Ted Hoffman

Of course thats what he is doing: Anything that detects the existence of others without detecting its own existence is God.
better yet, ponder upon this tautology:
The experience of existence (according to the traditional catholic) is based on being able to detect existence of other things. Therefore from the experience of existence is derived the experience of detecting existence.

Tongue twister? circular definition? alliteration?
You tell me.

Sleep is experienced from being asleep. Therefore from the experience of being asleep is derived sleep.

This is as good as it gets.

[ March 13, 2002: Message edited by: jaliet ]</p>

Ted Hoffman

I have the same question Albert
I could not have posed the Question better.
Sense.

But its not what you are missing: Its what Alberts' statements are missing.

Albert Cipriani

Dear Helen,


"God exists" is a misnomer. What I've attempted to show is that existence and being are not identical, that the former requires the latter and that the latter cannot be experienced by that which exists.



All your existence proves is that you detect the existence of other supposedly existent things. To illustrate, if you were in a perfectly efficient sensory depravation chamber and had your memory zapped, you would not exist as far as you were concerned. Only be sensing something can you infer your own existence.



Everything. -- Sincerely, Albert the Traditional Catholic

Albert Cipriani

Dear Draygomb,
I'm glad I was coherent for 15 out of 17 statements. That's not bad, considering my record here.

I think you're choking on the word "God." Just three letters long and one syllable, sort of like His three-in-one triune nature. Causes folks that have no trouble saying dis-establishmentarianism to gag. So, because you have an allergic reaction to The Word, let's drop it!

Special, for you today only, I’ll reduce the offending statements to the following:
15) Ergo, the experience of detecting existence is derived from being in existence.
16) Being in existence cannot be experienced except by a non-contingent being.
17) Ergo, because something exists, a non-contingent being is.

See? This way we avoid that nasty three-letter word. The "non-contingent being" is classically known to be God, but we don't have to say so. It'll be our dark little secret. -- Sincerely, Albert the Traditional Catholic

Draygomb

Albert Why not? Why can't a contingent being experience being in existence?

sir drinks-a-lot

Isn't this the Thomistic Cosmological Argument™, or a variation of it? I can never get past the "Contingent Being" part. I can never seem to understand what a contingent being is.

Please offer a lucid explanation.

sandlewood

Several days ago, I had written up another response continuing on with the topic of information. But I didn't post it since I figured things would move along better if we just let you get to the point, Albert, which you did.

I realize that what you are posting is an argument or line of reasoning by which you are convinced that a God exists (as requested in the thread title). I assume it's not meant to be an argument to convince the rest of us. An argument that convinces one person may not convince another. Whether or not there can be any total objectivity to arguments I really don't know.

But I can at least tell you that if I had to hold your line of reasoning as my own and defend it—as far as I understand it, which may not be completely yet—I don't think I could do it. I'll tell you why.

Like Jaliet, I immediately thought of Descartes here. I think, therefore I am. I know I exist because I am thinking, not because I have sensory input. So I have a problem with this premise.

Moreover, you seem to say at first that the way we determine that we exist is via information gained through our senses. But then you deduce from this, I believe, that we actually don't exist with out this information input:

If I were to be put into a sensory deprivation chamber, would I immediately cease to exist? Even if, by your reasoning, I may not be able to determine that I exist, it doesn't mean I don't. It just means I have a lack of information. Anyway, the point is moot thanks to Descartes.

Why infinitely regressive? Why not just circular? By your reasoning, if only two rocks exist in the entire universe, they can exist because they "detect" each other via gravity. But they could have come into existence at the same time. There is a shifting of the meaning of "contingent".

You seem to have your own definitions for words. I try to figure out your definitions from context, but it's not easy. I'm still not clear on your definitions of being, experience and existence. In 11, being is defined as existence, so they are the same thing. But in 12, being is the experience of existence. If I fall back on the accepted definition of experience, it's quite clear that experience requires observation based on sensory input. Therefore, unless you have redefined experience in some as yet unknown way, I don't see the difference between "experiencing existence" and the "experience of detecting existence" since experience involves detecting. Perhaps you mean to say that "being" is a direct way of knowing that you exist, not depending on any of the senses. But then, I would think that "cogito ergo sum" would satisfy this. So we would all be capable of "being".

This is one that makes no sense to me. I don't know what "derived" means in this usage. You may want to better explain this.

According to 12, being is existence.

As Jaliet pointed out, and I agree, in 15 and 16 you somehow got from "being" to "a being", swapping in the noun for the verb. You didn't need to put the Christian God in there. You could have put any god, or for than matter anything. The only requirement is that it be non-contingent.

Your line of reasoning strikes me as a jazzed-up version of the first cause argument in which, as is customary, God is magically plugged in as the first cause. In your case, something needs to be non-contingent, so let's call that God. If it were my reasoning, I don't think I could defend it very well.

Albert Cipriani

Dear Jaliet,


With humorless overly-sensitive trainers like you running around in Kenya, no wonder rhinos and zebras have yet to be domesticated. Take a cue from the rhino's butt, and grow a thicker skin.



Yes. Tho I object to the word "simply." Creation is nearly infinitely complex, whereas God is the absolutely simple thing (De fide dogma of the Catholic Church). I also object to the categorization of Creation not being real. Rather, it is merely less real than God. God is not the only reality; He is the ultimate reality.

You object to my #2 with:


No. Conscious detection has nothing to do with detecting the interrelationship of all things. A blind, deaf, and dumb man in a straight jacket can’t detect a pen OR a hen! So what does that prove? Nothing.

You've erected a straw man here, implying that detection must be a certain type of detection, conscious detection. But all my argument calls for is detection. Tho neither we nor the hen can detect that the pen detects the hen, we know that gravitationally it does.

