Crucifiction

If he's bound to logic; he's not the most perfect concievable being. I can imagine quite a few beings that are not constrained to logic; ones that can turn the sun into a giant pudding cup, ones that can both exist and be non-existant at the same time, etc.

luvluv

I guarantee you that you cannot concieve of a being who can exist and not exist at the same time. You can make a meaningless sentence about such a being, but you can't really conceive of him. (The meaningless comment is not an insult towards you, but the idea of a being existing and not existing at the same time is literally meaningless - it's incoherent).

At any rate, if there is any being that can do the logically impossible, it's impossible to prove or even provide evidence for such a being's non-existence. God's being bound by logic is what makes atheology possible.

mirage

Is it? I thought God was a necessary being or self caused or something under most Christian theology.]
Whatever the properties of the total system are restrict him. The causal relations between him and us must have some basis in system properties. He didn't create the total system.
You can create a local bubble of spacetime like perhaps the BB. But if you cause such a creation, you are related to it in temporal terms. That either requires a continuation of the metric "out" to contain you, or a different metric that contains both you and the spacetime you have created. It the creation of everything, whatever "everything" is, that can't be done.

Berry berry good point. I was making unwarranted assumptions about the topology. And indeed we could have a finite negative curvature universe.

luvluv

He didn't create logic, sure. What else restricts an omnipotent Being?

Okay?

Probably the latter...

I'm not aware of any version of the Cosmological Argument that suggests that God created "everything", if everything is taken to include Himself. Most arguments suggest that God created everything other than Himself though.

And I still don't get what the problem is....?

uncool

OK, luvluv, so how far in logic is God bounded? There are multiple types of logic...someone posted them earlier.
Propositional logic?
Syllogistic logic?
First-order predicate calculus?
Mathematical logic?
-Uncool-

35Kas

Mirage:

I say that it doesnt seem right to have things un-accounted for. IMO, if things could happen without cause, they wouldnt be bound by causality. There would be energy un-accounted for and energy missing from the system. Im not saying that this cant happen, but as far as i know they dont, as shouldnt.

Distance = velocity * time
Its a well known physical correlation. It implies that velocity, distance and time are related. You cant have movement without time. Velocity determines the speed at wich something travels over a period of time. I dont know which causes what, but i believe the notion of time is caused by movement, as we wouldnt be able to measre or perceive time if there werent any. If there is no movement in atoms, planets etc, there is no chaos, we can say that entrophy has reached maximum, so nothing happens, no time.

This i say because time, at least in GR, is not absolute. QM states otherwise, but thats another problem and im stipulating over it.

Now i didnt say time was caused. I say time exists whenever there is movement. I cannot get over the idea of getting energy and time suddenly coming out of non-existance. It should be rather self evident that since they exist, they should exist forever, as they have existed for ever. The implications of having space-time begin to exist is, in my opinion, inconceivable.

Think... Is it possible for everything not have existed? Yes it is, but claiming that this is the case implies that something not have existed before it did. Something could not be something before the universe existed because there is no reference to emasure that! There was no space-time! It is just absurd. Thats why i say it is easier to accept a model that does not require absurd things like gods or the universe to surge into existance. It must have always existed, and it must continue to do so forever.

If we conceptualize everything that exists as the universe, then there cannot be something outside of it. Multiverses and God would still be part of the universe.

Tsumetai:

I have always learned that energy cannot be magically created or destroyed, only transformed. I dont know if GR allows for that.Can you please provide a source that states GR allows for no global conservation of energy? Does that mean it allows for energy to be unbound by causality, which would result in energy randomly appearing and dissapearing?

Everyone else:

Why are you arguing if God is bound by logic? I thought it was already common sense that a God creating the universe, instead of the universe creating itself, is a proposition that only increases the degree of complexity of the issue and therefore Occam's razor should shave it off.

If a discussion like this is justified, why not discuss if the invisible pink unicorn is bound by logic or if it could create the universe but not itself?

I dont know if you noticed, but the "theory" that god created the universe was only proposed to sustain the loads of religious literature that mention him/they as the creator/s. A lot of people think god created the world like it says in religious books, but also, a lot of them just complicated the issue further by believing that God created the WHOLE universe just to adapt their non-sense to scientific theory and provide a justification for its existance. A god is not a requirement for things to exist and adding it to the system only makes it more complicated.

If god can be self caused so could the universe. Same for god being omniscient and eternal.

Alf

How does replacing "cause" with "contingent" remove the temporal aspect? Yes, I am "contingent", I exist only because I was once born by my parents. By necessity, they must have existed BEFORE me. It is meaningless to say that A depends on B for its existence when B exist at a later time than A. In that case clearly A does exist at one time without B and thus cannot be dependent upon B.

