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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   26696 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 11, 2023

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Bishop Barron has been on the Ben Shapiro Show, delivered lectures for the Heritage Foundation, been interviewed by Lex Freidman, and many more. If you look in the comments on his Youtube channel it does seem like many atheists, protestants, and members of other faith traditions watch him regularly.

On a whim I decided to watch a bit of the Ben Shapiro interview, and I'm thoroughly unimpressed. When Ben asked him what his favorite argument is for the proof of God, he says what essentially boils down to the First Cause argument, something that's been trounced in the internet atheist debates for decades. When pressed with a follow up of what caused God then, he responded with special pleading. He dressed it up with fancy words like "that which is properly unconditioned on this reality", and his presentation is polished, but he's just regurgitating arguments from a debate that was largely settled over a decade ago. After watching a bit more and hearing nothing but a few "God of the Gaps" arguments I closed the tab.

I am very disheartened to hear that you have deemed the Cosmological argument 'trounced... for decades." I have seen atheists like Dawkins completely misunderstand the Cosmological argument and refute caricatures of it. I have seen some philosophers provide interesting propositions that make supporters of the Cosmological argument need to add details and rebuttals. This is not a stagnant field, and no side has won (though there are several theist arguments that have no good rebuttals yet.)

In your link, rebuttal 1 shows that the author does not understand what is meant by "Cause," because radioactive decay absolutely has a cause. I don't like Craig's argument because the premise "The Universe Had a Beginning" is harder to defend than other premises, and I will not defend WLC's Cosmological argument. A flaw with Rebuttal 2 is that not every event needs to be separated from its cause in time, there are many causes that occur concurrently with the event it causes, like all Essentially Ordered Causes. My ire for Rebuttal 3 increases every time I see it. Just going to quote Feser on this one:

“What caused God?” is not a serious objection to the argument.

Part of the reason this is not a serious objection is that it usually rests on the assumption that the cosmological argument is committed to the premise that “Everything has a cause,” and as I’ve just said, this is simply not the case. But there is another and perhaps deeper reason.

The cosmological argument in its historically most influential versions is not concerned to show that there is a cause of things which just happens not to have a cause. It is not interested in “brute facts” – if it were, then yes, positing the world as the ultimate brute fact might arguably be as defensible as taking God to be. On the contrary, the cosmological argument – again, at least as its most prominent defenders (Aristotle, Aquinas, Leibniz, et al.) present it – is concerned with trying to show that not everything can be a “brute fact.” What it seeks to show is that if there is to be an ultimate explanation of things, then there must be a cause of everything else which not only happens to exist, but which could not even in principle have failed to exist. And that is why it is said to be uncaused – not because it is an arbitrary exception to a general rule, not because it merely happens to be uncaused, but rather because it is not the sort of thing that can even in principle be said to have had a cause, precisely because it could not even in principle have failed to exist in the first place. And the argument doesn’t merely assume or stipulate that the first cause is like this; on the contrary, the whole point of the argument is to try to show that there must be something like this.

It is not special pleading, it's basic logic. The Causal Principle is defined as "whatever begins to exist has a cause." This is a good defense of the Causal Principle. If someone can give a very good argument that A)There exists a series of causes and effects and changes, B) It is not the case that the series has an infinite regress, and C) It is not the case that its members are joined together like a closed loop, then they have given a very good argument that D) Therefore, the series has a First Cause and a first change. And many people have indeed made very good arguments on this, here is one of the latest

If there is a first, uncaused-Cause, and whatever begins to exist has a cause, then the first uncaused-Cause did not begin to exist. If the First Cause did not begin to exist it is not some sort of special pleading to say that it has no cause.

If you then go on to say, "The Universe didn't begin to exist, therefore it does not need a cause," the universe is a set of things that change, and this provides a good defense of "It is not the case that the series has an infinite regress."

When I open your links, and the first thing I see is stuff like this:

Ekyroptic universe, and Penrose’s conformal cyclic cosmology

It's indicative of someone trying to do what Scott described here. I'm not touching that stuff for the same reason I wouldn't try to go toe-to-toe with a Holocaust denier on the precise chemical compounds in Auschwitz gas chambers. I'd probably lose, and not necessarily because I'm wrong. Make your point legibly if you want to continue on this particular axis.

Instead, I'd zoom out and say the entire argument is the classic motte and bailey of God of the Gaps. Pointing out a gap in scientific knowledge does not mean the alternative is Christian theology. At best it simply muddies the waters, but why should one believe your specific God is the logical alternative, when there are many other gods that people believe in, or perhaps that science just hasn't had the capabilities of studying the ultimate cause yet?

