Naturalist Resources--A Short List Part 2

Last week on Thursday I published Part 1 of a list of resources for naturalists who are getting their feet wet in the subject, or who need further explanation. This is not going to be a "regular" Thursday feature. You won't see it again for several weeks, if ever. But tomorrow's blog, like yesterday's is about "free will vs. naturalism." That is a subject laden with pitfalls and dark corners and hidden doors. It won't be ready until tomorrow. Today, the list, Part 2.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is always a good place for good information. Its first two paragraphys under the heading "Naturalism" make clear the nature of the beast:

"The term ‘naturalism’ has no very precise meaning in contemporary philosophy. Its current usage derives from debates in America in the first half of the last century. The self-proclaimed ‘naturalists’ from that period included John Dewey, Ernest Nagel, Sidney Hook and Roy Wood Sellars. These philosophers aimed to ally philosophy more closely with science. They urged that reality is exhausted by nature, containing nothing ‘supernatural’, and that the scientific method should be used to investigate all areas of reality, including the ‘human spirit’ (Krikorian 1944, Kim 2003).
"So understood, ‘naturalism’ is not a particularly informative term as applied to contemporary philosophers. The great majority of contemporary philosophers would happily accept naturalism as just characterized—that is, they would both reject ‘supernatural’ entities, and allow that science is a possible route (if not necessarily the only one) to important truths about the ‘human spirit’." http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/naturalism/

The Secular Web is owned and operated by the Internet Infidels, Inc., a nonprofit educational organization dedicated to defending and promoting a naturalistic worldview on the Internet.

An apparent sister site, http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/nontheism/naturalism/ begins with its own short comparison between "metaphysical" and "methodological" naturalism, then lists a number of articles, all very much worth reading, under each heading.

(You will notice that where many "metaphysical" naturalists deny the existence of a "soul," and of "free will," this website takes the opposite view. See The Academy's Definition of "Strong" Naturalism in the left column.)

In addition, The Secular Web has one page devoted simply to listing all the names of the authors who have contributed to their site. The list is long, and impressive. http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/author.html They also have a Subject Index http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/index.html , and their own Library, which is another list http://www.infidels.org/library/

Freedom From Religion Foundation, http://www.ffrf.org/ , while not strictly a "naturalist" organization, has "more than 12,000 members, is the nation's largest association of freethinkers (atheists and agnostics). FFRF has been working since 1978 to promote freethought and to keep state and church separate.
"The Foundation promotes freedom from religion with a weekly national radio show, its newspaper Freethought Today, a freethought billboard campaign and other educational endeavors, including scholarships for freethinking students. In addition, the Foundation acts on countless violations of the separation of state and church, and has taken and won many significant complaints and important lawsuits to end state/church entanglements. No one has fought harder than FFRF to legally challenge the "faith-based initiative."

They have a billboard reading: "Keep Religion OUT of Politics." It is currently displayed in Denver and will remain there throughout the Democratic National Convention.

The Skeptics Dictionary http://www.skepdic.com/naturalism.html is like most other sites, attempting to explain the differences in the naturalistic points of view. It has a great number of live links to the various aspects of naturalism, then concludes that short section with this:

"The difference between mechanistic and teleological views may best be understood by considering a few examples," after which it lists the sex drive, bee pollination, pedophilia, What is the purpose of evil? teleology according to Spinoza, naturalistic worldview, and further reading.

The New Advent Catholic Encyclopedia http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/10713a.htm is a frequently used resource of mine. It is as objective as any reference, at least above the "blue line," where it merely defines the subject. Below the "blue line" is definitely the dogmatic version of the subject. But even having the dogma defined is often useful, and as dogma-defined goes, this Catholic reference is still objective, never preachy, merely saying what the Church says.

ALL ABOUT PHILOSOPHY.Org is obviously a theist organization, given that their only subtitle to "Naturalism" is "Improbable." http://www.allaboutphilosophy.org/naturalism.htm But they do a good job of explaining the "defeator" arguments against naturalism (see this Academy's blog 8.11-8.16.08.)

It is definately good to understand the defeator arguments. As this blog explained in that week, you are an "uninformed" naturalist, according to Dr. Quentin Smith, if you don't know how to defeat the defeators. In a sidebar, All About lists other "world views" like atheism, secular humanism, and existentialism, among many. Interesting reading for anyone wanting to understand "the other side."

