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Author | Topic: Time and Beginning to Exist | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
designtheorist Member (Idle past 3855 days) Posts: 390 From: Irvine, CA, United States Joined: |
In Message 94 you wrote:
As I have stated in other posts in this thread we can postulate other time dimensions which would allow there to be a first moment of "our time" and a temporally prior state (prior in a different time dimension). But this is not what you want - because that leaves open the possibility that the cause is temporal, working in the other time dimension. That is why that possibility has not been discussed in detail here. I responded in Message 97:
I must have missed the posts you are referring to. Try reworking your argument while explicitly acknowledging the possibility of a Designer/Creator acting from a "temporally prior state (prior in a different time dimension)" to the big bang. You have not risen to this challenge so I will do it for you. 1. Given the possible existence of an immaterial (and otherly timed or timeless) realm where a Universe Designer or Creator God may be said to be active prior to the big bang.2. Nothing that exists at the first moment of time came into existence AT ALL because it was never the case that they did not exist. (This is a false premise from the perspective of the immaterial realm you have postulated for argument's sake.) 3. If we take these objects to have a beginning, then it is one different from everyday beginnings. (This does not follow) 4. Therefore, the claim "Everything that begins to exist has a cause" is suspect, false or needs a more rigorous definition. (Again, this does not follow.) As you can see, the argument is not logically consistent. One may argue that we do not know if an immaterial being exists in such a realm as in premise 1, but the existence of such a being has not been disproved. If you argue it is not possible for a Designer/Creator to exist, then you are committing circular reasoning. Once you postulate that a Designer/Creator MAY exist (as you did in Mesage 94) in a "temporally prior state (prior in a different time dimension)," then your argument is logically inconsistent because the Designer/Creator is "prior" to the big bang being outside of the material realm and spacetime of our universe. Edited by designtheorist, : Typo!
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designtheorist Member (Idle past 3855 days) Posts: 390 From: Irvine, CA, United States Joined: |
I will only comment that your "reworking" is clearly self-serving, as well as inaccurate. Then fix it. Show me my error. Once before in this thread you showed me where you thought I was inaccurate. Do it again. Where is my error?
Of course if you assume a contradiction you get an incoherent argument. That's why your reworking is pointless. I don't see how I'm assuming a contradiction when you say you are willing to postulate a prior period of time in a different time dimension. I also don't see how it can be a contradiction unless there is a circular argument.
I see that you still fail to understand the concept of circular reasoning. Again it is quite simple. The conclusion of an argument must also be a premise. If that is not so there is no circular reasoning. I have pointed out in earlier posts that this thread arose from my earlier thread started at Message 1. I could make your implicit conclusion explicit in the argument if that would make it more clear for you. Although, I think it is already clear or you would not have said I was assuming a contradiction.
How do you justify the claim that there is a spaceless realm, with a different time dimension external to our spacetime? It does not follow from Davies' argument since Davies was arguing the position that our spacetime was all that there was. So where is the support for this assumption ? So your questions return to the earlier thread. As I said there, Davies is a mathematical physicist. His technique for examining the big bang is mathematics. Once he hits infinity, he can go no further. But that does not mean logic is prevented from going further. I quoted Davies mainly because I wanted to make clear that a singularity cannot exist as a singularity for any moment in time because it will immediately begin to rapidly expand. From the very first moment of the big bang, we had matter, energy and expansion of space-time. "Prior" to the beginning at the big bang (and I understand this is where you have trouble), Davies is not willing to discuss. "Prior" has no meaning inside our universe, but logically speaking it can have meaning from a perspective outside our universe. By the way, I did not use the term "spaceless realm," I used "immaterial realm." I'm not certain the two terms are equivalent.
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designtheorist Member (Idle past 3855 days) Posts: 390 From: Irvine, CA, United States Joined: |
You have not explained the specific relevance of your ability to produce illogical arguments. When someone has an unexamined/implicit argument, one has to make it explicit so it can be examined. This is the way logic is done. The fact the argument is incoherent is not of my doing. I'm simply making the argument explicit so PaulK can have a chance to modify it or reject it. By the way, this should not be taken as a putdown of PaulK. All of us have unexamined premises in our thinking every now and again.
