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Author Topic:   Can science say anything about a Creator God?
Percy
Member
Posts: 22392
From: New Hampshire
Joined: 12-23-2000
Member Rating: 5.2


Message 423 of 506 (697000)
04-20-2013 7:20 AM
Reply to: Message 417 by GDR
04-19-2013 8:45 PM


Re: Predictions
GDR writes:
I’m going to copy this over from what I wrote on another thread a while back concerning who created God. The same objection keeps coming up on different threads so this is actually the third time I've posted this.
In "The Fabric of the Cosmos" by Brian Greene, (one of my favourite books), he writes the following after talking about how we only experience time in one direction, and that we would expect there to be a law that confirms this.
quote:
"The perplexing thing is that no one has discovered any such law. What's more, the laws of physics that have been articulated from Newton through Maxwell and Einstein, and up to until today, show a complete symmetry between past and future. Nowhere in any of these laws do we find a stipulation that they apply one way in time but not the other. Nowhere is there any distinction between how the laws look or behave when applied in either direction in time. The laws treat what we call past and future on a completely equal footing."
It seems that our current understanding of the laws of physics indicate that theoretically it should be possible to exist by either going forward or back in time.
Greene raises this point so he can later explain why it *isn't* possible to go either direction in time. If you continue reading past page 145 and on through the section on entropy that begins on page 151 you'll understand why time can't flow in either direction. Sure, some equations like f=ma work equally well in either time direction, but the universe obeys *all* its laws (including entropy), not just some of them.
This alone would allow for an infinite existence.
Your conclusion doesn't follow from your premise (which was wrong anyway), and time doesn't need to extend infinitely in both directions to be infinite. The set of positive integers is infinite, even though it has a beginning point.
--Percy

This message is a reply to:
 Message 417 by GDR, posted 04-19-2013 8:45 PM GDR has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 424 by NoNukes, posted 04-20-2013 12:54 PM Percy has seen this message but not replied
 Message 428 by GDR, posted 04-20-2013 4:55 PM Percy has replied

  
Percy
Member
Posts: 22392
From: New Hampshire
Joined: 12-23-2000
Member Rating: 5.2


Message 434 of 506 (697042)
04-20-2013 5:44 PM
Reply to: Message 428 by GDR
04-20-2013 4:55 PM


Re: Predictions
GDR writes:
I'm certainly not in a position to argue the details of science with you or anyone else around here for that matter, but that wasn't the point that I was trying to make.
Yes, I know it wasn't the point you were trying to make. But it was the point that was wrong.
I'm only suggesting that the mathematics point to the possibility of a non-entropic existence.
This, too, is wrong.
The point of all this is that the idea that eternal or non-entropic existence in another dimension or universe isn't inconceivable scientifically.
True, but Greene was writing about this universe, and you were wrong about what Greene was saying about this universe.
Your argument is rather fluid and ambiguous, but you almost seem to be arguing that if something could be true of some other universe, then it could also be true of our universe.
--Percy

This message is a reply to:
 Message 428 by GDR, posted 04-20-2013 4:55 PM GDR has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 437 by GDR, posted 04-20-2013 6:19 PM Percy has seen this message but not replied

  
Percy
Member
Posts: 22392
From: New Hampshire
Joined: 12-23-2000
Member Rating: 5.2


Message 446 of 506 (697117)
04-21-2013 3:30 PM
Reply to: Message 438 by NoNukes
04-20-2013 7:16 PM


NoNukes writes:
None of the signals you describe would indicate intelligence to me...
SETI looks for narrow bandwidth signals because of the unlikelihood they would occur naturally.
--Percy

This message is a reply to:
 Message 438 by NoNukes, posted 04-20-2013 7:16 PM NoNukes has seen this message but not replied

  
Percy
Member
Posts: 22392
From: New Hampshire
Joined: 12-23-2000
Member Rating: 5.2


(1)
Message 452 of 506 (697149)
04-22-2013 7:28 AM
Reply to: Message 447 by Son Goku
04-21-2013 4:03 PM


Re: Green doing an illusion.
Son Goku writes:
The only problem is that from the point of view of the fundamental laws...
The laws of thermodynamics that set the direction of time seem pretty fundamental. I know you later argue, effectively, that they are emergent, but that's just our current state of knowledge, or perhaps even just of our terminology. Maybe the number of possible states *should* be considered a fundamental, rather than emergent, property of a system.
If the universe had began as a homogeneous soup of matter (which is "more likely"...
Though we do have a number of hypotheses, there is so much we don't know of the causes of the Big Bang that I don't think we can know that homogeneity is "more likely." When we eventually discover the true causes we may find that low entropy is the only and obvious possibility, and we may well utter, as Huxley about evolution, how stupid we were not to have realized it.
--Percy

This message is a reply to:
 Message 447 by Son Goku, posted 04-21-2013 4:03 PM Son Goku has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 459 by Son Goku, posted 04-22-2013 11:52 AM Percy has seen this message but not replied

  
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