Ham said: ...In addition to avoiding the illogic of a universe created from chaos or nothingness, a philosophy founded on Essence as the primary source can rationally account for the "how" and "why" of all these matters. What non-faith-based answers are offered in the MoQ? ..Another home run for Essentialism.
dmb says: If this primary source transcends experiential reality, then it's unknowable. How is it rational to offer an unknowable as the explanation of the how and the why of anything? And who said the universe was created? Or that it was created out of nothingness? Yes, it's illogically to claim that something came from nothing but you seem to be in a debate with medieval theologians, not MOQers. Radical Empiricism says that we have to account for every kind of experience and that we can say nothing about that which is outside of experience. The latter would preclude things like your essence precisely because it transcends experiential reality. The radical empiricist would take that as pure fiction, pure speculation. Even if it did provide an explanation for one mystery, it introduces an even bigger mystery. I mean the hows and why of its origin is not explained by simply calling it uncreated. Why not just say the universe itself is uncreated, that it evolves and expands but it didn't come into existence out of nothing. I mean, the big bang theory says the universe began to unfold from a tiny point but there is no claim about nothingness being the prior condition of reality. That's just a concept, the opposite of something. In normal use it makes sense to say I have "nothing" in my hand or "nothing" in my pocket but when you crank the notion up and posit some sort of metaphysical, absolute nothingness it becomes nonsense. Even if such a thing were possible, we couldn't know it because you'd have to be there to experience it and then there'd be something, namely you, the witness of this so-called nothingness. I mean, one can use unimpeachable logic and still come out very wacky if the starting premise is off. Solving the riddle of nothingness would be one of those. _________________________________________________________________ Windows Live™ Hotmail®:…more than just e-mail. http://windowslive.com/explore?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_t2_hm_justgotbetter_explore_022009 Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
