stevestory
Posts: 13407
Joined: Oct. 2005
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| Quote | 84
Bornagain77
July 8, 2020 at 5:45 pm
JVL holds that the ‘beyond space and time’ math that describes this universe ‘just is’ and that it is not contingent upon the Mind of God for its existence and also holds that God did not choose the particular mathematical form that this universe takes.
JVL’s position, as far as the philosophy of science is concerned, is a major step backwards. JVL’s position is very similar, if not exactly like, the position that was held by the ancient Greeks.
The ancient Greeks held to a necessartarian view of mathematics. A view in which mathematics, to use JVL’s term ‘just is’. And that necessartarian, i.e. ‘just is’, view of mathematics, played a major role in preventing the rise of modern science. As Peter Williams notes in the following article, “Both Greek and biblical thought asserted that the world is orderly and intelligible. But the Greeks held that this order is necessary and that one can therefore deduce its structure from first principles. Only biblical thought held that God created both form and matter, meaning that the world did not have to be as it is and that the details of its order can be discovered only by observation. ”
Is Christianity Unscientific? – Peter S. Williams
Excerpt: “Both Greek and biblical thought asserted that the world is orderly and intelligible. But the Greeks held that this order is necessary and that one can therefore deduce its structure from first principles. Only biblical thought held that God created both form and matter, meaning that the world did not have to be as it is and that the details of its order can be discovered only by observation. ”
https://www.bethinking.org/does-sc....entific
And as Henry F. Schaefer III noted in the following video, “The emergence of modern science was associated with a disdain for the rationalism of Greek philosophers who pronounced on how the world should behave, with insufficient attention to how the world in fact did behave.”
“The emergence of modern science was associated with a disdain for the rationalism of Greek philosophers who pronounced on how the world should behave, with insufficient attention to how the world in fact did behave.”
– Henry F. Schaefer III – Making Sense of Faith and Science – 23:30 minute mark
https://youtu.be/C7Py_qe....?t=1415
In fact, it was only with the quote-unquote ‘outlawing’ of the ancient Greek philosophers’s deterministic and necessitarian views of creation that modern science was finally able to achieve a viable birth.
As the following article states, “If science suffered only stillbirths in ancient cultures, how did it come to its unique viable birth? The beginning of science as a fully fledged enterprise took place in relation to two important definitions of the Magisterium of the Church. The first was the definition at the Fourth Lateran Council in the year 1215, that the universe was created out of nothing at the beginning of time. The second magisterial statement was at the local level, enunciated by Bishop Stephen Tempier of Paris who, on March 7, 1277, condemned 219 Aristotelian propositions, so outlawing the deterministic and necessitarian views of creation.
These statements of the teaching authority of the Church expressed an atmosphere in which faith in God had penetrated the medieval culture and given rise to philosophical consequences. The cosmos was seen as contingent in its existence and thus dependent on a divine choice which called it into being; the universe is also contingent in its nature and so God was free to create this particular form of world among an infinity of other possibilities. Thus the cosmos cannot be a necessary form of existence; and so it has to be approached by a posteriori investigation. The universe is also rational and so a coherent discourse can be made about it. Indeed the contingency and rationality of the cosmos are like two pillars supporting the Christian vision of the cosmos.”
