Descartes' conclusion on God was right. His premises were...

Existence has dimensions. Dimensions are a feature/aspect of Existence. Can there be any other definition that doesn’t include this?

Also, so long as it’s true, there’s nothing wrong with being circular. I’ll give you an example.

Reason can’t be doubted. This is also circular but true because anything other than this is paradoxical.

Dogma is something that reason warns us about. If anything is paradoxical, we can’t accept it. We look for alternatives or for clarity or for more information until we understand what amounted to the paradox. It’s not just that we shouldn’t accept it. We literally can’t accept it because we can’t understand it.

You cannot understand something coming from nothing. Even if you can have something that is entirely random or unknown, it has not come from non-existence (absurdity). Either it was generated by or is sustained by something else, or, it’s always been there.

Reason is objective and infallible. Where we lack knowledge or make mistakes is not reason making mistakes; rather, it’s our inadequate or inappropriate use of it. Once we have all the appropriate pieces of knowledge to feed reason and we do it appropriately, reason gives us the truth.

I am not in disagreement with unknowns. I’m sure there are unknowns, but unknowns are not the same as paradoxes. Not knowing if there are aliens with a 100 senses is not the same as not knowing if there are aliens that can be a square and a circle at the same time. Or married-bachelor aliens. Do you see the difference between unknowns and absurdities?

Do you see the difference between unknown and absurd? Did reason give us cause to doubt it? How would it do so?

No but when rejecting something is paradoxical, you can’t reject it. You can’t doubt/reject reason, because it’s paradoxical. You can’t doubt/reject Existence as being infinite because it’s paradoxical. You can’t accept non-existence because it’s paradoxical. Again, unknowns are different to paradoxes. You can accept that there are unknowns, but you can’t accept that there are paradoxes.

Circular but true.

Show me how something being endless or boundless or limitless would be paradoxical. You can’t call a box infinity. That’s like saying the square-circle or the finite-infinite so that’s obviously gonna cause problems. You can however have a semi infinite object that is like a box in terms of width and height but endless in terms of depth. This is not paradoxical at all.

Non-existence is absurd. An infinite existence is not. Any thing other than an infinite Existence will involve non-existence (absurdity) in some way. For example the rejection of Existence being infinite, results in Existence sharing a border with non-existence.

Existence has to be something otherwise it would be nothing. What’s the alternative?
A relationship between things is an aspect of Existence. Relationships are something that Existence sustains and makes possible. Things aren’t related to each other and separated via non-existence, they’re separated and related to each via Existence. And it (Existence) necessarily has to be infinite to avoid the absurdity that is non-existence/nothingness.

Existence has to be a thing and it has to be omnipresent and infinite. Take our solar system for example. It is encompassed by our galaxy which is encompassed by the universe which is ultimately encompassed by Existence. We are separated by something in Existence, we’re not separated by non-existence. Something is omnipresent/infinite/omnipotent/omniscient/Existence.

Not just the universe though. Existence encompasses the universe. If it didn’t, the universe would be surrounded by non-existence. If the universe is expanding, what’s it expanding into? If it’s not non-existence, then it’s surely Existence right? What possible alternatives are there?

Not if you’re omnipresent. Being omnipresent means you have reach and access to all things. You can do anything that is imaginable. All the examples you give are in relation to non-omnipresent things. Non-omnipresent things can never be omnipotent, they’ll always lack in some area.

Knowing x and not knowing x at the same time is not the same as knowing x and knowing what it’s like to not know x at the same time. I know some things now, but I know what it’s like to not know them whilst knowing them at the same time. Simply via a process of negation, you can know what it’s like to know less than you know or even know what it’s like to be less than you are. I know what it’s like to be blind, but i’m not blind. This is a case of negating the senses.

What does this mean to you exactly? Without omnipresence, you end up with things being separated by non-existence. You’d end up with the paradox that is non-existence. Things within Existence are different. You’ve got different shapes, colours and so on, but they are all sustained by that which is omnipresent. Some may think this to be energy but I think it’s something else. Either way, without omnipresence, you end up with non-existence separating existing entities and that is paradoxical.

