Discussion with Aaron the Agnostic

May 18, 2009

• Don and Brandon talk to caller Aaron about whether or not you can approach a topic like the resurrection without some presuppositions about the nature of reality.

Comments

[Josh]

I found this episode pretty interesting. I'm a Christian, although recently I've begun to study atheism in ways I never have before, and have found some of the arguments compelling. Not enough that I would ever consider ceasing belief in Christ, but compelling enough that I understand where they're coming from (which I think is a good thing, because it means I know how to approach religious discussions with them better).

I was thinking, after listening to this episode, about applying mathematics to the concept of meaning, especially since your guest had some difficulty understanding your point about it.

Basically, I was thinking about it like this: imagine a girl who has cancer. We know that we can cure it, but it will be incalculably expensive. Imagine that the cost is actually the value of all human-placed meaning in the world (as in, each person puts as much value as they can on the girl, and only that can cure her). Imagine if everyone did. We'd have, as a base value, about 7-8 billion units of 'value' or 'meaning'. So, we can say that when each person gives all their meaning/value (that is possible for them) to something, it was 1 unit of meaning or value.

Now, imagine that over the course of all the history of the world until the death of the sun that we have 100 trillion people. That's 100 trillion units of meaning. Spread that across a billion years and you have a quantity of meaning per year. Basically, this says that each year has so much value based on all human meaning placed on it.

The next logical step is to suggest that we try to apply meaning per year based on an eternal timescale (well, eternal in one direction at least, moving in the direction of eternal heat death for the universe). We are effectively saying X / Infinity, where X is the the total meaning human beings can ever have. Its a really simple calculus situation where we can say that effectively, X doesn't exist because anything less than infinity compared with infinity is effectively 0.

In that sense, it doesn't seem to me that we can say anything -ever- has meaning, especially objectively, because for an infinitely long amount of time in comparison, it will have none (and thus, we can say effectively it doesn't have any now and never could).

I'm still fleshing out this idea, but I think its just another approach to what you guys were trying to get across.

God Bless