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Laws of physics, nature and the universe
 Network Norwich columnist James Knight, addresses the laws of physics, nature and the universe in his latest column.
In the late eighties, as I am sure many of you will remember, we had immensely strong gale force winds that caused lots of damage throughout the country. I was only young (about eleven, I think) and remember being in the woods with a friend (who was several years older) and seeing the trees falling and the resultant woodland damage.
We were discussing the laws of nature and that if a tree were to fall a little to the left or a little to the right of a family camping in a tent, the outcome would have depended on the laws themselves. We both agreed that survival or death can be, and often is, conditioned by the smallest fractions within nature’s laws. Leaving the house just one minute later in the morning could be enough to change the course of your whole day. So far so good.
When I started to read lots of science in adulthood, I would sometimes think back to that day in the woods, how a pleasant woodland was subjected to nature’s devastating moods, and that anybody asleep at night in a tent between the trees would be helplessly subordinate to such moods as well (although it is quite clear that any wind strong enough to blow down a tree would have blown away the tent long before). But the conditions of whether the tree would have fallen on the tent depend not just on several factors within nature’s law, but also on the decision of the campers to set up in that particular spot.
I have written at length in the past about reason and how it must be treated as an Absolute (separate from nature herself) - therefore when thinking of such a point, we come to see that planning where to set up the tent and the factors involved in a tree falling on the tent are two very different things altogether. An amalgam has been observed - the freedom of the individuals and the natural laws of nature herself. If the campers had prayed beforehand that God would see that they set up in a safe place and that they would have a safe expedition, we can see quite easily that that prayer would not involve God suspending natural law (the wind, etc) it would merely involve Him seeing to it that they set up their tent in a safe place (which common sense might have permitted them to do anyway).
So if the prayer was answered, we are saying that the tree falling down was a ‘cause’ in nature’s law and that the fact that the campers set up their tent away from the danger zone was a different ‘cause’ of God’s intervention. But is this a satisfactory assumption? Having admitted that nature’s law (the wind, gravitation, etc) conditions that if the wind (W) hits the tree (T) with a certain force (F) that the tree is bound to fall down (FD) - the basic principle W + F onto T = FD can be said to be a factor in the law. But the tree itself is not really a ‘law’ - it is a fact. The wind is not really a ‘law’ it is an event. The wind blowing and the tree falling are not laws but things that obey laws.
The laws of physics mean that in motion, objects must conform to a rule. But the law won’t set anything in motion - it merely says what will happen when motion occurs. If I throw a ball high into the air, the laws of gravity say that it must return to the ground, but it is my free will, not the law, that caused me to throw the ball; we do not need human free will for motion to take place. If a stone was caught by a strong gust of wind and blown over a cliff, it would be subordinate to the laws of motion and gravity, and it would involve no human free will at all. But the wind that caused the stone to be blown was the result of another activity, a preceding activity in the laws of motion - itself depending on further laws.
However far you traced it back, you would not find a primary cause. This is why scientists are forced to admit that, strictly speaking, the laws of nature have never caused anything to happen, they are merely facts and events. The cyclone which caused so much devastation in Burma certainly moved according to the laws of physics, but it was not moved by the laws.
Let me put it another way - the same is true with the laws of arithmetic - they remain the same, irrespective of facts and events. The laws of arithmetic say it is a fact that if I have one million pounds and you have one million pounds we would have two million pounds between us. But the laws will still be the same whether we have two million pounds or nothing - they are not dependent upon facts or events. The laws of any one thing are patterns to which events and facts conform. You cannot say that the laws of nature cause any event any more than you can say that the laws of arithmetic cause you to be rich.
 Having admitted this, we can see that at whatever level we recognise a law, we must always ascribe to it a law further back from the one we are recognising. That does not necessarily mean that we must choose either God or an infinite regress right there and then, but we must admit that we are compelled to decide on something. It is easy to be ambivalent and state that we are bound to remain in the dark about the fundamental laws and that we might never find a ‘theory of everything’ - but one must not get too carried away with ambivalence, for knowledge of this is a sense of departure from what real ambivalence is.
If the stream of causes had an originator then we are talking about creation. If they had no originator then we will forever be explaining the stream without ever touching on what is outside of it (if anything at all). If it is not from God then it must be an everlasting law - in which case, we are stuck in ignorance; that is, to be stuck inside the thing about which we are trying to include an all-inclusive philosophy is like to trying to see yourself without a mirror - you will never get the whole picture at once.