Your use of the word all is paradoxical. The word all is not paradoxical. Just because the word all can be used in a way that amounts to a paradox, doesn’t mean that the word itself is paradoxical. Here are some other uses of the word all that is not paradoxical.

All of my cloths need a wash
All existing things have the quality of existing
Existence exists everywhere/is all-existing
All unknowns are either rational (a trait of Existence or something that Existence has the potential to produce) or irrational (something that has never been and will never be)

No paradoxes in my use of the non-paradoxical word all.

Just a note to this interesting discussion; in order to understand something one must value it.

Actually, I do want to pick up on something said earlier in the thread:

“Not even God can defy the laws of logic”

This means that the laws of logic are outside of God in terms of potence, and if they exist as such, why even postulate god, using occhams razor?

The rules of logic are abstract, like math. It’s a relationship between statements when we get to language based arguments. If your premises are off, what seems illogical, may not be. Once we get into arguing about the possibilities of a deity, our premises, which seem so obvious to us, may not apply. My dog, hearing my girlfriend’s voice coming out of the phone, always looked very disturbed. He’d smell the damn thing. He knew she was not in there. But that was her voice. He was utterly disturbed. He’d look around. It was just wrong. It was unpleasant for him. Any deity is vastly further beyond us than we are to dogs, even enhanced with our technologies. QM, for example, should humble in front of what will turn out not to have been illogical when we get more data. And in relation to a deity, the necessary data might very well never be accessible to us.

Logic is not about phenomena, it is about the relationship, in this context, between statements.

We are at the mercy of our statements, which are tailored to work with metaphors based on our motor cortex system, for example. We don’t even know all the premises we swim in, though we peck at them and perhaps realize a few now and then.

The universe is expanding but its not expanding into anything [ think of the balloon analogy ]

With more data, the conclusions from the law of contradiction may change, the axioms may need to be changed, but the law itself doesn’t.

If the universe IS NOT expanding into anything then the universe IS expanding into nothing.

Not if the universe is all there is. There in not nothing around the universe. There is no around the universe. Further the universe could be infinite and yet at all places expanding. You could also have a universe where you go off one end and come in at the other. It is finite yet surrounded by itself. We don’t like these counterintuitive possibilities because we live in finite local areas where everything has something outside it.

or expanding into itself.

It makes no difference. Ultimately, it comes down to this: If the Universe is not infinite (and it clearly is not), then it’s not representative of Existence. Existence is necessarily infinite. Paradoxical otherwise. We all know this, yet somehow some choose to ignore this despite what reason dictates.

It can’t be infinite and expanding at the same time, it’s got to be one or the other. Yes, you could have a universe where you go off one end and come in at the other. Being finite and surrounded by itself is impossible. It’s either bounded in a circular fashion (therefore surrounded by something else) or bounded in another manner (still surrounded by something else). In neither of these cases is it infinite (boundless)

Well, it’s good you are sure the universe is clearly not infinite. That might be worth a Nobel Prize, because cosmologists and astrophysicists are not sure if the universe is finite or infinite.

The universe must be infinite, otherwise there is a limit and an outside.

Unless we speak of finite universes inside of an infinite reality.

Infinity = motion itself

I just wanted to point out to certainly real, that another issue with his argument is that he claims there can be one and only one god, which means he’s defining god as unfalsifiable to every other being that can possibly exist. We can independently falsify atoms for example, things we can’t really see, but this one argument of his in particular demands! That nobody can falsify it. Convenient.

I actually now see certainly real as a cult leader, associating an unfalsifiable perfect being with himself.
He also states that all beings besides god are flawed and always will be.

Additionally, from my last post…

Certainly real didn’t comprehend that if something comes from something else, it, itself is the first time it’s been substantiated, which means that something that comes from something else must come from nothing at all or existence freezes forever.

I actually solved my own paradox, which I called the motion paradox through the formula: infinity equals motion. The moment you count an infinity, something moves, motion occurs.

This pure reason, the foundations of science. They can all be sure because they all clearly recognise that the universe had a beginning. This means that it’s necessarily not infinite. Being infinite means having no beginning and no end. So the universe does not qualify as infinite does it?

I’m Still coming to this thread…

Argghh…!!!

Let’s ponder certainly reals exact argument here.

