The Christian Discussion Thread X: Originally there were 15

[Tarsonis]

I was mostly joking but I can see you can't take a joke or recognize one. When you mentioned a god and the Christian god it reminded me of the argument that the god of the OT is not the same as the one in the NT. That's all. I'm out.

Jokes are heretical. The Inquisition will be seeing you shortly.

[Grenartia]

1. Muslims believe that the crucifixion never happened. This is false, therefore Islam is also false (among other reasons). As for polytheism, a weak god is not worth worshipping. Might as well serve the omnipotent power.
2. Isn't contact between matter and antimatter supposed to result in a massive explosion? Where are these being observed? Why haven't they destroyed the universe?

1. Muslims believe that the crucifixion happened, but Allah prevented Jesus from dying. As for your refutation of polytheism, you haven't disproved anything.
2. Well, you don't understand antimatter. When matter comes into contact with antimatter, 50% of the mass involved is converted into energy according to the formula E = mc^2 (so 1 unit of mass converts to 8.98755179 × 10^16 units of energy, aka a lot) - the rest is converted into neutrinos. On the macro scale, this would cause a massive explosion - less than 1 gram of antimatter would create an explosion larger than that of the Fat Man nuclear bomb. However, these particles have so little mass that the energy released by their annihilation is negligible.

Actually, no. The matter-energy conversion ratio is 1:1, or 100%. An electron and a positron collide and release two gamma rays with energy equivalent to their masses. Proton-antiproton (and other baryon-antibaryon interactions) collisions are quite a bit more complicated, involving intermediate particles (pions and other mesons), but the total energy and momentum are conserved. The intermediate particles then eventually decay into electrons, positrons (both of which could go on to annihilate each other and produce more gamma rays), gammas, and neutrinos (which may or may not be their own antiparticle, experiments haven't confirmed the Majorana status). This is annihilation (which occurs when the sum of all the quantum numbers of the particles involved equals precisely 0).

[Salus Maior]

1. Muslims believe that the crucifixion happened, but Allah prevented Jesus from dying. As for your refutation of polytheism, you haven't disproved anything.

This is also wrong.

Muslims believe that the crucifixion happened, but it was Judas (whom Allah made to look like Jesus) who was crucified and Allah spared Jesus.

[Grenartia]

Allow me to introduce you to Giordano Bruno. Truly a man who was a visionary, and ahead of his time. He hypothesized an infinite universe with no central body, where the stars weren't simply points of light, but other suns, around which other planets orbited, possibly even with their own forms of life. For this, he was tried and convicted of heresy by the Catholic Church, and promptly burned at the stake.

Ah, Bruno, the same man who believed in reincarnation and rejected basically all Christian theology. He was a heretic for more reasons than cosmology, the likes of which had no scientific backing in his lifetime.

Yet, the thing that got him on the Catholic radar was his cosmological hypotheses.

Also, where is the proof that these other heresies were not manufactured or otherwise exaggerated by his persecutors?

[Northern Davincia]

Ah, Bruno, the same man who believed in reincarnation and rejected basically all Christian theology. He was a heretic for more reasons than cosmology, the likes of which had no scientific backing in his lifetime.

Yet, the thing that got him on the Catholic radar was his cosmological hypotheses.

Also, where is the proof that these other heresies were not manufactured or otherwise exaggerated by his persecutors?

What reason would there be to manufacture heresies? It's already in-line with Bruno's other outlandish beliefs (for his time).

[Grenartia]

Ah, the Kalam cosmological argument. Thing is, the eternal cause of the universe does not have to be a god. And even if it was, how do we know that it was the Judeo-Christian God, as opposed to a (hypothetical) indifferent god that created the universe, then left it to its own devices and did not interact with it at all, let alone reveal itself to intelligent apes on one specific planet?

Slow down there Quixote, you just jumped on to like 4 other topics.

Whether or not God exists, and whether or not it's the Christian God, are two different questions.

Le't's just stick to the first one for now. The first question that must be answered is does God exist? If you don't like the word God, then fine, does a demiurge exist?

The Cosmological Argument, despite your repeated assertions that it has, has never been refuted nor has it been proven, mainly because this isn't something you prove through scientific means. Most notable criticism of the Cosmological Argument are so full of holes by Philosophy professor could barely contain his disdain for them when we covered the material.