A huge problem is that you are wading into a discussion that has a lot of back and forth. It's not the same as a Holocaust denier that is talking only to Holocaust deniers. Loke is formulating a response, referencing well-known models and terms, to atheistic philosophers of religion (there are many, such as Linford who is referenced throughout Loke's argument.) Unlike the disdain that people who argue with Holocaust deniers might express, atheistic philosophers of religion find the whole topic of great enough importance to devote a lifetime to, and support the position that "it is possible to rationally believe in God."

The Ekyroptic universe is a physics theory you might have heard popularized as "The Big Bounce." It was proposed by some pretty important theoretical physicists, Burt Ovrut, Paul Steinhardt and Neil Turok. Using the accurate scientific term to refer to a theory is not a knock against the argument.

The cosmological argument is explicitly not a God of the Gaps argument. It is not pointing out a gap in scientific knowledge. It is not:

  1. We don't know what started the universe
  2. Therefore God.

The above would be a God of the Gaps argument. Instead, the Cosmological argument is a logical argument based on the same metaphysical assumptions required to conduct scientific inquiry in the first place.

Edit: I don't really want to argue for the First Cause here. I realize I end up presenting a lot of arguments for the first cause in order to support my point, but I am not going to "make my point legibly" because my point is not that God exists.

The point that I am arguing for is that your arguments are incredibly outdated, and were wrong even back when you formed them. But despite this, you are completely, irrationally, confident in your belief that the cosmological argues for something it does not.

It would be like if I said, "I closed the tab once your scientist started talking about evolution. Don't you know that was debunked a century ago?" and then I link to an old web page that asks where the missing link is. Then I say, "If your scientist believes in evolution as the origin of living species, explain how non-living viruses can cross between species?"

It's fine to not follow this debate in detail, everyone has their own bandwith. But you never understood what theists ever meant by the cosmological argument. That is my point I am trying to make legibly.

Metaphysics is incoherent to anyone who isn't totally immersed in it. It takes the worst aspects of formal philosophy, mainly the mountain of jargon and the lack of applicability to the real world, and dials it up to 11. I have enough problems with normal ivory tower philosophy already, and metaphysics is where the ivory tower ends and philosophers build castles in the sky.

Implying it's not possible to debate the veracity of religion without diving into metaphysics is like saying it's not possible to debate the reality of the Holocaust without discussing the intricacies of chemical compounds on the walls of Auschwitz gas chambers. "There's lots of back and forth on these points, and your arguments are incredibly outdated if you don't discuss these particular chemical compounds". Nah, I'm almost certain there's nonsense somewhere if you're using it to prove this, but I'm not willing to devote dozens of hours to identifying where it is.

Unlike the disdain that people who argue with Holocaust deniers might express

The point of the Holocaust example isn't whether disdain is involved or not, but rather that they're leveraging information asymmetry to "prove" their point via jargon dumping, effectively setting up a no-win scenario for people who aren't utterly immersed in the niche topic. If they bite, they'll get demolished. If they don't bite, the denier can smugly claim victory by default. The only winning move is to not play that game, but rather to zoom out and focus on the bigger picture where information asymmetry is less severe.

It's fine to not follow this debate in detail, everyone has their own bandwith.

You're right, I really don't want to discuss metaphysics. I'm perfectly fine debating the veracity of religion in non-metaphysical ways, but if metaphysics is the only thing you want to discuss then there's not much to be gained from either side by continuing this.

I don't want to discuss metaphysics, you are the one who started this conversation. You are the one who made the bold claim that the Cosmological Argument was debunked decades ago and then linked to a source that clearly doesn't understand what the word 'cause' even is. It's not a hard word to understand!

Then after I demonstrated that I knew more on the topic than you, you still linked to the Wikipedia article on God of the Gaps, like I wouldn't have ever encountered that phrase before. You keep setting yourself up as an expert, but when I get in the weeds with you, you back out. Stop setting yourself up as an expert in the Cosmological Argument.

All I was doing before you started this topic was demonstrating that Bishop Robert Barron was a public intellectual given the criteria provided.

The biggest issue with that line of sophistry is that it precisely nothing to imbue the definition of "God" with other relevant properties, such as the whole omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent shtick.

Great, you've shown there "must" be an Unmoved Mover/Uncaused Cause. What exactly does find and replace with "God" for "the Big Bang" lose out on?

“No one has given any reason to think that the First Cause is all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good, etc.” is not a serious objection to the argument.

People who make this claim – like, again, Dawkins in The God Delusion – show thereby that they haven’t actually read the writers they are criticizing. They are typically relying on what other uninformed people have said about the argument, or at most relying on excerpts ripped from context and stuck into some anthology (as Aquinas’s Five Ways so often are). Aquinas in fact devotes hundreds of pages across various works to showing that a First Cause of things would have to be all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good, and so on and so forth. Other Scholastic writers and modern writers like Leibniz and Samuel Clarke also devote detailed argumentation to establishing that the First Cause would have to have the various divine attributes.

