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| Eddie_the_Kid
Posts: 2,545 Status: Lord Karma: +377 [+1] [-1]   |
Subject: but the problem you are hitting | |||||
| is that every why explanation you provide, or every step of the causation you look at, or stage of the theromodynamic cycle of the universe are all something. why do they exist or happen? why is there not, quite litterly, nothing at all; no universe, no vacum, no matter, to existence, absolutely nothing? No I am not looking for a supernatural answer, or a scientific answer, just a logical one. There are very few of those, and many of which only work because of other ideas associated with them. For example, the whims of a creator only provide an explination for something over nothing if the creator itself must necessarily exist by definition (as is the case with God, if the entity is real then it must have always existed by defintion, outside the realm of universal laws) as the creator itself is still something. The same can be said of chance, fate, or some other universal law of order if not of a creator. If they are the ultimate explination as to why there is anything, then they themselves must be self explained and must have the quality of necessary existence always. If this is the best of all possible universes then that presupposes that existence of anything is better then existence of nothing, and better in some way. Assuming things exist just because they do exist is one of the most logical/strongest possible explinations, but it begs the question and is essentially a cop-out. This is the problem of relying only on science when dealing with questions of a metaphysical nature. The scope of science is to limited to handle these types of questions (at our current stage at least). Relying on emperical evidence has limits, there is only so much we can observe. Theorhetical sciences have their own problems (admitably shared by metaphysics itself) in that humans have limited capacities for understanding a priori knowledge in a way somewhat similar to how the senses are limited in their abilities to collect and process emperical data. Because of our limitations, we can barely comprehend the possibility of absolute nothingness rather then something, and since it has never been observed, nor possible to observe for obvious reasons, it is even harder a concept for science to understand. Heck, limitations in human expressions like language make it all but impossible to even talk about nothingness because of its descriptive nature; we are instead forced to compare it to things we observe in existence and euse that to try and forumlate our conceptions. This is why in my original reply to Nate's post I actually said it is an unaswerable question while humans are stuck at our current stage of intellectual development, and we may never reach a stage that actually would allow us to attain this level of understanding, although I would like to be optimastic in the thought that we would eventually evolve enough to do so. For me, as I said, it is not a matter of religion vs science vs philosophy (in fact, both religion and science are just philosophies in themselves to some degree, and both have their origins in philosophy). It is a matter of looking at the available arguments and deciding what is the most logical answer. As a skeptic, if no answer is sufficently logical, or their are conflicting ideas, or if it is a subject that is simply outside the scope of human understanding, then all arguments should be viewed with suspicion, and final judgement should be suspended until such as time as a satisfactory answer can be reached. This is a questions where final judgement must be suspended as we cannot formulate and appropriate answer yet. In terms of your own justifying, it is this very skepticism that results in my being agnostic and not a theist or an atheist. Good discussions are always welcome, and seldom experienced in life, so alternative viewpoints are always welcome, without them discussion would be boring and uninformative  |
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