Language and Logic (General)

by dhw, Thursday, April 10, 2014, 19:47 (3878 days ago) @ David Turell

Dhw: However, I'm puzzled by your picture of an entity that does not change in any way and is not associated with any event. Such an entity might just as well not be there! Since I know you are referring to your god, which you call a universal intelligence, are you then telling us that the eternal something may be a mind that never had a single thought for ever and ever until suddenly it created our universe? -DAVID: Again, in your reasoning, you are anthropomorphizing whomever God is. I have no idea how a universal mind has thoughts, if it does in our sense of thinking.-And yet over and over again you have provided us with evidence of what you call "design", which you attribute to a "universal intelligence". If you are entitled to use such anthropomorphic terms, why is my assumption that a designing intelligence would be able to think dismissed for being anthropomorphic? And is it really so illogical to assume that a designing intelligence is unlikely to let its designing intelligence do absolutely nothing for eternity until 13.7 billion years ago? -However, there is a change of heart in the next part of your post, in which you favour my second alternative: "eternally conscious energy, for ever producing matter (= a god)," which you rephrase as "a timeless energy/mind which produces spacetime as a universe, perhaps one after another through eternity." But you go on to say: "There is no time between those universes, just/energy mind." In an earlier post you wrote that time was caused by events, and I asked if events were not simply the means by which we humans recognize and measure time. Either way, I don't see how you can classify the production of a universe as anything but an event, in which case ... even though humans were not around ... the same criteria would apply. If your God was not a total non-entity, it is perfectly feasible according to your own arguments that there may have been events and time before earthtime.