the singularity of being and nothingness
Posts tagged Causality
Causality and Religious Belief
May 4th
Recently, I've been working my way through On Religion, a collection of writings from "the greatest British philosopher," David Hume. Of course, Hume is well-known for his views on causality, even though there is debate over precisely what he thought concerning this subject…
While I do not wish to spend an inordinate amount of time analyzing my reading of Hume, I did run across an interesting passage that, at least in my reading, coheres interestingly with arguments that I have made personally, even if they are stated in a different way. In the following selection from "Of a particular Providence and of a future State," Hume recalls a "conversation" which he had with a friend who, donning the persona of Epicurus, seeks to defend the ancient philosopher's "denial of divine existence" before the "mob of Athens."
In the faux Epicurus' estimation, the philosophical necessity of the divine is unfounded in human reason because its fundamental basis is derived from a backward rationalization from the nature of the world. That is, his religious (and political…) persecutors believe in the existence of the gods because the world exists. However, their philosophical belief is not mere superstition; rather, they have made an attempt at More >
Peacocke Tuesday – Randomness and Causality
Oct 2nd
Over the last week, I have rolled through several chapters of Peacocke's book, "Theology for a Scientific Age," and I will not spend time going over the finer details of each discussion. I simply wish to note one of the issues that stood out most to me.
In a sort of continuous investigation, Peacocke looks at the nature of causality and its relation to the universe in which we live. Until the last century, it was generally assumed that causality was a one-way street, a sort of "top-down" movement with determinable and predicatable outcomes. What recent inquiry has revealed, especially in relation to quantum physics, however, is that causality is infinitely more complex than the old assumptions would leave one to believe. Because of the interconnectedness of the universe, the precise nexus of the "cause" of an "effect" becomes increasingly blurred as the lines between a "something" as cause and the same "something" as effect converge more closely upon one another.
So what does this mean? Far and away from the classic models of the universe which assumed that absolutely predicatability of naturalistic processes could be gained by a sufficient amount of data, this understanding of the interrelatedness of causality reveals More >
