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| Posted 6/26/2001 6:39 PM (GMT -6) |   | RE: An Imagined Conversati on Between Doc and Meph & Wislawa
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Mephi:
Human freedom is like when you were a little kid and your mother gives you a choice about what vegetable you’re going to have for dinner. “The choices are Brussels sprouts or Brussels sprouts,” she says and predicts with 100% accuracy.
Doc:
Human freedom is like when you were a little kid and your mother gives you a choice about what vegetable you’re going to have for dinner. “The choices are Brussels sprouts, broccoli, or spinach,” she says and predicts with 100% accuracy because she knows her daughter/son so well and her/his hatred of Brussels sprouts and broccoli, and her/his love of spinach.
Wislawa:
Human freedom is like when you were a little kid and your mother gives you a choice about what vegetables you’re going to have for dinner. “The choices are Brussels sprouts, broccoli, or spinach,” she says and you choose Shapddo—a spontaneously new vegetable born in the roots of your imagination. She anticipates with curiosity.
Mephi:
Okay okay okay but if so she could never have 100% accuracy about anything!!!!
Doc:
What is more Shapddo would have been logically possible and a mother with exhaustive knowledge should have been aware of it, at least as a possibility.
Mephi:
Even more than that this child’s self is still emerging. Her/his choices cannot be independent of the existence of Brussels sprouts, broccoli, spinach and the pseudo-existence of Shapddo. Certainly there must have been a first time that she/he tasted Brussels sprouts and her/his dislike for them would have emerged gradually. But this is true on an even more fundamental basis that experience. Metaphysically the ontological status of selfhood is conditioned by EVERYTHING else in the world.
Wislawa:
Okay the self might emerge but the question is whether these interactions with the mind/body/environment/genetics/Brussels sprouts are a sufficient cause of the will's choice. I suggest that if they are the will need not be, we are mere things in a world of made of things, that merely exist in and an extension of God’s self. You still want to maintain that we are other from God don’t you.
Mephi:
Well sure but if the will’s choice is not sufficiently caused by all this God cannot have 100% accuracy about things.
Doc:
Sure He can. He may not be able to have 100% accuracy about all things but He can in two respects. 1) In regards to the limit of possibilities (i.e. only ten cards are available to choose) and 2) He can have 100% accuracy about what He is going to do. After all God does have a will and when He does micromanage He always gets His way. The difference is that in openness He doesn’t have to micromanage everything to get His way.
Wislawa:
I’m with you on #2 but have problems with #1. Sure some things, such as drawing a card out of a hand of ten, are limited possibilities of this sort. But do we really want to say that making an artwork is like drawing one artwork out of a hand of millions upon millions of artworks?
Mephi:
And if we don’t want to say this we must say that there are things God can’t know or human operations that remain secret from God.
Wislawa:
This is necessarily entailed in freedom.
********************************************
Dream sequence
Socrates:
I’m with Wislawa. Anyone want to play Smess?
Doc:
What’s Smess?
Mephi:
I’ve converted to open theism but it wasn’t my choice. God put the necessary and sufficient causes for me to convert into motion last night.
Doc:
I’m sleepy. Man this party is fun.
Wislawa:
I’m sleepy too. Man I wish I was at a party. I’m going to sleep now to dream about cross-dressing spies.
- Wislawa
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| Posted 6/26/2001 6:40 PM (GMT -6) | | Oh, the Suspense!
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Mephi:
And if we don’t want to say this we must say that there are things God can’t know or human operations that remain secret from God.
Wislawa:
This is necessarily entailed in freedom.
Mephi:
Give me biblical, philosophical, or theological evidence that what you are saying can be true. That something in actual existence (human operations or something else) cannot be known exhaustively by a God who is held to be omniscient, infinitely intelligent, and ex-nihilo creator of all reality. This will substantiate your claim about "freedom"
Wislawa:
Hmmm...
___________________
What will Wislawa say? Will he turn Meph into a open view theist? Will Wislawa be turned into a compatibilist as a result of all this?? Will Doc finish his book??? Tune in next time, true believers, for the next episode of "Theologians who Dream about Cross-Dressing Barbara Streisand Impersonators...but Don't Tell Their Wives For Fear of Death!"