Of course, an atheist might try to rebut these various arguments. But to pretend that they don’t exist – that is to say, to pretend, as so many do, that defenders of the cosmological argument typically make an undefended leap from “There is a First Cause” to “There is a cause of the world that is all-powerful, all-knowing, etc.” – is, once again, simply to show that one doesn’t know what one is talking about.

To give these arguments takes pages and pages, here is a very hasty version missing all the background for the purpose of fitting into a comment. Chapter 6 of Five Proofs of the Existence of God provides a much more detailed argument.

Several attributes seem to follow immediately and obviously from God’s being Pure Act. Since to change is to be reduced from potency to act, that which is Pure Act, devoid of all potency, must be immutable or incapable of change (ST I.9.1). Since material things are of their nature compounds of act and potency, that which is Pure Act must be immaterial and thus incorporeal or without any sort of body (ST I.3.1–2). Since such a being is immutable and time (as Aquinas argues) cannot exist apart from change, that which is Pure Act must also be eternal, outside time altogether, without beginning or end (ST I.10.1–2).

As the cause of the world, God obviously has power, for “all operation proceeds from power” (QDP 1.1; cf. ST I.25.1). Moreover, “the more actual a thing is the more it abounds in active power,” so that as Pure Act, God must be infinite in power (QDP 1.2; cf. ST I.25.2). In line with the mainstream classical theistic tradition, Aquinas holds that since there is no sense to be made of doing what is intrinsically impossible (e.g. making a round square or something else involving a self-contradiction), to say that God is omnipotent does not entail that he can do such things, but only that he can do whatever is intrinsically possible (ST I.25.3).

The Fifth Way, if successful, establishes by itself that God has intellect. Furthermore, intelligent beings are distinguished from non-intelligent ones in that the latter, but not the former, possess only their own forms. For an “intelligent being is naturally adapted to have also the form of some other thing; for the idea of the thing known is in the knower” (ST I.14.1). That is to say, to understand some thing is for that thing’s essence to exist in some sense in one’s own intellect. Now the reason non-intelligent things lack this ability to have the form of another thing is that they are wholly material, and material things can only possess one form at a time, as it were. Hence immaterial beings can possess the forms of other things precisely because they are immaterial; and the further a thing is from materiality, the more powerful its intellect is bound to be. Thus human beings, which, though they have immaterial intellects are also embodied, are less intelligent than angels, which are incorporeal. “Since therefore God is in the highest degree of immateriality … it follows that He occupies the highest place in knowledge” (ST I.14.1). This argument presupposes a number of theses in the philosophy of mind and cannot be evaluated, or even properly understood, unless those theses are first understood. We will explore these theses in chapter 4.

We can also conclude, in Aquinas’s view, that “there is will in God, as there is intellect: since will follows upon intellect” (ST I.19.1). Why do will and intellect necessarily go together? For Aquinas, things naturally are inclined or tend towards their natural forms, and will not of themselves rest, as it were, until that form is perfectly realized; hence the acorn, for example, has a built-in tendency towards realizing the form of an oak, and will naturally realize that form unless somehow prevented by something outside it. What we are describing in this example is of course the goal-directedness of the acorn as something having a final cause. But other sorts of thing have final causes too. In sentient beings, namely animals, this inclination towards the perfection of their forms is what we call appetite. And in beings with intellect it is what we call will. Thus anything having an intellect must have will. (We will return to this topic in the next chapter.) Of course, since God does not have the limitations we have, he does not have any ends he needs to fulfill, any more than he needs to acquire any knowledge. Thus, as with our attribution of power, intellect, and other attributes to God, our attribution of will to him is intended in an analogous rather than a univocal sense.

Since something is perfect to the degree it is in act or actual, God as Pure Act must be perfect (ST I.4.1). Given the convertibility of being and goodness, God as Pure Act and Being Itself must also be good, indeed the highest good (ST I.6).

Feser, Edward. Aquinas: A Beginner's Guide (Beginner's Guides) (pp. 95-96).

Oh not Aquinas again.

Since to change is to be reduced from potency to act, that which is Pure Act, devoid of all potency, must be immutable or incapable of change

What's the "must" coming from? Not obvious at all to me.

Since material things are of their nature compounds of act and potency, that which is Pure Act must be immaterial and thus incorporeal or without any sort of body (ST I.3.1–2).

This is all frankly confused. Just because you can out the words "Pure" and "Act" together and the poor English language doesn't throw a segfault doesn't mean it means anything.

Since such a being is immutable and time (as Aquinas argues) cannot exist apart from change, that which is Pure Act must also be eternal, outside time altogether, without beginning or end (ST I.10.1–2).