"Defense of Naturalism" by Keith Augustine, is his "Thesis submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of theUniversity of Maryland, College Park in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree ofMaster of Arts 2001." http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/keith_augustine/thesis.html So if you are up to a long academic paper, this one is for you. It is also available at The Secular Web, listed above.


"An Atheist Fairy Tale" http://bevets.com/evolution.htm is a well-put-together and interesting commentary on the connection between atheism and evolution, with many attributions, but it seems to have no author. But for the sake of the good tale, here are the links to it:
Contents:
Evolutionism and Atheism
Common Objections
What is the evidence?
Intelligent Design
Theory or Fact?
Scientists and Bias
Evolutionism and Scripture
Consequences
Are Creationists Honest?
Audio Video
Links
Works Cited
It ends with this quote: "Evolutionism needs atheism needs evolutionism needs atheism needs evolutionism.Garbage in: Garbage out."


Another good argument for the "other side" is the PDF The Logical Underpinnings of Intelligent Design.

The Center for Naturalism and Naturalism.Org have a Yahoo group http://groups.yahoo.com/group/appliednaturalism/ If you feel like discussing the subject with an organization that has some of the best scientific minds behind it, this one is for you. There is no guarantee you will get answers from any of those scientific minds, but you could always address your questions to one of those parent websites. Or you could get into arguments with their members about whether or not humans have souls and free will.

"NATURALISM IS AN ESSENTIAL PART OFSCIENCE AND CRITICAL INQUIRY" by Steven D. Schafersman http://www.freeinquiry.com/naturalism.html was a "paper originally presented at the Conference on Naturalism, Theism and the Scientific Enterprise, sponsored by the Department of Philosophy, The University of Texas, Austin, Texas, February 20-23, 1997."

So, by clicking on that blue link to the conference, you automatically get ANOTHER resource. Don't you just love how the internet actually works?

"A Philosophical Premise of 'Naturalism'?" by Mark Isaak (another blue link) http://www.talkdesign.org/faqs/naturalism.html is published by Talkdesign.Org, http://www.talkdesign.org/cs/ which "is a response to the "Intelligent Design" movement of creationism. It is dedicated to: Assessing the claims of the Intelligent Design movement from the perspective of mainstream science. Addressing the wider political, cultural, philosophical, moral, religious, and educational issues that have inspired the ID movement. Providing an archive of materials that critically examine the scientific claims of the ID movement. We feel that the "Intelligent Design" arguments require this kind of focused attention due to their widespread use in antievolutionary activity."

Isaak's paper says, "we will see that the complaint about naturalism is applied unfairly to discredit only those parts of science that naturalism's critics oppose on ideological grounds."

Another of my favorite references for many things aside from naturalism is The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy http://www.iep.utm.edu/n/naturali.htm . I'm not certain, but I think there is an Objectivist or a neo-objectivist behind this resource.

Apex Naturalism http://apexnaturalism.org/ is an online magazine. On its About Page it says: "An apex is the top, peak or summit. Naturalism is a system of belief that proposes that all phenomena can be explained in terms of natural causes and laws. Thus Apex Naturalism means being dedicated to becoming the best Naturalist that we can be.
This inevitably means learning about ourselves, our naturalism and the world around us. This magazine is dedicated to that unending quest for wisdom and knowledge."

I just bookmarked that one for myself. It looks good.

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The Loss of Secularism in Naturalism, Part 3: The Rise of Realist Theism

Part 2 of this blog concerning the loss of secularity in the field of naturalism lead to Quentin Smith's contention that many committed naturalists do not understand even the false propositions about God.

"[A] problem with naturalist scientists," Smith writes in PHILO, http://www.philoonline.org/library/smith_4_2.htm "is that they are so innocent of any understanding of the philosophy of religion that they do not even know that they are innocent of this understanding, as it witnessed by their popular writings on science and religion."

This would, perhaps, appear to the "uninformed" naturalists to be condescending of their knowledge in their own field. Smith defines an "uninformed" naturalist as one who has an unjustified belief in his/her own subject field; "unjustified" because the uninformed academic is one who has ignorance of "defeater" arguments against naturalism. In other words, the arguments used by theists to counter the arguments of naturalism often contain logic which overwhelms and defeats the arguments of naturalism, to the degree that such arguments make naturalism appear to be the skeptical argument against theism.

