Certain people can't ever get it right

[IHAQ]

The Mormon "eternal now" idea is sheer nonsense.

It would be to anyone that believes that you’re born and then you die. Full stop.

Regards,
MG

I note you only partially quoted the line from the deans post. Here's the bit you (deliberately?) missed off...

Feel free to show otherwise by defining it.

Will you be defining it anytime soon?

[Physics Guy]

I also don't see any real connection between the so-called heap paradox and infinity. Infinities are weird but they are not ill-defined the way heaps are.

Maybe that's a connection in a way, though. From ample experience with language problems like the heap paradox, mathematics has learned never to rely on vague intuitive notions like "heap" but to insist on careful formal definitions. In so doing it has deliberately moved the concept of definition itself away from trying to say what anything means—because what does that even mean?—to saying only how and when you are allowed to say whatever it is.

That way lies madness, or at least a level of abstraction that is hard for meat-brained creatures like us. It leads to counter-intuitive concepts like transfinite numbers, where the number of powers of 17 is the same as the number of all other numbers. Mathematics says, Deal with it, because at least it's better than chasing our own tails all the time in our own clumsy definition and constantly confusing logical necessity with our own meat-brained inability to think outside some little box. In the mathematical way we may be confused but at least we'll be confused about something real and not just about some inadvertently self-contradictory fiction that we made up incompetently.

About the limited predictive power of biology: the Physics Guy snickers smugly. As Ernest Rutherford put it, perhaps because he was miffed at getting his Nobel Prize in Chemistry, "All science is either physics or stamp collecting." In comparison with the strong predictive power of theoretical physics, the best that other sciences can do is just to gather empirical facts and try to arrange them in patterns. Explaining things in hindsight, which evolutionary biology loves to do, for example, is an entertaining but inherently dubious exercise. The real test that your theory is on the right track is successful prediction and biology still doesn't do that so well.

It's not biologists' fault, of course. Physicists are only smarter than others in one way: we were smart enough to get our big cheat in right at the start before anyone really noticed what we were doing. We defined our subject to be, "All the easy stuff." That's the real definition of physics. As soon as it gets hard, we just bail, and say that that stuff is chemistry. We rarely even catch sight of biology. It would give us conniptions.

So I'm not blaming biologists at all for the difficulty of their job, which we by definition wimped out of attempting. Still it's a problem that should not be ignored, how much of what passes for biological theory consists of teleological Just So stories.

At least for now it seems like a real possibility that hardly any of evolutionary history was anywhere near as inevitable as our retrospective justifications make it seem. Perhaps everything that has led to us has been merely contingent. Perhaps the fixed laws of nature really leave enormous leeway in how biospheres can evolve, and most of the important facts of our existence have no deeper cause than the apparently arbitrary details of the initial conditions of the universe.

If that's true, then it means we may never get any much better explanation for a lot of things than, "God saw that it was good." You can replace the word "God" by whatever you want; the form of statement remains and it disappoints me but that may just be life.

[Chap]

Physicists are only smarter than others in one way: we were smart enough to get our big cheat in right at the start before anyone really noticed what we were doing. We defined our subject to be, "All the easy stuff." That's the real definition of physics. As soon as it gets hard, we just bail, and say that that stuff is chemistry. We rarely even catch sight of biology. It would give us conniptions.

Heh, heh! You just gave away a valuable secret.

Working in a school system where one specialised early, I chose at the age of 16 to do just plain physics and lots of maths, and since I was lucky to be in a school with excellent teachers I ended up with a nice scholarship to a good university. On the whole, my kids took my advice and profited from it. Fairly intelligent, but lazy enough so you just want to learn principles that stick once you have grasped them and are hard to forget (like being able to ride a bicycle), and no arbitrary facts to cram? Physics and maths is the way to go!

[mentalgymnast]

The Mormon "eternal now" idea is sheer nonsense.

It would be to anyone that believes that you’re born and then you die. Full stop.

Regards,
MG

I note you only partially quoted the line from the deans post. Here's the bit you (deliberately?) missed off...

Feel free to show otherwise by defining it.

Will you be defining it anytime soon?

Ha ha. Right.

It’s like trying to define a heap.

Would you care to throw out your hard fast definition of eternity/infinity? Some of the greatest minds , including some bright folks on this board, have attempted...attempted...to do so.