Now you point to quantum physics as providing proof of spontaneous creation via quantum fluctuations in a vacuum. The problem is when we say "from nothing" we're not talking about a vaccuum. A vacuum is the absence of matter. When we say nothing, we mean nothing. No matter, no energy, no Newtonian physics, no quantum physics, no space time continuum, no E=MC^2. Nothing. Something cannot come from nothing. So the universe and all its underpinning mechanics didn't come from nothing, it came from something. Something created them.

Now, said something must have always been in existence, in a way that is incomprehensible to linearly oriented minds such as ours. That something had to cause all the other things.

Now you say this doesn't have to be a God, it could be a primal force, but this falls apart under scrutiny. To say this thing doesn't have to be a god is to say this thing either was constantly in motion or moved moved itself without moving itself. The first falls apart because it presupposed motion not stationary as the default state, which is ridiculous because if its moving it has direction which means it has linear cause and effect which means time is a constant beyond the universe, etc etc etc, which means there is a t0 where even it didn't exist and were back to the impossibility of the universe.

The other possibility that it moved itself without moving itself, is also absurd. Nothing can move itself, i.e change its orientation without will. If this thing had no will, it would have remained eternally sedentary and the universe would never exist.

In order for anything to have come into existence, the prime mover must move itself. In order to move itself the prime mover most have possessed a will. The universe, necessarily required a god to create it.

I'd like to point out that the Big Bang does not really posit that all the matter and energy in the universe came from nothing, simply that an infinitesmal point (I.E., a singularity, though not necessarily a black hole) containing all of the matter and energy in the universe rapidly expanded some 13 billion years ago.

[Grenartia]

Allow me to introduce you to Giordano Bruno. Truly a man who was a visionary, and ahead of his time. He hypothesized an infinite universe with no central body, where the stars weren't simply points of light, but other suns, around which other planets orbited, possibly even with their own forms of life. For this, he was tried and convicted of heresy by the Catholic Church, and promptly burned at the stake.

From your own source:

"Starting in 1593, Bruno was tried for heresy by the Roman Inquisition on charges of denial of several core Catholic doctrines, including eternal damnation, the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, the virginity of Mary, and transubstantiation. Bruno's pantheism was also a matter of grave concern..."

None of those are about how stars were suns, or whatever.

And yet, his cosmic pluralism was what grabbed the authorities' attention.

I've also questioned the extent to which those charges accurately reflected Bruno's actual beliefs.

And finally, even if they weren't embellished, the fact remains that the Catholic Church was still clearly in the wrong for persecuting him, to say nothing of his utterly barbaric method of execution (which itself ignores the fact that execution itself is barbaric) in the first place.

[Tarsonis]

Ah, Bruno, the same man who believed in reincarnation and rejected basically all Christian theology. He was a heretic for more reasons than cosmology, the likes of which had no scientific backing in his lifetime.

Yet, the thing that got him on the Catholic radar was his cosmological hypotheses.

Not true, the thing that got him on the Catholic radar was becoming a priest. What got him in hot water with the Inquisition was defending heresies as a priest.

Also, where is the proof that these other heresies were not manufactured or otherwise exaggerated by his persecutors?

Where's the proof that they were?

[Constitutional Technocracy of Minecraft]

1. Muslims believe that the crucifixion happened, but Allah prevented Jesus from dying. As for your refutation of polytheism, you haven't disproved anything.
2. Well, you don't understand antimatter. When matter comes into contact with antimatter, 50% of the mass involved is converted into energy according to the formula E = mc^2 (so 1 unit of mass converts to 8.98755179 × 10^16 units of energy, aka a lot) - the rest is converted into neutrinos. On the macro scale, this would cause a massive explosion - less than 1 gram of antimatter would create an explosion larger than that of the Fat Man nuclear bomb. However, these particles have so little mass that the energy released by their annihilation is negligible.

1. Polytheists have gods that can be wounded, age, die, or even disagree in spite of having far more knowledge than mortals. Poseidon was unable to stop Odysseus from reaching Ithaca despite putting a curse on him. Occam's Razor helps me deduce that these feeble gods are not worth my time nor my prayers. You misunderstand the Islamic belief; according to Muslims, Jesus wasn't present for the crucifixion whatsoever.
2. Has an equal amount of matter and antimatter been observed?