-Meph
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| Posted 6/26/2001 6:40 PM (GMT -6) | | hey! Hey! HEY!!!
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I enjoy a cliff hanger as well as the next guy but y'all can't be putting words into the mouth of Doctor Boyd's psuedonym! It just ain't right. Rules is rules. Socrates or no Socrates!
Having said that let me say this, THIS THREAD ROCKS!!!! Ya'll have outdone yourselves. Please tell me this site is being archived and it's not just all going to disappear in a couple of days!!
Glamdring777
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| Posted 6/26/2001 6:41 PM (GMT -6) | | RE: Wholly Open Future Inconceiva ble
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Hello Dr. Boyd:
In your reply to Mephi you wrote the following:
"The "initial conditions" of a system -- the system at a given point in time (T1) -- are such that they may lead to outcomes A or B or C or D at another point in time (T2), depending on variables w,x,y,z. This is what it means to say that a system is "sensitive" to w,x,y, or z. Let us suppose, along with openness cosmology, that this openness to A or B or C or D is genuine. It is ontological, not just epistemological. That is, it is open even to God. Now note, the possible outcomes of the system at T2 are A, B, C, or D. The system is "open" to A, B,C,or D. But it is NOT "open" to A, B, C, D or E. Nor to F, G, H, I, etc.... The system is "settled" relative to the options A, B,C, or D. The future is partly determined. Suppose God, who is omnipotent and therefore can do anything not logically contradictory, decided A and D were unaccepable outcomes. Well and good. He decides to further specify the future of this system such that the possible outcomes are now only C and D. The future is even more partly settled. Suppose, for good and sovereign reasons, God decides to go further and make the only possible outcome D."
I see your point about God's ability to influence creation and bring about his purposes. But isn't the actual closer to "the inital state of point in time T1 could lead to 10 to the power of 56 possible states at T2". For God to select one outcome from so many others would reqire incredible intervention on His part. Depending on the amount of God's willing in His creation, don't you eventually end up in Mephi's court? How much license does God give us? How "tight" is His will?
Mephi, in your system is God constantly micromanaging creation to His will or did He simply so finely balance the initial states that He must only sit back and watch it unfold? (His own interactions taken into account, of course)
still uncertain
Rob
aka - Still_unsure
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| Posted 6/26/2001 6:42 PM (GMT -6) | | Rob Hits a Bullseye!
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Rob says:
Mephi, in your system is God constantly micromanaging creation to His will or (Meph grins) did He simply so finely balance the initial states that He must only sit back and watch it unfold? (His own interactions taken into account, of course)
Meph:
DINGDINGDINGDINGDINGDING!!! We have a winner!!! That's pretty much it! Way to go, Rob!
-Meph
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| Posted 6/26/2001 6:42 PM (GMT -6) | | Yo, Rob
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Still unsure, man?
Meph
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| Posted 6/26/2001 6:43 PM (GMT -6) | | RE: Yo, Rob
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Hi Mephi:
I am still (unfortunately) uncertain. I find the open view more appealing (probably I should say less offensive) than determinism but I'm having trouble reconciling an open future with God's ability to bring about HIS will without having to trash everyone else's anyway.
Your view of God fine tuning the initial conditions of a universe then having it unfold exactly to His will is certainly possible but I am not so sure that this is how OUR universe operates. Are you familliar with Thomas Young's double slit experiment? It demonstrates the wave nature of light(or, as we now know, any particle). He first performed it in 1803. Other experiments of a similar nature have been perfomed more recently which seem to defeat the law of absolute causality. It seems identical initial conditions DO NOT produce identical results. This is why I asked you about your view of God's relationship to the universe. The form of determinism you adhere to may be physically impossible in our universe. Don't get me wrong though, if determinism was proven true tomorrow I would accept it with humility. God is God. Perhaps I should look at process thought...nah, to many new terms to learn.
I'm open to the truth ... someone convnce me! If it's something that can't be known in this life, well, I guess I'll have to wait.
Still unsure but loving the Lord anyway.
Rob
aka - Still_unsure
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| Posted 6/26/2001 6:43 PM (GMT -6) | | Back At Cha, Amigo Rob
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Sup, Rob. Some things.
