An honest answer for a newbie, please.

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Originally posted by forgiven:

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Originally posted by John:

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Originally posted by forgiven:
anyway, you appear to be saying "that which begins to exist has no cause" or "for *every* effect there isn't a necessary cause" or something like that... is this in fact the case?

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Its more like all of our notions about causality are tied to the world around us-- to spacetime. Things happen sequentially. Things move through space. Remove time and space and try to imagine causality. It is like trying to define Cartesian coordinates without the Cartesian or the coordinates.

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i still don't quite understand how that ties in with what i asked... maybe i skipped a step... in your opinion, did the universe 1) begin to exist or has it 2) always existed?

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if 1), do you affirm or deny the premises "that which begins to exist has a cause"... if 2), well we'll deal with that later, if that's your position... note that i'm not asking you for any kind of explanation as to *when* the cause existed, if it existed, given the nature of space/time, i merely want to know if you affirm or deny the above premise

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Hi Forgiven,My take on this is that everything on a scale greater than a Planck length has a cause which may or may not have existed prior in time (direction of entropy increasing).Cheers
PE------------------
It's good to have an open mind, but not so open that your brains
fall out. - Bertrand Russell

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ok, that's fine... in that case, the universe either is or isn't on a scale greater than a planck length.. all i kept asking john was whether or not he affirmed or denied a certain premise.. it seems very difficult to get an answer to that question, which makes me wonder why

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Hi Forgiven,At present, the universe is many, many orders of magnitude greater than a Planck length (1.6 * 10^-35 m).But it was not always thus.I guess John's point is that some premises do not readily yield to vulgar oversimplifications as "yes" or "no". What if I were to ask you "have you stopped beating your wife yet?" Yes or no? Kind regards
PE------------------
It's good to have an open mind, but not so open that your brains
fall out. - Bertrand Russell

This is the old "why is there something rather than nothing?" chestnut, isn't it?My personal take (which you seem to share) is that we simply don't know - although theists and atheists would have to be able to come up with equally good answers. You can always go back and ask "why?" at every level until you start to wonder what "why?" actually means.As human beings, whose brains have evolved to cope with the rigours of the African savannah, we are particularly good at recognising patterns and the infinite why loop is unsatisfactory, because we can't readily map that into a pre-existing pattern template in our minds. We have observed instances where causality breaks down however (casimir effect), so the why question, whichever way you phrase it has shown itself to not always be applicable.I don't know if TC is asking whether the conditions of the BB are repeatable i.e given a state of infinite density for zero duration as existed "prior" to the BB, would that necessarily lead to a spawning of a universe? I'd have to shrug my shoulders at that.I think some loop quantum gravity theorists (Lee Smolin) have partially answered this (see my thread on Cosmological Natural Selection), but that pushes back the problem to an initial seed universe (the Primordial Egg!) the laws of physics for which we may never know.PE------------------
It's good to have an open mind, but not so open that your brains
fall out. - Bertrand Russell