Monday, September 2, 2013

Are You a Clear Thinker?

Do you perceive reality as it really is? Do you ever make assumptions? Do you think you understand what needs to be understood? Try these:


  1. You are a participant in a race. You overtake the second person. What position are you in?
  1. Mary´s father has five daughters. Their names are: 1. Nana, 2. Nene, 3. Nini, 4. Nono and ??  What is the name of the fifth daughter?
  1. A cup and a teapot costs $110. The teapot costs $100 more than the cup.  How much is the cup?
  1. In a lake, there is a patch of lily pads. Every day, the patch doubles in size. If it takes 48 days for the patch to cover the entire lake, how long would it take for the patch to cover half of the lake?
  1. Note: This next one must be done in your head only -- do NOT write it down.
Take 1000 and add:
40;
1000;
30;
1000;
20;
1000;
and 10.
What is the new total?

  1. A woman was going home. She turned the corner and saw a masked man.  She knew she would not get home. Who was the masked man?

ANSWERS:
  1. Second position. Normally, being in front of the second person means you are first, but only if the second person remains in second. As it is, overtaking the second person puts that person in third and you in second.
  1. The answer is Mary. When we see a pattern we tend to assume its relevance. In this case, the pattern of A,E,I,O,U is irrelevant.
  1. The answer is $5. You may have subconsciously assumed that the teapot was $100. You may have also assumed “simplicity”, something like this, “x + $100 = $110”. But it’s a bit more complex. It’s really like this:
x + (x+$100) = $110
2x + $100 = $110
2x = $10
x = $5
So cup is $5 and the tea pot is $105 for a total of $110. The tea pot is $100 more than the cup.



  1. Here complexity might be assumed, as if this were a complex math problem. The answer is just 47 days. Think about it for a while.
  1. The correct answer is 4,100. Did you get 5,000? The decimal sequence confuses our brain. You may have unconsciously jumped from 4,090 to 5,000.
  1. The answer is “the catcher”. This is a coed softball game and a woman is turning the corner at third base. She knows she will be tagged out by the catcher and will not make it to home plate. You would have no way to know all this if it was not revealed to you (like some aspects of faith), but what assumptions did you make trying to solve the riddle? The masked man was a criminal? The corner was a street corner? Home meant the place where she lived?


    Don’t feel bad; we need to make assumptions to survive everyday life. As I eat I assume that my food is not poisoned, although I have no evidence. As I drive through a green light, I assume the cross traffic will remain stopped, although I have no proof. The key is to have an awareness of our assumptions and realize that sometimes our intuition can hurt us and lead to a bad assumption gap. Whether consciously or subconsciously, once you make an assumption, the gap between what you think and reality can get further and further apart. This applies to matters of faith as well.



    Our souls (will & intellect) are damage by sin, therefore the will is weakened and the intellect is dimmed in regard to the things of God. Another (not so nice) way to say this is that sin makes us spiritually stupid & lazy when left to our own uninformed (or unformed) assumptions, intuition or conscience. The resulting thinking gaps divide us from God and from each other like bottomless chasms, but Truth brings unity and Christ is Truth itself. In Luke 12:49-53 Jesus spoke of coming to “divide”, but He came to divide us from whatever divides us from Him. He came to close the gaps. In order to actualize this however, we must be separated from our faulty ways of thinking.



    In a week or so I’ll post examples from my own faith journey that are all too familiar, and can help to understand bad assumption gaps in matters of faith. Once you start with a bad premise, the gap between what you think and reality can grow at an alarming rate.



    The riddles above are courtesy of a “thinking” company called Kepner-Trego that consults for the company I work for.

    46 comments:

    1. The bad assumption gap is an interesting concept. It shows once you apply logic and look at the evidence that you will get the true answer. The evidence shows me there is no god and that is why I am an atheist. This is not based on a bad assumption but following the evidence as illustrated in your example with the logic test.

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      1. Hi Christian,
        You’re bad assumption is that all the evidence you “see” represents all that reality is. Sort of like riddle #6.
        Peace.

