I invite you to read what I wrote.
Telling someone to read mechanics book in the middle of discussion doesn’t sound it is even an argument.
I have told you your physical time is readings from your clocks. What is that got to do with God?
I answered every questions you asked. But you seem to be forgetting what I wrote to you. What answer are you still looking for? What do you want know what it means?
Keeping distracting yourself from the topic doesn’t help getting into bottom of the argument. Just concentrate on the topic.
Why do you think the universe is needed for God existence? Saying the universe is substance is not telling much or adding anything to the argument.
Because both the universe and substance are obscure in what it means. Just keep repeating the words which are not clear isn’t going to help in progressing the argument.
Please answer these questions.
I can explain it to you if you are willing to learn.
That is certainly a wrong notion of physical time.
It has everything.
Do you believe in psychological time? If yes, why is it necessary?
I invite you to read what I wrote carefully! These are not what I said.
You are not willing to learn yourself. You just evades from the point making unnecessary comments irrelevant to the topic.
Answer my questions first I have wrote to you before progressing instead of keep evading with irrelevant nonsense.
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You are not willing to learn. There is no point discussing things with you further!
The problem is the situation where one has to keep asking how could anyone hope or expect to learn anything from the poster who evades the critical questions rubbishing it off with irrelevant nonsense instead of trying to consider and offer some logical and rational explanations or answers to the questions.
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What does the word “time” represent? Our advanced monkey brains evolved to perceive time as a linear flow - before, now, after. This is our mental image. But our mental images do not necessarily correspond to reality.
What does a seagull flying over a football stadium (soccer if you’re American) know about the offside rule? What does an amoeba know about the current events in the Middle East? This is situation we are in with respect to our knowledge of how the universe functions. We must be humble and acknowledge our limitations.
You cannot conclude that there is no third option. For all we know there are many other options that we haven’t yet figured out.
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Time is something that changes and allows change in other things.
I can. Consider the very moment now. Now, let’s imagine points in the past. Points in the past either exist eternally or they start from a specific point, so-called the beginning of time. There is no third option.
Because if a lion could speak, we would not understand it.
That clears it up, right?
The idea is that we all speak and we gather our understanding from the words based upon how they are used, obviously unable to peek into one another’s heads and see what they mean. There has to be an assumption that we share a form of life, that we all have the same sorts of practices we engage in, and that we respond the same way to the same things, else we cannot be sure we are playing the same language game when we speak.
If I say to a lion, “how are you today,” and he says “fair to middling” I could not say he is doing fair to middling with any sense of confidence because the lion does not share my form of life.
But “form of life” variances don’t require something as drastic as one being a lion and one a human. They can be subtle and exist among humans, and even then, we might share a form of life to some things and not others.
And that’s the part of the book I took a picture of. The way a religious person lives his life, what he takes as fundamental, the practices he engages in are so distinct that when he speaks of religion to an atheist, he as if a lion. He can’t be understood as to those things related to religion unless he can appreciate the form of life under which that usage arises.
When the Pope says “Lord” he doesn’t mean what the atheist means. Lord is who he worships, considers the creator of everything, is perfect, etc. When the atheist asks where is this Lord, you have a category error. You are asking for a thing, like maybe a tree, a gaseous mysterious entity or something like that. That isn’t what he means by “Lord.”
The critical distinction revolves around not what, but how the religious person believes.
If a religious person believes there will be a judgment day, he doesn’t think of it in an empirically verifiable way, but he uses “belief” in a very different way, making any argument by an atheist missing his point.
I’m not obvlivious to the problems with this argument because there’s a far distance between not understanding a lion and understanding the Pope, and surely much of what the Pope says an atheist fully understands. And I think of the apostate, who once fully believed as the Pope and who now no longer does, which would make it difficult to suggest he no longer actually can understand the Pope.
I also realize that there are plenty of believers who claim full buy in to the scientific model, asserting that empirical evidence does reveal God, although I would push back that what they take as proof is considerably different from what the scientist does.
So I take it with a grain of salt, trying to push through the Wittgensteinian argument, but I do have some sympathy for his position in that there does appear to be a fundamental disagreement over term usage between the beleiver and atheist, employing different usages with terms like “God” and “belief” that result in endless debate without addressing the issue. But there is something intuitively correct with saying the religious person has a different form of life than the atheist, actively engaging in conduct that reveals an very different sort of life.
Thank you very much for your long post. I agree with most of what you said. I have a close relative, a Buddhist, who always talks about his spiritual experiences. Most of the time, he mentions things that do not make any sense to us, and he also claims that you cannot understand these unless you undergo the same sorts of experiences. I totally understand that there are people who have inner experiences about God or any spiritual phenomena that are not describable to others. I also totally understand that we can not explain God in His totality. But that is not something that I am doing in this thread. I have a simple definition for God, the creator of the universe, which I think everybody understand it. I then make an argument for the existence of such a creator. Can we make an argument for the existence of God as a creator that everybody understands? Sure yes. Can we explain what God is in His totality? Sure no.
You’ve described what it does - not what it is.
The fact that you think you can shows that your imagination is closed off to other possibilities. Expand your imagination. Imagine that there may be points that are not on the line - i.e. time may be multi-dimensional - so there may be points perpendicular that are neither in the past nor in the future. Or imagine that time may be a circle in which case there is no beginning or end.
Or time may be something totally beyond our human comprehension.
Time is something that accommodates different forms of things in its moments. It is like space in a sense, since space accommodates things in different locations. Time also accommodates things with the difference that only one moment of it is present, the so-called now.
This is a cyclic model of time, which is a version of time with no definite beginning.
If our universe is an eternal past of finite repeating events, then you could always choose a point and get to the present event because there are finite events. So this present event would actually happen infinite times.
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I would say that time is a cognitive construct, the product of human thought. Time and distance do not exist for species other than humans. Time, distance, and god are products of human thought. Nowhere else do they exist. You ever see a mama bear checking her watch to see when she needs to pick up her cubs?
The eternal past is bigger than any infinity. One cannot simply get a finite duration from dividing eternity by infinity. That is the first problem. And the second problem is related to the unbounded number of present events that always exist in the past, no matter how far you go into the past.
Hi, and welcome to the forum. I was wondering if you studied the OP, specifically 2. I am asking since 2 is a good point for starting a discussion with a person who denies time.
“is related to” is not very specific. I don’t see a problem.
I have no clue what you mean here. You can have an infinite set that is built from repeating finite sets.
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Time exists - for humans. But not for all other species. They do what they are programmed to do, based on cues from the environment. So, god like time, exists for us as part of Human Thought Universe. Time (and god)exists. They are really ideas with no physical manifestations. I hope this clarifies my position. Thanks for the response. Rich C.