it's a thursday evening i'm supposed to be possibly interviewing someone tonight uh that should be happening in about an hour from now but i just want to hop on here non-monotheistic worldviews and how they all commit the fallacy of circular reasoning and just discuss that a little bit how that could be the case and how it is necessarily the case always it has to do with the uncaused first cause if you deny the uncaused first cause there are logical implications for that that go along with that denial that flow from that denial because if you deny that there is an uncaused first cause then you have only two scenarios to explore i've talked about this before we're just hashing it out a little bit because i've had some thoughts today about the trickier case there are two there are a couple of possible objections so i'm just gonna go through i just freestyle and you know me if you know me you know my style is very rambling and loose sloppy but uh you know i'm doing this for fun and this is how i think this is how i explore ideas naturally organically i don't not a philosopher i don't publish my findings i just think about ideas i enjoy playing with ideas so let's go through we'll start with the easier case if you're going to deny that there's an uncaused first cause so we can say well there is no first cause so it's just an endless chain it's an infinite regress right and so i'm going to show how this is necessarily circular and it won't take me too long it's basically the idea is that we have all the time we have an infinite amount of time to explore these ever shifting configurations of matter energy in space time because that's what nature is right we have matter energy the assumption the underlying assumption which i'm going with here for the sake of argument that okay there are no supernatural but we're not going to get into the question of free will today we're just going to talk about the circularity of non-monotheist worldviews so we're exploring the first case which is uh an infinite regress in time of cause and so as we explore let's start now in this present moment and all the moments that are flowing forward from what i just identified a couple of seconds ago as the first moment under consideration okay we can catalog every state of affairs every configuration of all the matter energy and all of space time we can catalog them and we can name them a b c and so on and invent characters to continue past the last letter of the alphabet or we can use letter number combinations doesn't really matter but my point here is as we catalogue these the inevitable situation we find ourselves in is as we of configurations of matter energy in space time is ever growing moment by moment endlessly growing when we look at that growing catalog what we realize is that we are really mapping out forbidden territory these configurations a b c etc they're all taboo they're all on the black list this catalog really is a black list of forbidden configurations why because if there's no supernatural hard so if we were to fall once again upon any of these catalogued we would necessarily be caught in the loop so we would have a circular chain of causality which is forbidden we cannot we can never have the effect preceding its own cause so this ever growing catalog this ever is the danger zone and as we meander and when i say we i mean all the fundamental particles or whatever the most fundamental constituent part of matter energy and space time is it doesn't really matter what it is but as these configurations evolve they cannot fall into a previous configuration that's already been experienced otherwise there will necessarily be a loop because there are no exceptions to the principle okay so some of the objections that i've are that that there is only a finite amount of configurations possible and yes of right they're only something like 6 or 16 elementary particles according to the particle physicists the different ways of classifying them you can you classify them broadly it's leptons bosons all these sort of things fermions you end up with six and if you break them down into what the scientists understand to be the actual electrons protons neutrons give or take i'm not worried about extreme accuracy on particle physics because these models are ever evolving ever changing and if you look back back at the history of the natural sciences you'll see that none of this is set in stone it's all and it's all designed to be the best working model that we have at the time until we have a better understanding and we can evolve our model obviously but even if we say just for the sake of argument that there are 16 from which everything is composed and comprised every part of our natural world and it wouldn't take that long it would you know even this finite size of space and there's no good reason to assume that space is infinite but that will be my part two the second case which i'll explore because atheists do bring up this idea that there is infinite space as well as infinite time hoping they're in to find freedom right freedom from the circularity that i'm so in this first case i'm not allowing for infinite space i'm just talking about and an infinite number of building blocks that's the first case so there are other avenues that we could explore in this thought experiment for example some atheists that i speak with and when i say speak with i mean online i interact with atheists on youtube in the comment section and stuff like that primarily on my four-year-old call that i did to the atheist experience with matt dillahunty lots and lots of comments there