1) Isn't it true that, with respect to EVERYDAY life, classical Newtonian physics works pretty much EXTREMELY precisely? As a matter of fact, for the discussion of everyday human activity, which is macrocosmic, it appears that determinism is the undisputed rule of the day...much to the disdain of libertarians.
2) The form of determinism that I assert is based upon one principle:
For any given state of reality IN ITS TOTALITY, there is only ONE consequent state of reality that will emerge from it.
Simply put, this means that if EVERY factor about reality is known at any time (For example, that you were actually able to freeze ALL things that exist such that there is NO movement or anything that resembles movement) it would be possible to predict with 100% certainty the consequent state of reality that will emerge from it exhaustively. Now, it could be that I have a bad understanding of quantum theory and chaos theory, but nothing that I've seen so far has disproven this. In other words, I haven't seen anything to truly indicate that there exists a genuinely INDIFFERENCE capacity of any state of reality such that two or more subsequent states of reality are able to emerge from ONE antecedent state. Again, I could very well be wrong, but I don't think so.
More later...maybe.
In Christ,
Meph
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| Posted 6/26/2001 6:44 PM (GMT -6) | | Back to Mephi's Game Analogy
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Hi ya’ll, Back from vacation. Ahhh, so nice, much needed, feel relaxed. Glad to see the conversation on this thread continued on in vigorous form while I was away.
I’m not sure where in this conversation I should jump I, but I think I still owe Mephi a comment on his clever probability game analogy. You’ll recall that in his analogy Mephi attempted to show that on the open view, God can’t know x with certainty if X is the chance result of A, B, or C, where A, B, or C are only more or less probable. If A, B and C each have a one-in-three chance of occurring, and X requires A, B, and C to occur for it to be brought about, the odds of X occurring are 1 in 9. Hence God, who knows all reality perfectly, must know that the probability of X occurring is 1 in 9. He cannot be certain of it.
I appreciate Mephi’s recognition that even to say the probability of X occurring is 1 in 9 – and not 1 in infinity – is to admit that the future is "partly definite." There is no incoherence in the "partly definite partly indefinite" view of the future. Indeed, as I have argued, the idea that the future could be completely indefinite is incoherent, for a "completely indefinite" thing is equivalent to nothingness. ( Incidently, in Trinity and Process I argued that the opposite notion of a completely definite future was equally incoherent, but that is another issue).
Nevertheless, Meph is not yet satisfied, for the kind of definiteness he is contending for is not a definiteness of range, but a definiteness of particularity. The open view cannot ascribe to God 100% certainty of any particularity. This, he argues, is what his probability game analogy demonstrates.
Is he correct? Perhaps, but first I'd like to ring the "definitness of range" thing for all its worth. I would argue that almost all biblical prophecy (where its genunely predictive, and not illustrative as in many NT cases) is covered by the "definiteness of range." For example, the "definiteness of range" accounts for how God can be assured of having a bride, even though each individual who is in the bride could have chosen otherwise.
That being said, does Mephi's probability game analogy show that God can't be certain of any particular x? Prima facia it might appear so. Every future event x arises from some series of events which might have been otherwise, hence it seems that x might have been otherwise. And, it seems, the probability of x being what it is is no greater than the sum of the probabilities of the events that led to it. IN short, it cannot be certain.
But this, in fact, doesn’t necessarily follow. X can be certain even if the events A, B, and C that led to it are merely probable if there were other merely probable events that could have led to X and the probability of all possible events leading to x amount to 100%. To illustrate, If A B and C lead to x, and A1, B1 and C1 lead to x, and A2, B2 and C2 lead to x, and any combination of the factors of the three series lead to x, then the chance of x occurring is 100% even if the odds of any particular factor in any series occurring is only 1 in 3. Note, once x occurs the particular series that lead to it had only a 1 in 9 chance of taking place. Hence it looks as though the chance of x occurring was 1 in 9. (In this sense, every particular contingent fact in reality looks infinitely improbable, for theew was a (theoretically) infinite number of contingent variables that lead to it.) In fact, however, the chance of x occurring by some series or other was 100%.