This was not always the case, he says. Naturalism in its original form began with the Pre-Socratics, and in the middle ages, during the rise of theism, was used by theists precisely as the skeptical argument. This continued until the second half of the twentieth century, "when universities and colleges had been become in the main secularized."

From physics to psychology, arguments were for a naturalist world-view, where theology and religion in academia sought to understand the meaning and origins of religious writings, "not to develop arguments against naturalism."

Then, in 1967, Alvin Plantinga http://www.veritas-ucsb.org/library/plantinga/home.html of the U. of Notre Dame, published "God and other Minds," a realist-theist view of existence. Until then, says Smith, realist theists kept their theism out of their work partially because theism, especially in its realist manifestation, was thought contain such low epistemic value that the standards of an "academically respectable" position to hold were missing.

The Pre-Socratic original forms of naturalism held sway until the theistic influences of Plotinus and Augustine. Plantinga then "defeated" naturalism in its modern form with his realist theist arguments, concretizing naturalism as the skeptical attitude toward theism, as the medeivals had made it, rather than, as Smith says it ought to be, "the philosophy of religion as a subfield of naturalism, viz. skepticism about naturalism." In other words, the "philosophy of religion," not religion itself, ought to be the skeptical attitude toward naturalism.

Plantinga's success then opened the door for other theists, realist and otherwise, to begin de-secularizing the science of knowledge that, whether "of theology or religion aimed to understand the meaning and origins of religious writings, not to develop arguments against naturalism." [Smith]

Smith makes it clear that his paper is not the time or place to rehash the history of what the Greeks believed, but his paper is meant for reading by better scholars than may be reading this blog. For the purposes of information, and to familiarize my readers with the ideas of the Greeks, these short descriptions are included before I go on. Smith's list of contributors is longer than the list I present here.

1. Leucippus: (a. 450 B.C.) developed the principle that all qualitative differences in nature may be reduced to quantitative ones; he distributes these through infinite space. These small particles of "Being" are separated from one another by that which is not-Being, i.e. by empty space. "Becoming", or the coming into being of things, is essentially the result of the motion of these atoms in space and their accidental coming together.

2. Democritus : (c 460-360 B.C.) developed the first important materialist philosophy of nature, unless we are to count that of Leucippus. His influence was transmitted by Lucretius' poem till the centuries of the Renaissance when scholars' attention began to turn toward the study of nature. He taught that all substance consists of atoms, that is, of indivisible and imperceptibly small particles.

3. Empedocles: about 490-430 B.C.E. attempted to reconcile the teaching of the permanence of Being of the Eleatics with the experience of change and motion as emphasized by Heraclitus. and therefore of the mixings of the elements. He was thus led to introduce a theory of value into the explanation of Nature.

4. Anaximander: (6th Cent. B.C.) With Thales and Anaximenes he formed the Milesian School of Greek Philosophy; with these and the other thinkers of the cosmological period he sought the ground of the manifold processes of nature in a single world-principle or cosmic stuff which he identified with "the Infinite". He was the first to step out of the realm of experience and ascribed to his "Infinite" the attributes of eternity, imperishability and inexhaustability.

5. Anaximenes: (6th Cent. B.C.) sought a cosmic material element which would explain the manifold processes of the natural world and declared this to be air. Air, he felt, had the attribute of Infinity which would account for the varieties of nature more readily than water, which his predecessor Thales had postulated.

6. Heraclitus: 536-470 B.C. held that there is nothing abiding in the world. All things and the universe as a whole are in constant, ceaseless flux, nothing is, only change is real, all is a continuous passing away. Heraclitus thus foreshadowed the modern conception of the uniformity of natural law.

7. That uniformity principle states that what happens once in nature will, under a sufficient degree of similarity of circumstances, happen again and as often as the same circumstances recur.
[1-7 are condensed from the "Dictionary of Philosophy," Runes, 1942. http://www.ditext.com/runes/index.html 1-7 are not intended to be an exhaustive list either of the Pre-Socratic contributors to naturalism, nor to the descriptions of their contributions. Better, exhaustive descriptions of their contributions can be found in many places on the web, if not in books, which are my own favorite means of gathering information. But as I do not live at the library, I make do with the internet!]

