On the other hand, since we are capable of imagining just about anything, and since we can become attached to our imaginings quite easily, checking our intuitions is a terrible way of reasoning about what’s really out there – that is, about substantive claims. This might be put down to the fact that there are many logically possible ways to get the world we see before us. This is obvious at some level even to the most religious person. I would hazard that few religious people would accept “intuitions” about substantive claims not involving religion – what stocks to invest in, which road to take to reach one’s destination, etc. Intuitions about substantive claims are not generally considered legitimate, so requiring that they be considered legitimate for substantive theological claims is special pleading.

It’s that, as abstract concepts, they exist in a way that doesn’t need a place or a time.

Thanks. Although I wrote a bit snarky, I think this is where I was headed. At the point in the conversion after I branched off, if Robin had made this reply I’d have asked her how God differs from the numbers. But again, God is usually referred to as passing between the world of time-space and some landscape/thoughtscape with no time and no space. I would put the boundary as well as the non place in the mind.

On a side note, I did make it to the pub last night and given this “inspired” line of thinking and the miracle of Guinness, I think that I have hit upon my new avocation: exploring the boundary between time and not time and space and not space. If some day you stumble across a blog that is a wild rambling rant of a manifesto on this subject, using all kinds of wild color combinations and lots of exclamation points, you’ll know that I’ve made it to the big time.

Well, God is just the being who exists identically with His nature. He just always exists how he exists.

It’s somewhat interesting that “God” apparently means only “existingness” to this sort of apologist, until they start adding personal attributes or bring up other nonsense like timeless creation. Whatever one might say about nonexistence, that is not a god, because a god’s existence is the only possibility they ever entertain.

It’s mostly uninteresting, because they say the same damn nonsense over and over no matter your response. It’s not much like having a conversation and certainly doesn’t require much thinking, even for the most sophistimicated of theologians. That’s why I think dialogues on this (real or imagined) are unproductive, except to make their unproductivity apparent.

In some way, God must be radically simple such that all his powers are all identical with Him himself.

So it’s not so much that might makes right — might is right. Love is power, timelessness is creativity, knowledge is personhood, all deepities are like every other. It’s somehow worse than Orwellian, because at least “War is Peace” has a definite meaning, albeit a false one.

In general, I believe a lot of the way humans describe things are subtly human-centric, for example, calling some food “delicious” as if that were an inherent property of the food. (At its extreme, this sort of thinking leads to bad sci-fi wherein aliens find humans “sexy” and abduct us.)

Meanwhile, I’m in agreement with the spirit of this article’s argument that quantum physics isn’t really “weird” or “incomprehensible”, but rather, human brains are the “weird” ones. Quantum principles are simply how reality works, period.

That said, we can still refer to quantum physics as being “irrational” in the same sense we might call certain foods “disgusting”: with an awareness of the human-centric bias this involves. And if we use this as our metric, we find that no, the universe is not completely rational/comprehensible. Yes, a human is capable of comprehending it, but this is, to use the food metaphor again, like aquiring a taste.

And even before we reach such extremes as quantum mechanics or relativity, basic physics does not follow our intutions, which are closer to impetus theory and such. The fact that the earth moves around the sun is, by my argument, “irrational”. It doesn’t instantly make sense or “feel right”; your brain has to work at it.

My point is that if God is a humanlike mind, why would he create such an “unhumanlike” universe? Perhaps in a sufficiently “rational” universe, we wouldn’t need science as such; common sense would suffice. (Or our common sense would work exactly like science.) As it is, science seems like this weird otherworldly thing to most people, as if they personally spend their weekends in some sort of “non-scientific” universe.

I admit this argument is a bit peculiar and my use of some words possibly nonstandard. But I believe that other definitions of “comprehensible” can come too close to anthropomorphic mistakes. What does it mean to divide universes into those which are comprehensible and those which are not? The original question of whether our universe is comprehensible is like asking whether Mount Everest is climbable. Both yes and no are arguable answers, since “climbable” isn’t rigorously defined.

