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PaperclipPerfector  23d ago (text post)   41256 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 8, 2025

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No, I'm not. Unless you hold to a later Mark date than most scholars today. And many scholars belive Mark was Jewish, such as William Arnal and Julie Galambush who are hardly Christian Fundamentalists.

Mark is far removed from the events that he's narrating, either in time or in space or both. The belief that he was jewish is a minority position. Unfortunately like many things plagued by apologetics you can't even tell when some people are just mistaken or deliberately lying.

Right now I do not have boiling water. If I were to fill a pot with water and put it on a stove and turn it on and heat made the water boil, all that chain of events was required to make the water boil. It's also clear that there was something about that chain of events that caused the water to boil, when otherwise the water would have stayed in my pipes without boiling. The heat of the stove had the causal power to change the water from liquid to gas.

The water boils because of a transfer of energy not because of causal power.

I am not arguing that there is something logically contradictory in an infinite series of mirrors. The argument is, even with an infinite series of mirrors there would be no face if there was nothing imparting an image of a face.

The face is irrelevant? It's just light in some arbitrary pattern being reflected, are you saying that you can imagine infinite mirrors but not infinite light? That you can only imagine light in a pattern if there is something giving it that pattern (but the same isn't true of the atoms of mirrors)?

Yes! The thing impossible isn't the speed of the atom, but the fact that the atom exists at all.

An infinite series of mirrors can exist but not a single atom? I'm not following. I don't find this persuasive at all, I think there's nothing impossible in imagining an universe comprised of a single atom.

The water boils because of a transfer of energy not because of causal power.

If you think that this materially changes anything I said then I don't know how to reach you. Something had greater energy and it transferred this energy in the form of heat to the water. We can go deeper and talk about entropy and the average velocity of the molecules. I took Thermodynamics, too. The specifics doesn't change the fact that something acting outside the water caused it to heat up.

It's just light in some arbitrary pattern

But there would be a reason why it's in one pattern instead of another. And mentioning light is actually more relevant to my argument! Because light is outside the infinite mirrors. There could be infinite mirrors and no face because no light! The infinity of the mirrors does not create an image.

An infinite series of mirrors cannot exist in reality, it's an analogy to the idea that claiming that an infinite amount of causes can explain itself. It cannot.

A single atom moving through space still needs an explanation. There are many things it could have been otherwise. For instance, the atom has a certain number of protons, electrons, and neutrons, but it would have been possible for it to have fewer or more. Why is it moving at this velocity and not another velocity? Why is there space for it to move in? A single atom has the potential to be something else, so something must have caused it to be as it is instead of in another way.

You're arguing for a kind of existential inertia, but that is a whole other can of worms than an argument for infinity.

The water boils because of a transfer of energy not because of causal power.

If you think that this materially changes anything I said then I don't know how to reach you

I think it does change things because every time I've heard that argument it ends with "and that's why god needs to exist here and now" and you don't get there with energy transfers because once the energy is transferred the source doesn't need to continue existing.

But there would be a reason why it's in one pattern instead of another. And mentioning light is actually more relevant to my argument! Because light is outside the infinite mirrors. There could be infinite mirrors and no face because no light! The infinity of the mirrors does not create an image.

I really don't know what you are even saying at this point. Usually these arguments are trying to prove the existence of god through a logical impossibility (i.e. non-existence of god is logically impossible thus god exists). I don't think there's anything logically impossible in the existence of an arbitrary arrangement of light, it doesn't need a cause.

I haven't laid out a proof for the existence of God here because I don't have the time to write one out. All I am doing is objecting to you saying that ALL proofs for God's existence rely on the non-existence of actual infinity. But based on what you're saying I'm not convinced you've understood a single proof in the slightest.

I'm going to try to write it out again without mirrors:

Imagine a circle of 100 robots facing each other. Each has a command to raise their hands if the robot next to them raises their hand first. Each robot starts with its hands down. After how many hours will every robot have its hands raised? They never will.

What if you made the circle bigger? 100,000 robots. 10^100 robots? Infinite robots? (Please understand, I am not implying that a universe of infinite robots is possible without God or anything like that. This is a thought experiment to demonstrate an aspect of a different argument.)

Just because there are infinite robots does not mean that they will all raise their hands with infinite time.

Now we come upon a circle where some robots have their arms up. We know that every robot is programed to not raise its hands until the one in front of it had its hands raised. What can we deduce from this?

Even if the robots had been there for an infinite length of time beforehand, the answer remains the same. There must have been something different from the chain of robots - like a robot that started off with raised hands.

If the circle is infinite then it's a line. On this infinite line of robots either no robots have their hands raised or at any point in time an infinite number of robots on the left has their hands raised. No, I'm not convinced that your argument for the necessity of a starting point is correct, it's simply a problem with dealing with infinites.

But suppose your argument is correct and there must be a starting point. Lets examine the consequences. The line-of-robots-world you describe is fully deterministic so we can reverse the arrow of time. In the reverse-time-line-of-robots-world a robot lowers their hands if the robot to the right lowered their hands, that means there must be a first robot to lower hands therefore the line-of-robots-world has an end, we already proved that it had a beginning, and thus the line-of-robot-worlds can not be infinite.

at any point in time an infinite number of robots on the left has their hands raised.

Not necessarily, some robots on the left might have their hands raised for a long, long span, and then there might be once again robots that do not have their hands raised. I'm not advocating for a starting point in the sense that the line cannot be infinite on either side.

So: infinite robots with hands down, some point on the line something outside the line of robots intervenes to make a robot raise their hands. We know this thing cannot be a robot with its hands down.

I think this counters your argument about the robots lowering hands too?

The point is you can disagree that the world is like the robot analogy but saying that it is infinite does not counter it.

So: infinite robots with hands down, some point on the line something outside the line of robots intervenes to make a robot raise their hands. We know this thing cannot be a robot with its hands down.

Yes, this is another way things could be. But it doesn't get you anywhere with your argument because it isn't logically necessary.

I'm not arguing for God's logical necessity, I am arguing that the argument for God does not rely on infinity not being real.

So you want to argue that god is contingently possible?

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