1. Is this an attempt to patch the false dichotomy of Pascal's Wager?
2. Not on a macro level, there is an imbalance between matter and antimatter. However, on the quantum level, empty space itself is churning with virtual particles and virtual antiparticles appearing and annihilating each other. Normally, every particle and antiparticle travels towards each other and annihilates (however at the singularity of a black hole the particles will be separated, so some virtual particles and antiparticles will become real particles, thus taking mass from the black hole - this is known as Hawking radiation)

[Kowani]

Yet, the thing that got him on the Catholic radar was his cosmological hypotheses.

Also, where is the proof that these other heresies were not manufactured or otherwise exaggerated by his persecutors?

What reason would there be to manufacture heresies? It's already in-line with Bruno's other outlandish beliefs (for his time).

>Implying people didn’t make shit up to get their neighbors in front of the various Inquisitions.

[Constitutional Technocracy of Minecraft]

1. Muslims believe that the crucifixion happened, but Allah prevented Jesus from dying. As for your refutation of polytheism, you haven't disproved anything.
2. Well, you don't understand antimatter. When matter comes into contact with antimatter, 50% of the mass involved is converted into energy according to the formula E = mc^2 (so 1 unit of mass converts to 8.98755179 × 10^16 units of energy, aka a lot) - the rest is converted into neutrinos. On the macro scale, this would cause a massive explosion - less than 1 gram of antimatter would create an explosion larger than that of the Fat Man nuclear bomb. However, these particles have so little mass that the energy released by their annihilation is negligible.

Actually, no. The matter-energy conversion ratio is 1:1, or 100%. An electron and a positron collide and release two gamma rays with energy equivalent to their masses. Proton-antiproton (and other baryon-antibaryon interactions) collisions are quite a bit more complicated, involving intermediate particles (pions and other mesons), but the total energy and momentum are conserved. The intermediate particles then eventually decay into electrons, positrons (both of which could go on to annihilate each other and produce more gamma rays), gammas, and neutrinos (which may or may not be their own antiparticle, experiments haven't confirmed the Majorana status). This is annihilation (which occurs when the sum of all the quantum numbers of the particles involved equals precisely 0).

Thanks for correcting me

[Tarsonis]

Slow down there Quixote, you just jumped on to like 4 other topics.

Whether or not God exists, and whether or not it's the Christian God, are two different questions.

Le't's just stick to the first one for now. The first question that must be answered is does God exist? If you don't like the word God, then fine, does a demiurge exist?

The Cosmological Argument, despite your repeated assertions that it has, has never been refuted nor has it been proven, mainly because this isn't something you prove through scientific means. Most notable criticism of the Cosmological Argument are so full of holes by Philosophy professor could barely contain his disdain for them when we covered the material.

Now you point to quantum physics as providing proof of spontaneous creation via quantum fluctuations in a vacuum. The problem is when we say "from nothing" we're not talking about a vaccuum. A vacuum is the absence of matter. When we say nothing, we mean nothing. No matter, no energy, no Newtonian physics, no quantum physics, no space time continuum, no E=MC^2. Nothing. Something cannot come from nothing. So the universe and all its underpinning mechanics didn't come from nothing, it came from something. Something created them.

Now, said something must have always been in existence, in a way that is incomprehensible to linearly oriented minds such as ours. That something had to cause all the other things.

Now you say this doesn't have to be a God, it could be a primal force, but this falls apart under scrutiny. To say this thing doesn't have to be a god is to say this thing either was constantly in motion or moved moved itself without moving itself. The first falls apart because it presupposed motion not stationary as the default state, which is ridiculous because if its moving it has direction which means it has linear cause and effect which means time is a constant beyond the universe, etc etc etc, which means there is a t0 where even it didn't exist and were back to the impossibility of the universe.

The other possibility that it moved itself without moving itself, is also absurd. Nothing can move itself, i.e change its orientation without will. If this thing had no will, it would have remained eternally sedentary and the universe would never exist.

In order for anything to have come into existence, the prime mover must move itself. In order to move itself the prime mover most have possessed a will. The universe, necessarily required a god to create it.

