universe's origin [Archive] - Two Plus Two Newer Archives

siegfriedandroy

11-12-2006, 07:45 AM

why does the universe exist? many disbelieve in russell's 'eternal universe' these days. so why, if there is no God, did the universe simply arise 17 (or whatever, not that we can discern the difference) billion years ago? there is no God. what was before? i remember in 10th grade biology my teacher, mr wilkes, (12 yrs ago), said that was a stupid question. if i wasn't so shy back then, perhaps i would have challenged him. so dumb, though, imo. telling us 14-16 yr olds that it is a stupid question. should have majored in bio, then i could have been (would never have happened to me though, i am not a fool) dogmatized and truly made to believe that the above is a stupid question.

so where did the universe come from (assuming it is not eternal)? if it is eternal, then why does there exist an eternal universe? am i fool to raise such a question?

MidGe

11-12-2006, 07:54 AM

why does god exist? many disbelieve in 'eternal god' these days.

so where did god come from (assuming it is not eternal)? if it is eternal, then why does there exist an eternal god? am i fool to raise such a question?

Answer: YES

siegfriedandroy

11-12-2006, 08:19 AM

[ QUOTE ]
why does god exist? many disbelieve in 'eternal god' these days.

so where did god come from (assuming it is not eternal)? if it is eternal, then why does there exist an eternal god? am i fool to raise such a question?

Answer: YES

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midge. my favorite smp poster!! when will we drink together??!! i am probably much different than how you perceive me! anyway, i followed the 1st 1/2 of your response. in the end, the question (i guess) is whether it's more reasonable to believe in a universe ((un)created?- i believe it's clearly created) that exists with or without (like u2) God. in my opinion, it makes more sense to say that the universe (with everything- our families, friends, loves, hates, etc, etc, ad infinitum, etc etc, times a billion) was not the result of something arising from nothing (whatever that is, none of us really know). makes more sense that the something came from something...

MidGe

11-12-2006, 08:41 AM

siegfriedandroy,

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in the end, the question (i guess) is whether it's more reasonable to believe in a universe ((un)created?- i believe it's clearly created)

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That's the issue, I see no more likeliness of one or the other.

Another way of looking at the question would be, in which way would the universe be different from god, and all, of that answer, consequences.

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It makes more sense to say that the universe as not the result of something arising from nothing (whatever that is, none of us really know). makes more sense that the something came from something...

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Yep, same applies to your concept of god, which is after all only a concept, and even less tangible that reality as it is experienced. It is only an, extra, unneeded step.

siegfriedandroy

11-12-2006, 08:49 AM

you say it is no more likely either way? so why are you so adamant that the world (universe) is uncreated?

siegfriedandroy

11-12-2006, 09:02 AM

how is it an extra, unneeded step? why do you say this? how is the universe different from god???....... ummmmmmmmmmmm, i cannot easily explain. how am i (or you) different from God? it's obvious, but im just not sure the easiest way to explain. do you really believe that the universe could exist if there really, in the beginning, was NOTHING. do you know what nothing means? i was nothing 28 yrs ago. somehow could a universe spring from the nothing that was(NOT) me? God is not 'nothing'. God DOES NOT EQUAL the universe. God did not come from nothing (nor did the universe)

MidGe

11-12-2006, 09:06 AM

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God did not come from nothing (nor did the universe)

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Good enough for me... It gives god no preeminence over the universe... What you call god is what I have not yet named! /images/graemlins/smile.gif

Peace, bro!

siegfriedandroy

11-12-2006, 09:08 AM

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God did not come from nothing (nor did the universe)

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Good enough for me... It gives god no preeminence over the universe... What you call god is what I have not yet named! /images/graemlins/smile.gif

Peace, bro!

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what i meant was god did not come from nothing (since He's always existed (is outside of time, etc)). and the universe did not come from nothing (it came from Him).

evank15

11-12-2006, 09:12 AM

The original causation problem and the resulting infinite regression make this question (seemingly) unanswerable.

siegfriedandroy

11-12-2006, 09:16 AM

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The original causation problem and the resulting infinite regression make this question (seemingly) unanswerable.

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could you please elaborate?

evank15

11-12-2006, 09:29 AM

It's just what you've been discussing.

Here's the universe. Where did we come from? Something created us. So who created our creator? Their creator. So who created the creator's creator? And so on, infinitely.