My point was that a secularist/agnostic is unlikely to at least entertain the possibility that they are living IN and as part of eternity. And will continue in what might be referred to as the eternal now. For lack of better words to describe it. Rather they think that we are living as a finite beings that will simply snuff out someday, like the sun.

But much sooner.

Regards,
MG

[honorentheos]

The answer Physics Guy gave answers your request MG.

When you use those terms you are doing so from a different place that ignores the more specific descriptions already discussed.

Suppose you want to discuss infinity as a way of describing God. It's how Mormonism defines it in the D&C as well. So if you describe God's love as infinite, you are just repeating the vagueness of God=eternal as interchangable in the language used. It's essentially saying God's love = God's love. You want that defined while ignoring everything else that's been shared? Well, what's to be done about that other than recognize you aren't going anywhere with this that is meaningful?

[Chap]

At what point would time become eternity? I ask this from a perspective of looking at time as part of an eternal now.

The Mormon "eternal now" idea is sheer nonsense.

It would be to anyone that believes that you’re born and then you die. Full stop.

Regards,
MG

I note you only partially quoted the line from the deans post. Here's the bit you (deliberately?) missed off...

Feel free to show otherwise by defining it.

Will you be defining it anytime soon?

Ha ha. Right.

It’s like trying to define a heap.

Would you care to throw out your hard fast definition of eternity/infinity? Some of the greatest minds , including some bright folks on this board, have attempted...attempted...to do so.

Look, you are the guy who introduced the idea of eternity to this thread - aren't you? So go on, tell us clearly what it means.

If it's just another of those vague terms that can shift its meaning to accommodate the taste and rhetorical needs of the user from moment to moment (and goodness knows we see enough of those on this board), then maybe we would be better off leaving this concept out of the discussion altogether?

[Physics Guy]

Fairly intelligent, but lazy enough so you just want to learn principles that stick once you have grasped them and are hard to forget (like being able to ride a bicycle), and no arbitrary facts to cram? Physics and maths is the way to go!

Yes, but I am now suffering from this. My policy for many years has been to try to know as little as possible except for knowing how to reconstruct as much as possible from first principles whenever I might need it. This has made my professional expertise into a sort of highly compressed file which can be uncompressed into a large volume, but which takes a bit of time to uncompress. So I'm an ignoramus who can upgrade into an expert on a wide range of topics by unpacking the relevant files for a while, and I like this better than having a more limited range of knowledge that's more immediately accessible.

Once I'm finished with a topic for a while, I seem to dump the uncompressed data pretty thoroughly. I may retain a few edits to the core principles but I discard all the uncompressed details and soon forget them completely. Within a couple of years of finishing my PhD I failed to recognise my own dissertation when someone asked me about it. I didn't remember writing any of it at all and said that must have been someone else.

The problem now is that I am teaching an online course on basic quantum theory, so I have to uncompress a lot of stuff every week. It isn't fun any more. But okay, it's a job, and a very good job as jobs go. I can hardly complain. But I'm seeing a downside to my longstanding strategy.

[dastardly stem]

It certainly appears to me he's pointing at the paradox of infinity and saying, "And there is God".

For minds greater than mine, where does the Sorites Paradox, or the paradox of the heap, fit in with your discussion of infinity?

Regards,
MG

I'm not really following where you want to go with this question, as it doesn't seem to apply as I see it. But I also reconsidered Craig's argument since I last posted here.

Previously I attempted to point out that Craig's premises seem problematic. I wanted to change premise 1 because it felt like a leap from premise 1 to 2. He says, everything that begins to exist has a cause. And we just say ok, because even if we can say some photon has no discernable cause, we get simplistic and think well yes if we're talking about the existence of things like bicycles and canned tuna fish having causes, then everything like that has a cause. But then he jumps to the "universe begins to exist", and it makes me wonder who he's trying to fool. Agreeing that everything that begins to exist assumes, only, everything in the universe begins to exist and can't apply to the universe itself. Everything goes dark for us when we want to ask the question what caused the universe. We haven't perceived anything outside it. It feels like a sneaky way to argue God is creeping around in the darkness to me. "we don't know anything about a point prior to that expansion 13.7 billion years ago, therefore it must be God!" It feels like a way to argue a God of the gaps while claiming ones not arguing a god of the gaps.

It really makes me want to concede the point of a cause, which is the result of his argument, and then point out his premise that it must be God, as if he's creating a cumulative case, is easily rejected since it's simply a false premise--a statement suggesting something that is undefined and unverifiable.