God, the only and one and only, for all eternity, is the only perfect being.

This means that a perfect being cannot create anything but imperfect beings (by definition)

So, every being created by god will ALWAYS be imperfect (by certainly reals definition)…

And this being does everything we do, yet it is perfect, for never creating another perfect being and sinning in every being besides ITSELF?

I thought per argument that god is all selves.

Dimensions of what? Spacial dimensions? Temporal dimensions? Psychological dimensions? How long is 1 second in terms of inches? Dimensions don’t mean anything until you define them in terms of what already exists, so what you’re doing is describing a relationship between existent things. And since we can’t describe relationships between nonexistent things, existence itself precedes our descriptions of it.

Existence means relationship because we can have no other conception of what existence means. Dimensions exist as an artifact of the spacetime fabric of the universe. If the fabric gets bigger, then our dimensions get bigger, but we have no way of knowing that because there is nothing to compare it to other than itself.

Reason isn’t reason unless it is doubted. As soon as you postulate anything to be incontrovertibly true, look out!

My aphorism collection on the topic:

  • There is only one certain barrier to truth: the conviction that you already have it.

  • It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble, it’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.

  • What a wonderful security there is in being wrong, because when you’re wrong, you’re sure to be right.

  • The test of a good theory is that it’s unfalsifiable; not that it’s infalsifiable. (I think I have the grammar right… a good theory can be falsified, but isn’t; a bad theory cannot be falsified)

Anyway, reason that isn’t doubted, isn’t reason, but faith. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong, but just that it’s not reasonable.

A paradox is a paradox because it can’t be understood using a frame of logic, so if the paradox is true, it merely means our logic was faulty. At least some great truths started as paradoxes: like if the earth is round, why do people not fall off? If you knew nothing, that would seem a sensible concern, wouldn’t it? Up and down are fixed dimensions, so when the earth rotated, people should fall off the bottom, but they don’t, so what explains this paradox? Eventually we discovered gravity and everything fell into place :slight_smile:

That seems sensible to me. So the reason QM events are causeless is because the universe cannot know what it will do before it does it, so it can never identify the cause.

How do you know reason is objective and infallible? How can the thing residing inside the construct make conclusions about what lies without the construct?

Yes of course, but Einstein said “God does not play dice with the universe” and insisted there were “unknowns” yet to be discovered while Borh said “Don’t presume to tell God what to do” and insisted the “unknowns” do not exist. Bell finally proved Borh right: there are no unknowns and what’s left is the absurd. It is my speculation that the absurd is explained by self-inspection, but that’s just speculation on my part; maybe things can come from nothing.

Here is an excellent presentation including a card game to illustrate the problem. FWD to 41:00

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISdBAf-ysI0[/youtube]

In my view, reason forces the conclusion of self-inspection to explain absurdities which defy reason. I’ve said before that there is one thing that cannot be known, but now I believe there are two things: the self and other because if we can’t know the self, then we can’t know the other, but all we can know is the relationship between the two, which can only give us clues about what each are, but never 100% certainties nor the explanation of absurdities. IOW, there is no you outside the universe with which to view the universe in order to make conclusions about it. You’re stuck on the inside trying to discover what you are (the internal) and what everything else is (the external) and that’s not a problem that can be solved according to reason.

Reason is merely another mode of perception. As Goethe said “Thinking… is no more and no less an organ of perception than the eye or ear. Just as the eye perceives colours and the ear sounds, so thinking perceives ideas.” What we perceive is “the other” that is not us, but is a part of us. We can’t perceive things that are truly disconnected because there is no mechanism by which to do so. If there were a mechanism, they wouldn’t be disconnected. So we only perceive connected things, which aren’t things, but continuations of us and a part of us. So when we perceive, what we are perceiving is ourself, but veiled by the illusion that it’s not, and the relationship between the two is what we call reality. So when we try to get to the heart of reality, then infinities, circularities, and absurdities result. Reality is the stubbornly persistent illusion resulting from the eternal ignorance of oneself.

Wait, what is paradoxical? I can’t reject reason because rejection of reason is paradoxical or because reason is paradoxical?

