Londoner wrote:'Prediction', 'interpretation' and 'suppositions' are not features of the material world; such that they are present or absent. They are things that are in the mind of somebody trying to make sense of that world.
Oh, absolutely!
So this raises an important question of how "consciousness" springs out of what Materialism posits as an entirely "material" world. By all rights, it not only should not, it CANNOT.
We have no mechanism for such a transformation, and no material explanation for its result.
And so is 'chaos'; it is not a state of affairs, it is a description of our lack of comprehension.
Subtle but important change of word: it's a description of a lack of "comprehensibility." Chaos implies not a state in the mind of an observer, but rather a condition in which nothing can exist to observe at all, and nobody can exist to observe it anyway.
When you describe chaos you write 'No thing would stand in any predictable relation at all to any other thing'. But if that was the case, then there would be no 'things';
Absolutely. Whatever "existed," if we could even use such a word, would have no "thingness"; no feature that made it distinguishable from other "things."
...we only identify things by their relationship to each other. If you could make the judgement that 'things were chaotic', then you would have described their relationship, hence they would not be chaotic.
It's worse. (I wonder if you're keeping in mind the distinction between merely "random" and "chaos"?) There's nobody to make such a judgment...at least, nobody who depends on "existence" as humans experience it. Remember that in chaos, no two "particles-of whatever-chaos-is" stand in any relation at all to any other; including the molecules of an observer's body or the integrity of his consciousness to organize it.
'Chaos' is like 'universal' and 'infinite'; an abstract concept that does not - cannot - describe any possible state of affairs.
Right. It's a negation of our state of affairs, not an affirmation of a new state of affairs. That's a key realization.
If we try to insert such terms into a description of the physical world we just create paradoxes; our descriptions become self-contradictory. The only way we can resolve such paradoxes is to introduce a meta-paradoxical explanation, like a Being which is not a being in the normal sense.
Absolutely. And we get exactly the same effect if we try to speak of an "actual infinite." We can conceive of it
theoretically, but put it into the context of a
material existence, and immediately, every bit of predictability or coherence we can posit about it goes out the window.
But this is unnecessary since the paradox was only created by a misuse of language.
That's a supposition, but not one I find reason to share.
But the others...specificity, pattern, predictability, interdependence and so on...those can be observed by anyone. I tried to confine my terms to those sorts of things.
But they are not 'design' in the sense of needing a designer.
Most certainly they are. In the old "watchmaker" analogy, you immediately recognize a found watch as being a product of design...and you don't need to have met the designer to know for certain that there has to be a watchmaker to produce such an object. Maybe the only question, then, is what sort of "object" are we observing in the Earth? One that has these features (specificity, pattern, interrelation, and so on) or one that does not?
I think you know what I observe. I wonder that you don't.
That we observe these things says something about
us, that we look for patterns, that
we try to describe the world in a way that makes certain relationships predictable. Our description is artificial and deliberately restricted. If I describe a relationship between A and B, that relationship is a function of my choice to distinguish A from B. And my decision to leave C and all the other letters out of the picture.
To put it another way, I can describe a relationship between any thing and any other thing, since both are part of the same universe. If that was sufficient to show 'design', then no thing could not show design.
I would agree that all that exists does indeed show design features. The only sense of "undesigned" we get is actually from observing things which are damaged, corrupted or destroyed, and thus lack the design that things ought to have. We sort of "analogize" to the idea of "non-designed."
But since the description 'designed' must apply to everything, then it would be meaningless.
Non sequitur. We attribute "existence" to all "things," but we do not imagine that is meaningless. And as I say, we can
analogize as above in order to conceptualize an opposite, or so it seems to me.
Why not ask the Designer?
Because, even if I could, I could not possibly understand their answer.
So let me get this straight. Your supposition has to be that because you do not understand the Supreme Being, it is not possible for the Supreme Being to reveal anything to your awareness? Gee, that looks considerably less than "supreme" of Him, especially since someone so "unsupreme" as me can apparently very easily achieve the thing you would be positing Him as being utterly incapable of doing -- namely, making a statement you could understand.
That is why I could not understand God.
Not
on your own, perhaps. I suspect I could not either. And yet, as above.
Saying every-thing is a collocation of things does not solve the problem. Is 'everything' also a 'thing'? If 'everything' was a thing, then the set 'everything' would not be complete, since it would not contain itself. We would need a bigger 'everything', an 'everything that includes 'everything'', and then another... But if 'everything' is not itself a thing, then when talking about 'everything' we are not talking about things, but about an abstract entity.
"Abstract"? I don't see this is the right word. We would certainly be talking about something that transcends our understanding. But such things are known by us to exist, as baffling as they sometimes are.
Take for example, this very simple and well-known scientific observation: the universe is expanding. Do you doubt it? Do your observations (to say nothing of the expert testimony of every astronomer with a telescope, including the famed Edwin Hubble) not confirm it to you? Do you not believe in "the Big Bang"?
Well, if the
universe is expanding, then let me ask you this: just what is it expanding
into?
You see, we don't actually know. We believe the universe -- by definition -- is infinitely large, but also
observe that it is expanding. How do we make sense of that, except to say that there is something very odd going on that we can indeed observe, but which we don't presently fully know how to explain?
So why should it make us marvel if we have some perplexities in describing the normal activity of the observable universe, and also a few in describing the nature of the Creator of all that?
However, if He should ever decide to speak to us...
So has God spoken? Maybe that's the only real question.