The original causation problem is just a fancy way of asking what our origins are. Original refering to the universe at time t=0.

And fyi(OP), the universe is (13.7+/-0.2)Gyr old, not 17 or some other number.

siegfriedandroy

11-12-2006, 09:31 AM

[ QUOTE ]
It's just what you've been discussing.

Here's the universe. Where did we come from? Something created us. So who created our creator? Their creator. So who created the creator's creator? And so on, infinitely.

The original causation problem is just a fancy way of asking what our origins are. Original refering to the universe at time t=0.

And fyi(OP), the universe is (13.7+/-0.2)Gyr old, not 17 or some other number.

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The Creator is uncreated. We are created. This 'regression' problem is some sh*t in your head w/o ultimate merit.

evank15

11-12-2006, 09:35 AM

"The Creator is uncreated."

I take issue with that statement, mainly because it is impossible.

The regression problem is a real problem for those of us who think rationally.

siegfriedandroy

11-12-2006, 09:47 AM

evank15

11-12-2006, 09:52 AM

Something out of nothing?

The stance I'm arguing for here is the "we are too stupid right now to know" stance.

But then again, that is a very scientific view of things. The religious view is "we are too stupid to know right now...so let's say God did it", which of course is seen throughout history.

Lestat

11-12-2006, 12:33 PM

I think that teacher must've been an imbecile, because it's not a stupid question at all. The problem is, the answer is beyond our reach right now and may always be.

You can posit a god, but now you have just as big (if not bigger), of a question in what is god's origin? I don't see why people who have little problem believing that god "always was", can't accept that the universe "always was".

Again, the answer could lie in multiple dimensions, it could be other factors, or it could be a god. But even if it IS a god, it's very unlikely it's the same god YOU are thinking of. It could be a god who doesn't care. It could be a god that doesn't even know we exist. And lastly, it could be a god of a different religion than you believe in. Pluggin in a god does not answer anything.

FortunaMaximus

11-12-2006, 01:05 PM

[ QUOTE ]
"The Creator is uncreated."

I take issue with that statement, mainly because it is impossible.

The regression problem is a real problem for those of us who think rationally.

[/ QUOTE ]

It's solvable, if you make concessions to the fact that causality is only a human paradox and has no bearing on large scales. It isn't violating anything by making a joke of cause and effect, it's an expected property.

Once you've done that, a self-emergent large-scale process must start somewhere in mathematics, a large pattern, if you will. It's no different than what some are trying to do with cybernetics, throw a mass of numbers in and let it churn and sort out its own evolutionary order.

Now apply these same principles to the universe, which is at its very core, an expanding finite set that has infinite potential.

Add this interesting dilemma to the mix, the Big Bang is the Singularity that triggered this Universe, and this same Universe is rife with smaller singularities.

Child's play, child's playground, if you've ever visited one of them and they had a single structure with all those tubes and slides. Each singularity has the future potential to trigger its own Universe, just not in a way that interferes with this Universe. We just don't know the critical mass yet, or if the Big Bang singularity was the minimum mass necessary to trigger an Universe.

So you can think of it as a manifold of interconnected Universes.

This isn't disprovable as a whole, but there are minor flaws, and Metric and thylacine have been kind enough to debate ane explore more scientific principles in an enjoyable fashion in another thread.

Maybe in the end, those barriers are inviolable by both mass and information, and those aren't two-way portals. We got a huge Universe, we're not gonna lack for space or matter/energy. It's a race against cosmic timescales though to evolve fast enough to beat entropy and to be able to function in a infinitesimally low energy state.

Prodigy54321

11-12-2006, 01:34 PM

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"The Creator is uncreated."

I take issue with that statement, mainly because it is impossible.

The regression problem is a real problem for those of us who think rationally.

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Why is it irrational to posit an uncreated Being?

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it is just as irrational/rational to posit an uncreated universe

the point is that god does't just get special exceptions because you want him to..

seigfriedandroy, I'm going to pull a "you" and state that it is so obvious that you are incorect

THEIST: there must have been a creator of the universe
ATHEIST:why?
THEIST:because something can't come from nothing
ATHEIST:ok so what happened?
THEIST:god created the universe
ATHEIST:then what created god?
THEIST:nothing
ATHEIST:I thought you just said that something can't come from nothing?
THEIST:oh, except for god...or when god wants to do something
ATHEIST:ummm ok

how do you not see how this is not a logical argument.

