Putting aside the term God, would you agree?

[Segev Moran]

I have no problem putting aside the word God, and I often refer to what is called God is the 'Source' some call God(s). It is a descriptive utilitarian word in the English language, and no one religion, faith, church nor belief system can claim it as their own only.

I agree, what i've meant here is not to take the word God as an entity or some other religious definition

 

[Segev Moran]

There may have been, or maybe not. We don't know. Going back, all models break down just after T>0

Lets assume there is nothing. from that nothing the first thing comes.. this would be the initial state..
I can't understand what you are saying.. either has been or hasn't? the fact is there is something... ??? can you explain

 

[Segev Moran]

Who says the chain has a beginning?

The fact there is a chain, means it had a beginning
If not, you suggest an infinite "loop" state which means it was always there, still, it had to come to be somehow or elzse it wouldn't be the event that caused it to be will be reffered to as the initial state.

 

[Segev Moran]

Even though I am a theist I do not accept this line of reasoning concerning the justification of the existence of a 'Source' some call God(s) based on the origin of particles from the human perspective.

'Thin air?' Not the scientific view base don the evidence. There are still unknowns, of course, but the origin of particles through the processes of Quantum Mechanics is the best explanation regardless of whether God exists or not.

I Agree.
I was just responding to one's claim that the universe came from nothing.
Matter and energy are a cycle.. energy cam first, than matter... something made this energy erupt or be created in the first place. whether or not its a physical or "spiritual", no one really knows, we can only assume based on what we experience.

 

[exchemist]

A question for those who don't admit that there must always be a cause. If you computer stops working, what do you do?
1. Try to work out what's wrong.
2. Ask a more experienced person for help.
3. Do nothing and hope it will work tomorrow. After all, if things can happen without a cause, what's the point of (1) or (2)?

Now explain to me how that homely analogy helps to account for radioactive decay.

 

[Segev Moran]

No. I do not agree with this.
'Our history'? The Big Bang was quite a bit before human history started.

Our as our universe's history, not human history.

No. In the BB model (the original one), time literally starts at the BB. There is literally no 'before'.

Exactly, there is no before as time is not time. hence in our pov it is a "freeze" state where everything existis in the same "time" dimension (imagine a dot spreading to a line)

No, if everything has a cause, then the sequence of causes goes back infinitely. Which means the whole sequence is causeless.

Exactly!
The caused emerged from the causeless.

Hmm...this makes many of the flawed assumptions that theists like to make. It assumes everything has a cause, except that it then goes against that idea, claiming there was a 'first cause'. It assumes time has always existed, even though it is quite consistent to have time itself starting. And, of course, without time, there is no causality, so time itself can have no cause. Your identification of eternity with the BB 'event' is also question begging in many ways.

I'll try and explain...
If you look at an idle grain of sand.. in our POV it is frozen in time.. meaning it has no movement.
If you will look on the same grain in a electron POV, it experience time in a different way than the outer "observer" experience it.
It might seem dormant yet it is in constant movement.

Imagine a POV from outside our universe.. for it, time in our universe is irrelevant.. it experiences our entire "timeline" at once.. its kind of hard to explain but i hope i managed to give you an idea of what i mean.

 

[Segev Moran]

Why is that? Could there not be, potentially, hundreds of uncaused causes? They don't even have to all happen at the same time. Just because one is earlier doesn't mean it is the cause of *everything* later.

I also think you have to look closer at your concept of 'triggering'. All 'triggers' work through some sort of physical law. So without physical laws, there is no causality.

True... yet we know that the entire universe (as we know it) came from one nanometer (much smaller actually ) point (just as an example), wouldn't you say something made this energy be?

 

[Segev Moran]

Ultimately? No, I don't. Even if the Big Bang scenario is correct, the BB itself isn't technically an 'event'. In many ways, it is the absence of an event.

Please elaborate

 

[Segev Moran]

No.

So it just popped into existed without nothing that triggered it.
Amazing! why do you suggest it never happens inside our universe? meaning was it a magical appearance that only happens outside the realms of our universe?

 

[Segev Moran]

I know what you meant. What I don't know is why you assume that everything is part of a single "chain;" how could you ever justify this assumption?

