Post Edited (Tom) : 7/12/2009 12:51:52 PM (GMT-5)

Post Edited (Tom) : 7/12/2009 3:24:50 PM (GMT-5)

Tom: Is it your view that ‘realism’ (metaphysical realism) entails ‘determinism’?

Jeff: Sorry Tom. Just saw this thread. Don't have much time. But the answer to the question is "no."

Tom: Then why are you a determinist with respect to the physical world? You spoke with some conviction about the deterministic relations of physical entities, claiming that the outcomes of physical events follow deterministically from previous events.

So, to ask again—what informs this conviction of yours? I thought it was just your ‘realism’ (because you claim the indeterminism of QM would undermine realism). But you say your determinism doesn’t have anything to do with your realism. So what is it that tells you all physical entities behave exclusively deterministically?

Already posted:

You obviously believe we are volitionally free. So it must be your belief that we are ‘spirit’ (and/or ‘mind’) and that ‘spirit’ (and/or ‘mind’) is sufficiently free of the determining influence of our bodies and the surrounding material world. This freedom of the spirit/mind from the material allows you to posit freedom of choice operative in/upon the physical world. Right? The ‘mind’ can determine the ‘body’, can act as a cause within the otherwise utterly deterministic system of the material universe without being itself caused by that system. Our ‘spirits’ and/or ‘minds’ aren’t subject to the causality, the determining influence, which defines the material universe (in your view).

I’m interested in knowing WHY you’re not a determinist with regard to the behavior of the immaterial, spiritual world. Physical entities can only behave deterministically, but spirits and minds may behave freely? Why?

-------------------------

“To be is to be observed” is, I believe, true. Its truth is entailed in trinitarian theism, and without any threat of infinite regress. This is why I asked if your ‘realism’ is an all-inclusive theory, i.e., if you include ALL the reality you believe exists within “the real.” For example, would you include the triune God? If so, then there’s no danger of an infinite regress, for with a trinitarian God there is (necessarily) address and response, the God-defining act of ‘observer’ and ‘observed’, of fully apprehending and fully apprehended ‘difference’. Nothing can exist which is not observed. Some perceive this insight without knowing what it means, without having the trinitarian resources to explain it (which ought not surprise us as trinitarian theologians). Bohr and Heisenberg said some very ‘non-realistic’ things (because they didn’t always draw good philosophical conclusions from their science), but it doesn’t follow that one need deny ‘realism’ in order to affirm indeterminacy in the created physical order. God needs to be brought into the equation.

Maybe we should say just what we mean by ‘realism’?

---------------------------

Jeff: I see nothing intuitive about the idea that material particles are REALLY indeterministic in their motion and properties.

Tom: Neither do I. I don’t get my belief that the physical world behaves on some level indeterministically from my “intuition.” I get it from science, partly, and from theology, partly.

Jeff: Indeed, they can't be to God if your view of continual creation is true, because in that case God is PUTTING them continually exactly where they happen to be.

Tom: Jeff, HOW do you account for the free exercise of the human ‘spirit’ (and/or ‘mind’) then? Surely God sustains our spirits. Surely our spirits are ontologically dependent upon God as the source and provider of their very existence just as the physical creation is. Unless you want to deny creation ex nihilo and claim that the immaterial world is self-existing, ‘absolutely’ cut off from ‘all’ involvement and sustaining activity from God, you do with the immaterial spiritual world (which you believe is free) exactly what I do with the physical—i.e., suppose that God sustains it in its freedom. You seem to have this idea that “God sustains X” means “God determines X” when it comes to physical entities but not when it comes to spiritual entities. What in the world tells you that? Science? Theology? Intuition?

God can sustain entities in their power to self-determine. If this were not true we COULD NOT be free in ANY sense.

Jeff: …because in that case God is PUTTING them continually exactly where they happen to be.

Tom: Does God PUT you wherever YOU decide to be? No. You think YOU’RE free. And you know that your existence depends upon God’s sustaining activity—whatever that activity is. You’re not ‘absolutely’ cut off from divine presence and activity. But with physical entities all of a sudden God CAN’T be so present to sustain and also make room for self-determination on any level as is the case with spiritual entities? I don't get it. You admit the spiritual can act as a cause within the physical world so the two have to be closely related; yet God can sustain one (the spiritual) in its freedom to act while the same sustaining activity upon the other (physical) ENTAILS determinism?