I'd like to point out that the Big Bang does not really posit that all the matter and energy in the universe came from nothing, simply that an infinitesmal point (I.E., a singularity, though not necessarily a black hole) containing all of the matter and energy in the universe rapidly expanded some 13 billion years ago.

And that singularity came from.....?

[Tarsonis]

What reason would there be to manufacture heresies? It's already in-line with Bruno's other outlandish beliefs (for his time).

>Implying people didn’t make shit up to get their neighbors in front of the various Inquisitions.

>Implying such an act was unique to inquisition courts and not every court that has ever existed since man first started using them.

[Constitutional Technocracy of Minecraft]

I'd like to point out that the Big Bang does not really posit that all the matter and energy in the universe came from nothing, simply that an infinitesmal point (I.E., a singularity, though not necessarily a black hole) containing all of the matter and energy in the universe rapidly expanded some 13 billion years ago.

And that singularity came from.....?

We don't know. Perhaps the collapse of a previous universe. Perhaps a quantum event in a parallel universe. Perhaps a god. We really don't know (but please don't hedge your bets exclusively on the third option and assume that of all possible gods it is the Judeo-Christian god, or the god any religion is centred around)

[Tarsonis]

1. Polytheists have gods that can be wounded, age, die, or even disagree in spite of having far more knowledge than mortals. Poseidon was unable to stop Odysseus from reaching Ithaca despite putting a curse on him. Occam's Razor helps me deduce that these feeble gods are not worth my time nor my prayers. You misunderstand the Islamic belief; according to Muslims, Jesus wasn't present for the crucifixion whatsoever.
2. Has an equal amount of matter and antimatter been observed?

1. Is this an attempt to patch the false dichotomy of Pascal's Wager?

What? Dude. No. He's obviously saying a god that can be bested by humans or bested at all are.. how did the hulk put it... "Puny gods." They're not worth his time to pray to, when instead he prays to the Almighty. This has nothing to do with Pascal's wager, and your attempt to shoe horn it in here betrays the thinness of you "atheist cred.

[Grenartia]

Why do you keep saying CTM was saying Galileo was executed? He was put under house arrest for the rest of his life by Pope Paul V (the very same one you claim was a heliocentrist) for the heresy of "following the position of Copernicus, which is contrary to the true sense and authority of Holy Scripture".

As for the question of why Copernicus wasn't similarly persecuted, that's because his model wasn't published until shortly before his death in 1543. In fact, by 1532, he had finished his work, but kept it unpublished for the next 11 years for fear of the very scorn Galileo later earned. There is some speculation that the primary reason it wasn't condemned by the Catholic Church was because of a preface that acknowledged that the hypothesis might be wrong, but it was still useful for astronomical calculations. Indeed, up until Galileo and Kepler came forward with substantial evidence in favor of heliocentrism, most astronomers in Europe rejected Copernicus's conclusions. So even if he had lived past the publication of his book, he likely wouldn't have been persecuted, because he wouldn't have been perceived as a threat.

Given that Pope Paul V was the one who persecuted Galileo for heliocentrism, we can safely say he was not, in fact, a heliocentrist. So lets move on to Kepler. His books were also banned for advocating heliocentrism, but apparently Galileo ignored Kepler's work. Its also notable that Kepler was the assistant and successor to Tycho Brahe, one of the most noted and respected astronomers of his time (admittedly, Brahe didn't advocate heliocentrism, but rather his own system, geo-heliocentrism which is basically geocentrism, but acknowledging that every other body in the solar system orbits the sun except the moon), in the court of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II, who wasn't exactly the most devout Catholic, and was quite tolerant of Protestants (which Kepler was). Essentially, the Catholic Church couldn't do much to Kepler like they could to Galileo, at least until Rudolph abdicated, and even then, he was fully aware of the dangers of being a Protestant and potentially finding a new job under Catholic jurisdiction.He sought employment in an area with more religious freedom, and went to Linz, and then later to Ulm due to the Thirty Years' War. So, basically, Kepler wasn't persecuted, because he made sure to stay firmly out of the Catholic Church's grasp.