CityFan

11-12-2006, 01:41 PM

The reason it's a "stupid question" is that there is no "before" The unierse did not just appear at a point in time, because time itself is part of the universe. It's just another dimension.

Anyone who is able to conceive of a spatially finite universe, i.e. one with an edge of space, should be able to conceive of a universe with a start point and an end point aling the axis of time.

As usual though, the ultimate response is: what's your alternative theory?

CityFan

11-12-2006, 01:46 PM

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should have majored in bio, then i could have been (would never have happened to me though, i am not a fool) dogmatized and truly made to believe that the above is a stupid question.

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Believe it or not, the study of science is not about being dogmatised into believing things which seem absurd to the outsider. THAT has another name...

Science is about developing UNDERSTANDING of theories, not accepting them blindly.

It sounds like your teacher was terrible - maybe he didn't understand the subject himself - but don't take it out on the rest of the world.

John21

11-12-2006, 03:24 PM

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how is it an extra, unneeded step? why do you say this? how is the universe different from god???....... ummmmmmmmmmmm, i cannot easily explain. how am i (or you) different from God? it's obvious, but im just not sure the easiest way to explain. do you really believe that the universe could exist if there really, in the beginning, was NOTHING. do you know what nothing means? i was nothing 28 yrs ago. somehow could a universe spring from the nothing that was(NOT) me? God is not 'nothing'. God DOES NOT EQUAL the universe. God did not come from nothing (nor did the universe)

[/ QUOTE ]

While you exist now, you didn't exist 30 years ago. So 30 years ago, the only thing that existed was your possibility.

If you apply that line of thinking to the cosmic scale and say before there was anything, there was nothing, and if there was nothing - then it must be possible for nothing to be. Just like in your unique sphere of existence, your not being was a possibility.

So if you grant the idea that the universe began from nothing, you are also granting that 'nothing' is a possibility. And if it is possible for nothing to be, then it must be possible for everything to be, because there is no thing to limit the possibilities of everything.

I know the above statement is a difficult concept to grasp, but the idea is that once you grant 'possibility' - the possibilities are infinite until 'some thing' limits them. But seeing how we're considering the universe as being created from nothing, no such limiting factors were present.

Saying the universe started out of nothing is the same as saying it started as infinite possibilities. Or as some Gnostics would say - the polarity between the two.

FortunaMaximus

11-12-2006, 04:14 PM

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Saying the universe started out of nothing is the same as saying it started as infinite possibilities. Or as some Gnostics would say - the polarity between the two.

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This is awesome. More you post, more I realize we see things quite in a similar fashion at times. I might be a little more prone to hyperbolic hypotheses though. <chuckles>

John21

11-12-2006, 05:26 PM

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Saying the universe started out of nothing is the same as saying it started as infinite possibilities. Or as some Gnostics would say - the polarity between the two.

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This is awesome. More you post, more I realize we see things quite in a similar fashion at times. I might be a little more prone to hyperbolic hypotheses though. <chuckles>

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My problem is, that when I tell someone I'm thinking about nothing, they don't get that I'm really thinking about NOTHING. Just searching - trying to keep my eyes and mind open.

FortunaMaximus

11-12-2006, 05:33 PM

Zero is not nothing, nothingness is not nothing, it's just as big as infinity, at least in potential.

Wonder what a lunch table with Ramanujan and Einstein and Hawking and Francis of Assisi along with a Taoist priest and a Mohawk shaman would be like.

I know where that's coming from. It took me years to even be able to condense that into the above first sentence.

Nikanoru

11-12-2006, 06:18 PM

great post

madnak

11-13-2006, 08:40 AM

siegfriedandroy

11-19-2006, 05:45 AM

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
how is it an extra, unneeded step? why do you say this? how is the universe different from god???....... ummmmmmmmmmmm, i cannot easily explain. how am i (or you) different from God? it's obvious, but im just not sure the easiest way to explain. do you really believe that the universe could exist if there really, in the beginning, was NOTHING. do you know what nothing means? i was nothing 28 yrs ago. somehow could a universe spring from the nothing that was(NOT) me? God is not 'nothing'. God DOES NOT EQUAL the universe. God did not come from nothing (nor did the universe)

[/ QUOTE ]

While you exist now, you didn't exist 30 years ago. So 30 years ago, the only thing that existed was your possibility.

