Alright, so I was having a discussion about the existence of God/The Creator/ and kept getting strawmanned as an atheist. (At this point I have no reason to believe either way because it seems that in the end it doesn’t really affect me, or how I conduct myself)
{As a sidenote: I keep getting told that I’ll understand it when I’m older and come to this way of thinking. But the thing is I’ve heard the same thing about all the arguments for the state and we all know those turned out to be BS. It just seems like such a copout.}
The person I was talking to kept bringing up Nature and how it MUST be clear that all of this couldn’t have just happened. As they put it; " An ipod has as much chance of appearing out of thin air right here as nature has of coming about by itself".
See, here’s the kicker for me. And I tried to explain my hang up as best I could.
It seems to me that Nature or The Natural Order of Things, (whatever you want to call it) works in a very decentralized manner. There isn’t a central planner directing all of the actions of the entire ecosystem.
So if life at its simplest is decentralized, it just seems very hard for me to turn around and then say that everything was done by one all powerful central planner. It doesn’t seem like you can plan dectralized order because by its very nature if you plan it, it ceases to be decentralized; right?
If a general [=central planner] organizes a dozen commando missions behind the lines with the flexible assignment to “wreak havoc” [=decentralized], is there some contradiction?
I think it’s best to view centralization and decentralization as a sliding scale. The commando missions would be more centralized if the general micromanaged them instead of letting the commandos decide how to accomplish their mission. Likewise, the missions would be more decentralized if the general didn’t come up with the targets of the missions and the commandos were the ones to decide their own missions.
The mistake is in assuming that the Creator sits somewhere in a capital (in Heaven) and uses strings to rule over the world.
Another way it could be is that everything in the world IS the Creator, or at least an aspect of Him. So, from our point of view, of course, everything is decentralized. Every atom has its own properties and behaves according to them. In an ecological system, the energy is dispersed through the system in the most efficient way by each animal doing what’s best for it and all competing.
But all the atoms and all the animals and all their properties (and space and time) are being constantly created by the Creator ex nihilo.
Imagine a computer game, in which you have thousands of NPCs doing each his own things on the battlefield. You point to the computer game and say: “There is no central general telling each soldier to go here and there, etc. There is no Creator.” But the Creator is the game itself. The computer, the code, the source of electric power, etc. (Also, the human behind the computer game, etc., etc. There are many different levels in the Divine.)
Also, to say that it has no effect on your life is BS. Of course it has effect on your life. It is possible to be agnostic in theory, but not in action. If I tell you that eating pigs spiritually disconnects you from the Creator, you may not know theoretically whether it’s so or not and declare your ignorance, but in practice, you either eat pigs (acting as if what I was saying is BS) or not.
Of course it is, and that’s exactly my point. A close reading of the OP, and translating my parable with the following code, will resolve the OP’s contradiction.
What if I told you that capital “G” God = nature, and that nature never just is, but in a constant cycle towards equilibrium.
Thus, nature is and isn’t, it’s happening, and a rebuttal to your central divine planning friends, that it came into being, and if it was created by God then God must have been in a void, or nonexistent, and only created just as the Universe, and thus created just as nature was created, but was egotistical enough to claim that HE did it all.
One problem with cosmological arguments that is commonly overlooked even by nontheists is the problem of the counterfactual. It’s supposed to be surprising that anything exists but the question is: as opposed to what?? It seems that we know what it Is to not exist but do we really? I would argue that absolute nonexistence is actually inconceivable by the human mind. The problem is that we are reasoning about the Absolute in that we are reasoning as if we can look at things from the divine perspective which we cannot.
Anyway, for my thoughts on the op’s idea…it kind of makes sense due to the fact that the articles of confederation actually mentioned the “great governor of the world” while the social nationalists (that is, the Federalists) didn’t. One could say that there has never been a world govt because it is trying to be the supreme being and is therefore a revolt against the laws of nature.
I don’t think the cosmological arguments actually try to understand literal non-existence. I think they take existence of the external universe as given and attempt to give a justification for its existence rather than take it as given (this where the heart of these kinds of debates lie).
On a side note I think we can begin to understand literal non-existence by way of analogy- e.g it’s like a vacuum.
To the OP,
I don’t think the libertarian position rests on the superiority and/or existence of decentralised planning as against central planning but rather the superiority of competitive vs monpolistic planning. See this paper on a different perspective on the calcualtion debate.
Actually, I think this is precisely the problem… we reason about non-existence as if we have some literal notion of what it would mean for there to be some region of space with literally nothing inside of it. It turns out that the energy density of the vacuum is a massive number and physicists have precious little idea what to make of this besides yammering on about black holes, antimatter, and other such nonsense.
