Why Didn't the Universe Always Exist?

[idea]

I love this essay: The Beginning. by Brig Klyce

Nor is anything gained by running the difficulty farther back.... Our going back, ever so far, brings us no nearer to the least degree of satisfaction upon the subject. — William Paley (1)
How did life begin in the first place? It's a natural question. Yet science is nowhere near the answer to this question. In fact, the question may be flawed. Maybe there was no beginning. This possibility cannot be logically ruled out.

Helmholtz​

This possible consequence of cosmic ancestry is not new. In 1873, the great German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz said, "if failure attends all of our efforts to obtain a generation of organisms from lifeless matter, it seems to me a thoroughly correct scientific procedure to inquire whether there has ever been an origination of life, or whether it is not as old as matter..." (2). Contemporaneously with Helmholtz, Louis Pasteur wrote (3):

I have been looking for spontaneous generation during twenty years without discovering it. No, I do not judge it impossible.... You place matter before life, and you decide that matter has existed for all eternity. How do you know that the incessant progress of science will not compel scientists... to consider that life has existed during eternity and not matter?

In 1914, BAAS President William Bateson suggested that life may have evolved from an original complex that already included all of its ensuing variety (3.5). How could that begin? And in 1926, Russian geochemist V. I. Vernadskii observed (4):

None of the exact relationships between facts which we know will be changed if this problem has a negative solution, that is, if we admit that life always existed and had no beginning, that living organisms never arose at any time from inert material....

 

[muhammad_isa]

Of course, and you see fit to believe by faith. Are you offended that I say so?

..and so do you.
You have faith in the current scientific facts and theories.

I have a great deal of faith in them too, but not to the extent that they rule my mind.
I evaluate things from more than one perspective. I call it thinking.

You merely add the word "critical" and claim your way is superior.

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

You have faith in the current scientific facts and theories.

No, I don't, if by faith you mean unjustified belief as in gods and angels and afterlives. My trust in empiricism and my rejection of religious-type faith is supported by the success of the former and the uselessness of unfalsifiable beliefs.

I evaluate things from more than one perspective. I call it thinking.

Yes, but not all thinking is good thinking. You allow in other types of thinking, which don't benefit you except perhaps to comfort you.

I have a friend who, when told, "Great minds think alike," was quick to point out that so do mediocre minds.

You merely add the word "critical" and claim your way is superior.

Critical thought and empiricism have been confirmed to be superior to belief by faith. They converted alchemy to chemistry, astrology to astronomy, and creationism to cosmology and evolutionary biology.

 

[muhammad_isa]

No, I don't, if by faith you mean unjustified belief as in gods and angels and afterlives.

I do NOT mean that, quite obviously.

I mean what I say. You rely on the scientists honesty, and correct conclusions etc.
I never claimed its unjustified, as you do with anything other than science.

Yes, but not all thinking is good thinking. You allow in other types of thinking, which don't benefit you except perhaps to comfort you.

That is merely your bias. You claim your way is superior.
I see it as narrow-minded, and lacks insight and feeling .. robot-like.

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

You rely on the scientists honesty, and correct conclusions etc.

No, I don't. My confidence in empiricism comes from two observations:

[1] It works in my daily life. When I make decision based in properly evaluating the evidence of the experiences of daily life, I am rewarded, whereas, if I were to make decisions based in faith -based beliefs, the outcomes are variable and less satisfying.

[2] Science works. It makes life longer, more functional, easier, safer, more comfortable, and more interesting. Religious beliefs do none of that.

I never claimed its unjustified

Agreed. You don't call faith-based belief unjustified. Still, it is by the standards of critical analysis.

You claim your way is superior. I see it as narrow-minded, and lacks insight and feeling .. robot-like.

My way generates results. Yours just generates useless to harmful unfalsifiable beliefs.

 

[muhammad_isa]

My way generates results..

You believe that they produce favorable results.
"seeing is believing" .. perhaps.

 

[gnostic]

You have faith in the current scientific facts and theories.

I have a great deal of faith in them too, but not to the extent that they rule my mind.
I evaluate things from more than one perspective. I call it thinking.

You merely add the word "critical" and claim your way is superior.

That is merely your bias. You claim your way is superior.
I see it as narrow-minded, and lacks insight and feeling .. robot-like.

Excuse me, but I could say the same with you, if you (and others like you) allowed your belief in scriptures or belief in superstitions (eg “God did it”), to cloud your thinking…that would be consider biases.

if I was to compare what science say about nature, and whatever religion you believe in that would say about nature, then I go with the one that are verified by evidence (which would include experiments) & data, and not something that come from scriptures or religious teachings.

The problem with religions, especially in scriptures that talk about nature (eg natural phenomena like Earth, Sun, rain, mountains, seas, living organisms, etc), they often used vague descriptions, or worse, using symbolic languages that often appear in verse literature like poetry, epic poems or scriptures, eg literary devices like for examples - metaphors, similes, analogies, allegories, etc.

These literary symbolic devices can have any number of interpretations that can contradict each other, or could cause confusion. They are often obscured, misleading or just outright wrong.

Now I am assuming you are a Muslim, so I will give you some examples from the Qur’an of a simile or metaphor.

In Qur’an numbers of passages it describes the Earth being “spread out” or “stretch out” or “extend”, and some would include it being spread out like a “bed” (20:53, 43:10) or like a “carpet” (51:48).

A simile is where one thing is mentioned - like the “Earth” - and this is described and compared with something else entirely - like with “carpet” or with “bed”. That the Earth is described as being spread out like bed or being spread out like carpet, would imply that the Earth is flat like a bed or a carpet.

