Re: I thought I'd figured this out on my own.

Well now...philosophy. I always figured Paul was a pretty smart guy. 88, too.

What he's getting at there, I think, is sort of an ontological, or 'being', argument. Basically saying, "One can see God by the works he has created."

I like the Muslim version of that, which made me laugh the first time I read it: "Need proof of God? Look out the window."

What that all tries to do is validate, or explain, one thing through another. In science, it was the first rationale for Black Holes. We could see galaxies swirling around something, but we couldn't see the 'something.' Steven Hawking explained it this way:

"Suppose you walk into a dark ballroom and see lovely ladies in the white gowns swirling to the music. Now, they could all be dancing alone. But their particular movements makes you think there must be something more. And sure enough, when you turn on the lights after the music ends, each lady in white has a male dancing partner, dressed in a black tuxedo, which you couldn't see in the dark."

So, you used one provable thing, "I see ladies in white gowns," to discern something that was not immediately provable, "dancing with partners in black tuxedos."

The Greeks formalized that way of thinking, so far as I know, and that might be where Paul got it from. Their version (one of them) was, if you chisel a cube out of stone, it can get pretty close to being a perfect cube. Or, if you eye a drop of water, it can be pretty close to a perfect sphere. But it will never fully be so. There will always be imperfections, and in the material world, it will never quite be 'perfect.' Yet, in your mind, you can envision a perfect cube, or sphere, or anything, really. Why?

Why can we imagine perfection, yet never actually experience it, unless it does exist, in some alternate way that we don't have full access to?

Later medieval scholars would work that simple argument into the Ontological explanation for God's existence. The mere fact that you can image the idea of a perfect God means it has to exist, in some sense.

There's tons of branches and alternative ideas off that kernel, but that's the root of the study of being.

Fordtunate Son

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Nov 15, 2024, 12:15 PM

>But there is a specific unchaotic thing that has happened or we would not be here.

Chaos and order are real bug-a-boos. I've thought about them a lot. I don't have any answers, lol, but I have thought about them an awful lot.

We speak about our frames-of-reference, and I think chaos and order may be completely referential as well. That is, the only difference between the two is our perspective, or, our frame.

We tend to think of order and chaos as qualitatively different...that order requires intelligence, or design, say, and chaos does not. But I'm not so sure of that. Order may be chaos, only from a different perspective.

Consider this painting:

or this sculpture:

One could stand in 1000 places in that stairwell, or in that field, and from only one perspective does one see a circle, or a face. So does that make the circle 'special' in any way? Only the fact that we say its special makes it special. It's simply 1 of 1000+ possibilities.

Or suppose I splatter yellow and blue paint droplets randomly about. Is where they touch and make 'green' evidence of design, or is a seemingly 'ordered' result at the micro-scale (green at the edges of contact) simply a random occurrence from a 'chaotic' action at another, higher level (splashing paint across the room)? How special is the 'green', really? Green will say very special, because it's green, of course, with a green frame-of-reference.

From our celestial observations, we see our seemingly 'ordered' solar system, but other solar systems (along with ours) seem randomly scattered throughout our galaxy. The galaxy seems to have an ordered form, a spiral...but then entire groups of galaxies seem to be randomly scattered throughout the universe. And one could reverse the same principle down at the atomic level.

There seem to be alternating 'levels' of order-chaos-order-chaos, and so on on. But does it reveal anything other than our own interpretations and perspectives? I just don't know.

Order?

Chaos?

>So, while we believe that we are expanding our frames, I think we are tightening them. Our inability to understand or comprehend the overall at once.

Yes, I agree with this. But I think it's a simple human limitation. We just don't have the computing power see all things at every level all the time. Even something simple, like numbers, gets quickly out of hand for us. I can easily imagine or visualize 1 or 2 items. Even say 10 or 15. But I simply cannot grasp or visualize a million apples, or a billion bananas, or a trillion pears.

We do abstraction and simplification exceptionally well. I think we have to; it's our only way to comprehend complex things. I can see the sun as one big yellow ball, but if I try to imagine the billions of atomic explosions happening on its surface, simultaneously, I just can't do it. I must abstract and simply it.

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I thought I'd figured this out on my own.