The War against the War Between Science and Faith Revisited – July 2010
Excerpt: …as Whitehead pointed out, it is no coincidence that science sprang, not from Ionian metaphysics, not from the Brahmin-Buddhist-Taoist East, not from the Egyptian-Mayan astrological South, but from the heart of the Christian West, that although Galileo fell out with the Church, he would hardly have taken so much trouble studying Jupiter and dropping objects from towers if the reality and value and order of things had not first been conferred by belief in the Incarnation. (Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos),,,
Jaki notes that before Christ the Jews never formed a very large community (priv. comm.). In later times, the Jews lacked the Christian notion that Jesus was the monogenes or unigenitus, the only-begotten of God. Pantheists like the Greeks tended to identify the monogenes or unigenitus with the universe itself, or with the heavens. Jaki writes: Herein lies the tremendous difference between Christian monotheism on the one hand and Jewish and Muslim monotheism on the other. This explains also the fact that it is almost natural for a Jewish or Muslim intellectual to become a pa(n)theist. About the former Spinoza and Einstein are well-known examples. As to the Muslims, it should be enough to think of the Averroists. With this in mind one can also hope to understand why the Muslims, who for five hundred years had studied Aristotle’s works and produced many commentaries on them failed to make a breakthrough. The latter came in medieval Christian context and just about within a hundred years from the availability of Aristotle’s works in Latin,,
If science suffered only stillbirths in ancient cultures, how did it come to its unique viable birth? The beginning of science as a fully fledged enterprise took place in relation to two important definitions of the Magisterium of the Church. The first was the definition at the Fourth Lateran Council in the year 1215, that the universe was created out of nothing at the beginning of time. The second magisterial statement was at the local level, enunciated by Bishop Stephen Tempier of Paris who, on March 7, 1277, condemned 219 Aristotelian propositions, so outlawing the deterministic and necessitarian views of creation.
These statements of the teaching authority of the Church expressed an atmosphere in which faith in God had penetrated the medieval culture and given rise to philosophical consequences. The cosmos was seen as contingent in its existence and thus dependent on a divine choice which called it into being; the universe is also contingent in its nature and so God was free to create this particular form of world among an infinity of other possibilities. Thus the cosmos cannot be a necessary form of existence; and so it has to be approached by a posteriori investigation. The universe is also rational and so a coherent discourse can be made about it. Indeed the contingency and rationality of the cosmos are like two pillars supporting the Christian vision of the cosmos.
http://www.scifiwright.com/201........visited
As to the last sentence of the preceding quote, “Indeed the contingency and rationality of the cosmos are like two pillars supporting the Christian vision of the cosmos”, it is important to note just how radical of a departure this ‘contingency vs. necessatarian’ transformation in the philosophy of mathematics was.
As Edward Fesser notes in the following article, for Christian scholastic philosophers of the medieval period “Mathematical truths exhibit infinity, necessity, eternity, immutability, perfection, and immateriality because they are God’s thoughts,” whereas for ancient Greek philosophers, “mathematical objects such as numbers and geometrical figures exist not only independently of the material world, but also independently of any mind, including the divine mind.”
KEEP IT SIMPLE – by Edward Feser – April 2020
Excerpt: Mathematics appears to describe a realm of entities with quasi-divine attributes. The series of natural numbers is infinite. That one and one equal two and two and two equal four could not have been otherwise. Such mathematical truths never begin being true or cease being true; they hold eternally and immutably. The lines, planes, and figures studied by the geometer have a kind of perfection that the objects of our experience lack. Mathematical objects seem immaterial and known by pure reason rather than through the senses. Given the centrality of mathematics to scientific explanation, it seems in some way to be a cause of the natural world and its order.
How can the mathematical realm be so apparently godlike? The traditional answer, originating in Neoplatonic philosophy and Augustinian theology, is that our knowledge of the mathematical realm is precisely knowledge, albeit inchoate, of the divine mind. Mathematical truths exhibit infinity, necessity, eternity, immutability, perfection, and immateriality because they are God’s thoughts, and they have such explanatory power in scientific theorizing because they are part of the blueprint implemented by God in creating the world. For some thinkers in this tradition, mathematics thus provides the starting point for an argument for the existence of God qua supreme intellect.
