[more about Carl Sagan]
Eternal is boundless, and that means you would have to count forever into the past, so far that you would never reach an end and thus you could never move forward either because you never reach that "first moment" because it does not exist. In a physical world, infinity is impossible because EVERY physical thing much have a beginning and a cause. The blades of grass are bound by time, our lives are bound by time, and even the great stars have a lifetime. Everything in this physical world has a beginning and an end. Everything. But God is not a physical being, he is a spirit and is thus not bound by the laws of nature. He need not have a beginning, need not have a cause, he can simply "be". Carl Sagan should really know better, that is why his mind was deluded. His animosity toward God corrupted himself. The more I learn, the more I realize that secular knowledge is really pitiful compared to the knowledge of God. Men like Sagan, Thomas Paine, and Voltaire may be crafty, witty, or persuasive, but their arguments become really deluded and elementary when they oppose the things of God.
29 comments
Thomas Paine?
Following that logic, where does God come from?, in which space-time dimension was he enclosed?, is it cyclical or tautological?
1, 2, 3...
So many answers and so little time to explain them all. Personally, I like string theory and the yo-yo view of the universe (i.e. the universe expanding until gravity overcomes the expansion and puts it into a collapsing phase where it contracts until it becomes a singularity and then "explodes" into an expanding phase and rinse and repeat).
In a physical world, infinity is impossible because EVERY physical thing much have a beginning and a cause. The blades of grass are bound by time, our lives are bound by time, and even the great stars have a lifetime. Everything in this physical world has a beginning and an end. absolutely nothing about the notion of one physical event "causing" another that definitively sidesteps this problem. Really, the notion that every chain of events has a first cause is:
(1) based on shoddy analysis of real-world situations we have encountered. For any chain of events, the "causes" involved eventually become so muddied that it becomes impossible to look back any further. At that point, we say: well, there's the thing that started this whole mess.
(2) justified (weakly) by appealing to the Big Bang. However , even in the best case, this could only allow you to say that every chain of physical events has a first cause after the singularity event. The notions of "cause" and "effect" are inextricably tied into the notion of "time" -- in fact, stating which event happened before the other is inescapable in describing a cause -- and time itself a property of the physical universe. This is an important point, because even if you could develop a definitive rule of cause and effect of physical events, it would NOT APPLY AT ALL to the physical universe itself, as there is no concept of "time" in a frame containing the physical universe. This may be what theists argue allows them to posit God as being beyond the bounds of causation, but they fail to see that it can be used by atheists in reference to the physical universe. And Occam's Razor makes a nice tie-breaking instrument.
Time is a dimension, like width, height and depth. The only difference is that we can only move in one direction. Does an object with length, width, and height but no duration exist? No, at least not in any appreciable way.
Thomas Paine and Voltaire both believed in G-d, but they were deists, which is different from theism, and had issues with the Christian church.
I'd say that you're the deluded one, dearie.
The difference between fundies and science-accepting people seem to be that fundies panic when hearing "we don't know yet", while the rest of us think it's interesting and exciting that there are still things to learn.
If God is a spirit, then he's confined to the spiritual world, and has no impact on the physical world. Your arguments become really deluded and elementary when you oppose the things of reality and science.
Holy fucking stupid.
Only in religion. Even Republicans are beginning to get when you say something stupid don't double and triple down to get out of it.
Carl Sagan was deluded because he didn't realize you have to walk into the past forever before you can realize tomorrow because you DON'T.
that's your fucking stupid claim that all y'all pretend has any validity. "count forever into the past, so far that you would never reach an end and thus you could never move forward either" absolute illogical bullshit. Only in religion can such concepts warp reality, we come from the past and live forward, this is reality.
We all live on a planet where everyone knows we go to tomorrow and the past is,,well the past. The most primitive of us know this, it's a given.
But shaolt20 has religious faith, based on ancient fiction so "Men like Sagan, Thomas Paine, and Voltaire may be crafty, witty, or persuasive, but their arguments become really deluded and elementary" compared to childish, ridiculous bullshit.
Confused?
So were we! You can find all of this, and more, on Fundies Say the Darndest Things!
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