From billc@minerva.phyast.pitt.edu Tue Jan 17 19:34:44 EST 1995
Article: 149285 of alt.atheism
Path: newsfeed.pitt.edu!minerva!billc
From: billc@minerva.phyast.pitt.edu (Morbius)
Newsgroups: alt.atheism,talk.philosophy.misc,talk.religion.misc
Subject: Re: The future
Date: 18 Jan 1995 00:21:35 GMT
Organization: Department of Physics & Astronomy, University of Pittsburgh

In article <3feq7a$mru@senator-bedfellow.MIT.EDU> buehler@sybil.mit.edu (Royce Buehler) writes:
>My definition would be "A is the cause of the fact that B exists." This
>formulation is atemporal.

These statements exemplify exactly what is wrong with your arguments.
Causality is not atemporal.In fact, Causality is simply a consequence
of the Poincare group of spacetime symmetries which equations of motion
in physics must satisfy, so causality is meaningless outside of
space-time, or a metaspace-metatime. If you wish to use this concept
of causality outside of its domain of validity then you must define
it there, just as the Poincare symmetry defines it in space-time. In
other words, you must show how an event A can "cause" an event B when
neither A nor B is in a space-time. You must do the same for the other
verbs you have used, such as created or jumped. Otherwise, you will
be talking nonsense when you use the space-time definition of causality
in the sentence "God is the cause of the fact that time exists." Just
because you can say it does not mean that it makes sense, anymore than
the sentence "a circle has exactly four corners" makes sense with the
usual definitions of circle and corner .


-Morbius