Problems with this section; for Frank (Agnosticism)

by Frank Paris , Monday, November 23, 2009, 15:40 (5478 days ago) @ dhw

"This is one of those irritating contradictions that cause misunderstandings."-On the contrary, it's not a contradiction. It's the same thing. Perhaps you're stumbling on the word, "created," in assuming it is the traditional Christian understanding of "creating out of nothing." I've repeatedly said that this is not true. When I say, "God created the fundamentals," that's just shorthand for "spinning them off of himself," which is not creating out of nothing. In being part of God, their "nature" is naturally from God. When they "do their thing," the laws of nature are expressed. There's no contraction in recognizing that "the laws of nature flow out of the fundamentals."-"I take this to mean, then, that since the particles of God are what is physical, God has a physical component and a non-physical component."-I think there's some kind of category mistake going on here. The fundamentals aren't taken from a "component" of God that that happens to be physical and the rest of him is not. When particles of himself are spun off and allowed to interact with each other, what is manifest is the physical universe of which we are a part, and the laws of nature.-'You have stressed the commonness of telepathy, but you have not dealt with the claim David makes that patients see dead people who inform them telepathically that someone else has died. This does not fit in with the explanation you suggested of broken contact between the patient and the "someone else".'-It certainly does, if you view the vision that people see dead people as a hallucination: a "trick" the brain plays on those hallucinating to make sense of the telepathic "message" that a connection has been severed through the death of someone.-"Since God's infinite consciousness is not physical, but he has physical components, why should there not be a similar, autonomous combination in humans?"-As pointed out above, claiming God has "physical components" is a category mistake. Therefore we can't conclude anything valid from your statement. The fundamentals have the same nature as God himself, only limited to the most extreme extent. Look at them as very dim images of God that become brighter when they are united in organisms and come to a focus, eventually as consciousness.-Sometimes statements that you make that follow one after another in the same paragraph seem to wildly switch from one topic to another. When I see a string of statements appearing in the same paragraph, I naturally assume a thread of a single arugument is taking place, but sometimes it seems as if you're wildly swinging from one subject to another. That's the trouble with these forums. The posts are so often little more than a stream of consciousness and it makes it difficult to address the issues coherently. I'm having this very kind of trouble in the paragraph that starts, "I take this to mean..."-So let me treat the issue of God "cutting loose" a fundamental particle. In spinning them off, they achieve autonomy not because he's granting them freedom out of the generosity of his own heart, but because they are so minimally conscious that he can't control them as he would through a highly conscious creature, by exposing the fullness of his essence to it. So the fundamentals just go about doing their natural "thing", sometimes naturally sticking together and eventually building up higher organizations. These organizations themselves find themselves in competition with each other and often come into conflict, because their "centers" are not in contact with each other and have their own being at stake. It's just evolution going on.-'We might have our own autonomous non-physical particle, "cut loose" by God and ... like God's own consciousness ... able to survive the destruction of the physical particles? Isn't this just as logical an interpretation of the data at our disposal, and wouldn't this explain the extraordinary phenomenon of NDE's?'-I have the concept of God having the ability to take a look at the consciousness that arises naturally out of a physical organism constructed out of the fundamentals, and then duplicating that consciousness as an autonomous being that can float off independent of the physical organism after which it is modeled. This in effect would be God creating "souls" that may live on after death. Is this what you're talking about?-I'm not sure this is a coherent position, because "the consciousness that arises naturally out of a physical organism" is a process that is tied to the particular configuration that a nervous system is in at any particular moment in time. Of course God could take a "snapshot" of that consciousness at any moment in time and spin a copy of it off as an autonomimous being, but that seems rather arbitrary.-I don't know if that actually happens anymore than you do, but it is a possibility, and that could explain NDE, as wildly improbable as it might be, considering that consciousness is a process and not an autonomimous substance. It's just that I think the severing of telepathic connections is a far simpler explanation of what's happening in premonitions of someone's death than "contact with the dead."