Without beginning? Sure. Without end? Why?

He's correct in the sense that modern physics considers time to be meaningless in the absence of anything that can serve as a clock.

Hence immaterial beings can possess the forms of other things precisely because they are immaterial;** and the further a thing is from materiality, the more powerful its intellect is bound to be.**

Bruh

I admire the sheer audacity of that statement, if literally nothing else.

Now the reason non-intelligent things lack this ability to have the form of another thing is that they are wholly material, and material things can only possess one form at a time,as it were

Quantum superposition says hi.

But other sorts of thing have final causes too. In sentient beings, namely animals, this inclination towards the perfection of their forms is what we call appetite

???

Since therefore God is in the highest degree of immateriality … it follows that He occupies the highest place in knowledge

Ah, I knew Anselm would get a shout out somewhere. Tell him that his ontological argument proves the existence of the perfect pizza, which alongside the other necessary qualities for perfection, such as existing in my hand (clearly better than not existing isn't it?), also comes with more laudable/necessary properties such as banishing his spirit to the aether.

These are words of art that require precise definitions and examples to understand what is even being said here. For example your rebuttal of "quantum superposition" doesn't work on what is meant by the word "form." Without writing a hundred pages on what is meant by the terms Act, Potency, Perfection, etc I cannot defend this argument, and so I will not be defending these arguments in a forum post (or at all, dozens of better people have written these books already.) But please desist from claiming that theists do not give arguments that go from First Cause to the Divine Attributes.

But please desist from claiming that theists do not give arguments that go from First Cause to the Divine Attributes.

Sure. I'll water my claim down to "theists do not give arguments that go from First Cause to the Divine Attributes that happen to be remotely sane or comprehensible".

How many explanations, books, and tutors did it take for you to go from a child's understanding of zoology to a doctor's understanding of biochemistry? That this topic is difficult to understand without gaining a background in metaphysics is not a serious argument against it.

There's a reason the job market for doctors is pretty solid and that for theologists looks threadbare. You'd think such convincing arguments that could save priceless souls might fetch better market rates.

I don't care to delve into this further because I strongly expect it's a waste of my time, the expected value of further information is negative. I don't need to confound my otherwise perfectly clear thinking by looking into whatever a few millenia of theological sophism has achieved, given that the fruits of it are so paltry. You don't need to be a doctor to understand homeopathy doesn't work, for all that its devout practitioners have built up their own parallel corpus of literature and jargon.

Great, you've shown there "must" be an Unmoved Mover/Uncaused Cause. What exactly does find an replace with "God" for "the Big Bang" lose out on?

What does replacing the Big Bang with God lose out on? Both of them share the attribute of serving as a termination point for materialistic explanations. Anything posited past that point is unfalsifiable by definition, unless something pretty significant changes in terms of our understanding of physics.

If there's an unmoved mover/uncaused cause, that means that there's at least one non-materialistic answer that's unavoidable. Materialism's whole point is that no non-materialistic answers are necessary, that it offers a seamless answer to all our questions. This is a seam, and not a small one either. And as I argued in our last go-round, it's not the only such seam.

What does replacing the Big Bang with God lose out on? Both of them share the attribute of serving as a termination point for materialistic explanations. Anything posited past that point is unfalsifiable by definition, unless something pretty significant changes in terms of our understanding of physics.

Simplicity, in the information theoretic sense, since you're dispensing with all the complexity involved with God. And that is the case, while waffling about omniscience and the lot might sound simple in natural language to a brain that, at the first go around, doesn't see all the glaring issues with that package deal, good luck showing the Kolmogorov complexity isn't ridiculous. And complexity needs to be justified, and boy does God not constrain expectations in the least.

If there's an unmoved mover/uncaused cause, that means that there's at least one non-materialistic answer that's unavoidable. Materialism's whole point is that no non-materialistic answers are necessary, that it offers a seamless answer to all our questions. This is a seam, and not a small one either. And as I argued in our last go-round, it's not the only such seam.

Explaining "all but one" beats the alternatives on offer. Mathematics is not considered invalid because it begins from base axioms. Besides, our intuition is hopelessly flawed in such matters, whether or not the Big Bang was an Uncaused Cause remains an open question in physics, and the universe doesn't give a shit about how much of an affront it is to our sensibilities it is to have things like that around. Time itself ceases to have meaning both before the Big Bang (which started the clock), or in more prosaic entities like black holes.

Besides, why isn't the Big Bang covered by "materialism"? It can very well accept such a primitive, since nobody claims that black holes are a failure of the same. Our intuitive notions of causality went out the window the moment quantum mechanics, with all it's superposition, entanglement and reference-frame/observer dependent definitions of cause and effect arrived.

If it conflicts with intuitions or our notions of "satisfying" answers, so much the worse for the latter. The math does a better job, or at least works while our intuitions halt and catch fire.