There may be other dimensions in our universe that we do not yet know about, but if our four dimensions of space (three parts) and time (one part) are themselves a creation of the originator then we no longer have to remain ambivalent. We can see Him as the cause of all the laws, including that of free will. Now we can see that the question of whether the originator wanted the tree to fall down at that particular time and the question of whether He wanted the family to set up their tent in safe place is not a question of ambivalence, for the first implies a connection with the second and vice-versa.
You can know a little about a playwright from the characters that he creates and the stories that he makes, but to learn a lot about him one must step into the realms in which he is constructing the drama. The same is true about our search for God. Whether we are Christians or not, the search for God or for Godly things will be most successful when we can seek with knowledge of the story of creation that God is writing, and the plans that He is making for us, every day.
Life with God is a journey, a progressive journey with conditions under which all kinds of blissful human liberations occur. That turbulent day in the woods seems like such a long time ago now. But as I look back and think about my journey, I can see retrospectively the hand of God guiding me into His presence. I was only a young boy on that blustery day; I have come a long way on my journey thanks to God’s grace and guidance. I have a long way to go and a lot more to learn. However much we progress we will still always have much more growing to do; and with this hindsight I can look back and say one thing with certainty - there is no other journey on which I would rather be, and no more enriching pleasure to be found elsewhere.
He (Christ) is "'the stone you builders rejected, which has become the capstone. 'Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved." Acts 4:11-12
The views carried here are those of the author, not of Network Norwich, and are intended to stimulate constructive debate between website users. We welcome your thoughts and comments, posted below, upon the ideas expressed here. You can also contact the author direct at james.knight@norfolk.gov.uk
James is a Norwich local government officer, author and Proclaimers church member in Norwich.
Meanwhile, if you want to find out more about Christianity, visit: www.rejesus.co.uk
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 | | Paul (Guest) | 24/06/2008 07:46 | PAUL
James nice answer, but not good enough. And by the way whatever makes you think I’m a student? I don’t need any tired old doctrines to bring sense to my world thank you very much. Perhaps you need to be more of a student of life. They tell me you’re supposed to be one of the great polymath thinkers of your time. I’ve yet to see it.
Moving on to your reply….
You are proposing some sort of ‘law or logic’ but you can’t escape the fact that you alone in your perception of reality is the one composing them. Any thoughts about reason being an absolute is surely only a theory about your perception - your own thinking - not about reason itself - solely created by you. However hard you try you won’t be able to escape the problem. I’m sure you and me agree that the question of the absoluteness of reason is to use your term a sister question of whether God exists or not. If God exists then I would have no problem with reason being an absolute in fact it would probably be a necessary position. But I can’t help thinking that you only think reason is an absolute because you think God exists. Your problem is still there you can’t escape that fact that your belief in God might be simply a fact about your own perception rather than about anything that is real or true.
| | | | James Knight (Guest) | 24/06/2008 10:44 | Hi Paul,
Thanks for your reply. How do I know you’re a student? Perhaps it’s that unmistakeable grandeur and irrepressible keenness that gets you up early onto campus. The tenor of your response has a familiar ring to it. If I were to hazard a guess, I would say you’re studying something like psychology – your matriculation consisted of high hopes about changing the world with you neo-perceptive achievements; you probably come from a family of achievers with quite high expectations (elder sisters I’d guess – soaked in academia), but you’re also, I’d guess, part of an alternative culture; I imagine you with long-ish black hair, a couple of tattoos and face piercings, a man who thinks he’s too intelligent for slipknot, but isn’t averse to Sisters of Mercy and Nirvana et al. Anyway Paul, I like your style and I admire your tenacious search for the truth.
As regards your reply - you were doing ok, you were wading about near the shore where the biggest danger was that the odd crab might nip you. But now you’re swimming with sharks, miles away from safety.
Whatever else is gong on exclusively and uniquely in my head, a Christian faith is not exclusive or unique to me, you will find it in many other minds too - belief in a God of one kind or another in many more. The very best one could concede was that this type of thought occurred uniquely in one mind and that through a long chain of social interaction and linguistic commonality this was passed on from head to head - a bit like a ‘meme’. In fact I would guess that that is what you do think happened, and you are not alone. In which case, I do not see why you would claim Christianity to be ‘simply a fact solely …created by you’. But your biggest problem lies elsewhere.
