Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Hanslanda]

Not sure if it ends up being relevant or not, but they've recently theorized that there is another part of time that we can't see called 'imaginary' time or something similar. Basically, if time as we feel it was a line, imaginary time would be a perpendicular line to it.
So perhaps god just runs on imaginary time.

[Prometheusmfd]

So, like the square root of negative one minutes?

[Karlito]

What about something that's able, but factually does not interact with anything? Say some particle a sufficiently large distance outside the expanding edge of the universe moving away from it at the speed of light, or some silly shenanigan like that? It would be irrelevant, obviously, but would something that simply is incidentally outside the light cones of everything else, in perpetuity, be nonexistent?

It's not a silly idea at all, since there are, in fact, pretty good reasons to believe that entire galaxies exist outside the sphere of the observable universe which are moving away from our own at faster than the speed of light. I suppose in some sense, being completely causally disconnected, they don't exist, but in another sense, they're certainly real.

[Hanslanda]

I... Would guess so. I'm not exactly an expert on the whole thing. I'll try and find the article though.

[MrWiggles]

Not being able to disprove something has no bearing on the issue, as you can't disprove anything. Its fallacious. This is why there burden of proof, as in to prove your claim with credible, refutable repeatable evidence. The default position is rejection because its practical, as suppose to taking no stance which isn't practical. This isn't an assertion because the stance existed before the issue was raised, and the stance is held if the burden proof isn't met.

Claiming 'not rejection not accepting' isn't a more suitable ground to hold, because it doesnt do anything that the default position already does. It just tries to take an invented middle ground that doesn't do with anything else.

[alway]

So, like the square root of negative one minutes?

Perpendicular, yes. Also similar to quaternions; those represent 3 perpendicular spatial directions using the sets of imaginary numbers i, j, and k, each of which are imaginary, but also perpendicular to one another. In this case, imaginary time is useful because it smooths out singularities from equations. And assuming the theory behind it is correct, it allows us to figure out things we otherwise couldn't; like what goes on inside a black hole, as well as explaining the birth of a universe from nothing.

Say some particle a sufficiently large distance outside the expanding edge of the universe moving away from it at the speed of light, or some silly shenanigan like that?

This is a misconception about the expansion of the universe. The whole thing stretches out, like a rubber band, rather than an adding of material to the edges. Which leads to another misconception; the universe, while finite, is also without boundary in a similar way to the surface of a sphere; so it has no edges.

[Blargityblarg]

I would furthermore state that the prevalence of the idea that "Atheists and theists are both wrong because they think they know something, only agnostics aren't stepping over the line because we aren't claiming anything" is a variant on the golden mean fallacy.

I disagree. If the agnostic position were chosen because it's 'in the middle', then yes, but with the reason you've provided, I don't see how it's an example of that at all.

[Askot Bokbondeler]

do you give the teapot theory the same amount of merit you give to the possibility of the existence of a god?

[Hiiri]

The whole word "agnostic" is just useless and muddling up the issue. For all I care, everyone is agnostic.

Nobody has knowledge of gods, even if they claim to have. If they had knowledge of them, they should be able to demonstrate it to everyone else. If they can't demonstrate it, how do we know it's not just a brain damage?

If a person says "There is no God", he's most likely saying it in the sense as anyone would say about Santa, not in the "absolute sense" everyone keeps obsessing about. He could be wrong, but it is the reasonable assumption to say there is no Santa, since this proposition has not been shown to be true. When was the last time you heard someone shout out: "YOU CAN'T PROVE THERE'S NO SANTA!"

In my ears, if you say: "I'm not an atheist, I'm agnostic" is same as you'd say: "I'm not an atheist, I'm blonde"

[Il Palazzo]

Say some particle a sufficiently large distance outside the expanding edge of the universe moving away from it at the speed of light, or some silly shenanigan like that?

This is a misconception about the expansion of the universe. The whole thing stretches out, like a rubber band, rather than an adding of material to the edges. Which leads to another misconception; the universe, while finite, is also without boundary in a similar way to the surface of a sphere; so it has no edges.

He probably meant a particle moving away from the edge of observable universe - i.e. a de facto horizon.
Of course, to answer Frumple's question, the existence of such entities can be indirectly proven* by observations within the bubble. In other words, these particles follow the rules as we know them.

*don't jump on that word, please.

[MagmaMcFry]

Most of this discussion won't be going anywhere until we agree on the definition of the word "exist".

[Bauglir]

This is always my question to agnostics: why does god get a special evidence pedestal where you have to have disproving evidence to not believe it?

There's no special pedestal. God gets this treatment because there are people who already believe. In advance, it's not about popularity, but it's about the status quo - no reason to waste energy changing it without a good reason. There are all sorts of reasons to argue against a lot of particular religions or deities, but I don't actually think the existence or nonexistence of the relevant spiritual entities is one of them. Religiously-motivated violence, for instance, is a great one (useful only for religions that encourage violence, whether explicitly or through the actions of religious leaders with non-religious motives). You can approach that argument from similar axioms to the person you're talking to, since you can ground the whole thing in observable fact - you cannot logically prove the nonexistence of God to somebody who takes the existence of God to be axiomatic, and let's be honest here, as an unobservable entity, God can only even make sense as a fundamental assumption.

I'm not going to go out of my way to prove that fairies and wizards don't exist (I consider this a waste of my time, just as I do with regards God) without a situation in which that believe is actually being problematic. And even then it's entirely possible that I'll consider it easier to approach the whole thing sideways and leave the fairies and wizards belief intact and just argue that they aren't a necessary explanation for whatever the mystery is.

[MonkeyHead]

Does "faith" in the existance of something lead an individual to lack a required proof to belive in said thing? I mean, I was certain the Higgs boson existed in a "faith" style manner before any experimental proof for it existed (save for the maths)...

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Does "faith" in the existance of something lead an individual to lack a required proof to belive in said thing?

The definition of faith is belief without evidence, so yes.

I mean, I was certain the Higgs boson existed in a "faith" style manner before any experimental proof for it existed (save for the maths)...

The Higgs Boson wasn't based on faith, it was based on the fact that without it the Standard Model was left incomplete, and a undiscovered particle with certain properties would be able to fill that gap. The alternative would be that the Standard Model is completely illegitimate and we had been looking at the whole thing from a very wrong angle.

[MonkeyHead]

The technicalities if the theory (which I am familiar with) aside, it was the only example of something that I truly believed in before it could be shown to exist beyond reasonable doubt. As for the "filling the gap" argument, I am of the opinion that our ancestors invented gods/nature forces/supernatural entites for the same reason, if applied to simpler concepts.