Literary Framework View & Exodus 20:11

Helmut-WK · Jan 20, 2023

I decided to use the samew style as you, don't complain if this is not fair at some points (perhaps you understand how unfair your way of writing is when you see it applied to you?).

JAL said:
A person is either conscious/alive or dead. Atemporality means the person is not conscious/alive for even one second of time.

Shallow. Atemporality has nothing to do with consciousness, but with the time frame one exists in.

As I have said: What you call atemporality is temporality with no move or change. Because you cannot imagine an existence outside time.

Again: The simile of an author writing a novel Let's take a novel about a fictitious person, from new years eve 1900 to the death of Stalin. The universe created by this novel is, of course, rather similar to our universe, we can map the time in this novel to time in our universe, but it is not our universe, since the leading person of the novel did not exit in our world. But every person in this novel lives in the time from 1900 to 1953.

Does the author live in this time? No, he doesn't live in the universe of the novel, he lives in our world, but even their not in that time (he was born in the 1960s). So he is atemporal from the universe of that novel. Does it follow that he is not conscious/alive?

The only open question here is: Does God live in a »meta-time« comparable to the time the author lives in, or is His existence so different that "time" is the wrong term to describe it and we cannot even imagine it? There is no way to answer it.

I pointed this out earlier. You ignored that argument and write as if it has been proven that a atemporaly person cannot be conscious.

JAL said:
Scientific ergo logical? Please. The Big Bang expands into nothingness? Total nonsense.

Ignorant. You can describe the universe in a way that there is no nothing which the universe expands into. It is either infinite, or finite like the surface of the earth, which has no bounds. If the universe is finite, it gets bigger, but there is no outside.

Your objection only attacks a model of the universe that is not used by modern astronomy (many astronomers would even call it »wrong«, though it is just another coordinate system for the universe).

JAL said:
Einstein's conclusions on time dilation, space, and matter are largely derived from a metaphysically inane "special relativity" theory already disproven by a well-published physicist.

Really? I have read several »refutations« of special relativity, and everyone used at one point an assumption which contradicts special relativity (e.g. that two incidents which are simultaneous to observer A must be simultaneous to observer B, even when they move at different velocities).

The main assumption of special relativity is: The speed of light (in a vacuum) is the same for any inertial observer that measure in a frame where he is not moving. Anything else is a logical consequence of that. A refutation of special relativity can only consist of the refutation of that assumption. Anything else must contain a logical error (I'm rather sure that I can show mew the error when you show me the »refutation«).

JAL said:
Then stop pretending that shame is a rebuttal of my merit/suffering thesis. Reduce? Your words read like this, "The cross is not only about suffering. It's also about a block of wood."

How shallow. Block of wood is no value in the ancient world. Honor and shame was - and this is independent on anything what Tertullian said (it is not special philosophy, but cultural world view).

In short: One can reduce shame to suffering, or suffering to shame, but you cannot reduse suffering to wood.
Long version:
You reduced shame to suffering. Which does not make sense in any culture. We in Germany sometimes experience cases of »honor killing«, when immigrants from a honor/shame culture feel obliqated to kill a daughter that is no longer virgin. Or think of duels 200 years ago out of violation of honor. In the ancient world, suffering could be reduced to shame, but reducing shame to suffering was nonsense in this frame of thinking.

It is the story of the One who put away His divine honor and took the shame of a meek man, even the shame of dying on a cross, that in the long run made an alternative world view where meekness is not regarded as a vice, but as a virtue, where bad consciousness is not the result of shame, but of guilt. A world view that reduced shame to a subjective feeling instead of an »objective« reality that is often more important that the question of guilt.

JAL said:
Why do I need to explain this? You make NO EFFORT to read my posts in a fair, charitable, intelligent way.

I could say the same about you. Complaining that I »neglect« a point that I have rebutted to shows you do not understand what I write. Maybe I did not understand something you wrote either. So instead insulting me, repeat your explanation with some other terms or examples.

JAL said:
Obviously, if God had already DECIDED and SWORN to do the atonement Himself, He couldn't substitute an angel at the last moment. Did I really need to explain that?

Then the sentence that an angel could have atoned for us as well makes no sense. Or do you think God swears without thinking about what He swears? That an oath given before creation (Eph 1:4; 1.Pt 1:19-20) would be protested against (by God!) millenia later in Gethsemani? No, Nu 23:19 says the contrary.

JAL said:
Although I can't prove anything 100%, my approach to merit is plausible both logically and exegetically.

You declare known fact as »illogical« (special relativity has been tested by many experiments!), and then you think you can decide what is logical?

Logically and exegetically, it produces severe problems: How can the creator of space and time live within space and time as you obviously think? How can a God that is not what you call »snotty« speak as God does in Job? How can the Bible say that temptation was a new experience to Christ, when there was temptation before creation?

JAL said:
There's no way you can honestly say, "I'm 100% sure it is wrong."

I'm 100% sure that your reduction of shame to suffering is so alien to the ancient way of thinking (I once read Augustine was the first one who thought guilt more important than shame). You don't even understand that in ancient thinking, shame was the opposite of honor or glory, not of joy, contentment or another feeling.

JAL said:
Irrelevant to the merit/suffering thesis.

Dancing around. It is relevant for the question whether God is worthy of praise. If merit/suffering is irrelevant to this, drop it here and answer my question without using it: And a person that had a happy father has no reason to praise him?

JAL said:
Unbelievably shallow.

I answered to what you wrote. If my answer was shallow, it was because what you wrote was not deep enough to see the relevant point.

JAL said:
How inane. Again, you make NO EFFORT to read my posts in a fair, charitable, way.

Neither do you, when you read my posts. Don't complaim that I got infected by your habit.

JAL said:
Obviously the divine Word is not sinning if present only for purposes of tracking and gravity.

Oh, I took your word as a real answer, now it is clear it was only a shallow response to what I wrote.

JAL said:
Where in this response is an explanation of how a tangible human body can make a physical impact upon a non-physical soul?

I did not say that I know how it can do this, I gave evidence that it can do it. Any theory which results in "it cannot" therefore must be wrong. I don't need to formulate a theory how this can happen.

I do not how how a guy that weakened the USA and made it ridiculous all over the world could get more than 10% votes in his attempt to be re-elected (was the voting rigged in favor for Trump?). I don't know how, but I know it happened.

JAL said:
This is so dishonest. My "sentences" were directed against an immaterial soul.

My examples show that an material soul can physical impact on the body, and you dance around it.

JAL said:
So dishonest. Shame/suffering/merit is my whole thesis. That's hardly "marginalizing" it.

How shallow. Suffering is your thesis. As to shame, you declared it is only suffering and need not to be taken as a value of its own. Thats marginalizing.

JAL said:
For the millionth time, He suffered the agony of temptation before creation.

No, he did not, this can't have happened, James 1:13. Stop repeating arguments that the Bible rebuttals.

JAL said:
Again, thanks for correcting me here. The cross isn't only about suffering. It's also about nails and a block of wood. Sorry I overlooked the important parts.

How dishonest. Did I say nails and wood were important? You did not even try to address the point I mentioned.

JAL said:
So dishonest. That strawman was not the axiom, as I've reminded you probably 30 times now.

OK: It follows from what? That something done without effort has no worth, even if this was the best the actor could do, and the result was excellent?

JAL said:
So dishonest. Again, that strawman was not the axiom, as I've reminded you probably 30 times now.

Shallow. The paragraph You responded by this sentence was not about axioms, but a question to be more precise in your question. Yoiu did not take the time to think abouizt that, because you were still by the axiom theme above.

JAL said:
The total period of time was 36 hours. During those 36 hours, did both men put in equal effort toward obeying conscience (whether plumbing or otherwise)? If yes, they merit equal credit/praise.

Which means: If God created effortless (because nothing can be a real effort for an infinite God), but dis "obey conscience", he deserves praise.

JAL said:
For the millionth time, just ask yourself how those 36 hours will be evaluated at the Judgement Seat of Christ. Obviously, He will assess those 2 men according to my definition of merit.

Dishonest. You know pretty well the question is not about the judgement Christ would judge this (fictitious!) case. It is about whether this measure can be the only reason for being worthy of praise.

Christ can judge us because He is man (by incarnation) and experienced any temptation that we experience (Heb 4:15). The Father did not experience it, therefore he gave the judgement to the son (Jn 5:22-27).

JAL said:
You KNEW that would be my response.

No. I could not think that you would respond in that way. You are not the oinly one who has problems to think in the ways of the other disputant. I don't claim to be above you (while you obviously think so). I don't even really think you are dishonest (I used this term whenever your actions met the criteria for being called dishonets by you).

JAL said:
Again, you made NO EFFORT to read my post in a fair, charitable, way.

Your wording throughot your post (which I now imitated to some degree) shows you do not read my post in a fair, charitable way. Why do you complaint when I do the same?

JAL · Jan 20, 2023

helmut said:
Ignorant. You can describe the universe in a way that there is no nothing which the universe expands into. It is either infinite, or finite like the surface of the earth, which has no bounds. If the universe is finite, it gets bigger, but there is no outside.

Your objection only attacks a model of the universe that is not used by modern astronomy (many astronomers would even call it »wrong«, though it is just another coordinate system for the universe).

I said the Big Bang theory of expansion into nothingness is absurd. And yet 99% of scientists accept this theory. From wikipedia:

"The Big Bang is not an explosion of matter moving outward to fill an empty universe. Instead, space itself expands with time everywhere and increases the physical distances between comoving points. In other words, the Big Bang is not an explosion in space, but rather an expansion of space." (Italics NOT mine).

You say that modern astronomy does NOT use this model? In other words, you seem ignorant of the Big Bang and yet call me ignorant? Again, entirely uncharitable.

helmut said:
As I have said: What you call atemporality is temporality with no move or change. Because you cannot imagine an existence outside time.

Oh I can imagine an existence outside time, but not consciousness outside of time. I was clear on that. To be conscious is to be conscious (i.e. experience something) for at least one moment. And in God's case at least, it had better last more than one moment. Otherwise He has been dead since that first moment.

What you call atemporality is temporality with no move or change. Because you cannot imagine an existence outside time.

Not an accurate reading of me. Let me explain how I have always used the term atemporal. Watch a basketball game. You see four successive quarters and, moreover, you see them consecutively, not simultaneously. An atemporal observer would see them simultaneously. How so? I'll try to explain. Video-tape the entire game. And then use software to convert it into a series of snapshots/frames Now lay out those photos in a line consecutively. Stand far enough away as to visually take in the whole series in one glimpse. Theoretically, you have now watched the entire game in one moment and thus without temporal succession. This absence of temporal succession is the understanding of atemporality traditionally predominant among classic theologians, as suggested here:

God and Time | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

iep.utm.edu

There are problems here. First, actually there was temporal succession, because that "one moment" can be subdivided into smaller lapses. Second, God dies quickly if He was conscious only for that one moment. Third, an infinite number of snapshots/frames is needed to capture all details of that one game, and infinity is not a specific integer. In fact, if the future extends infinitely forward, He would definitely need an infinite number of snapshots to capture everything.

That same article says that atemporality is on the wane; temporality dominates among today's theologians.

Anyway you seem to subscribe to a different version of atemporality described as follows:

helmut said:
Again: The simile of an author writing a novel Let's take a novel about a fictitious person, from new years eve 1900 to the death of Stalin. The universe created by this novel is, of course, rather similar to our universe, we can map the time in this novel to time in our universe, but it is not our universe, since the leading person of the novel did not exit in our world. But every person in this novel lives in the time from 1900 to 1953.

Does the author live in this time? No, he doesn't live in the universe of the novel, he lives in our world, but even their not in that time (he was born in the 1960s). So he is atemporal from the universe of that novel. Does it follow that he is not conscious/alive?

The only open question here is: Does God live in a »meta-time« comparable to the time the author lives in, or is His existence so different that "time" is the wrong term to describe it and we cannot even imagine it? There is no way to answer it.

I pointed this out earlier. You ignored that argument and write as if it has been proven that a atemporaly person cannot be conscious.

Let's keep our eyes on the prize. My goal is to dispense with unclear theology, to rid ourselves of incomprehensible/incoherent Christian jargon. Let's not behave like a cult! Let's start with what is most clear - namely ordinary temporal succession as we experience it. I'm claiming that God and man participate equally and identically in that succession. No distinctions at all. Automatically, then, my view is clear. You might have questions about the start of time, or infinite past (and so on), but the basic concept is clear. (I can answer those questions with clarity, by the way).

Your discourse is a departure from that simplicity and is anything but clear. You seem to be saying that God experiences temporal succession but it's not the succession currently transpiring for men, almost as if to say that God lives in His own universe/dimension, He's not really in our universe/dimension. (The article lists that kind of assertion as one of several theories arising over the centuries). I can make no sense of this theory. What are you trying to establish? Let's review the facts. The Third Person indwells me. He (empathetically) experiences my life moment by moment, as I experience it. If I worship Him today, I feel a special influx of His presence. And if I pray tomorrow, I will experience another such influx. This is temporal succession. I can also grieve Him at this very moment. To try to claim that He exists in a timeframe other than ours is incomprehensible/incoherent jargon. It seems to make a distinction without any clearly discernible difference, certainly not a relevant one.

You said earlier that God can Incarnate whenever He wants because He is "atemporal". And? Your point? Again, a distinction without any clear difference. My version of God is temporal and, as a matter of fact, He DID incarnate at precisely the moment of His choosing.

JAL · Jan 20, 2023

helmut said:
Really? I have read several »refutations« of special relativity, and everyone used at one point an assumption which contradicts special relativity (e.g. that two incidents which are simultaneous to observer A must be simultaneous to observer B, even when they move at different velocities).

That's not my refutation. Nor that of the physicist mentioned.

helmut said:
The main assumption of special relativity is: The speed of light (in a vacuum) is the same for any inertial observer that measure in a frame where he is not moving.

Correct. The postulation is a constant speed of light regardless of whether the observer, or even the light-source, is moving. One article states:

"[Photons] always travel at the speed of light. It doesn't matter how quickly you chase after or run towards light, either; that speed you view it traveling at will always be the same....[Nothing], no matter how you move, how you make the light move, or how you change the energy, will cause the speed of light to change.

