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Comment by lnanek2 | Hacker News Reader

The idea that the universe is anything more than physical laws playing out has just as little evidence as religion and the existence of omniscient godly beings. It is pretty much based entirely on wishful thinking by people who want to believe free will exists. They have no hard evidence and are basically making up an invisible pink fire breathing dragon just as much as the theists.

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Except that really serious people have given arguments and proofs for the existence of God. Try attacking Godel's ontological argument without contradicting yourself. (This would require a year or more of study of formal logic culminating in quantified modal logic. Sadly, formal logic is something most scientists don't learn.)

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/scientists-use-c...

http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/248548/godels-ontolo...

The logic itself might be sound, but it doesn't matter if the assumptions are false, or possibly self contradictory. A false statement implies any other statement.

Try refuting the assumptions without falling into self contradiction. You are just asserting that the assumptions are false. The assumptions are not beyond debate, but at that same time, they are not trivially false like you claim.

It's claimants duty to provide reason for his assumptions.

I don't have the time to produce a formal proof right now, but ideas for directions:

1. It's a 'good' property to stop any 'bad' properties from existing (otherwise they're not really 'bad'). A godlike thing exists, and contains all good properties, thus nothing with 'bad' properties can exist. This is either a contradiction with reality if you take reasonable definitions for 'good' and 'bad', or proof that the 'good' and 'bad' in the proof are meaningless, should be replaced by 'X' and 'Y', and then neither of other assumptions is valid (could be X(essential) as well as Y(essential))

2. A property that is very good might force a property that is slightly bad on its own, and still be good in total. I'd guess this can't be formalized, since good and bad are so fuzzy in the entire proof.

>> It's claimants duty to provide reason for his assumptions.

Read the literature. Godel and many others have provided volumes supporting it.

You wouldn't walk into a physics department and claim that "black holes" are ridiculous right? Your nonchalant dismissal of the assumptions is sort of like a creationist claiming evolution is false because monkeys exist.

1. You have totally misunderstood the proof.

2. Homework: ponder why relativism is self-contradictory :).

No, it just requires understanding something about the nature of mathematics and its relationship with reality. You can't prove the existence of god any more than you can prove the existence of gravity. To make the connection between the math and reality requires interpretation, as Einstein repeatedly pointed out.

Gödel's amusing exercise is just a formalization of St. Anselm's, and most of the centuries of criticism of the latter can be applied to the former. In particular, his little proof has three definitions and six special-purpose axioms, and, in addition to all this, depends on a property of goodness or perfection that is only defined implicitly. Naturally, the existence of something that he interprets as "god" falls out as a theorem. Big deal.

The nature of mathematics are that the theorems are contained within the axioms. If the axioms are self-evident, and the conclusions are surprising, we have some interesting math. But at least two of Gödel's axioms are not self-evident. Therefore, this "proof" strikes me as a setup, and is not very interesting.

The same can be said for anything in life. I really hope you wake up everyday praying that the laws of physics hold today because there is no proof that will hold today.

If you claim that goodness is artificial/relative/subjective, then you are hilariously self-refuting yourself. :)

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/relativism/#5.9

Well, you fooled me. I thought you were serious and might know what you were talking about.

>I thought you were serious and might know what you were talking about.

Thanks for the kind mature words.

You are no different from the Christian fundamentalists who accuse that the scientists (including logicians like me) don't know what they are talking about. Sigh.

I was being respectful, but you showed your deficiency by attacking my intellect. Thanks for that.

I can only point in the right direction. I cannot rectify a highly deficient education (ah, the US).

That's obviously a strawman. A relative morality doesn't claim that 'truth' is relative, it claims that the concepts of 'good' (morally acceptable) and 'bad' are relative.

Thus when saying morality is relative it's not that we say that the factuality of "X is moral" depends on your setting, but that the statement makes no sense unless you specify what morality you mean, because "moral" just means "acceptable in a given morality system".

Ah, but why must a physical law be deterministic?

The problem here is that we're all human and thus certain things are probably unknowable. You have disdain for someone who makes something up to fill that void, but I have disdain for someone who creates axioms in order to affirm their faith in science as the arbiter of truth. I am agnostic in the viewpoint that philosophy has a lot more to say on the subject than the either the worshiper of religious gods or the worshiper of science.

And ironically lacking free will they are incapable of believing anything else . . .

For me, I consider snarky smugness to be evidence of free will.

Physical laws don't necessarily have to be deterministic.

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