Mephi’s game probability analogy establishes that God cannot have 100% certain knowledge of x only in cases where x can ONLYcome about by the merely probable series A, B and C, not by any other merely probable series. But it does not rule out any certain divine knowledge where x could have been brought about by some other merely probable series.
Hence, in the open view, the future can be partly definite, and known by God with 100% accuracy, in cases where:
a) the range of merely probable options is definite
b) a particular event x is certain to come to pass by merely probable means, when the total sum of all possible means of bringing x about amounts to 100%
c) a particular event x is certain because it’s occurrence is not contingent upon other merely probable events. (viz. the events leading to x are now historically necessary or God unilaterally decides to bring about x)
If a future event was demonstrated to be a) certain to God while b) dependent on a particular merely-probable series events such that no other merely-probable series could have brought it about, then I think we would have a difficult argument for the open view of the future to handle.
Lets get concrete. The two best candidates of such instances in Scripture are the Josiah prophecy mentioned by in 1 Kings, cited earlier by Mephi, and the prediction of Cyrus in Isaiah 42 or 43 (I believe). Here individuals are a) named before they or their parents are born andb) have a particular deed ascribed to them before they are born. Josiah would tear town pagan altars and Cyrus would led the children of Israel to return to their homeland. Both individuals, and both deeds, appear to be the result of merely probable decisions of people. Consider all the decisions that had to be coordinated to ensure that the parents of these two would be born, their names would be what they are and they would do what the prophecies about them say they would do.
The open view explains these two episodes by pointing out that:
a) while the odds that the particular people who turned out to be the parents of Josiah and Cyrus would be born was small, the odds that someone would be the parents of Josiah and Cyrus was 100% -- obviously, for if Josiah and Cyrus didn’t have parents, they wouldn’t have existed.
b) while the odds that the parents of Josiah and Cyrus would be named "Josiah" and "Cyrus" seem small, given the number of possible names their parents could have chosen, there’s nothing in the open view to prevent God from occasionallyacting the way Calvinists say he always acts and unilaterally ensuring that the parents are inclined to the point of certainty to name their kids what he wants them to be named. (he could do this by a variety of creative ways, if he desired, as attested to by the case of Zacheus and John the Baptist. See Lk 1). This unilateral action restricts the freedom of the parents in this one respect, but this no more undermines the general morally responsible freedom of the parents in life than does (say) their size and weight and place of habitation restricts their freedom in other respects.
c) while the odds that Josiah and Cyrus would choose to do the deeds the prophecy ascribes to them seem small, we can imagine, if we try, a large number of ways that God could have steered influences into their lives to lead them in this direction. If he needed to, there again is nothing in the open view to prevent God from occasionally acting like Calvinists say he always acts and unilaterally ensuring that Josiah tear down the pagan altars and Cyrus lets the people go. (On the open view, the metaphysical price to be paid for this unilateral action would be that, if Josiah and/or Cyrus acted contrary to the character they had already acquired with their morally responsible freedom, their deeds would have had no genuinely virtuous quality to them. )
Against all this, if it could be proven that the naming of Josiah and Cyrus, and the predicted deeds they carried out, were the results of merely probable causes and could not have been brought about by any other merely probable means or by God’s unilateral activity, then these two cases would provide good cases against the open view.
(Even if this were established, however [ and its hard for me to imagine how it could] an open theist would be justified in holding to her position if the difficulties accrued by abandoning her position were greater than the difficulty of these two cases.]
Enough for now. I probably should think about sleeping someday.
Blessings
Doc
aka - GregBoyd
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| Posted 6/26/2001 6:44 PM (GMT -6) | | RE: Back to Mephi's Game Analogy
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Doc (and all)-
I didn't know where to stick this post. This seemed a good place.
Does anyone know if Calvin every interacted with Aquinas’ notion that God is “timeless”? I constantly have Calvinist friends argue that God “foresees” the future from his “eternal now.” But did Calvinist ever specifically affirm or deny the concept of timelessness? If not, does not his theology presuppose (with the OV) that the future does not, properly speaking, “exist” out there somewhere in the future?
Tom
PS Will comment later on your reply to Meph. Great thread!
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| Posted 6/26/2001 6:45 PM (GMT -6) | | Alright!
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This is gonna be SOOO sweet. Stay tuned, true believers. Doc, you won't believe your eyes...