Look at the structure of everything we experience.
Everything is connected to everything.
As an example:

BB -> Formation of matter -> formation of stars -> formation of galaxies -> formation of systems -> formation of earth -> formation of the moon -> formation of seasons -> formation of climate -> formation of life conditions -> formation of life -> formation of plants -> formation of complex life -> formation of mammals -> formation of humans

There is an obvious order of events. there could be millions of events in between that caused "splits" in the chain, but without a doubt our entire universe can be literally drawn in a clear order of formation.

this is of course just an example to explain my point.

 

[Sleeppy]

Eternity is a descriptor of an infinite passage of time... Doesn't fit, if time began from all perspectives (i.e. including the initial cause's perspective).

 

[Segev Moran]

How do you know that there is a reason for that?

Reason as something that caused it.
I know it because i can draw conclusions.
If i see something that moves, i conclude that something caused it to move. (even if this cause is the thing itself!)
Can there be electricity without energy?
Can there be energy without a source to that energy?
Can there be matter without atoms?
Can there be atoms without particles?
You get the point
The chain goes back until things no longer apply.. as others stated here, until time doesn't exist.
Time "emerged" due to something that happened. this means that something probably started this process as time has no will. (unless you think it does and that is a whole new OP )

Natural for the tendencies of human brains, sure. Logical, not so much.

This is the Logic i used:

A rock is not a living being and has no "free will". if i see a broken rock,. i assume something broke it.
If i suspect this rock does have a "free will", i can assume that either it broke itself or something broke it.
I would be quite weird in my POV to say that maybe it just broke out of the blue without a cause.

If we establish its logic to think this about a rock... wouldn't you suggest its logic to think like that about a star? or a galaxy? or a universe?

 

[9-10ths_Penguin]

Look at the structure of everything we experience.
Everything is connected to everything.
As an example:

BB -> Formation of matter -> formation of stars -> formation of galaxies -> formation of systems -> formation of earth -> formation of the moon -> formation of seasons -> formation of climate -> formation of life conditions -> formation of life -> formation of plants -> formation of complex life -> formation of mammals -> formation of humans

There is an obvious order of events. there could be millions of events in between that caused "splits" in the chain, but without a doubt our entire universe can be literally drawn in a clear order of formation.

this is of course just an example to explain my point.

"Everything is connected to everything" doesn't explain your assumptions.

When I "look at the structure of everything I experience," I notice that very few things have a single cause... so why do you assume that everything does?

 

[Segev Moran]

I don't mean that everything came out of nothing. Consider the YouTube video analogy again. Did the events that transpire in the seconds after 00:00 come out of the seconds preceding 00:00 ? Since there are no seconds before 00:00, how could it be ? Would it even make sense to say such a thing ?

That's not a good analogy i think.

Think of it like so:

You have a video with 1000 frames. you play it in a loop.

now lets assume for this example, that the smallest time unit is 1 second.

you play the film in 10 FPS.

this means that the entire film is 100 seconds long.
now assume you play it in 100 fps... the events (frames) of the film are the same.. all the events in the film still take place, but not it all happens in 10th if the time.. each second now becomes much dense.

Now lets say you play this film in a speed of 1000 FPS. this means that in the smallest time unit, the entire events of the film exist. this means everything exists in the same time.

In our POV time is not relevant here.. the film is in a "freeze" state where everything happens in the same point.
For someone with a different POV of timem that for example can see 1ms instead of 1s, the film seems to move in a different "time frame"..
Hope this didn't confuse you even more

 

[LuisDantas]

Reason as something that caused it.

Indeed. I realize that you want to perceive one as existing, but that is really very arbitrary, to the point of serious hubris even.

I know it because i can draw conclusions.
If i see something that moves, i conclude that something caused it to move. (even if this cause is the thing itself!)
Can there be electricity without energy?
Can there be energy without a source to that energy?
Can there be matter without atoms?
Can there be atoms without particles?
You get the point

I think that I do indeed. I just don't think it is at all convincing.

The chain goes back until things no longer apply.. as others stated here, until time doesn't exist.
Time "emerged" due to something that happened. this means that something probably started this process as time has no will. (unless you think it does and that is a whole new OP )

This is the Logic i used:

A rock is not a living being and has no "free will". if i see a broken rock,. i assume something broke it.
If i suspect this rock does have a "free will", i can assume that either it broke itself or something broke it.
I would be quite weird in my POV to say that maybe it just broke out of the blue without a cause.

If we establish its logic to think this about a rock... wouldn't you suggest its logic to think like that about a star? or a galaxy? or a universe?

