Atheos

Also, ARISCE, you may want to rent the movie "What the <bleep> do we know?" (substitute a few science looking symbols for the bleep part). I certainly don't advocate the movie as a source of truth but it does seem to provide what I believe is somewhat of a layman's introduction to quantum physics. The mystic aspect of it gets a little over the top IMHO though.

Good movie to watch if you're stoned. Not that I've ever been stoned, mind you.

-Atheos

Volker

I think it is logical impossible to claim that every event has to have a cause. Just suppose there is a god that existed eternally. His existence is an event. Does god have a cause? Either, you say yes or no. In the former case you have to postulate some super-god or a natural or supernatural event that caused god, leading to an infinite chain of causes again. So I think the answer to that question is "no".

So if you say that god does not have a cause, you're contradicting your claim that everything that exists (or every event) has to have a cause.

And, to speak of science: Of course there are events - quantum fluctuations - which do not have a cause (so it seems). You can, of course, think that the cause of this event hasn't been found yet. But to claim that there must be a cause is to claim knowledge about something you can't know, which is a self-contradiction. The same is true if I say that those quantum fluctuations do not have a cause. All we can say is that we don not know if there is a cause or not, and we can't rule out either possibility. So the assumption that "everything has a cause" is weak. And because of the logical possibilities, it is plain wrong!

If you define "cause" like scientists do, existence cannot have a cause. Some event B is caused by A when A exists (so the existence of A is presupposed), when A exists in time before B (or at the same time, presupposing the existence of time), when there is space between A and B or A and B are acting in the same space-continuum (presupposing space), and when A transfers energy to B (presupposing the existence of energy). Causation is a tansformation of something already existing, so it does not make sense to say that "A caused the existence of B". This does not explain existence, but presupposes it.

Neither of the four defining terms of causation will apply to "something comes into existence". And, we can assume that A does not cause B if only one the the conditions is not met. But none of the four conditions are met!

So only if you presuppose existence you can claim that "every event is caused". That is, causation can never explain the "coming into existence". That is, existence cannot be explained, if the explanation relies on causation. Normally, if we ask a why-question, we're asking for the cause of something. But if there is no cause the question is meaningless - and the answer, too.

Now, we don't have to stick with this definition of cause. We can redefine it and claim that "something can be caused to exist". But we never have observed this. So we have no grounds to assume that "everything that starts to exist has a cause", because we never have seen a single thing coming into existence caused. Quite the opposite is true - we do not know what causes quantum fluctuations. These events seem to be uncaused. The conclusion would be that "we never observed that something came into existence caused, therefore all existence has to be caused". That is definitely a wrong start.

Thus, your argument fails. Your claim is not even unsupported, it is logical false - something must have started to exist uncaused (god, or the universe), or must exist eternally, which means "uncaused", too (god, or the universe). So I think that it is impossible to explain existence, if the explanation includes causation. "God caused the universe" is the wrong answer to a meaningless question. Of course, it implies that "a god that caused the universe to exist" cannot exist and is a strong argument for strong atheism (concerning gods that create the universe(s)).

A third possibility is that A caused B to exist, B caused C and so on until Z caused A (a circle). But the complete circle exists in this case uncaused, too.

Volker

One other thing: Even a god who knows everything cannot answer the queston "Why do you exist?". His existence must be as mysterious to him as ours is to us. So even god cannot give an answer to the question "Why does something exist and not nothing?".

gudanov

The idea that everything has a cause is sort of common sense, but quantum mechanics, general relativity, and modern physics in general all seem to indicate that common sense is a really bad guide to the way things fundamentally work. The way I see it, nobody has a clue what the being outside our universe means, so trying to prove anything by applying our common sense to that realm is meaningless. Not to mention general realtivity tells us that time is a meaningless concept external to the universe.

Even in our universe, there is stuff in quantum mechanics that can really challenge our ideas of cause and effect. Take the two slit experiment for instance. If you pass photons one at a time through the slits and don't detect which slit each photon takes you get an interference pattern, but if you do detect which slit, then you get two groups of photons behind each slit. Now lets say those detectors uses down converters and shoots off an extra photon to the side every time a photon goes through. If a photon goes through the left slit, then an extra photon shoots off to the left. If a photon goes thorugh the right slit, then an extra photon shoots off to the right. If those signal photons are detected, we get the two groups. If those signal photons are not detected we get an interference pattern. This holds true even if the signal photons are detected at a distance such that the pattern is formed before the detection takes place. There is a real world experiment for precisely this effect, but more complicated than my description.

Volker

I agree. Most of our everday concepts are useless even to grasp within our universe (and this may be true even for things outside of our universe). And because it was crucial to know about causes for the survival of our ancestors, and because we can endlessly ask "why-questions", we're used to think, that everything has to have a cause. But this has psycho-logical reasons, not logical reasons.

I think we exist because it is impossible that nothing exists. Take a complete void - a perfect vacuum, for example. If the known natural laws work for that, there must exist energy in that vacuum, because of the uncertainty principle. You can't say that there is no energy. And if there is energy, the perfect symmetry is broken. You can either say that it is impossible for a perfect vacuum to exist, in that case, there always was something existing. Or, you can say that a perfect vacuum can exist, then there are no natural laws that forbid something to happen there (like a vacuum fluctuation). In either case, the symmetry will be broken again. Spontaneous breaking of the symmetry is the "cause" of existence - and the source for order as well.

In quantuum vacuum, there is no time. When something starts to exist, time starts. But in which direction? The answer is, that all physical processes are time-symmetrical, so the answer is: Time happens in all directions possible. So the vacuum has no direction in time at all. Time in one direction, of course, breaks the symmetry again. And from one of these fluctuations our universe was build, with a preferred direction in time.

This can be explained in a way that contradicts our notion of time: At the lowest level, all known physical processes are time-symmetrical. Some quantuum effects can be explained only if you think that single particles travel backwards in time. But only single particles: At makro-level something happens that is called decoherence. You can't tell where a single particle is located in space, but take a few billion particles and you can. You can't tell in which direction a single particle travels in time, take a few billion particles and you can - because symmetry is broken again. That is the "cause" of everything that happens - though something like a "random cause", which seems like a contradiction - unless you study quantuum physics and see that our everday knowledge is somewhat misleading.

MxM111

Somebody else here mentioned, that in order to have cause, you need time, which kind of explains how our universe can appear "seemingly without cause", so I will not discuss it here.

As for the law of entropy increase, in my opinion it is the most strange law in physics. It is statistical law, and thus it can be applied with very good certainty for a system consisted from large number of particles. (But even here there is a problem, it is not absolute certainty, it is just 99.999999..% probability) So when our universe is just singularity, the are no particles, so you can not apply this law. Thus it is quite possible to imagine pulsating universe with conservation of mass/energy which cames from singularity and ends in it just to create a new universe.

There are other possibilities. For example, a black hole quite possibly is another universe "from inside", and that universe has it's own black holes just scaled down, etc. So we have a system which has infinite number of black holes and we are in one of those. Note that you have infinitely nested black holes down and up-stream. I am sure we can come up with other sceneries, that does not fit into possibilities described by you.

EarthWalker

Question: What a vacuum fluctuation might really be?
Does something really cease to exist, then reappears...or is something just changing states? Please feel free to give me the layman's version of it in a couple of paragraphs, if that's possible