It sounds like you're Spinozian, with a twist from Plotinus. Plotinus thought the ultimate reality was potentiality. Aquinas said actuality was prior to potentiality because otherwise potentiality could not get started. I think this is wrong, and it is part of the flaw in the botched arguments of deists like Devans99 in trying to prove there is a transcendent God. Potentiality being prior to actuality is in a lot of philosophies and theologies. Just think of the traditional idea of Heaven in China! The world flows from potentiality. There doesn't have to be an eternal being of Act. Potentiality doesn't have to "choose" in order for something to come from it — Gregory
I don’t use the term ‘logically impossible’ because I don’t think it makes sense. Something can be illogical and still possible (like love), but not both logical and impossible without exposing some level of ignorance. The way I see it, there are two dimensional levels of awareness and existence outside of time that tend to get confused A LOT. And it’s understandable, because we need to be at least vaguely aware of existing outside of potentiality to be able to distinguish it from possibility. Most people tend to experience ‘phenomenon’ as whatever exists outside of a knowledge structure we call ‘logic’, but it’s more complex than that. And ALL the phenomenon you mention I believe are consistent with a fifth and sixth dimension to reality. — Possibility
If I approach an object, first i have to go half the distance. Otherwise I am there. And half that, otherwise i am there. Laws of identity say this goes on forever. So objects are infinite. Yet they are finite to us. The division of a whole into parts gives us exactly that sum when combined. We can say things are merely potentially infinite like Aristotle's said. But nothing could then be truly actual, because it would only potentially have parts, which is absurd. Heraclitian fire is the solution — Gregory
Sure, the phenomenon called Love is beyond logical impossibility, yet to describe it in a proposition, puts it into an axiom or construct of logic and language. Thus, when trying to verbalize Love, it becomes a logically impossible (or ineffable) phenomenon. Or at least a metaphysical one, that in theory, would include a 5th dimensional force (as you suggested), as even Einstein would posit. — 3017amen
And so all we are really alluding to there, in an anthropic way, is the complex nature of consciousness, and the theory that conscious energy is 'out there' only being filtered by the brain. (That of course being in opposition to say the materialist view that the brain excretes substance to do its job of cognition-within itself as a self contained thing in itself.)
And that thought process of entropy would, I believe, also align with Schop's philosophy of a Metaphysical Will in nature.
So, to embrace logical impossibility (as a Christian Existentialist) as irony would have it, only supports my world view of the super natural existing-Love. (Which it turn, relegates Atheism to a pathology inconsistent with natural phenomena or otherwise in denial of the human condition.) — 3017amen
Objects are infinitely divisible, so they have infinite parts. Hence Zenos paradox. Belief in God is about desire, not knowledge. People want more. They are not satisfied with annihilation. But what does it even feel to speak of an "order beyond the material"? The idea of prophecy is justified with molinism or compatabilism. The former makes no sense, because it makes people having made choices without existentially existing. The latter makes God a monster. — Gregory
By granular, you mean discrete? The discrete is like a unicorn. It doesn't exist. Does it have size or not? Is it something or nothing? Those questions refute the opponents of Zeno and Parmenides — Gregory
I think calling it a ‘pathology’ is unnecessarily judgemental. It derives from a lack of awareness — Possibility
With respect to the definition of super natural I'll offer this:
It seems to me that the supernatural (whatever it may be) is outside of space and time and thus the laws of nature as we know them do not apply to the supernatural. By laws of nature I refer to strong force, weak force, gravity, EM force.
The 'supernatural' could describe anything which cannot be observed or proven by any classical means, but only by intuition and belief. Such as the presence of love, or for some people, the existence of God. You cannot classically devise a "proof" of neither but it exists only in our minds and in the way we believe. We can't prove we love someone, we just know that we do. And so I believe that love and God are examples of supernatural "entities". — 3017amen
To speak to one's logic of it all, I would have to default to Kant's idea of the noumenal realm, when trying to understand the true nature of this thing called Love and/or the super natural. — 3017amen
I disagree that understanding or proving either love or ‘God’ can only be achieved by intuition and belief. We can subjectively ‘prove’ or at least affect the probability of the awareness of both love and ‘God’ existing for others by how we relate to them and to the world. It’s not scientific (not yet), but the potential is there, at least. — Possibility
You might feel you need something higher, but that doesn't prove there is something higher. Desire is not an argument for existence. I think this is essentially where Schopenhauer parts with Aquinas — Gregory
I disagree that understanding or proving either love or ‘God’ can only be achieved by intuition and belief. We can subjectively ‘prove’ or at least affect the probability of the awareness of both love and ‘God’ existing for others by how we relate to them and to the world. It’s not scientific (not yet), but the potential is there, at least.
— Possibility
How or what are some of the cognitive tools we can access in proving or understanding the EOG? — 3017amen
Managing the relative uncertainty of our predictions is already beginning a paradigm shift in how we do science. Recognising that what we understand as ‘value’ or ‘potential’ is not necessarily numerical I think is the next big hurdle for science. — Possibility
And this excerpt from an old post objecting to the soundness, etc of "the cosmological argument":The ancient atomists (as well as Heraclitus) took it as axiomatic that motion was constant and universal without exception but generations later Aristotle disagreed with [his] "unmoved mover" fiat. On what grounds, however, is it reasonable to assume that
(a) physical / natural motion ever started or (b) needed to be started or (c) that there is stasis (e.g. "unmoved mover") that starts, and therefore is prior to, physical / natural motion?
Aquinas' "First Way", IMO, is [only] vacuous scholastic twaddle without justifying this anachronistic Aristotlean assumption. — 180 Proof
(i) At best the argument is unsound.
(ii) Otherwise, it's an invalid, or incoherent, induction from the experience of the cosmos to [wait for it, wait for it] a-cosmos.
(iii) Also, there's a further incoherence of trying to make an a posterior argument justify an a priori premise.
(iv) Lastly, one of the argument's hidden assumptions - nullifying soundness - is that the cosmos, consisting of cause and effect relations, is itself the effect of a cause (i.e. "First Cause") - compositional fallacy, no?
(v) And, nailing this apologia's coffin shut for good, this purported "First Cause" is not even uniquely, or identifiably, (JCI) theistic, but just as arbitrarily can be attributed to deistic or pandeistic or ... QFT tunneling symmetry-breaking theoretic "creation"-concepts.
Caveat: And some, or most, of these same objections also defeat the rest of that toothless old quaint Quinque viæ (due, in no small part, to Aristotlean 'teleological' pseudo-physics). — 180 Proof
Aquinas believed that good and being are the same thing. Good and beautiful are the same too, for him. — Gregory
God merely is the most actual of all. He is infinite — Gregory
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