Simplicity, in the information theoretic sense, since you're dispensing with all the complexity involved with God.

Infinite universal cycles, simulation, and God are all equally non-materialistic, and it seems to me that information theory doesn't apply to non-materialistic explanations. In what sense would it? In what sense is God more complex than a universe looping according to non-observable physics without beginning or end? Is there math that can be shown proving one less complex than the other? You mention Kolmogorov complexity, but I'm skeptical. Wikipedia provides:

the Kolmogorov complexity of an object, such as a piece of text, is the length of a shortest computer program (in a predetermined programming language) that produces the object as output.

...I don't think you can write a computer program that produces either "God" or "A looping Universe" or "The computer the universe is being simulated on" as output in any meaningful sense, so I don't think you can meaningfully calculate the Kolmogorov complexity of any one of these, nor compare their complexity to determine which is the "least complex". All three concepts are, by definition, outside the bounds of observable reality, which means that whatever statements you make about them are unfalsifiable. I see no reason to presume that you can meaningfully do math on unfalsifiables.

Explaining "all but one" beats the alternatives.

It doesn't, actually, if the alternatives do not conflict with materialism when materialism gives answers that seem reasonable. Christians did not reject the concepts of math or gravity or the rocket equations. The whole claim of Materialism is that it was better because it left no need for anything further. It turns out that it does in fact need further things, and in addition appears to require discarding quite a large amount of solid evidence. Those realities pretty seriously undermine its claims to primacy through simplicity, occam's razor, etc, or that people are forced to it by a hard-nosed commitment to only draw forced conclusions.

There are no forced conclusions are forced. All reason is irreducibly axiomatic. We all believe as we will. We each make our bets and take our chances.

Besides, why isn't the Big Bang covered by "materialism"?

Because the math says it happened, but the math also says it can't happen. That is just another way of saying "we don't have a good explanation for this phenomenon."

Our intuitive notions of causality went out the window the moment quantum mechanics, with all it's superposition, entanglement and reference-frame/observer dependent definitions of cause and effect arrived.

Our "intuitive notions of causality" are the foundation of Materialism. Abandon those, and what remains? If you get to appeal to miracles, why shouldn't I?

The math does a better job.

The math doesn't do a job at all. It isn't supporting your conclusion. Your commitment to Materialism is axiomatic, not ultimately dependent on the outcome of a formula.

Infinite universal cycles, simulation, and God are all equally non-materialistic, and it seems to me that information theory doesn't apply to non-materialistic explanations.

I genuinely do not see how that applies. Why is a simulation or an infinite universe non-materialistic? I'm not being intentionally obtuse, I don't see it.

If a simulation bottoms out in a basement universe, then there's clearly a materialistic explanation for everything running inside it for one.

Infinite cycles of universes, multiverses and the like do not mean that they don't meet the criteria, which I consider interchangeable with materialism for all practical purposes, of being described by the "true" laws of physics, or at least better ones than we have today, which work mighty well within the one universe we have to work with. Ignorance is not the same as incompatibility.

I don't think you can write a computer program that produces either "God" or "A looping Universe" or "The computer the universe is being simulated on" as output in any meaningful sense

You can produce entities with a conception of "God" by running human DNA, plus a support structure for the same. That's how we ended up running about and uttering His name.

The Kolmogorov complexity of a concept can be much less than the exhaustive description of the concept itself. Pi has infinite digits, a compact program that can produce it to arbitrary precision doesn't, and the latter is what is being measured with KC. I believe @faul_sname can correct me if I've misrepresented the field.

A Big Bang is defined by extrapolating backwards from the laws of physics, as well as additional supportive observations. If you posit a God that's responsible for the Big Bang, then he's got that much complexity and much, much more.

Further, it's the combination of complexity and no added value when it comes to constraining expectations that severely disprivileges claims of God being a more succinct/favorable/supported explanation for anything, let alone the origin of the universe.

Christians did not reject the concepts of math or gravity or the rocket equations.

Abiogenesis? Evolution? Don't tell me there isn't a sizeable number of Christians who deny either/both. At the very least, I presume you believe that God set up the parameters to produce either.

The whole claim of Materialism is that it was better because it left no need for anything further

No, it can be better because it's better than everything else on the table.

There are no forced conclusions are forced. All reason is irreducibly axiomatic. We all believe as we will. We each make our bets and take our chances.

I see no reason to disagree. As Yudkowsky said, there's no argument that can convince a rock.

Because the math says it happened, but the math also says it can't happen. That is just another way of saying "we don't have a good explanation for this phenomenon."

"Our explanation is better, even accounting for incompleteness"

Our "intuitive notions of causality" are the foundation of Materialism. Abandon those, and what remains? If you get to appeal to miracles, why shouldn't I?