Underlying your position is a sort of chicken and egg problem - do we believe in God because we think reason must be an absolute or do we think reason is an absolute because we believe in God? Well firstly most of us aren’t basing our belief in God on an analytic assumption about reasoning, most of us Christians are basing it on our personal experiences and observations, plus the very strong philosophical, historical, anthropological, archaeological, and, yes, scientific cases that support such a belief. Christians are claiming a personal experience of God through the Holy Spirit living inside of them. Now any question of Reason being an absolute belongs elsewhere.
It is true that the premises of a sound induction may have given good reason for the conclusion (logical induction says it’s going rain sometime in Norwich in the next year) but do not logically entail the conclusion, in the same way they do in a valid deduction. Now here’s the rub; even valid deductions (John and Peter are males therefore John is a male) are only facts about the interlocking system of nature unless valid descriptions are made from a source higher than themselves. But it becomes even more complicated if we deny any Absolute truth. Take the law of non-contradiction which says that no two contradictory beliefs can both be true. Christians believe that Jesus Christ is the incarnation of God. Now if it is true that He is the incarnation of God, all claims that He is not must be false. Now of course one could claim that Christ’s claim had been misinterpreted by those that followed Him or that the Bible had been mistranslated, but these are claims about things outside of the law of contradiction - for the brute residual fact remains the same, irrespective of human perception and interpretation, either He is God or He is not. Now, of course, there are in my view a great many reasons why a man can believe that Christ is God, but that is not the point we are trying to outline here. The law of non-contradiction is more of a primacy than the conventional truths about which you spoke earlier. There’s more.
Having admitted this we are now saying that all of these conventional truths are contingent. If a statement made by a naturalist is only taken to be true on the basic ‘conventional’ level of reality, then that statement could have been ultimately false; therefore the law of non-contradiction is not accommodated in the naturalists view. The naturalist is borrowing parts of the absoluteness of reason and distorting them for his own ends. Of course the naturalist can passionately decree, ‘of course one conventional truth can contradict its opposite’ but immediately in stating this he is going beyond conventional truths; thus you will find him admitting that there are more than just conventional truths. Under the naturalist’s premises even a truth about the law of non-contradiction will be dependant on conventional realities; thus surely if any of these conventional realities are contingent then so is anything that depends on them - including the truth about the law of non-contradiction. Start swimming back now Paul, it gets much worse for you.
Even if we accept the impossible, that conventional truths can generate laws such as non-contradiction and apply them to universal patterns, there is nothing in the conventional truths framework that can logically imply the necessity of such laws. For any such implication is itself a modal notion. The modal cannot be explicable in non-modal terms; that would be like trying to explain the moral law without invoking anything ‘moral’. As naturalism is committed to thinking of modal in non-modal terms it cannot accommodate the notion that any logical laws exist.
You attempted to create an idea based on allusions to ideas and concepts, suggesting that such modality can arise from them. This seems to be blatantly false, and it isn’t difficult to see why. You can start by bringing in an established conventional truth, such as the human concept that ‘octogenarian’ means a person in his or her eighties, therefore that is sufficient to generate the necessity, ‘all octogenarians are in their eighties’, and something similar naturally explains all other conventional truths. However once one begins to ask how concepts generate such necessity we see the problems arising. If rational laws emerge from the relationship between our conventional concepts we must rightly ask what is the naturalist thinking of when he speaks of ‘relations’? If he is thinking of relations from logical laws it is clear that he cannot have any naturalistic explanation for the laws of logic. Perhaps he could claim that our perception of necessity is wrong, but in doing so he will have contradicted his own argument of how he reached such a conclusion. This is, in effect, the opposite position to my position which says that reason cannot emerge from non-reason, it must be an absolute.
