I had hoped to be gone from this sidebar by now, but evidently my points were not clearly made, so I will try one last time to explain why we cannot communicate.
My previous reply to you was carefully worded to be as gentle as possible. But I can see it missed its mark altogether, because you replied as follows:
When I said that you are speaking “words without knowledge” I was hoping you would understand that to mean “you are speaking of things you know nothing about.” The above is a case in point for you have attributed motives to me that you could not possibly know. You cannot read my mind.
And concerning the characterization of knowledge per se even the term “objective probabilistic analysis” is oxymoronic because probability theory itself has an underlying bias whether the mathematician chooses Combinatorics or a Frequentist or Bayesian approach. The sampling choices affect the distributions in Order Statistics – therefore, the inferences drawn for the continuous based on the distribution of the discrete cannot rise to "objectivity."
The points about causality and beginnings which I raised with you are not at all "foggy." They have been tested in many a debate on this very forum with some of the most heavily credentialed Freepers imaginable in a variety of disciplines – from Physics to Philosophy.
The bottom line, applying causality to physical cosmology, is that "existence exists" regardless of how one understands that existence – but this point has escaped you and I cannot help you to obtain it.
Now, before I go, I do wish to engage a few issues raised in your last:
If you do this then perhaps you will appreciate that – in questions such as “what is reality” - the observer is part of that which he seeks to observe and thus his determinations can never rise to “objective truth.”
Another example is the limitation of our vision and minds to a four dimensional construct – three of space and one of time. If you were able to see from a higher dimensional aspect, your arm might be here, your torso might be there. IOW, that your arms and torso are connected from a four dimensional worldview – does not mean this is “objective truth.”
Likewise you cannot declare something is random in the system when you don’t know what the system “is.”
And likewise you cannot declare that God does not exist when you have no knowledge whatsoever beyond sensory perception of matter in all its motions.
Well said. Materialism is not the same thing as philosophical realism, although most modernists carelessly confuse the two, materialism and realism, and think of themselves as realists.
Furthermore, materialists cannot even know what is "real" in the material world. You can pound on a desk and say that it is real. You see it and feel it. But we know that the wood of the desk is in fact mostly empty space, made up of electrons orbiting around atomic nuclei. (If, in fact, there is any such thing as electrons, protons, or neutrons, or maybe these elementary particles are made up of muons or something else we don't know about yet?)
The world that materialists think of as real changes with every scientific advance.
Indeed, materialism often slows the advancement of science, because members of the scientific establishment stubbornly refuse to change their view of the way things work until their noses are absolutely rubbed into the new discoveries, as Thomas Kuhn points out in "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions." It happens again and again.
Materialists like to parrot that the Catholic Church resisted Galileo's hypothesis that the earth goes around the sun whenever resistance to science comes up. In fact, Galileo's friend the Pope only clamped down and ceased protecting him from his scientific rivals when Galileo (falsely) insisted that the movement of the earth was a proven fact, not a hypothesis. It was not really proven until more than a century later. Yet, four hundred years later, the Galileo affair is still the most famous example of opposition to scientific advancement, endlessly repeated.
In the real history of science, I suspect that most often literal-minded materialists are the ones who have most tenaciously resisted new and upsetting discoveries.