For debate:EarthScienceguy wrote: ...
The universe could not exist in the form that it is in unless there was an omnipresent, omnipotent, and omniscient God.
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Please offer some means to confirm the referenced claim is true and factual.
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For debate:EarthScienceguy wrote: ...
The universe could not exist in the form that it is in unless there was an omnipresent, omnipotent, and omniscient God.
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No, you are not understanding information theory. Information has to exist somewhere therefore there is no such information. Where is it that God could not exist or does not exist? So when you can find a place where God is not get back with me.You haven't answered the questions, and you haven't solved the contradiction. How does the god know it exists everywhere and at all times? How does any being know that there isn't anything left to know?
What? That is what the whole infinity discussion was about.I never said time. You have not understood what I wrote if that is how you took it. I ask that you re-read it, and then comment on it. Since you still haven't answered the question about how you know that a god exists outside of space and time, you might want to cover that first. Then you can explain why my math doesn't show that living in the now means no existence at all.
I exist. You exist (I think). Therefore something has to be eternal. Since we exist something has to have always had to exist something had to be the first cause of everything. In Sean Carroll's universe, it is a "mother" universe in which entropy moves in both directions. For Christians the first eternal cause is God. The discussion is not whether something is eternal or not. The question that everyone has to answer for themselves is what has existed eternally.Eternal: If a being is eternal it can never get to the point in it's existence where it creates a universe. It would take an eternity before it did that, and of course there is no end to eternity.
The block universe theory states: the universe is a giant block of all the things that ever happen at any time and at any place. On this view, the past, present and future all exist — and are equally real.So why pray then? If we don't actually have free will (which we clearly don't if the future is already determined) then there is zero point to prayer. If a MGB is all knowing then free will is impossible. You were going to heaven or hell before you were born. You might want to explain the claims of miracles then too by the way, and also why prayers are sometimes answered. If prayer is to align our desires with the god, why do they sometimes work according to the claims of believers?
Kenisaw said:What are you talking about? Where did I say that the past present and future do not all exist? I was pointing out that your claim about what Einstein said was false.
Einstein did not say that. Here is where people get that from, in a letter he wrote to someone about the death of someone close (Michele Besso). “Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. For us believing physicists the distinction between past, present, and future only has the meaning of an illusion, though a persistent one.” He was not stating that the past, present, and future all exist at the same time. Einstein proved that time is relative, so that it can be experienced at different rates by different people, relative to each other. Each person would still experience time the same way, but it would appear that others were experiencing it either faster or slower. Everyone would still experience it though, and experience it in a certain direction. If it were possible for a person to travel at light speed then time would stop for that person, relative to others, but the trip (no matter how long) would be over the instant it began. At no point, however, do you experience BEFORE the trip at the same time AS the trip. Einstein knew this all too well since he figured out relativity.
I'm too much of a naturalist/reductionist to look at things too far outside of those boundaries. If a packet of photons or sound waves are traveling through space then they exist as those things indpendent of whether any eyes or ears happen to get in their way and intercept them for conversion into "information."I'm curious to know how you would consider this in terms of information.
I was thinking it's only really information on the perceiving, but William says or implies the information is there whether we perceive it or not.
Yes. Otherwise they would be called 'light' or 'sound' rather than light and sound.There are major differences between light and sound in terms of their mechanisms and how we perceive them.
Light can be "happy"?Light can behave like a particle in some instances (eg. the photoelectric effect for which Einstein's explanation won him the Nobel Prize in 1921) and like a wave in others (eg. diffraction and refraction). Unlike sound, light needs no medium to travel in and is happy to propagate in a vacuum.
The definitive mechanism for how this universe came into existence has yet to be found. It is an unsolved problem, therefore any explanation involving a god being (of any description) is just another hypothesis waiting to be substantiated (or not). Ditto for the "Big Bang" and other ideas derived from modern physics and observations, although these at least have some observational support (unlike god beings). There is no proof that an "eternal first cause" is necessary.What eternal first cause do you believe that created this universe?
Nope. It is already information.If a packet of photons or sound waves are traveling through space then they exist as those things indpendent of whether any eyes or ears happen to get in their way and intercept them for conversion into "information."
Nope. Rather it is information which is then processed decoded understood. Otherwise you are arguing that it is not information until it is made into [created into] information.I would argue that "information" (to a human) is only created when the photons are processed by the apparatus of the eye, retina, optic nerve and visual cortex to create the perception of an image in the brain. Without that mechanism the photons are just photons as described by physics, and don't contain any "information" themselves (or maybe they could be said to contain "potential" information?).
DrNoGods wrote: ↑Tue May 18, 2021 1:06 pm [Replying to EarthScienceguy in post #32]
How is this even a logical statement? If the universe had a beginning then something had to cause the existence of the universe. Unless you believe in some sort of static universe theory.There is no proof that an "eternal first cause" is necessary.
Open questions in science do not mean that we know nothing of the answer. We know the parameters that the open questions have to fall in, by observations that we can make.
According to Einstein's theory of relativity, there can be no such thing as free will without a creator God.
Nope. It is already information.
How do you then distinguish betweem "information" in a bare, single photon with the "information" that results from the processing of many photons (or even a single photon in some cases)? The perception of an image in the brain is information that results from a chain of physical processing steps between capturing light by the eye and the visual cortex creating the image perception. This perception of an image is not present in the photons when they entered the eye ... they have no "knowledge" of this potential image being produced so cannot be associated with that information (the image). They are simply the feedstock that the eye/brain path uses to ultimately create the perception of the image in the brain.Nope. Rather it is information which is then processed decoded understood. Otherwise you are arguing that it is not information until it is made into [created into] information.
Is this your definition of information then? That sounds like a completely generic definition where virtually anything that physically exists can be described as "information", if it can be used in any way to create other types of information. Not a particularly useful definition of information.But it has always been information... In Formation.
How do you know the universe had a beginning?How is this even a logical statement? If the universe had a beginning then something had to cause the existence of the universe.
Exactly my point. There is some observational and theoretical support for a hypothesis like the Big Bang, whereas there is nothing of the sort for the hypothesis that a god being created the universe (or exists at all).Open questions in science do not mean that we know nothing of the answer. We know the parameters that the open questions have to fall in, by observations that we can make.
What? How is that even a logical statement (to steal your phrase)? The TOR (Special or General) says nothing about free will, or creator gods.According to Einstein's theory of relativity, there can be no such thing as free will without a creator God.
Nope. It is already information.
Nope. Definitions are simply ways in which the information is decoded. Definitions produce further information but the information defined might be incorrect.That depends on your definition of the word "information."
I often wondered how a scientists mind works and have discovered through that, that they focus on the things of the thing, rather than the thing Itself.A photon travels as an electromagnetic wave where the energy is continuously oscillating between electric and magnetic fields. It has certain characteristics such as an energy (E = h*v where v is frequency and h is Planck's constant), a speed in vacuum (c = 2.99792458e10 cm/s), and a speed in a material with an index of refraction n (c2 = c/n). What "information" does this represent for the "bare" photon....
...What "information" exists in a single photon, by itself?
Yes and we have information through that. We observe that it travels. Thus we can say that it is propelled by some force to do so.A photon travels
So the universe is the information it is conveying? How does such a definition help in any way to understand what "information" actually is? It suggests that virtually everything in the universe is information, making the meaning of the word ambiguous.The universe is that which conveys the information at the same time as it is being the information.