You object to my #3 as follows:


Duh! You're simply begging the question of information by adding an intermediary process to it. It's as if I were saying a mud hut is made out of mud. And you are saying, no it isn't, it's made of mud that's been sun-dried and shaped into bricks and mortared together with wild rhino dung.

Without mud there is no mud hut. Without sensory inputs, there is no information no matter how well or poorly we are able to process that information.



OK. Since you understand my meaning, and are aware that no other word in the English language carries that meaning, from now on, instead of using the word "information," I will employ the word "forinmation." That way you won't continue to reflexively grope for dictionary definitions.

You object to my #4 as follows:


You remain hung up on the false dichotomy between sentient life and dumb matter. Tell me, what's a rock doing when it falls towards the earth and what business does water having "seeking" the line of least resistance? If these things are not detecting their own existence in relation to their surroundings, what are they doing?

An objective analysis of the behaviors of inanimate life compared to animate life reveals no qualitative differences. The differences are merely quantitative. For example, only gravity and little boys move rocks. But many many things, from ice cream cones to bicycles move little boys.

You object to my #5 as follows:


This is not an argument, it is an argumentum ad verecundiam, an appeal to the authority of a long dead white male. Shame on you.



If you would stop interpreting "thing" as "living, thinking, sentient thing" you might not have so much difficulty with my argument.

Consider a meteorite that after a billion years of weightlessness, now detects its own (albeit diminished) weight on the surface of the third rock from our sun. It detects this fact about itself by its crystalline structure being deformed ever so slightly on the side that's pressing against terra firma. This information it now carries in its atomic structure is contingent upon the earth being where it is and being as massive as it is, which, in turn, was contingent upon the sun forming where it did, which was contingent upon... etc.

You say my #7 is a non sequitur because:


This ball of yarn is almost too knotted to bother unwinding. The latest science puts our universe at from 12 to 14 billion years old. Every particle in it is that old even tho particles did not distill out of the primeval plasma until say 1000 years after the Big Bang. To argue otherwise is to beg the question of what energy/matter is.

You are no different. Do you think that you are not equally as old? Do you think you poofed into existence at conception or birth? Were you not also part of that grape that your father ate that happened to get metabolized into the one sperm that got lucky with your Mom? And didn't the carbon in that grape come from two generations of star dust, which came from... etc.?

No, Dorothy, there is no stork, there are no birthdays. Rather, we all share the same birthday called the Big Bang, that orgasmic moment that began all moments... and your persistent illusions of birthdays.

You ask,


Yes. Since information by definition is relational, at least two things must be in relationship for information to be derived. Information cannot be about a single thing, for that would involve the single thing detecting itself, experiencing itself, and this is impossible (remember my perfect sensory depravation example?).

Only a Being that can experience itself, a Being that is not contingent upon other things to detect itself, only such a Being could derive information about Itself. Such a Being is God, and the information derived is His Triune nature.

Yes "hot" and "day" are things. Neither is one thing tho. Hot is billions of air molecules moving faster than normal against our skin such that eventually our dull brains clump the detection of them together as a single event we call "a hot day."

You sure like the word "paralolgism. From the number of times you use it to brush aside my arguments, I'd say you like that word even more than you dislike my use of the word "information." At least I've bothered to describe what I mean by information. You are content to simply describe my arguments as paralolgisms and move on. Shame on you.



What could be more intuitive and logically necessary than that? Something must in some way exist before it can detect the existence of other things.

Yet you call that a paralolgism and a tautology. Yeah! That's the spirit. When you don't know how to bring down your opponent's argument, a double-barrel shot gun blast of buck shot and the ensuing cloud of smoke will compensate for your poor linguistic aim. Shame on you.



Exodus 3:13-14 "If they should say to me: What is his name? what shall I say to them? God said to Moses: I AM WHO AM. He said: Thus shalt thou say to the children of Isreal: HE WHO IS, hath sent me to you."



That's as logical as saying because I detect my visage in my mirror, my existence is contingent upon my visage in my mirror. Because God EXPERIENCES (does not DETECT, which is all we are capable of doing) His creation does not mean that God is contingent upon His creation. He knows Himself through His Triune nature without seeing His reflections in our image. -- Sincerely, Albert the Traditional Catholic

Albert Cipriani

Dear Jaliet,


Yes it is. As a tautology, yours is as good as it gets because there is no difference between being asleep and experiencing sleep. Those two phrases are just two different semantic constructions for an identical act -- sleeping.

But can we not resolve the act of our existence more finely? If we cannot, if it cannot be resolved into the act of existence (what we do) and the act of being (what God does), then you are right and I am being tautological by asserting that the prerequisite for our existence is being. But if I can tease out a difference in meaning between these two terms, then my statement is not a tautology.

Allow me to approach my meaning from another angle. How can thing X detect the existence of thing Y if thing X does not itself exist? It cannot. And I thing we are all agreed on this point.

So what is this thing X that exists, by means of which, it detects the existence of everything from the alpha to the omega? We must go beyond just giving a name to it, like "myself" or "matter." That explains nothing; it only labels the inexplicable.

My label for the inexplicable is "being." Ergo, we can say: the thing that exists, by means of which it detects the existence of other things, is "being." This explains nothing, rather, it describes the ontological construction I believe we all share. Our ability to detect is predicated upon our ability to be. We must be, before we can detect.

But the odd thing about our being is that we cannot detect our being directly, only indirectly through the supposed being of other things that we detect. So the necessity of our being coupled with our utter inability to detect that being is as close as we can come to the empirical evidence for the necessity of God. For if there is a God, by definition, He is as absolutely necessary for Creation as He is absolutely undetectable by Creation. -- Sincerely, Albert the Traditional Catholic

HelenM

Actually I think not but thanks for replying...

love
Helen