How can a good God allow suffering

''Man is the measure of all thngs' PROTAGORAS

....and one of those things is 'complexity'!

Theists will continue to play the facile game of 'Man is God's creation' in order to get the psychological palliative of 'closure' . They ignore the fact that what we mean by 'explanation' is about human abilities to predict and control. Where that ability is currently limited, they invent 'The Big Controller' ....the 'God of the Gaps'.

And a second game theists play is with their misunderstanding of the word 'causality' which has limited usage in science. This is because the lay human understanding of 'time' which underpins the sequence 'cause and effect' has been deconstructed in modern physics thereby rendering questions like 'what caused the big bang' as scientifically meaningless.

Rorty the pragmatist has no problem with the emotional function of 'belief', but points out the days of religion doing the job of science are over.

How has time been deconstructed by modern physics ? Are you saying there is no "then, now and eventually"?

Einsteins theories of special and general relativity tell us ...
1. That 'before and after' are like 'up and down' in that they depend on particular observers. and cannot be universally specified/
2. That time ceases to exist in a black hole such as the one thought to be associated with 'the big bang'.
The main equations in modern physics can be written without a time parameter.

Relativity Says time cannot be subjectively specified if the observers do not know each others speed relative to each other. GPS would not work if an objective time between the satallites and the GPS antennae could not be determined. We can determine that.

The other thing that must be brought into the equation is a gravitational field effects the clocks in the satellites compared to the GPS antennae. That also can be accounted for .

As long as there is a Higgs field interacting with matter we can measure time.

There is no higgs field inside a black hole. Though, The Higgs is able to carry information (which includes time)in waves outside the event horizon of a black hole.

So the only thing that affects time is relative speed and gravity.

The thing about time that is always constant is the arrow of time. The past is always behind us and a moment or the recent past can be measured with reasonable accuracy because when a measurment is taken at a moment time is nearly eliminated from the equations. But the future location of a particle is harder to determine because the location of a particle is a stastical anlysis over time and beyond the moment that a measurment is taken a particles lication can statitically be anywhere in the universe.

But by taking many measurements at once that statistical difference can be just about eliminated. So, on the scales of our bodies and large pieces of matter (which are measuring immense numbers of particles at once) and the speeds they are moving at (which are relatively slow) that stuff about speed and gravity becomes easily managed and is nearly irrelevant when it comes to talking about the past the future and the present. And any discrepancies that have been introduced by changes in speed and gravitational in the past probably can be accounted for and estimated up until the time of the establishment of the higgs field and matter as long as we do not try to do things at the quantum level.

You have obviously not read Rovelli 'The Order of Time' . From this it is clear that none of your verbiage deals with with the parochial ordering of events nor do you appear to understand that 'disorder' as in the second law of thermodynamics is also observer dependent. Indeed you very use of the word 'measuring' shows ignorance of the observer dependence of first level of measurement i.e 'nominal' or 'naming'.
All you are doing is creating a pseudo scientific smokescreen which misses the key point that the concept of a first cause' is scientifically vacuous.

Give me an example of how I use Verbage wrong.

In science time is irrelevant unless there is enough order to measure movement in distance or rotation over time.

It was over before it began. Anyone who understands evolution would understand this.

Your 'verbiage' shows no understanding that 'causality' has no scientific basis since its sequential essence is based on the pre-Einstein concept of 'universal time'. What 'works' in everyday life (like 'flat earth distance measurements' or ''the Sun traversing the sky') cannot be applied at the macro level where shifting paradigmatic coherence is the norm as science progresses. Your 'God concept' IS an everyday psychological construct no matter how much you try to dress it up with with shifting 'complexity' issues in frontier science, or your misundertanding of the subjective/human nature of 'information'.

Could you explain this shift in paradigmic coherence at the macro level?

One example is the shift from a Newtonian paradigm to a Relativistic one in which the understanding of 'gravity'shifted from that of a force between masses to the bending of space-time by masses. A second would be the Copenhagen interpretation of sub atomic particles not as 'things' but as 'interaction events'. Paradigms do not dismiss the utility of former concepts...they delimit that utility by restricting their contexts. No paradigm can make claims to be 'closer to truth' or 'reality', since those are both undefinable lay concepts based on social agreement between humans with mutual needs and common perceptual apparatus. Pardigms themseves have social dimensions in whch contemorary social forces tend to direct 'legitimate subject matter'
In Kant's largely accepted view, we can never have access to 'ultimate reality' [if indeed it could be said to exist at all] and many of our concepts like 'causality' are merely perceptual a priori s, which in modern parlance could be called 'hard wired'.

I often wonder how those who actually accept this view that reality can't be perceived, reconcile the fact that our senses give us a pretty accurate representation of what objective scientific measurements tell us about things around us. Same thing goes for the concept of causality.

Sure, we don't see the full spectrum of light, feel the chemistry of our environment, etc., but incomplete knowledge is not the same as inability to know. I'm not sure people who accept that Kantian view actually exist. How the **** could they even get up in the morning and function.

All Einsteins equations are saying is that the space time continuum (higgs field) and matter is made up of standing waves (clocks).

Special relativity tells us how a group of standing waves that construct matter interact with another group of standing waves that construct the higgs field when the matter is not being accelerated.

General Relativity tells us how these same groups of standing waves interact if they are accelerated by gravity or some other source.

