Rational Ag

I received a personal e-mail from someone regarding a post here on II. The e-mail was in response to the thread pdwblw started named <a href="http://iidb.org/ubb/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic&f=47&t=000969" target="_blank">a loving god</a>, in which I retorted to his statement that his bible-god loves us with a synopsis of Moby Dick. My point was obviously to show that, while interesting, much of the bible is fiction and should be regarded as such. There are plenty of interesting stories, and it's interesting to talk about them and learn things from them, but they aren't any more important or inspired than Moby Dick. We shouldn't regard them as reality any more than we should regard any other work of fiction as factual.

The e-mail "rebuttal" included a poor rendition of the cosmological argument for the existence of a God, which I will respond to publicly below. I am curious though, what in the world does a statement that the bible is fiction have to do with the cosmological argument? How is that a response to what I stated? I wonder if the e-mailer thought that the cosmological argument was particularly convincing? Maybe he/she was trying to personally "witness" to me, and that argument was one that was personally convincing to them, so they thought that they would share. Either way, my response is below his original e-mail to me.


Let's pick this apart one section at a time, shall we?

It is my sincere hope that some time in the near future pastors and missionaries will stop trying to speak about things that they have absolutely no clue about. First off, all evidence suggests that our universe (as we know it) is winding down, and will eventually die out. Secondly, entropy is not a "state". It's an abstract concept physicists use to describe the useful amount of work in a system. You seem to be trying to get to the concept of equilibrium, and you think that if the universe is eternal, then it would be in a state of equilibrium right now.

Nobody knows the state of matter and energy before the big bang. Nobody knows what existed before the big bang. The only information we have about our universe is within this frame of reference (our present universe). To make statements about the nature and existence of matter/energy/deities before the big bang is speculation. We currently do not understand the physics behind cosmological interactions, and have no idea how matter and energy interact. We cannot make any kind of conclusions based on evidence about what caused the big bang.

However, we do observe that matter and energy cannot be destroyed. Thus, we have no reason to believe that the universe is anything but eternally existent.

We don't know why the big bang happened, and we don't know what caused it. We do know that something happened about 14 billion years ago that severely altered or changed the state of matter and energy in the universe to make it look as it does now. Because the structure of the matter and energy in the universe is as we see it, and the event that happened 14 billion years ago was so drastic, it's difficult for us to speculate about the nature of matter and energy aside from how we understand it.

Consider this: A person walks into the deserts of California and blows up a small nuclear bomb. The blast radius is 12 miles and it severely alters the makeup and chemistry of the surrounding land for miles. Five years later, the ant colony living there in the center of the universe is building and exploring the land around it's mound. Consider how the ants perceive the world around them. The only land they know about has a certain radiation to it. They don't know what caused the radiation, and they don't understand that land exists without this radiation. Were the ants to be intelligent beings, they could not speculate on what thier universe looked like before this radiation. Since the radiation had such a dramatic effect on the state of the matter, and since it winds down at a certain rate, the ants would be able to tell when something happened to the universe as they know it, but they wouldn't be able to determine what had happened before the explosion and they wouldn't be able to tell what caused it. We are ants in a universe too large for us to grasp. We are ants in a universe that's on a timescale far greater than the lives of us and our people.

Philosophers enjoy discussions about actual infinites, because we don't have the ability to comprehend them. Speculate with me that the universe is infinitely old. Assume that the infinite timeline goes in either direction off either end of your desk. If you are unable to do this because you have a mental block, go ahead and assume this infinite timeline applies to your God instead of the Universe, it's the same thing. At some point between infinitely old and the infinite future, there is the present. As we progress through time there is always a "present". An infinite timeline is composed of a series of finite points. Even though the line is infinite, we exist as a finite point somewhere in that line.

I personally don't know anyone who holds that the universe is infinitely large. In fact, all evidence suggests that all of the matter and energy in the universe is finite in size. I have no problems with your conclusions here, but I disagree with your reasons for coming to such a conclusion.

I'll grant you that all events have causes (although some quantum mechanics studies lately have begun to show that's not necessarily true.

However, events deal with matter and energy that are already existing. Cause hasn't been shown to apply to existence, it applies to cause/effect relationships within the universe as we know it. All things that happen must have a cause. These cause/effect relationships work within an already existing universe of matter and energy. All things that exist have not been shown to have a cause.

For example, the matter and energy that make up my desk existed before my desk was made. The cause was the desk maker, his materials, tools, and equipment. Everything that caused my desk to exist was in existence in the universe prior to my desk being made. No amount of matter or energy was created or destroyed in the making of my desk.

Using another example with non-human interaction (just in case you feel the need to use the tired watchmaker analogy), mountains are formed by lava coming through the crust of the earth's surface. No matter was created or destroyed in the making of the volcano. The previously existing matter and energy caused the mountain to form, but the existence of the mountain didn't have a cause. The matter and energy already existed.