Moreover, a further difficulty arises here. If naturalism is true and my argument that reason is an absolute is false, you would expect that naturalism would be capable of explaining more things about existence than the absoluteness of reason (AoR) position. Therefore the corollary of that position should be that if an explanation occurs under naturalists’ provincial domain it ought to be preferred over the AoR position providing it is not an obvious solecism against the ‘conventional truths’ laws. You probably have figured out already tha
| | | | James Knight (Guest) | 24/06/2008 10:45 | t I don’t think this position valid. But if one were to accept the premises he could only accept the conclusion if it is impossible that the premises are true and the conclusion false. But that is manifestly not the case, for if he does he must discard necessity. Necessary truths governed by laws are the only things that support such arguments - and as we have just seen, necessary truths do not fit into the naturalists sphere of reasoning. Furthermore AoR does not challenge the contextual validity inside conventional truths, such as my statement about octogenarians, it simply insists that their laws are governed and generated by something Absolute.
We now move to consider the implication of the statement about our apprehending these logical laws, which of course involves our ability to rationally infer. And it goes without saying that if one is to rationally infer anything he must be able to apprehend the laws of logic with reference to which that particular inference is coterminous in the ring of rationality. In other words the inference itself must be rational to be rationally inferred. To rationally infer X from the conjunction of Y with “if Y then X”, he must be aware of the law of logic according to which this position is reached from these premises. The difficulty seems to me to be the following. Whatever the naturalist’s position regarding the logical laws, it cannot bring into the ring (on naturalistic presuppositions) that which is behind the mystery of our knowing the law. Moreover there must be some justification as to how this is known. The laws themselves are not reinforced or authenticated by experience or by empirical investigation; therefore our knowledge of them must come from elsewhere. This leaves the naturalist with a difficulty, he must admit that only if they are dependent solely on our own cognition can they be explained, but that is manifestly not the case (we have seen already that there are several laws that are not mind-dependent laws). If the naturalist were right, he would immediately be forced to admit that these laws could have no real role to play in our assessment of external things after all. Unless the scales are separated from that which we are trying to weigh, we can do no weighing. Unless the standard by which our inferences are measured is something extricable from those inferences, any attempt to formulate a judgement of inferences will fall to the ground immediately. And Paul, if these problems I have raised do not present enough prima facie difficulties for your position, I should like to tell you that the naturalists level of tractability is about to drop even further.
By the way, I should remind you at this stage that even if I were to formulate a theory of everything that really did get in explanations for EVERYTHING, yet at the same time made it an intractable proposition that reason is an absolute, the theory, however good and however pervasively inclusive, would fail to stand up for very long.
In case anyone isn’t following my argument as closely as I would wish, I should say, I do not mean that there are not many instances when various irrational thoughts do lead someone to the truth via circuitous and meandering methods of reasoning. Man A who thinks that his wife is being unfaithful because he has seen her out in a car with another man when she says she was somewhere else has better reasons for thinking as he does than man B who thinks his wife is being unfaithful because when he was a boy his father left his mother for another woman, but it could turn out that A’s wife has remained faithful and was organising a surprise birthday party for her husband and that B’s wife was indeed being unfaithful. It is true that to discover the cause of someone thinking as he does often discredits it, but we know equally well that irrational thoughts can be reinforced by demonstrable evidence - but we do not say that because the evidence proved him right that his thinking was rational. The point is, there is a difference between claiming that no thought is valid if it can’t be explained by rational inferences and saying that reason itself (as a whole) is valueless if it comes from non-reasoning sources. However much you try to circumvent this problem you will only be talking about conventional inferences within the large but inconsequential set of conventional truths.
Furthermore having agreed that physical causes are not rational themselves, if the vast compilation of thinking that goes on in the interlocking system is really a collection of physical events, how can any of them be ultimately rational unless they are filtrated into the system from something that is absolute and ‘truthful’? You can by all means celebrate the distances we have travelled with these conventional truths - they have got us to mobile phones, psychotherapy, even to nanotechnology - but under the premises you attempt to invoke, they are only facts about a system, a relatively small system in a relatively vast interlocking system. How anyone could hope to draw logical inferences about the whole interlocking system and beyond from conventional thoughts within the subsystem is beyond me, and I hope beyond you and far beneath your derision.
All good wishes
James
| | | | an astounded Paul (Guest) | 24/06/2008 12:22 | Oh my God where’nearth did that come from???!!!?? I’m effin well gobsmacked. It’s like you’ve crystal gazed into my whole life. You’re more or less spot on, I am the youngest of three (with two elder sisters, ones a lawyer the other a consultant) I’m studying sociology and am not averse to the odd bit of black eyeliner. Am I that transparent???!!!??? You’re not as clever as you think though, my hair is SHORT and black ;-Q. Ok you’ve got me interested now – it’s a pretty boring day here. I don’t agree with your assessment of the ‘reason’ thing, but you’ve done enough for me to take you rather seriously now!!
