Hawkingfan

In the philosophy forum, the following exchange occured in the thread entitled "Naturalism Irrational?":

tomaq:
"When it comes to the existence of the universe, the naturalist explanation seems to be irrational.

1. the universe “sprang” into existence out of nothing approx. 13.7 billion years ago

or

2. the universe has always existed

2a. the universe has always existed and things in the universe changed in relation to other things (time existed)

2b. the universe existed in a static state (no change, no time)
(universe as used here could also be the “timeless singularity” since universe is defined as: everything that exists, and from this “timeless singularity” came the universe as we know it approx. 13.7 billion years ago).



1. Is irrational because “somethingness” cannot come to being from “pure nothingness”. Within this state of pure nothingness is the absence of possibility, potentiality etc. If “somethingness” or “existence” has a beginning, it must be logically preceded by “nothingness”. According to (1.) the universe did have a beginning (13.7 billion years ago) and thus according to (1.) the beginning was logically preceded by “nothingness”. Therefore (1.) is irrational.

1a. the universe is the totality of existence
1b. the universe began to exists 13.7 billion years ago
1c. therefore, the universe is necessarily logically preceded by nothingness

This renders option (1.) irrational.


2a. the universe (including space/time) has always existed.

This is irrational due to the impossibility of traversing an actual infinite amount of moments. Here is a cheesy example that illustrates the point. If I am in an infinitely big room, with an infinite amount of people who are all standing up, in order for me to sit down, everyone else has to sit down first. When will I be able to sit down if an infinite amount of people have to sit down first? Never. If an infinite amount of moments have to occur in order for the present to exist, when will the present exist? Never. The present exists, therefore there have not been an infinite amount of moments.

2b. the universe existed in a static state (no change, no time). Call this the singularity if you like.

A. If the universe exists now in a dynamic state, then it is irrational for the universe to have existed in a static state, unless there is some reason for it to change from one to the other.
B. It is more rational to believe that the universe is currently in a dynamic state than a static state.
C. Therefore, it is irrational to think that the universe existed in a static state.

I understand this is presupposing that causality would apply to the singularity. One might say that causality began as a result of the shift from static to dynamic. What reason is there for this assertion? This would seem to be an appeal to quantum mechanics, or spontaneity. However, if causality does not apply to the singularity, why does spontaneity?


*this is a thread meant to examine naturalism. lets keep this a theism free thread. (theists are welcome, but not theism) there are plenty of threads that talk about theism."

Many people addressed the above very well, and I chimed in on page 2 with:
Hawkingfan:
"[Concerning 2b]There is no such thing as a "moment" in a singularity because time does not exist. Time only exists after the BB. So there are no infinite amount of moments that have to occur before the BB. Another problem with the above example (where event A happens before event B), is that it concerns arrows of time (thermodynamics), specifically the chronological arrow. In a singularity, arrows of time do not exist."

tomaq:
"so from the original post, it seems you agree that options 1 and 2a are irrational. it sounds like you hold to option 2b. how would you respond to my critique of 2b in the original post?"

Hawkingfan:
tomaq's OP:
2b. the universe existed in a static state (no change, no time). Call this the singularity if you like.

"I don't know if it was static or not, but I would guess that it wasn't since all I've read on the subject says that it was there as "infinitely small and infinitely hot" (which doesn't help much). The infinite heat implies infinite motion, no? (I don't think we can know for sure right now, since the laws of science at that time have not been determined). One of the major problems is that all of the math dealing with the singularity prior to the BB and Planck time deals solely with infinite numbers so all of our current science and math "breaks down" and is practically useless."

tomaq's OP:
A. If the universe exists now in a dynamic state, then it is irrational for the universe to have existed in a static state, unless there is some reason for it to change from one to the other.

"It may or may not be irrational. This is because we are talking about 2 different sets of laws--those before the BB, and those after. If we were simply using current laws of science (the ones after the BB), then yes, it would be irrational. But we don't even know what laws governed the state of the universe prior to the BB, so it is possible that those laws would deem it rational."

tomaq's OP:
B. It is more rational to believe that the universe is currently in a dynamic state than a static state.

"That is true."

tomaq's OP:
C. Therefore, it is irrational to think that the universe existed in a static state.

"Maybe not. The TOE, or the Unified Field Theory, or the Unified Theory of Gravity, or whatever the theory will be called is being developed as we speak and is going to include the set of laws that governed the universe prior to the BB. It will let us know once and for all the answers to the good questions you've raised. But any definite answer on this now would be quite premature. Hawking thinks the theory will be here in less than 25 years."

tomaq:
"there seems to be some confusion on this thread about speaking of "before" the big bang, since the big bang is when time was created and thus there is no before. how would stephen hawking reply to this idea? is it a semantical issue?"