Since, both matter and the higgs field are made up of these standing waves, (clocks) as matter moves or is accelerated through the higgs field it changes the density of the higgs field. (or changes in the density of the higgs field causes acceleration known as gravity) This change in energy density (which is known as curvature of the space-time continuum) causes a change in the rates these clocks are ticking off time. This change in the way the clocks are ticking as the the space time continuum (higgs field) interacts with the matter that constructs two different observers, makes time appear and, to actually operate at two different rates for each observer according to where the observers are located according to gravitational fields and/or how fast they are moving relative to the higgs field and each other.

Quantum mechanics, The standard Model, Shroedingers wave equations, Plancks Equations, Boltmans Equations, higgs mechanism etc. . . give us a systematic explanation of how matter and the higgs field are interacting where they come into contact with each other. But unlike relativity that looks at the picture as smooth line of all the clocks involved stretching across space, QM and quantum gravity looks at each as indiviual clocks with the electrons of matter and the photons of the Higgs bosons being the hands on the clocks.

I understand relativity and the qm wave equations well enough to account for them when interpreting the information obtained from the observations of the universe as a whole and, how its entropy has changed overtime.

You must be able to tie qm and relativity together to be able to interpret this information coherently and accurately.

Which is why I agree with leadfoot I agree because, our senses and intelligence reveal what all these seperate views and interpretations of the physical world are telling us in a simple and comprehensive way. So why do you want to make it so complicated it becomes incomprehensible.

That is like teaching somebody how to drive a car using quantum mechanics and relativity without using your five senses to understand what a car looks like and how all its atoms interact with the operator and the road as complete units.

Your post is the epitome of naive realism. We of course form useful models of what we called 'the world' and its 'permanent' features for us relative to our lifespans. The fact that we agree aspects of those models with others is hardly surprising given our common perceptual apparatus. So what? We cannot assume that our 'world' is the world of other species with different apparatus, and nor indeed is it likely to be the 'world' of some humans from different cultures which condition their perceptions via segmentation of their world via their language. You only need examine the views and lives of some religious fundamentalists to understand that !
I suggest you examine that word 'knowldge' which for me simply means confidence about specific predictions {and post-dictions) about our mutual concerns. It is NOT about some nebulous pot of gold some like to call 'truth'. Knowledge is about 'what currently works for what we care about', and that can and does change. Look, for example, how 'caring about the environment' has shifted the course of 'science' over recent years.

Thank You.



But, God said he created us to live forever.



I just assume that our world is the world Jesus created for his stated purpose because that story best fits the data.



We are all on individual journeys that are designed for each individual to reach an eternal goal while each individual journey is part of a single all encompassing eternal Journey containing all humans that are combined to fulfill one master plan.

Sounds kind of narrow minded, bigoted and short sighted. I see a much bigger eternal plan.

Sounds selfish and egotistical. Especially when we are such a small intelligent creature, living for a short time (or at least short when only this part of our eternal existence is considered anyway)In a vast universe where all matter and all of the laws of physics are the same millions of light years apart.

Which suggests it was assembled by someone with much greater intellectual and physical capabilities than ours. And while what currently works for what we care about is important it seems logical that The Creators eternal plan be taken into consideration and given its due priority over our individual desires.

The last post was a response Leadfoot. You are clearly not equipped to handle it.

Not surprising, but you avoided (suppressed?) what I actually said. Here it is again:


I was comparing what our senses tell us to what scientific instruments measure. To the extent that they overlap, they agree.

Do you now want to make the argument that the instruments were infected with our human error prone nature or some such rot?

Instruments 'measure' (i.e. enable interaction) with those focal aspects of human attention of mutual interest. There is of course still perceptual sensory apparatus involved in every measurement; and raw senses do NOT always correspond with output readings of transducers as in the case of 'color vision' for example.
For every focal aspect humans chose for 'measurement' there is a potentially infinite number which are not. This point has become even more significant with concepts of 'dark matter' and 'dark energy' which by definition are impervious to 'observation'. In fact, human ingenuity in enhancing our perceptual interactions with our world via transducers has even resulted in the perplexing findings that some of those interactions (aka 'subatomic particles') appear to fleetingly pop in and out of 'existence' at random.

'Man is the measure of all things'...and thinghood is bestowed by man on selective aspects of his shifting exchanges with what he projects as his species specific world.

'Things are merely monotonous interaction events' ROVELLI

Are you capable of responding to my last two.

Subatomic particles are not popping in and out of existence. They are popping in and out of a Higgs boson. You cannot see individual subatomic particles (like electrons and quarks of atoms )and (the virtual quarks that make up a Higgs boson) until you knock them out of the boson that they existed in at their stable energies. You cannot detect the individual particles when they are part of the bosons but they are there. Reality is not appearing and disappearing.

Given that we are a mere hundred years or so since the thinging of 'the electron', can you guarantee that those things in your above post will still have explanatory currency in a hundred years time ?
You would, of course, be foolish to answer 'yes' to the above which implies that your use of words like 'existence' and 'reality' are somewhat ill considered. If in doubt, consider the fate of 'phlogisten' or 'the aether' or even 'the four elements'.
Capability in debate comes from being able to understand opposing positions which might undermine your own. I suggest that you lack such understanding with respect the well established pragmatism involved in mine.