        Delete
      2. Of course reality is what we see. What is outside of reality is beyond testing unless it influences the reality in which we exist. If this is the case (eg. God answering prayer) then we can test the hypothesis. If we test the prayer hypothesis we see that it does not work, so the assumption of something outside our reality fails.

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      3. Christian,

        I think that will give you an incomplete view of reality. For example, you yourself cannot see infrared electromagnetic waves. Since you believe in only what you "see" then you MUST conclude they do not exist.

        Does that mean, before instrumentation for IR waves existed, those kinds of waves did not? Of course not. Humanity just were unaware of their existence. The fact is that they had an incomplete view of reality. Certain evidence was not correctly understood until they could detect and subsequently understand the IR waves.

        We have an effect that cannot be explained by ANY POSSIBLE physical explanation, such as the physical universe itself. One need not go directly to God, one must at the least acknowledge a non-physical cause. If so, then empirical science that can only test physical data would be helpless to explore that reality.

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      4. Of course you cant see IR waves, but you can detect them. So IR waves have been proven, as they had a hypothesis. Then tested it and it was shown to be true.

        Prayer was tested. According to the bible it should work, according to the word of your God it should work. Yet it failed in every study. So we can test the god hypothesis, otherwise the bible is wrong.

        So we tested IR it exists, we tested the god hypothesis it fails. Please elaborate.

        BTW, the physical universe has an explanation, the singularity that it comes from. If you then say the creator (God) made the singularity, then who made god and the cycle continues.

        Delete
      5. Christian,

        A person cannot directly detect IR waves. They were found to exist through their effects. Something we CAN see was affected and changed by something we could NOT see. It was logical to say that something (however unseen) must exist to cause that effect. The analogy is made.

        Prayer is not a mechanical process. Prayer is a request. If you did a scientific study on whether a person (motives unknown) would grant a request unknown to the requester, that might be a good "blind" test. However one cannot perform a "double-blind" test of this type as the person who receives and can (or cannot) respond to the request is aware of this testing. He can alter his response to the situation, according to his own motives. Such an experiment is non-deterministic. Prayer is such a situation and is therefore not subject to empirical testing.

        Lastly, the point is this, regardless of anything else. The Universe itself came into being with the Big Bang. However, in the physical world, something cannot come from nothing. There MUST be something else (whatever that is) to cause it.

        Do you concede that the stuff of the universe cannot have created itself?

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      6. No, I wont concede that something can come from nothing. The Casmir effect explains that something can come from nothing and has been experimentally verified. This is proof that the stuff of the universe can create itself.

        Delete
      7. Christian,

        Your reference to the Casimir Effect is a misuse of the word nothing. It operates in a vacuum that is now known to be full of virtual particles.

        This is not "nothing". There is no surprise that something can come from something. This is not what I refer to.

        I refer to actually nothing. Do you believe that something can come from actually nothing? No particles of matter. No antimatter, no fields, no vacuum, no space.

        Nothing.

        Delete
      8. I think this is something beyond our comprehension. Nothing does not exist we cannot observe it and so we have to conclude that it does not exist. So can something come from nothing in this sense I am not sure. I can have no definitive answer, as it requires me to believe first in the concept of nothing and then something coming from nothing.

        A question/statement for you. If God made something from nothing then we have a problem that God is nothing. Otherwise the nothing in the beginning does consist of something, that something is God.

        Delete
      9. Hi Christian,

        If there once was nothing, how can there be something now?

        We know that the universe is not eternal. It had a beginning. We know this.

        The problem is that we know logically that effects always have causes. Since the first matter in the universe was once NOTHING, something non-material MUST have caused it.

        Can you agree?

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      10. Hi again

        I am not sure how I can explain this any other way but to say. If the universe came from nothing according to your definition of the word, that been nothing is literally the absence of everything. Then a non material object is nothing and hence does not exist. So if there was nothing then God can not be the creator as God is nothing.

        So If I agree with your statement then all I am saying is that God is nothing (non-existent) according to the definition of the word.