As for this:



Allow me to introduce you to Giordano Bruno. Truly a man who was a visionary, and ahead of his time. He hypothesized an infinite universe with no central body, where the stars weren't simply points of light, but other suns, around which other planets orbited, possibly even with their own forms of life. For this, he was tried and convicted of heresy by the Catholic Church, and promptly burned at the stake.

Bruno wasn't really a scientist, he had a fever dream one night and tried to assert it as truth. He was literally laughed out of Cambridge for his assertions. The fact that he was ultimately right was luck, not rigor.

Secondly his execution for heresy had very little if nothing to do with his cosmological model.

He wasn't, as you imply, some random guy who had a fever dream and went out like some homeless guy on a street corner yelling incoherent rambling. He was an educated man, and used logic to defend his hypotheses. Plenty of times, scientific inspirations have come from rather unscientific places (Einstein's insights about Relativity, for instance, came from daydreaming while working at the patent office). The genetic argument doesn't really apply here, since he did make an honest and sincere effort at justifying himself.

[Constitutional Technocracy of Minecraft]

1. Is this an attempt to patch the false dichotomy of Pascal's Wager?

What? Dude. No. He's obviously saying a god that can be bested by humans or bested at all are.. how did the hulk put it... "Puny gods." They're not worth his time to pray to, when instead he prays to the Almighty. This has nothing to do with Pascal's wager, and your attempt to shoe horn it in here betrays the thinness of you "atheist cred.

Well, strength/weakness has no bearing on whether a god exists at all

[Tarsonis]

And that singularity came from.....?

We don't know. Perhaps the collapse of a previous universe. Perhaps a quantum event in a parallel universe. Perhaps a god. We really don't know (but please don't hedge your bets exclusively on the third option and assume that of all possible gods it is the Judeo-Christian god, or the god any religion is centred around)

And those things came from? and then Those things came from? You see what I'm getting at? This isn't an argument of natural science but of reason. Go back and read my post.

[Tarsonis]

What? Dude. No. He's obviously saying a god that can be bested by humans or bested at all are.. how did the hulk put it... "Puny gods." They're not worth his time to pray to, when instead he prays to the Almighty. This has nothing to do with Pascal's wager, and your attempt to shoe horn it in here betrays the thinness of you "atheist cred.

Well, strength/weakness has no bearing on whether a god exists at all

Neither does the price of tea in china.

[Constitutional Technocracy of Minecraft]

We don't know. Perhaps the collapse of a previous universe. Perhaps a quantum event in a parallel universe. Perhaps a god. We really don't know (but please don't hedge your bets exclusively on the third option and assume that of all possible gods it is the Judeo-Christian god, or the god any religion is centred around)

And those things came from? and then Those things came from? You see what I'm getting at? This isn't an argument of natural science but of reason. Go back and read my post.

And God came from... ?

Edit: The universe could come directly or indirectly from an eternal cause (this doesn't mean that the eternal cause is God, as opposed to any naturalistic first cause)

[Grenartia]

Yet, the thing that got him on the Catholic radar was his cosmological hypotheses.

Also, where is the proof that these other heresies were not manufactured or otherwise exaggerated by his persecutors?

What reason would there be to manufacture heresies? It's already in-line with Bruno's other outlandish beliefs (for his time).

To strengthen the case against him.

[Constitutional Technocracy of Minecraft]

Well, strength/weakness has no bearing on whether a god exists at all

Neither does the price of tea in china.

How the hell is Chinese tea prices related to this?

[Lost Memories]

Ah, Bruno, the same man who believed in reincarnation and rejected basically all Christian theology. He was a heretic for more reasons than cosmology, the likes of which had no scientific backing in his lifetime.

Where is the proof that these other heresies were not manufactured or otherwise exaggerated by his persecutors?

A book, written by him, called the shadows of ideas (De Umbris Idearum) which among its topics covered also magic.
You can still find it published around, if you're curious about it. Not the most enlightening read.

[Tarsonis]

Neither does the price of tea in china.

How the hell is Chinese tea prices related to this?

Exactly.

[Tarsonis]

And those things came from? and then Those things came from? You see what I'm getting at? This isn't an argument of natural science but of reason. Go back and read my post.

And God came from... ?

Edit: The universe could come directly or indirectly from an eternal cause (this doesn't mean that the eternal cause is God, as opposed to any naturalistic first cause)

Again go back and read my post