thomaq

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?

thomaq

first of let me say that i think you have given us a good way to address the issues. not as "know it alls" or arrogant people. we are just people with common interests all searching for truth. i appreciate what you have said. let me deal with a few things in your post that i feel will clarify my intentions a little bit.

1. i acknowledge that naturalism does not claim to have all the answers. in my examination of naturalism, i am trying to come up with as many options as possible and then examine them skeptically. i would love to hear some more options. i have just been applying skepticism to the options that i have seen (and that i think are most widely held) and i have found good reasons to call them irrational. i have not heard any better reasons to call them rational.

2. we are never justified in thinking all options have been exhausted. if all past and current options are irrational, we can still have faith that science will indeed give us more answers in the future.

3. what you have presented here still falls into either option 2a or 2b. sounds like it would be a series of "2b occurances". you would still need a rational explanation for the shift from the singularity (static) to dynamic.

4. i am not claiming theism here, i am claiming skepticism. but being that i am applying skepticism to naturalism, let me say that it is not my position that people who are waiting for more answers are irrational. i appreciate and respect everyone who searches for truth. in my own search for truth, i have come to the conclusion that "as of now, at this point in human history" naturalist explanations for the universe are irrational.

thomaq

1. just by definition. if there is a present, and the past is infinite, then an infinite amount of moments had to occur in order to reach the present.

2. when dealing with infinity i have never tried to bring up the "beginning" of the universe. i stated that "if" the universe is infinite then it by definition did not have a beginning.

3. all you have done here is explain that "any" finite interval can be crossed, not an "infinite" interval. (in fact an infinite interval is incoherent).

4. i dont care if someone goes to the "goddidit" card or not, if the present exists then a temporally infinite past is inconceivable and impossible by definition.

5. and again, no one is asking that.

Alix Nenuphar

thomasq:

Your point,
is not clear to me. What, precisely, do you mean by 'identity'? What does 'identity relies on an existent' actually mean?

It would help to clarify the meaning you ascribe to precede. Are you suggesting an 'equivalence'? A 'definition'? An 'aspect'? Is your usage acceptable in the construction: even numbers precede 2? I might point out that your attempt to explicate your meaning involves yet another sequence word: order.

If we replace 'precede' with your alternative has, we have the construct: the universe has nothing - I suspect this is not what you intend.

I suggest that you use another word entirely, since the common definition of 'precede': 'temporally antecedent' will simply cause confusion.

Once this is clarified, we can proceed to a discussion of whether or not naturalistic explanations of the universe are irrational. Regrettably, of course, that would tell us nothing about whether naturalism itself is irrational.

Could you also please define 'naturalism' as you are using it within this thread?

Thank you.

thomaq

Alix Nenuphar,
i will most definitely answer your questions. first i would like to make sure we dont go on a tangent. the line of reasoning i was using was to show that option 1 on the original post is irrational. are you possibly thinking that option one is a viable option or do you think options 2a or 2b would be better? if you agree that option one is irrational, then i would prefer not to clutter the thread with more argumentation for it. but if it you think it is rational that something could come from nothing then i will respond with an answer.

Alix Nenuphar

thomasq:

I am genuinely not trying to side-track this thread; but until we agree on common terminology, it is impossible to ascertain whether you option 1 is rational or not.

Based on your statement of the problem, I am certainly willing to argue that option (1) is rational - in the sense that you appear to be using, i.e. that it involves no logical contradictions.

Hawkingfan

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.
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.
That is true.
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.

thomaq

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?

Wyrdsmyth

Well, I think we have the proper attitude then.

I am still unsure as to what you mean by the 'good reasons' you have to find naturalism irrational. If you find reasons to doubt certain given theories, then I can go along with that. But any given cosmological theory that you find intuitively problematic does not necessarily cast a shadow of irrationality on naturalism as a whole. And when it comes to cosmology and astrophysics, we should all keep open minds -- don't you agree? Besides, what is it that you find irrational? That the universe could have always existed, that it could come from nothing, or both? But are those not the same options open to a supernatural origin?

Let me ask this a different way. When are we justified in ruling out that the cause for a given event is not and cannot be natural, and that a supernatural explanation is the more plausible one?

Okay, the point I was trying to make is that theories are not always as cut and dry as some would like them to be. There are many possibilities and combinations of possibilities.

Quote:

4. i am not claiming theism here, i am claiming skepticism. but being that i am applying skepticism to naturalism, let me say that it is not my position that people who are waiting for more answers are irrational. i appreciate and respect everyone who searches for truth. in my own search for truth, i have come to the conclusion that "as of now, at this point in human history" naturalist explanations for the universe are irrational.

How are they irrational? And how does being skeptical of any given theory translate to being skeptical about naturalism as a whole? I think it is quite healthy and proper to be skeptical about theories, and to put them through the most rigorous criticism possible. But even if a theory ends up shot full of holes -- how does that translate to naturalism being shot full of holes? The origin of the universe is admittedly one of those areas of knowledge about which science can say little or nothing for sure, and only offer theories that often border on wild speculation. And, in many cases, the speculation part of it is admitted up front. That truly is the frontier of natural science, and may indeed always be the frontier, or even just beyond it. I find it odd that someone can be so skeptical of 'naturalism,' since naturalism is just what is all around us, and our guesses about how it works, in general and in its particulars. That's all it is, really.

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.

Hopefully Jesse, one of the moderators in that forum and a physics expert, can help us. He is much more knowledgable and is much more articulated than myself. If he won't respond, then maybe I can PM him.