Using the same logic, we would have to violate the very well established conservation of matter and energy principals to assume anything other than an eternal universe. All cause-effect relationships are to be understood as events within the universe, and don't apply to the existence of things, but rather the state of that matter and energy.

You have not shown that the universe was brought into existence, so a discussion about stuff that is "greater" than the universe is irrelevant. However, you should probably define "universe" for me as you use it. I take "universe" to mean everything that exists. Does God exist? If so, he is part of the Universe as I define it. If you mean everything "natural" that exists, then fine. Since I haven't seen any evidence for anything "supernatural", then our definitions are equal and God does not exist.

Why would your proposed "uncaused cause" need to be infinite in both space and time? Do you really understand what that means? Please explain it for me.

This is my favorite part of this whole essay! This is really just too entertaining by itself, so I won't add anything to it.

This whole exercise in your version of a cosmological argument has been a leap of logic. The cosmological argument for the existence or nonexistence of God requires one to assume their conclusion. The cosmological argument for God is neither evidence for or against the existence of God because it's entirely speculative. You can choose to believe in ancient Hebrew myths regarding the existence of the universe, but I'd rather put my stock in theories that are supported by evidence.

-Rational Ag

EvilTeuf

Sorry to hijack, but doesn't Hawking (and possibly some others) have a different take on it?

Rational Ag

Kind of, yes. My term "die out" was a poor one. The universe as we know it had a beginning at the big bang, and it seems as though our universe will re-collapse on itself sometime in the far distant future. That re-collapse would be my "die out", because the universe as we know it would go *poof*.

From his lecture linked below:

"The conclusion of this lecture is that the universe has not existed forever. Rather, the universe, and time itself, had a beginning in the Big Bang, about 15 billion years ago. The beginning of real time, would have been a singularity, at which the laws of physics would have broken down. Nevertheless, the way the universe began would have been determined by the laws of physics, if the universe satisfied the no boundary condition. This says that in the imaginary time direction, space-time is finite in extent, but doesn't have any boundary or edge. The predictions of the no boundary proposal seem to agree with observation. The no boundary hypothesis also predicts that the universe will eventually collapse again."

You can read the rest of the <a href="http://www.hawking.org.uk/lectures/bot.html" target="_blank">Stephen Hawking lecture</a> on the beginning of time if you like.

-Rational Ag

Laera

Doesn't something out of chaos theory suggest the following:

Given the amount of matter-energy interaction in the universe, a constant state of change is inevitable. Pretty much if ANYTHING was EVER moving/changing/reacting, no matter how infinitely long the universe has existed, there will never be a universal equilibrium or ceasation of change.

Theories like inertia, and cause-effect (chaos theory) are less temporal than the second law. Granted they all came out of our limited ability to observe the present state of our tiny part of the universe, however... Inertia seems to be a property of matter (like gravity). And chaos theory (simplisticly: butterfly flaps in china and a child in africa dies in a famine) is an observation of the capability of small amounts of change having huge consequences. Motion is change (re-location of matter in space and time). Granted not all small changes bring about drastic effects, odds are they even out on average. But, that doesn't mean everything *stops changing,* as the author of the email seems to imply would happen given an infinite past.

The second law is only a property of closed systems. We've never observed entropy formed in a system, and can't imagine how it would be possible. But one wild thought is maybe it's created in another part of the universe?

On a side note, here's my crack at a definition of Entropy:
Entropy is a theoretical way of quantifying "how much closer" a closed system is to a state of equilibrium.
And remember, there is still *change* in equilibrium - the electrons never stop moving, do they?

One last thing:
He posits the God of the Bible is the "necessary uncaused cause." I'm going to go ahead and suggest that the Hindu Elephant God sneezed (he's much larger than the universe - obviously, since he's it's creator, right?), and that's the event we theoretically call the Big Bang. Would the author care to tell me what grounds he has for choosing his version over mine? (keeping in mind that the elephant god has given much wisedom to his followers over the past centuries - kind of like his god... hmmm...)

Now, back to your regularly scheduled thread.

Laera

I thought of a better way of saying all that:

A sine wave is "in equilibrium" and on average over time, has no positive or negative effect. Yet, at any point on that wave, there is either a trend toward change, or a perceived net effect. What's to say we aren't simply observing the down side of a pulsing, though infinetly stable universe? Everything changed drastically 15 billion years ago, and I personally don't think we'll ever find out what the universe was like before that. But I'm not willing to make up a story and tout it as fact... though I'm pretty free with my wild speculation!

Max Bane

I'm not sure this is the current theory anymore, according to my admittedly lay sources...
The article then goes on to say that in 2001 HST researchers found evidence that Dark Energy (originally proposed by Einstein) must be responsible for pushing the galaxies apart, and that the acceleration must have begun relatively recently in the universe's history.