that's where i met this lady who hopefully will contact me tonight and possibly tomorrow it wasn't quite clear if she was available tonight or tomorrow i offered both she said sure that's where i met her and uh i believe she's a pantheist so i'm interested to talk to her and she as any sane person should i think but in any case in this first case where we have infinite time there are some atheists who come back at me and say well you're assuming that the psr is universally valid what if it's not maybe it's not and so i don't want to go down that rabbit hole but just briefly i would just comment that if you abandon the psr but you stick to your naturalism in an attempt to get out of this circularity i would just say well you've adopted instead of hard determinism pure heart because the psr plus naturalism equals hard determinism but if you don't accept the psr you haven't escaped her determinism you've just added contaminated your herd determinism with occasionalism occasionalism says that we cannot always attribute causality to these conjoined conjunctions these these exceptions that people want to abandon the psr and say it's not universal that means there's a certain percentage of effects which are uncaused i've had atheists actually say that this is the case because of their flawed understanding of quantum mechanics and these sorts of things the bad philosophy that's floating around in these scientific books popular books that atheists are gobbling up and have been for so just to let you know if you want to abandon and maintain your naturalism you haven't escaped her determinism you've just got now an impure hard determinism it's still hard we have two ways of looking at the mechanism of the occasionalist components we can say they're purely actually truly and really random meaning uncaused or is there a mechanism behind that which is well ordered so it's basically um you're gonna end up with things a certain portion of the natural effects being caused randomly which i think is completely or you got the psr and your naturalism plus your psr gives you hard to tip hard determinism but even if you chuck the psr you still have hard determinism just with this uh occasionalism okay and the the reason that the occasionalism doesn't break the hard determinism is because we don't have any good reason to think that it does there's no good reason to think that it does because of the predictability statistically right i've done an analysis of the quantum wave functions how they collapse statistically and we know that it is predictable i worked in quantum physics we know that it's predictable statistically our inability to predict individual wave functions is completely irrelevant completely irrelevant if you bear in mind that statistically they behave in a well-ordered manner in a predictable manner what that means is if we were to examine that bell-shaped curve which is typical of a lot of these and we see how it's fulfilled always with a large number of samples and then we just step backwards in time and we see how the data came in drip by drip by drip by drip but drip to fill in what was a flat line into a bell-shaped curve when we step backwards in time we see drip by drip by trip how the data we were able to predict using hindsight 2020 hindsight we were able to predict where each data point goes why because it's well behaved statistically we'll fill in that expectation that mathematical curve every time given enough data points right that's why we are able to have this technology my camera my computer your your telephone your tablet whatever it is okay so that's why the occasionalism that you've introduced by re rejecting the psr is not really a rejection of the psr it's a more it's just a more sophisticated version of the psr a mysterious hidden psr behind the occasionalism and then you add that to the macro scale predictable behavior of everything else that the scientist examines it doesn't fall under the quantum mechanics per view and you basically have the psr so you reject the psr and in that rejection it's not really a rejection it's just an instead of having pure psr now it's a mysterious two-tiered psr with the quantum stuff the orderliness but it is there and we we know that from experience so anyway this first case uh we end up with circularity because we're mapping out configurations of matter entering space energy in space time and it's cons constantly growing catalog and these are forbidden zones of the map and as the configuration meanders it will inevitably stumble and forcing us to admit that the effect precedes the cause it precedes its own cause in one hundred percent of the cases one hundred percent of the effects precede their own cause now i guess another objection to this could be that we don't have to subscribe to the principle of causality we don't even need to subscribe to the principle of contradiction you you're free to throw out any principle you want but you have to live with the consequences right you can throw causality but don't claim to love natural science you can say well i believe in the principle of causality but it's not universally valid i think there are exceptions well it's the same thing with the psr in saying that you're not really rejecting the psr and when you say you're rejecting cause you're not really rejecting the principle of causality all you're doing is obfuscating it by giving an impure and more mysterious and sophisticated form of the principle of causality because when it comes right down to it there's an interaction it's an interface interplay always between the un supposedly