Saving Jeff's Soul

Jeff Harmsen and I are still at it:

EJ:
You can't possibly know there is nothing physical outside our universe (if there even is such a thing).

SR:
You are committing here the formal fallacy of denying the antecedent. Your argument was premised on the claim that space was infinite. I do not need to know it is not. You need to know it is.

Physics believes it is not.

EJ:
Suppose there is an area of void past quasars. How long would that void last? Laws of inertia indicate something else will materialize, no matter how vast this hypothetical void spans.

SR:
The law of inertia does not involve creatio ex nihilo. You can trust me on that.

EJ:
God is not mathimatics. The former is defined as an omnipotent entity, the latter a numerical classification system.

SR:
Oxford defines mathematics as “the branch of science concerned with number, quantity, and space, either as abstract ideas (pure mathematics) or as applied …”
But mathematics is your term, not mine. I was referring more precisely to the use of axioms, common to abstract mathematics and philosophy—self-evident truths, such as that one plus one equals two, or that numbers can be multiplied into infinity, or that a thing cannot both exist and not exist.

All true axioms partake of the divine nature. They are part of the Logos, the structure of creation.

EJ:
Whereas the supernatural has been disproved (see my previous writings or read Dawkins), numbers can be proven with equasions and by predicting phenomena empirically.

SR:
What do you mean by “supernatural”? Because the literal meaning is something “above nature”—so numbers themselves are supernatural. And you seem to believe in numbers.

EJ:
In any event, you concede it is impossible to know all numbers.

SR:
No, you are imagining what you want to read here. It seems possible in theory for an infinite being to know all members of an infinite series. Indeed, it is only in a trivial sense that we ourselves, finite though we are, do not “know” all members of this series. No number is hidden from us, unknown to us—even, as you demonstrate, to a child. We simply never have our attention focused on all at once. There is no reason to suppose God could not do this at least as well as we could.

EJ:
Knowing everything has nothing to do with choice. Either one knows everything or He does not. We just proved it's impossible to be all-knowing.

SR:
Again, this is perfectly easy to demonstrate even using us finite beings as examples. And presumably God, being omnipotent, can do at least as much as we can. If I happen to have the strength to punch someone and knock him out, does it follow that I must at all times be punching someone and knocking them out? I would hope not. Similarly, I know French. But this does not oblige me to think in French at all times. That I do not does not mean I do not know French.

EJ:
How do I know I am not brainwashed like yourself? Because I have been dispossessed. As such, my thinking is not frozen to a single book, one loaded with erroneous content.

SR:
Dispossessed? Is that like being “born again”?

EJ:
If it is not true that the Catholics turned their backs on the Jews during the Holocaust, why did Pope J.P2 provide such an elbaorate apology for this instance of Christian inhumanity?

SR:
He didn’t. He apologized that some Christians did not do more.

EJ:
How old do you think Confucius was when he said that? Old! Thus proving my point that abstinence is not for the young and lively, but for those with a low sex drive!

SR:
How did it get down to sex? That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? You don’t want to believe in God, because then you don’t have the freedom to have sex. Otherwise, why did this come up?

EJ:
Thanks Steve, for refraining from eluding to me as the village idiot this time. Very Christian of you!

SR:
You’re imagining what you want to read. I called you the Village Atheist, not the Village Idiot—though those terms may mean the same thing to some.

EJ:
… No way has religion been around as long as humankind.

You still have not assimilated the absolute fact that you can not believe in something you don't know about. Before humans developed language, how could they have communicated something as complex as the supernatural?

SR:
We cannot tell how long language has been around; it leaves no traces. We can tell how long religion has been around: burial customs. Was there a time when humans did not have language? Only God knows. But we find burial customs everywhere we find humans.

EJ:
Moreover, after language was developed, the first religions were based on animals (animism), which had nothing to do with the type of spirtualism your cult practices.

SR:
Animism does not have anything in particular to do with animals. Animism in the belief that all things have souls (animae). Whether anyone has ever believed that, much less whether it was the belief of earliest man, is up for grabs. Just an interesting theory.