The world is like a spewing gusher of oil out of the mouth’s of milliions of gargoyles dressed up in scholar suits. A superficial film floating in front of the eyes now on a global scale turning minds into shit for brains. Oh we are so doomed…..

Stephen Hawking makes the argument that since time itself didn’t exist therefore God would have no time to create the universe in. He said it’s from science But this introduces a subtle paradox that can best be shown using this challenging statement:

“If God had no time to create then also The Big Bang had no time to Bang, what is good for the goose is often also good for the gander as well. Give Up.”

Yet we know the universe did not always exist because stars keep time like candles by using up their fuel and dying. It is even more mind boggling to realize that time itself cannot possibly be infinite since time would never be able to tic down to the present time from an infinite past.

About about in circles we go !!!

Your mission should you choice to accept it, is to find a solution to this paradox.

To find out more about my view points please feel free to visit my discusions:

http://answers.yahoo.com/activity;_ylt=AtRg8ZtS2LRpCQt.DeXfMfnsy6IX;_ylv=3?show=ed16380f11d628bdeac10227c45df672aa&view=public

Stephen Hawking makes the argument that since time itself didn’t exist therefore God would have no time to create the universe in. He said it’s from science But this introduces a subtle paradox that can best be shown using this challenging statement:

“If God had no time to create then also The Big Bang had no time to Bang, what is good for the goose is often also good for the gander as well. Give Up.”

Yet we know the universe did not always exist because stars keep time like candles by using up their fuel and dying. It is even more mind boggling to realize that time itself cannot possibly be infinite since time would never be able to tic down to the present time from an infinite past.

About about in circles we go !!!

Your mission should you choice to accept it, is to find a solution to this paradox.

To find out more about my view points please feel free to visit my discusions:

http://answers.yahoo.com/my-activity

∞ YES ∞ NO ∞

Hhmmm…. Difficult to compare them since the societies they lived in were so different. Newton has gravity, optics, calculus and of course the whole idea of mathematical philosophy; Einstein has the photoelectric effect, SR, GR, old quantum theory, Bose-Einstein statistics, his early work on thermodynamics. How does one compare such accomplishments?

In some sense, I think that many of Newton’s ideas would have been found at most not much later by others (and in some cases this happened—see the dispute with Leibniz about the calculus). That’s true of some of Einstein’s stuff as well, particularly SR, but if Einstein hadn’t come up with GR, we might have had to wait much longer. Einstein himself said that the only time in his life he was really revolutionary was with his explanation of the photoelectric effect.

But aside from science? Newton spent a huge amount of time with occult and religious stuff: alchemy, biblical chronology etc. He never married; whether he was celibate or the “greatest whoremonger in London” I don’t know. He spent the latter part of his life as master of the mint. Einstein played the violin quite well, was politically active, appreciated female company and, although it was ultimately futile, never gave up working in science, spending the last 30 or 40 years of his life in search of the unified field theory.

In whose shoes would you rather be?

Richard P. Feynman

As fiction, scripture should give one wisdom (seen through GODs eyes) not knowledge
(seen through mans eyes).

To my understanding the possibility of there being a multiverse is one of the latest cosmological insights and it does away with the notion that everything including time started with the big bang. After having been practically taboo for a long time the question “what happened before the big bang?” is now a scientifically valid question.

So there may well have been something (including time) before the big bang, so that Hawking’s argument that God could not have created the big bang because there was no time for anything (including God) to exist before the big bang, does no longer hold.

To me the problem is summarized nicely by Davies:

“Either you have an unexplained god, or you have unexplained laws.”

The issue there is that “god did it” does not explain the laws, nor does it explain anything of scientific importance. The laws on the other hand – although themselves unexplained – do in turn explain a whole lot of things (possibly including why it is that people do have religious beliefs).

For example, he says, “In some models of the origin of the universe, the vacuum undergoes a spontaneous phase transition to something more complicated, like a universe containing matter.” But the vacuum isn’t nothing. What does he mean by ‘vacuum’. If by ‘vacuum’ he means the traditional physics definition, then he’s not, strictly speaking, talking about the origin of the universe here, but the origin of the matter and energy in the universe. So it’s vague statements like these that want to make me look at the papers he’s drawing his information from to gain a more accurate and precise understanding of his position.