The medievals reduction of naturalism may not have been deliberate. Smith does not make it clear what the intentions of Augustine and Plotinus were, but says that reduction of the high esteem for naturalism still prevails today in the modern form of naturalism, i.e., the naturalism of the modern secular scholar is not the naturalism of the Pre-Socratics. It prevails today especially in the "uninformed" naturalist who holds the "the unjustifed belief," rather than the belief that is justified by being "informed" of the arguments of the theists, arguments that defeat the "uninformed" arguments.

One cannot, in an argument, turn to defeat the theist unless he/she is in informed of the arguments used by the theist which attemtp to defeat the naturalist world view. Such a defeat is possible, Smith contends. He outlines four goals for the informed scholar by which naturalism may be retrieved "from its de facto reclassification by medieval philosophers."

It is imperative that naturalists take back the field, reversing the roles of the naturalist and theist to the roles given them by the Greeks, not to the de facto reclassified naturalism of the modern scholar. Smith lays out four very major tasks for the informed naturalists, tasks which will reverse the concretization of naturalism as the handmaiden of today's desecularized realist theist role the humanities.

For example, naturalism ought not appear as an objection to arguments for God’s existence, objections to theism such that God's existence is based on natural reason; "natural reason" should be the default position, and all other philosophies of religions would then become skeptical objections to naturalism.

Smith's Four Goals of the Informed Naturalist will be closely examined tomorrow.

A direct link to PHILO, The Center for Inquiry, and Purdue University is in the left column of this website.

Please send all comments to mailto:freeassemblage@gmail.com
The Free Assemblage of Metaphysical Naturalists is the sm (service mark) of the Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism tm, which is the educational arm of the Assemblage.
This publication © 2008 by Curtis Edward Clark and Naturalist Academy Publishing ®

The Big Question of Existence

What “Exists”?
“Existence” is often referred to as the "Universal Truth.” It is common for people to ask, “What is truth?” or “What is reality?” They are asking about Existence, the Big Question.
Cartoons depict people climbing to the top of a mountain to consult a “wise man,” to get the answer to a question that is burning in their minds. The comic strip B.C.1 integrated the “wise man” right into the prehistoric era of man, where the “wise men of mysticism,” Socrates and Plato, belong.

Often when asking about the “Big Question” it is with the expectation that a secret and mystic explanation will be given, and that perhaps it will be years before they can “divine” what the wise man told them is “the answer to the universe.” (That is why the mystics belong in the pre-history of philosophy.

But more than likely they harbor the wish that they, too, will comprehend this secret and divine or mystic explanation in one single lecture, in a revelatory moment. Sometimes, as with “Yahweh,” a single word which if spoken would do something. There are those who even say that word, when spoken correctly, will destroy the world.
People who ask about reality or facts don't always understand that they, too, are asking about existence. Existence is the universal preoccupation of our intellectual lives, because we not only want to know, “Where did it come from?” but it is the cognoscenti of our intellect. It is the object for which our consciousness pines and on which it is inextricably linked—cognoscenti are objects. Our consciousness is the subject of those objects.
When the Big Question is not phrased as "What is reality?" or "How do I know I exist?" or "Isn't the whole world subjective?", or “What exists and what does not?”, then, the Big Question is provoked of us in the angry, defiant tone of the indignant statement "Prove that I exist!"

Yes, people actually get angry about logic, and demand that someone talke them out of their irrationally induced life of skepticism. More often than not the Big Question is yet another but equal statement, “Prove God does not exist.”

Knowledge of what exists and what does not has become smudged and greyed when “existence” comes to be seen as “perceptions”. Don't you often hear the question, “Is reality our perceptions?” [continued]
[1Johnny Hart; http://lambiek.net/artists/h/hart.htm ]

[continued] The lines of knowing what exists and what does not have been blurred, sometimes erased altogether. A person can be convinced that the ego is necessarily egotistical; that nothing one does in life can have any meaning because “in the end we all die”; and that being “dust in the wind” has some significance to the life one must lead.
They can be convinced there is the possibility the sun won't rise in the morning, that the dog who got out won't get hit by a car, so they don't worry or hurry, then the dog gets hit, proving the human is flawed because he has been convinced of that (Kant) or because he wants to be convinced of that. Sketpicism has convinced him he cannot be right because there is the possiblity that he his not right.
Those two concepts of being “dust in the wind” and “in the end we all just die anyway” are the most skeptical arguments for un-reason in today's verbal arsenal on existence. Those questions have a lot of people flummoxed. What is the purpose of following a principled life if in the end you just wind up dead? We will get to the answer.