It appears to me that your attempts to say that naturalism is a method of thinking belonging in a system means that each and every one of those thoughts is from something non-rational. Your biggest difficulty might be trying to apply ‘rational and ‘non-rational’ to material things like matter. The problems appear here to be an inevitable stalemate, you’re no more justified in justifying a belief for God than I am a belief for no God, all we have been talking about is the mystery behind thought. If it is true that ultimately no system of thought can be seen as ultimately true if thought results from non-rational causes I don’t see why the opposite isn’t true - if all thought is from an absolute source why all of our thoughts aren’t absolute and thus true!!
I do admit that I can see the weakness in my own position or perhaps the strength in yours, but how you go from your position to claims of God existing is for me to be guilty of pressing on quicker than your shoes can take you. And also would you not admit that we only really acquire concepts of rational and irrational through our experiences of what we perceive to be one or the other?
Thanks
Paul
Ps Whatever else I choose to believe about organised religion, you are a formidable debater with a great mind. My position is still a disagreement about God, but I would be mad not to take your position seriously, as I don’t believe that mind of yours would let in nonsense lightly.
| | | | James Knight (Guest) | 24/06/2008 15:55 | Hi Paul,
Thanks very much for your reply, and thanks for your post-script (I think). Looks like I have another response to type. You’re really exercising my brain today.
As regards my belief in God and treating reason as an Absolute; Paul, you misunderstand my position a little. I don’t base my opinions and beliefs about God solely on my thinking that reason is an Absolute, that is only a splash in the vast ocean of evidence, experience and inner-analytical persuasion. Add to that all the personal experience of Jesus Christ that one has when he or she ‘knocks on the door’ and it amounts to something life-changing. My ‘Absoluteness of Reason’ argument is a corollary of the inner-analytic persuasion.
I think you are right to insist on a meticulous analysis of why this argument has led to our thinking of material things in rational ways. However I must depart from you again when you speak of mental processes being things to which rational and non-rational distinction may not apply.
In fact, you say
“Your biggest difficulty might be trying to apply ‘rational and ‘non-rational’ to material things like matter”
The distinction between rational and non-rational seems to me to be a false one; surely you mean ‘ration and irrational’?. That for me would be a better distinction, as the distinction between rational and non-rational is not an antithetical distinction. The crunch here is really that because matter is neither rational nor irrational the causes by which naturalists explain their own reasoning are not therefore irrational and the argument against naturalism breaks down. If I have understood correctly the tenor of your argument, I should like to say I think it problematic, particularly as you will find many naturalists claiming, in fact, a monopoly on rationality - a position which contradicts their initial premise of material non-rationality.
On your final question,
“Would you not admit that we only really acquire concepts of rational and irrational through our experiences of what we perceive to be one or the other?”
I have this to say. What you’re trying to do here is smuggle in the assumption that we must have experienced some form of irrationality in thought to know what rationality is; in which case you will then claim that all reasoning can’t be invalid - thus hoping that my argument breaks down. But it won’t get you very far. However far you progress on your premises, you will not be able to sneak in any counter-explanation against my claim that naturalism does entail that we cannot have the concept of validity without recourse to conventional systems alone . You might have been better arguing that if naturalists do not have the concept of validity how would they know what the statement meant? But all this depends on interpretation of validity; for conceptual validity in the conventional sense has no weight, in fact the only validity that is being accounted for is the validity that the naturalists are borrowing from the Theists. In summary what it really boils down to is this; the truth of naturalism cannot be meaningfully insisted upon - for all naturalists’ claims would be based on something that was equally unreasonable. We have already established that under the naturalists presumptions there is no rational or irrational nature to matter, therefore if the reason you think that your cognitive processes are determined by neuronal movements is itself down to neuronal movements, your opinion has no room in any chain of validity at all; that is, there is no reason to link the facts of neuronal movement to facts about truth.
