Quote from: Astargath on May 05, 2018, 01:07:29 AM

Quote from: CoinCube on May 04, 2018, 07:47:18 PM

Quote from: af_newbie on May 04, 2018, 05:48:12 PM

Quote from: zhuchunyu on May 04, 2018, 05:08:22 PM

Quote from: CoinCube on May 04, 2018, 04:48:21 PM

You might find my recent post in the Health and Religion thread interesting. I was asked why I believed in God. This was my answer.

Why Do I Believe In God?

.

I am a Chinese and I am an atheist.
I have to say that from the perspective of mysticism,
I can NOT understand some of the points.

Please forgive my disrespect.

Let me break down his points in more readable form.

CoinCube believes that because there are truths and infinities in Mathematics that cannot be proven there must be an external infinite entity that exists but cannot be proven to exist.

He also claims that such truth (about existence of such infinite entity aka God) predicates all our system of logic and is required for that system to work truthfully.

He also claims that this infinite entity ~~interacts with the physical world~~, is the source of the moral code that we should follow.

He claims that any other moral code that is not ~~dictated by~~ predicated on this external supernatural infinite entity is doomed to fail and leads to atrocities and disintegration of societies (or utter tyranny).

More or less.

The underlined statement skips 8 steps from opening permise to final conclusion but anyone who wants to read those steps can follow my link above. I also corrected a few minor areas of your summary.

Also when talking about infinity it is useful to differentiate the potential infinite from the actual infinite. Mathematics as it advances is inching us ever closer to the realization that the actual infinite exists.

Potential Infinity vs. Actual Infinity
http://www.numbersleuth.org/trends/potential-vs-actual-infinity/

Quote from: Ryan

What is infinity and does it even exist? In our everyday experience, we find only finite things. A basket of eggs contains only a fixed number of eggs and no more. Our bodies are composed of particles (molecules, atoms, protons, quarks, etc.). But whatever particles describe our make up, we find only a finite number. It may be billions or trillions or more, but it still doesnt get close to infinity. Even the known universe is finite its only so many light-years in diameter and contains only so many elementary particles.

How, then, does one even get close to infinity? People have long realized that theres no biggest number because its always possible to add 1 to any number and get still a bigger number. So numbers themselves, taken collectively, are infinite. Any given number is finite, but the mere fact that numbers go on forever thats infinite.

But what sort of infinite is this? The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle (384 322 BC) proposed that there are two types of infinity, a potential and an actual infinity. In a potential infinity, one can keep adding or subdividing without end, but one never actually reaches infinity. In a sense, a potential infinity is an endless process that at any point along the way is finite. By contrast, in an actual infinity, the infinite is viewed as a completed totality. Aristotle rejected actual infinity, claiming that only potential infinity exists.

So what, you say? For all practical purposes, we get on quite well with quite a bit less than even a potential infinity. Take the worlds most powerful supercomputer, Japans K Computer, which runs at 10 petaflops, using 705,024 SPARC64 processing cores. There are absolute limits to what this machine can do in terms of storage, retrieval, and processing. Its safe to say that 10^100 (i.e., the number 1 followed by 100 zeros, aka google) sets an absolute limit on the amount of processing steps this machine will ever do, on the length of the longest number it can compute, and on the amount of bytes available to the machines memory.

And yet, the infinite is not so readily cast aside for practical reasons. Modern mathematics is done almost entirely in terms of sets (recall the New Math). Set theory treats just about anything as a set (the only things that are not sets are things too big to be sets more on that in another post). Now numbers are sets. For instance, 0 is the empty set (it contains zero items). The number 1 is also a set (it is the set that contains zero, and thus is a set with one item).
But all the numbers taken collectively (0, 1, 2, etc.) also form a set, known to mathematicians as the natural numbers and represented as {0,1,2,3,}. Ah, but whats that ellipsis, those three dots (i.e., ), doing there? Doesnt that tell us that the natural numbers are really just a potential infinity? Mathematicians dont treat the natural numbers as a potential infinity but as an actual infinity a completed totality that includes all numbers 0, 1, 2, etc.

But what do mathematicians know anyway? Perhaps treating the natural numbers as an actual infinity is just a convenient way to think about numbers and do calculations. If peoples concerns about infinity were left simply at the level of mathematics and its scientific applications, the debate over potential and actual infinities would be moot. But it turns out that this debate spills over into other areas, notably theology. If God is real, is he an actual infinite or is he just a potential infinite? Most religious believers see God also as unchanging, so if God is real and infinite, he must be an actual infinity.

Now its interesting that Georg Cantor, who invented set theory over 100 years ago, did so in part for theological reasons, seeing the infinite sets he came up with as a reflection of the infinity of God. Others, however, not believing that God exists or thinking that the very concept of an actual infinity is incoherent, reject the actual infinity and thus view Cantors so-called actual infinities as simply a device for describing much more mundane and finite processes. Yet it is a device that every working mathematician uses. As the great mathematician David Hilbert put it, No one will drive us from the paradise which Cantor created for us.

The debate over potential and actual infinities has been ongoing for centuries, and this short post wont resolve it. Nonetheless, its worth noting that Cantors work on set theory has showed that the concept of an infinite set makes mathematical sense and avoids contradiction. Certain paradoxes, such as that infinite sets can be put in one-to-one correspondence with proper subsets (e.g., there are as many even numbers as natural numbers: 0à0, 1à2, 2à4, 3à6, etc.), may fly in the face of common intuitions, but science confronts us with lots of things that are counterintuitive.

In any case, modern mathematics, especially in its wholesale incorporation of set theory, has given the single biggest boost to the view that the actual infinite exists. Not that this proves the actual infinite exists the nature of existence itself (a field philosophers refer to as ontology the study of being) is itself up for grabs. But the mere fact that treating mathematical entities as actual infinities has yielded incredibly fruitful mathematical insights (Cantors paradise) gives the actual infinite breathing room that it never had in the past.

References:

Joseph Dauben, Georg Cantor: His Mathematics and Philosophy of the Infinite (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).
Michael Hallett, Cantorian Set Theory and Limitation of Size (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984).

Which is a bunch of bullshit:

1.''There are things in this universe that are True yet even cannot ever be proven True no matter how much knowledge or technology advance.''

There is no way of knowing if some true things cannot be ever proven.

2. ''Criticism
Perhaps the best-known objection to a coherence theory of truth is Bertrand Russell's. He maintained that since both a belief and its negation will, individually, cohere with at least one set of beliefs, this means that contradictory beliefs can be shown to be true according to coherence theory, and therefore that the theory cannot work. However, what most coherence theorists are concerned with is not all possible beliefs, but the set of beliefs that people actually hold. The main problem for a coherence theory of truth, then, is how to specify just this particular set, given that the truth of which beliefs are actually held can only be determined by means of coherence.''

7. ''It is a well-known empirical fact that humans are much less likely to defect if they know their behavior is being observed'' Then we could just install video surveillance everywhere and have laws that punish people for doing bad things, oh wait, we have that, we don't need an imaginary entity.

7. But if you are being surveilled while you are installing the video surveillance, you will be a lot less likely to install it.

Cool