Jeff: They CAN be by my view, however, though they don't need to be to explain our experience.

Tom: Actually I don’t have any problem believing God determines the collapse of quantum particles, but that he does so freely, even randomly. I’ve even entertained the possibility that God IS the wavefunction. That probability wave just IS God’s sustaining presence, holding the material world in its course at the quantum level probabilistically. Why probabilistically? Because God’s creative. Because he likes to change things up. Because he likes variety. Because he’s free and freedom is what issues from him.

What experience do you have of the world that tells you all events in the material world follow deterministically (excepting the immaterial event of the human volition being a cause in the material world)?

T

Post Edited (Tom) : 7/13/2009 6:04:35 AM (GMT-5)

P.S. Again, to re-clarify, since you've forgotten apparently: I don't believe God has to sustain anything in existence once He creates it. He would have to ANNIHILATE a created entity for it to go out of existence. But given UR, I don't see why that would ever happen. ALL THINGS are redeemed. This is part of what it means for God to be FULLY COMPETENT--NOTHING IS WASTED.

And one more time: If it is God who is CAUSING the material entities to have the attributes they have, those attributes can NOT be indeterminant to GOD. And thus, metaphysical uncertainty/indeterminism IS FALSE. And whether your view is correct or not, it IS a logical possibility. And therefore there is no APOSTERIORI way to PROVE or DEMONSTRATE metaphysical uncertainty/indeterminism. It only SEEMS so to us--JUST LIKE LIGHTNING. But QT theorists tend to be atheistic AND positivistic. So if THEY don't have sufficient perspective, what they observe IS the way it is. The problem is, LIGHTNING!!!!!!!!! And a host of others!!!!!!!!!!!!!! These people are NOT CONSISTENT.

Post Edited (Similtude) : 7/13/2009 7:02:35 AM (GMT-5)

No problem, Tom. It's good to see where we differ so as to see why we take the routes we do. That way we know what to address.

But it's important to understand how different people use the language of QT. When a copenhagen adherent says we can't determine the location of a particle, if they are positivistic in their metaphysics, they basically MEAN the particle HAS NO location at that time. But I have no idea what a particle IS if it has no location. That doesn't compute to my mind at all. There is a reason why there is lots of debate about it even amongst the most prestigious scientists. Because their metaphysical approach dictates how they think about it. The observational data, per se, can't tell us the metaphysical truth about it. Because we have LIMITED perspective which MIGHT be insufficient to know how even SMALLER particles that move even FASTER play into the phenomena we can actually observe WITH LIGHT.

The late Tom Van Flandern told me by phone (I always had to call up to re-subscribe to his bulletin), because I inquired, that no scientists ever challenged his views on QT. I think the reason is simple. They know that their differences are philosophical and not APOSTERIORI. A very good book on the subject is "The Ghost in the Atom," co-authored by Paul Davies. There are some good websites that talk about the virtual unintelligible language of much of modern physics. Stuff like virtual particles.

The reason why this state of affairs has come about is because the math that models the observations has variables and constants that can't be easily attributed to any attributes the mind can conceive of. So physicists start making up words to assign to those variales/constants that really have no intelligible meaning to the human mind. But how else can they communicate to each other which variables/constants their talking about?

But if Van Flandern is right, there may very well be perfectly intelligible entities and attributes that those variables and constants correspond to, though we have no theory, as of yet, to explain it. But that's what science IS--the continual attempt to explain as simply (analogically) as possible what we, as yet, have no confirmed explanation for. Nothing to get worked up over, then. Science is always dealing with the UNKNOWN and the NOT YET UNDERSTOOD.

Van Flandern held to ideas I reject, too. He believed the universe was infinite in extent and scale. He pretty much had to posit that to avoid the problems with a finite universe since he was an atheist. But again, that shows how metaphysics CONSTRAINS our way of thinking. I try to explain things as analogously/parsimoniously as possible. To me that is the criteria to use. There is an infinte set of merely logically-possible solutions if you don't mind having to posit as many non-intuitive unknowables as it takes to render them coherent.

I allow for supra-categoral relations. These would be meaningless to me, since I couldn't think in terms of them. But they would not be contradictory to my categories. What I can't allow for, because to do so is to commit intellectual suicide, is that reality is COUNTER-categorical. To do that is to give up any way of meaningfully talking about open theism or anything else. "If nothing is obvious, nothing can be proved."