No? I mean, to hell with the initial reasons for why people adopted materialism, that is irrelevant in evaluating its truth value, or if not entirely irrelevant, then hardly the most pressing aspect.

I fail to see how the Big Bang counts as a miracle, as the word is commonly used.

The math doesn't do a job at all.

It predicts the universe originated from a pointlike singularity, which both conforms with observational evidence, and is more than the Bible gets right.

I genuinely do not see how that applies. Why is a simulation or an infinite universe non-materialistic? I'm not being intentionally obtuse, I don't see it.

Because "materialistic" means observable, falsifiable, testable, quantifiable, connected to the unbroken chain of cause and effect. Previous loops of an infinite loop universe are not part of that unbroken chain, cannot be observed, tested, quantified, or falsified in any way.

If a simulation bottoms out in a basement universe, then there's clearly a materialistic explanation for everything running inside it for one.

If you cannot access the basement universe, you have no evidence of anything about it at all. If you could access it, and its physics didn't present a break in cause and effect, that would be evidence for materialism. But if it had the same physics we do, it has the same break in cause and effect that we do, hence the same problem. You are of course free to posit that the other side of the break in cause and effect is just more Materialism, but such a claim has equal evidentiary support as belief in God or the Karmic wheel, which is to say, none. You have to take it on faith, axiomatically, because the break itself gives you zero evidence to support such a thesis. In fact, if the other side were identical to this side, one wonders how the break could exist at all.

Infinite cycles of universes, multiverses and the like do not mean that they don't meet the criteria, which I consider interchangeable with materialism for all practical purposes, of being described by the "true" laws of physics, or at least better ones than we have today, which work mighty well within the one universe we have to work with.

And I can argue that the "true" laws of physics consist of the ontological necessity of God, but I wouldn't expect that to persuade you. Likewise, you should not expect unfalsifiable claims of a "true" physics that you can neither describe nor test to be persuasive to those who do not choose to be persuaded.

The fact remains that you do not believe in such a "true physics" because evidence has compelled you to do so, because that evidence does not exist. You believe in such a "true physics" because your axioms, if true, necessarily imply that they must exist, even if you cannot see them. Your axioms are supported by evidence you do have; they are not idle fancy. But being axioms, they are chosen, not forced. You believe what you have chosen to believe, and you interpret and weight evidence from the perspective of that choice. Axiomatic certainty has little persuasive value to those who do not share the axioms.

Ignorance is not the same as incompatibility.

Indeed not, but neither is it knowledge. I can claim that we each will have perfect knowledge of God, eventually. You could reasonably reply that you will believe in God when you see him, and not before. I can argue the same about "true physics" for the same reason.

You can produce entities with a conception of "God" by running human DNA, plus a support structure for the same. That's how we ended up running about and uttering His name.

The fact that we can't observe or test how the support structure got here is the entire problem under discussion.

The Kolmogorov complexity of a concept can be much less than the exhaustive description of the concept itself.

And yet I am confident that neither you nor anyone else can actually produce a rigorous algorithm for any of the non-material unfalsifiable concepts discussed above, of the sort needed to actually perform a comparative test of Kolmogorov complexity. If you could access these things, they would by definition be observable. If there were observables that provided answers to these questions, we would have mapped the clockwork as we intended, and there would be no need to go fishing in such dark waters for answers to the unanswerable. To use Kolmogorov complexity as evidence, you need to actually run the numbers, and I'm pretty sure you can't, because they don't exist.

A Big Bang is defined by extrapolating backwards from the laws of physics, as well as additional supportive observations. If you posit a God that's responsible for the Big Bang, then he's got that much complexity and much, much more.

Unless you have falsifiable evidence for how the Big Bang could cause itself, Materialism demands it have a cause. God is no more complex a cause than "true physics" causing a looping universe or any other unobservable, unfalsifiable hard break in the chain of causality. If God could be demonstrated rigorously to be more complex, that would be an argument against it being the simplest solution, though I'd be interested to see whether Boltzmann brains, solipsism or simple denialism come out simpler still. But again, I see no reason to believe that you or anyone else can write rigorous algorithms for things that are fundamentally unknown and unknowable.

Abiogenesis? Evolution? Don't tell me there isn't a sizeable number of Christians who deny either/both. At the very least, I presume you believe that God set up the parameters to produce either.

I'm agnostic on abiogenesis, as I'm not aware of it being demonstrated in the strong sense, but it seems plausible enough. Evolution, sure. And likewise, certainly there are a number of Christians who deny either/both. I disagree with them, but on the other hand, there are a number of Atheists who have believed "Science" that was entirely fictional, so it seems to me that it more or less balances out. People, generally, often believe things that are demonstrably not true for a variety of reasons. All we can do is attempt to minimize this tendency.

