F... "Everything Happens for a Reason"

[cpayne5]

Originally Posted by Schneed10

I know you didn't say anything about change. I did.

If you know everything, and can mathematically predict exactly how everything is going to react with each other, then you can do something to make any reaction happen that you want.

For example, we don't know everything about medicine. But we do know some things. For instance, we know what causes the flu. It's a virus. We know how it attacks our body and we know how it chemically multiplies. Because we know this, we were able to create a vaccine to prevent the flu from attacking our body. The knowledge of the flu enabled us to prevent it.

We also now know enough about genetics to be able to clone animals. We know how cells multiply and that if you use the same genetic code, you can recreate an exact copy of an organism. So what do we do with that knowledge? We clone cows and chickens for sale in our grocery store.

Now imagine we know EVERYTHING and can predict all human behavior in all instances, as well as all animal behavior in all instances. With that knowledge, we can intervene all we want, and make any reaction happen that we want. We'd essentially be all-powerful, exercising our own free will over anything we chose.

The story may be all laid out for us. But we'd be able to read it all. And we'd be able to rewrite the story in any way we see fit.

No. You're not understanding what I'm saying, yet.

All of this is a logical IFF, btw, dependent upon the existence of no God/Creator.

If we are nothing more than physical beings composed of physical matter, then we are nothing more. We cannot rewrite anything. We cannot learn anything. We do not have a free will. We cannot predict. We can do nothing on our own. We are simply compositions of matter and the resulting actions or reactions of said matter. Nothing more.

If everything is guided by physics and the properties of every building block to the universe is constant, then there is one and only one course of action all matter can take. Everything is dependent upon everything else (because everything influences everything, according to physics, correct?). There are no forks in the road. None. Zip. Zilch. Nada.

Disclaimer - Again, I do not believe this. I'm just saying that if our world (not only Earth, but WORLD) is nothing more than a physical world, then this is how I believe it would be governed.