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Author Topic:   Big Bang Theory Supports a Belief in the Universe Designer or Creator God
Rahvin
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Posts: 4032
Joined: 07-01-2005
Member Rating: 9.2


(3)
Message 79 of 317 (640157)
11-07-2011 5:16 PM
Reply to: Message 75 by EWCCC777
11-07-2011 3:57 PM


Re: A being?
Hi EWCCC777,
There are quite a few problems with your statements here:
if the universe expanded much more quickly or more slowly, life would not be possible. I've heard one scientist/philosopher assert that it is fine-tuned to one part in a trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion, and that were changed by one part the universe would not support life. Is that incorrect?
The real answer is that the question is irrelevant.
You make several unfounded assumptions simply to ask such a question. One is that you are assuming that "ife is a "goal." If life is simply incidental, the "tuning" of the variables of the Universe are irrelevant. It takes an innumerable set of unlikely circumstances to result in just a single snowflake of a specific shape landing on a specific spot on the ground - yet it happens every day. This is unremarkable because we know there is no "intent" behind it.
The concept that human life is a "goal" of the Universe, that we exist as something more than the end product of purely natural processes, is nothing more than hubris.
The second assumption you make when you ask this question is that the Universe was formed specifically to make life as we know it, as opposed to life forming in accordance with the Universe that happened to exist.
Imagine that you see in the road a pothole filled with rainwater. Was the pothole "tuned" to fit exactly that much rainwater in exactly that shape? Or did the rainwater conform to whatever pothole was already there when the rain fell?
Neither of these assumptions has any basis in evidence, and so the reasoning that follows is irrelevant. Your question, basically, is meaningless.
If it is, I would really like to know, since I don't wish to use it again if it is. And if it is correct, one could certainly argue that it points toward design.
How many games of blackjack do you think are played in Las Vegas in a given day? What do you think is the probability of having exactly the sequence of cards drawn that will be drawn today? Does the improbability of that event point to "design?" Must there have been intent to result in the exact series of cards drawn?
Improbable events happen every day. It doesn;t imply design or intent.
In any case, my bottom line is this: We don't know of any other transecendent force capable of creating matter (not to speak of life) from nothing. The only force we know even POTENTIALLY exists is a supernatural Being, and there is some body of evidence that points toward His existence.
We don't know of that sort of thing, either. You can imagine it, sure...but your concept is no more valid than any of the infinite alternative "potential forces" that any person can come up with. We've never observed a "supernatural being" that can create Universes. What makes your "being" more likely than a "cosmic egg," an inanimate object that "caused" the Universe?" Or any other conceivable notion?
You can't just say that "God is the only thing we know of..." because we don't know of any such thing. No more so than we "know of" Thor, Zeus, the Cosmic Egg, the Cosmic Cube, Galactus, Unicron, or Rocky the Flying Squirrel.
The only thing we "know of" is the Universe itself. And we know, from evidence, that the concept of causality starts to get muddy when you approach the minimum value of time. It's rather hard to have a preceding, causal event when there is not earlier point in time - it's rather like asking what's farther North than the North Pole, the question just doesn't make any sense at all.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 75 by EWCCC777, posted 11-07-2011 3:57 PM EWCCC777 has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 95 by EWCCC777, posted 11-07-2011 9:49 PM Rahvin has not replied
 Message 99 by EWCCC777, posted 11-07-2011 10:06 PM Rahvin has replied

  
Rahvin
Member
Posts: 4032
Joined: 07-01-2005
Member Rating: 9.2


Message 248 of 317 (640445)
11-09-2011 4:35 PM
Reply to: Message 99 by EWCCC777
11-07-2011 10:06 PM


Re: A being?
Forgive me, but the odds of that happening in an instant, unprovoked by anything but pressure and energy, seem to have to be the worst odds of all time (or whatever came before--or not "before" since there was no "before", but you get my drift --time).
This is exactly correct.
However, no actual scientific theory proposes any such thing.

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
"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." - John Rogers

This message is a reply to:
 Message 99 by EWCCC777, posted 11-07-2011 10:06 PM EWCCC777 has not replied

  
Rahvin
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Posts: 4032
Joined: 07-01-2005
Member Rating: 9.2


(5)
Message 296 of 317 (640550)
11-10-2011 1:01 PM
Reply to: Message 276 by designtheorist
11-10-2011 11:22 AM


