Putting aside the term God, would you agree?

[Altfish]

Laughed at in science as much as intelligent design.

It is a hypothesis, nothing less nothing more.
As opposed to Intelligent Design which is disproved.

 

[David T]

It is a hypothesis, nothing less nothing more.
As opposed to Intelligent Design which is disproved.

Oh hypothesis sounds scientific like bigfoot ID is also a hypothesis.

No krauss went into total crackpot loony tune territory. And believe it or not actual scientists can actually have complete crackpot ideas!???? Did you know newton was facinated by alchemy? So would we say "oh its a hypothesis alchemy is true?" or do we say crack pot? Besides krauss has shown he actually is not remotely a logical individual just by his personal behavior!

 

[Marcion]

Time as such does not exist. We, as moving minds, use the perceived movement of matter or of particles as a measure of so-called time.
So before there were particles that moved, time did not exist and so the idea of eternity is meaningless.
Eternity also presupposes that there is a Mind who undergoes this eternity of nothing moving as a "waiting" Entity but without matter there is also no mind who waits or measures time.

The more interesting question is where matter and energy came from. Spiritual philosophy says that matter and energy are special states of consciousness. So before matter en energy (time and space) started there would have been just pure unlimited Consciousness.
We cannot conceive of unlimited Consciousness because our own mind depends on time and space to form ideas, we cannot move outside those two and can never fathom its cause with our mind.

 

[Segev Moran]

Almost everything at the macroscopic level has multiple causes. In fact, I would challenge you to find anything macroscopic that only has a single cause.

separation of a photon from an atom.
combustion.
energy.
lightning.
rain.

I understand what you mean though, it takes several things to happen an electron to separate from an atom, but there is order to things.

what i mean by that is that in order for an outcome to happen, things work in a specific way.

if it is so common, can you please give an example of multiple causes (that the outcome will happen regardless of the order of events)? instead of answering you threw the ball back at me

 

[LuisDantas]

Oh hypothesis sounds scientific like bigfoot ID is also a hypothesis.

No krauss went into total crackpot loony tune territory. And believe it or not actual scientists can actually have complete crackpot ideas!???? Did you know newton was facinated by alchemy? So would we say "oh its a hypothesis alchemy is true?" or do we say crack pot? Besides krauss has shown he actually is not remotely a logical individual just by his personal behavior!

Hypothesis is a word with a very clear meaning.

If you do not know what that meaning is, that shows a lot of where you stand, and very little of what the word and its use are.

 

[Segev Moran]

The 'singularity' that most people talk about when mentioning the Big bang is not an event--it is not part of spacetime. In fact, it is *defined* by the fact that spacetime cannot be extended that far. It is more an absence that it is a presence: the inability to extend time past a certain value.

No, of course not. the singularity is a state.
The expansion is an event.
The cooling is an event (a series of events actually).
the merging of particles are events.
the formation of star dust is events.

The big bang initial state is not something i see as an event.
I do however assume that something caused this dot of concentrated energy to form in the first place, weirdly enough many people assume it is possible this enormous amount of energy all tucked into a single proton's size came to be with a cause, just our of the blue as a magical thing. i can't see how that is possible.

 

[Segev Moran]

No, that is an ordering of very broad occurrences that happened over very large distances, not single events. So, the formation of a galaxy in one place will not be causally connected to the formation of a galaxy at a place distant from the first. The individual stars that form are not causally linked to each other. Etc.

You are focusing on *one* chain among a great many that exist. There is no reason to assume the different chains all link up to a single precursor.

Obviously.
The formation of one single drop of rain is an outcome of a series of many many events. thats why i used the term chain of events.
My question is, wouldn't you agree there is a chain of events (even if some of them occur in many place at the same time).
Water cannot boil if there is nothing to heat them first.

 

[LuisDantas]

I thought you meant to discuss the origin of existence instead.

I am waiting for a clarification, @Segev Moran .