Post Edited (Similtude) : 7/13/2009 9:26:36 PM (GMT-5)

Tom: This will disappoint Jeff, but I think I have to say that human were mortal (contingently so of course, for we shall become immortal) prior to the arrival of human sin.

Jeff: I define the words differently. To me, mortal means you will most assuredly die. Or, as Genesis says, DYING THOU SHALT DIE. Immortal means, we will most assuredly NOT die. So what Adam was, IMO, was a being that could die, say if he didn't eat, but that did not HAVE to die in the way mortals do. And by eating of the tree of life, he could contine to live and "beat" whatever entropic processes would have led to death, otherwise.

Tom: More specifically (in answer to your question Jeff), yes, I think babies did die prior to the Fall.

Jeff: I think they COULD have died, but that it would have been due to human negligence rather than natural evil.

Tom: That's not a problem-free view obviously. But it causes less problems for me, even if it makes me look silly.

Jeff: Right. It's important to see that ALL world-views have aspects that SEEM to be problematic. That keeps us humble.   I don't see your view as being less problematic than mine, of course. And it's not babies dying before the Fall, per se, that seems silly to me. What seems silly to me is saying that if the world was created as it is NOW, with all the existing natural evils, that the probability of even ONE fetus or infant dying is less than 1. To my mind, the probability of LOTS of infants and fetuses dying, given those conditions, is CLEARLY 1. Indeed, for you to say otherwise, IMO, seems to be just a deduction from an intuition about God. It has nothing to do with EMPIRICAL or APOSTERIORI reasoning.

And that's the point. We BOTH believe that God MUST be benevolent to even account for the competence of our APOSTERIORI and DISCURSIVE apprehensive abilities. All else is simply trying to work out a coherent way of explaining how that can be, given a world of seemingly "vain" suffering. If suffering didn't seem vain at all, for anyone, then there would be no perceived problem of evil at all.

I was reading Thomas Kuhn a while back. He made a great point. He said we're all trying to account for our experience in a way that seems most simple to us (I would add that we want it simpler if and only if simple is more SATISFYING!). And he added that that will always be relativistic ("in the eye of the beholder," IOW). That is true. We have different intellectual strengths and weaknesses that account for that relativity. In science, we supposedly come up with TESTS to rule out that relativistic bias. In philosophy, we can't. So consensus in philosophy is hard to attain. 

What is important, then, is to realize that to argue against benevolent theism is to prove TOO MUCH. It proves that the premises of our very arguments were unknowable. Thus, to disbelieve in benevolent theism is to disbelieve in any CLAIM with certainty. For to be certain is to "see" intuitively that some TRUE criteria has been satisfied. As Lewis said:

1) If nothing is obvious, nothing can be proved.

2) We can't prove there are proofs.

3) We can't prove there are no proofs.

In reality, we just believe (NOT PROVE) that we are designed TO apprehend and that we can reason inferentially/discursively to valid conclusions, therefore. CORRELATIVE with that belief is the benevolence of God (just as finite is correlative with infinite). You can't have one without the other. So all we're really doing is arguing theodicy once we accept that to apprehend and reason inferentially implies the benevolence of our designer. Theodicy, i.e., in the sense that we're trying to explain HOW God is good, not WHETHER He is good. Right? We will make inferential errors about that just like scientists have been wrong historically on about everything. And yet we don't assume that science, PER SE, is bogus.

As for indeterminism, you say God knows where all entities are at any GIVEN time and what their other attributes are. Thus, nothing about the attributes of entities is unknown to God at any GIVEN time. That, alone, rules out absolute indeterminism. Thus, the Copenhagen view is just false, as most physicists believe it to be. The Copenhagen view, according to what I've read, is only held by a majority of ELITE scientists who tend to be atheists. Their opinion, to be consistent, has to be consistent with ATHEISM. And that's the problem. How do you get to an atheistic, observer-dependent reality? I don't see how  unless you define "observation" as meaninglessly as some do to try to render it coherent. But then it's worthless as an explanation because the terms involved are meaningless.