uncaused causes and the caused effects always there's always that interplay there's always that interaction and at the end of the day if there's any causality then there's nothing but causality if there is any place in this material world where the principle of causality holds then it holds everywhere it's the same thing with the psr so it's just a question of trying to push it back into the obscurity of those mysterious places where we can imagine falsely that there are no sufficient reasons and that there's not really causality that effects don't have causes or that there are uncaused natural causes and these sorts of things so this is the circularity that comes about if we examine the infinite chain of causality through time now what if we look at the second case which is we have all the time literally infinite time to explore and to evolve and change these ever-shifting configurations of matter energy and space-time well now on the vertical dimension as we freeze time the timeline take any point on the timeline we freeze time and we look horizontal sorry vertically it's kind of arbitrary i use the horizontal for time the vertical for space but if you usually if you look at like film editing if you hold out film like in the old days you would have right so we can examine here this picture that picture so pause right now and think about pick a direction and just zoom forward fast forward as fast as you can accelerate constantly or better yet jerk forward that jerking is an acceleration of acceleration so instead of a constant acceleration it's an accelerated acceleration that's called jerk in physics what this logarithmic infinity infinity infinite infinities ever magnify infinitely and infinitely as we zoom forward in your chosen direction and you'll never reach the end you'll never even come close to the edge of space because space is infinite that's what they want us to believe these non-monotheists right the ones who believe that there is a material universe at and that's what i'm considering in these two these two cases of circularity i can get to the other ones um so we have how do i get circularity out why would i that it is necessarily the case that even if we have infinite matter infinite space it's still circularity well i would say no limit on the configurations of any particular exploration if we seek we shall find there's no reason unless you want to invent a reason but there's no reason that suggests itself why every configuration somewhere in this infinite expanse of space so to illustrate what i'm talking about because it's a little bit hairy think about this moment now and then all the moments that are flowing from think about configurations that are flowing from it doesn't matter how how long a moment lasts that's if there's any change whatsoever that is a different moment right i often think about the universe from god's point of view i think that change takes place one thing at a time meaning that there's one change at any given moment i think it might be with the trillions zillions i don't know how many of parts there are we talk about elementary particles how many quarks are there in the this is a really silly question works how many quarts in a gallon know how many quarks in the universe how's very precise answer three point two eight times ten to the eighty or more than a vigintilian but less than a an ascentillion okay so more than 3.28 times 10 to the 80 anyway it's a big number weight onto these sorts of it's fun they have a number they're having fun a lot of science is just having fun pretending to be god and imagining that we understand that we've mapped things out properly and stuff i'm a curious person i i enjoy asking useless questions and exploring what the answers might be so i understand the atheist scientist and his quest for silly answers to silly questions i 3 times 10 to the 80 number of quarks in the universe i was speculating that possibly they are quantized in terms of how much they move like in terms of a rotation or translation or you know you've got the xyz and you've got so i i imagine it quantized so it's not uh it's discrete there's nothing in between the two possible stages so there's like a little what to us would be completely imperceptible uh i guess aristotle defined movement and st thomas aquinas defined the movement from potency to act so that's a good generalization of what movement is so whether it's rotation whether it's translation or temperature rising it doesn't really matter what the parameter is we're looking at for this movement for this change in my mind it's quantized and it's discrete meaning there's nothing in between the two so it goes from condition a to condition b or condition a1 to condition a2 or whatever you want to label it and there's nothing in between there's no possible intermediate space it's quantum it's quant it's quantified it's quant quantum it's discrete that's the word okay and each one of the quarks each one of those three times 10 to the 80 quarks in the universe they all take turns moving using aristotle's definition of motion take turns your turn so that would give you some sort of i think a moment really is that fine rarefied that tiny minuscule i think a moment it really is and i like to imagine that things happen one at a time now a quark is a quark truly a fundamental building block of the universe i don't know i don't really care if i had to guess i'd say no of course not don't be silly how could what the fundamental elements the building blocks of material stuff is don't be don't be absurd okay but we use these ideas like the quark