Owens Tryptic of Ignorance

I hold this to be an original device of my own invention.

This could be formed as an argument about the nature of the universe; however, we can expand it to include anything that exists outside of the universe (for example a multiverse, or a multiverse of multiverses) such that we could label it as a description of what is, or "reality" itself.

Form

Reality is necessarily infinite, finite, or something else.
I cannot understand:
1. An infinite regression of past events. Why should such a reality exist?
2. A finite reality, with a prior or post-reality state, from which nothing could come. Why should such a reality exist?
3. Something that is neither infinite nor finite and is itself a third state of being. I don't even understand what this could be.
I do not and cannot understand reality.

Use

The point of the tryptic is that my incomprehension is total and even-handed. I cannot understand an infinite past, but I cannot understand a finite one either, so the fact that an infinite past is hard to imagine (Hilbert's Hotel) is no reason to prefer a finite one and the creator that is supposed to come with it. Incomprehension is not evidence (Personal Incredulity). The honest answer to "why is there something rather than nothing?" is that I do not know, and neither does anyone else; "God" is a label for the gap, not an explanation of it (Appeal to Ignorance).

Also see

Linked from

Infinite regress

The First Cause Argument, Prime Mover Argument, and Kalam Cosmological Argument all rest on the premise that an infinite regress of causes is impossible. I do not think this is shown. There is no logical contradiction in an infinite past,…

Personal Incredulity

The limit of my imagination is a fact about me, not about the world. This is the point of Owens Tryptic of Ignorance: I cannot understand an infinite past, a finite one, or any third option, and that incomprehension is evidence of nothing.

Hilbert's Hotel

It shows no such thing. The hotel is counter-intuitive, not contradictory. Mathematics handles infinite sets without inconsistency (Georg Cantor's work on transfinite numbers predates Hilbert's hotel by forty years), and the "absurdities"…

Panpsychism

Premise (b) is the whole dispute, and it is asserted rather than shown. "Experience cannot arise from the non-experiential" has exactly the form of "life cannot arise from the non-living" and "the properties of a compound cannot arise from…

Physicalism and Materialism

What the alternatives have in common. Each of the rivals begins from the same observation, that it is hard to see how experience could be physical, and each builds an ontology to house the difficulty. Dualism adds a second substance or a s…

Deism

What it was. Deism was the position of much of the Enlightenment: Thomas Paine's The Age of Reason, Voltaire, Jefferson, who cut the miracles out of his New Testament with a razor. The deists accepted the argument from design, because befo…

God

Owens Tryptic of Ignorance

Argument from Contingency

The argument, like its relatives, trades on the Appeal to Ignorance: we cannot say why there is something rather than nothing, therefore God. I do not know why the universe exists, and I see no reason to think that the question has an answ…

Argument from Existential Dependence

I do not know what, if anything, is fundamental. I see no reason to believe the fundamental thing is continuously propping up the non-fundamental things, and no reason to call it God if it were (Owens Tryptic of Ignorance).

Argument from Scientific Discoverability

Evolution predicts the pattern exactly. Our intuitions are reliable about medium-sized objects moving at medium speeds, and fail for the very small, the very fast, the very large, and the probabilistic, which is where evolution had no need…

Argument from the Principle of Sufficient Reason

I do not know why there is something rather than nothing. I see no reason to think the question has an answer of the kind the argument wants, and I decline to let my incomprehension be used as evidence (Owens Tryptic of Ignorance, Appeal t…

Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism

Reliability is not all or nothing, and the pattern of our unreliability is what evolution predicts. Our faculties are good at medium-sized objects, faces, and social threat, and bad at probability, large numbers, the very small, and anythi…

Fine-Tuning Argument

This is, I think, the most interesting of the design arguments, and the one where "we do not know" is the honest answer on all sides. I decline to let that ignorance be entered as evidence (Owens Tryptic of Ignorance).

First Cause Argument

Rejection of premise 2. An infinite regress may be coherent. There is no logical contradiction in an infinite past, any more than in the infinite sequence of negative integers. The intuition that it is impossible is an intuition, not an ar…

Kalam Cosmological Argument

Infinite regress is not necessarily impossible. Craig argues that an actual infinite cannot exist, but mathematics handles actual infinities without contradiction, and the "absurdities" he cites (Hilbert's Hotel) are counter-intuitive, not…

Religious Apologetics

Owens Tryptic of Ignorance

Substrate Independence

Why the belief in a special material is so natural. It is the same move I describe under Souls: the brain models the self as a thing that has a body, so a thing is what people go looking for. The intuition that "mere" computation cannot fe…

World View

Incomprehension is not evidence. That I cannot understand an infinite past, or how matter gives rise to experience, tells you about me, not about the world (Owens Tryptic of Ignorance).