-Meph
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| Posted 6/26/2001 6:45 PM (GMT -6) | | RE: Back At Cha, Amigo Rob
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Hey Mephi:
I agree with your first premise, Newton's clockwork universe SEEMS to be the rule of the day for us at the macroscopic level. Now, in your second statement you said the following:
"if EVERY factor about reality is known at any time (For example, that you were actually able to freeze ALL things that exist such that there is NO movement or anything that resembles movement) it would be possible to predict with 100% certainty the consequent state of reality that will emerge from it exhaustively. "
Unfortunately, we apparently CAN know every factor and NOT know subsequent future states. Even if only at the macrosopic level, the ability for particles to have more than one subsequent state after begining IN THE EXACT SAME INITIAL STATE nullifies your form of determinism. Are you not afraid of Sproul's "maverick molecule"?
We return to your game analogy with God still unable to predict the future with 100% accuracy. Remember chaos 's "sensitivity to initial conditions"? It certainly applies here. Please correct me if I am wrong but Pierre Simon de Laplace's determinism has to be abandoned.
Or so says I.
Rob
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| Posted 6/26/2001 6:46 PM (GMT -6) | | Quite Puzzled
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Rob,
You said:
"Unfortunately, we apparently CAN know every factor and NOT know subsequent future states. Even if only at the macrosopic level, the ability for particles to have more than one subsequent state after begining IN THE EXACT SAME INITIAL STATE nullifies your form of determinism.
Meph:
Please explain this further. It sounds to me like some things are being very confused here with quantum theory and chaos theory. Be as detailed as you can, please. For my sake.
Meph
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| Posted 6/26/2001 6:46 PM (GMT -6) | | RE: Alright!
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The thrill, the tension, the suspense, the anticipation...how is one to stand it?
with baited breath
Doc
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| Posted 6/26/2001 6:47 PM (GMT -6) | | After You, Tom. You Genius, You...
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Yo, Tom. I want to wait until you post, big dawg. I figure you have some good stuff to say. Plus I want to see if you saw what I saw. Do your thing, my man.
Meph
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| Posted 6/26/2001 6:47 PM (GMT -6) | | RE: Quite Puzzled
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Hi Mephi:
I will borrow heavily from Gerald Schroeder and refer you again to Young's double slit experiment. If you take an opaque plate and cut a slit in it that is equal to or smaller than the wavelength of light(0.4-0.7 thousands of a millimeter), when you shine a light through this slit you can diffract the light "waves".( Just as any wave will diffract if it passes through an opening smaller than it's wavelenghth.) A screen held behind the plate will show a band of light with fuzzy edges.
Now, if you cut two slits and shine light through them something interesting happens, instead of two fuzzy bands of light, you get alternating light and dark bands. The wave nature of light is manifested in this interference pattern. In 1905, Einstein performed an experiment(which I will not go into detail about) called the photo electric effect. His experiment showed that light travelled in packets of energy(particles).So here we have a paradox of duality. How do particles cancel one another out to produce interference patterns? This riddle hasn't yet been solved. In theory all matter has this duality.
Returning to our slitted plate, if we use a maser and fire one atom at a time at our slits and replace our screen with photographic emulsion when one slit is covered eventually we will see the expected fuzzy band(after many shots of course). Now the good part. Open both slits and again fire one atom at a time. You would expect to see two fuzzy bands but amazingly the interference patern returns. Each atom is a single entity, with a fixed locality, in it's passage through one slit, why should opening or closing the other have any effect on it? Very bizzare. It gets worse. Place a particle detector near either slit so you will know when a particle has passed through it and suddenly the wave nature of light disappears. Our emulsion will shown only two fuzzy bands. The particles not only know if one or two slits are open, they know if anyone is watching their course. You can sy to me "the detector must have effected the particles passed through the watched slit". Perhaps, but how does the detector effect the ones passing through the other slit? These experiments mark the end of the line for causality in classical physics. Causality requires that if the initial conditions are identical, so must be the outcomes. Not so for these particles, the results were arbitrary. Where each particle fell on the screen was affected by a second slit through which it did not pass. As far as the particle was concerned, the identicl conditions produced nonidentical results. de Laplace's determinism can be categorized with Newtonian physics, Euclidean geometry and linear equations as simply a good APPROXIMATION of creation. Think about it, if God wanted to create a universe where free will was possible, can you think of a better way than to build indeterminism into the very fabric from which it's substance is made?