the electron these sorts of things is familiar images and we can imagine that that's the most the quark for example could be one of the most fundamental particles whatever stepping through time moment to moment but if we go back to that moment now minutes ago now that initial moment where i said it is a fast growing catalog from our human perspective a very very fast growing very very fast growing very brief even if i'm wrong in my speculation about what a moment is where you've got one thing happening at a time i just happen to like that because i there's no there's no reason why that couldn't be the case and to me it seems like an orderly way to get things done one that to me seems like an appealing way for god to govern his universe so the reason i'm stepping you through this catalog is because i want you to look at the individual configurations that we're cataloging okay we're cataloging them by looking at time a few minutes ago i said use this as the starting point and just catalog it okay almost an infinite number but a very large number let's say now if space is infinite as a lot of atheists like to say excuse me if space is indeed infinite then each and every one of those that we've been cataloging for the past few minutes each and every one of them is to be if we only go far enough in any direction because in any everything eventually i had us moving through time to catalog temporal stuff now we're freezing time and we're looking for the items in our catalog because we gathered up a whole bunch of stuff and now we're going to go searching for it in space not in time but in space at this particular or any moment in time it's all there so this is how we have circularity if space is infinite because everything is somewhere if space is infinite everything is somewhere if space is infinite think in if you don't believe me think about the real world because that fantasy world of the atheist is complete nonsense we know it's nonsense because of the circularity because every effect is temporarily prior to its own cause which is absurd so the atheist fantasy land where there's an infant chain of cause and effect backwards in time or infinite either way you stuck with circularity you have so i was going i was going somewhere with that i can't remember where i was yeah i had a follow-up thought for that let me take a drink and i'll think about anyway i hope it's clear oh yeah that's what i was gonna say just came to me now even though i gave up but it came to me just as i gave up i want you to think about this world and the textbook i don't know a water molecule right it's a what what is it what is this h2o what what is that exactly it's a configuration of matter energy and space time right sub configuration because we've got all kinds of water molecules all over the place i'm 70 or whatever allegedly ostensibly around 70 percent there's water all over the place at least here on earth i don't know about but it remains the case even though the universe is not exclusively that sub configuration or that configuration which we refer to as h2o or water the universe isn't exclusively that if we were to freeze time and look at the configuration it's very complex from our finite point of view it's very complex we have all kinds of different stuff it's not just water right but it's still true to talk about water h2o we can still talk about that zoom in and the textbooks will talk about the fundamental particles and the fundamental forces and how the fundamental particles transmit these forces and so on so my point here is that if we were to look that repeats a configuration that repeats in this world in the real world something like the h2o it's not it's not uh shocking or controversial if you head in this direction eventually you'll bump into that configuration which we call it's not it's not that here on planet earth where there's lots it's interesting to think about it as there's probably a whole bunch of h2o floating around right how far would you need to go in any direction to bump into a water molecule fascinating thought experiment i don't less than a centimeter you know it's it's an interesting question but it's the actual answers not as interesting as the question itself the the idea is that what i'm driving at here is that these a unique context but h2o is h2o with h2o is h2o there's a context okay there i don't want to take anything away from the unique orientation and position of any water molecule in the ocean but at the same time it's still a water molecule there's still that configuration it conforms to that form or that idea we would list the ingredients and we'd just show the relations they fall within the constraints and the definition of a water molecule obviously all right we would not stop and consider that a water molecule right we would continue moving forward in space until we bumped into a water molecule because that's what we're looking for so the reason i'm going on about this is because if if space were infinite which it's not if space were you'd bump into right infinite number of contexts actually he'd run into david ross with pink hair blue hair mohawk whatever this deformity that deformity a better looking meal worse looking me fatter skinnier like everything barely recognizable as human whatever but when i say this configuration i mean freeze time and like this configuration with my hands like this my face like this this sweater these glasses this hair boom okay that configuration you will find it in any direction in a universe that has infinite space you will find it and if you go far enough you'll find