Ask Ethan: Does Light Always Move At The Same Speed?

It's the foundation of Einstein's relativity, but scientists can concoct very clever setups. Is there any way to change the speed of light?

www.forbes.com

Another article states.

"The speed of light in a vacuum is constant for all observers, regardless of the motion of the [light] source or the [motion of] the observer."

https://web.fscj.edu/Milczanowski/psc/lect/Ch3/slide9.htm

Which theory sounds like nonsense to me. Velocity is always relative for logical reasons. If two trucks are moving at the same speed, a man can jump from one truck to the other. Asking me to denounce this fact or, rather, to deem light as an "exception" to this rule, is like asking me to denounce basic math. Let's start with a religious refutation. The Glory of God radiates physical Light, for example the pillar of Fire illuminated Israel's nocturnal journeys. As I said, the divine Word tracks all matter including photons/light and thus, quite often, moves at the speed of natural light. Can the divine Photons slow down a bit and then accelerate to once again catch up to ordinary photons? Not according to special relativity! One truck can accelerate to catch up to another truck but, if Einstein is correct, a divine Photon can't catch up to a natural photon. This is logically absurd.

helmut said:
How shallow. Block of wood is no value in the ancient world. Honor and shame was - and this is independent on anything what Tertullian said (it is not special philosophy, but cultural world view).

In short: One can reduce shame to suffering, or suffering to shame, but you cannot reduse suffering to wood.
Long version:
You reduced shame to suffering. Which does not make sense in any culture. We in Germany sometimes experience cases of »honor killing«, when immigrants from a honor/shame culture feel obliqated to kill a daughter that is no longer virgin. Or think of duels 200 years ago out of violation of honor. In the ancient world, suffering could be reduced to shame, but reducing shame to suffering was nonsense in this frame of thinking.

Dishonest. I didn't reduce shame to suffering. I simply cited shame as an example of suffering. I further claimed the shaming of the Son merits praise only insofar as it imposed suffering upon Him.

helmut said:
Then the sentence that an angel could have atoned for us as well makes no sense. Or do you think God swears without thinking about what He swears? That an oath given before creation (Eph 1:4; 1.Pt 1:19-20) would be protested against (by God!) millenia later in Gethsemani? No, Nu 23:19 says the contrary.

Unbelievable. I can't even bring myself to dignify this with a response.

helmut said:
You declare known fact as »illogical« (special relativity has been tested by many experiments!), and then you think you can decide what is logical?

That's like citing "proof" that 2 + 2 = 5. If you reach an incoherent/illogical conclusion, it's time to reexamine the parameters and premises of your proofs an experiments.

helmut said:
Logically and exegetically, it produces severe problems: How can the creator of space and time live within space and time as you obviously think?

More atemporality jargon? Not helpful. Atemporality is a doctrine spawned from the assumption that God must be philosophically ideal and therefore transcendent above man in all respects including time. These theologians never even considered the possibility that Yahweh is pragmatically ideal.

helmut said:
How can the Bible say that temptation was a new experience to Christ, when there was temptation before creation?

I can't recall where the Bible says that but, even if it does, I would read it in context, that is, as a reference to the Incarnation and thus not a commentary on what happened prior to creation.

helmut said:
Dancing around. It is relevant for the question whether God is worthy of praise. If merit/suffering is irrelevant to this, drop it here and answer my question without using it: And a person that had a happy father has no reason to praise him?

Answering this question about 30 times is still not enough? (Sigh). You can praise someone such as your wife for miscellaneous reasons including her beautiful blond hair and blue eyes but that doesn't necessarily make her worthy of praise in a truly meritorious sense. In a strict sense, a woman merits praise only if he she labors/suffers righteously - see Proverbs 31:10-31.

helmut said:
I did not say that I know how it can do this, I gave evidence that it can do it. Any theory which results in "it cannot" therefore must be wrong. I don't need to formulate a theory how this can happen.

No, the evidence supports a physical/tangible soul, because only that kind of soul would be impacted with suffering when the physical/tangible body is damaged. Again, it's a question of DEFINITIONS. By definition, an intangible soul is one that would NOT be impacted by physical bodies. For the millionth time, you can't have your cake and eat it too. Look, I can't prove anything 100%. What I CAN say, however, is that we behave like a cult if we opt for a conclusion that flies in the face of the available data.

helmut said:
My examples show that an material soul can physical impact on the body, and you dance around it.

Huh? Why would you need to show me examples of my own position? Earlier I said:\

".An intangible soul conflicts with the idea that Christ's tangible body induced suffering."

You replied:

"I can't see any conflict. Do I misunderstand your term "intangible"? English is not my mother tongue …"

Then I spelled out the definitions:

"..Tangible: physical, touchable, susceptible to collisions, capable of impacts that push or pull other physical objects.
...Intangible: The opposite of the above. A substance or reality void of the above properties and capabilities.
Given these definitions, physical damage to the body won't have any IMPACT on an intangible mind, hence no suffering.

And I reasserted my argument:
"I gave you an example of a contradiction: damage to Christ's tangible body could not have inflicted/impacted an intangible soul with any suffering."

You objected:

"If your sentence were true, there is nothing to be gained by fasting. And every psychosomatic illness were pure imagination."

Are you a moving target? Where exactly do you stand?

helmut said:
No, he did not, this can't have happened, James 1:13. Stop repeating arguments that the Bible rebuttals.

Shall I even dignify this with a response? I told you that God labored/suffered to become holy, and THEN implemented a system to make His holiness irreversible. Obviously, James 1:13 is referring to an irreversibly holy God.

The alternative is the traditional view of an immutably hold God who, as such:
....(1) Could not have mutated/incarnated into the sort of being temptible in the wildnerness.
...(2) Merits no praise because His innate holy character compels Him to do good.

helmut said:
OK: It follows from what? That something done without effort has no worth, even if this was the best the actor could do, and the result was excellent?

An evil man can pay me to perform a service fruitful to his agenda. Does the money have worth? Yes. Does he merit praise in the strict sense? just because something has worth, doesn't mean that the moral agent merits praise in the strict sense.

helmut said:
Which means: If God created effortless (because nothing can be a real effort for an infinite God), but dis "obey conscience", he deserves praise.

No effort/suffering? Then no meriting of praise in the strict sense.

helmut said:
Dishonest. You know pretty well the question is not about the judgement Christ would judge this (fictitious!) case. It is about whether this measure can be the only reason for being worthy of praise.

The judgment seat of Christ is always relevant because it exhibits God's values and confirms that He values merit precisely as implied at Proverbs 31:10-31. We are supposed to align our values with His. If your fictional analogy deviates, it is false.

helmut said:
Christ can judge us because He is man (by incarnation) and experienced any temptation that we experience (Heb 4:15). The Father did not experience it, therefore he gave the judgement to the son (Jn 5:22-27).

Baloney. God was already judging angels before creation, and judged Adam and Eve thereafter. All these parties were supposed to endure the agony/suffering of temptation. It is on THAT basis alone that He was already judging them.

JAL · Jan 20, 2023

@helmut,

William Lane Craig frankly admitted that the notion of an ultra-transcendent God - what I have termed a philosophically ideal God - derives from philosophical models and not strictly from Scripture. He confirmed that these dogmas came from the Catholic Church, and the Reformers simply swallowed them hook, line, and sinker instead of reevaluating them. Craig is not insisting that these concepts are all necessarily wrong. Indeed he himself subscribes to some of those notions. He's just pointing out their origin. He includes atemporality in this list of philosophically ideal traits not clearly indicated in Scripture.

JAL · Jan 20, 2023

@helmut,

I misunderstood your summary of special relativity. You had it correct, so I edited that part of my post.

Helmut-WK · Jan 21, 2023

JAL said:
I said the Big Bang theory of expansion into nothingness is absurd. And yet 99% of scientists accept this theory. From Wikipedia:

"The Big Bang is not an explosion of matter moving outward to fill an empty universe. Instead, space itself expands with time everywhere and increases the physical distances between comoving points. In other words, the Big Bang is not an explosion in space, but rather an expansion of space." (Italics NOT mine).

An expansion of space is no expansion into nothing. I tried to explain it to you. It means that distances are growing, but there is no outside nothing filled by expansion.

JAL said:
You say that modern astronomy does NOT use this model? In other words, you seem ignorant of the Big Bang and yet call me ignorant? Again, entirely uncharitable.

No, you are ignorant. You interpret the bib bang as an expansion into nothing, but in the model which describes the universe this way the word »comoving« used in the Wikipedia text makes no sense. Many astronomers, those who are not aware that their model is just a coordinate-transformed version of the "expand into nothing" model, will call it wrong.

JAL said:
Oh I can imagine an existence outside time, but not consciousness outside of time.

We are not conscious about that. But if the creator lives in outside time, He is of course conscious of it. And since he created out trime, He is conscious of outŕ time (like an author of a book is conscious of the time line within this book).

JAL said:
Not an accurate reading of me. Let me explain how I have always used the term atemporal. Watch a basketball game. You see four successive quarters and, moreover, you see them consecutively, not simultaneously. An atemporal observer would see them simultaneously. How so? I'll try to explain. Video-tape the entire game. And then use software to convert it into a series of snapshots/frames Now lay out those photos in a line consecutively. Stand far enough away as to visually take in the whole series in one glimpse. Theoretically, you have now watched the entire game in one moment and thus without temporal succession. This absence of temporal succession is the understanding of atemporality traditionally predominant among classic theologians, as suggested here:

God and Time | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

iep.utm.edu

The weak point of your example us: The watcher is no creator. He does not cause the players to play their game, he only observes.

Better example: A man drawing a comic-strip story. And he arranges the pictures in the same way as you described. And then He decides to change something in some drawings. This is atemporal acting in the temporal comic-story.

JAL said:
There are problems here. First, actually there was temporal succession, because that "one moment" can be subdivided into smaller lapses.

Irrelevant. We are not speaking about the time the video is watched, the time is the time of the video pictures, i.e. of the games played, not the time the game was played.

Let's go back to the notion of creation: The time in out universe is not the time God lives in, like the time of the author of the strip is different from the time the figures in the strip story live in. They are unconscious of his time (unless he decides to put information about that into the strip story …). By analogy, we are unconscious of God's "time", we don't even know whether "time" is the best analogy to our world, so any statement about thius would be pure speculation. I know enough to know that we better do not speculate on this, but leave the matter in the unknown.

JAL said:
Second, God dies quickly if He was conscious only for that one moment.

You again mix the time of the thing watched (the game from beginning to end) with the time of the watcher. Even if the watcher needs weeks to see every picture, you cannot point to any moment in the game where he watches it. Therefore, he is atemporal.

JAL said:
Third, an infinite number of snapshots/frames is needed to capture all details of that one game,

No. If you divide time in smaller bits, the precision of energetic states during a single bit will decrease. There is no gain to put into such small pieces that you have no information at all about the game at a specific interval.

So the number of time slots you need to describe that game is finite, perhaps less than googol (10^100), and certainly less than googolplex.

JAL said:
and infinity is not a specific integer.

What nonsense! 3½ is no specific integer, so 3½ inches are impossible? Even if I overlook the error of saying »integer«: The square root of two is no rational number (you have to leave what the ancient Greek considered as common sense to deal with that number, hence the term »irrational«!), the square root of -1 (the imaginary i) is no real number (you have to leave the common sense of he middle ages to deal with imaginary and complex numbers), and yet no true mathematician has any problems dealing with irrational (e.g. π) and complex (e.g. 2+3i) numbers.

And as I pointed out: While there only as much computable numbers an integers, there are more real numbers, hence more non-computable numbers (mathematical jargon: greater cardinality). No-one can describe a non-computable number (any meaningful description would give a way to compute), so we have a proof that almost all of the real number are beyond our comprehension.

Why then should it be any problem hat infinity is nor "integer"? It is a problem with your limited capacity of imagination, nothing more. My imagination is limited, too, but I know that the limits of my imagination capacity are not the limits of mathematical theory, and not the limits of reality. I would be very surprised if there would be nothing in the next world that is outside the limits of my imagination and therefore surprises me.

JAL said:
In fact, if the future extends infinitely forward, He would definitely need an infinite number of snapshots to capture everything.

The Bible say the future is not infinite … but as I said above: This is a pseudo-problem. Mathematics (i.e. strict logical thinking not tampered by imagination and its limitation) says infinity can exist. You are wrong if you think you can exclude it just by theory.

JAL said:
That same article says that atemporality is on the wane; temporality dominates among today's theologians.

I prefer logical arguments to the shifting sands of theological thinking accommodated to the spirit of time.

JAL said:
Anyway you seem to subscribe to a different version of atemporality described as follows:

Let's start with what is most clear - namely ordinary temporal succession as we experience it.

Science says it is not clear whether this is a feature of reality, or only a feature of our experience. Outside revelation of God, there is no real proof that your philosophy based on temporal succession is better than, say, Hindu theology that thinks our experience is only mana and should therefore not taken as the base of logical thinking. Ever heard of Capra and his speculations?

You declare something as most clear that other thinkers deny and scientist declare unclear.

JAL said:
I'm claiming that God and man participate equally and identically in that succession.

Which slaps straight into the face of the notion of creator of space and time. Whatever your God is: He cannot be the Creator of our universe, only some Demiurg (did I pick the correct philosophical term?) inside the universe.

It is logically impossible that the Creator "and man participate equally and identically in that succession" of time.

To put it into scientific terms: the spatial and temporal relation of our universe to God's eternity are unknown. Any attempt to describe them would be pure speculation. And I refuse to speculate on that. Fullstop.

When an author writes a book and then glimpse over a longer time span (say, one year) with a short sentence, does he need to wait for a year before he can continue writing? Nonsense. Has he no other option than continue to write what happened after that year? No, he can chose to write about what happened one month before the time of the events he just finished to write down. Do the figures in the book participate in this flashback, are they conscious about it? Nonsense, of course. But when it comes to God, the »author« of this universe, you declare this very nonense as most clear.

I will definitely not follow you into such nonsense.

JAL said:
Your discourse is a departure from that simplicity and is anything but clear.

Reality is often not clear. remember: almost all (in the mathematical sense of that term) numbers cannot be computed. The whole world of real numbers is full of unclearness. Not (mark you) the theory about it, which states that things are unclear.