We think of cause and effect (CE) as verific because we have seen CE in action everywhere we look. But the platforms for CE and our grounds for assertion on this relationship (X) provide us with no explanation why this should be so (the same is true, as we have seen, with the law of non-contradiction). CE runs on a different system to X, therefore the naturalist’s position seems to involve the difficulty of explaining why as a matter of fact two very different systems CE and X run together in our cognition. The naturalist might just about get away with the emergence of CE in cognitive system (although he would still be struck with explaining the verity of a system from the self-imposed limited position of being contained within the system he was trying to explain) - but trying to bring in X as an interrelating sister to CE involves a miracle all by itself. The naturalist seems to be stuck in a ‘best we can do’ standpoint.
Furthermore, an even bigger difficulty occurs, because there is no logical reason, and thus no logical explanation, why laws outside of the conventional truths would become part of our cognition and penetrate our belief systems unless there were some interrelational process from outside. If the naturalist is right, that we developed CE over a long period of naturalistic evolution, it might be trickier to explain how X filtrated into our cognitive systems in the way that it has. This isn’t a deal-clincher either way; that is, it doesn’t cast an insurmountable cloud over naturalism nor does it affirm theism.
But the argument need not rest on this treehouse analysis - that is to say, we can bring in experience to help us understand which of our many hypotheses accord with our experiential knowledge. As regards the relations between CE and X - however far back the process was taken you would be left with the beginning of what was to be a causal chain, on the naturalist viewpoint, a chain from something non-rational. How the non-rational nature of the first link could promote a logical relation between CE and X is a big problem for the naturalists. If we say that naturalistic evolution caused minds that related C and E to the principle of X using the foundational and ‘conventional’ premises on which C and E relations are based, we are only really explaining how it is that naturalists came to such a belief - we are still treating every belief as non-valid as it is merely a contextual fact within the conventional system - a system which is itself still burdened by the ‘causation’ problem and will thus leave us with the meta-question ‘why is that so?’.
And notice the difficulty in forcing oneself to take the position I just stated. A thought can only be a logical thought over another if laws of logic exist, therefore human beings must be able to apprehend laws of logic. The naturalist can only accept this if he says that a) there are such things are logical laws, and b) that we are capable of apprehending them. In which case how can the naturalist explain this ‘a and b’ coterminous existence? Is naturalism really bound up in an explanation linking to an ‘irreducible act of stellar serendipity’? Do not misunderstand me, I am not saying that from the existence of causes there is no naturalistic capacity to deduce reasons, but that the overlapping dialectic between causes and reason is, under the naturalists’ premises, unexplainable without recourse to the most irrational and absurd coincidence. If everything we believe is a mere coincidence, it also follows that casual connection between thinking and laws are also coincidental and in fact, the reaso
| | | | James Knight (Guest) | 24/06/2008 15:56 | n that our thinking corresponds to this naturalistic view of coincidence has itself the same difficulty imputed. Are we really to believe that a coincidental event or series of events (with only the flimsiest of dialectics) in the realms of neuronal movements are able to explain ultimate realities of existence? That must be stretching it too far.
Of course the naturalist has tried in the past to link conceptions of truth to evolutionary biology and say that pragmatic reasoning is merely a fact about our long evolutionary chain of adapting for survival. In other words the contingent connection between beliefs is simply a fact that it is advantageous to have such a contingency. But that still begs the question - how did our cognitive faculties become competent enough to understand things which are themselves not part of the system. Furthermore we still haven’t escaped the difficulty of making assertions outside of our purview of rationality. Some evolutionists claim that this won’t explain why a person who has sound inferential abilities is more likely to survive than a person who doesn’t,** but I’ll come to that later.
** By the way, assumptions about our inferential abilities emanating from the evolutionary system do not provide me with any difficulties, as the simulacrum itself contains within itself all the necessary systems for such an outcome (including macroevolution). It should be remembered that the entire universe consists of matter, which cannot be created nor destroyed; in which case, the make-up of personhood is ultimately the same make-up as the rest of the universe (aside from Spiritual activity - “in God’s image”). Therefore any explanations of this kind, regarding survival, and in fact any piece of information about the system from within the system is only really a fact about the simulacrum anyway. As my theory involves the simulacrum notion anyway, this provides me with no difficulty - in fact, I would go so far as to say that any interrelational explanations or any theories about cognition, cause, reasoning, foundational principles, and our perception of laws outside of the simulacrum, are all easily explained because the simulacrum is as it is - a reflection of the heavenly realm with a divine filtration system.