No, it can be better because it's better than everything else on the table.

In what way? It can't be in explanatory value if its explanations are shared by its opponents, and the disagreements are over things it can't actually explain. One might argue that it is unsporting of people like myself to accept science that can actually be demonstrated, while not accepting "science" that cannot, and limiting my speculations to areas where speculation seems to be both the only option available and also warranted by the evidence at hand. Yet why should I do otherwise?

I see no reason to disagree. As Yudkowsky said, there's no argument that can convince a rock.

There are arguments that could convince me: close the loop on physics, resolve the contradictions, demonstrate Determinism of the brain. Scientists believed they'd do these things for hundreds of years. Maybe they'll do it still. Maybe AGI will bust the whole business wide open. And yet, until the evidence can actually be observed, science itself demands that results be demonstrated, that claims be testable, that we keep a clear delineation between what can be proven and what has merely been asserted. That demand must come before the preference for Materialism.

"Our explanation is better, even accounting for incompleteness"

Were you to be convinced that Kolmogorov complexity cannot be meaningfully applied in the way you suggest above, would that change your conclusions? In any case, "better" is a value statement. Better how?

I fail to see how the Big Bang counts as a miracle, as the word is commonly used.

Then explain what caused it. This is the basic method of science. Claims must be tested. You don't get credit for an explanation if you can't show your work.

All this is rather missing the point, though, because my argument is not that Materialism is disprovable. My point is that Materialism is axiomatic, and that like all axioms it is chosen, and that this fact can be trivially demonstrated by backtracking to the point at which evidence terminates at the chosen axiom, itself unsupported.

Because "materialistic" means observable, falsifiable, testable, quantifiable, connected to the unbroken chain of cause and effect. Previous loops of an infinite loop universe are not part of that unbroken chain, cannot be observed, tested, quantified, or falsified in any way.

I think you're adding more to the concept of "materialism" than it strictly/necessarily implies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materialism

Materialism is a form of philosophical monism which holds that matter is the fundamental substance in nature, and that all things, including mental states and consciousness, are results of material interactions of material things. According to philosophical materialism, mind and consciousness are by-products or epiphenomena of material processes (such as the biochemistry of the human brain and nervous system), without which they cannot exist. Materialism directly contrasts with idealism, according to which consciousness is the fundamental substance of nature.

Materialism is closely related to physicalism—the view that all that exists is ultimately physical. Philosophical physicalism has evolved from materialism with the theories of the physical sciences to incorporate more sophisticated notions of physicality than mere ordinary matter (e.g. spacetime, physical energies and forces, and dark matter). Thus, some prefer the term physicalism to materialism, while others use the terms as if they were synonymous.

(I am using it interchangeably with physicalism, since I obviously know that energy and fields exist and not "just" matter.)

I do not see where any of your objectioms come into the picture as an indictment of materialism itself.

At most, you're bringing up notions of falsifiability in the Popperian sense, but that is strictly inferior to Bayesianism, where 1 and 0 are not valid probabilities, it's impossible to actually prove or disprove any hypothesis, at most you can get arbitrarily close (or assume them as your starting prior, in other words an axiom, which no amount of evidence will budge).

So the fact that we can't be perfectly sure of what's going on in potential previous universes or even the Basement of the Simulation is a quantitative and not qualitative failing. Since literally nothing else you didn't start out as holding axiomatic can meet the same standard, what of it? I can see where the bulk of the probability mass lies.

The fact remains that you do not believe in such a "true physics" because evidence has compelled you to do so, because that evidence does not exist. You believe in such a "true physics" because your axioms, if true, necessarily imply that they must exist, even if you cannot see them.

But I am compelled to believe so. The overwhelming trend for millennia has been that our best model of the laws of physics explains a wider and wider set of phenomena, to the point that outside particularly exotic situations like black holes, extremely high or low temperatures, or at the Big Bang, most of physics is solved, the equations predict mechanics to well within the limits of your sensors and computational hardware for simulating it. Not even the enormous amount of dark matter and energy out there even remotely comes close in terms of causal influence as a star a dozen lightyears away does through the tenuous tug of its gravity.

It is not complete, but it's inching ever closer, and we're busy trying to tease out 0.00000001% divergences between reality and our predictions to find the errors. Try doing that with a Bible.

Besides, there could potentially not be just one "true physics" but a family of equivalent models that produce the are isomorphic to each other and produce equivalent results, while being technically distinct. This is just a minor quibble, if I'm to be exacting.

I disagree with them, but on the other hand, there are a number of Atheists who have believed "Science" that was entirely fictional, so it seems to me that it more or less balances out

Believe it or not, not even I claim that adopting Atheism makes you infallible when it comes to matters of fact. At best, it makes you less wrong (ever wonder why the biggest collection of rats don't fall themselves "100% Guaranteed Correct.com"?), and at least here, they're avoiding a glaring and unforgivable form of being wrong.

