Kalam Cosmological argument

What is a thing?
How does a thing exist?
What is a medium?If your statement is true then does it follow that a medium needs a medium to exist in?lfen

I am seeking a clarifying identification. Sounds is a phenomena of compression waves in a material medium either solid, fluid, or gas. So that is one use of the word media, the one I'm most familiar with where the media is matter.I'm thinking that matter is a form of energy when examined at the sub atomic level.I'm not familiar with GR definition of media. I'm not that educated in physics. And the idea that matter required a media, or that space time could be regarded as a media is new to me.lfen

So you are referring to particles, atoms, molecules and their aggregates as things.Are you just asking how matter/energy came into existence? Why there is the universe of matter/energy space/time rather than nothing?OR, are you asking about the various aggregates that we observe such as stars, planets, rocks, or living organisms and their artefacts?lfen

I'm seeking more clarification of terms and referents.'You' and 'I' are refering to our conscious idea of ourselves, or to the existence of the physical organism?Once that is cleared up I'm intrigued by your phrase "are additions to the affairs of the universe and so is everything else". If all the events in the universe are not the universe but are additions, what then in your view are the affairs of the universe?lfen

Here you aren't using material as synonymous with matter, but with mass/energy/time/space. What about consciousness? material or immaterial in your view?lfen

I think this depends on how you are defining a "self" and that is a slippery propostion. In one sense a self is a virtual world created by an organism. That virtual world can identify itself in a myriad of shifting ways and if it creates a virtual world it can choose variously to identify or disidentify with it but there are senses in which it is always a part of it, as well as senses that it is not a part of it.lfen

But many Buddhists would take that as a perfect example that everything happens as a result of many interdependent causes. It's not a chain of individual causes 1,2,3 but a net in which the air, the sun, the earth, organisms in the sea and air and on the land all interact and that wave in turn affects all those things to varying degrees even though many may be so tiny as to be immeasurable.lfen

By KNOW do you mean symbolically model? Sensually consciously experience? or?lfen

This sounds tantalizing. Could you amplify on this? or can you recommend books for general readers or links that might go into the current concepts of matter?lfen

A cause? A single cause influences everything? This is a fact?What is this cause? What is the factual basis of your claim?What exactly is this influence of which you speak? What logic is being defied?What physics does a purely naturalistic explanation defy?lfen

You imply single causation but you don't state it definitively.Everything I can consider is the result of uncountable influences. There is no single cause. I'm not sure how a first cause would even work. Yes, I understand Aristotle and many philosophers find the notion attractive but the Buddha many centuries before the Common Era came up with the interdependency of all phenomena.As I understand one of the earlier versions of Hawking's singularity theory of the Big Bang then the first cause might be what ever breaks the symetry of the singularity so that it becomes unstable and the universe begins to expand and cool. Hawking later came out with a modified version that has an indeterminate "beginning" but I'll leave that to the physicists here as I understand that even less.I don't think cause and effect are the best approximation of the changes of the universe as anything you choose as an effect can also be discovered to be a cause and anything you choose as a cause can be seen as an effect. For system analysis it's a userful construct.Take a light switch being switched on. If the wiring is sound and there is electricity and a functioning bulb then the filaments heats sufficiently to emit photons. But was throwing the light switch the sole cause of the light coming on? Why did the organism throw the switch? Why was the circuit in place. etc.Since you give precedence to the revelations of men from apprx. 2000 years or so ago that are falsified in many respects by science I'm not sure why you leave the indeterminate security of faith and revelation and try these old philosophical arguments.I'm not reading back over this thread. Done it once and it's not that important. My questions were meant to illuminate the gaps in your presentation of your argument. You are often ambiguous or sketchy, which I realize is hard to avoid in this brief reply medium of a board, but you could have addressed some of the problems.I believe you have admitted that there is no way to prove the existence of God, or maybe that was Rob? Anyway, so far no one has advanced a proof of God that has stood the scrutiny of philosophers.lfenEdited by lfen, : removed a misplaced word

You quoted me saying: And you concluded from that: I have no where written that earlier men were of lesser intelligence because I don't believe that. I quite concur that the developement of today depend on earlier developements many of which required great intelligence. I think it's clear that I am claiming that science two thousand years later has access to far more data, better tested models, better instruments, etc. and has falsified some important ancient beliefs. This has to do with the state of knowledge, not the state of intelligence. Different phenomena. Cause is a concept. What is it we observe? I think it is interactions between forces and matter. At the level of the brain these interactions can result in changes in conception that mediate force interactions with matter. I don't know enough about QM to say anything in that regard. It may be events occur that dont' involve forces. I'll have to wait for someone with more knowledge of physics about that.In a number of places in your reply you have acknowledged that somethng happens for a number of reasons but then the next reference you make is to something happening because of "a cause" singular.I'm not arguing that there wasn't a single first cause, I'm arguing that it is by no means necessary that there was a first cause though that notion my feel the most logical. We just don't know enough yet to determine that.Buddhism and Advaita Hinduism believe that that Being was never born and so can never die. What we see in the universe is a series of transformations, permutations of matter/energy/space/time.Think of a whirlpool in a flowing stream. You watch the stream and you notice an eddy begining which grows into a little whirlpool in which water whirls for a while and then that pattern breaks up and the current at that point flows more smoothly. Did anything come into existence or cease existing? No.A pattern emerged and then changed. What are things, living, non living? They are temporary patterns assumed by matter/energy. What we call birth is not something added to the universe, nor is what we call death or destruction something be subtracted from the universe. They are just changes in pattersn.What are causes? They are patterns that give rise to different patterns. That is what we observe about the universe continuous ongoing change but at very different time scales. The changes in the earth's orbit take place over much longer time spans than do changes in cells that are dividing for example.lfen