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Originally Posted by marmalade  Quote:
Originally Posted by Skepticologist Right. NOTHING to do with fate at all. From my agnostic viewpoint, the universe has been set in motion by a force I have no way of substantively understanding, but I can still observe it. | |
You've posed a bunch of questions, but I'll take a shot at answering all of them.
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Originally Posted by marmalade I'm curious about what the above statement means to you personally. |
It simply means that I subscribe to the now trite and over-used dictum "**** happens". With so much motion in the universe, lots of things are bound to happen. A microcosmic example would be a freeway. With so many cars in motion, accidents are bound to happen. But whether in a macrocosmic or microcosmic sense, things just happen, not because there's some script written by some supreme being, and not because they're meant to happen.
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Originally Posted by marmalade Why do you think there is a force that set in motion the universe? |
I guess that belief comes purely from my experiential base. I'm a firm believer in cause and effect. Things may not happen for a reason, but they happen because something else happened that caused them. The closest to a logical proof for the existence of a supreme being I've encountered is Thomas Aquinas's concept of an
umoved mover. It appeals to me because of my affinity for the principle of cause and effect. Based on that principle, at some beginning point of the universe, there had to be a cause for the effect of the first motion that millenia later has resulted in all the motion currently going on in the universe. However, to claim that that cause was some supreme being that set the universe in motion begs the question, what was the cause of the effect of the supreme being?
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Originally Posted by marmalade Why do you think the universe was set in motion? |
I have no idea.
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Originally Posted by marmalade What was the beginning point? |
Again, I have no idea. Bound by my temporal belief in cause and effect, I feel strongly that there was one, but I can't get my head around what it was or why it existed.
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Originally Posted by marmalade You say you can observe this force...
What observations are these? |
Simply the motion. Three years ago I sailed from Gibraltar to the Canary Island on a 42-foot sloop. When we got out into the open Atlantic, we were constantly going up and down on 20-foot swells (fortunately at comfortable intervals). The captain explained that such large but gentle swells originated thousands of miles away in the North Atlantic. Conversely, shorter, choppier waves were the result of more local weather conditions. But whether the cause of the water conditions was more or less observable, something had to set both the swells and the waves in motion.
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Originally Posted by marmalade Why do you interpret these observations as you do? |
I'm not sure what you mean by
interpret. I specifically said that I don't think there's any meaning behind what I observe; only that I observe it.
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Originally Posted by Skepticologist What is deemed as fate by those among us who demand meaning from anything and everything that happens as the result of the chaotic motion of the universe is simply happenstance to those of us who don't demand such meaning. |
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Originally Posted by marmalade I don't demand meaning from anything, but I do have a sense of meaning in the world and I have a hope for meaning. Even your perspective is meaningful, and your definition of meaning in the universe seems very important to you. Its probably safe to assume that nobody here is a complete nihilist which is to say that all of us are probably believers in some kind of meaning. |
I, too, "have a sense of meaning in the world", but it doesn't extend to a meaning for everything that happens. Instead, I make my own meaning. For the 31 years of my career, the meaning was providing for my family and achieving some modicum of success. Since I retired three years ago, the meaning has taken on more of an altrustic focus out of concern for what my legacy will be; what difference my existence will make. As such, my focus is pretty much confined to my relatively small sphere of influence.
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Originally Posted by marmalade Why do you assume that anything and everything in the universe is the result of chaotic motion that, as you said above, was set in motion by a force at the beginning of time that can't be understood despite being observeable?
What do you mean by chaotic motion? By chaotic, do you mean lacking in consciousness, intelligence, and purpose? Do you mean lacking in an intrinisic ordering principle? Or are you referring to chaos theory? |
The fact that I don't believe things happen for a reason, or as the result of some divine master plan, lends itself to a conception that they happen in a random, unpredictable, i.e. chaotic, way. And, as an agnostic, I have no proof, nor reason to believe, that there's any "consciousness, intelligence, and purpose" behind them.
With regard to "an intrinisic ordering principle", I do have evidence, through the discoveries of science, that the universe in a macrocosmic sense operates according to certain regular and predictable principles. It's when observed in a microcosmic sense that chaos becomes apparent.
I suppose that, in a way, I am referring to chaos theory. It's just that points of perturbation seem to occur with much greater frequency the more microcosmic the systems are.