| Author | Message | ||
     H0gwash |
Why is God not chaos? (pulled from Entropy thread) | ||
| Sami |
If you have 30 minutes to spare, this video deals with the question of why God is not chaos: E. Michael Jones - The History of Logos and the Logos of History https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4cWZ_6myL8 The fact that we are asking questions and searching for answers is evidence of the fact that we are creatures of Logos. Speech is what sets us apart from other animals. From the Gospel of John we learn that God is Logos. Logos is a Greek term for speech, reason, order. Chaos is a Greek term for void, gap, empty. The question, "Why is God not chaos?" can be answered by understanding that Logos is what chaos is not. It would be like asking, "Why is light not darkness?" Light is what darkness is not. It would be a category mistake to equate light with darkness, or God with chaos. | ||
| H0gwash |
I'm not watching anything more than 5 min. Others may enjoy your videos though. I tend to believe the universe is mostly the unhospitable dust swirl of chaos, yet somehow from it we arose over billions of years. I find the saying that the absence of a God required that man create one somewhat more convincing than the other way around. Because chaos made man and man made language, I ultimately consider language and words and religion to have arisen out of chaos in man's humanistic attempt to limit chaos as much as possible. Chaos is why the word "not" was mistakenly omitted from a 1631 publication of the bible making the commandment read "thou shalt commit adultery" D'oh! I'm all for humanism which includes most religions and their general pursuits. I just don't take them at face value when they say they are an unchanging set of values. (Message edited by h0gwash on March 22, 2021) | ||
| Sami |
If you don't enjoy videos, then you might enjoy the book by the same author. Interesting to mention is that Amazon has banned the books of Dr. E. Michael Jones for "hate speech". It's getting popular these days to read banned books  That which is cannot come from that which is not. Meaning cannot come from meaninglessness. If everything has arisen from chaos, then Humanism becomes meaningless. Hopefully you understand that I'm not trying to convert you. I won't be able to even if I wanted to. If you are thirsty, then drink. But I cannot make you drink. | ||
| H0gwash |
I'll agree that 100% meaningfulness does not arise out of 100% meaninglessness but 99% meaningfulness can arise and that is practical enough for people to use on a daily basis. That remaining 1%, well, some idiot just forgot to put the word "not" in the printing press, and he was fired and the books were reprinted with the correction. (Message edited by h0gwash on March 22, 2021) | ||
| Blake |
How can you observe the universe and think it is chaos? If DNA is literally the book (collections of design details AND assembly and maintenance instructions) of life, and if books don't write themselves, then the author is... ? | ||
| Blake |
It seems to me that something either has meaning or not. In any universe destined for oblivion, the cold hard objective truth is that there is no meaning for anything. Haven't many of our greatest thinkers concluded as much, both theists and atheists alike? One of the wisest men to ever live, King Solomon explained the issue in unequivocally sharp terms. Seek wisdom. Don't be foolish. | ||
| Sami |
Gerard, chaos is practical enough for people to use on a daily basis? Let's put that idea to the test, shall we? (I'm using the Pledge of Allegiance as an example): "I pledge allegiance to the False Flag of the United States of America, and to the Banana Republic for which it stands, one Nation under Chaos, very much divisible, with lack of liberty and justice for all," Suddenly, God doesn't sound too bad after all. You can't base anything on chaos, because chaos renders everything meaningless. | ||
| H0gwash |
I don't base everything on chaos, I'm not that much of nihilist, yet, anyway. I just know that it exists underneath everything we do. It only manifests itself once in a while as something that is easily corrected. Sometimes it's easier to just ignore it. Only once in a very long while it is catastrophic, like a rocketship exploding or a pandemic going mainstream. The pledge itself has not been immune from chaos. It was altered in the 1950s during the Red Scare and the words "under God" were added. You would think that would be simple enough, but the schoolchildren who had recited it for years would forget it had been changed, and for a while one or two children forgot, it could be different children each time. What would have been a recitation in unison would get garbled by the edit. | ||
| Hootowl |
None of that represents chaos, as it relates to the existence of God or the universe. That is simple change brought about by men quite intentionally. | ||
| H0gwash |
It was not cinematic level chaos starring Dwane Johnson for sure but it not exactly as men intended. | ||
| Hootowl |
Unforeseen consequences are not chaos, as it relates to the sort of “did God create us or did we create God” formation-of-the-universe chaos theory. | ||
| H0gwash |
I think we both know that nothing can prove or disprove God, so this is a bit of a moot argument, but since we like to argue, do you think maybe God created chaos, or that it is because we can't fully understand him? I don't see chaos as sinister, but I am sure some see chaos as Lucifer's creation... (Message edited by h0gwash on March 24, 2021) | ||
| Aesquire |
Imho, Both. What we call natural laws are our interpretation of what we see around us. With limited view and ignorance. A metaphor... The laws of thermodynamics and motion are what we learned from watching the mechanism of a pendulum clock. We've traced the gears and the pendulum has several different explanations, but the hard part is understanding why the weight pulls on that chain. And we haven't watched long enough to see anyone pull it back up. The deeper secrets we are trying to figure out looking at a quartz watch. We think there's something like a pendulum going on, but it's hard to measure the vibration of the crystal in a can with a 1940's oscilloscope. Our 1840s science could see the gears and the little electric motor but the regulatory stuff was just magik. | ||
| Hootowl |
“I think we both know that nothing can prove or disprove God” You’ve obviously never read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.  | ||
| H0gwash |
No, but I did enjoy the movie, especially the characterizations of Marvin the robot and the dysfunctional president, and the disinterested prophet who just wanted to watch the tele. (Message edited by h0gwash on March 24, 2021) | ||
| Hootowl |