Rob
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| Posted 6/26/2001 6:47 PM (GMT -6) | | RE: After You, Tom. You Genius, You...
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Meph-
You’re gonna have to sail this channel alone dude. My head is stuck in Doc’s “cosmic/anthropocentric” dualism hanging on the cross. I’m freakin!
Tom
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| Posted 6/26/2001 6:48 PM (GMT -6) | | RE: RE: Quite Puzzled
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Ok. I think I see something. I'll do this in the form of questions, because I want to slowly develop this:
1) All of the interesting outcomes that were in Young's experiment. Were they repeated, over and again...or did they just happen once and never again? In other words, the experiment ITSELF. Was it replicated in full?
2) What is your understanding of causality and determinism?
3) What is your understanding of chaos theory and "initial states"?
Hope you don't mind me playing riddler for a sec, but I think this will be important. Let's plug away at this.
Meph
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| Posted 6/26/2001 6:48 PM (GMT -6) | | RE: RE: RE: Quite Puzzled
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Everyone,
Before I enter this fray, let me say how much I appreciate this site, and all of you. As you all are probably aware, there is a dearth of Christians willing or even able to discuss issues on this level. These intelligent and generally non-hostile exchanges (except for occasional ranting visitors) are truly wonderful. The mental stimulation is great, and complements to Wislawa on her marvelous sense of humor.
It's hard to keep up with all these postings and arguments when life is busy. But I'll try to ad a few thoughts later. May you find them less boring than this note.
Peace.
Sincerely,
Unworthy
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| Posted 6/26/2001 6:49 PM (GMT -6) | | RE: RE: Quite Puzzled
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Still Unsure Says: "Think about it, if God wanted to create a universe where free will was possible, can you think of a better way than to build indeterminism into the very fabric from which it's substance is made?"
Doc: Bingo, my friend. Robert Kane makes this point in The Significance of Freedom. Check out some of Lucas' work on this. But the best, in my opinion, is the Nobel Prize physist turned theologian John Polkinghorne. He argues that from quantum mechanics as well as from chaos theory, complexity theory and thermodynamics, "we are presented with a picture of the world that is neither mechanical nor chaotic, but at once both open and orderly in its character." J. Polkinghorne, "The Quantum World," in Physics, Philosophy and Theology, 341. Partly open, partly settled reality. Bingo. In his work Quarks, Chaos & Christianity, Polkinghorne relates this openness to God’s love which grants the world independence (hence a role for chance) as well as to God’s faithfulness which gives the world its regularity. This is also what allows for freedom.
Since you express an knowledge of, and interest in, modern scientific thought and how it relates to indeterminism and freedom, here's a few of the works I most stimulating. I. Prigogine and M. Sanglier, The Laws of Nature and Human Conduct (Brussels: Task Force of Research Information and the Study of Science, 1985); I. Prigogine, From Being to Becoming (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1980); idem. and G. Nicolis, Exploring Complexity; Waldrop, Complexity; Z. Nitecki, R. C. Robinson, eds., Global Theory of Dynamical Systems (Proceedings: Northwestern, 1979); B. Weber, D. Depew and J. Smith, eds. Entropy, Information and Evolution (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988)’ I. Stewart, Does God Play Dice? The Mathematics of Chaos (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989) ; L. Glass, M. Mackey, From Clocks to Chaos: The Rhythms of Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), and finally, and most recently (for me) Del Rae, The Cosmic Dance (a wonderful odd and insightful world renowned physcist who elucidates how reality is composed as a dance of form and freedom.)
All of these works, in various ways, argue that the paradigm emerging from various fields of science today entails a world that is orderly while open, chance and deterministic, free with structure.
-Doc
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| Posted 6/26/2001 6:51 PM (GMT -6) | | Thank you Unworthy
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Unworthy notes: "let me say how much I appreciate this site, and all of you. As you all are probably aware, there is a dearth of Christians willing or even able to discuss issues on this level. These intelligent and generally non-hostile exchanges (except for occasional ranting visitors) are truly wonderful. The mental stimulation is great, and complements to Wislawa on her marvelous ."
