doubtingt

There is definitely no consensus among physicists that quantum behavior is non-deterministic in the sense that they constitute "uncaused" events. Neither "randomness" nor "unpredictable" constitutes a lack of causation, only our failure to be able to identify a cause.
In addition, it is entirely unjustified to generalize quantum principles to events that are not at the quantum level.

For a decent intro to what quantum mechanics does and does not tell us, along with a critique of common psuedo-quantum quackery, go to:

<a href="http://www.csicop.org/si/9701/quantum-quackery.html" target="_blank">http://www.csicop.org/si/9701/quantum-quackery.html</a>

Here's an excerpt of what you'll find there.

"The conventional interpretation of quantum mechanics, promulgated by Bohr and still held by most physicists,...concerns only what can be measured and what predictions can be made about the statistical distributions of ensembles of future measurements. As noted, the wave function is simply a mathematical object used to calculate probabilities. Mathematical constructs can be as magical as any other figment of the human imagination-like the Starship Enterprise or a Roadrunner cartoon. Nowhere does quantum mechanics imply that real matter or signals travel faster than light. In fact, superluminal signal propagation has been proven to be impossible in any theory consistent with conventional relativity and quantum mechanics (Eberhard and Ross 1989)."

Shadowy Man

I guess I've stated it before, but not stressed it too much, that the Big Bang theory is just that, a theory.

All the evidence that we actually have says that the universe was in a very hot and dense state, 10-15 billion years ago. We don't really know much about what happened before that point.

Fluctuations in the cosmic background radiation help to shed light on the thermodynamic state of the universe at that point, but any extrapolation of the Hubble expansion to a singularity is just that, an extrapolation.

I remember hearing Alan Guth give a talk on his inflationary model and my crude understanding of it, and I should probably read some followup material (he has a book on it, right?) is that inflationary theory doesn't really have a real T=0 moment, so no "creation" is really necessary. There was a period of rapid inflation of some kind of "false vacuum" state, which then "decayed" into a normal space state and that is what we are observing today.

I guess I don't every worry too much about what "created" the universe because we don't really have any information at all about what happened before the time of last scattering.

Rusting Car Bumper

All complex multi propositional conglomerations in science are theories. So what?

Quantum theory will always be "just a theory" yet here we are building transistors and computers.

DC

Rusting Car Bumper

The first propostion isn't true. Stating "a cause" suggests a single cause.
The fourth doesn't follow and proposition 3 is merely asserted. The universe exists but we don't know that it "began to exist." The fourth could be stated that "the universe consists of entities which appear to be causal."

DC

Shadowy Man

DigitalChicken:

What I meant was that the idea that the universe began as a singularity at time T=0 is not a substantiated fact. The expansion of the universe, on the other hand, is. Additionally, the cosmic background radiation proves that the universe was once hot and dense. But people on this board, and others, seem to think that the idea that the universe sprang from nothing through a quantum fluctuation at T=0 is also a fact. It is not. It is an unproven assertion based on the extrapolation of a theory beyond the limits of its applicability as we currently understand them.

Rusting Car Bumper

Of course it isn't. It never will be. Its a product of theory and as such it will always be a proposition to which we could a assign a relative degree of probability.

Most all of these are also propositions like I described above.

Science does not produce "facts." It produces propositions which are subject to review given new evidence or theories.

DC

Shadowy Man

Well, I guess it gets to what you really want to define as "fact". I think the facts I listed are as much fact as that the Earth is in an elliptical orbit around the Sun.

Certain Facts: Galaxies show absorption/emission lines that are redshifted. Redshift is correlated with distance to the galaxy. Cosmic background radiation is a nearly perfect T=2.73K blackbody. These are well established and not disputed.

A theory: Redshift is due to Doppler effect.

Conclusion: The universe is expanding and was once hot and dense.

This argument is just as valid as saying that the way that the stars, planets, and Sun move in the sky gives the conclusion that the Earth is in a Keplerian orbit around the Sun.