On Causality, Creation and Existence
Hi designtheorist,
Throughout this thread, you've expressed your assertion that Big Bang cosmology requires an intelligent causal agent. Your assertion, however, has been based on a series of misconceptions about the Big Bang and the nature of the Universe as a whole, coupled with some unfounded assumptions and a few logical fallacies sprinkled on for good measure.
Let's start by pointing out that conceivability by a human brain is not a requirement for any aspect of the Universe. After all, there are stranger things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamed of in your, or any other, philosophy. There are many aspects of the Universe that are counter-intuitive to the human mind - and that doesn't stop those concepts from accurately representing the reality of the Universe. Human beings, after all, evolved on Earth, and our base of knowledge, our familiarity, is based on the limits of our own experiences. We cannot see atoms, we cannot see electrons, we cannot directly observe quarks, we have no experience that can relate to gluons. Galaxies and globular clusters and nebulae are, to us, just pretty pictures from telescopes.
Arguing that alternative hypotheses are invalid because they are "inconceivable" to your mind is nothing more than an Argument from Incredulity, a logical fallacy.
To really delve into the mysteries of the Universe, we need mathematics. And the math shows us that our experience of the Universe is, frankly, illusory.
You and I experience "time" as a constant-rate continuum of events moving in the direction of increasing entropy. We cannot go backward, and we have no control over its rate of passage (except through relativistic velocities in different inertial frames, but then, we can't actually do that at the moment either). We experience time this way because our brains are themselves entropy machines - our very thoughts require the passage of time in the direction of increasing entropy. That's how the electrochemical processes that drive our minds work. The consequence of this is an anthropomorphized concept of "causality."
To a human mind, we see all events as causes and effects, related points in a never-ending chain that make up the continuum of time.
But time is just another dimension, no different really than length, or width, or height. If you could experience the Universe independently of time, you would be able to see the entire course of your life as a set of interconnected events. You could look forward, or backward, and see the exact state of the Universe at any given moment. The Universe would appear unchanging, because change requires time.
So do causes, and effects. A "cause" is an event which precedes its effect in time. To be "caused," there must be an earlier point in time for the "cause" to occupy.
When we're talking about the Universe as a whole, were talking about time itself as well, because time is nothing more than a property of the Universe, just like width, or length, or the total mass-energy it contains.
If the opening moment of the Big Bang was in fact T=0, the very earliest moment of time...then when would the "cause" occur? What time, exactly? T=-1?
The concept of an earlier moment in time than the first moment, a "cause" for the beginning of time itself, is literally as meaningless as conceiving of a point further North than the North Pole. The concept ceases to make sense to human intuition.
The reality of the first moment of time is that all of our predictive models break down in that first moment. The Universe was too hot, and too small, and too massive for any of our current observations to relate to. The math simply breaks down.
So the real answer, here, is that we don't know much about the reason the Universe exists.
Perhaps the Universe was inevitable. Perhaps "existence" is favored over "nonexistence." Perhaps there are infinite Universes floating in some extra-Universal space-like dimension. Perhaps reality exists as a probability field, and the Universe we experience is simply the result of the most probable series of events. Perhaps the Universe hatched from an egg. Perhaps an extra-Universal intelligence, using technology we cannot even yet imagine, created the Universe. Perhaps one of these, or one of an infinite number of alternative hypotheses, explains the origin of our Universe.
The honest answer is that we don't know. What we do know is that our concept of causality breaks down when we talk about the origins of the Universe itself, just as the concept of the direction "North" breaks down when we start talking about movement in outer space.
Big Bang cosmology tells us only that, as you look through time, the Universe exists in different states. The farther back you go, the smaller all of the spacial dimensions become, while the mass-energy of the Universe remains the same. If we trace the trend all the way back, we arrive at a point where our ability to mathematically describe the Universe breaks down.
That's all. It does not even tell us if those so-far-indescribable moments (typically called the Singularity, which is just physics-speak for "we don't know what's going on here with any reasonable degree of accuracy") were the actual beginning of the Universe...or whether our concept of "beginnings" even has relevance.
These open questions and uncertainties are why we continue to study the Universe, why we create such facilities as the Large Hadron Collider to duplicate as closely as we can the conditions of those first moments, so that we can develop the math to describe them.
But the Big Bang does not support the idea of a religious "god" as a creator any more than any other hypothesis. It doesn't contradict any of them, but then, what would? A magic omnipotent Creator could just as easily Create a static Universe, one that does not appear to have a beginning. After all, the vast majority of physicists were still religious before the discovery that the Universe is expanding.
If there is a god, the Big Bang doesn't help us see it. It would look the same to us, either way, given the information we currently have.
"Failing to contradict" is not the same as "supporting evidence." Evidence needs to adjust the relative probability of accuracy among competing hypotheses...and nothing about the Big Bang increases the likelihood that there is a deity beyond competing hypotheses that are also not contradicted.

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
"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." - John Rogers

This message is a reply to:
 Message 276 by designtheorist, posted 11-10-2011 11:22 AM designtheorist has not replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 299 by New Cat's Eye, posted 11-10-2011 1:12 PM Rahvin has not replied

  
Rahvin
Member
Posts: 4032
Joined: 07-01-2005
Member Rating: 9.2


(3)
Message 310 of 317 (640652)
11-11-2011 11:46 AM


This thread was unfortunate.
The OP failed to recognize the most basic logical fact:
Big Bang cosmology does supports (though not nearly conclusively) the hypothesis that the Universe had a "beginning," inasmuch as there appears to be an absolute minimum value for time.
"God" is merely one potential explanation of that "beginning." There are countless more conceivable hypotheses, ranging from colliding branes to cosmic eggs to the possible inevitability of existence.
Beyond that, "God" alone is not an explanation, it's an attribution. It asserts who is responsible, not what actual function was performed. Even if we were to accept that "God did it," we would be no closer to discovering what "caused" the Universe, just as saying "Joe did it" doesn't tell me what fixed my car.
The entire thread has been a massive phlogiston argument, whereby a name is asserted to be the answer to a mystery, yet no actual explanation is given, no understanding is increased.
Tack on multiple appeals to authority through mass quoting, some appeals to personal incredulity, and an unfounded assumption that causality for the Universe itself functions in the same way as causality as human beings experience it, and you have a basic summary for the thread.
Big Bang cosmology is no more evidence for a Creator God than is the existence of life itself, or gravity - they are only "Evidence" if you begin with the false premise that a Creator God is the only possible cause for any of the above.
The OP's arguments began with a false premise and proceeded through multiple logical fallacies. His entire argument was invalid from start to finish, and we are left once again with a Universe that does not provide any apparent evidence supporting the god hypothesis.

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
"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." - John Rogers

  
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