JAL said:
You seem to be saying that God experiences temporal succession

As said above: I don't know whether He does or not, and cannot imagine any way (besides divine revelation) to decide it. And I see no passage in the Bible that deals with that question.

JAL said:
but it's not the succession currently transpiring for men, almost as if to say that God lives in His own universe/dimension, He's not really in our universe/dimension.

Like the author is not in the universe the plot of his fictitious novel plays in. But he can act in the universe, incarnate, perfuming miracles and so on. In a way, he is everywhere in this book.

JAL said:
He (empathetically) experiences my life moment by moment, as I experience it.

Where it is said the Spirit experiences this the same way as you do? Show me the Bible verse, or acknowledge that this is pure speculation.

JAL said:
If I worship Him today, I feel a special influx of His presence. And if I pray tomorrow, I will experience another such influx. This is temporal succession.

In our time.

JAL said:
I can also grieve Him at this very moment. To try to claim that He exists in a timeframe other than ours is incomprehensible/incoherent jargon.

Perhaps it helps when I mention what some author said about a scene in one of her books. I don't recommend that book, but I have to tell parts of the plot to explain what the author said:

A woman has to flee out of Soviet occupied Afghanistan from her husband, who turned out as a soviet spy that undermined the help they gave to the Mujaheddin and the poor Afghan people. She is accompanied by a CIA agent which became her lover again, and he builds a booby trap to kill the husband and the soviet soldiers accopaning him.

But the woman resists, the author has no way to convince her, so they are taken by the soldiers, and the author had to invent a new plot which finally let them arrive safely in Pakistan.

Whatever you think of the remarks the author made about her book, this is a sort of analogy to the relations of our us to God. He is "author", i.e. creator, and we live in the time He created. And we can make decisions against His will.
Let's call the woman Jane (AFAIR this was her name in the novel, but I may be wrong). Do you really think it is "simple" to maintain that the author experienced the same time frame as Jane? Is it "unclear" and just "incomprehensible/incoherent jargon" to say the author lives in another time frame than Jane?

JAL said:
You said earlier that God can Incarnate whenever He wants because He is "atemporal". And? Your point?

You said the very contrary. I said: You are wrong in that. My point. And your point?

JAL said:
My version of God is temporal and, as a matter of fact, He DID incarnate at precisely the moment of His choosing.

But what does incarnation mean? In my author≡Creator analogy, incarnation is a clear notion: A figure in the book which is the author himself who wrote that book. And of course,m the author can chose the time where he appears in his book precisely.

But what do you mean precisely when you say "incarnation"?

Helmut-WK · Jan 21, 2023

JAL said:
Which theory sounds like nonsense to me. Velocity is always relative for logical reasons. … Asking me to denounce this fact or, rather, to deem light as an "exception" to this rule, is like asking me to denounce basic math.

It is not denouncing basic math, but denouncing the assumption that classical mechanics uses the correct formula.

In a vehicle which travels at velocity v1 fires a missile at velocity v2 (in the same direction as it travels), the velocity of the missile is not (v1+v2) as in classical mechanics, but rather (v1+v2)/(1+ v1*v2/c²). Which is the addition axiom of the atanh function, so if you use the rapidity (calculated as r=atanh(v)), you will find that the rapidity of the missile is r1+r2.

The rapidity of c (vacuum speed of light) is infinite (+∞), and if you add a finite number, the result is ∞+f=∞. So if you "add" c to a speed less that c, the result is c.

The reason for postulating such a theory: Michelson/Morley. An experiment which, given classical mechanics, showed that the earth does not move (not even rotate). Scientists did not want to accept this, and relativity theory turned out to be the most elegant explanation. One standard approach of Einstein was: Do not assume anything that you cannot measure directly.

And there have been other experiments that showed that indeed the relativistic addition theory fits to reality, and the "basic math" addition of classical mechanics does not. This is a fact.

JAL said:
Let's start with a religious refutation. The Glory of God radiates physical Light, for example the pillar of Fire illuminated Israel's nocturnal journeys. As I said, the divine Word tracks all matter including photons/light and thus, quite often, moves at the speed of natural light. Can the divine Photons slow down a bit and then accelerate to once again catch up to ordinary photons?

That's incomprehensible/incoherent. The way the word "tracks" (better: maintains) the whole universe has nothing to do with velocity. There is no passage in the Bible where you can show (without invoking some special hypotheses of yours) that photons from God, that behave like physical photons, alter their speed.

JAL said:
Dishonest. I didn't reduce shame to suffering. I simply cited shame as an example of suffering. I further claimed the shaming of the Son merits praise only insofar as it imposed suffering upon Him.

Now you reduce your claim to something you cannot prove, but take for granted without any proof.

The most natural reading from passages as Ph 2 is: The Son is to be praised because He was meekly, even if you disregard His suffering.

An ancient might even add: The suffering of the son "merits" only praise because it was part of His self-humiliation (cf. 1.Pt 2:23-24). I will not defend that sentence, it is just a mirror to what you say.

JAL said:
Unbelievable. I can't even bring myself to dignify this with a response.

In other words: You cannot answer my argument from Scripture.

JAL said:
That's like citing "proof" that 2 + 2 = 5.

No, you are like the one saying »a carpet 10 feet long and 5 feet wide has 15 ft, if you say that it has 50 ft² is like citing a "proof" that 10+5=50«.

If the mathematics does not fit to the experiments, this means you use the wrong formula. No experiment can ever refute mathematics, because mathematics is pure thinking. But experiments can refute a formula used in a theory on reality. And the formula "you only have to add the velocities" has been proven wrong. It is only a good approximation in cases where zero can be considered a good approximation of v1*v2/c².

JAL said:
Atemporality is a doctrine spawned from the assumption that God must be philosophically ideal and therefore transcendent above man in all respects including time.

No. I spawn it from the notion of Creator.

JAL said:
I can't recall where the Bible says that

I already told you the passage:
Heb 5,7 During the days of Jesus’ life on earth, he offered up prayers and petitions with fervent cries and tears to the one who could save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverent submission. 8 Son though he was, he learned obedience from what he suffered 9 and, once made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him

JAL said:
but, even if it does, I would read it in context, that is, as a reference to the Incarnation and thus not a commentary on what happened prior to creation.

So you mean, he suffered before creation and did not learn what he learned in Gethsemane. In my eyes, this is a reason to call Him lazy, or stubborn at least.

And since I don't believe we can call Christ stubborn or lazy, I conclude that He did not suffer during creation.

JAL said:
Answering this question about 30 times is still not enough?

No, because your "answer" always deflects from the the point I ask: Why should there be no other reason to be worthy of praise as "merit"?

If you dance around and do not answer my question, but just repeat the cause of my question, don't complain that I question again.

JAL said:
By definition, an intangible soul is one that would NOT be impacted by physical bodies.

I did not read the definition you gave (I assume it was in one the flood of postings which I did not read pout of overflow). Dictionary says a tangible thing is something that can be touched.

My view of soul: It is something like a function of body, either a material or a immaterial body. It cannot be seen or touched, but it is tangible according to your definition of tangible.

And even a proponent of an immaterial soul separated from body may say: Soul is immaterial, but tangible.

JAL said:
The alternative is the traditional view of an immutably hold God who, as such:
....(1) Could not have mutated/incarnated into the sort of being temptible in the wildnerness.
...(2) Merits no praise because His innate holy character compels Him to do good.

This is a caricature of the traditional view, and you know it. I don't dignify it with a response.

JAL said:
An evil man can pay me to perform a service fruitful to his agenda. Does the money have worth? Yes. Does he merit praise in the strict sense? just because something has worth, doesn't mean that the moral agent merits praise in the strict sense.

You are even unable to give your examples right. The question you had in mind must be "Does I merit praise in the strict sense?" Sign of loose thinking (caused by exhaustion when answering?).

And it does not help to bring a moral touch to my example. Repairing a defunct heating device is not immoral, I asked about a specific difference and you bring a quite difference dimension. Your example does not help in any way. It makes only sense in this context if you think that "good" work for a bad objective does merit praise when it contains suffering. I'm sure you will not subscribe to that thesis.

JAL said:
No effort/suffering? Then no meriting of praise in the strict sense.

This is an axiom of yours, or can you give any reason why something that is not connected to effort/suffering cannot be worthy of praise?

JAL said:
The judgment seat of Christ is always relevant because it exhibits God's values

In other words: You say, that effort/suffering is the only value of God's, and meekness/humility has no worth of its own. Nor does love.

This is a somewhat biased interpretation of what the Bible say about that.

JAL said:
Baloney. God was already judging angels before creation

I didn't speak of angels, they are measured by other measures than us, so any definite position on that matter would be speculative.

JAL said:
and judged Adam and Eve thereafter.

Which was possible because He incarnated. Forgotten that I said God is atemporal? "Before the cry, I will answer" (Is 65:24).

JAL · Jan 21, 2023

helmut said:
An expansion of space is no expansion into nothing. I tried to explain it to you. It means that distances are growing, but there is no outside nothing filled by expansion.

No, you are ignorant. You interpret the bib bang as an expansion into nothing, but in the model which describes the universe this way the word »comoving« used in the Wikipedia text makes no sense. Many astronomers, those who are not aware that their model is just a coordinate-transformed version of the "expand into nothing" model, will call it wrong.

We are not conscious about that. But if the creator lives in outside time, He is of course conscious of it. And since he created out trime, He is conscious of outŕ time (like an author of a book is conscious of the time line within this book).

More shallow, uncharitable answers. The Big Bang is said to create space and time. That means it is not expansion of the universe into (existing) empty space but expansion of space, just as I the article said, and thus a creating of space "where" there was only nothingness. I am so tired of your endlessly-nitpicky, shallow critiques of my posts.

helmut said:
Irrelevant. We are not speaking about the time the video is watched, the time is the time of the video pictures, i.e. of the games played, not the time the game was played.

Let's go back to the notion of creation: The time in out universe is not the time God lives in, like the time of the author of the strip is different from the time the figures in the strip story live in. They are unconscious of his time (unless he decides to put information about that into the strip story …). By analogy, we are unconscious of God's "time", we don't even know whether "time" is the best analogy to our world, so any statement about thius would be pure speculation. I know enough to know that we better do not speculate on this, but leave the matter in the unknown.

Incomprehensible jargon and therefore cult-like lingo. On the one hand you're admitting that your version of atemporality is humanly incomprehensible. But you insist that you are right and I am wrong? Even though I propose simple temporal succession that we all daily experience and comprehend? How is my debate with you any different than debating with a cult?

NOT TO EVEN MENTION the Problem of Evil exacerbated here. An omnibenevolent God, if atemporal and thus foreknowing the fall of Adam, Eve, and Lucifer, would surely have created Bob, Sally, and Vincent instead. Atheists have always rightly insisted that an infinite, philosophically ideal God does not resolve the Problem of Evil.

helmut said:
No. If you divide time in smaller bits, the precision of energetic states during a single bit will decrease. There is no gain to put into such small pieces that you have no information at all about the game at a specific interval.

So the number of time slots you need to describe that game is finite, perhaps less than googol (10^100), and certainly less than googolplex.

You seem to operate under the assumption that energy can't be a continual flux, that it is intermittently punctuated. I don't have faith to believe that claim. Just because human instruments detect only periodic changes doesn't disprove finer graduation.

helmut said:
What nonsense! 3½ is no specific integer, so 3½ inches are impossible?

It's difficult to be patient with these unfair, dishonest, irrelevant, and nonsensical extrapolations of my statements.

helmut said:
Why then should it be any problem hat infinity is nor "integer"? It is a problem with your limited capacity of imagination, nothing more.

You are indoctrinated (en-cult-urated) into infinitude dogma and will defend it by any means possible, even if your statements are incoherent.

God is supposedly immutable and is therefore a SPECIFIC reality. Infinity is a non-specific quantity, despite all your protests to the contrary.

helmut said:
The Bible say the future is not infinite …

Ok, educate me. Maybe I missed that in the Bible, so show me where it is. It was my understanding that heaven is everlasting.

helmut said:
Mathematics (i.e. strict logical thinking not tampered by imagination and its limitation) says infinity can exist. You are wrong if you think you can exclude it just by theory.

Again, math isn't the real world. It maps to the real world, hopefully as much as possible. I certainly can't identify anything in the real world that is currently of infinite quantity. Potential infinitudes? Yes. Actual existing infinitudes such as, "We are now at year infinity." ? No. Such is logically inconceivable and thus cult-like to assert.

Currently the year is 2023. Every year that we spend in heaven, we can increment that number by one. At what point will we reach year infinity? Total nonsense. This sounds like stupidity. And I suppose at that point reality terminates, even God ceases to exist, because reality has reached its final year of existence? Or is there an infinity plus 1?

How can you expect me to believe this garbage?

helmut said:
Science says it is not clear whether this is a feature of reality, or only a feature of our experience. Outside revelation of God, there is no real proof that your philosophy based on temporal succession is better than, say, Hindu theology that thinks our experience is only mana and should therefore not taken as the base of logical thinking. Ever heard of Capra and his speculations?

You declare something as most clear that other thinkers deny and scientist declare unclear.

Don't be ridiculous. Say a man is 24 years old and his birthday is tomorrow. How many scientists would complain, "Hmmm...temporal succession is so uncertain and so unclear. In fact we can't be sure whether he will be 25 years old tomorrow, or 23 years old."

Our experience of time is linear. That is what is most clear. To propose non-linear time is contrary to normal experience, less comprehensible,. and therefore trends toward cult-like discourse. Look, I can't prove anything 100%. All I can do is remind you that, if we are to be rational exegetes:
....(1) We should try to stick with clear notions.
....(2) If we can't find a clear explanation of something, be honest to admit, "I don't know a good answer here."

INSTEAD, traditional theologians wanted to pretend that they had the answers to al the big questions. This led to sevreal cult-like assertions still accepted today.

helmut said:
Which slaps straight into the face of the notion of creator of space and time. Whatever your God is: He cannot be the Creator of our universe, only some Demiurg (did I pick the correct philosophical term?) inside the universe.

helmut said:
It is logically impossible that the Creator "and man participate equally and identically in that succession" of time.