        Delete
      11. Hi Christian,

        One thing at a time. Do you say that the physical universe came from nothing? I say that is a contradiction.

        I say that the physical universe came from a non-physical cause. Let's leave out what that is for the moment.

        Universe does not mean "all reality" it means physical space-time and matter. If we disagree on terminology, we'll never understand each other.

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      12. How can the Universe not encompass all reality. If this is so then there is a reality beyond what we call reality? And that makes no sense as it is a reality or it is non-existent, but it cannot be both.

        Delete
      13. Christian,

        Follow the logic.

        If
        Premise 1: the universe did not always exist
        Premise 2: the universe (on your view) is "all reality"
        Premise 3: something cannot create itself
        Conclusion: The Universe does not exist now

        But since
        The Universe exists

        Your proposition is refuted. One of the premises must be false.

        We clearly need to distinguish the physical universe from all reality.

        (One cannot substitute God for the universe in my propositions above since he is eternal, and does not fulfill premise 1. See the Kalaam Cosmological Argument.)

        Delete
      14. So this God cannot effect the reality we live in as he/she exists outside of this reality. If yes God is useless and could be called a singularity.

        If no, (and we use biblical definitions of god) then we can measure God and all evidence shows that God does not exist.

        Now prove god and then when you have proven god, please make sure it is your god. Proof not faith.

        xxxxxx
        BTW on a side note, there is now some people that believe the Universe came into existence from a collapse of a four dimensional star, this is very recent work in the last week.
        http://www.nature.com/news/did-a-hyper-black-hole-spawn-the-universe-1.13743

        Delete
      15. Christian,

        You are a again using "universe" and "reality" as synonymous.

        All right, let's use your definitions.

        Premise 1: The universe is all reality
        Premise 2: The universe began to exist
        Premise 3: Something cannot cause itself
        Conclusion: Reality (the universe) does not exist

        This can be a problem if the universe we live in does not exist. There has to be something OTHER THAN physical causes to cause the physical universe. (Please do not inject any pre-conceived notion of God here)

        Your BTW doesn't help, since there if there had been a physical something prior to the current universe, then there must have been something else to cause it.

        I am looking for the start of ANY physical universe.

        You either keep looking for another physical cause (uninteresting) or deny a non-physical cause, which leave you in the same unexplained state.

        Delete
      16. Anyway. Yes, for the cause of the argument lets accept their is an immaterial (non reality) cause to the universe. OK so there is an immaterial cause to the universe. Lets proceed form here.

        I just want to make sure if something is immaterial then it is not reality.

        Delete
      17. I don't understand the problem here. If the physical universe was not always in existence, then what began it? The only logical possibility is a non-physical cause of some kind, right?

        If so, that non-physical cause must be "real" (aka part of reality) or else it does not exist.

        If you assert that only material things are real, then the universe must not exist now because its cause never existed.

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      18. Perfect, thn if the cause is part of our reality. Then it can be tested. So now we can test this cause as its part of our reality.

        So lets skip the acrobatics and call the cause Biblical God. We can test the prayer hypothesis for example and it fails. So logical conclusion.

        Delete
      19. Christian,

        You make a false assumption that everything that is "real" can be tested. Why do you assume that? Prior to modern times, many "real" things in our physical world could not be detected directly (for example infrared light - see my earlier reply to you). Did those things become "real" when they could be directly detected? Where they "unreal" prior to that time? No.

        If you believe only what can be tested, you will miss out on lots of things. Love cannot be measured or tested or induced. Some of its consequences can, but the cause itself cannot directly be seen. Do you believe that someday it will? If so, that's faith in Science. If not, why can't it be detected? Isn't it real?

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    2. The 5th problem admits of another answer. The masked man is a fireman wearing a gas mask. He is coming out of her home/house/apartment building, which is engulfed in flames and falling to the ground. She will never be able to re-enter the building.

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      1. That is the answer I came up with as well.

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      2. I also came up with a fireman.

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      3. I came up with masked man = doctor.

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    3. I meant the 6th problem. Oops.