Consciousness and “Existents” Must Exist
But this concept of existence itself is not possible to comprehend without consciousness, and that very fact as a thing in itself implies the existence of at least one one thing in existence: consciousness. If one thing exists in existence, it becomes the proof of the existence of existence. That is how a tautology works, and why it must work. It cannot be defeated without at least one unworkable concept going to its grave, or another one proving to work right along it. Aristotle out; Copernicus and Galileo in.

(You can also say this is the time that traditional metaphysics went to its grave, because Aristotle out means his metaphysics. In came physics, standing alone in the mind of one man, and his metaphysics were different from Aristotle's. It was modernly cosmological, and ever since the cosmology of astro-physics has become more remote from its roots. I met a cosmologist in his office on a university campus, where he proceeded to call ideas of metaphysics other than those of physics to be “Bunk!”

“Science was born as a result and consequence of philosophy; it cannot survive without a philosophical (particularly epistemological) base. If philosophy perishes, science will be next to go,” wrote Ayn Rand, in “For the New Intellectual.”
In her “Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology,” she writes, “It is not the special sciences that teach man to think; it is philosophy that lays down the epistemological criteria of all special sciences.”
http://www.aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/science.html

The "universal truth" is the following: "Existence exists." It is also equally as true that “Existents exist”, and neither statement can be true without the other also being true.
Existents (noun) are any thing and all things that exist, have existed, and can exist. From the “strings” in string theory—even if strings are someday proved not to exist, they still exist as ideas—to the spaghetti on your plate and the plate under the spaghetti.
Ideas are existents because they have existence in the mind. Rocks and gas, and muons, and Harry Potter, trolls and fairies and elves are existents, if not in empirical, “material” reality, then at least as subjective reality, i.e., concepts, in our heads. Concepts are subjective existents. Spaghetti is an objective existent. Spaghetti the idea is a subjective existent.

An “existent” is anything that exists; therefore, existents exit in existence.

Proof of the correctness of this statement is as follows;
If: existence did not exist, You would—could not—exist in any form, not as an independent objective existent in an independent, objective, empirical universe;
nor as a subjective existent in someone's mind or in the “godhead” or as figment within another mind;
nor as an existent in Your own mind whether or not you believed Your mind was the only existent in existence.

(To be existent in Your own mind, and to argue that all other things in existence are created by Your consciousness is called “Solipsism.” This is also called the Primacy of Consciousness.1 But it is a fallacy, having no basis in empirical reality. It still requires the acknowledgment that at least one thing, Your consciousness, is an existent. Solipsism is sometimes the reason for asking “IF a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, does it still make a sound?”; with the resultant answer, “No, because a 'sound' is something heard, and if you were not there to create the falling tree it could not fallen in the first place.2

(I have seen the question asked—more than once—“If I die, or close my eyes, does the world cease to exist?”)

If existence did not exist, You, in any form whatsoever would not exist because there would be no existents whatever. In what medium can an existent such as "consciousness" exist except in the medium of existence? Even if we discovered that the only existence is in “the godhead,” at least one thing would exist. Certainly nothing can be an existent in the absence of existence.

The "axiomatic concept"3 that "existence exists" began at least no later than Aristotle, who used it as formulaic. The formula "A is A" means literally that a “thing” cannot be something else. To Aristotle it means first and foremost that [continued]

[[1Ayn Rand: “Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology”
[2This is not even the true meaning of the question, but for most people that meaning has been lost or never found. We will examine that Q&A in Chapter &.
[3“An axiomatic concept is the identification of a primary fact of reality, which cannot be analyzed, i.e., reduced to other facts or broken into component parts....all other concepts, all axioms, propositions and thought—consists of axiomatic concepts.” Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology; Ayn Rand; © The Objectivist, Inc. http://www.aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/axiomaticconcepts.html ]]


[continued] Existence exists.”