(Sigh). So dishonest and uncharitable. Creation refers to the beginning of time. I CLEARLY stated that I was leaving that question aside for the moment. I said that man currently participates in a temporal succession, and He walks this journey hand-in-hand with the indwelling Holy Spirit and thus in the same time frame as He.

helmut said:
To put it into scientific terms: the spatial and temporal relation of our universe to God's eternity are unknown. Any attempt to describe them would be pure speculation. And I refuse to speculate on that. Fullstop.

Hypocrisy, right? By insisting that my position is wrong, you already have speculated on the issue, albeit drawing cult-like conclusions.

helmut said:
When an author writes a book and then glimpse over a longer time span (say, one year) with a short sentence, does he need to wait for a year before he can continue writing? Nonsense. Has he no other option than continue to write what happened after that year? No, he can chose to write about what happened one month before the time of the events he just finished to write down. Do the figures in the book participate in this flashback, are they conscious about it? Nonsense, of course. But when it comes to God, the »author« of this universe, you declare this very nonense as most clear.

I will definitely not follow you into such nonsense.

See what I mean? You have not only speculated, you regard yourself infallible on your conclusions.

helmut said:
Reality is often not clear. remember: almost all (in the mathematical sense of that term) numbers cannot be computed. The whole world of real numbers is full of unclearness. Not (mark you) the theory about it, which states that things are unclear.

And yet you insist that I'm clearly wrong. Seems like hypocrisy to me.

helmut said:
As said above: I don't know whether He does or not, and cannot imagine any way (besides divine revelation) to decide it. And I see no passage in the Bible that deals with that question.

As I stated earlier, the church's greatest error is a failure to make the pursuit of Divine Revelation (prophecy) her top priority (1 Cor 14:1).

Insofar as we are NOT prophets, we fallback on things like exegesis and common sense. Which doesn't bode well for cult-like foggy claims.

helmut said:
Where it is said the Spirit experiences this the same way as you do? Show me the Bible verse, or acknowledge that this is pure speculation.

Although I can't prove anything 100%, all the data of Scripture points to God undergoing a temporally successive chain of experiences much like we do. For example God became angry with Moses at the burning bush. He wasn't angry with Moses from "atemporal eternity to eternity." The Bible generally reads like a normal history book in terms of temporality. There might be a few problem passages (as with every theology) but by and large, that's how it reads.

In terms of empathy,

"35For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in: 36Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me." (Mat 25)

In terms of empathy, think about God as Judge. Arguably, He needs to have some (empathetic) sense of what I am experiencing in order to judge me properly.

helmut said:
Where it is said the Spirit experiences this the same way as you do? Show me the Bible verse, or acknowledge that this is pure speculation.

It sounds like you're trying to strawman-hyperbolize my words. Hopefully my words above set the record straight.

helmut said:
In our time.

Incomprehensible jargon. I can grieve Him at this moment, but He experiences it in "His" time and not "our" time? So there are multiple "times"? This is exactly like someone saying, "I believe in 50 dimensions. Our universe/reality is only one of them." That's a foggy cult-like statement. Sounds like something a Yoga instructor would say, viz, "Feel the energy of all the dimensions flowing through you. Bask in this rejuvenating power!"

helmut said:
Perhaps it helps when I mention what some author said about a scene in one of her books. I don't recommend that book, but I have to tell parts of the plot to explain what the author said:

A woman has to flee out of Soviet occupied Afghanistan from her husband, who turned out as a soviet spy that undermined the help they gave to the Mujaheddin and the poor Afghan people. She is accompanied by a CIA agent which became her lover again, and he builds a booby trap to kill the husband and the soviet soldiers accopaning him.
But the woman resists, the author has no way to convince her, so they are taken by the soldiers, and the author had to invent a new plot which finally let them arrive safely in Pakistan.
Whatever you think of the remarks the author made about her book, this is a sort of analogy to the relations of our us to God. He is "author", i.e. creator, and we live in the time He created. And we can make decisions against His will.
Let's call the woman Jane (AFAIR this was her name in the novel, but I may be wrong). Do you really think it is "simple" to maintain that the author experienced the same time frame as Jane? Is it "unclear" and just "incomprehensible/incoherent jargon" to say the author lives in another time frame than Jane?

And all this from the guy who objects to me that we shouldn't speculate about time. So it's okay when YOU do it, but not when I do it, even though all I do is reaffirm our standard experience of linear time.

Your analogy reaffirms your belief that God is in "HIs" time and thus not in "our" time. Humanly incomprehensible jargon. I have a clock in my room, ticking away. My neighbor has a clock in his room, ticking away. I can't conceive of how "his" time could be any different than "my" time. God sits on a throne surrounded with angels. One of those angels could take my neighbor's clock and carry it up to heaven. And there too, it is ticking away (assuming it is battery-powered). Why should I believe that my time isn't "HIs" time? Will the two clocks show different times? I don't see any logically compelling reason to believe so.

To claim that God exists in a different time is incomprehensible jargon. No one can really understand what that means or how it could transpire. Is God with me now? Yes. Then He is like my neighbor. In fact, is if He is with my neighbor, the two of them are observing the same ticking clock.

You have engaged in wild speculations unclear. All I've done is affirm the linear history that we already believe in.

helmut said:
But what does incarnation mean? In my author≡Creator analogy, incarnation is a clear notion: A figure in the book which is the author himself who wrote that book. And of course,m the author can chose the time where he appears in his book precisely.

But what do you mean precisely when you say "incarnation"?

You want the specifics of my views? Show me some sign that you are fertile ground. From what I've seen, you only want to strawman-attack my views. You don't even want to be honest enough to admit that the Hypostatic Union is logically problematic. Mainstream theologians who accept the Hypostatic Union admit that much. Here's Norm Geisler admitting that the human mind MUST accept perceived contradictions in order to accept the Hypostatic Union, clinging to faith that God somehow resolves them somewhere out there in distant intellectual outer-space beyond the reach of the human intellect:

“The fact that one cannot explain how the two natures unite in one person without contradiction has nothing to do with the obvious fact that what happens when they do [unite] is clearly not a contradiction” (Norman L. Geisler, “Avoid… Contradictions” (1 Timothy 6:20): A Reply To John Dahms,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, Vol 22:1 (1979), p. 62).

On my assumptions:
...(1) The Incarnation is literally a joke to explain. Nothing could be easier. No need for contradictions.
...(2) Regeneration is just as easy to explain, exactly how God accomplishes it. Traditional theologians admit they can't explain this.
...(3) The Problem of Evil is fully and easily resolved. Traditional thinking can't even resolve the Fall. (Here traditional theologians are somewhat dishonest in their pretense of adequately resolving the POE including the Fall).

JAL · Jan 21, 2023

helmut said:
It is not denouncing basic math, but denouncing the assumption that classical mechanics uses the correct formula.

In a vehicle which travels at velocity v1 fires a missile at velocity v2 (in the same direction as it travels), the velocity of the missile is not (v1+v2) as in classical mechanics, but rather (v1+v2)/(1+ v1*v2/c²). Which is the addition axiom of the atanh function, so if you use the rapidity (calculated as r=atanh(v)), you will find that the rapidity of the missile is r1+r2.

I insisted on relative velocity with two trucks. I don't see where the above words are a rebuttal. In some shape or form, the above equation factors in the velocities of both the "trucks" (i.e. both the two moving objects), right? Also I'm not clear why you say that classical mechanics is a failure in this regard. Wikipedia states:

"A ballistic missile is a missile only guided during the relatively brief initial powered phase of flight, and whose remaining course is governed by the laws of classical mechanics."

I'm not really here to defend classical physics. Heck, I am not even insisting that the speed of light varies. God has designed our universe. As designer, His hand - the same hand which imposes and regulates gravity - might be regulating ordinary photons in ways that appear to be a constant speed. The problem is when you extrapolate that kind of observation too far because you think it is a logical necessity as opposed to a divine intervention. From a purely logical standpoint, it is absurd to claim that light-particles are "special" and thus the "one possible exception" to relative motions.

Einstein's theories are practically useful, just like gravity was for Isaac Newton. But Newton didn't take his gravity-theory literally! Seems to me he was prudently cautions about extrapolating his observations too far.

Maybe now is a good time to bring up that proof against special relativity. It goes something like this (as best as I can recall). A man is running on railroad tracks toward an advancing train shining its headlights toward him. To defend a constant speed of light (i.e. factor out the relative velocities), one must lean on "time dilation": time slows down. Fine. (Even though this is cult-like gibberish). HOWEVER, imagine a second train behind the man (it had already passed him) and is thus departing from him in the opposite direction, with its tail-lights shining backwards in his direction. Since this is the reverse scenario, time speeds up. The contradiction: Time slowed down and yet time speeded up.

Many years ago, I sent that proof to a physics professor via my sister (who earned a degree in chemical engineering). My sister had befriended him when he was earning his doctorate in physics. His wife contacted us confirming that he received the message. I always found it interesting that he never replied.

helmut said:
The rapidity of c (vacuum speed of light) is infinite (+∞), and if you add a finite number, the result is ∞+f=∞. So if you "add" c to a speed less that c, the result is c.

If only I believed in infinitude. But thanks for illustrating the incoherence. You said: ∞+f=∞

Meaning, infinity plus any number is infinity - the same number we started with? No matter how much we add to this number, we end up with the same number? Yeah, that makes a ton of sense logically.

Above I already cited the following words from you:

helmut said:
It is not denouncing basic math, but denouncing the assumption that classical mechanics uses the correct formula.

In a vehicle which travels at velocity v1 fires a missile at velocity v2 (in the same direction as it travels), the velocity of the missile is not (v1+v2) as in classical mechanics, but rather (v1+v2)/(1+ v1*v2/c²). Which is the addition axiom of the atanh function, so if you use the rapidity (calculated as r=atanh(v)), you will find that the rapidity of the missile is r1+r2.

I think you're referring to a formula applicable to particles approaching the speed of light. I suspect that ordinary projectile motion (e.g. missiles) calculates fairly well under classical physics. The problem with Einstein's "advanced" formula is that it's difficult to know what to believe. Because we don't know how much divine intervention is involved with photons, and how much of Einstein's formula is a product of his (possibly) false assumptions about time, light, and so on.

helmut said:
The reason for postulating such a theory: Michelson/Morley. An experiment which, given classical mechanics, showed that the earth does not move (not even rotate). Scientists did not want to accept this, and relativity theory turned out to be the most elegant explanation. One standard approach of Einstein was: Do not assume anything that you cannot measure directly.

And there have been other experiments that showed that indeed the relativistic addition theory fits to reality, and the "basic math" addition of classical mechanics does not. This is a fact.

See above.

helmut said:
That's incomprehensible/incoherent. The way the word "tracks" (better: maintains) the whole universe has nothing to do with velocity. There is no passage in the Bible where you can show (without invoking some special hypotheses of yours) that photons from God, that behave like physical photons, alter their speed.

First, this is ridiculous. The divine Word, defined as physical particles, cannot alter His own speeds? I have to "prove" this extrapolation of my position?

Secondly, I don't feel the need to prove anything. Fact is, my system is the only one without contradictions. As such, it automatically trumps all traditional systems, simply in virtue of being both coherent and logically consistent.

Third, I have no idea what you're talking about. Ordinary light is slowed down by media like fabric. Moses wore a veil over his face blazing with divine Light too intense for Israel's eyeballs. This example tells us two things:
....(1) Divine Light is physical. Otherwise, the physical veil on Moses face would have failed to hinder it.
....(2) If Moses can slow down divine Light particles, I'm pretty sure they can slow themselves down.

helmut said:
The most natural reading from passages as Ph 2 is: The Son is to be praised because He was meekly, even if you disregard His suffering.

This makes no sense. Real virtues, including meekness/humility, are defined by suffering the agony of temptation - the temptation to be non-virtuous. Why should I praise God for His meek character if it is an innate trait invincibly compelling to Him, completely out of His control?

helmut said:
If the mathematics does not fit to the experiments, this means you use the wrong formula. No experiment can ever refute mathematics, because mathematics is pure thinking. But experiments can refute a formula used in a theory on reality. And the formula "you only have to add the velocities" has been proven wrong. It is only a good approximation in cases where zero can be considered a good approximation of v1*v2/c².

I dealt with this above.

helmut said:
I already told you the passage:
Heb 5,7 During the days of Jesus’ life on earth, he offered up prayers and petitions with fervent cries and tears to the one who could save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverent submission. 8 Son though he was, he learned obedience from what he suffered 9 and, once made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him

Correct. Christ arrived as ignorant fetus and, as such, had to undertake a learning process on earth. In this example, He learned obedience. Precisely why the traditional theory of an immutably omniscient Son of God (a being who cannot learn) cannot be true.

helmut said:
My view of soul: It is something like a function of body, either a material or a immaterial body. It cannot be seen or touched, but it is tangible according to your definition of tangible.

And even a proponent of an immaterial soul separated from body may say: Soul is immaterial, but tangible.

This is trying to stand on both sides of the fence. To assert a tangible-intangible soul is like asserting a material-immaterial chair. Not sure if I should risk sitting down. The whole notion of 'spirit' is an antithesis to matter. In fact, traditional theologians define it as devoid of extension in space (has no size and shape). You can't reach out and touch something that has no extension to touch.

Again, traditional thinking forces a person to embrace contradictions as a vain attempt to "resolve" the inherent problems and overall incoherence. How is this type of approach better than a cult?

helmut said:
This is a caricature of the traditional view, and you know it. I don't dignify it with a response.

No it's not. For example, as I said earlier, God is supposedly "infinite" love but neglects to atone for the fallen angels? The whole system makes no sense. If God were infinite love, everything would be atoned for. Hell would be an impossibility. Even the sin of rejecting Christ would be pardoned.

helmut said:
You are even unable to give your examples right. The question you had in mind must be "Does I merit praise in the strict sense?" Sign of loose thinking (caused by exhaustion when answering?).

And it does not help to bring a moral touch to my example. Repairing a defunct heating device is not immoral, I asked about a specific difference and you bring a quite difference dimension. Your example does not help in any way. It makes only sense in this context if you think that "good" work for a bad objective does merit praise when it contains suffering. I'm sure you will not subscribe to that thesis.

