tronvillain

What can I say? It has all been said.

Biff the unclean

The primitive seeked an explanation through the myth as we seek it through the reason.
What do you mean "we?" You are using nothing but myth.

I'm saying: "I know that God has to be presupposed in the creation of the Universe, although I can't offer any empirical proof of it".
Which is exactly what the primitive was doing when he said that a god made the lightening or a goddess lived in the volcano.
You are presupposing that a myth must be true, but you have empirical proof of it.
Were you to use reason you would be forced to admit that since you have no empirical proof that a god exists you have no way of observing it. Having never observed it you have no way of knowing what it's behavior is, if it creates anything or not.
Reason tells you that every natural effect has an equally natural cause. It tells us that since no supernatural causes have ever been found to exist it is foolish assume one now.
Honesty tells us that if you don't know how something happened-like the beginning of everything-then you should not claim that you do.

Are you able to prove me you can count to infinite? So you're deifying ignorance, not me.
I can't help but notice that it is you who are claiming knowledge of the infinite, and not me. So start counting.
It is also only you who are claiming that they are not ignorant of how it all began. You claim to have knowledge of a god and in the same breath say "I can't offer any empirical proof of it." By any standards you are not telling the truth by your own admission, shame on you.

irichc

Oops, one of your fellows says that what I'm saying "expresses a true proposition". Maybe I'm not so absurd, uh? But he also adds that Universe may exist uncaused, that is, with an immanent reason. Well, that's a fallacy. If reason was immanent to matter, we would never find a first reason (like when we divide by zero) and we should ask ourselves, like Heidegger:

Why is Being rather than nothingness?

And, for the other first agents that SRB imagine, if they are outside the space-time, ¿how could they be more than ONE (any division presupposes space)? ¿how could they be limited or created by another gods? (any creation presupposes time)?

Daniel.

Forum of philosophy (spanish):

http://boards1.melodysoft.com/app?ID=isegoria

irichc

¿Are you asking me for a picture of God? ¿Can any mathematician picture infinite? ¿Can you smell colours?

You are not reasoning at all. Ad hominem fallacy.

Daniel.

Philosophy forum (spanish):

http://boards1.melodysoft.com/app?ID=isegoria

Hawkingfan

Dr. Michio Kaku, Henry Semat Profesor of Theoretical Physics at the City University of New York states as follows concerning the beginning of the Universe and its expansion:

Imagine a child blowing up a balloon. Imagine that there are dots painted on the balloon. Notice that all the dots are moving away from each other. The farther any two dots are, the faster they are moving apart.

Now imagine there is an ant living on the balloon. To the ant, the balloon is infinite in two dimensions. The ant, walking on the balloon, could go an infinite distance around the balloon and never reach "the end of the balloon." To an ant, the "universe" would be a two-dimensional, expanding surface, such that the farther the dots are, the faster they move.

If you were to ask the ant, "What is the universe expanding into?," the ant would reply that the question has no meaning. The ant can only move on the surface of the balloon, yet the expansion of the balloon lies in the third dimension, in hyperspace, which is beyond the understanding of the ant. All that the ant understands is that the space between dots is expanding. But it cannot understand "into what is it expanding," since that requires knowledge of the third dimension, or hyperspace, which is beyond the ant's comprehension.

Also, if you ask the ant, "From where did the balloon expand?," the question would have no meaning. The expansion point lies at the center of the balloon, which is off the "universe" of the ant. Thus, the balloon's Big Bang also lies in hyperspace, beyond the understanding of the ant.

To us, however, all these answers are trivial. We live in hyperspace (the third dimension) so we can see that the balloon is finite and is expanding in the third dimension, and that the balloon's Big Bang lies in the center, also in the third dimension.
Likewise, there may be other balloons floating in hyperspace. The ant, which has difficulty understanding its own balloon, would have an even greater problem understanding the fact that there might be other balloons, with other ants on them.

Similarly, we are like the ant, except that our universe appears to be infinite in three dimensions. We can go an infinite distance in any direction, and never reach the "end of the universe."
Likewise, the space between our galaxies is expanding, such that the farther a galaxy is, the faster it is going (this is Hubble's Law). (However, there are also random motions, so galaxies can sometimes collide. For example, our own galaxy may one day be gobbled up by the Andromeda Galaxy.)

But the question, "Into what is the universe expanding?" makes no sense to our three-dimensional brains. The location of the Big Bang is in hyperspace.

(If we try to retrace the early history of the universe, we still cannot locate the Big Bang. If we go back 15 billion or so years, the universe might have been as big as, say, a bowling ball. The entire universe, with all its space and matter, was only that big. But nowhere on the bowling ball was the Big Bang.)

Today, cosmologists are grappling with the question, "What happened before the Big Bang?" Einstein's equations break down at that point, so we need a theory which combines the quantum theory and general relativity (the unified field theory). So far, the only candidate for such a fabled theory is the 10-dimensional superstring theory.

To quantize the universe, let us first consider an electron. We know from chemistry class that the electron can exist simultaneously in infinitely many orbitals surrounding the nucleus. (Because of the Uncertainty Principle, we can never know for sure precisely which state the electron is in, until an observation is made.) These are "parallel electrons." This strange fact about electrons has been verified thousands of times in the laboratory.
Now if we quantize the universe, we must treat it like an electron. Because of Uncertainty, this means that the universe must also exist simultaneously in an infinite number of states. These are parallel universes.

