The old testament says teaches that God can order you to slay your family. This was never revoked in the new testament. Christians allegiance is to someone besides their families, if you are to follow the Bible

Christianity has also hijacked the idea of a family friendly culture. It use to be Church law in the dark ages that children of priests were to be enslaved. Instead of getting to know their father, they were made slaves.

If the plank length is the smallest length, than it not zero. Therefore you can make a right triangle with it. Half the hypotenuse is smaller than the Plank length. There you go

If someone can commit murder and God can step in and wipe it clean, that's evil. I don't want to hear excuses like "he repented and so God wiped it clean". If it is true and complete repentance than it would wipe one clean by itself and what even is left after that for God to wipe clean? God is irrelevent to this, except as a helper. We all need help, but forget asking "God" for it. Many of us swim in Kantian ether all day. No chance of something coming from another dimension. No elephants walking through my area from dimension 11

An eternal run from truth saying "no substance, no substance" leads to an infinite regress, which sounds like hell. Phenomenology might be a start, Buddhism might be better. John Paul II said in his book on hope that Buddhists are atheists and cut themselves off from creation as the handiwork of God. Is the discussion between Buddhism and Christianity one about truth and its nature (and thus related to this thread)?

Christianity doesn't just say that God helps you with grace to forgive yourself and others. Many say that Jesus's death washes the sin away (is the "prime mover" in this). Catholicism in particular say the words of a priest wash away sin. This is an immoral position to hold. Guilt is personal, so only something personally done can wash it away. Forget placing it all on someone innocent

Very few people ever get much certainly about things in life through their own intellect

Kant quoted with approval the words of poet Haller: "The world with all its faults/Is better than a realm of will-less angels." I would add a God who doesn't have to strive to that list.

"And what a sigh of relief men will breathe when they suddenly discover that the living God, the true God, in no way resembles Him whom reason has shown them until now!" Lev Shestov

But the "easy" answer is to say that there is truth in objectivity

That definition is fine.

"Is there truth in that definition?"

"No, there is no substance"

"Any substance in that response"

"No"

The problem of philosophy

"But there is no substance in the law of non-contradiction! It can be treated as a nothingness"

"Is that true?"

I want to find something spiritual in all this. The Dalai Lama said that, in the modern world spirituality without quantum physics is an incomplete picture of reality. Also he supported "Nagarjuna’s contention that things only exist by way of designation." Nagarjuna is very interesting when seem in light of Aristotle. The Madhyamaka or Middle Way and the Chittamatrin or Mind Only, likewise teach of the selflessness of phenomena itself. What can this mean?

Well the infinite divisibility of a geometric object suggested to me that pure geometry doesn't apply to the world of phenomena we know

We seem to be going in the direction where no knowledge can be obtained other than knowledge of ourselves. This is where Descartes started in his Meditations. Nevertheless, Descartes argument that things at a distance look small when they are really large is awkward. Instead of an illusion, we just have perspective, which he didn't seem to understand. Sure the world seems objective in its worldliness. But there are other questions two, like gender. To MANY, it is common sense that there are two sexes, male and female. That these are natures. Modern nominalism says otherwise.

Philosophy is hard

I've had experiences (which others have told me they have had too) where I see a road or something with trees and all those green leaves, and my mind tells me the reality out there is exactly as it looks. This is not an argument, but still it is a very strong experience, more so maybe than the opposite of hallucinating. I propose Heideggerian being-in-the-world-ness, because the quantum world is possibility processes. Anyway great discussion! I will check out Lee Smolin

Books like The Phantom Brain, Quantum Psychology, and even a Ted Talk I saw argue that we almost hallucinate our own reality. But to prove this from science is to first accept the reality of the nervous system as matter in space. So I don't know what trick that use to get around this. It also, again, seems to deny that the sum is greater than the parts, and forgets that the classical realm comes from but is not reducible to the quantum. Classical physical biology give rise to our spiritual experiences of the world, and that is a structure that has legitimate selfness too.

If the classical is not entirely reduced to the "small", if for no other reason than emergent principles, then maybe scientific explanations of our sense organs don't represent the reality at the top (our experience of the world). What we think we see is really an image created in the brain, but.. is it? Is this not reductionism?

