Muad'Dib

Ehm, some of the most profoundly useful applications of mathematics are to physics, but there's a heck of a lot more to mathematics than just modeling the universe. There's a lot of stuff that will never have any physical application.

Some mathematicians go so far as to say that physics is a subset of mathematics*, but really the methodologies are different enough that IMO it's meaningful to speak of them being two distinct (though intimately related) fields.

Edited to add: it's worth pointing out, too, that the role of observation and experiment is to ensure that the universe does in fact behave consistently with our mathematical models. Time and again we've quantitatively predicted things that turned out not to hold--e.g., we didn't expect c to be constant in a vacuum; "Ultraviolet catastrophe" was a phrase coined to express the chaos of predicted emission of blackbody radiation before the Rayleigh-Jeans Law was replaced by Planck's Law; and most famous of all, Newton's quantitative predictions of velocity and acceleration (and much more besides!) were discovered to be inaccurate at relativistic speeds.

* Edited again to add: physicists tend not to be impressed with this claim!

Psycho Economist

Refractor,

I'm sorry that my choice of the word disembodied caused such confusion; I should have said insubstantial. I'm glad that you understood what I meant anyway... that you chose to ignore it in favor of the cheap shot is another matter, but I'll take my earned lumps from you the same as I would the atheists here.

However, my word choice does not change the fact that there's no basis to support the notion of unphysical / insubstantial consciousness. For most of human history, we've believed that consciousness had an insubstantial basis, specific details varied according to theology. This "soul" that enabled us to experience life was supposed to be immortal and separate mankind from animals. And it’s true, animals other than apes do not have any sense of self (e.g. when confronted with a mirror image, falsely recognize it to be another animal), very limited declarative memory, little capability for symbolic representation, relatively limited emotional ranges. But from lesion studies, to primate observations, to work with marine mammals, to functional brain imaging studies and work with brain damaged individuals, the evidence indicates that mental activity -- those tasks attributed to a mind -- occur in the brain. The soul then, is both un-affirmable (it cannot withstand efforts to disprove it, since the concept is constructed in a way that us not practically falsifiable) and superfluous.

Your rebuttal that your god doesn’t have to be physical makes no sense to me. In the specific exchange you rebut, I did not accuse your god of inhabiting the physical universe before he created it; I challenged the notion that he existed (at all) before (any kind of) existence. I would hope that by not having specified constraints like "physical universe" and "physical existence", you’d realize I was meaning the most general cases possible. So again, how can your god have any kind of existence (including any immaterial existences) before "having created" existence itself? Without resorting to "God can make 2+2 = 5."
I didn’t assume that infinite seas of boiling quarks exploded a complex, ordered universe into existence. I think that as they cooled, the quantum and classical laws of physics took over from whatever governed their behavior before. Nuclear forces bound the quarks into subatomic particles and subatomic particles into atoms, gravity doing the rest. The complexity is an artifact of perturbations in the original distribution of quarks at the time quantum and classical laws took over. The order, beyond what is attributable to gravity and chemistry, is a side-effect of our over-active pattern-recognition capabilities. From cosmology to cognitive science, this belief is supported (tentatively, I will concede -- all scientific knowledge is tentative) by evidence. On the other hand, your belief in insubstantial consciousness is not affirmatively supported by any evidence thus far, and is contradicted to the extent that physical and transcendent consciousness are mutually exclusive.

Hawkingfan

Yes, I know. For example Tachyons.

I don't have any arguments with what you've said. We both know how important calculus is to science. My point was that observation should have math in order to be completely valid in physics.

Muad'Dib

Tachyons are the concern of theoretical physics rather than mathematics--by mathematics I mean the stuff mathematicians are interested in. But I see what you meant by your earlier claim now. I was thrown off by the earlier phrasing.

Hawkingfan

Right. Tachyons are apart of theoretical physics, but the reason they are a theory at all is because scientists discovered the concept accidentally from the mathematics of other theoretical problems. It's similar to black holes. The theory of black holes came while working on the mathematics of something else. It wasn't until much later they were actually observed.

Shadowy Man

What do you mean by "actually observed"? Which black hole do you believe was "observed" first?