So, I would like to see you explain to me how dividing the world in "contingent" and "necessary" things remove the temporal problems. For one thing, I haven\t yet seen any "|necessary" things, everything I see around me is "contingent" so I really find the disctinction rather useless. Secondly, as described above it does NOT remove the temporal aspect. The temporal aspect is inherent in the problem at hand, no rewording can remove it.

The truth is that the universe exist in time, time exist in the universe one cannot exist without the other and neither can exist without space and space cannot exist without the two. Matter/energy is the fourth side of the coin.

Of course, one can then really wonder what is going on inside the photon. If you were sitting on a photon as it is travelling by the speed of light. Time essentially stops, space vanish - the universe vanish - where did it go? Does the photon really exist? Surely, we can notice its effect on any brith sunny day and any other day as well, but seen from the photon there is no universe, no time, no space and therefore no energy or matter either, so as seen from the photon, does it exist?

Alf

Alf

The idea that time starts with BB stems from the general theory of relativity.

Time and space is as much a product of matter as matter is a product of time and space. Matter wherever it is changes space and time around itself. The change is on the big scale appearantly very small so the universe as a hole appear to be near euclidian (cfr. the flat space and curvature measurements done these days) but it also appear that without matter at all, space would not even be possible. A measuring rod stretches out the less gravity you have around it or it shrinks as it gets in a gravity field. If no gravity field at all, the rod would stretch out to infinity making the concept of space meaningless.

Same thing with time. In a gravity field, time slows down. A clock at jupiter\s surface would tick slower than an identical clock on earth. Again, no gravity, time would move infinitely fast making the concept of time meaningless.

So, space and time requires gravity to be meaningful and that means they require matter to be meaningful and that means no matter means no space and no time.

So, if BB was the thingy that "created" matter, it follows that time isn't meaningful "before" BB - indeed, talking of "before" BB is meaningless.

Now, you can roll time backwards and reach BB but not exactly time 0, you can only reach times AFTER time 0. Indeed, we have a limit around the planck time when quantum effects appear to play a more important role than gravity does. This also means that space and time play a less important role in the early universe since they are a product of gravity. Therefore time and space in the early universe is fuzzy things not very well defined. This also means that even if BB itself was "caused" by some event in some universe that existed "before" our own, the timeline is broken between that universe and our own. Hence it doesn\t make sense to say that this universe was "before" our own - because you have the situation that you have a timeline in some universe which then cause a BB to happen which "creates" our own universe and then makes a new timeline for our own universe. The two timelines are NOT connected because of the fuzzy state in the early universe shortly after BB.

It is only after the planck time when the universe become large enough that gravity started to play a role that time and space became meaningful and hence you can talk about "before" and "after".

For this reason the first cause argument breaks down completely since it envisions an unbroken timeline back to the first cause. As explained above that isn\t how time is and so the argument fails. Some people claim that cause and events arent temporal thingies but that is meaningless. Cause and effects are discussing events. One event is a "cause" of another event and one event is the "effect". Events are things that take place in time and in space and so is inherently temporal and spatial. For this reason to ask what caused the unvierse is also quite meaningless. Time is defined within our universe and has a fuzzy start somewhere within the planck time of our early universe and asking for cause and effects outside of this context where time is meaningful does not make sense.

Hope this explains.

Alf

Gawdzila

It can be argued that energy can come from nothing, actually. The Casimir
Effect is caused by random, uncaused fluctuations. Tiny, sure, but
measureable. In addition, it has been postulated that the total energy
content of our universe is close to ZERO. The amount of total negative
versus positive charge in the universe has been measured to be a 1:1 ratio
with great precision (according to Michio Kaku, anyway). If gravity is treated
as a sort of "negative energy", apparently the total energy content of the
universe is almost nil. With so little energy involved, it seems not so hard to
believe that it could happen due to a tiny, random quantum event.

It is my understanding that quantum physics messes up our concept of
causality pretty good, at least on the smalest levels
Energy actually DOES seem to appear and disappear here and there.
It's called zero-point energy.

mirage

Whatever the behaviour of the system is that he's in and had no hand in creating. That could still translate to enormous power from our perspective. There are problems with his interaction with our "universe" from outside of it, but I'm not sure any of them are fundamental logical barriers.
There may be no problem if you don't think God created the universe in the sense of everything. However, the cosmo argument rest on the idea that a first cause is needed. In powerful alien god, he isn't a first cause. Just another cause in his own little timeline. There is nothing to suggest that such a state of affairs implies a sentient being, and if this state or god outside our little bubble made our bit, then who made him? It ignores the infinite regress problem which is the foundation of the cosmo argument.