I'll borrow your format.. out of temporal sequential order. (dry j/k)
>Not really, the rebuttal is "the term creation is undefined in the domain of the hypothetical god", "who created god" does not make sense. We can only define god, by exclusion. By attributing any property to the concept we already stepped out of the domain of logic.
Hmm... well my difficulty with that is that creation means that the universe above exists in a nested state in relation to God. Nesting and being nested is a property that is attributable to both God and universe, and it implies neither space nor time. An existential value is also very definitely a property. Defining existence by negation/exclusion.. I'll think on that.
>Anyway you derived an argument from an example, the argument in your opinion would be "if the universe is an abstraction itself...". And that is indeed an assumption, a supposition.
Perhaps, my argument would be 'if the universe is a simulation then forms of existence that -think they exist- are capable of being simulated. How does one place limits on it, address what existence even is, because if you can't ultimately define what it is, you can't define what it is not, either? How do you then arrive at that negation leading to what God is? If existence is capable of being simulated, for example, Descartes' dream argument where reality is ultimately unknowable, except that now Descartes' reply itself is called into question if a being may be real or simulated, does the simulation think it thinks or does it actually think? With all odds being equal what does this imply universally?' One can provide an example amongst endless examples, without any yardstick for measuring success. Is there such a yardstick?
There were very little ground rules layed down in the intro posts in this thread.. And hence this exchange clarifies things because now there are less assumptions or suppositions to go around as there were ten posts up. Implication however =/= supposition rather it may indicate presupposition. Which is fine, everything presupposes something else, which is partially why one analyses implications.
>If I had an argument it would rather be something like "the way the universe is formed might be in the future discovered as one without external intervention, beyond all doubts, and logically proven as the only possible one, or even proven as the only conceivable one. But that's empty circular reasoning, because the proofs have modeled the universe in terms of concepts which we have derived from our understanding of it. So all we have proved is that the universe is a closed system"
Yes I completely agree in that nobody is going to ever have the ultimate answer, because such is beyond the capability of empiricism.. the age old problem is how one can arrive at any knowledge of what possibly exists outside that knowledge through reason and observation.. I wonder about the Wittgenstein quote 'what we cannot speak of, we must pass over in silence' ..which doesn't mean the effort isn't worthwhile, after all, I doubt we'll ever run out of things to learn about
>But that's outside the topic.
Hmm, this might be the root of our discussion. Can one by a process of negation from what exists arrive at what doesn't, from 'the inside'?
>More than a convenience, it follows from being the creator: the time of an abstraction is never the same time of the plane where the abstraction is thought up in our universe, after all.
>Time, in a game of life can be defined as the discrete sequence of generations. How long it take to compute them is not relevant to the abstraction.
Time in a game of chess can be defined as the sequence of moves: even if the rules refer to timeouts, time annotations are just metadata.
>The fact that creation IN OUR UNIVERSE is impossible without unidirectional time is just a proof of the link between the concept "creation" and "time" in our universe, so that any attempt of redefining it in the dimension of a hypothetical god must define the equivalent of an unidirectional time axis in which he operates. Of course such definitions are equivalent to all the assertions made about objects outside this universe AKA religions.
Not necessarily, God is antecedent to time by our temporal standards if God creates what we think of as time. God still is responsible for its being, why otherwise say god 'creates' the universe? I see you wish to define God as existing outside of a unidirectional time axis but with the example I'm unsure. I have plenty of data files on my hard drive that contain sequences of moving images existing all at once, arrays and data matrices can store temporal data as well, and there's only one reason a sequence of states should be 'successive'. Outside the 'game'.. humans just so happen to experience time in the direction of increasing entropy, for whatever reason. Calculations of such events also occur in the direction of increasing entropy.
What I'm getting at is that I have an image from your analogy as God being like a programmer looking at a data file that contains all the temporal data as an abstraction.. hence what did you say.. 'the act of creating the universe coincides with knowing everything about it'.. except this occurs whether or not 'the guy' is bound by time. But that temporal data exists only by virtue of the conditions of the programmer's very existence in the first place: it is computed sequentially in that universe to begin with, which implies creator time, and secondly, perception of time as a sequential thing. I see you reaching (not in a bad way at all) with the idea of time as a data abstraction that can be represented spatially or via information, but I don't think the analogy is close enough to a God that exists independent of time yet in a relationship with it.
Second, once again the issue here is speaking about the substance of reality (say your simulated universe) as opposed to the conditions that make it possible for reality (the simulation) to exist, and how does one account for God in that relationship. The world's religions disagree quite a lot about God and whether or not concepts of God are restricted to certain conditions of existence to begin with. Nobody seems to even agree.. is God 'bound' to create the best of all possible worlds or not..? If 'creation' as we think of it doesn't exist in God's reality then why say God created the universe? God has to make existence possible before putting things in it (if God even does that).. God has to define time itself unless God is bound by time, or e.g. the a priori condition that time is the best arrangement of things, and God must do things the 'best way' etc. And a relationship between creator and creation doesn't necessarily imply time, or limits to that relationship or other relationships.
>This is why I prefer staying in the universe and talk about abstractions we create, instead of the hypothetical domain in respect to which we are the abstraction.
Well, the hypothetical domain and what exists in it is already being defined.
>Well, it is yours, you called it an ontological argument. To me it is an example that proves the OP claim as inconclusive.
The example kind of does utilize the ontological argument not just in conceiving God a priori but God as the 'first cause' in which God also exists outside of what humans call time.