whatever scale of context you're looking for so if you look for water you're going to find that very quickly if you're looking for david ross that's going to take a bit of journeying forward in any direction but you will find it you will find the david ross in this pose bling and you'll have to go even further obviously if you want david ross bing in this pose with this apartment building and even further with the entire city and even further if you want the entire country of canada and even further if you want north america and you know even further if you want the entire earth and even further if you want the whole right you're gonna have to travel further in this infinite space of the atheist fantasy world in order to of configurations there's water in all of them right so we don't need to go too far to find another configuration called a water we have to go even less far if we're just looking for so all of this to say my present my past if we go far enough in any direction we will find that so simultaneous if we if we stop time now in this fantasy atheist fantasy of infinite space we stop time now and we just explore in any direction we're gonna find so it's all happening simultaneously and because that's the case at every it is sad but true that in that fantasy world the effect always exists temporally prior to and simultaneous with and after before before during and after but my point is that it's a violation of the law of causality to have the effect temporally prior to its own cause that's the absurdity that we're searching for in order to there's a an impossibility here for infinite space it just cannot happen now one of the objections is well what if there are infinite building blocks then you're never going to run out of things to make configurations to come up with well where's your evidence what what's what's your reason for positing infinite i mean it is it is an interesting if there are infinite of fundamental building blocks of these configurations of matter energy and space time what would that mean what have you ever classified things have you ever tried to common properties in diverse objects have you ever tried 10 things that you think have nothing in many many many many many many common properties common elements scientists using occam's razor this is how scientists came to understand the fundamental particles now i'm not saying this understanding is correct i'm not saying this understanding is adequate or comprehensive i'm not saying there's much truth in the natural sciences there's much truth but we're scratching the surface here we have very very little knowledge of what's going on very little knowledge but the fact that the scientist is looking at patterns looking at commonalities looking at form this is why we know that nominalism is because if we just say because i think the atheist is forced to say that everything every individual thing just is what it is period that's that's as far as we can go there is no classification classification all classifications are social constructs right i say that there is a reality and there are universals and there are two sexes among humans male and female and some unfortunate people are born with ambiguous genitalia and different rare physiological problems that's true they're deformed they don't match the form they don't have the perfect human nature their defects and deformities sad but true no judgment we all have deformities we we all stray none of us is perfect in our human nature possibly his mother i don't know about right the nominalist is forced to say and any classification is a social construct right so the atheist has to do the same thing with each and every single cork every left on every electron every boson everything it is what it is and this thing right next to it is what it is and the same with same thing with every water molecule in the universe it is what it is and the water molecule next to it is what it is and if we use the word water molecule that's a social construct it's not real because this one here is different from that one over there and this one is what it is and that one is what it is those differences are real significant and this is a unique little snowflake okay that's hard nominalism completely useless a destroyed product the protestant religion with emmanuel kant and the rest and william lockham and it's just a tragedy derailed that particular group of branches off of so i think i've said enough i have to go now because i'm possibly going to be doing a podcast with this uh woman so it excuse me for the rambling rant about the circularity of non-monotheist world views my focus is on the another time maybe i'll think about other worldviews that are not monotheistic worldviews how they have circular reasoning i think it's pretty obvious that if there's only god and there's only heaven then the circle therein is the same circle that i value which is that everything comes from god and everything goes back to god but they don't acknowledge not god that anything is not god right so probably not too much to talk about with the with those other types of non-monotheist world views so anyway that's it for for now maybe i'll be back uh with a guest i'm not sure but uh hopefully i'll do some more streaming this fundamentals of catholic dogma by dr ludwig ott last weekend i didn't have time to continue but hopefully this weekend i'll have a little bit of time i've got a very busy weekend once again coming up but anyway for today thanks for listening thanks for being there and we will talk thanks for being there and we will talk soon take care god