Doc: Thanks tons unworthy. This is why Christus Victor hosts such a site.
-doc
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| Posted 6/26/2001 6:53 PM (GMT -6) | | Heh riddler???
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Meph, you are so cruel. I've been waiting with baited breadth for you to show me what you "see." You set me up for like this huge revelational slam. You cat, you toy with me, a little mouse, for mere amusement. Come on bro. Give it to me. Bring it on. Hit me in the jimmy! Thank you capitan, may I have another! I can take it. Hit me. I can't take the suspense any longer! Pull the trigger or I'll crack.
Time to go back to work. I love the escape from reality this board affords. Don't you?
Doc
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| Posted 6/26/2001 6:53 PM (GMT -6) | | RE: Heh riddler???
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Before I go back to reality, I just felt in a particularly generous mood and wanted to supplement Unsure's reading list (and that of other interested parties) a bit more.
On the new paradigm of freedom and structure as complimentary principle emerging in science, and how it may relate to theology, see K. Ward, "God as a Principle of Cosmological Explanation," in Physics, Philosophy, and Theology: A Common Quest for Understanding, R. J. Russell, W. R. Stoeger, G. V. Coyne, eds. (Vatican Observatory, Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1988), 249-54. (All the essays in this collection are worth the time to study.) See also a nice little book by D. J. Barthalomew, God of Chance (London: SCM Press, 1984). He notes that the world emerging from quantum physics is "a world of orderliness but not of clockwork regularity, of potentiality without predictability, endowed with an assurance of development but with a certain openness as to its actual form. It is inevitably a world with ragged edges, where order and disorder interlace each other and where the exploration of possibility by chance will lead not only to the evolution of systems of increasing complexity, endowed with new possibilities, but also to the evolution of systems imperfectly formed and malfunctioning." Ibid., 49. Great quote, heh? Conservative theologians may find the Open model of reality unintelligible, but if so, the bulk of contemporary scientists are talking nonsense! In truth, its the one view that squares with both our ordinary experience and science (which, Mephi, is why this view is not rooted in naive realism. )
Of related interested, for a great work showing that many branches of science are moving toward a view of time as open ended and irreversible, see P. Coveney, R. Highfield, The Arrow of Time (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1990). A seminal work arguing for the irreversibility of time is I. Prigogine’s From Being to Becoming (W. H. Freeman, San Francisco, 1980).
That should keep ya'll busy for a while. I want a report on my desk at the end of the summer -- says the prof.
Doc
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Date Joined Jun 2001
Total Posts : 516
| Posted 6/26/2001 6:54 PM (GMT -6) | | RE: RE: RE: Quite Puzzled
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Hi Doc:
Thanks for the list of titles, I'm going to try to get my hands on some of them. I'm very interested in Polkinghorne, I have not read any of his works but have heard many good comments. I was wondering how specific you feel God's plans for creation are. He obviously has set some limits to it(settledness) as you pointed out earlier. Most prophecy I am aware of in the bible is something He could easily bring to pass rather than it being something I would say had to be a prediction of the future. So, do you feel He has a specific "destination for creation"? (That's kinda catchy, reminds me, after rereading my response to Mephi I thought about making some T-shirts with "Who's afraid of the Maverick Molecule?" on them. Anyone want one?)
Rob
aka - still_unsure
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Registered Member
Date Joined Jun 2001
Total Posts : 516
| Posted 6/26/2001 6:54 PM (GMT -6) | | RE: RE: RE: Quite Puzzled
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Hi Mephi:
In answer to question #1- Yes, they are easily replicated, in fact Young's original experiment is performed in many science classrooms.
#2 I don't imply that there are such things as effects with no causes, only that identical effects don't always follow identical causes. Simon de Laplace's Determinism is an imposition on creation by men who didn't fully understand reality.
#3 My understanding of Chaos theory is decicdely basic. I am trying to improve it continually though. When I refer to "initial states" I mean "all aspects of the object or event at that point in time".
If you find these experiments interesting, I will relate what I know about others that are even spookier!
talk at you later
Rob
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