Hawkingfan:
"Right, "before" should be discarded. All I can think of to use to describe what I'm talking about is the "initial state of the universe" that was not the bb. Of course, you may then have a problem with "initial". Alot of it has to do with semantics. Here's some quotes from Hawking's "A Brief History of Time":

p.49
All of the Friedmann solutions have the feature that at some point in the past (between ten and twenty thousand million years ago) the distance between neighboring galaxies must have been zero. At that time, which we call the big bang, the density of the universe and the curvature of space-time would have been infinite. Because mathematics cannot really handle infinite numbers, this means that the general theory of relativity (on which Friedmann’s solutions are based) predicts that there is a point in the universe where the theory itself breaks down. Such a point is an example of what mathematicians call a singularity. In fact, all our theories of science are formulated on the ssumption that space-time is smooth and nearly flat, so they break down at the big bang singularity, where the curvature of space-time is infinite. This means that even if there were events before the big bang, one could not use them to determine what would happen afterward, because probability would break down at the big bang.
Correspondingly, if, as is the case, we know only what has happened since the big bang, we could not determine what happened before-hand. As far as we are concerned, events before the big bang can have no consequences, so they
should not form part of a scientific model of the universe. We should therefore cut them out of the model and say that time had a beginning at the big bang.

p.9
..the big bang...If there were events earlier than this time, then they could not affect what happens at the present time. Their existence can be ignored because it would have no observational consequences. One may say that time had a beginning at the big bang, in the sense that earlier times simply would not be defined. It should be emphasized that this beginning in time is very different from those that had been considered previously. In an unchanging universe a beginning in time is something that has to be imposed by some being outside the universe; there is no physical necissity for a beginning. On the other hand, if the universe is expanding, there may be physical reasons why there
had to be a beginning.

p.12
...there is a question of the initial state of the universe.
...God could have started the universe off any way he wanted. That may be so, but in that case he also could have made it develop in a completely arbitrary way. Yet, it appears that he chose to make it evolve in a very regular way according to certain laws. It therefore, seems equally reasonable to suppose that there are also laws governing the initial state. I turns out to be very difficult to devise a theory to describe the universe all in one go. Instead, we break the problem up into bits and invent a
number of partial theories. Each of these partial theories describes and predicts a certain limited class of observations...
...quantum theory of gravity...We do not yet have such a theory...but we do already know many of the properties that it must have...we already know a fair amount about the predictions a quantum theory of gravity must make.

Hawkingfan:--it appears we should throw out all terminology concerning "before the bb", or or "existence before the bb" for that matter because as Hawking says, those are "undefined" at a singularity. I know that sounds like a cop-out.

I should also correct myself about the current theories being worked on. They will describe, as Hawking says, "the physical reasons why there had to be a beginning."

You should start a new thread in Science & Skepticism concerning this because I am not an expert. I do however know that your arguments are flawed because they are using terminologies and logic based on the scientific theories that are broken down in the circumstances you are referring to. They do not apply to the initial state of the universe."

tomaq:
"[In response to someone else's post]It necessarily follows that at that point before the universe existed, nothing could have been in existence. Therefore, nothingness would be logically prior to the universe.
Another way to put this would be to say that if the universe is all that exists and yet has not always existed, then there must have been some point when nothing existed."

Hawkingfan:
"But at the intial state of the universe, the term "always existed" is undefined. It means nothing (that is, it has no meaning, not that it means "nothing"). The only meaning it has is AFTER the BB (and it would mean: from the BB ---->event X).

The initial state of the universe and the big bang are indeed confusing. The part that seems to be the most confusing to you is the state the universe was in at the bb. You know that time existed since the bb, and you know a singularity existed at the bb; but the question "how long has it existed there?" is meaningless because time does not exist in a singularity."

We would like some feedback from the physics experts here (Jesse, et al.). Thank you.

Hawkingfan

JESSE,
YOU'RE BACK! PLEASE HELP!

Normal

Has this guy not heard of "Energy cannot be created or destroyed"?

The "existence" (aka physical make-up) of things is always changing, but the "energy" that makes up their existence is guaranteed to always exist in some form. If you want to attach an "age" to the existence of the singularity in that manner, you'd have to do the same thing to the existence of everything, and that would mean everything is "eternal".

Jesse

Hey Hawkingfan, yeah, just got back from a trip to New York for a few days...it seems like the Origin of Time and Space thread is also dealing with the same question. Basically I think you're partly dealing with the philosophical issue of whether time "really" flows or not--if you think that it does, that the future doesn't really exist yet, then the notion of the universe "springing from existence out of nothing" might be the only way to interpret the standard Big Bang theory (ignoring for the moment variants of the Big Bang theory based on quantum gravity rather than classical general relativity). But if you take the philosophical view that time is a sort of subjective illusion, that the future and past are just as real as other locations in space, then there isn't really any "something from nothing" here--there's just a complete spacetime which includes all the events that happened or will happened in the universe's history, and there's no need to imagine that this complete spacetime "came into existence" in some sort of meta-time (just like theres no need for a meta-space, or 'embedding space', for curved spacetime to sit in). You can parametrize the time dimension on this spacetime in any way you like--the big bang could be t=0, but you could also just as well treat the big crunch (if there is one) as t=0, with the time parameter increasing in the direction of decreasing entropy (ie what we ordinarily think of as the 'past').

eh

Ahh yes, but it is often claimed that because the net energy of the universe is zero, creation ex-nihilo would not violate the conservation laws. It's a neat little trick.

Hawkingfan

Thanks Jesse! (and everyone else)
I believe in the second option you gave. Makes sense to me. Tomaq may have some questions about it, though.

lpetrich

I tend to be rather agnostic on the origin of the Big Bang.

It can be shown from the Penrose-Hawking Singularity Theorems and certain reasonable hypotheses about the equation of state of matter that the Universe had come out of some quantum-gravity phase.

And we lack a good theory of quantum gravity.