Shallow reading. My point is that merit in the strict sense always hinges on righteous suffering. For example we can find some kind of worth in everything, even in an evil man, but it's still not worth in the strictest sense of virtue. I gave my example right.

helmut said:
This is an axiom of yours, or can you give any reason why something that is not connected to effort/suffering cannot be worthy of praise?

The fact that we will be judged on effort/suffering is not reason enough? The cross is not reason enough? Proverbs 31:10-31 is not enough?

The whole bible from Genesis to Revelation - where God praises righteous behavior and disparages evil behavior - that is not enough?

Meaning, has God ever frowned upon a person for poor innate traits? Or deemed a person more praiseworthy base on innate traits?

Take two people of equal virtue but differing vastly in innate traits. So the one with better traits is more praiseworthy? He "wins"? Of course not. This means that his superior innate traits merited no worthy-of-praise points at all. None. Nada. Zero. Zilch.

The logic is clear, you just don't want to accept it.

helmut said:
In other words: You say, that effort/suffering is the only value of God's, and meekness/humility has no worth of its own. Nor does love.

False dichotomy. Totally dishonest.

helmut said:
This is a somewhat biased interpretation of what the Bible say about that.

I didn't speak of angels, they are measured by other measures than us, so any definite position on that matter would be speculative.

Which was possible because He incarnated. Forgotten that I said God is atemporal? "Before the cry, I will answer" (Is 65:24).

(Yawn) More atemporal jargon. Incomprehensible. And there's no reason to read that verse in such manner. Before I cry out to God, He's already reading my mind. He knows my petition before I declare it.

JAL · Jan 21, 2023

@helmut,

Regarding all your talk about God being the creator of time: how is your position not gibberish? You said that God exists in "HIs" time and thus not in "our" time. Ok, so where did "His" time come from? Did He create that too? When did He do that? What was happening at that time? Isn't your position incomprehensible jargon? Traditional theology, incomprehensibly, claims:
....(1) The Son of God is "eternally" begotten. Atemporally begotten? What's that even supposed to mean? Incomprehensible.
...(2) The Trinity existed before creating time. What's that supposed to mean? The Trinity is a fellowship of three persons, and we can only understand fellowship as successive/consecutive interactions/communications and thus as time-consuming. So there was time before He created time?

Again, the entire traditional system is one big fog of confusion. Nothing is clear.

JAL · Jan 21, 2023

@helmut,

You seem to believe that mankind's past, present, and future are already played out before an atemporal God. He sees all the chapters of the completed book. This leads to several places of fog:
....(1) Here I am in the present. God foreknows my future free choices, and sees them already played out, even though I have not yet made up my mind? He knows my free choices before I do?
....(2) Suppose God knows my future in virtue of being there watching me. Watching me? That means I TOO am there. If He knows my future in virtue of being there, then I too should know my future in virtue of being there. When I point this out, people reply, "God is special." This is special pleading void of any clear logic.
....(3) Your claim, I think, is that God can edit the chapters of this book (modify history as He likes). Wonderful. That means He can retract the crucifixion, by going back to a moment before He promised to do it. In that case, I have no real promise of salvation, effectively His promise is a lie, especially if He retracts it.
....(4) I have difficulty enjoying time-travel science-fiction. It's too unrealistic. A man can go back to yesterday and meet himself? Suddenly there are two of them? The paradoxes are endless and incredibly foggy. In Exodus, God speaks to Moses at the burning bush. For an atemporal God viewing all the chapters of the book, this is happening right now. Viewing all the chapters? And thus watching Himself speak to Moses? So there are two Gods? Totally unclear.

Helmut-WK · Jan 22, 2023

It took my almost an hour to write this down. The answer to the first of your posts. If you want me to read the other post also, please do not answer until I have answered them, hopefully tomorrow.

JAL said:
More shallow, uncharitable answers. The Big Bang is said to create space and time. That means it is not expansion of the universe into (existing) empty space but expansion of space, just as I the article said, and thus a creating of space "where" there was only nothingness.

You don't understand. The space is »created« by stretching, not by adding space from the outside. So there is not „nothingness” the space is »created« from.

Or do you refer to the very beginning? There are several competing theories on that, a rather new one is that inside every black whole a new universe will expand, which means that our universe started a the inside of a black hole in another universe. If you want, you may explore the different hypotheses, and pick up the one most plausible top you. But to write as if every theory on big band says it happened out of nothingness is simply wrong.

JAL said:
I am so tired of your endlessly-nitpicky, shallow critiques of my posts.

I show that your critique of Big Bang is based in misunderstandings. This is not shallow. You are shallow in assuming that you know more of science, in every answer to my scientific explanations you made mistakes (including your last one, of course).

Did I complain of „endlessly-nitpicky, shallow critiques” when you pointed to my poor handling of philosophy? You konow more about philosophies than I do, but I know more about science. Relativity theory was one of my favorite theme when I was young, I invested a good deal of reading, thinking and sometimes calculating to understand what special relativity says (I could not master general relativity in that depth, and I did not explore the specific electromagnetic aspects of special relativity, a field I had underestimated).

JAL said:
On the one hand you're admitting that your version of atemporality is humanly incomprehensible.

No. It is quite comprehensible. What I said is, that we cannot know everything about a time dimension we have no access to. It is not difficult to understand that we have no access to, and it is quite comprehensible that we therefore cannot say much about that.

And the analogy which I used to prove the atemporality of a Creator is comprehensible, too.

»We don't know what exactly in in this room, but we know this room exists and that here must be something in it«. - »Thats incomprehensible jargon and therefore cult-like lingo«.

JAL said:
But you insist that you are right and I am wrong? Even though I propose simple temporal succession that we all daily experience and comprehend?

As I have said a dozen times: This is in conflict with the notion of Creator.

JAL said:
An omnibenevolent God, if atemporal and thus foreknowing the fall of Adam, Eve, and Lucifer, would surely have created Bob, Sally, and Vincent instead.

You deny a fundamentally biblical theme:

Ps 139:16 Your eyes saw my unformed body; all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.
Acts 2:23 This man [Jesus] was handed over to you by God’s deliberate plan and foreknowledge; and you, with the help of wicked men, put him to death by nailing him to the cross.
Rm 8:29 For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters.

JAL said:
Atheists have always rightly insisted that an infinite, philosophically ideal God does not resolve the Problem of Evil.

Which is a fulfillment of
1.Co 1:21 For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe. 22 Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, 23 but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling-block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles …
Instead of accepting that the wisdom of God is beyond our understanding, or to say it in the words of Paul …
1.Co 1:25 For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength.
… you prefer to exchange the "foolishness of God" by human wisdom. And you end up with a God that is not the creator of our universe (though he might have formed the earth), that is in principle one of us, for he started as weak as we are now.

And all this despite the fact that even human wisdom has shown there are things we cannot grasp. I already mentioned the fact that almost every number cannot be computed. With your philosophical background you surely know about the incompleteness theorems of Gödel (or Goedel in ASCII, in case you cannot type an ö) which proved that we cannot construct a logical frame that includes "everything".

JAL said:
You seem to operate under the assumption that energy can't be a continual flux, that it is intermittently punctuated.

No. Either you know next to nothing about quantum physics, or this a a very shallow response.
I now move a sentence that I wrote above here:
You certainly heard about the uncertainty principle (the breakthrough by Heisenberg, which showed that the uncertainty inherent in waves also hold for particles), and that Einstein failed when he tried to disprove it (because he believed that »the One above there doesn't throws dice«, „Der da oben würfelt nicht”).
I was too optimistic about your knowledge, partly because I thought you collected information about the items you declare illogical, lest you make a hasty, unfounded judgement. But now I see you did exactly that. What I said was the form of the uncertainty principle (energy and time, instead of pulse and space) Einstein used in his most famous attempt to refute the uncertainty principle, which was then rebutted by Pauli, who used relativity theory (!) to disprove Einstein.

You just call illogical, shallow etc. what you don't understand. If I would act so, I would declare Tertullian shallow

JAL said:
It's difficult to be patient with these unfair, dishonest, irrelevant, and nonsensical extrapolations of my statements.

It was no extrapolaton, I took literal what you said, with the hint that this was loose speaking which may be caused by loose thinking.

JAL said:
Infinity is a non-specific quantity, despite all your protests to the contrary.

As long as you don't specify which infinity you mean, it is ridiculous to complain about non-specificity. Name a specific infinity, and it is more specific than almost any real number.

You said no word about imaginary numbers. They are definitely specific, though not real (in the math sense of that term, in ordinary sense of "real" they are a real as π).

JAL said:
Ok, educate me. Maybe I missed that in the Bible, so show me where it is. It was my understanding that heaven is everlasting.

Rev 20:11 Then I saw a great white throne and him who was seated on it. The earth and the heavens fled from his presence, and there was no place for them.
As you certainly know, "The earth and the heavens" is a rather Hebraic expression for the whole universe (or kosmos in Greek). Revelation has a very "semitic" style, my suspicion is that John wrote it in Hebrew and then translated it into Greek.
Rev 21:1 Then I saw ‘a new heaven and a new earth,’ for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea.
The very end of the story: The old universe is gone, God created a new one. We can only speculate about it and what will happen there - and we have the pictures where we cannot be sure what is literally and what is symbolic in them. But it is clear that our universe (including heaven!) will come to an end. For details, study Revelation

JAL said:
Again, math isn't the real world. It maps to the real world, hopefully as much as possible.

No, math does not »map« the world. You can use math to map aspects of reality, but then you have to chose the right math. Which formula is right is an empirical question.

JAL said:
I certainly can't identify anything in the real world that is currently of infinite quantity. Potential infinitudes? Yes. Actual existing infinitudes such as, "We are now at year infinity." ? No.

You picked the very example of infinity where you safely can say we will never arrive at.

And you made a mathematical error: Infinity is exactly about »greater than anything finite«. What you say can be reformulated as "infinity is not finite". Which does not say that it cannot exist.

Infinite universe means: There is no limit in distance, to any distance you may name as »actual distance« there is a greater distance (whether you apply this sentence to temporal or spatial distance, is unimportant, the notion if infinity is the same).

Helmut-WK · Jan 22, 2023

Part 2 of the one-hour-text.

JAL said:
Don't be ridiculous. Say a man is 24 years old and his birthday is tomorrow. How many scientists would complain, "Hmmm...temporal succession is so uncertain and so unclear. In fact we can't be sure whether he will be 25 years old tomorrow, or 23 years old."

What a shallow response. Temporal succession exist as a notion in our mind, no one suspects this, and this notion is clear, so there will be no discussion about 23 or 25 or so.

But whether it is a correct description of ultimate reality, this is disputed.

I believe that temporal succession is real, and have a clear idea about that (BTW: which includes that the mathematical measure of time by instruments may be not a correct picture of ultimate reality). But I cannot honestly say that this should be clear to every person.

JAL said:
Our experience of time is linear. That is what is most clear.

Trivial.

JAL said:
To propose non-linear time is contrary to normal experience

This may be because "normal" experience my be special. For example, it is not pat of our normal experience that synchronicity is relative (which is proven by special relativity).

JAL said:
....(1) We should try to stick with clear notions.

Then start by not using an unclear notion as infinite, but specify which specific infinity you mean when you talk about the reality of infinity.

JAL said:
....(2) If we can't find a clear explanation of something, be honest to admit, "I don't know a good answer here."

When I do this, you complaint.

JAL said:
INSTEAD, traditional theologians wanted to pretend that they had the answers to al the big questions. This led to sevreal cult-like assertions still accepted today.

This from the man who wanted answers to questions where I can only say "OI don:t know" and then complaints when I give not the desired answer …

JAL said:
(Sigh). So moment. I said that man currently participates in a temporal succession, and He walks this journey hand-in-hand with the indwelling Holy Spirit and thus in the same time frame as He.

I'm not sure whether the indwelling Spirit (who dwells in many believers simultaneously!) has the same experience as believer he dwells in. But, for the sake of argument, let's take that for granted. This means that the indwelling of the Spirit can be compared to incarnation, where Jesus has the same linear time experience as any other man. This says nothing about whether the Creator is atemporal or not, it leads to nothing in this respect. It's just trivial.

JAL said:
Hypocrisy, right? By insisting that my position is wrong, you already have speculated on the issue, albeit drawing cult-like conclusions.

Name a speculation. I started with science, and with the notion that God created the universe. From there it logically follows that He created space and time. And this logically means that He is atemporarlily.

Another way was the analogy of an author of a book to the "author" of this universe (which. BTW solves the riddle of God' predestination an man's free will), which also leads to the conclusion that God must be atemporarily.

It is simple logic that a temporal Creator is a contradiction, no speculation involved. Speculation begins when it comes to the question of the exact nature of this atemporality.

If you think I am wrong show me the error I made.

JAL said:
See what I mean? You have not only speculated, you regard yourself infallible on your conclusions.

This is a comment on a paragraph where I explain that something you declare as most clear is not. It was you who, by using phrases as "shallow", "most clear" etc- always hinted (to say the least) that his conclusions are infallible.

JAL said:
And yet you insist that I'm clearly wrong. Seems like hypocrisy to me.

In said that the theory is clear, but the details are not (simplified for the sake of brevity). And yes, you are clearly wrong.

JAL said:
Insofar as we are NOT prophets, we fallback on things like exegesis and common sense. Which doesn't bode well for cult-like foggy claims.

It does not "bode" well to claims that God is part of his creation, either.

JAL said:
Although I can't prove anything 100%, all the data of Scripture points to God undergoing a temporally successive chain of experiences much like we do.

Just one side, there are passages that point to the contrary, e.g. "before they cry, I will answer", i.e. God reacts to the cry before it was shouted.

You argue with a biased selection of biblical passages, not with the whole bible.

JAL said:
In terms of empathy, think about God as Judge. Arguably, He needs to have some (empathetic) sense of what I am experiencing in order to judge me properly.

He has That sense because he Himself lived as man here:

Hbr 4:15 For we do not have a high priest who is unable to feel sympathy for our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are – yet he did not sin.

And lest you give a distorted exegesis: This was said about incarnation. It is not the father is our high priest, it is the son.

JAL said:
It sounds like you're trying to strawman-hyperbolize my words. Hopefully my words above set the record straight.