Another example:

“Then why is there something rather than nothing? Because something is the more natural state of affairs and is thus more likely than nothing-more than twice as likely according to one calculation. We can infer this from the processes of nature where simple systems tend to be unstable and often spontaneously transform into more complex ones. Theoretical models such as the inflationary model of the early universe bear this out”

Again, I want to look at the paper containing this calculation. I say this because it’s one thing to say that something is more likely than nothing (whatever that means in your paper), but it’s an entirely different matter to say that there exists a process by which ‘nothing’ can spontaneously transform into ‘something’ because ‘something’ is more likely. Presumably, if there’s ‘nothing’ (no matter, no energy, no space, no time) then what kind of process can transform ‘nothing’ into ‘something’? Just because, in nature, you observe simple systems being unstable and transform into more complex ones, doesn’t mean you can extend that idea to ‘nothing’ transforming into ‘something’ because ‘nothing’ is less likely than ‘something’. It’s an analogy which may not necessarily apply to ‘nothing’ and ‘something’. But I understand that he is using this for the purpose of explaining this stuff to people, which is why I’m wondering if he has referenced the papers he came across somewhere.

But thanks for sending that link to me. I looked up his books on amazon, and they do look interesting even though I’m a theist.

Science supplies two kinds of answers: on the one hand, to the question “what existed before the Big Bang,” it doesn’t merely reply “nothing:” the experimental evidence implies that nothing could have existed before the Big Bang (and as any good Daoist could tell you, nothing is not to be sneezed at!)

The other kind of answer it supplies is to questions like “define the nothing that existed before the Big Bang:” a seemingly straightforward philosophical question, but one that science shows is about as answerable as “what is the sound of one hand clapping?” or “what is at the place where a circular road ends?” It’s like “if everything that exists was caused by something else, and God exists, what created God?” This is analogous to the “shicho,” or endless ladder trap in the game of Go: better to recognise it for what it is, and stop such fruitless pursuit before it begins.

It’s not that science can answer all philosophical questions, in particular normative ones: it can, however, help to clarify our analyses of such questions…and to help us to clearly distinguish between questions that have a normative (i.e. judgmental) element from those that do not.

Having shaved with Occam’s Razor this AM, always happy to supply a pinch of parsimony to the recipe!

Back to you!

I’m not really sure what God is made of or how He created the universe from nothing (assuming the universe WAS created from nothing).

Why even bother pretending that God is even a viable hypothesis, then? An incoherent thing made of an incoherent nonsubstantive substance that incoherently acts on nothing at all is just incoherence squared, cubed, and raised to ever higher powers of incoherence.

If you want to learn more about God, in what sense God transcends space and time, and what kind of existence He has, check out the writings of some theologians, Thomas Aquinas.

I have. Thomas Aquinas commits multiple logical fallacies and uses stupid word games to come to incoherent and illogical conclusions.

Thomas Aquinas didn’t know anything about the actual universe, let alone about God. He just filled his works with sophistry and bullshit.

I have no idea how our universe was made (if it was made through natural processes), and regardless of how much sense the notion of a God creating it makes, it also makes no sense to suggest that the universe came into existence from nothing, as I explained above.

It makes much less sense to suggest a God, as I explained above.

If there is no multiverse (and we don’t know the answer to that without knowing what the fundamental theory is, which Stephen Hawking doesn’t know), then, no, there was no zero-point energy before the big bang because if there is no multiverse then our universe did not come from a “parent universe”. Therefore, no zero-point energy from which our universe could have been born.

Or in other words, there was no zero-point energy because you say so. The argument by fiat remains a logical fallacy.

Where did you come across the notion that “nothing” is unstable?

It’s quote from Frank Wilczek.

  http://www.csicop.org/sb/show/why_is_there_something_rather_than_nothing

I have no idea how our universe was made (if it was made through natural processes), and regardless of how much sense the notion of a God creating it makes, it also makes no sense to suggest that the universe came into existence from nothing, as I explained above.