If the naturalist claims amount to the proposal that any person able to adduce good reason for believing what he does - that his belief escapes the tough gamut of scrutiny needed to ascertain its trajectory in casual history - then I think the naturalists are mistaken. The reason I think they are mistaken is because such an account of rational belief allows no distinctions between reason for having such a belief and a rationalisation of that belief. The reasons for belief must be merely part of what brings it about that they happen to believe such things, it makes no allowances for the insistence that our apprehension of the laws of logic play an explanatory role in our ability to fit in the premise as true; moreover this also affects the propositional content of all interrelational belief systems in the ‘conventional’ domain of reasoning.
Best wishes
James
| | | | Paul (Guest) | 25/06/2008 13:32 | You’re good. You’re one slamming intellectual dude!! I’ve read your comments three times now and thought about them and I have to admit that it is hard to disagree with you, or at least hard to miss where you’re coming from. I have tried to write a retort but I wonder if I’m just doing so to win an intellectual battle, one which I don’t think I’m going to win.
Ok, I’m not sure I’m with you on the LAWS question. Are you saying the laws that govern physical states are different to the laws that govern mental states or that all these laws really fit under one thing in the simulacrum?
Cheers
Paul
| | | | James Knight (Guest) | 25/06/2008 14:31 | Hi Paul,
Thanks for your reply. I’m right on the ball today. I was thinking about you earlier, and I can sense a void in your life. It’s a very familiar void, an absence of Jesus.
We have been discussing something which is rather involved, but it might be a good time to head back to simplicity, after all, the message of good news that Christians have is rather simple and does not intrinsically favour any intellectual positions. I will quickly answer your question about laws and mental states and then I’ll say something else.
Laws
There are two types of laws in this sense, there are fundamental laws, of which the laws of morality and non-contradiction are two, and there are derived laws which fit in with the conventional truths that we mentioned earlier. Now naturalism can only explain derived laws, like, say the way light works in the context of a inwardly contained universal proposition, and the physical laws which operate in systems such as physiology and other such physical entities. Now Christians believe that within the simulacrum God is operating at a spiritual level as well. Naturalists deny this, so naturalists are therefore left with only physical propositions. Let us say that we can concede that one physical mental event can exist, we must have to agree that the naturalistic assumption is therefore a postulation that one physical mental state can cause another. Suppose that the first physical mental (PM) event causes a second PM event, we are saying that the first mental state has caused the second, yet the reason that the first PM causes the second has nothing to do with the state of either PM; that is, their content is irrelevant in the sense of causation. We would have to admit that PM1 and PM2 and indeed the cause linking the two are only examples and explanations of the physical properties of both. In which case we are left with the unenviable position of trying to identify a conventional ‘derived’ law from the physical properties of that which is subject to the law. That would be a bit like saying that the ball being heavier than air is the cause of gravity. The casual nature of one thing can, I suppose, tell us about the characteristics and events which are determined by its casual nature, but this casual law is only a derived law, it has nothing on a fundamental law, therefore its physical description is subsumed under a derived law. The same is true of our analysis of the brain. If laws that are derived laws of physicality are not governed by fundamental laws then what happens in our brains is largely irrelevant - our thoughts are a set of irrelevancies which happen to be governed by laws of derivation within the physical system.
I said I would show how I think this links in with evolution. If the laws of logic appear as true, nature, you may have noticed, always agrees. Nature never disagrees with any of the fundamental laws. Naturalistic evolution says that this is because the mind is the result of naturalistic evolutionary processes. Yet if nature knows no rationality or non-rationality herself, this cannot really be so. If thinking is a result of mindless events then the best we can say is that every thought is a casual law within the conventional system. But to say that nature herself is the overarching system whereby the laws themselves brought about thinking is something even more irrational. In other words, if the casual laws that bring about our reasoning are really the result of non-rational nature then nature has no linkage to the truth. The laws that bring about the casual laws in conventional truths turn out to be the same laws that cause every physical event in the interlocking system. In truth the evolutionary story is only directly concerned with organisms in the sense that they are a constituent part of the evolutionary tree as a whole. A fit organism can adapt and survive and reproduce, thus the value of truth regarding biological activity is quite instrumental, but useful only in the context of evolutionary domain, not in the running system of the simulacrum itself.