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    4. "You’re bad assumption is that all the evidence you “see” represents all that reality is. Sort of like riddle #6."

      Your assumption is that you know or can test for something you can't see, and yet pretend you know what is there.

      "he key is to have an awareness of our assumptions and realize that sometimes our intuition can hurt us and lead to a bad assumption gap. Whether consciously or subconsciously, once you make an assumption, the gap between what you think and reality can get further and further apart."

      That is the case when it comes to religion. You assume there is a God, have no evidence that this God exists, and then base everything off this false assumption.

      That's faith.

      You even admitted yourself that you have no way of knowing whether your God is the correct God. You just ASSUME it is.

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      1. Hi CA,

        Yes we assume it to be true. In exactly the same way we find a house in the woods and ASSUME someone built it. We don't see anyone. We can't find anyone. No one seems to be there when we are there. It would be irrational to therefore infer that its builder does not now exist, nor had ever existed.

        We have a physical universe that did not last forever. From where did it come? Whatever we know about its source, it HAS to be non-physical. This is what we infer from the evidence that we have a non-eternal universe.

        Be careful using language regarding believing only what you see/sense. According to that view, someone who has never seen the country of China "pretends" it is there. Even worse, someone whose father died before s/he was born, "believes" that s/he had a father. It is not rational to disbelieve in the existence of the father based upon direct sense experience.

        We may disagree only upon which evidence we admit.

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      2. "Yes we assume it to be true. In exactly the same way we find a house in the woods and ASSUME someone built it."

        Find a deed. Find the person who built it. See the billions of other houses that were built with human hands. All evidence. No evidence of your God exists.

        "It would be irrational to therefore infer that its builder does not now exist, nor had ever existed."

        It would. Notice how it's a natural phenomenon that you might not understand at the time? Once you dig, you'd find it's natural, rather than supernatural. That's the way with every supernatural claim so far. No scientific theory has ever been replaced by a supernatural one. Supernatural claims are replaced by scientific ones all the time.

        "We have a physical universe that did not last forever. From where did it come?"

        There are theories that cover this. You just have to read them, like the books I pointed out to you in the last article. Jumping to the conclusion that God did it is not the road to truth. It's the road to the assumption, that your article so eloquently points out is dangerous to truth and knowledge.

        "Whatever we know about its source, it HAS to be non-physical."

        No it doesn't. You just assume it has to be non-physical.

        "According to that view, someone who has never seen the country of China "pretends" it is there. Even worse, someone whose father died before s/he was born, "believes" that s/he had a father. It is not rational to disbelieve in the existence of the father based upon direct sense experience."

        Again more false equivalence. You can travel to China. You can talk to people from China. No one in their right mind doesn't know China exists. These are all evidence based things. Same with the father. We know through evidence how birth happens. It's no secret.

        "We may disagree only upon which evidence we admit."

        Yes. You're satisfied with none at all. I'm not.

        Delete
      3. By the way, if we use your own logic, you would walk out into the forest, see the house and assume that God made it. Then you'd start worshiping that house as a sign of god.

        That's your own logic. That's where it leads. You would have been wrong about the house, for the exact reasons you specified in your article. Your very own article debunks your religion.

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      4. Hi CA,
        You are incorrect. When I come across the house in the forest, my only assumption is that it was created using intelligence because that is a reasonable and responsible assumption. To assume the house came from nothing for the purpose of nothing, and materialized as a random occurrence is unreasonable and irresponsible. The same is true for all of creation and the existence an anthropic universe.
        See post entitled Reasonable & Responsible. Enjoy!!
        Reasonable & Responsible

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    5. Fun, but putting the tag line before the puzzles tipped me off to not go with my first answer!

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    6. "You are incorrect. When I come across the house in the forest, my only assumption is that it was created using intelligence because that is a reasonable and responsible assumption. To assume the house came from nothing for the purpose of nothing, and materialized as a random occurrence is unreasonable and irresponsible. The same is true for all of creation and the existence an anthropic universe."

      Dear Ben, you are misrepresenting the position most scientists take and using a false equivalent to do so.