There is also a very different answer, in which the mathematical realm is a rival to God rather than a path to him. According to this view, mathematical objects such as numbers and geometrical figures exist not only independently of the material world, but also independently of any mind, including the divine mind. They occupy a “third realm” of their own, the realm famously described in Plato’s Theory of Forms. God used this third realm as a blueprint when creating the physical world, but he did not create the realm itself and it exists outside of him. This position is usually called Platonism since it is commonly thought to have been Plato’s own view, as distinct from that of his Neoplatonic followers who relocated mathematical objects and other Forms into the divine mind. (I put to one side for present purposes the question of how historically accurate this standard narrative is.)
https://www.firstthings.com/article....-simple
In the minds of the Christian founders of modern science, mathematics, especially any mathematics that might describe the universe, was certainly not held to be necessary, as the ancient Greeks held and JVL currently holds, but any mathematics that might describe was instead held to be contingent upon God’s thoughts.
Perhaps the best example that I can give for the fact that the Christian founders of modern science held mathematics, especially any mathematics that might describe the universe, to be God’s thoughts is the following quote by Kepler, (which he made shortly after discovering the laws of planetary motion),,
“O, Almighty God, I am thinking Thy thoughts after Thee!”
– Johannes Kepler, 1619, The Harmonies of the World.
Several quotes along similar lines we presented in post #53
https://uncommondescent.com/neurosc....-706255
Thus JVL is actually defending a necessitarian view of mathematics that the ancient Greeks also held. A fruitless view of mathematics that played a major role in preventing the rise of modern science since a necessitarian view of gives rise to the “Greek philosophers who pronounced on how the world should behave, with insufficient attention to how the world in fact did behave”.
In short, a necessitarian view of mathematics and/or creation, undermines empirical science itself since those who hold to a necessitarian view of mathematics, apparently, didn’t, and still don’t, believe that it was possible for the universe to take any other mathematical form than the one it currently has..
On this point they are sadly, and profoundly mistaken.
Godel’s incompleteness theorem is more that enough, in and of itself, to prove this point. But to add even more weight to the claim that the mathematics that describe this universe could have been different. The free will loop-hole in quantum mechanics has now been closed by Anton Zeilinger and company.
On top of that, “Human mathematicians are able to create axioms, but a computer program cannot do this without violating information conservation. Creating new axioms and free will are shown to be different aspects of the same phenomena: the creation of new information.”
Algorithmic Information Theory, Free Will and the Turing Test – Douglas S. Robertson?Excerpt: Chaitin’s Algorithmic Information Theory shows that information is conserved under formal mathematical operations and, equivalently, under computer operations. This conservation law puts a new perspective on many familiar problems related to artificial intelligence. For example, the famous “Turing test” for artificial intelligence could be defeated by simply asking for a new axiom in mathematics. Human mathematicians are able to create axioms, but a computer program cannot do this without violating information conservation. Creating new axioms and free will are shown to be different aspects of the same phenomena: the creation of new information.?http://cires.colorado.edu/~dou...../info8.pdf
And as James Franklin noted, “the intellect (is) immaterial and immortal. If today’s naturalists do not wish to agree with that, there is a challenge for them. ‘Don’t tell me, show me’: build an artificial intelligence system that imitates genuine mathematical insight. There seem to be no promising plans on the drawing board.,,,”
The mathematical world – James Franklin – 7 April 2014
Excerpt: the intellect (is) immaterial and immortal. If today’s naturalists do not wish to agree with that, there is a challenge for them. ‘Don’t tell me, show me’: build an artificial intelligence system that imitates genuine mathematical insight. There seem to be no promising plans on the drawing board.,,,
– James Franklin is professor of mathematics at the University of New South Wales in Sydney.
http://aeon.co/magazin....e-about
Thus the Christian Theist has multiple lines of strong evidence, (many more lines than what I have presented here in this short post), that he can appeal to to support his claim that the mathematics that describe this universe is contingent upon the Mind of God for its existence, and indeed that God chose this particular mathematical form that this universe has taken. Whereas JVL has, basically, only his ignorance of the history of science, and his ignorance of the evidence itself, to appeal to,
It is truly sad that he repeatedly chooses ignorance over God: |
That's not a snip, he actually ends the post right there.
Does Minnesota involuntarily commit people? Or do they let you go home but send a social worker around every few weeks to make sure the lights are on and you have Ramen and you haven’t starved to death?
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