Which is it? Are you proposing that humans have a natural tendency to presume a cause-consequence structure in our perception (which is trivial, but true) or are you discussing the nature of existence instead?

Those are two very different subject matters, and you seem to want to meld them somehow.

 

[Segev Moran]

The observable universe was once much more compressed than it is now, yes.

But, again, to say there was something that 'made this energy be' implies the existence of time before that energy existed. But, by all accounts, energy existed whenever there was time. That means that the energy, like time itself, cannot have a cause.

Exactly.
Energy existed from whenever there was time in OUR POV.
From the Human POV, when this energy was just a dot of energy, time wasn't... well, simply wasn't. so i see it as an infinite state. than an event, a single event caused a chain of reactions that caused this "dotted" energy to expand and create time, space and so on.

 

[Segev Moran]

Absurd, since the very claim of a first cause is based on the predicate of a causeless thing, namely the first one. So, it is logically incoherent to deny it by showing something that it actually expects.

And that is also incoherent in general, since it is possible to have causal sequences that have no initial cause, and yet they are all caused.

Ciao

- viole

Science is based on reality, wouldn't you agree?
So if our science demonstrates ALL OVER that there is always a cause, how come you cannot cast this to the beginning?
Our entire "history of the universe" is based on casting current findings to the past. the assumption is that things worked than as they work today. we know there was a change of forces, we know to calculate the movement of the universe, all based on the assumptions that the universe works as it works. why the change? it sounds very much theistic way of thinking the the universe might have just popped into reality

 

[Segev Moran]

I'm a bit late in arriving at your thread, so if my comments have already been made please disregard them.

Hi

Yup.

Thats a better stating point than most people here

I would say time "didn't exist," but for the sake of your argument, okay.

Its the same. if time doesn't exists, it means there is no "arrow of time", so events don't occur rather everything exists in the same "frame" of time. this is what i mean by what i wrote.

A first cause of our universe, okay.

Okay as agreed? or okay as whatever you say?

Can't assume that at all. "Placed" implies something aside from and before the initial event. We would need some very good evidence before asserting such a thing. Whatcha got?

As an example:
I see an apple, thus, the apple came to be.
I know from EVERY measurement we have ever made that everything that came to be, came from something else.
The only exception we have these days is spontaneous appearances of particles in a vacuum, but this is not yet confirmed as we can't really get to a 100% vacuum and we don't really have the ability to measure the creation of those particles as they almost imminently cancel each other and disappear.

This raises the question of where do they go to?
We have the assumption that we are in a closed system, meaning energy is not new, it is recycled. so it is assumed that those particles are not fading out of existence, rather transform to another whatever you decide to call it.

As we have yet to encounter anything that simply pops into reality with a reason (cause), i can't see why we assume the the entire universe simply popped into existence.

It seems that if i say God created, you'll say i have no reason to believe so and if i say the universe just popped into existence it sounds logical. weird?

What "thing" is this? The mysterious placer? And to assert that this "thing" contained within it all our reality is too much of a leap over a lot of necessary prerequisite evidence.

The thing is a dot of everything we know.
A single dot in the nothingness of our universe in the size of no more than one proton.
This one proton holds within it the entire energy that forms ALL our universe. all the starts, all the systems, the galaxies, the nebula.. all of it, condensed in one tiny dot.
this is what i mean by "thing" as i have now name to call it. some call it
singularity, so i guess it can be called the "singularity".

So sorry, I can't go along with your scenario here.
.

Nothing to be sorry about if we all thought the same this forum would render obsolete

 

[Segev Moran]

I am saying it could have been like that. We don't know, because there is no evidence either way. I am reminded of a discussion Polymath and I had on this forum some months ago, centred around the idea in modern physics that there are some uncaused processes.

The classic example is radioactive decay. Atoms of a radioisotope decay randomly, at a rate proportional to their number and characteristic of that isotope.