No, the theme was experience of time. Nothing else.

JAL said:
Incomprehensible jargon. I can grieve Him at this moment, but He experiences it in "His" time and not "our" time? So there are multiple "times"?

I explained this several times (remember: author). If you don't understand what I say, any further discussion is futile.

As I said: The very notion of Creator implies He does not live in the time he created, i.e. our time. You can't refute that.

JAL said:
That's a foggy cult-like statement.

So Creation (in the full sense of the word) is »foggy«. Hmmm…

JAL said:
I can't conceive of how "his" time could be any different than "my" time.

Well, the time of mesons flying to earth is that of a clock ticking much slower than our clocks. This could be measured experimentally (and it is, BTW, in accordance to special relativity).

I you can't imagine what is proven as real, this is a problem with your imagination.

JAL said:
To claim that God exists in a different time is incomprehensible jargon.

This is hypocrisy. The example with the time a person in a novel lives in (a time in a fictitious world) contrasted to the time the author livers in is comprehensible. You may not believe that it is so, but you can comprehend what I mean. You are no idiot!

JAL said:
Here's Norm Geisler admitting that the human mind MUST accept perceived contradictions in order to accept the Hypostatic Union, clinging to faith that God somehow resolves them somewhere out there in distant intellectual outer-space beyond the reach of the human intellect:

And this you count as a valid argument? As I have said: After exploring the "normal" reality, science was convinced they could explain the whole world in a mechanistic way. The world appeared as a deterministic automata, so the hypothetical demon of Laplace could calculate the whole past and whole future. But when the macro- and microcosms was explored, it appeared that this picture of the universe was wrong. Non-Euklidan space, relativity of synchrony, particle ans wave just being two aspects of the same object - all this made the world totally different from the naive mechanical picture of, say, 1880.

Quantum logic allows to understand how one cam maintain Jesus 100% man, Jesus 100% God and man not God. Well, strictly speaking not at the same time, but in a sort of wavering from one to another. This is not illogical, if you assume that the divine logic has some resemblance to quantum logic.

All this is beyond your imagination - but that is a sentence about your imagination, not about God, reality or so on.

JAL said:
...(1) The Incarnation is literally a joke to explain. Nothing could be easier. No need for contradictions.

Well, explain: Jesus is God, all of God is within Him bodily, the father is God, but Jesus is not the father. Explain, without any need of contradiction.

Jesus is man (to deny it would be anti-christian), Jesus is YHWH. YHWH is no man. Explain, without any need of contradiction.

And. last not least: How can it happen that God who is Spirit (and a Spirit has no body) can become man? I see a contradiction to statements you gave.

JAL · Jan 22, 2023

helmut said:
It took my almost an hour to write this down. The answer to the first of your posts. If you want me to read the other post also, please do not answer until I have answered them, hopefully tomorrow.

I'd prefer you didn't read it and didn't answer. I've literally "had it up to here" with your patronizingly dismissive dishonest and nitpicky posts.

helmut said:
You don't understand. The space is »created« by stretching, not by adding space from the outside. So there is not „nothingness” the space is »created« from.

Again. Stretching into what? Nothingness. To horizontally stretch a rubber band (internally) from 2 inches to 5 inches, there must be either:
...(A) 3 inches empty space outside of the rubber band
...(B) Or the rubber band somehow "creates space" where there was nothingness and thus effectively expands into nothingness (as I said repeatedly).

Choice B is the official definition of the Big Bang. Which is incoherent/incomprehensible (that was my whole point), at least from an atheistic point of view. The Big Bang theory is supposed to be "purely scientific" and thus essentially atheistic. (Admittedly a theologian could embellish it but I'm referring to the purely scientific version).

You would happily go back and forth with me 500 posts on this ONE ISSUE, telling me I have no idea what the Big Bang entails because you are more scientifically advanced than I.

From a wikki:

"The Big Bang is a misnomer, as it implies an explosion. In fact, the model describes an expansion of the Universe, not into some pre-existing space, but rather that it created space as it expanded. There is nothing outside the Universe, so there was nothing to expand into.
General Astronomy/The Big Bang and Cosmic Expansion - Wikibooks, open books for an open world

That's funny. Sound like exactly what I've been saying for multiple posts and you keep telling me I've got it all wrong. My whole point is that expansion into nothingness, at least from an atheistic point of view, doesn't make sense. Or, as I've phrase it on other threads, creation of space ex nihilo doesn't make sense from an atheistic point of view.

@Eveyone: please ignore any post where he dismisses my conclusions. You can see for yourself that such posts are the dishonest artifacts of someone determined to strawmsn-nitpick everthing I post.

helmut said:
Or do you refer to the very beginning? There are several competing theories on that, a rather new one is that inside every black whole a new universe will expand, which means that our universe started a the inside of a black hole in another universe. If you want, you may explore the different hypotheses, and pick up the one most plausible top you. But to write as if every theory on big band says it happened out of nothingness is simply wrong.

Clearly, I was critiquing the mainstream theory of the Big Bang. Alternative versions are irrelevant, because my point was that even a large consensus in the scientific community unfortunately isn't enough to decisively establish truth.

helmut said:
I show that your critique of Big Bang is based in misunderstandings. This is not shallow. You are shallow in assuming that you know more of science, in every answer to my scientific explanations you made mistakes (including your last one, of course).

See above.

helmut said:
And the analogy which I used to prove the atemporality of a Creator is comprehensible, too.

(Guffaw). I almost fell out of my chair again. You cannot "prove" a theory incomprehensible and seemingly ridden with apparent contradictions. You tried to argue that human authorship of a book "proves" that God is an atemporal being who sees all the chapters of life? That's your "proof" ? Could anyone imagine a boast more shallow or absurd?

helmut said:
»We don't know what exactly in in this room, but we know this room exists and that here must be something in it«. - »Thats incomprehensible jargon and therefore cult-like lingo«.

So dishonest. My assumption don't extrapolate to that kind of conclusion. A room is something we clearly understand at least in the sense of experience. We see objects in rooms every day. If the room has no light, we don't see these objects so we don't know what's in the room.

Incredibly bogus strawman-attack. Par for the course.

helmut said:
As I have said a dozen times: This is in conflict with the notion of Creator.

Yes. You've asserted that. Proving it is another matter. Oh that's right. You "proved" it when you said that human authorship of a fictional book establishes your conclusions. I almost forgot.

helmut said:
You deny a fundamentally biblical theme:

Ps 139:16 Your eyes saw my unformed body; all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.
Acts 2:23 This man [Jesus] was handed over to you by God’s deliberate plan and foreknowledge; and you, with the help of wicked men, put him to death by nailing him to the cross.
Rm 8:29 For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters.

What's your point? Is this a Calvinist argument? Calvinism contradicts God's love and can't even handle the Fall. Calvinists have no idea what Paul means by election - but neither do Arminians, in my opinion. Here too, I'm pretty sure I offer the first consistent handling (of the election passages).

helmut said:
Which is a fulfillment of
1.Co 1:21 For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe. 22 Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, 23 but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling-block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles …
Instead of accepting that the wisdom of God is beyond our understanding, or to say it in the words of Paul …
1.Co 1:25 For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength.
… you prefer to exchange the "foolishness of God" by human wisdom. And you end up with a God that is not the creator of our universe (though he might have formed the earth), that is in principle one of us, for he started as weak as we are now.

You seem to be rambling.

helmut said:
And all this despite the fact that even human wisdom has shown there are things we cannot grasp.

Again. If your theory is humanly incoherent/incomprehensible, just remain silent. Or rather say, "I don't have a good answer on this issue." My complaint is when people INSIST that their incoherent/inconsistent views are correct and, to make matters worse, insist that the fully consistent, fully coherent views of someone like me, or Tertullian, cannot be correct.

(I'm referring to Tertullian's early years. He completely flew the coop toward the end of his life, not sure whether it was due to senility, or Alzheimer's, or something else).

helmut said:
I already mentioned the fact that almost every number cannot be computed. With your philosophical background you surely know about the incompleteness theorems of Gödel (or Goedel in ASCII, in case you cannot type an ö) which proved that we cannot construct a logical frame that includes "everything".

No. Either you know next to nothing about quantum physics, or this a a very shallow response.
I now move a sentence that I wrote above here:
You certainly heard about the uncertainty principle (the breakthrough by Heisenberg, which showed that the uncertainty inherent in waves also hold for particles), and that Einstein failed when he tried to disprove it (because he believed that »the One above there doesn't throws dice«, „Der da oben würfelt nicht”).
I was too optimistic about your knowledge, partly because I thought you collected information about the items you declare illogical, lest you make a hasty, unfounded judgement. But now I see you did exactly that. What I said was the form of the uncertainty principle (energy and time, instead of pulse and space) Einstein used in his most famous attempt to refute the uncertainty principle, which was then rebutted by Pauli, who used relativity theory (!) to disprove Einstein.

You just call illogical, shallow etc. what you don't understand. If I would act so, I would declare Tertullian shallow

Dismissive and patronizing, you shove the uncertainty principle down my throat as yet another strawman-attack. Because after all:
....(1) Your assumption is that scientific-consensus establishes fact - even religious fact?
....(2) And you are sooooooooooo much more advanced in science than I am, right? I mean, you proved it when you actually defended Big Bang expansion into nothingness !!!! (i.e. atheistic creation of space ex nihilo).

In an analogical sense (not in a literal quantum-wave sense), I was obviously using the term "infinite snapshots" for the pictures seen in God's mind to fully contemplate and fully digest a basketball game. I wasn't implying actual photos limited by the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics. (Of course the finite God of my theology is only pragmatically ideal and thus frankly couldn't care less about fully digesting the game to such an infinite degree).

Not just a strawman, but a double-strawman, because, as I already pointed out, even if I agreed with you that an infinite God could fully capture the game in a finite number of snapshots (which I don't), He would still need an infinite number of snapshots to take in all eternity at once.

helmut said:
As long as you don't specify which infinity you mean, it is ridiculous to complain about non-specificity. Name a specific infinity, and it is more specific than almost any real number.

This is drivel. And even when I linked you to an article stating that math has recently proven all infinities to be equal, you still dismissed me, or to be more accurate, tried to prove it wrong. You might think you're advanced in math, but I'm pretty sure you're not nearly as advanced as the authors behind that article and the mathematicians who recently created those proofs. For the moment, I'm accepting their conclusions over yours.

helmut said:
You said no word about imaginary numbers. They are definitely specific, though not real (in the math sense of that term, in ordinary sense of "real" they are a real as π).

You keep bring this up. From what I can see it's a total strawman, because I can't think of one place where it is relevant to the crux of our debate.

Strawman, after strawman, after strawman.

helmut said:
Rev 20:11 Then I saw a great white throne and him who was seated on it. The earth and the heavens fled from his presence, and there was no place for them.
As you certainly know, "The earth and the heavens" is a rather Hebraic expression for the whole universe (or kosmos in Greek). Revelation has a very "semitic" style, my suspicion is that John wrote it in Hebrew and then translated it into Greek.
Rev 21:1 Then I saw ‘a new heaven and a new earth,’ for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea.
The very end of the story: The old universe is gone, God created a new one. We can only speculate about it and what will happen there - and we have the pictures where we cannot be sure what is literally and what is symbolic in them. But it is clear that our universe (including heaven!) will come to an end. For details, study Revelation

Time will come to an end? Incoherent drivel. For example, fellowship between two parties can only be defined as consecutive intercommunications or interactions. As always with you, this is once again a case of you insinuating, "Your position is definitely wrong even though my position is totally incoherent gibberish." Lovely.

helmut said:
You picked the very example of infinity where you safely can say we will never arrive at.

(Guffaw). And it only took about 100 posts for you to finally concede the point that incrementing an integer will never reach infinity? Every time I made this point you dismissed it or strawman-attacked it.

Why do you waste so much time on strawmen attacks?

helmut said:
And you made a mathematical error: Infinity is exactly about »greater than anything finite«. What you say can be reformulated as "infinity is not finite". Which does not say that it cannot exist.

I have no idea what "profound brilliant rebuttal" you think you are making here. Sounds to me like another strawman. And yes, there is no specific integer of value infinity. Maybe you're not quite as advanced in math as you imply.

helmut said:
Infinite universe means: There is no limit in distance, to any distance you may name as »actual distance« there is a greater distance (whether you apply this sentence to temporal or spatial distance, is unimportant, the notion if infinity is the same).

I have no idea what you just said. I think you're once again trying to establish the reality of an infinite integer by arguing that the future is infinite. (You seem to vacillate on this infinity issue). I already addressed that extrapolation. Strictly speaking, the future is not infinite, but potentially infinite. That potential will never be realized because we will never reach "year infinity".

JAL · Jan 22, 2023

helmut said:
This may be because "normal" experience my be special. For example, it is not pat of our normal experience that synchronicity is relative (which is proven by special relativity).

Proven by special relativity? The very theory which flies in the face of the divine Light illuminating the heavenly city and shaded by the veil over Moses' face? Please.

helmut said:
This from the man who wanted answers to questions where I can only say "OI don:t know" and then complaints when I give not the desired answer …

(Sigh). Clearly that is not the nature of my complaint. Even in the case of your most honest response so far, it was still unsatisfactory. Effectively you insinuated, "I don't know the answer on this question, but your position is definitely wrong (or at least not even worth considering)."

helmut said:
I'm not sure whether the indwelling Spirit (who dwells in many believers simultaneously!)...

Correct to put the exclamation point for emphasis. As noted earlier, traditional thinking holds to Doctrine of Divine Simplicity which affords no coherent theory of omnipresence because such a God has no size and shape. Thanks for reminding me.

helmut said:
I'm not sure whether the indwelling Spirit...has the same experience as believer he dwells in. But, for the sake of argument, let's take that for granted. This means that the indwelling of the Spirit can be compared to incarnation, where Jesus has the same linear time experience as any other man. This says nothing about whether the Creator is atemporal or not, it leads to nothing in this respect. It's just trivial.