Anyway, as I said before, if we define “comprehensible” in the more usual way, then the whole thing is trivial for the reasons Jaime mentions. All it ought to take is that any given two things are distinguishable.

There’s another thought that just occurred to me. If the theist were correct that a rational universe necessitates a creator, this implies the possibility of an uncreated “irrational” universe. But once we allow for such a possibility, we get the principle of explosion, or something like it. Surely an “irrational” universe could just plain happen to look/be like a rational one, and happen to lack a creator? At worst, this violates Occam’s razor, or would if the theists original argument held weight (and did not itself violate the razor).

An additional question is whether our universe is or might be less than 100% comprehensible. I think it is 100% comprehensible, but would still argue that we can’t rule out other possibilities. By definition, however, we would never know. If something is truly incomprehensible, then even its existence would not be knowable (in my view). You can’t point at something and truthfully say “That thing over there? It’s totally incomprehensible.”

http://ecclesia.org/truth/lying.html

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dialetheism/

It seemed to me that an omnipotent being must have perfect knowledge and as an immediate consequence or easily drawn conclusion must be omnipresent to be all knowing. YMMV.

English and other normal languages are poor at capturing some concepts, like infinity. These are better understood via math.

When Jaime and Robin discuss eternity, timelessness, and finite moments, I get the vague feeling that they are both wrong. There’s nothing specific I can put my finger on, but I’m reminded that Zeno’s paradoxes (discussing infinite numbers of infinitesimal things or steps) were never solved by any philosophical argument – they were solved by calculus. Yes, we can in fact count infinities of infinitesimal quantities in a finite number of defined steps. But not via philosophical propositional logic – by mathematical integration. Likewise here, I get the vague feeling that the issue of whether or not – or how – an event can occur within timelessness may never be solved by trying to find the right philosophical propositions, but by math.

My point above is that anything that exists does so according to the local parameters, ie laws of physics/nature, from which it arises, and therefore, whatever the circumstances in that reality/universe, it makes sense. Existence/stability over time, or the analogue, operates according to that reality, therefore:that reality makes sense to inhabitants of that reality = rationality.

Because we exist and interact successfully (survive, and thrive), anything we understand as reality that allows us to more deeply interact successfully(increased understanding) is therefore the very meaning of the word ‘rational.’

We don’t have to estimate how much of the universe we understand, everything that we can possibly understand follows the cause/effect relationship, because of the local reality of unidirectional time.
It is only at extreme levels;energy,size,time intervals, and complexity, that we begin to encounter events that we don’t understand.
Even here, the methods of science, based on the consistent properties of space/time that constrain ALL AND EVERY event and interaction imaginable, are expected to ultimately lead to a coherent understanding of these most extreme circumstances.

Your “Maybe our universe is only 1% comprehensible! (A notion which may lead to paradoxes… which is precisely the sort of thing I’m talking about.)” is obtuse in the extreme, for our universe very, very, very well understood – to the point of successfully modelling and predicting events, with great precision, molecular and sub-atomic, and gravitational and cosmological, energies.
Our understanding of the ‘laws’ of reality are 100% for almost 100% of time of existence of matter.

That is rationality. That is what we mean when we say that because we are part of reality, we understand and operate and exist according to conditions that dictate what reality is.

By existing and thriving and deeply understanding our place in, and interactions with, reality, we conclude that we are rational.

Whatever the conditions of some other part of the multiverse, whatever exists inside them does so by ‘making sense’ of those conditions. We cannot possibly guess anything about what is outside of our reality, because our reality – the laws of our universe’s physics, break down. Our reality, and therefore what ‘makes sense to us’ no longer applies ‘out there.’ Before ‘here’, our universe.

Therefore, it is principally meaningless to try and postulate possible scenarios and properties for some god or first cause, because those scenarios are meaningless outside of our universe in the first place.

Our morality comes from personal understandings of reality that allow us to thrive as individuals, and through empathy, understanding that others have the same values as us and applying those personal understandings(values) universally.