Hawkingfan

The Eighteenth Century French philosopher, Laplace, first suggested the existence of a gravity field so strong that light could not escape. Einstein did the mathematics and John Wheeler coined the term 'Black Hole'.
I realize why you place quotes around the word: observed. We all know that by definition you cannot see a black hole. But the properties of black holes were theorized first. And we can now see that theorized behavior. So there is only evidence of them.
We only know of their existence "indirectly". In the 1980s astronomers discovered a perfectly normal star called Cyg X-1 which appeared to move to and fro. This lead them to believe that it was orbiting an invisible companion. Strong X-rays were also given out. Cyg X-1 is quite an ordinary star and cannot be producing the X-rays by itself. However, theory predicts that just before matter is forever lost in a black hole, it gives out radiation, a kind of death cry if you like. Cyg X-1 is over 8000 light years away. Two small ones (with a mass a few times that of our sun) in our galaxy, like Cygnus X-1, and huge ones in distant galaxies (with masses up to a few billion times that of our sun) where matter is seen to spiral around very quickly close to the centre of the galaxy. Something is there that is very dense, probably too dense to be a collection of stars, or even a cluster of stars, so a black hole is the most likely candidate. A supermassive black hole with 2 billion times the mass of the Sun lurks in the nearby giant galaxy M87.
Astronomers have now detected about 1 dozen black holes in X-ray-emitting binary star systems, where a normal star orbits a massive yet invisible companion that theory says must be a black hole. Even more convincing evidence has come from the centers of several large galaxies, where stars move about so quickly that they must be caught in the grips of a massive object. By calculating the size and mass of these objects, the only conclusion seems to be that the center of these galaxies harbor supermassive black holes.
For more information read, "Black Holes Ain't so Black" in A Brief History of Time. It discusses what we can and can't see as far as black holes are concerned.

Refractor

And first and foremost, you'll also notice I never once claimed that the universe "MUST" have had a cause. I have only claimed that it MOST LIKELY had a cause, and it does.


Who said "physics" spawned the universe? That statement represents a paradox because "physics" is everything physical, and everything physical IS the universe! So that statement is the same as saying - "We know nothing about how the universe spawned it's own creation". How can something be both it's own cause and effect at the same time?

Okay, my argument doesn't hold water against quantum speculations. So what? Should I allow every little speculation that comes along to prevent me from making logical inductions?

What do you base these claims on? We have no evidence linking the origin of the universe with quantum events. ZERO. All the evidence that points to the origin of the universe is macroscopic (redshift, background raditation, observed expansion, etc) ...so my macroscopic approximation is perfectly in line with the evidence and therefore valid. As soon as you present some evidence from quantum physics that is inherently and conclusively linked to the origin of the universe, I will concede this point. But as of now, I have never seen quantum evidence that had any conclusive evidence that could be conclusively and directly link it to the origin of the universe.


To the contrary, you posit all kinds of naturalistic theories that have no justification whatsoever. We have never observed any mindless natural process create universes; we have never observed mindless natural processes create living organisms out of non-living matter. We have never seen mindless natural processes develop a man out of ameobas......and when you eliminate the possibility of an intelligent designer, you are automatically left with only mindless natural processes to do the job. And as I pointed out, these natural processes have never been observed accomplishing what most atheists like to assume they can accomplish.

At this point, you need to offer an explanation for what you think "design" is in the first place. According to the dictionary, design is defined as "an underlying scheme that governs functioning, developing, or unfolding". This universe (and planet) is LOADED with trillions of extremely complex laws and schemes that govern the functionality and development of all biological, and non-biological systems. That is DESIGN by definition. It DOES exist in the natural world and we marvel at it!!


Because there is no reason or basis for the assumption that the principles of design/cause as it exists in the physical realm would extend into the supernatural realm.


Refractor

Hawkingfan

Baloney. If you stick some ammonia, methane and a few other simple chemicals into a jar and subject them to ultraviolet light then after a week or two you get a mixture of organic molecules, including amino acids (the building blocks of protein). So current theories propose a "primordial soup" of dilute organic chemicals. Somewhere a molecule happened to form which could make copies of itself out of other molecules floating around in the soup, and the rest is history.

Soma

That still doesn't explain why organic molecules would organize themselves into such complex systems, and somehow, have purpose for each system imbued into them.

It's almost if a transcendant lifeforce is manifesting itself into any organic substance...