If there is no multiverse (and we don’t know the answer to that without knowing what the fundamental theory is, which Stephen Hawking doesn’t know), then, no, there was no zero-point energy before the big bang because if there is no multiverse then our universe did not come from a “parent universe”. Therefore, no zero-point energy from which our universe could have been born.

Where did you come across the notion that “nothing” is unstable? Was this worked out in a paper somewhere? I’m curious. It would be interesting to know why they concluded that “nothing” is unstable rather than stable. I mean, when you say that something is unstable it would imply (I think!) that there is some process which can turn that unstable state to a stable state. But stable and unstable with regards to what? Energy? But with “nothing” there is no concept of energy. There is nothing. Or do they mean that “nothing” is unstable under tiny perturbations of “nothing”. How do you perturb “nothing”? If there is “nothing”, then there is nothing around to do the perturbing. “The physical laws that govern that instability”? But this brings me back to my point. If there is “nothing” there are no laws. So it would be interesting to read and figure out what they meant.

So you think it’s reasonable to say that the universe came into existence from nothing?

It’s more reasonable than saying that God created the universe from nothing.

So we don’t know anything that we need to know to settle the issue of the origin of the universe.

If we did, cosmologists wouldn’t be conjecturing different scenarios, now would they?

So describe for me in what form do the laws of quantum mechanics exist. What are their origins. What are they made of? Why those laws and not just classical laws?

In what form does God exist? What is God made of? Where is outside of spacetime that God supposedly exists? What is God’s origin? What did God do to create spacetime, and how did he do it, and why did he do it that way and not some other way? How do you know that God exists as a person, and is not just the laws of physics?

I’ve already explained why I think it’s incorrect to think of those laws as somehow existing without a universe in which (and on which) to act.

But you’re fine with positing a God which exists without a universe in which and on which to act!

I don’t what else to say.

How about realizing that you’re making less sense than Stephen Hawking?

Spacetime creation from what? Out of what?

What does God create spacetime from? What does God create energy from? What does God create laws from?

See, you end up having to answer the same questions that cosmologists do, and you posit more entities that require even more questions.

The virtual pair production is just an analogy. Particles appear out of the vacuum of spacetime. Particles are made, not from nothing, but from the zero-point energy of spacetime.

And can you prove that there was no zero-point energy before the big bang?

If you hope to accomplish that feat, it would take more than a slightly different law.

And yet you hope to accomplish everything with a God that purportedly “exists” in no space and no time with no laws at all. What does existence even mean, in that case?

And what will this “law” or “mechanism” act on in order to create spacetime?

What does God act on in order to create space time?

What does this law describe if there’s nothing around to describe?

Where does God exist, if there’s nowhere for God to exist?

What is the system? All we have are particles within spacetime.

Which means that there’s even less of a system for God to exist in.

Take away spacetime and you’re left with nothing.

Which is unstable, say some cosmologists, and therefore you can get everything from nothing with the physical laws that govern that instability.

What Hawking is venturing is a disproof: namely of the hypothesis that God created the universe. This, he maintains, is far easier to disprove than the nonexistence of leprechauns, unicorns, etc. somewhere in the universe, because it’s the whole package we’re talking about.

Again, Hawking’s disproof rests on recursion, or extrapolation backwards: it simply isn’t possible for anything, anything at all, to have existed before the Big Bang. Not an easy concept for the human mind to wrap itself around…but one directly inferred from the experimental evidence.

I’m not gonna waste my time or breath trying to convert one single believer: I know they live and breathe their parallel universe of belief.

What I will do, however, is defend my POV against them, and help reassure unbelievers: you are not alone…they have their God, we have each-other.

Faith is a great gift, eh? Let me draw you a picture I would like to see as a bumper sticker:

It’s of the RMS Titanic, going down. Caption: “Captain Smith Had Faith”…

Finally, let me lay a concept on you from Harlan Ellison: when belief in a god dies, the god dies. Where are Zeus and Thor and Huitzilopochtli nowadays? Why, they’ve lost their following…

…It’s not for nothing that the Romans feared the new monotheistic mystery cult of Christianity: they understood that monotheism is but one god away from atheism.

Thank you, monotheists, for preparing the way for atheism! The pleasure…is ours.