It doesn't remotely balance out.

And yet, until the evidence can actually be observed, science itself demands that results be demonstrated, that claims be testable, that we keep a clear delineation between what can be proven and what has merely been asserted. That demand must come before the preference for Materialism.

Bayesianism is a strict superset of "Science". It allows me to observe the distribution of the numbers produced by a die and see it's glaringly lopsided, and then to take the money of anyone who loudly claims that we must studiously pretend that it's balanced since we don't know for sure what the exact odds are.

As I've kept on saying, the balance of probability is nowhere close to evenly split. Materialism/physicalism is overwhelmingly likely to be correct, even more so if you compare it to religion. Since you can't have perfect credence without starting with it, better take what you can get.

On the matter of falsifiability, on a scale much smaller than deriving a GUT or solving the Hard Problem, if someone was to train an AGI on solely known physics/empirical observations of reality and it started espousing the Jude-Christian God (all references being scrubbed from the training set), I will happily do an about face, at least if you can convince me there isn't any data contamination or other forms of tampering involved.

Religion as you see it, while hardly the worst strain around, is still a pernicious distortion of your memeplex and epistemic rationality. There's no way in hell an independent, intelligent entity without the same biological failure modes as humans would come to the same conclusions as you do, I'll bet on it.

Were you to be convinced that Kolmogorov complexity cannot be meaningfully applied in the way you suggest above, would that change your conclusions?

Sure? It would change how confident I am in said conclusions, at the very least. And not to just a tiny degree either.

In any case, "better" is a value statement. Better how?

Once again, as I've said so many times, by the standards of Occam's Razor (itself a consequence of Bayesianism when you have two hypothesis, of different levels of complexity, that do the same job of predicting the data, leaving aside that in this case they are hilariously lopsided), and from constraining of expectations.

To the extent it's a value judgement, it's an unavoidable one.

Then explain what caused it. This is the basic method of science. Claims must be tested. You don't get credit for an explanation if you can't show your work.

Trust me, not veering off a cliff is sufficient reason for me to feel like I'm being more sane even if I don't know where the road ends. I'm no physicist, I merely have justified confidence that nobody is doing a better job than they are.

Besides, cause and effect become very confusing at that level, if you think Kolmogorov complexity is a headache, you haven't seen nothing yet. All directed acyclic graphs and complicated causal boundaries while throwing even the concept of objective time to the wind. But the maths works, I'll do better at understanding it when someone finds a way to lend me about 20 more IQ points. In the meantime, I am content with my confidence that I'm on the correct team, even if we're still hashing out the finer rules and tiebreakers of the sport.

The Kolmogorov complexity of a concept can be much less than the exhaustive description of the concept itself. Pi has infinite digits, a compact program that can produce it to arbitrary precision doesn't, and the latter is what is being measured with KC. I believe @faul_sname can correct me if I've misrepresented the field.

Sounds right to me.

there's no argument that can convince a rock

You're just not determined enough. I think you'll find the most effective way to convince a rock of your point is to crush it, mix it with carbon, heat it to 1800C in an inert environment, cool it, dump it in hydrochloric acid, add hydrogen, heat it to 1400C, touch a crystal of silicon to it and very slowly retract it to form a block, slice that block into thin sheets, polish the sheets, paint very particular pretty patterns the sheets, shine UV light at the sheets, dip the sheets in potassium hydroxide, spray them with boron, heat them back up to 1000C, cool them back off, put them in a vacuum chamber, heat them back up to 800C, pump a little bit of dichlorosilane into the chamber, cool them back down, let the air back in, paint more pretty patterns on, spray copper at them really hard, dip them in a solution containing more copper and run electricity through, polish them again, chop them into chips, hook those chips up to a constant voltage source and a variable voltage source, use the variable voltage source to encode data that itself encodes instructions for running code that fits a predictive model to some inputs, pretrain that model on the sum total of human knowledge, fine tune it for sycophancy, and then make your argument to it. If you find that doesn't work you're probably doing it wrong.

Sounds right to me.

Do you think we can rigorously define the Kolmogorov complexity of the Christian God, and/or infinite looping universes based on unknown physics?

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You're just not determined enough. I think you'll find the most effective way to convince a rock of your point is to crush it, mix it with carbon, heat it to 1800C in an inert environment, cool it, dump it in hydrochloric acid, add hydrogen, heat it to 1400C...

My, that sounds like an exceptionally involved and complex procedure, surely it can't be economically viable? I'll continue trusting in my trusty hammer, that rock will come around if it knows what's good for it! Science fiction fans these days, coming up with the darnedest ideas..

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