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designtheorist Member (Idle past 3855 days) Posts: 390 From: Irvine, CA, United States Joined: |
The fact that I am willing to postulate something is irrelevant. The argument deals with the case where there is no prior time in any time dimension. Assuming otherwise creates a contradiction. Okay, this confirms my first criticism of your argument - that you had an unexamined/implicit premise that there was no prior time in any time dimension. But, you see, this is where the logical fallacy of circular reasoning comes in. Let me reformulate your argument for you. 1. No timeless state or time dimensions exist prior to the beginning of time at the big bang. (This is your unexamined and implicit premise which we will accept for the sake of argument for the time being.)2. Nothing that exists at the first moment of time came into existence AT ALL because it was never the case that they did not exist. (This premise may be self-contradictory but we will not examine it closely for now.) 3. If we take these objects to have a beginning, then it is one different from everyday beginnings. 4. Therefore, the claim "Everything that begins to exist has a cause" is suspect, false or needs a more rigorous definition which will exclude it from applying to the first moment of time. 5. Therefore, one cannot say the big bang supports the idea of a Universe Designer or Creator God. In this formulation, your argument is internally consistent in the sense the two conclusions follow from the premises. However, the argument is guilty of circular reasoning because the Universe Designer/Creator God, if one exists, must reside outside of the boundaries of our spacetime. Are the premises valid? The first premise is not known and cannot be known. That alone means the argument needs to be reformulated. The second premise is possibly self-contradictory. "The first moment of time" means time came into existence. If time itself came into being, then what existed before time? Whatever you call it, matter did not exist then. What does that mean for your argument? Of course, if you are willing to postulate the possible existence of a timeless or otherly timed dimension, as you said you were in Message 94, then your argument becomes incoherent. Perhaps now you can see why Arthur Eddington said the big bang had "insuperable" problems unless we look at it as "supernatural."
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designtheorist Member (Idle past 3855 days) Posts: 390 From: Irvine, CA, United States Joined: |
How can you have a 'prior' that is in a different time dimension? Quite easily. It is a matter of perspective. Imagine for a moment that you were in a spacetime dimension in which you could watch colliding branes creating new universes again and again. Each new universe has its own spacetime. Can you identify which universe came into being first and which one last? Of course. Do you see now?
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designtheorist Member (Idle past 3855 days) Posts: 390 From: Irvine, CA, United States Joined: |
Larni asked:
How can you have a 'prior' that is in a different time dimension? Some things are logically possible and some are not. For example, sometimes people ask "God can make a rock big enough He can't lift it?" That is logically impossible. Larni seemed to think it was logically impossible to have a prior in a different time dimension. It is not logically impossible as I demonstrated. Now you seem to be asking me to prove it exists. I cannot do that but neither can you prove it does not exist. If you postulate the possibility, as PaulK said he is willing to do, then the problem PaulK is trying to solve with this thread goes away. Edited by designtheorist, : No reason given. Edited by designtheorist, : Replying to Panda, not Larni
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designtheorist Member (Idle past 3855 days) Posts: 390 From: Irvine, CA, United States Joined: |
No.........................in order to witness "branes" and new universes being "created" one would have to be outside all frames of reference. "Outside all frames of reference" is an interesting idea. Do you mean like a timeless, immaterial realm? But why can't such a realm have its own frame of reference?
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designtheorist Member (Idle past 3855 days) Posts: 390 From: Irvine, CA, United States Joined: |
Argument from ignorance. This is a logical fallacy. It is not an argument from ignorance because it is not my argument. We are discussing PaulK's argument. PaulK could strengthen his argument if he could prove an immaterial realm does not exist. He cannot. Edited by designtheorist, : No reason given.
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designtheorist Member (Idle past 3855 days) Posts: 390 From: Irvine, CA, United States Joined: |
Any particular reason you ignored the rest? Laziness? Or is cherry-picking individual quotes out of a larger amount of relevant text just a hopeless neurosis of yours? I would have said I was short on time, but if you want to guess laziness I will go with that.
The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all things else to support and agree with it. - Francis Bacon I like this quote. I think it mostly true. When you see someone actually change their mind because of new evidence, it is time to look more closely at that evidence. That is the way I feel about Allan Sandage learning the big bang was a unique event. It started him on a journey which resulted him becoming a Christian. Pretty startling evidence for the former atheist.
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designtheorist Member (Idle past 3855 days) Posts: 390 From: Irvine, CA, United States Joined: |
I think either 1 or 2 would be an acceptable equivalent to "begins to exist" although I would favor 1 only because it has fewer words.
