Helmut, List: Peirce simply says "antecedent state" in his Logic Notebook entry, but I take him to mean a *logically *antecedent state because of his contemporaneous remark that *Ens necessarium* "has its being out of time" (CP 6.490, 1908). After all, time *itself *is an aspect of our existing universe, so the *Ens necessarium* must have been real "before" time to *create *time, even if it extends to the *infinite *past such that the universe "had no definite beginning," as Peirce was inclined to think (CP 6.506, c. 1906). "The idea of time must be employed in arriving at the conception of logical consecution; but the idea once obtained, the time-element may be omitted, thus leaving the logical sequence free from time" (CP 1.491, c. 1896). Accordingly, "temporal succession is a mirror of, or framework for, logical sequence" (CP 1.497).
Genesis 1:1-2 states, "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void [*tohu wa bohu*]." A straightforward reading of this is that God created the entire universe (including time) from absolutely nothing (no pre-existing "stuff"), and its initial state was chaos. Peirce himself writes, "The state of things in the infinite past is chaos, tohu bohu, the nothingness of which consists in the total absence of regularity" (CP 8.317, 1891); quoting verse 2, "*tohu wabohu, terra inanis et vacua* is the indeterminate germinal Nothing" (NEM 4:138, 1897-8); and "In that state of absolute nility, in or out of time, that is, before or after the evolution of time, there must then have been a tohu bohu of which nothing whatever affirmative or negative was true universally. There must have been, therefore, a little of everything conceivable" (CP 6.490). Here are a couple of other relevant passages. CSP: We start, then, with nothing, pure zero. But this is not the nothing of negation. For *not *means *other than*, and *other *is merely a synonym of the ordinal numeral *second*. As such it implies a first; while the present pure zero is prior to every first. The nothing of negation is the nothing of death, which comes *second *to, or after, everything. But this pure zero is the nothing of not having been born. There is no individual thing, no compulsion, outward nor inward, no law. It is the germinal nothing, in which the whole universe is involved or foreshadowed. As such, it is absolutely undefined and unlimited possibility--boundless possibility. There is no compulsion and no law. It is boundless freedom. So of *potential *being there was in that initial state no lack. Now the question arises, what necessarily resulted from that state of things? But the only sane answer is that where freedom was boundless nothing in particular necessarily resulted. (CP 6.217-218, 1898) If we are to explain the universe, we must assume that there was in the beginning a state of things in which there was nothing, no reaction and no quality, no matter, no consciousness, no space and no time, but just nothing at all. Not determinately nothing. For that which is determinately not *A* supposes the being of *A* in some mode. Utter indetermination. But a symbol alone is indeterminate. Therefore, Nothing, the indeterminate of the absolute beginning, is a symbol. That is the way in which the beginning of things can alone be understood. (EP 2:322, c. 1901) Peirce's "nothing" was devoid of determinate *existence* but teeming with indeterminate *possibility*, "a little of everything conceivable," from which "nothing in particular *necessarily *resulted." As I have suggested before, God as *Ens necessarium*, eternal pure mind, imagines an inexhaustible continuum (3ns) of real possibilities and their combinations (1ns), and exercises perfect freedom in choosing which of these to actualize (2ns). Regards, Jon Alan Schmidt - Olathe, Kansas, USA Structural Engineer, Synechist Philosopher, Lutheran Christian www.LinkedIn.com/in/JonAlanSchmidt / twitter.com/JonAlanSchmidt On Fri, Sep 20, 2024 at 3:44 PM Helmut Raulien <[email protected]> wrote: > > Jon, List, > > is there a proof, that " logical antedescent" must mean temporal > antedescent? Only then your conclusion at the end of your post is correct. > The start is a boundary condition, and looking at them always helps to > judge hypotheses. If at the beginning there was no universe, only God, then > at this starting point classical theism fits. But what if there never was > nothing? Then God is not the temporal creator, but still the logical > creator. But never without something, immanent or not- but not immanent > would mean more logical problems, than immanent. Even in the bible a > temporal state of nothingness is not mentioned, just "vast and empty", of > which some say, that that is a mistranslation of "Tohuvabohu", which rather > would mean chaos. I guess, chaos can be understood for a logical starting > point boundary condition for evolution. To see it as a termporal starting > point too, might be just a human attempt of reverse engineering due to > experience. People migrate to a place, where stones ly randomly around, and > build a house with them. I only want to say, that we should not use > premisses, which we cannot prove, for refuting anything. Even if the big > bang would be proved, there couldn´t be a proof, that it came out of > nothing. > > Best regards, Helmut >
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