I still maintain that existence can’t be infinite or existence wouldn’t exist. That’s the opposite conclusion from yours and all I can suggest is to spend a couple years pondering infinity and you’ll probably land the same place I did: infinity isn’t something that can exist. First of all, things have borders/walls/edges and infinity does not. Infinity is a box with an inside but no outside. Infinity is a box containing all boxes, including itself. The infinite has no context or contrast and is ubiquitous, so it’s impossible to delineate/detect/observe and therefore, because it has no affect/no relation, it cannot be said to exist.

Now, existence can apply to ALL of the universe, but that’s finite with edges/contrast.

Well, it’s saying that the thing called “nonexistence” does not exist. If the universe is expanding into nonexistence, then nonexistence is a thing to be expanded into, but if nonexistence doesn’t exist, then it’s not possible for the universe to be expanding into it. So is nonexistence a blank slate with nothing on it or is it the absence of a slate? If my drawing is too big, I can glue on more paper, but if I have no more paper, I can’t continue drawing.

Why can’t I call a box infinity? Infinity is supposed to contain things and containers are boxes which have sides. If your pc had infinite memory, it would have no memory because there would be no reference point to allocate anything and if it did write something to memory, it could never find it again.

A timeline is a container of things that are happening now, but if the container has no edges, then how does it contain anything? In acoustic we have the idea of an infinite baffle which divides the two sides of a speaker without confining it and influencing the speaker by the addition of a box, but really it’s an infinite box containing the pressure wave to prevent cancellation and a totally absurd construct where the wave is contained while effects of containment are deleted.

I don’t know why I’m always on the “proving” end of this argument since I’m not the one postulating new concepts. It should be up to the one asserting infinity to show it’s true. Do you have any evidence that infinity exists?

Oh I see… you’re asserting that the concept of nothingness is absurd. And to avoid conceding nothingness exists, you’re suggesting that existence is infinite. I understand now. Ok, well, why can’t existence be finite and what’s beyond the finite doesn’t exist? Why can’t the nothingness be infinite and the somethingness be finite?

Omnipresence doesn’t necessitate infinite. Existence could exist everywhere within the finite universe, but not anywhere else in infinity.

It does seem that something would have to exist in relation to nothingness, but then nothingness would be a thing that exists.

What encompasses existence? Haven’t you just moved the goal posts?

That’s why it’s the million dollar question lol

How does omnipresence make up for the fact that one could not be big and small at the same time in order to posses the advantages of each simultaneously? Every advantage has a disadvantage and I don’t see how being everywhere at once refutes that.

That process of negation is called apophatic knowledge (to speak away from, nonconceptual knowledge). That knowledge is a little different from the cataphatic knowledge (conceptual), so even if one were to strip away concepts like a sculptor chiseling away stone, the result will not be the same as the painter applying paint. I can imagine what it’s like to be blind, but I can’t know what it’s like.

How can nonexistence separate things if it doesn’t exist?

In order to have a thing, we need something that it is not. If there is nothing that is not the thing, then the thing doesn’t exist. Shape is not color, but shape cannot exist without color.

“All your clothes” is different from “all the clothes”. All existing things have the quality of existing only because there are things that do not exist, so it’s not all the things, but only some of the things.

There are subsets of existence that you may want to ponder as well, such as being and nonbeing. A light can be on, off, or nonexistent. When the light is on, it’s being. When the light is off, it’s nonbeing. When the electrician removes the light, it’s nonexistent. Just because the light is off doesn’t mean the light doesn’t exist because the potential to exist still exists. So we can have existence as a state of potential rather than actuality (being and nonbeing).

I don’t understand why a perfect being can only create imperfect beings.

Christians describe it as God creating perfect beings who then choose of their own free will to deviate from perfection, but that seems to beg the question of if they were really perfect to start with because if a perfect being can choose evil, then what’s stopping God?

I don’t know why that would be. If the speed of light is constant, as they say, then energy is constant because E=hv. Constant = constant x constant. Where is the problem?

The problem is that infinity is a religion to too many people. I feel like the only one who doesn’t “believe” lol [-o<

They want it to be infinite because infinity explains everything that we cannot explain. In infinite time and an infinite number of universes that are each infinite in size, then everything is certain. If you don’t understand, then the answer will be because your mind is finite. It’s a religion.