Once it is propotional, it cannot be random.
Maybe the randomness is which of the particle decays, yet we base our entire "back dating" on this radioactive decay as we know there is ratio by which the decay works. if it was nothing but a random process that has no order, we couldn't have rely on it to back date fossils.
event is not a mechanism.
Gravity exists... The fact we don't know what caused gravity, (or the initial force that gravity emerged from) doesn't mean it just is.

It is weird to me that people think that a stable, ordered process can't be formed without something that made it work as it does.
Maybe i am wrong, obviously. we have no real knowledge about anything. but in my reality, whenever i see something that "acts" in a specific way, regardless of how exactly it operates that way, i assume that something else made it work this way.
When i see something that has no order (which i haven't yet ) i can assume it has nothing but randomness in it and nothing "orders" it into working the way it does.

We already discovered that there is no real randomness in our universe. non, not even one single thing in our existence is considered random.

There is no mechanism known for what makes a given atom decay at a given moment.

Agreed

There is no pattern that so much as hints at the presence of any mechanism.

Besides the rate.

Applying Ockham's Razor, they are treated as uncaused events.

This is a different thing. they are treated this way as we don't know the cause.. not because we know they are causeless.
This actually kind of works against the Razor concept as the "Razor philosophy". assuming there is no cause is exactly the same as assuming there is a cause with the exception that until today most of the things we know about the universe suggest there is a cause to everything that happens. the later seems "less assumed" and more connected to our reality.

The spontaneous emission process in decay of excited states of an atom is similar. Here, there is an immediate cause, in that according to QED the emission is stimulated by vacuum fluctuations in the EM field. But those fluctuations are themselves uncaused. They just, er, happen, from time to time.

I'll read about it more

Now, you may say, "But everything has a cause, so there must be one. We just haven't found it yet". And you might one day be shown to be right. But, as far as science goes, there is no reason to take as axiomatic "everything must have a cause". And, as there is no evidence for any cause, Ockham's Razor wins and we say, "According to our current model, there are uncaused events in physics".

Can you define how science assumes there was a big bang?

 

[Segev Moran]

I don't think we know enough to reach any conclusions about the beginning of the universe. Our perspective, our entire sense of existence is based on the idea that every beginning has a cause. So here's a beginning looking for a cause. Maybe the universe is an exception to this.

Was there something before our universe existed? Who knows. If there was, we may never find any evidence of it in our current universe.

I guess this leaves a person free to create whatever narrative about the beginning of the universe that suits their fancy. It's unlikely that anyone will ever be able to prove your narrative wrong... or right for that matter.

What would I agree on? I'd agree we don't know, probably will never know. Maybe it's fun to speculate but I wouldn't put a lot of stock into any of it.

True, we don't really know.
We don't really know anything. all we can do as guess our best guesses based on how we understand reality.
The fact is our reality is a big question mark. but putting this aside, we can make assumption based on our reality.

our reality seems to have an order. even if it looks chaotic, there is order to things. everything thought you have is an outcome of a thought before it.
every action you make is an outcome of the action before it. our entire reality works that way.
There is nothing that just happens as far as we know (not talking about HOW it happens, rather the fact that it seems that everything we encounter doesn't just happen out of the blue - this approach seems more fit to believing in angles and magical forces).
It is true we cannot conclude A from B with a 100% certainty, but if i see a rolling ball, i assume something caused it to roll.
so far, everywhere i tested this assumption process.. i seemed to be correct

 

[Segev Moran]

It didn't confuse me. I just have no idea how it relates to my post. Perception of time is irrelevant to my post.

Your explanation claimed that if i play a video, there is no meaning to time before 00:00.
I agree. what i wrote was that it is irrelevant to the question of time.
there is no negative time, and i never claimed there is.
in my OP when i talked about eternity, i didn't mean time BEFORE the existence of our universe, rather a point when time was not in "motion" and everything was just there, all at once, no past, present or future.

Your analogy of the Youtube video has got nothing to do with what i was saying before it, so i tried to explain what i meant.

 

[Segev Moran]

I define a cause as a movement of energy from a region of higher to a region of lower energy, and an effect as the change that results.