Moreover, the plurality of the godhead doesn't help us there unless, by "observation," those scientists mean non-3D entities "knowing" about other non-3D entities. I have no reason to believe they mean any such thing. Furthermore, the plurality of the godhead, per se, doesn't entail the necessity that their existence DEPENDS on the awareness of each other. That would involve, it seems to me, the positing of a separate, non-intuitive, non-categorical, non-falsifiable, non-testable claim--which is what I'm trying to avoid. And if God is literally continuously creating 3-D particles, moment-by-moment, God truly does DETERMINE their attributes, moment-by-moment. That is not true of volitional beings. WE DETERMINE some of our attributes. We are SELF-DETERMINING, to some extent. So we truly are stuck with 2 categories of causality, per your view, as far as I can tell--deterministic (natural) and self-determining (volitional).

I'm, frankly, quite unimpressed with the metaphysics of atheism. It is arbitrary at best, and downright incoherent and/or meaningless, at worst. They're trying to get something from nothing. Ain't doable.

P.S. To my mind, a physical particle, by definition, is 3-D. That means it is spatially extended, which means it takes up space. But that means it's SOMEWHERE, no matter what physicists say. Physicists can't trump definitions. If there is an entity which, at certain points of time, has no location, we are NOT talking about a physical particle, as I define it. I just listened to a guru lecture on the subject. He admitted FRANKLY that QT is COUNTER-INTUITIVE.

That's no way to do metaphysics. That degree of skepticism about intuitions/categories implies the impossibility of discursive/aposteriori knowledge as well, whether he's thought it through or not. Neo explained it to him, but he's too dense to get it. Other notables DO GET IT. Sir Martin Rees, e.g., realizes that atheism entails the possibility that he is just a simulation with no experience of "reality" as it "really is," blurring the "boundaries" between realism and idealism.

Great mathematicians (which is what a lot of physicists are) can be VERY BAD METAPHYSICIANS. Just like great metaphysicians may be elementary mathematicians. The difference is, an elementary mathematician can be RIGHT about the math he/she knows. But it is difficult to be a mediocre metaphysician and be right. When it comes to metaphysics, a little knowledge is dangerous. Because it's easier to make category mistakes in metaphysical speculation than about elementary mathematical relations. Indeed, that's why there is no real debate about elementary math.

One more thing. As for probability playing into volition, I think it clearly does with respect to what I called FC2--those directed modes of thought/action which have to do with recognizing and deploying means to PREVIOUSLY chosen ends. Given some "normal" set of conditions prevailing over some duration of time, we can speak probabilistically about that, meaningfully. But that ORIGINAL choice, that's something different altogether. I don't see how we can apply probability to that.

Post Edited (Similtude) : 7/17/2009 3:58:05 PM (GMT-5)

It is not seeing the world "as it is" that is the goal of science. It is seeing the world as is best fitted to HUMAN ends as is possible (where little is given, little is required; where much is given, much is required). We may never know the smallest particles or the causes of all phenomena. But that doesn't stop us from 1) knowing as much as is analogically possible so as to predict the future successfully enough to deploy means to attain ends and 2) to see the forms, patterns, trENDS, and tENDencies that God has wrought for our wonder and aesthetic pleasure.

But there very well may be aspects of God's creation that we can not observe or understand which has nothing to do with any intrinsic randomness or unpredictability. This could be because of the requirements for parsimony or some other preferred feature of reality, or because they were meant for the observation and inspiration of angels, or because they were meant for the aesthetic pleasure of the Father/Son, or some combination of these. Positivists and atheists deny that any of these non-anthropocentric ends are real or possible.

But what do positivists and atheists know about the matter if theism is actually true? I have a video series on relativity. The lecturer admits that Lorentzian relativity is a possible explanation of Einstein's equations. If that is so, and positivism is false, then it is obvious why no one claimed that Van Flandern was wrong. All they claimed was that they disagreed with him. But Van Flandern told me that throughout his career scientists would disagree with him MERELY on the supposed "authority" of Einstein. But science has NOTHING TO DO with authoritarianism. To hold to authoritarianism in science is like trumping scripture with tradition. It is to turn the epistemological order of the sequence of discursive thought on its head.

Obviously, Einstein would have never blazed new territory had he stuck with authoritarianism. Science can't progress that way. When scientists remain in the theoretical straight-jacket of authoritarianism, they do what has actually BEEN done--they posit the counter-categorical/intuitive to "explain" the data without allowing for those explanatory possibilities (which are non-amenable to atheism, positivism, and authoritarianism) which render our categories/intuitions coherent with our experience.

Post Edited (Similtude) : 7/19/2009 7:28:12 PM (GMT-5)