Craig's point on infinity is simply to say you can't go back forever in time...something had to start as a logical inference. Going back forever doesn't seem to make sense in time. To me he's simply using that paradox of infinity as a means to argue God. He usually tacks an expansion onto the argument for cause by stating that the cause must be a timeless, spaceless unembodied mind. I don't see how that can be an acceptable premise because there is nothing in that description but words that are as paradoxical as is infinity--which he argues can't possibly be something real--and infinity of time since its paradoxical.

It's a pretzelled mess when you contemplate the parts he puts into the argument for a cause of the universe, somehow arriving at God. But he's smart and is an apologist so he wins because millions of people will hear his erudition and be satisfied.

[dastardly stem]

No. But, I'll give you this, it might make sense in Mormonism.

Mormon leaders waged a war of common sense on Christian theology. They tried to make theology concrete and work out logically in material terms. They didn't do a very good job, but that's beside the point. The point is, as you know from the D&C, Joseph Smith tried to solve the conceptual problems of infinity by simply banishing it:

Yes, thanks for pointing this out.

Still find it curious that Dr Peterson is so keen on Dr Craig and his arguments for God. Dr Craig, as far as I can find, only argues for a traditional God on precisely the basis that this God is immaterial. Peterson's fawning love for Craig does nothing for Peterson's position. It does nothing for Peterson's position on God. If Craig has a point, in fact, it only helps demonstrate the weakness of Peterson's position. I guess in a way, then, it's good that Peterson relies on his intuition that Craig is smarter-est than Hitchens. It puts his position clearly below them both, in terms of credibility. Pretty funny, though, that he doesn't realize that.

[Gadianton]

Look, you are the guy who introduced the idea of eternity to this thread - aren't you? So go on, tell us clearly what it means.

Just to clarify one thing, Chap, MG is on the hook for defining more than mere eternity.

My point was that a secularist/agnostic is unlikely to at least entertain the possibility that they are living IN and as part of eternity. And will continue in what might be referred to as the eternal now.

IHAQ and myself are not looking for a definition of infinity or eternity from MG, but for a definition of the "eternal now".

It’s like trying to define a heap.

LOL! How cute. MG figures out a way to give nebulous woo of any kind a free pass based on the intractability of the heap problem. If MG wishes to move the goal posts and say the "eternal now" is slippery in the same way a "heap" is slippery, which is to say; as we can't precisely define a heap, we can't precisely define an "eternal now", then fine, we grant his moving of the goal posts. But he is on the hook for providing the reasons an "eternal now" is a slippery idea. Physic's guy explained the the heap problem with laser clarity. It's now MG's turn to explain the "eternal now" problem with the same laser precision.

MG? let's get to work, buddy.

MG asked, pompously:

Would you care to throw out your hard fast definition of eternity/infinity?

Let's review the standard definitions.

Looking back over the last 2,500 years of use of the term “infinite,” three distinct senses stand out: actually infinite, potentially infinite, and transcendentally infinite. These will be discussed in more detail below, but briefly, the concept of potential infinity treats infinity as an unbounded or non-terminating process developing over time. By contrast, the concept of actual infinity treats the infinite as timeless and complete. Transcendental infinity is the least precise of the three concepts and is more commonly used in discussions of metaphysics and theology to suggest transcendence of human understanding or human capability.

It's reasonable to assume "eternity" simply means infinite time, with the term "infinite" needing to get locked down according to one of the three proposed modalities of infinity. We've seen that the Mormon scriptures punt and go the transcendental route. But perhaps something has been overlooked? MG will need to weigh his options as that will be the first step towards explaining the problem of the "eternal now".

Let's get back to this:

My point was that a secularist/agnostic is unlikely to at least entertain the possibility that they are living IN and as part of eternity. And will continue in what might be referred to as the eternal now.

I have no problem entertaining the possibility if MG can explain what is meant by "eternal now" with half of the clarity that Physic's Guy explained a "heap". If that's a Herculean task, I understand, and I don't think anyone will think less of MG if he were to refer to an Encyclopedia or other standard work that provides a summary of what is meant by "eternal now". In fact, we'd all probably respect him much more for it.

Atheists notwithstanding, why would a Theist be any more likely to entertain the possibility of living in an "eternal now", if nobody can provide a clue as to what an "eternal now" actually is? Does William Lane Craig think he lives in an "Eternal Now", MG? Do you think Craig is more open to it than I am?