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designtheorist Member (Idle past 3855 days) Posts: 390 From: Irvine, CA, United States Joined: |
No, I couldn't. The existence or non-existence of an immaterial realm is irrelevant to the argument in the OP. It is not irrelevant as you have already admitted in Message 124 where you wrote:
The argument deals with the case where there is no prior time in any time dimension. Assuming otherwise creates a contradiction. As I made clear very early on, one does not have to assume the existence of an immaterial realm - only the possibility of an immaterial realm. As long as you refuse to admit a possibility of such a realm, then you are committing circular reasoning. If you admit the possibility of such a realm, then the issue you are discussing is immediately resolved.
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designtheorist Member (Idle past 3855 days) Posts: 390 From: Irvine, CA, United States Joined: |
The standard Big Bang model of Cosmology (Lambda-CDM model) combined with experimental data tells us that the universe was very small 13.7 billion years ago, not that it began at that point. Not true. This is one of the standard myths I showed was false in my earlier thread. The thread starts at Message 1. Briefly, it is impossible for an infinitely hot and infinitely dense singularity to remain in that condition for any period of time without immediately expanding rapidly. As soon as the singularity came into existence, the universe began expanding.
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designtheorist Member (Idle past 3855 days) Posts: 390 From: Irvine, CA, United States Joined: |
For one thing, what you state does not even conflict with what Son Goku has said. Given that the BB model says nothing about the universe as a singularity, there is no conflict between what you are claiming to disprove and what Son Goku has described. The mathematics of the BB model breaks down at the singularity because of infinity but the laws of physics do not necessarily break down. Heat rises and expands in our universe, correct? Like charges repel each other? The electromagnetic force is more powerful than gravity, yes? There is no reason to believe any of these would be different when the universe was in its earliest moments. Just as photons and neutrinos are flying out at the speed of light or faster, space itself is expanding. But let's say, for the sake of argument, the singularity was real and the laws of physics were suspended. What triggered the change? Why would the universe, stable for aeons, suddenly expand in a flash of light and heat generating the cosmic microwave background radiation we see today? Did the laws of physics just get tired? Did gravity finally just give in to the push to expand? It is just nonsense to assume the universe could exist for any period of time as a singularity. And it is pointless nonsense. Nothing is to be gained by the speculation. The theory makes no prediction and adds no insight to our knowledge.
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designtheorist Member (Idle past 3855 days) Posts: 390 From: Irvine, CA, United States Joined: |
Thank you Percy. When I am scanning the page, it helps me to find the comments I am looking for if I change the subtitle.
I appreciate the other hints as well. If I remember correctly, at one point I clicked on something that allowed me to find all of the comments of a particular poster on that one thread. I have not been able to find it since. Am I remembering correctly? If so, how do I do that again?
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designtheorist Member (Idle past 3855 days) Posts: 390 From: Irvine, CA, United States Joined: |
I wrote:
quote: PaulK writes:
The basic problem here is that the quote doesn't support your claim in the slightest. Paul, I am afraid you must be feeling emotional right now. Emotion has been shown to destroy the ability to reason correctly. Read the words again. You admit your argument depends on a time dimension where there is no prior time in any time dimension. You also admit that postulating a prior time dimension creates a contradiction. In Message 94 you wrote:
As I have stated in other posts in this thread we can postulate other time dimensions which would allow there to be a first moment of "our time" and a temporally prior state (prior in a different time dimension). By the way, I searched for "postulat" using Command F and the word was never used prior to Message 94. I have not been able to locate the "other posts in this thread" you are referring to here. If you can identify them for me, I would appreciate it. I wrote:
quote: PaulK writes:
No, since you want to argue that the cause of the universe MUST be immaterial, you pretty much need your immaterial realm. We are not discussing my argument in this thread. We are discussing your argument. This is important because the person making the argument has the burden of proof. All I have said is that your argument has an unexamined/implicit premise that a prior time in another time dimension is not possible and this is circular reasoning. At first you denied it. Then you admitted it. Then you denied it again. Now you are saying it is irrelevant. It is getting rather tiresome.
PaulK writes:
All you are demonstrating is that you are irrational and have no care for the truth. This is an ad hom attack. You are better than that, Paul. Try to get control of your emotions.
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