The Axiomatic Concept (see Note 3 above) becomes “Just” an Axiom.
The first “A” in the formula is any “object” you want to put in the formula; the second “A” is its non-contradictory identity, called the “subject,” no matter which “identity” one chooses as the subject.
For example, Man can be identified as “an upright primate with opposable thumbs”; or as “the animal with grammatical and syntactic vocal patterns, or as “the rational animal.” None of these description contradicts what we know “Man” is, but the first two descriptions are more general as differentia than the second, which is more particular. (Differentia is the difference between two or more things. The cagegory the two or more things are in are called a genus.) They do not contradict each other, but the identity of “rational animal” supersedes any other description because it is the most particular of all the descriptions of “Man.”
The “most particular definition” of a thing is found in the “axiom”1. And that “most particular definition” is called the “essence” of a thing.“Rational animal” is the ultimate, most particular definition of the concept “Man.” The “essence” of a thing is always contextual. The “essence” of the concept “latch” can be either a thing that keeps something else, like a door, closed; or it can mean to secure something like a door with that thing called a “latch.” One is a noun; one is a verb. But if you are talking about “latching” on to a husband, the meaning of the verb again changes. There is no contradiction in these differences, because in each case we are not talking about the same thing.
But in the case of the question, “What is the essence of Homo sapiens?”, it can only be “the rational animal” because Bigfoot walks upright also, but we don't know if he is rational, yet we know that the only known rational animal is Man.
Existence in Metaphysics2 and in Epistemology3 See Chapter $"Existence exists" is the epistemological axiomatic concept ; "existents exist" is the metaphysical axiomatic concept. This means it cannot be said that “existence” does not exist; and it cannot be said that existents do not exist. To say either one, is to deny that whatever means by which you comprehend such things and come to deny them also does not exist!
These axiomatic concepts have, therefore, been argued if not utilized by all [continued]

[[1 “An axiom is a statement that identifies the base of knowledge and of any further statement pertaining to that knowledge, a statement necessarily contained in all others, whether any particular speaker chooses to identify it or not. An axiom is a proposition that defeats its opponents by the fact that they have to accept it and use it in the process of any attempt to deny it.” Galt's Speech; “For the New Intellectual”; Ayn Rand http://www.aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/axioms.html
[2 “Metaphysics” is the identification of the “essence” of a thing, as well as all the constituent identities, and whether or not they exist in the first place. And if one is found to exist, like “Goldilocks”, only in the mind and literature, but not in empirical physics, its placement in the importance of all things metaphysical may be low. All things metaphysical have a placement in a hierarchy of values that your mind determines. Your spouse would probably come before Goldilocks, your dog before your shoes.
[3 “Epistemology” is the method by which identifications are discovered, identified, and verified as true or real. It is a hard-wired faculty of the mind, ready at birth to go to work identifying the new world, just as the lungs are ready to go to work breathing. But neither faculty works until birth. ]]


[continued] philosophers, and none disagrees, at least by default, that existence exists because it would require the statement that "existents do not exist."
As axiomatic concepts, they are the given, the self-evident, and describe all things that have existed, exist now, and ever will exist. Therefore, since no philosopher can disagree that existence does not exist, even if he acknowledges it with Solipsism, all must agree that existence cannot never have existed, at the risk of contradicting that .
The Default Position on Creation Non-existence is not the "default position" to argue from. Creationists make it the default position. But why should it be said that at one time God was the only existent?
To argue this default position is to contradict the axiomatic definition of the word "existence", not to mention contradicting the axiom of physics that states that matter does not cease to exist, it only changes forms. God had to make Creation out of things that already existed, because the matter he used never disappears. (If you don't believe in God, it's OK; this is just a sidebar.)
Since matter, according to the accepted laws of physics, does not cease to exist, it must always exist in the future and cannot have been created or it cannot have always had the nature of being existent. If we admit that God exists, we must also admit that he used material in the Creation that exhibits the physics of not ever having been non-existant.
That goes directly back to the concept that the "absence of existents" is not the default position. The "absence" of a thing is not the existence of the absence of a thing. "Absence" of existence cannot be an "existent."It is from these axiomatic concepts that all other concepts, axioms, propositions and thoughts are derived.Axiomatic concepts are the most particularized definition (denotation) of existents. The concept “existence” is derived from the perception of “existents,” the very fact of which proves that at least one this exists in existence, even if that one thing is the consciousness of a Solipsist.

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