      I get why you have to do that in order to make your position on a supernatural deity seem reasonable, but these arguments you are making have been debunked several times. The reasonable response if you don't understand how the house or the universe began, would be to say you don't know. Not jump to the conclusion that not only a deity made it, but that your particular idea of a deity made it.

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      1. "these arguments you are making have been debunked several times"

        Explain how they were dubunked?

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    7. "Explain how they were dubunked?"

      No one has said that the universe came from nothing. Nothing in science is not really nothing. You merely keep misrepresenting the position most scientists make to back up your argument to make it seem reasonable. You've jumped to the conclusion that God made everything, then jumped to the conclusion that YOUR God made everything. It's exactly what your article warns against. The only way to defend against your own logic, which is spelled out nicely in your article, is to continue to make apologist arguments that scientists all over the world have debunked thoroughly.

      I wish we could time warp an ancient Greek who believed in Zeus to the modern era. I would love to see them make an argument against you using their faulty logic. You would then tell them there is no evidence for their God and continue to not believe, while making the same argument in defense of your God.

      The only reasonable answer to something you don't know is to say 'I don't know', rather than assuming you know, when you really don't.

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      1. CA,
        Consider this question: “How can we know what’s true?” Science is one tool. Open your mind to other tools; Philosophy, metaphysics, logic, common sense and your own heart. Do you truly believe your entire life and the life of everyone you know is just an accident heading toward non-existence; just a lucky bunch of atoms living on a lucky dirt/water ball called earth.

        A practical example: Would a U.S attack on Syria be just or unjust? What is the best decision to make? How can we know what’s true? Why isn’t the US president employing the best scientist in the nation to help answer this question? Because science is not the right tool.

        Atheists tend to have the wrong headed approach that God is one thing among many, like a ghost floating around the universe or a flying spaghetti monster. Think of God as “being” itself or “existence” itself. Once you understand that science cannot answer all questions, you will see that apologist arguments for God can NEVER be debunked by science. All science can conclude is that “we don’t know” or “we have no way to know”. Assuming science is the right tool for the question of God is a classic BAD ASSUMPTION. One cannot try to use a tape-measure to try and measure time and then conclude that either time does not exist or there is no way to measure time.

        Peace.

        Delete
    8. "Once you understand that science cannot answer all questions..."

      Actually, no. That science CANNOT answer all questions assumes facts not in evidence. All you can really say is that science HASN'T answered all questions. There may in fact be some questions that have a level of complexity (or a small amount of significance) such that their solution is impractical or a waste of time, but you still can't say "I don't know, so therefore God."

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      1. Raymond,

        Unfortunately that is not correct. Here is a scenario. Nothing can bring itself into existence. Yet the physical universe is finite in time. Assuming that every effect has a cause, what could have caused the universe? The logical conclusion is that of a non-physical cause.

        What empirical science can answer questions about anything non-physical ? You cannot sense it with your sensors nor measure it with your calipers. Therefore science CANNOT answer all questions.

        Lastly, I would never say "I don't know, so therefore God." However it seems like you are saying something close to "I don't know yet, but I have faith that Science will someday know."

        Delete
      2. The statement "nothing can bring itself into existence" is an assumption. Again, from a scientific method perspective, a better statement is "we have no evidence of anything bringing itself into existence".

        And, "the logical conclusion is that of a non-physical cause" is not logical in the least. The logical conclusion is that we have insufficient evidence to explain the cause. The cause could very well be a physical cause that we have not discovered. (It could also be a non-physical cause too, but it is also a logical leap to say that ANY physical result can have a non-physical cause.

        It is certainly a logical fallacy to say "therefore science CANNOT answer all questions. All you can truly say logically is that science HAS NOT answered all questions, and science MIGHT NOT answer all questions.

        That also means that you are putting words in my mouth when you say "I have faith that Science will someday know." I have no such faith, because some questions may be so complex (or irrelevant) that science won't make the attempt.