Nice. I don't think General Relativity will ever be reconciled with Quantum Physics. The geodesics don't work at that level, because space doesn't work the same way. There is force in the atom, despite the attempt to get rid of force in the Newtonian sense

Yes, whatever they consist of. The Dali Lama is interested in arguing that the quantum world gives rise to the classical world, although it doesn't follow that this is so just because the quantum is smaller. "Emergent" seems to mean the composition is greater than the smaller parts and so have more meaning. Aristotle's "potential infinity" seems to dovetail nicely with seeing the levels energy appears in

Let me clarify the previous post: an infinity of smaller and smaller movements with a limit of zero gives rise to dimensions. This reminds me of Lawrence Krauss's arguments

What does density mean at that point? Cardinality is the number of members of a set. What else can there be to a set besides that??

Interesting post Relativist. Sounds similar to an infinity of points arising to give a finite segment or solid

Contingency and necessity, in the A/T sense, I have long thought to be in the "eye of the beholder". Being and Time has impressed me with the Heidegerrian idea that consciousness actually brings out more being in things. He doesn't think the scientific paradigm expresses the nature of the world fully and that we need his strong ontology. How could science even debunk the idea that consciousness can bring more density of being out of Being? This might be like someone thinking there are fairies in objects, but the idea of Being doesn't seem childish like that does to me. The discussion on here of A/T arguments from motion do, nonetheless, seem to me to show that energy is in some way mysterious to human understanding, and doesn't operate entirely in a mechanistic way. Teilhardians call the unknown the spiritual, if for no other reason than that they blur most lines. I am found of a physicalist understanding of reality, as long as we keep the nature of being and time a type of mystery

Lawrence Krauss said the universe is "not only an illusion, but an accidental one". In modern language though doesn't accidental just mean random, and doesn't random just mean not within a certain pattern?

Quantum fluctuations sound like Heraclitus's fire, where the universe is the smoke from the cosmic furnace. I am currently reading Heidegger and learning his insights into when the world becomes the flames

Some of the "otherwordly" ideas about the origin of the universe are:

1) that the place Heaven, which obviously has different "physics" than ours, caused the world- Confusianism

2) that we are all one spiritual being, which created the world- Hinduism

3) that nothing "created" the world being cause and effect are limited to this world and spiritual things don't cause, but there can still be spiritual events like the birth of the universe- Buddhism

4) that we flow from, but are not caused by, the eternal Form of Causality- Platonism

5) that motion is limited to phenomenon, which is the merging of the forever mysterious substance "the thing in itself" with our lenses of time and space- Kantism

Thanks for the thoughts!

Two cents: if energy is the foundation of causality, motion, and force, wouldn't it first have to have been in a state of perfect stillness? How could it get, from itself, from that state into the complex universe we experience?

Believers in supernatural powers have the problem that this 'realm' might be out to fool them in order to garner more faith

My concerns stem from reading David Hume. Closer to the Truth series on youtube had the question of "whether the laws of nature can change" addressed by physicists. To my mind they had no good answers. Again, it seems reasonable to try to manipulate nature in our favor, but it seems arrogant to me to say scientists know what happened in the universe billions of years ago when it can't be proven that "rewinding" the laws of physics is the way to go

Where did God come into this question? I don't believe in God

Saying either that laws can change or that new laws from, say, another dimension will start kicking in are not different with regard to a methodology of science. Haven't you seen sci-fi movies?

If free will was an illusion, Galileo couldn't say "I dropped the two balls ten times and they always fell at the same rate, so they will always do so in the future". This is because he might have been at the cycle where the balls fall at the same rate ten times, but only those ten times. If he had free will, Galileo would seem to have more statistical evidence, but not if compatibilism is true.

Science seems regular when we are making phones and such. But even then, philosophy would seem to say that this could change at any moment, if only because other laws could kick in at any time. This causes special problems for cosmology, where they try to rewind the laws of physics. There could be infinitely many laws we don't know about that totally blur what happened in the past. So we can and should try to make cell phones, but saying we know thru physics what happened in the past seems to be an absurdity

I think science assumes free will is real. That's why a scientist would say its unlikely they just happen to come upon certain laws. But if compatibilism is true, and instead of God being the determiner of what happens (as Aquinas thought), matter is the prime mover, then we could possibly be in a world where the laws could change any second and we would be at the mercy of its flux. You can say "I tested this chemical and it always ruins steel", but maybe that law changes after you've done the study. Science seems to be based on philosophy, and philosophy seems to give it no sure foundation