What is evidently true is that the position of the naturalist and the position of myself (that I think reason is an absolute) are almost opposite positions, therefore I see no great difficulty in showing the infelicity of one of the two. If the felicity of our conventional truths underwritten by casual laws are not to be attributed by the most outrageous naturalistic fortune, we must agree that there is an unbreakable affinity between our sense of logic and the nature of reality which is itself underwritten by fundamental laws. Can naturalism underwrite a solid foundational affinity between our sense of logic and reality itself? It seems to me that the answer is always an emphatic NO! Suppose naturalism could get in all the explanations for our reasoning; it could at best only explain why our cognitive faculties are apt to bring about steady conclusions on subjects closely interrelated with our everyday events and actions at a casual level. But if reason is an absolute from a self-sustaining and ‘perfect’ source, it is easy to see how fundamental laws work asymmetrically with derived laws, and how through the divine filtration system we are able to postulate theories of reality that are backed up by concrete truths and how in the process we lift from ourselves the huge burden of trying to proffer explanations about reality that are straight away contradicted by the erratic and volatile nature of a non-caused and non-governed existence.
I said that after commenting on your questions I would say something else. These debates are interesting in themselves, but they have led us away from the most important discussion we could be having. Now is a good time to get back to basics - the truth of Jesus Christ. I was very moved by one of Tim’s comment earlier in these exchanges when, upon questioning whether a man wishes to move away from the Christian faith, we can only really ask ‘Lord to whom shall I go?…if you don’t have the words of everlasting life then no one else has…”. Yes, amen to that brother. Words spoken by a man who is of considerable intellect. You see Paul, aside from all the complexities of the universe and human psychology, there lies a truth that can humble even the best men. I do receive some very generous comments of praise in response to my work on here and elsewhere. And, of course, I can’t really live up to them, I am only a layman with a keen mind and an even keener heart. Passion for the truth can lead a man into all sorts of special places, providing he makes no attempt to compromise that which appears to him as a resounding truth. Tim is right, if Jesus does not offer us the truth then no one does - all of our philosophies are just fancy footwork in an ultimately inauspicious ball game. If you want to make the best of life you cannot do it by sacrificing the truth. I spent much of my early twenties attempting to tweak the truth a bit in order to have he best of both worlds - but it cannot be done, for as our Lord says, where your treasure lies there your heart will be also. You cannot serve two masters; thankfully Christ offers us certainly so we do not have to. Whenever anyone as
| | | | James Knight (Guest) | 25/06/2008 14:32 | ks me the meaning of life, I tell them I have been fortunate enough to find out from the one who IS life. The answer is summed up beautifully by St Paul in his letter to the Ephesians:
As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient. All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our sinful nature and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature objects of wrath. But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions-- it is by grace you have been saved. And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus. For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith-- and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God--not by works, so that no one can boast. For we are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do. Ephesians 2:1-10
Yours
James
| | | | Paul (Guest) | 25/06/2008 17:26 | Wow what a guy you are. I’ve never seen such a smart guy humble himself in that way before. You’re right there is something missing in my life. Whether I can find it in Christianity remains to be seen. Amongst all your words I have come to one big conclusion. Whether you’re right or whether you’re wrong, you are at least spot on in saying that we can’t reject this man Jesus if he is telling the truth. I’m yet to decide, but your arguments are strong enough for me to take it all seriously. Its no good any of us seeing the truth and then ignoring it. If I’m to think of myself as a good man of reason in this world then I owe it to myself to hang on to something if it shows itself to be true.
Thank you very much for your words James. I’ve never read any religious books like the bible before. My nan was pretty religious and says she saw the figure of Jesus by her bed. I always thought she was doolallay. I guess now she might have been right. Whatever way it turns out, I thank you for your clever thinking and clear understanding of things. I wish the world had more people like you. For every drunken, drugged up knitwit I have to encounter at uni, its good to know there are people like you out there James. I guess I have been called somewhere from the supernatural realm. I shall put you to the big test now James, as you imply if this is true I will probably start to see it soon. Do you mind if I start emailing you soon? I’m bound to have some questions that I want to keep pretty personal. I’ve found your collection of columns on network norwich and I’m going to take some time out to read them over the summer.
Thanks again.
Paul
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