like the Higgs boson and gravitational waves, for decades, and that evidence was only recently found.
Dark matter is the modern equivalent of tree spirits, in my opinion :P
I saw a TED talk by Rupert Sheldrake a few months ago... which inspired me to add his book (amzn.to/1WJhcHA) to my Amazon wish list. I haven't read it yet.
I'm curious if either of you are familiar with him?
@Flimzy Hmm. Interesting article. A religious analog: I see the Bible as not so much interested in conveying truth to us (though it does do a certain amount of that) as it is interested in conveying salvation to us. IOW, its goal is not so much cerebral as practical: It wants us to become saved. And it says what's needed to accomplish that, in preference to providing a detailed and epistemologically accurate presentation of the actual nature of God, spiritual reality, and material reality.
@El'endiaStarman Right. It might be found. But until it is, it's theory, not reality.
@Flimzy I've heard of Rupert Sheldrake, but couldn't say anything intelligent about who he is and what he said/did without looking it up.
@LeeWoofenden I was pondering the article on my way home today... the analogy of the desktop icons was interesting, but too abstract for me. I found myself thinking more of previous conceptions of the universe... the sun revolving around the earth, the earth being flat, earth/wind/fire as elements, etc... for most practical purposes, each of these concepts is perfectly reasonable for day-to-day living
@LeeWoofenden I've had a similar idea in vague form before. It had to do with how the creation story, for example, need not be true in the literal/historical sense, but it was written to convey truth of a different kind, which is that God made us and that we are His special creation (among other truths). It's hard to elucidate it well though.
The doctrine of biblical inerrancy is very recent in Christian history
First, let's put biblical inerrancy into perspective.
Two centuries or so ago, and for all of Christian history before that, not a single Christian church, denomination, or preacher held that the Bible is inerrant. The very...
@El'endiaStarman Another stab at it that doesn't make that point explicitly, but gets there in a roundabout way, is this article on my blog: "How God Speaks in the Bible to Us Boneheads."
@Flimzy That's not correct. Einstein showed that time, space, matter, and energy are all the same "thing". What one observer sees as two simultaneous events at different locations, another observer might see as two sequential events in one location, and yet another observer might see the events occur in the reversed order, and yet another might only see one event. It's all relative (hence "Relativity")
@Flimzy and in quantum mechanics, neither matter nor energy are immediately conserved. Particles pop in and out of existence all of the time.
@LeeWoofenden whether or not reality is a product of consciousness, science and mathematics certainly are. Mathematics is not the "language of the universe", and this is coming from a mathematician. It is one language of the imagination
@Andrew Yes. That's more-or-less what I said over in the other chatroom, about mathematics. Science, too, is simply our description of reality as we perceive it, and not some reality in itself.
Can God change, if he wanted to, the mathematics ?
If so, how ?
(I'm not sure if it is more adapted to here or to a philosophy forum, since it would be logical that the question has already been asked a long time ago, say for example by Descartes, or by Thomas Aquinas. So I hoped to have both ...
I've recently read this BBC article which makes the claim that Judaism originated some time around 2000 B.C, if not earlier. I've seen a number of sources which make similar claims (Source 1, Source 2). Perhaps I'm mistaken, but don't all surviving Jewish texts date back to the Hellenistic peri...
This article claims that people may be killed for owning a bible. How true is it?
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