Says nothing? Translation, "You haven't proven your conclusion 100%." The biblical examples of temporal succession are seemingly innumerable. And I even gave you a trumped-up example of an angel carrying a clock to the throne that would continue ticking as it elevates. Jesus could have carried one Himself, if clocks were available in His day:

"9After He had said this, they watched as He was taken up, and a cloud hid Him from their sight. 10They were looking intently into the sky as He was going, when suddenly two men dressed in white stood beside them. 11“Men of Galilee,” they said, “why do you stand here looking into the sky? This same Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come back in the same way you have seen Him go into heaven.” (Acts 1).

I don't have to prove it 100%. The biblical data favors simple temporal succession. Anything else is wild speculation. And worse yet, it is unclear/incomprehensible. Occam's Razor means, "The simplest explanation is usually the correct one, so don't needlessly embellish it with a multitude of explanatory factors." Again, I'm trying to get away from assertions unclear and thus cult-like. It's not about "proving" all my claims 100%. As I've reminded you repeatedly.

Chalk up another strawman. Gee what a surprise.

helmut said:
Name a speculation. I started with science, and with the notion that God created the universe. From there it logically follows that He created space and time. And this logically means that He is atemporarlily.

No, it doesn't. And the only reason I haven't elaborated on this error is because, as I told you, I'm reluctant to share my pearls until I see clear indication that you are willing to be a charitable debater. As it stands, you just dismiss EVERYTHING without due cause. Handing waving.

helmut said:
Another way was the analogy of an author of a book to the "author" of this universe (which. BTW solves the riddle of God' predestination an man's free will), which also leads to the conclusion that God must be atemporarily.

Predestination/election passages are not a problem for me. Admittedly those passages give Arminians some pause, but not me. Arminians fall back on a watered-down reading that I don't fully agree with, but at least it's not a baldfaced contradiction of God's omnibenevolence as in Calvinism. Let me summarize: my system fully supports individualistic, monergistic election/predestination foreordained before the creation of the world - and yet anyone can be saved! That's a blatant contradiction, right? Wrong. You're making the same mistake here that you make with respect to Creation - you assume that you've exhausted the possibilities. Think a little deeper, nay, think outside the box.

helmut said:
It is simple logic that a temporal Creator is a contradiction, no speculation involved. Speculation begins when it comes to the question of the exact nature of this atemporality.

Think outside box. Not easy to do, after 2000 years of indoctrination. That's why I'm here to help, but you've made it clear that you don't want my help. You're too advanced for me, right? And maybe that's the problem:

25At that time Jesus declared, “I praise You, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because You have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children.

helmut said:
It does not "bode" well to claims that God is part of his creation, either.

Can you point to where I said that? Or point to where the materialist Tertullian said that? This is more dishonesty, right?

helmut said:
Just one side, there are passages that point to the contrary, e.g. "before they cry, I will answer", i.e. God reacts to the cry before it was shouted.

That's what I said, right? He answers quickly because he reads your mind before you shout. How does God-speed establish atemporality?

At this point you're probably thinking, "Hey that's unfair - I don't have to prove it 100%, right?" Admittedly I'm holding you on this point to a very high probative standard (although not 100%). But I do this for a very good reason - I'm not being unfair. My theology is based on ordinary claims, specifically on:
....(A) the existence of tangible substance (matter),
....(B) the temporal succession that we all experience.
These are things of which we can say, with high confidence, "I know them to be real."

Anything else, such as immateriality or atemporality, is an extraordinary claim. Quite probably a fairy-tale: "Use the immaterial Force, Luke!" Or, "Go travel back in time, Luke!" Extraordinary claims cry out for extraordinary degrees of corroboration. When you show me a passage that can easily be explained by an ordinary claim such as temporal succession, by Occam's Razor we should be especially reluctant to explain it via extraordinary claims. That's trivial.

helmut said:
Hbr 4:15 For we do not have a high priest who is unable to feel sympathy for our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are – yet he did not sin.

And lest you give a distorted exegesis: This was said about incarnation. It is not the father is our high priest, it is the son.

Divine empathy is implicit since He is Judge. That verse simply adds more proof, and makes more explicit, what is already implicit.

helmut said:
Well, the time of mesons flying to earth is that of a clock ticking much slower than our clocks. This could be measured experimentally (and it is, BTW, in accordance to special relativity).

I you can't imagine what is proven as real, this is a problem with your imagination.

Either you're being totally dishonest or you're not as advanced in science as you implied. Time-dilation is merely an interpretation of laboratory experiments based on the (false) ASSUMPTION of light-constancy (special relativity). (I'm not denying that they "think" they've established light-constancy by observation, I already discussed that part earlier). Let's take a look at some statements from this article:
Time dilation - Wikipedia

You repeatedly imply that time dilation is a fact. I stand unconvinced. It seems inferred from Einstein’s ASSUMPTION of light-constancy.

“Time dilation can be inferred from the observed constancy of the speed of light in all reference frames dictated by the second postulate of special relativity.”

That wikipedia article paints a scenario of light reflecting between two mirrors and comments:

“Keeping the speed of light constant for all inertial observers requires a lengthening of the period of this clock from the moving observer's perspective. That is to say, as measured in a frame moving relative to the local clock, this clock will be running more slowly.”

Thus it seems scientists START with the (incoherent) assumption of light-constancy and then INFER time dilation. Similar to how scientists make the incoherent claim that the Big Bang created space ex nihilo.

Also, earlier you said Einstein’s enhancement of the add-velocities formula was a fact. I’m not convinced. It seems inferred from the (incoherent) ASSUMPTION of light-constancy. The article states:

“This constancy of the speed of light means that, counter to intuition, the speeds of material objects and light are not additive. It is not possible to make the speed of light appear greater by moving towards or away from the light source.”

helmut said:
This is hypocrisy. The example with the time a person in a novel lives in (a time in a fictitious world) contrasted to the time the author livers in is comprehensible. You may not believe that it is so, but you can comprehend what I mean. You are no idiot!

I understand the example. But you seem oblivious to the fact that it doesn't convincingly extrapolate to reality. To illustrate the implausibility of your extrapolation, it is somewhat like arguing like this:
....An author wrote a fictional book. The events take place in chronological order and thus are temporally successive chapters.
....The author can turn to any chapter in that book, thus "traveling" in time.
....This proves that men CAN build time machines.
Huh? How does human authorship of a fictional book establish any kind of atemporality? Again, you are making an extraordinary claim. My system is built on ordinary claims. You might think otherwise, but for me to explain this would divulge some pearls that I'm reluctant to share with you.

helmut said:
And this you count as a valid argument?

Unfair, dishonest, dismissive. Hand waving. I have shown you a couple of seemingly blatant contradictions in the Hypostatic Union. AND I said I could happily expose a total of about six of them. AFTERWARDS I cited Norm Geisler on this point, widely reputed to be one the greatest theologians of the past century - frankly admitting that the human mind MUST embrace contradictions to accept the Hypostatic Union. You think any theologian really wants to admit that? Yet you insinuate that it's not a valid point. Let's review one of the contradictions that I gave you about two natures ignorant and omniscient.

"My friend Mike is a math genius. Ask him any math question, he will tell you the answer. But he also has a second nature, ignorant of math. Ask him any math question, he can't tell you the answer."

And you have the gall - the blatant dishonesty - to insinuate that I'm not raising worthwhile objections?

As I said, I've literally "had it up to here" with your posts.

helmut said:
As I have said: After exploring the "normal" reality, science was convinced they could explain the whole world in a mechanistic way. The world appeared as a deterministic automata, so the hypothetical demon of Laplace could calculate the whole past and whole future. But when the macro- and microcosms was explored, it appeared that this picture of the universe was wrong. Non-Euklidan space, relativity of synchrony, particle ans wave just being two aspects of the same object - all this made the world totally different from the naive mechanical picture of, say, 1880.

Yeah, non-Euklidian geometry alleged to map to reality. More gibberish probably rooted in the (incoherent) special relativity including Einstein's (gibberish) theory of curved space such that the shortest distance between two points is a curve, NOT a straight line.

Again, Einstein invented brilliant formulas useful for calculations, as I indicated. But don't take them literally! Newton was wise enough to realize that gravity should not be taken literally.

helmut said:
Quantum logic allows to understand how one cam maintain Jesus 100% man, Jesus 100% God and man not God. Well, strictly speaking not at the same time, but in a sort of wavering from one to another. This is not illogical, if you assume that the divine logic has some resemblance to quantum logic.

Wavering? Incomprehensible rambling. You'll NEVER see me make such an unclear, meaningless, ambiguous statement while pretending it's theologically precise, cogent, and definitive. Here again the attitude is, "You're definitely wrong even though my position is incomprehensible/incoherent."

helmut said:
Well, explain: Jesus is God, all of God is within Him bodily, the father is God, but Jesus is not the father. Explain, without any need of contradiction.

As I recall that was your problematical reading of a verse in Colossians.

helmut said:
Jesus is man (to deny it would be anti-christian), Jesus is YHWH. YHWH is no man. Explain, without any need of contradiction.

It's a joke to explain on my assumptions. I see no reason to share those pearls with you.

JAL · Jan 22, 2023

helmut said:
And. last not least: How can it happen that God who is Spirit (and a Spirit has no body) can become man? I see a contradiction to statements you gave.

What is you point? That an immaterial Spirit cannot become man? Why would you say that, if you believe that the Son is an immaterial spirit? Nevermind. Suffice it to say that I am a monistic materialist. As such, I believe that immateralism is a false, cult-like doctrine.

The English term Spirit appears in English translations of the OT and NT. Does that mean the OT is the clear originator of immaterialism? No it does not. Take any Philosophy 101 course. It credits immaterialism to Plato, not to the OT, because neither the Hebrew nor Greek verses have clear support for the translation "immaterial Spirit." Three main problems (but trust me, there are more than three problems):
....(1) The term ruach is used at least 100 times in the OT for physical wind/breath. Nobody disputes this fact. A basic rule of hermeneutics is to interpret the unclear passages in light of the clear.
....(2) The connotations in the verse-contexts are dramatically effective (as we'll soon see) in discrediting the translation Spirit.
....(3) We will see God's face. Immaterial Spirit is defined in orthodoxy as Divine Simplicity void of size and shape.

To summarize. The two competing translations are:
...(A) The Holy Spirit/Ghost as immaterial substance,.
...(B) The Holy Wind/Breath as physical substance.

The following was from an old thread where a poster adduced John 3:8 to prove option-A, that God is a Spirit who merely resembles the metaphor of breath/wind. This is my response to him.

You're referring to John 3:8. Let's discuss that verse, shall we?

"The [divine] Wind [Pneuma] blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound but know not from whence it came or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the [divine] Wind [Pneuma]" (John 3:8).

Do you see that word "pleases"? This proves that ordinary wind isn't mentioned in this passage - not even metaphorically. Ordinary wind doesn't blow wherever it pleases to go, it has no say in its final destination, - it rather END UPS wherever the forces of nature happen to drive it. This is the divine Wind/Breath blowing wherever it wants to go, just as it pushed apart the waters of the Red Sea as a blowing Wind/Breath from God's nostrils (Ex 15:8-10).

Secondly, Pneuma is used twice in this passage. If you're saying it's a metaphor, then the first instance of Pneuma is used as a metaphor for the second instance. But nobody formulates metaphors that way, where a word is used as a metaphor for the same word.

Thirdly. God was well aware of Plato's philosophy when the Gospel of John was written. Thus He was well aware that translators would have to decide, in that verse, between reading it as either:
(A) The Holy Spirit/Ghost
(B) The Holy Wind/Breath
If God WANTED us to read it as Spirit/Ghost, the LAST thing He would do, assuming He is a wise instructor, is make any mention - even metaphorically - of physical wind/breath in that context. Yet that's precisely what He did, and He does this time and again, in multiple passages, two of my favorites being:

"He breathed on them and said, 'Receive the Holy [Breath]'" (John 20:22).

"They heard the sound of a mighty rushing wind...They were all filled with the Holy [Wind]" (Acts 2).

Any first-grader living in ancient Greece would realize that the OBVIOUS meaning of the text, based on the CONTEXT (the mention of physical breath/wind) is The Holy Breath/Wind. Only someone indoctrinated into Platonic philosophy could possibly read the text any other way.

JAL · Jan 23, 2023

@helmut,

Anticipating a typical strawman attack, the title The Holy Wind/Breath is a Third Person title. Tertullian and I are staunch trinitarians. In fact, Tertullian was one of the founders of the doctrine, as he is the first known author to use the word Trinity.

Job 33:6 · Jan 23, 2023

9Rock9 said:
So, after doing some research on the various viewpoints about Genesis 1, I think I lean towards the literary framework view.

In case you are unfamiliar with the literally framework perspective, it advocates the idea that the creation week of Genesis 1 is about putting the things there were created into typological or topical categories rather than presenting a sequential order for creation.

I think it allows one to reconcile Genesis 1 with modern scientific consensus, which is why I find it appealing.

That said, I do have one stumbling block that keeps me from being completely convinced. Mostly, a particular verse, Exodus 20:11, which seems to reinforce the idea that the creation week was actually over the course of six days. Also, it is the basis of the six days of working and resting on the Sabbath, and our weeks have seven days.

What are your thoughts on this, and if you hold to a literary framework view, how do you reconcile it with this verse?

In the ancient here East, the number seven was used to infer a sense of completeness.

Other ancient near Eastern narratives also include a 7-day cosmic temple construction.

The Bible, and Genesis in particular, actually describes ancient near Eastern cosmology I'm not not in science, hence why it can be difficult to try to make the Bible into a scientific document or to fit science backwards into the Bible.

Examples of how we know that the Bible is not describing science:

Helmut-WK · Jan 23, 2023

You didn't wait for my next post, which I interpret that the posts I did not read at that time are unimportant, so I will not read them.

JAL said:
Again. Stretching into what? Nothingness. To horizontally stretch a rubber band (internally) from 2 inches to 5 inches, there must be either:
...(A) 3 inches empty space outside of the rubber band

No, there is no such space, because not a rubber band stretches into space, rather space itself stretches.

JAL said:
...(B) Or the rubber band somehow "creates space" where there was nothingness

This implies a place where this "nothingness" was.

If you prefer, think of everything shrinking, the speed of light slowing down etc., only space is constant. Same reality, a different description. Physicists prefer the simple alternative, i.e. expansion of space.