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      3. Hey Ray,
        Questions about morality, justice, good, evil, the meaning of your life, etc., are not questions for science. Science is the wrong tool, just like a tape measure cannot measure all things. Can we use a tape measure to measure time or energy or force? Should we then say the following?

        “It is certainly a logical fallacy to say ‘therefore a tape measure CANNOT measure all things’. All you can truly say logically is that a tape measure HAS NOT measure all things, and a tape measure MIGHT NOT measure all things.”

        Peace.

        Delete
      4. Raymond,

        Okay so are you actually challenging my premise "Nothing can bring itself into existence"? Another way to say this is "Nothing can cause itself to be"

        Since I cannot assume you actually mean this, I will ask you directly. Do you assert that the above statements are false?


        Delete
      5. Ben, you are certainly right that I made an overgeneralization. Science has the capacity of answering questions about the physical universe, but it still takes a human agent to work the questions to get to the answers. I think that is a little better statement. There are plenty of questions that science doesnt answer. Movie trivia, who won the big game, what was the result of the vote, where'd you get that coat?

        But the tape measure analogy isnt very helpful. We certainly do have ways to measure time (duration) energy and force. Tape measures are used to measure size and would not be appropriate for other scientific purposes.

        Joe, I am challenging your premise on the basis that you have not tested EVERYTHING to be able to say that NOTHING can bring itself into existence. I'm not saying that it's false, but that you havent proven with certainty that it is true. You're assuming it is true.

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      6. Raymond,

        First of all while true (I haven't proven it), you find yourself in a very small minority (perhaps of just you) who believe that something can come from nothing. Again, nothing is defined as no matter, no energy, no space nor time. Boom. Something of matter/energy/space/time appears. Uncaused. That is what I assert cannot happen.

        Secondly, this type of statement is called an axiom. It is a fundamental assumption. It is by definition unproven but still considered valid. One can challenge assumptions with proof otherwise, but in the absence of proof either way, one can freely choose to assert or deny it.

        Thirdly, you did not answer my question, are YOU asserting the contrary to my premise? Do you actually want to say that something can come from nothing? Or are you simply pointing out that it might not be that way? Do you BELIEVE it?


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    9. Even if we stipulate that something can't come from nothing, the nothing in itself hasn't been established. Yes, the universe may have started as the result of a specific event, but the concept that there was a state of nothingness before that is just an assumption. Maybe the event that started reality as we current perceive it was the destruction of a previous reality, with all its matter, energy and duration. It is just as likely a proposition as a state of nothingness.

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      1. The best scientific minds agree that the material universe is not backwards eternal. It had a beginning. Also, it has been shown that entropy endures across previous universes, so again physical reality is not backwards eternal.

        So it's not really as likely.

        If there ever was a state of nothingness and if you assume that's all there was then there would be nothing now. The most reasonable conclusion based on science and logic is that there is something other than the physical universe that started / caused it.

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    10. Well, I am certainly not up on the current science on Cosmology, so I will accept your statement about "not backwards eternal".

      However, the basic logical premise doesn't quite ring true for me. I hope I am restating it adequately.

      1. The physical world cannot have generated spontaneously from nothingness.
      2. The physical world exists.
      3. An agent outside of space and time must have created the physical universe.

      How about...
      1. The physical world cannot have generated spontaneously from nothingness.
      2. The physical world exists.
      3. The state of nothingness must not have existed.

      That one seems more logically sound to me - current science notwithstanding.

      And as a follow up (which I dont think you have expressly stated in this thread, but I'll present it anyway) - if there was an agent outside of space and time that created the physical universe, was that agent the Judeo-Christian God? If so, why do you think that?

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      1. Raymond,

        This is fine. You are adding a missing premise that a state of nothingness existed. This state of nothingness follows from the current theory of the Big Bang (and even from a theory that includes a sequential (but not infinite) series of Big Bangs).

        If you reject the Big Bang theory which implies the (logically) preceding nothingness, that's fine. I just do not agree.

        Thanks.

        As to your follow up, I would rather establish that a non-physical cause exists before discussing the attributes of such a cause.

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