While it is true, that I don’t read Arabic, and there are possibilities that translating passages into English, may lose their actual contexts, but being ”spread out“ or “stretch out” like a bed or like a carpet would indicate a flat surface, not rounded like a sphere.

Now you may also cite some passages that imply roundness of the Earth. But being “round” isn real good descriptions, because many shapes can be round. With 2-D shapes, both circle & elliptic have round & curve shape. In 3-D, ”round” can include a sphere (eg ball or orb) or a spheroid shape like ellipsoid (eg egg shape), or it can be round & flat at the same time like cylinder (as well as disk) or cone.

So unless scriptures like the Qur’an or Bible be more precise with their wordings, by describing the Earth being shape of sphere, orb or ball, just saying “round” isn’t good enough, because as I said number of shapes can be round & flat like cylinder or disk.

The Earth is definitely spheroid, meaning it isn’t a perfect sphere, as the circumference at the equator is wider than those (circumference) of the polar.

The Ancient Greek natural philosophers have known the Earth to be orb-like for about a thousand years before the composition of the Qur’an, but no Muslims describe the Earth being spherical until centuries later, when Muslims scholars have translated Greek texts into Arabic and Persian, from 9th century and later.

Biases can go both ways. How you view the world, can just be as narrow.

 

[gnostic]

@muhammad_isa

I forgot to say before pressing the "Post reply" button.

That everyone are capable of "thinking"...including yourself.

You wrote:

I have a great deal of faith in them too, but not to the extent that they rule my mind.
I evaluate things from more than one perspective. I call it thinking.

That's all good and well.

It is particularly good to able to do that. Because in the line of any scientist's work, that scientist have to be skeptical of other people's work, BUT he or she must be also capable of evaluate his or her own work, skeptically, because no hypothesis a scientist has formulated to be automatically true, that's why a scientist, if he or she can MUST TEST his or her own hypothesis, to determine its validity, as must any other scientists (eg peers in Peer Review).

No new hypothesis is true, unless it has been rigorously tested, whether it be the scientist or someone else (some other scientists). And the only way to test a hypothesis

Note that I wrote - "...or someone else" - hypotheses can be tested by independent scientists. For instance, Albert Einstein was more theoretical physicist than a experimental physicist, especially in some of his models in Special Relativity and his models in General Relativity, other scientists have his hypotheses.

Anyway, I am digressing, as I normally do. Sorry. Back to the subject of "thinking".

As I said everyone is capable of thinking. You, me, and so on.

But not everyone is capable of "critical thinking", an ability to scoff at, when you replied to @It Aint Necessarily So with this:

You merely add the word "critical" and claim your way is superior.

You are making it out as this is bad.

Critical thinking is not so much as being "superior", as being able to analyze things (things, like an argument or evidence or fact) objectively, without biases.

Some people do critical thinking better than other.

The question is, can you analyze your own work, critically & dispassionately? Can you critically analyze your own belief?

When I was younger, I did believe in the Bible, Old Testament & New, and believe in Jesus' teaching and all. I didn't question what I believe in, and I didn't question the gospels. But during a 14-year period hiatus, I was busy with college life than with works, so religion took a backseat, and I didn't open up the Bible until 2000.

The year 2000 was my 2nd year when I created my website Timeless Myths, that included information about Greek and Norse and Celtic myths. I was doing research on the Grail legend for my Arthurian section at Timeless Myths, when I picked up the Bible once again. But it wasn't Jesus' death and Joseph of Arimathea that changed my personal view on religion, it was Jesus' birth (Matthew 1:23) about the messianic sign that supposedly prophesized Jesus' coming in Isaiah 7:14.

The gospel claimed that Jesus was Isaiah's Immanuel, but when I re-read Matthew 1:23 along with Isaiah 7 (whole chapter and not just verse 14), I came to realize that the gospel has cherrypicked the Isaiah's sign, leaving out the rest of sign (Isaiah 7:14-17).

Perhaps, I was young and inexperience at the time, that I took what the gospel of Matthew at face value, didn't bother to double-checking what I read, didn't cross-reference one book from the other. But being more experience with life and with literature, I did as much as cross-referencing as I could.

This discrepancy in Matthew 1:23 with Isaiah 7:14-17, made me check for other so-called messianic signs, comparing the gospel with supposed signs of Jesus from the Old Testament.

From that point on, I was more "agnostic" than a "theist", although, quite frankly I never heard of agnosticism until 3 years later (2003), when I joined my first internet forum.

The point, I was able to critically analyze my own belief - questioned it for the first time.

Can you question, analyze and challenge your own belief, muhammd_isa?

If you cannot evaluate your religion critically and skeptically, what make you think you can analyze any scientific theory?

 

[muhammad_isa]

..not everyone is capable of "critical thinking", an ability to scoff at, when you replied to @It Aint Necessarily So with this:

You are making it out as this is bad.

It is bad, imo, if "critical thinking" is merely an evaluation of physical observation, and nothing more.
That is not really critical thinking, as the word "critical" implies.

Critical thinking is not so much as being "superior", as being able to analyze things (things, like an argument or evidence or fact) objectively, without biases.

..and if there is no data to analyze, how can one reach any conclusion?
The only physical data we have to analyze, pertains to this universe, and that says nothing
about the possible existence of another.

..From that point on, I was more "agnostic" than a "theist", although, quite frankly I never heard of agnosticism until 3 years later (2003), when I joined my first internet forum.

The point, I was able to critically analyze my own belief - questioned it for the first time.

Can you question, analyze and challenge your own belief, muhammd_isa?

Yes, thankyou.