You need to drink heavily while concentrating on forcing the alcohol to kill the brain cells responsible for retaining any memory of that abomination of a film. Read the book. | ||
| Hootowl |
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1187961-the-babel -fish-is-small-yellow-and-leech-like-and-probably This proves the non-existence of God by proving the existence of God. | ||
| H0gwash |
*laughing* chaotic faith arguments? I suppose I should read the book. I may have large banks of time coming up to devote to such pleasures. | ||
| Aesquire |
Come on! The various movies, series, and radio play aren't bad. Alan Rickman as Marvin. The books are better. So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish. | ||
| Hootowl |
The BBC tv series was fairly faithful. The rest can take a flying leap into a sun during the finale of the loudest rock band in the universe, assuming the band is even performing these days. I have it on good authority that the lead singer is taking a year dead for tax purposes. | ||
| Britchri10 |
The original radio broadcasts were the best theatrical iteration. The TV series comes second. The movie was not so good.... YMMV Nothing beats the books though. (Take it from someone old enough and geographically lucky enough to have experienced all of them when they were originally released.) | ||
| Aesquire |
I had to wait until Public Radio/tv bought the BBC radio play & then the tv series, so a few years behind. I admit the 2005 movie is the least of them, but Zooey, Martin, & Yasiin ( Mos Def ) did a decent job. The further from the original the worse it gets. Imagine Zach Snyder's Lord of The Rings. Or Michael Bay's Pearl Harbor! Shudder. | ||
| Hootowl |
Followup https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/6458-meanwhile-th e-poor-babel-fish-by-effectively-removing-all-barr iers | ||
| Aesquire |
... do you think maybe God created chaos, or that it is because we can't fully understand him? I don't see chaos as sinister, but I am sure some see chaos as Lucifer's creation... HOgwash, chaos as the product of Coyote, or Loki, maybe... If you feel the need to blame a supernatural entity for what just is. Going on the Monotheistic version, God created Chaos, and we're too dumb to understand it. Or you might say Chaos is Free Will for everything that we haven't figured out. The entire Free Will vs. Predetermined argument is just another thing we're too ignorant to get. | ||
| Sami |
People mistaken chaos for what they do not know. A grammar mistake or an alteration is not chaos in the philosophical sense. This post of mine may contain gamrmar errors, and I may edit this post later on to add or substract things to it, but that doesn't entail chaos. God cannot be chaos, because God is what chaos is not. Another way to understand this is by thinking of light and darkness. Light is what darkness is not. Light cannot be dark in a similar way that God cannot be chaos. | ||
| Hootowl |
I agree. To extend that thinking to an ordered universe, where we perceive chaos in systems, it is only because we do not understand the system, as we cannot understand the mind of God. | ||
| Hootowl |
I also agree with Hog, in that chaos is neither good nor evil. Where we may differ is that I don’t believe God created chaos, rather that we simply cannot see the pattern and so cannot predict a result. So chaos isn’t good or evil because it may not actually exist, as it relates to systems, even though a system may appear to be chaotic to us. | ||
| Aesquire |
 | ||
| Sami |
Blake: "How can you observe the universe and think it is chaos?" The universe is orderly, any observation to the contrary is, as people have correctly pointed out, a reflection of our lack of understanding. I agree that you cannot observe the universe and think it is chaotic. The fact of observation presumes order to begin with. If one begins with the presumption that the universe is chaos, then no meaningful observation can be made. Is chaos evil? No, unless by "chaos" we mean something other than the philosophical concept. Evil involves intent, which is lacking in chaos. | ||
| H0gwash |
While I do endorse the characterization of God as a handsomely bearded man, IMHO it implies that nature laws, presumably created by God with the creation of the universe, can be understood on human terms. I tend to believe that much of the data which defies predictions of theory is best explained scientifically and quatatively, and then it can be easy to give the new theory a more approachable humanistic analogy, and a beard on that analogy really helps sell it. It is fair enough to say that the apparent chaos is simply a part of God that we don't yet understand. The chaos of yesterday and today is often explainable/ quantifiable later on. Chaos fascinates me as proof that we still don't know everything, and I enjoy that. IIRC, the entropy that Squids originally posted about is a system in and of itself, which is super sensitive to initial input and appears random to many but not all people. We plan and make predictions based on reasonable assumptions and still everything goes crazy. In Sami's post about spelling and grammar, people often don't even notice the spelling and grammar errors because they are "chaos trained" in that they see the gestalt of the sentence and their brains instantly correct the typo. I find this fascinating because it is something computers still have to be taught. When a disaster breaks out, often times ex military field people react the most efficiently because they are chaos trained, they see the order in the apparent disorder. EDIT damn, misspelled quantitively (Message edited by h0gwash on March 25, 2021) | ||
| Hootowl |
Funny old thing, computers. I listened to an interview with the chief AI scientist at Tesla talking about AI training. It is not possible to write a program that describes a fire hydrant under all lighting conditions, accounting for variations in color and shape. What they do is show the computer tens of thousands of pictures of fire hydrants of all shapes and colors under various lighting conditions. This trains the AI. If you show a 5 year old one picture of a fire hydrant, that child can immediately identify a fire hydrant in any other picture. His point was, an easily trained AI is a long way off. | ||
| Aesquire |
...an easily trained AI is a long way off. That's what the MCP wants you to think. Re: God with a Beard. I prefer the depiction from the film Dogma, but the renaissance painter version is meant to convey wisdom of age in a European medieval culture. Like Mr. Clean is a muscular Genie, who seems he can handle not just hard work, but miraculous results. In both cases the image is meant to inspire trust. That's not a criticism. Advertising is how you increase market share. |