So I'm drawn to the hypothesis that mass-energy (or some equivalent of it) is what exists, and that the physical phenomena of our universe, including the dimensions, are qualities or by-products of it. Thus time exists because mass-energy does, not vice versa, and mass-energy's existence is simply a datum, not itself a caused phenomenon.

And this mass energy was always there? sounds like God to me

The old argument from 'first cause' always had many failings, not least the egregious non-sequitur that the first cause must be God.
These days it has the further problem that in quantum physics we find innumerable phenomena that are not 'caused' in classical terms, such as the spontaneous formation and instant mutual annihilation of particle-antiparticle pairs (whence the Casimir effect) or the emission of any particular particle in the course of radioactive decay. These have instead to be described in terms of statistics within parameters.

I have discussed this a lot in the answers here

While it's not clear that the Casimir effect has any relevant consequences in human terms, radioactive decay certainly can.

Same here.

 

[Segev Moran]

The classic example is a pencil:

I, Pencil by Leonard E. Read | Leonard E. Read

... but just about anything would do. I can't think of a single thing that only has one cause. Can you?

Yeah i can
You are the second person that tells me everything has multiple causes yet can't give me an example
If there are so many, please give one
I will read what you've sent about the pencil, but can you have something less philosophical?

 

[Segev Moran]

I thought you meant to discuss the origin of existence instead.

Nope

 

[Segev Moran]

You Make some sense if realty is a something. But to determine it you would have to be free from it outside of it.

Please note in the OP i say human POV.
In our human POV reality is something

If, while you are in it, and make a claim about it, as if you are independent from it thats a personal psychological issue and a troubling mental disorder called NORMAL!

So are you saying you are "normal"? In this type of discussion "normal" debates with itself a variety of views it has of reality as it is standing outside reality!

Normal seems pretty cuccoo to me but hey i am wierd....

Lol. I am far from normal i fear

 

[Koldo]

Your explanation claimed that if i play a video, there is no meaning to time before 00:00.
I agree. what i wrote was that it is irrelevant to the question of time.
there is no negative time, and i never claimed there is.
in my OP when i talked about eternity, i didn't mean time BEFORE the existence of our universe, rather a point when time was not in "motion" and everything was just there, all at once, no past, present or future.

Your analogy of the Youtube video has got nothing to do with what i was saying before it, so i tried to explain what i meant.

Your explanation claimed that if i play a video, there is no meaning to time before 00:00.
I agree. what i wrote was that it is irrelevant to the question of time.
there is no negative time, and i never claimed there is.
in my OP when i talked about eternity, i didn't mean time BEFORE the existence of our universe, rather a point when time was not in "motion" and everything was just there, all at once, no past, present or future.

Your analogy of the Youtube video has got nothing to do with what i was saying before it, so i tried to explain what i meant.

Where are you placing that point in time ? If you are placing it before the universe you are placing it before time. Therefore my analogy applies. If you are not placing it before our universe then in what sense are you talking about the creation of the universe ?

I took it you were talking about the perspective of an external observer seeing our universe from outside in that last post, therefore no past, present or future so to say. Which is completely unrelated to this topic.

 

[Segev Moran]

I am waiting for a clarification, @Segev Moran .

Which is it? Are you proposing that humans have a natural tendency to presume a cause-consequence structure in our perception (which is trivial, but true) or are you discussing the nature of existence instead?

Those are two very different subject matters, and you seem to want to meld them somehow.

I don't have enough knowledge about our nature of existence so i can't make any claim regarding it.
The idea behind the OP is to understand why people think so differently and how is it so that some do not accept the idea of a cause and effect as reasonable and logical.
You said this is trivial but scouting through the responses you will find that many do not share your same understanding
As I see it, my understanding of God related to the Idea of cause and affect.
It seems that most Atheists do agree with the idea that something caused our universe to exist.
I find it quite odd as even when i was an atheist, i couldn't deny the fact that something made it all happen. our reality (in our POV) is to ordered and complex to be something that just pops into existence without order.