The root problem lies in forsaking causality. An absolute vacuum would be a region of space which is neither causally affected by nor causally affecting the rest of the Universe. Whether it is “empty” or not is actually beside the point. It is its role in altering the state of affairs in the Universe - and, in turn, being altered by states of affairs in the Universe - that is crucial.
Non-existence is paradoxical on its face - it is a state of affairs that is no state of affairs, that is, it is not affected by nor affects any other state of affairs. Now, the paradox doesn’t prove that non-existence is impossible (and, thus, that existence is necessary)… this would be a cheap, trick escape from the argument. The fact is that it is paradoxical because we simply aren’t omniscient. We don’t know enough to know what nothing really is. In order to understand what nothing is, we would have to first understand what everything is, in order to understand what everything is not (nothing). But to understand what everything is, we would have to be omniscient. Because we are not the Absolute, we are not omniscient. Because we are not omniscient, we don’t understand what the everything is and because we don’t understand what the everything is, we don’t understand what nothing really is.
I agree in a strict sense with most of your post. I still don’t see why analgous reasoning if handled with the parameters of the strict sense is problematic- I’m not saying non-existence is a vacuum but like one.
Even if I agreed with everything you wrote above it still doesn’t invalidate cosmological arguments for the reason above.
I think that it shows that cosmological arguments are essentially circular arguments in disguise. If we cannot comprehend what nothing is, then there’s no point in asking why there’s something rather than nothing, that is, why there’s something rather than something-else-which-we-can’t-even-say-what-its-properties-are-or-are-not. And if there’s no point asking, then any answer given to the question is just a non-explanation masquerading as an explanation, in that it provides no new information on the matter nor any insight regarding the logical consequences of one’s assumptions. The type of arguments that satisfy these criteria are called circular arguments.
But as I said before cosomological arguments per se do not need to conceive of nothingness itself but as just a way of giving justification for existence itself. It would seem odd to strive for justification for particular types of existence, for example how can it be that monkeys exist, but stop at existence of the external world unless one can come up with a way of arguing that the external universe provides justification for itself (most probably a panentheist argument).
I’m not trying to make mankind omnisicient but trying to give a framework to understand what we already know.
I’ve been thinking about epistemology lately especially rationalism vs empiricism. The former in its pure form is just tautological as Wittgenstein shows “clearly” in the Tractatus (also since the rationalist thinkers thought in time the source of their a prioristic knowledge was experience) and the latter is a mass of data with no way of interpreting it hence none can lead to knowledge. So we must have both at the same time.
Therefore the proper procedure (IMO) for epistemology then is to accept propositional statements which are intuitive as basic (since they’re intuitive they have content). Obviously this could be seen as "unscientific) but it’s our only option. The question then is what is intuitive. I’m thinking of beginning with the proposition of Francis Schaeffer that the “World is a glorious ruin”- it is both wonderful and depraved at the sametime. The next question then what gives grounds for the possibility of that being the case.
The only other option to this it seems to me is to accept propositions as intuitive but seek no justification for them which is essentially pragmatism- or as I call it throwing in the towel.
Centralized: There is one person calling the shots, planning everything. [Actually he is vague here. It may mean one person “directing” everything that happens, whatever directing means. It may mean one person “planning” everything. It may mean one person “did” everything. Since “planning” is the most difficult to refute, I’ll go with that one].
Decentralized: The negation of Centralized, see above.
The world looks decentralized, meaning it looks as if no one person planning everything that happens here. [“It seems to me that Nature or The Natural Order of Things, (whatever you want to call it) works in a very decentralized manner.”]
But if it looks that way, it is that way. [“There isn’t a central planner directing all of the actions of the entire ecosystem.”]
Thus the world is decentralized. [“…life at its simplest is decentralized”]
Which means, by definition, that it is not centralized. Which contradicts the possibility of it being centralized, obviously. [“So if life at its simplest is decentralized, it just seems very hard for me to turn around and then say that everything was done by one all powerful central planner.”]
The refutation I offered is that 2 is wrong. I gave an instance of a planner whose plans will look unplanned.
Now you mention it, 2 is an inherently weak assumption in the first place. There are plenty of examples in real life of an inexpert eye seeing no planning at all in a carefully planned event. Need we look further than the many events conspiracy theorists claim to have been planned by conspirators to look unplanned, and succeeded.
Second contradiction:
OP’s defintions:
Centralized: Something planned.
Decentralized: Negation of Centralized.
An ordered thing implies it was planned [“…order…you plan it”]
Thus, by defintion, it is centralized. [“…if you plan it, it ceases to be decentralized; right?”]
But a thing cannot be both centralized and decentralized. [Law of excluded middle].
Therefore there is no such thing as decentralized order.
If we accept 1, and the definitions, this one has no flaw. But it is just playing with words. It makes no assertion about the world.
There is no step where he says, for example, “the world is ordered”, or “the world is not ordered”.