Dennis wrote:

The plan is to build science in a rigoros natural philosophy. Relying on the 'fruits of science' only insofar as there is a metaphysic to support it. You and I disagree that science produces knowledge about the world in and of itself, I reject this and claim that this simply gives the most impoverished form of knowledge where the heavy-work is done by the natural philosophy on which a scientist makes any prediction.

You weren't kidding about being a Platonist. What's the demarcation between science and natural philosophy? Why think science doesn't produce knowledge? Don't you know that the Earth revolves around the Sun and not the other way around? Don't you think that this knowledge is produced by science? Where's the breakdown in your opinion?
 

Thank you for the reply. Just a reminder, saying that you don't hold to science producing knowledge about the world, but obviously it does if anything else, is simply not going to work. Either you hold to it doing so, or not. We can discuss the consequences (what you are doing), later. 

God is not in space time, he is above and beyond it. Some people over here take space to be a substance in itself in which all other substances are put. So I'll leave it to them to argue from here if they wish to. The scope of scientific theories can be modified for the theist to simply add whatever you've characterized of the theist.

KevinScharp wrote:

What's the demarcation between science and natural philosophy? Why think science doesn't produce knowledge? Don't you know that the Earth revolves around the Sun and not the other way around? Don't you think that this knowledge is produced by science? Where's the breakdown in your opinion?

Why does the Earth spin? Okay, it spins. You've now named two things, so we have at least the 'Sun' and the 'Earth.' What is a sun? What is a planet? What test will you do to find the identity conditions and not ultimately be doing metaphysics rather than predicting on ontologically loaded definitions? We're now engaged in metaphysics, and somewhere down the line, Natural Philosophy. 

You are ontologically committed to these entities whenever you make reference to them, what kind of ontological status they have, is the question for the enterprise of Metaphysics and the right analysis of nature. Obviously this is a contentious point, but that's what Classical Theists do. They proceed with heavy metaphysical aggression.

Bertrand Russell wrote:

It is not always realised how exceedingly abstract is the information that theoretical physics has to give.  It lays down certain fundamental equations which enable it to deal with the logical structure of events,while leaving it completely unknown what is the intrinsic character of the events that have the structure… All that physics gives us is certain equations giving abstract properties of their changes.  But as to what it is that changes, and what it changes from and to—as to this, physics is silent. (My Philosophical Development, p. 13)

Edward Feser wrote:

Empirical science, as it is typically understood in modern times, studies material reality by developing quantitative models and testing them by observation and experiment.  That, at any rate, is the paradigm, which is why physics -- with its mathematical formulae, rigorous predictions and technological applications, and discovery of strict laws -- is commonly regarded as the gold standard of science.   The philosophy of nature is a middle ground field of study, lying between metaphysics and empirical science.  Unlike metaphysics, it is not concerned with being as such, but with changeable, empirical reality in particular.  But neither is it concerned merely with the specific natures of the changeable, empirical things that happen to exist.  It is rather concerned with what must be true of any world of changeable, empirical things of the sort we might have scientific knowledge of, whatever their specific natures and thus whatever turn out to be the specific laws in terms of which they operate.  Nor is the philosophy of nature concerned merely with the quantitative aspects of material things, but with every aspect of their nature.  In Aristotelian philosophy of nature, these fundamental features of any possible empirical reality (or at least any sort we might have scientific knowledge of) include act and potency, substantial form and prime matter, efficient and final causality, and so forth.  (That is not to say that some of these concepts don’t also have broader metaphysical significance.  But the philosophy of nature approaches them from the point of view of the role they play in making sense of the empirical world, specifically.)[1]

I got the joke btw .


[1]http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2012/05/natural-theology-natural-science-and.html

KevinScharp wrote:

iwpoe wrote:

KevinScharp wrote:

Why think that that is metaphysically possible? If Jesus's body disappears, and it had mass, and no new mass/energy is added by God, then then we're talking about a mathematical contradiction. That's not metaphysically possible.

Technically Jesus' body rose into the sky until it was no longer visible. We don't know what was done with its mass/energy:

Acts 1:9:

And after He had said these things, He was lifted up while they were looking on, and a cloud received Him out of their sight.

[καὶ ταῦτα εἰπὼν βλεπόντων αὐτῶν ἐπήρθη καὶ νεφέλη ὑπέλαβεν αὐτὸν ἀπὸ τῶν ὀφθαλμῶν αὐτῶν.]

It could have been converted to energy, stored somewhere, chopped to bits, who knows? It's not even clear that after the resurrection itself the body is material in the way we normally understand material any longer. I don't know how God reconciles his actions with his general laws. Jesus claims to no be a spirit/ghost after his ressurection, but other than that, it's not clear.

So he has a material body -- and it ended up in heaven, which I'm assuming is not a location in spacetime. So some mass/energy disappeared.

Oh, we can do worse than that. On most standard definitions of matter (in the relevant sense), matter must exist in space. So it's a broadly logical contradiction. No conservation of mass/energy needed.[1]

One could try “Matter is what has mass”. Pruss points out that would have to include the mass coming from energy (relativistic mass) or exclude photons and gluons.

He also points out that if mass is a natural kind tightly tied to the world's physics, then if the laws of nature were different there would be no matter.

 
[1]Based on this, I would check the scholastic interpretation of matter and the Catholic church's interpretation of the ascension. The scholastics would have almost certainly caught such a straightforward contradiction and stepped on it. Checking out what the scholastics meant by matter might also shed light on what, in ontological terms, a resurrection body is supposed to be.

KevinScharp wrote:

Dennis wrote:

Hi John(sorry to bother you again!)

What kind of ontological status would the law of conservation have? Is it a thing in and of itself, is it a property, is it a relation?

This is a matter of dispute in the literature. Each of these view has been defended along with: it's a proposition, it's an inference rule, it's a sentence, it's part of the framework of possible worlds, it's a mental model, and it's whatever mathematical things are.

This is right. It's a regularity, it's a second-order relation between properties, it has to do with how the natures of beings interact, etc., though not all accounts are treated equal.

Last edited by John West (4/18/2016 10:02 am)

KevinScharp wrote:

iwpoe wrote:

KevinScharp wrote:

Why think that that is metaphysically possible? If Jesus's body disappears, and it had mass, and no new mass/energy is added by God, then then we're talking about a mathematical contradiction. That's not metaphysically possible.

Technically Jesus' body rose into the sky until it was no longer visible. We don't know what was done with its mass/energy:

Acts 1:9:

And after He had said these things, He was lifted up while they were looking on, and a cloud received Him out of their sight.

[καὶ ταῦτα εἰπὼν βλεπόντων αὐτῶν ἐπήρθη καὶ νεφέλη ὑπέλαβεν αὐτὸν ἀπὸ τῶν ὀφθαλμῶν αὐτῶν.]

It could have been converted to energy, stored somewhere, chopped to bits, who knows? It's not even clear that after the resurrection itself the body is material in the way we normally understand material any longer. I don't know how God reconciles his actions with his general laws. Jesus claims to no be a spirit/ghost after his ressurection, but other than that, it's not clear.

So he has a material body -- and it ended up in heaven, which I'm assuming is not a location in spacetime. So some mass/energy disappeared.
 

All we can do here is speculate but the whole point of the Resurrection and Ascension is not to see "how" it happened but "why" it happened. It does not matter that God used so and so principle or so and so law or stopped certain principles / law or override it etc that is at the end of the day just process, the real question is God's purpose and reason behind it.