JAL said:
From a wikki:

"The Big Bang is a misnomer, as it implies an explosion. In fact, the model describes an expansion of the Universe, not into some pre-existing space, but rather that it created space as it expanded. There is nothing outside the Universe, so there was nothing to expand into.
General Astronomy/The Big Bang and Cosmic Expansion - Wikibooks, open books for an open world

That's funny. Sound like exactly what I've been saying for multiple posts

No. You said there is a nothingness into which the space expands, but the underlined sentence says what I have said: That there is nothing the space can expand into (not even a nothingness). Expansion of space is without an "into'".

JAL said:
My whole point is that expansion into nothingness, at least from an atheistic point of view, doesn't make sense.

We agree in this. So why did you interpret that sentence in a way hat doesn't make sense, while I told you what is really meant by that sentence?

JAL said:
Clearly, I was critiquing the mainstream theory of the Big Bang.

Which says the space does not expand into anything, for there is nothing to expand into, not even a nothingness.

JAL said:
You tried to argue that human authorship of a book "proves" that God is an atemporal being who sees all the chapters of life?

Like modern science, I reject the old atheistic view that space was eternal and not created. If God created space, he is not inside the space, and if he created our time, he is not inside our time. Quite logical.

The comparison with a human author, who creates the space, time etc. of the plot of his book, is a way to make the distinction between different times comprehensible, but it is no proof (I said that you may chose not neleive it, and instead believe in a God who did not create our universe).

JAL said:
A room is something we clearly understand at least in the sense of experience.

And the distinction between the time in a book and the time we live in is also something any reader of fiction can experience.

JAL said:
We see objects in rooms every day. If the room has no light, we don't see these objects so we don't know what's in the room.

I refine my analogy: We know a certain object is not in the room we are in (we know the Creator of our universe is not in pour universe). We cannot say whether it is in another room, or somewhere outside any building (we don't know whether there is another time the atemporal Creator lives in, or whether he is atemporal in a more strictly way - something which I cannot imagine, but which I cannot rule out on logical grounds).

JAL said:
Yes. You've asserted that. Proving it is another matter. Oh that's right. You "proved" it when you said that human authorship of a fictional book establishes your conclusions.

No, the proof was that the Creator of time does not live in time.

JAL said:
What's your point? Is this a Calvinist argument?

I don't care whether Clavinists use that argument, I ask whether the argument is valid. I'm no Calvinist.

JAL said:
Here too, I'm pretty sure I offer the first consistent handling (of the election passages).

You are the first one to understand election?

JAL said:
You seem to be rambling.

Again. If your theory is humanly incoherent/incomprehensible, just remain silent.

One physicist said: To understand modern science you have to leave common sense. He did not say: You have to leave sanity and reason, he did not say: You have to accept something incoherent/incomprehensible. But you have to accept that your view on the world is wrong. Newton's physic is a good approximation to reality in everyday usage, but if fails with high velocities, it fails in the microcosm, and it fails in the macrocosm.

JAL said:
Dismissive and patronizing, you shove the uncertainty principle down my throat as yet another strawman-attack. Because after all:
....(1) Your assumption is that scientific-consensus establishes fact - even religious fact?

No. Science has a method that means that anything related to supernatural cannot be detected by natural science (therefore, these aspects of scientific methodology are sometimnes called »methodological atheism«. Which means that there can be no scientific proof for God, but also means that the absense of such a proof doesn't mean anything.

JAL said:
....(2) And you are sooooooooooo much more advanced in science than I am, right?

You had to edit one of your posts when you found out that my description of special relativity was correct and your ideas about it wromh
You don't uinderstanfd the mathematics of infinities (especially not why I can called Aleph-0 definite)
You misunderstood "there is nothing to expand into" as "there is a nothingness to expand into", which is ridulous.
I told you several cases you declared illogical that can be observed in nature (e.g. clocks running in different speeds) and expoeriments (e.g. the speed of light being the same for all observers, regardless of their movement).

Could you tell me any scientific fact that I denied?

JAL said:
I wasn't implying actual photos limited by the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics.

The uncertainty principle is not about uncertainty of photos, but about inherent imprecision of nature itself. It is a corollary of viewing particles as waves (and using Fourier analysis to determine location and momentum - sorry, I used "pulse" in an earlier post, wrong translation from German). The notion of "photos" comes in when you look at the proof of Heisenberg who showed that - contrary to common sense - particles exhibit the same sort of imprecision on pulse and location.

This uncertainty inherent in matter itself is an explanation of radioactive decay, you cannot just dismiss it as a feature of our pictures of that matter.

You may resort to Bohm's theory (a non-standard interpretation of quantum mechanics) to invoke precise locations and movements of particles, but this is not only non-standard, but also non-local, so it gives rise to the question whether space is as we perceive it. See wiki on this.

JAL said:
Not just a strawman, but a double-strawman

Again, you conclude a straw-man where there is none, because you did not understand what modern science really said (here: about thr "uncertainty" inherent in nature).

If you want to invoke infinity: There are infinite couples of uncertainty parameters to describe the scene, even if you restrict the choice to the precision inherent in matter.

JAL said:
And even when I linked you to an article stating that math has recently proven all infinities to be equal

No, the article didn't say that. It said that two infinities were proven equal - and it also stated that two infinities I cited as different are different. Do I need to quote the paragraph of that article that said it?

JAL said:
(Guffaw). And it only took about 100 posts for you to finally concede the point that incrementing an integer will never reach infinity?

Did I ever say the contrary? I said Aleph-0 is definite, I did not say it can be reached by counting.

JAL said:
Every time I made this point you dismissed it or strawman-attacked it.

You didn't make that point, you said infinite is imprecise or indefinite, which is a total different proposition.

JAL said:
I have no idea what "profound brilliant rebuttal" you think you are making here.

In your terminology: I showed that either your argument which should proof infinites cannot exist was a straw-man, or that you silently replaced it by a trivial fact I never denied.

JAL said:
I think you're once again trying to establish the reality of an infinite integer

I never said anything about a infinite integer. Straw-man. The difference between "definite infinity" and "infinite integer" is certainly know to you.

JAL said:
by arguing that the future is infinite. (You seem to vacillate on this infinity issue).

I said: There is no theoretical argument against an infinite future. But our time (the current aion) will come to an end, we wait for a new universe.

JAL said:
I already addressed that extrapolation. Strictly speaking, the future is not infinite, but potentially infinite. That potential will never be realized because we will never reach "year infinity".

Let's take space instead. We will not reach a place with infinite distance from here, regardless of our future motions. And there is no place with infinite distance. But space is infinite, because if it were not, there would be a finite distance not realized in the universe.

OK, I cannot prove space is infinite, but all evidence I know points to that, and at least there is no argument why it must be finite, and AFAIK no scientific argument why it should be finite.

If space is infinite, we have an infinity that exists.

JAL · Jan 23, 2023

helmut said:
I refine my analogy: We know a certain object is not in the room we are in (we know the Creator of our universe is not in pour universe). We cannot say whether it is in another room, or somewhere outside any building (we don't know whether there is another time the atemporal Creator lives in, or whether he is atemporal in a more strictly way - something which I cannot imagine, but which I cannot rule out on logical grounds).

Incomprehensible. He is omnipresent, but not in our universe? He's in a different space-dimension? He walks hand in hand with us, but is in a different time-dimension? Again, I might as well be conversing with a Yoga instructor, or a cult. Nobody understands these nebulous assertions

helmut said:
No, the proof was that the Creator of time does not live in time.

Sheer assertion. You haven't exhausted the possibilities. Think outside the box. And it makes no sense as explained above.

helmut said:
I don't care whether Clavinists use that argument, I ask whether the argument is valid. I'm no Calvinist.

Then I have no idea what your point was.

helmut said:
You are the first one to understand election?

To be more precise. I'm the only one I know of who renders it consistently AND without watering down the seeming strong force of Paul's words. (I'm not insisting that Arminians are wrong in their less-intense reading of Paul, I'm just glad that I found a way to take Paul's words as strongly and literally as possible, without falling into Calvinism.

Just like I'm the only one I know of who explains the Incarnation clearly and without contradiction.

On a thread, one guy laughed at me when I said I could easily explain the Incarnation. He repeatedly insinuated I was nuts. Then I broke it down for him. No further complaints!

helmut said:
One physicist said: To understand modern science you have to leave common sense. He did not say: You have to leave sanity and reason, he did not say: You have to accept something incoherent/incomprehensible. But you have to accept that your view on the world is wrong. Newton's physic is a good approximation to reality in everyday usage, but if fails with high velocities, it fails in the microcosm, and it fails in the macrocosm.

Where did I say to take Newton literally? About 3 time nows I said NOT to do so, right?

helmut said:
No. Science has a method that means that anything related to supernatural cannot be detected by natural science (therefore, these aspects of scientific methodology are sometimnes called »methodological atheism«. Which means that there can be no scientific proof for God, but also means that the absense of such a proof doesn't mean anything.

You had to edit one of your posts when you found out that my description of special relativity was correct and your ideas about it wromh

Totally dishonest. I edited my summary of your statement because I thought YOU had it wrong. Then I realized we were saying the same thing.

helmut said:
You don't uinderstanfd the mathematics of infinities (especially not why I can called Aleph-0 definite)

You're funny. You evidently think that inifinity is a specific integer, because you fought me on this point every time I raised it.

helmut said:
You misunderstood "there is nothing to expand into" as "there is a nothingness to expand into", which is ridulous.

Your usual dishonesty. To begin with, I used a question, not a statement, to illustrate the absurdity. I asked, "The Big Bang expands into nothingness? Total nonsense." I didn't see any need to answer that question, and still don't. I implied that expansion into nothingess is ridiculous. Which is what you just said, so we are in agreement. The only other option is creation of space ex nihilo (as I've pointed out on other threads), which is an option not logically available to an atheist. So what the atheist is left with, then, is an unanswerable question: "The Big Bang expands into nothingness?"

You'd raise objections of substance if you had any.

helmut said:
I told you several cases you declared illogical that can be observed in nature (e.g. clocks running in different speeds) and expoeriments (e.g. the speed of light being the same for all observers, regardless of their movement).

Could you tell me any scientific fact that I denied?

Total dishonesty. The facticity itself is a lie. You and I are in disagreement about the facticity of light-constancy. You then point to experiments whose conclusions presume the light-constancy assumption. In effect, you presume what's in dispute and then call it a proven fact.

helmut said:
The uncertainty principle is not about uncertainty of photos, but about inherent imprecision of nature itself. It is a corollary of viewing particles as waves (and using Fourier analysis to determine location and momentum - sorry, I used "pulse" in an earlier post, wrong translation from German). The notion of "photos" comes in when you look at the proof of Heisenberg who showed that - contrary to common sense - particles exhibit the same sort of imprecision on pulse and location.

This uncertainty inherent in matter itself is an explanation of radioactive decay, you cannot just dismiss it as a feature of our pictures of that matter.

You may resort to Bohm's theory (a non-standard interpretation of quantum mechanics) to invoke precise locations and movements of particles, but this is not only non-standard, but also non-local, so it gives rise to the question whether space is as we perceive it. See wiki on this.

Again, you conclude a straw-man where there is none, because you did not understand what modern science really said (here: about thr "uncertainty" inherent in nature).

Dishonesty. It's not an imprecision in nature itself. It's a limitation of humans and human instruments. If a basketball player is running the length of the court, or any distance at all, Xeno's paradox shows that the distance traveled is potentially an infinite number of segments (snapshots). I personally have no interest in that many snapshots, but your supposedly infinite God sees and knows everything. Does He have all knowledge, or not? Don't shove the uncertainty principle down my throat. Shove it down His. If He sees only intermittent snapshots, and thus not ALL the snapshots, He has failed to capture the entire motion. Of course the smallest segment will be infinitely small, which of course makes no sense.

No matter from which angle you look at an infinite God, it doesn't make sense.

helmut said:
No, the article didn't say that. It said that two infinities were proven equal - and it also stated that two infinities I cited as different are different. Do I need to quote the paragraph of that article that said it?

Actually I only read the first couple of paragraphs of the article. I just read another paragraph on the sidebar of the article. It says:

"Two different infinite sets have the same size when each element of one set can be paired with an element of the second."

And it gives an example. If one set is ALL the integers, and the other set is only the EVEN numbers, then it's "two different infinities".

(Guffaw). So what? This is completely irrelevant to our debate. And yet this strawman was your basis for attacking so many of my posts built on my simple claim that infinity is not a specific integer? Total dishonesty. I should have realized that when, multiple times, you appealed to imaginary numbers as "another objection" to my infinity-claim.

Any strawman will do, right?

helmut said:
I never said anything about a infinite integer. Straw-man. The difference between "definite infinity" and "infinite integer" is certainly know to you.

No, but you KNEW that's where I was coming from, and you attacked via notions completely irrelevant to the debate (see above). That makes YOU the source of the strawman.

helmut said:
I said: There is no theoretical argument against an infinite future. But our time (the current aion) will come to an end, we wait for a new universe.

And here you are at it again. You KNEW that point was irrelevant to the debate. You KNEW I was referring to time in general. And yet you used it as a basis for attack.

helmut said:
Let's take space instead. We will not reach a place with infinite distance from here, regardless of our future motions. And there is no place with infinite distance. But space is infinite, because if it were not, there would be a finite distance not realized in the universe.

Huh? I didn't get you. Earlier I suggested that the end of reality probably forms a continuum to the opposite end such that you would reenter there. In a loose sense (a totally ridiculous sense) you could say, since it is a continuum, that this constitutes an infinite distance since you keep reentering. But that's a stupid terminology - what's really happening is that you are re-traversing the same finite distance repeatedly.

There is no "infinite distance" (a region of infinite meters measured) since there is no specific integer infinity.

helmut said:
OK, I cannot prove space is infinite, but all evidence I know points to that, and at least there is no argument why it must be finite, and AFAIK no scientific argument why it should be finite.

I can't prove anything 100%, but the twofold argument for finitude is the most cogent position.
...(1) All we know for sure are finite objects. This makes finitude an ordinary claim. Anything else would an extraordinary claim, basically a fairy-tale, and thus a cult-like assertion.
....(2) There is no specific integer infinity.

Unless we want to behave like a cult, we should accept the most cogent position.

Literary Framework View & Exodus 20:11

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