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Puritan Board Freshman
I am but a casual reader in the physical sciences, so please forgive my inaccuracies in terms and structurals.
If you expand an atom to the size of a football ground, you still cannot see the handful of neutrons and electrons whizzing around. An atom is 99.999% the absence of anything known. I have no doubt that should we do the same to a neutron, it too would consist of 99.999% absence of anything known.
Thus an atom consists of almost nothing physical. We don’t really know what colour this atom might be except some vague notion of empty translucent greyness.
The human body consists of trillions of these atoms. Thus the human body is 99.999% nothingness, with no colour. It is only by virtue of the differences in valency and other relationships and forces acting between atoms/molecules that the idea of boundary and relative permeability is observed. Put another way it is because the density/permeability of a piece of steel [itself consisting of the same nothingness with a different structure] is differentiated from the density/permeability of the human body that the two when pushed together do not become one.
The ear. It is a physical apparatus that detects movement in the medium, and translates that vibration into electric signals with different waves that the brain interprets, and then makes the resulting ‘sound’ known to you.
The eye. It is a physical apparatus that collects refracted light waves, and with a combination of chemical and electrical stimuli, feed the brain again, to make the resulting ‘colours’ and ‘shapes’ known to you.
The end result of seeing and hearing occurs within a pitch black almost sound-proof environment. Yet you hear music of many shades, and you see beauty with many voices.
The point is that the body is bordering on non-existent, and within that body, external stimuli are collected and interpreted and made known to ‘you’. What is you?
Some argue that ‘you’ is the thing that collects all the data and translates it into whatever it is that the thing can deal with and continue to interact with the outside environment. This feels very shallow to me.
Another argument is that ‘you’ is a spirit. Without a spirit ‘you’ don’t exist except as a blob of grey nothingness. ‘You’ cannot be your brain because it is encased in ‘black’ and ‘you’ could not see anything.
Some suggest that this is a powerful argument to demonstrate that the spirit is much more a reality than what is perceived as reality – the body.
What do you [no pun intended] think? If some form of the above is validated and accepted as a better way of thinking about the world [both epistemologically and in particular ontologically], then can this logic be further extended to prove the existence of a spirit God? Not after the fashion of Augustine with his imagining of God, but rather, in the way of giving full credit to the existence of some immaterial thing that God has created to give a human body a ‘self’ … a ‘you’. An eternal thing that is not decayed by its host.
If you expand an atom to the size of a football ground, you still cannot see the handful of neutrons and electrons whizzing around. An atom is 99.999% the absence of anything known. I have no doubt that should we do the same to a neutron, it too would consist of 99.999% absence of anything known.
Thus an atom consists of almost nothing physical. We don’t really know what colour this atom might be except some vague notion of empty translucent greyness.
The human body consists of trillions of these atoms. Thus the human body is 99.999% nothingness, with no colour. It is only by virtue of the differences in valency and other relationships and forces acting between atoms/molecules that the idea of boundary and relative permeability is observed. Put another way it is because the density/permeability of a piece of steel [itself consisting of the same nothingness with a different structure] is differentiated from the density/permeability of the human body that the two when pushed together do not become one.
The ear. It is a physical apparatus that detects movement in the medium, and translates that vibration into electric signals with different waves that the brain interprets, and then makes the resulting ‘sound’ known to you.
The eye. It is a physical apparatus that collects refracted light waves, and with a combination of chemical and electrical stimuli, feed the brain again, to make the resulting ‘colours’ and ‘shapes’ known to you.
The end result of seeing and hearing occurs within a pitch black almost sound-proof environment. Yet you hear music of many shades, and you see beauty with many voices.
The point is that the body is bordering on non-existent, and within that body, external stimuli are collected and interpreted and made known to ‘you’. What is you?
Some argue that ‘you’ is the thing that collects all the data and translates it into whatever it is that the thing can deal with and continue to interact with the outside environment. This feels very shallow to me.
Another argument is that ‘you’ is a spirit. Without a spirit ‘you’ don’t exist except as a blob of grey nothingness. ‘You’ cannot be your brain because it is encased in ‘black’ and ‘you’ could not see anything.
Some suggest that this is a powerful argument to demonstrate that the spirit is much more a reality than what is perceived as reality – the body.
What do you [no pun intended] think? If some form of the above is validated and accepted as a better way of thinking about the world [both epistemologically and in particular ontologically], then can this logic be further extended to prove the existence of a spirit God? Not after the fashion of Augustine with his imagining of God, but rather, in the way of giving full credit to the existence of some immaterial thing that God has created to give a human body a ‘self’ … a ‘you’. An eternal thing that is not decayed by its host.