No, not at all.

That is just undue extrapolation of expectations that arise from the neurological nature of humans into a scope that does not has any apparent reason to sustain those expectations.

 

[Segev Moran]

You seem to be assuming that an initiation event necessarily implies an initiating cause.

I am not persuaded that this follows. There would seem to be uncaused events - according to current physics, at any rate.

The term "placed" seems to me tendentious.

I think you are mixing not knowing the cause to un-caused.
It kind of resembles to not knowing hence god...
Our entire universe is assumed to be a closed system. meaning that the energy it holds is bound to it.
There is nothing new in this universe.
you assume that everything just popped into existence without nothing causing it, yeah?
I find it quite weird

 

[Segev Moran]

I suppose this scenario applies to me given I reject that god in the ways that are substantive and meaningful. I don't "lack belief" in it (such a weird phraseology), but monotheistic god-concepts are not part of my way of life.

I wrote this as most theist easily accept the idea of initial cause.

No, I don't agree there had to have been an initial cause to everything. I'm a bipedal animal with extremely limited capabilities.

How did you become a bipedal animal? why would you assume you didn't just became one out of the blue?

How arrogant would I have to be to suppose that

everything - when I cannot perceive and know everything to even the remotest degree - must have an initial cause?

How can it not????
I really don't understand people who think things just became without something that caused them to become.
What is wrong with my logic? i seriously ask.
I do not say that as a theist assuming God initiated everything (although it my belief)...
I really can't understand what it means that something simply becomes.

Can you give an example (as imaginative as you can) for a scenario where something simply becomes?
What am i missing here?

Pretty darned arrogant.

I don't think so.
I think people who think things can happen without a cause are really preferring not to think that there is a cause for things.
Have you ever, in your entire existence, experienced or learned about something that had no cause?

Hubris seems a quality intrinsic to all humans to some degree or another, granted, but I'm not arrogant in this particular way on this particular question I suppose. As someone who is familiar with the concepts of acausality, cyclicality, and eternity, there are many alternative propositions to "there must have been an initial cause."

Can you give me one example please?

At that point you get to ask yourself - which narrative to I prefer? As a student of natural science cyclical models resonate much more with me than linear "initial cause" models.

So you assume a cyclical model can just become one out of nothing? (Please note i refer to human POV only)

It's also more consistent with how I experience reality. As far as my experiences are concerned, the world has always been here and is constantly transforming itself through (often cyclical) exchanges of energy.

I assume you mean everything in existence when you say the world and not earth per say.
And how this world came to be? did it create itself?

Whether or not it was always this way is irrelevant to me. If there ever was a moment of "initial cause" that isn't the world I live in nor is it a world I experience. I would not worship an entity allegedly responsible for such things for the same reasons

Agreed. that is no reason to worship entities.
I can't see how worshiping is good in any way.

it is too disconnected from my experiences and is not meaningful to me.

I can relate to that.
It will change nothing in my life experience if i discover one way or another.
There are other things much more important that dictate the way i live my life

 

[Segev Moran]

Of course not. The reasons for my refutal are both nomological and logical.

The nomological reason is that causality applies to things in a space-temporal context in thermodynamic disequilibium. Ergo, when there is already a lot of stuff around. Unless you are able to give me a definition of cause that does not assume these things (e.g. a time and a direction thereof).

The logical reason is that if that cause is something, then it cannot have predated everything. Since something is contained in everything, that would entail that the cause predates or causes itself, which is logically absurd.

On top of that, a more modern ontology of time, for instance B series, rules out that the Universe, as a whole, could have had any origin at all. In other words, things like “coming from” are totaly inapplicable. So, all those first cause arguments assume Newtonian time (the one of our intuition) which has been discredited more than 100 years ago.

Ciao

- viole

Thats why i used human POV in the OP

 

[Segev Moran]

So, how many independent ways do we have to refute the idea of a first cause?

As i see it, the way to refute it is to show one thing that is causeless.
Not even in reality, but as a Mathematical form.

 

[Polymath257]

So it just popped into existed without nothing that triggered it.
Amazing! why do you suggest it never happens inside our universe? meaning was it a magical appearance that only happens outside the realms of our universe?

No, technically, the universe consisting of ALL of space and ALL of time simply exists. It doesn't 'pop' because time is part of it. Causality is *part* of the universe and thereby cannot be applied to the universe as a whole.