Imagine boiling water (a quantum mechanical phenomenon). Out of nothing, bubbles form and then quickly expand. Similarly, the leading theory among cosmologists today is the multiverse theory, which states that quantum universes are constantly being created out of Nothing. Many of them are probably short-lived; they have a Big Bang, but then rapidly have a Big Crunch and disappear back into Nothing.

(This does not violate the conservation of matter and energy; the matter of the universe has positive energy, but the gravitational field has negative energy, such that the total energy for a closed universe is zero, so it takes zero energy to create a closed universe.)

This means that Big Bangs are probably happening all the time, with entire bubble/universes springing out of the vacuum. However, life probably does not exist in most of these universes. Protons need to be stable for several billion years in order to create DNA (or at least some other auto-catalytic, self-replicating form of stable matter). So many of these other universes in the multiverse are probably lifeless, consisting of, say, a sea of electrons, neutrinos, and photons.

Our universe is probably one of the few in which the expansion is so great that the universe lives for many billions of years, enough for stable matter to form.

This may ultimately explain the Anthropic Principle: the puzzle that the physical constants of our universe seem "fine-tuned" to allow for intelligent life to form. Some have speculated that it was no accident that the physical constants of the universe are precisely those which allow for life to form. If the constants were a bit different, then deuterium and the higher elements would never have formed, and hence DNA could not exist.

However, this multiverse idea argues against that. It says that there are indeed an infinite number of dead universes, and our universe just happens accidentally to be one in which the constants of the universe accidentally came out consistent with life, so we are here to debate the question in the first place.

Can the multiverse theory be tested? Its critics say no, since a real test involves re-creating the Big Bang, which is impossible.
However, a new generation of satellites will soon make precise measurements of the microwave background radiation. Very small perturbations in the smooth "echo of the Big Bang" may possibly prove some version of the "inflationary universe theory," which in turn is nicely explained by the multiverse idea.

Similarly, many physicists (myself included) believe that we will one day solve the superstring theory, in which case we will be able to make precise statements about what happened before the Big Bang.

faustuz

Proponents of this argument (I believe it’s called the Cosmological argument, no?) posit that motion must have a cause because it is never observed, and is beyond their comprehension, that motion can not occur without a mover. They then posit that since the universe is in motion there must have been an a priori mover, and they call that God. When somebody objects that they have just added an entity into the equation that itself needs an a priori mover, they say something like it’s “suprasensible” (whatever that means), or spiritual, or transcendental. Whatever. When you object that it is also never observed that things are set in motion by “suprasensible” (whatever that means), or spiritual, or transcendental entities, and that such a concept is equally as incomprehensible as motion without a mover, they say something like "I know that God has to be presupposed in the creation of the Universe, although I can't offer any empirical proof of it". So, you’ve just spent an hour debating the creation of the universe with somebody who has no useful explanation that they can defend as to how or why the universe was created, and yet their explanation is for some reason superior to “no prime mover”.

I just don’t get it.

I also don’t get why we keep hearing this same argument again, and again, and again, and… each time it’s proposed as if it were some great revelation.

irichc

I wasn't trying to understand God, but to justify faith in God. Faith is rationally plausible, despite what some rationalists say.

Daniel.

Biff the unclean

¿Are you asking me for a picture of God?
No, I am asking you to be honest.
You admit that you cannot prove that there is a god. Then you turn around and not only do you tell us that there is a god you tell us what this god has done

¿Can any mathematician picture infinite?
It's usually written as a sideways figure eight

¿Can you smell colours?
You are the one who is claiming to have knowledge that he admittedly doesn't have. I can't smell colors but I can smell a rat.

You are not reasoning at all. Ad hominem fallacy.
Nice try, it's funny that they call themselves "Apologists" yet they never apologize. This is no "ad hominem fallacy" this is you not telling us the truth and getting caught trying to pull a fast one. Your argument isn't incorrect because you are a terrible person. You haven't made an argument. You've made only an assertion, the truth of which you admit you have no proof.

And to top it off you even boast that you can't prove what you claim! (¿Can you smell colours?)

Dr Rick

Faith is obviously plausible but still irrational; it is belief in the absence of or contrary to evidence. You have provided no rational argument to justify faith.

Rick

SRB

The fact that something exists rather than nothing is an excellent example of a fact that cannot possibly be explained. The Principle of Sufficient Reason is necessarily false. That's because any thing, T, one might put forward to explain why something exists rather than nothing would already PRESUPPOSE that something exists, namely T. A presupposition that something exists, obviously, does not qualify as an explanation for why something exists rather than nothing. It follows that the Principle of Sufficient Reason is false.

In any case, I see no coherent chain of reasoning in what you have written to show that all events (or states of affairs) have causes. You just assert that a denial of such a view is "a fallacy." You'll need to do better than that.

I would say that causation is necessarily temporal and that for X to be caused to exist there must be a prior time when X does not yet exist. So clearly THE TOTALITY OF TIME cannot be caused to exist, since there was no time when the totality of time did not (yet) exist. It is logically impossible for a being who is outside of time to change in any way or to cause anything to happen, since change presupposes the existence of time. So if God is outside of time, necessarily God did not cause the universe to exist.

If the universe does have a cause, there are many candidates for what that might be. Cosmologists speculate about "bubble universes": maybe our universe budded off from a previously-existing bubble of spacetime. Maybe the universe was caused to exist by some hitherto undiscovered impersonal force or mechanism. If the universe was caused to exist by a person (or persons) maybe he is only finite in power. Or maybe he is not completely good. Or maybe he is not all-knowing. Perhaps he died shortly after creating the universe. As can be seen, there are plenty of alternate explanations, both personal and impersonal, for the origin of the universe, aside from the traditional theistic one.

SRB