If you apply that line of thinking to the cosmic scale and say before there was anything, there was nothing, and if there was nothing - then it must be possible for nothing to be. Just like in your unique sphere of existence, your not being was a possibility.

So if you grant the idea that the universe began from nothing, you are also granting that 'nothing' is a possibility. And if it is possible for nothing to be, then it must be possible for everything to be, because there is no thing to limit the possibilities of everything.

I know the above statement is a difficult concept to grasp, but the idea is that once you grant 'possibility' - the possibilities are infinite until 'some thing' limits them. But seeing how we're considering the universe as being created from nothing, no such limiting factors were present.

Saying the universe started out of nothing is the same as saying it started as infinite possibilities. Or as some Gnostics would say - the polarity between the two.

[/ QUOTE ]

how do you define 'nothing'?

jogsxyz

11-19-2006, 11:44 PM

[ QUOTE ]
[

THEIST: there must have been a creator of the universe
ATHEIST:why?
THEIST:because something can't come from nothing
ATHEIST:ok so what happened?
THEIST:god created the universe
ATHEIST:then what created god?
THEIST:nothing
ATHEIST:I thought you just said that something can't come from nothing?
THEIST:oh, except for god...or when god wants to do something
ATHEIST:ummm ok

how do you not see how this is not a logical argument.

[/ QUOTE ]

Now I see it. The universe must be God.

baumer

11-20-2006, 12:09 AM

What's north of the North pole?

John21

11-20-2006, 03:30 AM

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
how is it an extra, unneeded step? why do you say this? how is the universe different from god???....... ummmmmmmmmmmm, i cannot easily explain. how am i (or you) different from God? it's obvious, but im just not sure the easiest way to explain. do you really believe that the universe could exist if there really, in the beginning, was NOTHING. do you know what nothing means? i was nothing 28 yrs ago. somehow could a universe spring from the nothing that was(NOT) me? God is not 'nothing'. God DOES NOT EQUAL the universe. God did not come from nothing (nor did the universe)

[/ QUOTE ]

While you exist now, you didn't exist 30 years ago. So 30 years ago, the only thing that existed was your possibility.

If you apply that line of thinking to the cosmic scale and say before there was anything, there was nothing, and if there was nothing - then it must be possible for nothing to be. Just like in your unique sphere of existence, your not being was a possibility.

So if you grant the idea that the universe began from nothing, you are also granting that 'nothing' is a possibility. And if it is possible for nothing to be, then it must be possible for everything to be, because there is no thing to limit the possibilities of everything.

I know the above statement is a difficult concept to grasp, but the idea is that once you grant 'possibility' - the possibilities are infinite until 'some thing' limits them. But seeing how we're considering the universe as being created from nothing, no such limiting factors were present.

Saying the universe started out of nothing is the same as saying it started as infinite possibilities. Or as some Gnostics would say - the polarity between the two.

[/ QUOTE ]

how do you define 'nothing'?

[/ QUOTE ]

?

LuckOfTheDraw

11-20-2006, 03:54 AM

I don't think it's possible to verify any results.

My personal belief, however, is that there is something outside of our unviverse that is eternal. Something out of nothing seems very irrational to me. It would be nice to say that our universe is eternal, but through science, we know that our universe had a beginning - and probably an ending. So, I prefer to believe that there is something (call it what you want) outside of our universe that somehow is responsible for our universe's existence. This eternal something doesn't have to abide by our notion of causality, it just always has been. Like I said, who really knows, but this isn't just some silly faith, it's just the only thing that makes sense to me.

LuckOfTheDraw

11-20-2006, 03:59 AM

Intriguing post, John. If nothing is truly the same as an infinite set of posibilities, then maybe the something I speak of in my last post, that caused the existence of our universe, is actually an eternal nothing. Maybe nothing is the only thing possible to exist for eternity. I'll have to ponder on this for a while. Never thought of nothing that way.

MidGe

11-20-2006, 04:01 AM

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My personal belief, however, is that there is something outside of our unviverse that is eternal. Something out of nothing seems very irrational to me.

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LOL

LuckOfTheDraw

11-20-2006, 04:03 AM

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My personal belief, however, is that there is something outside of our unviverse that is eternal. Something out of nothing seems very irrational to me.

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LOL

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Yeah yeah. Just read the rest of post. What I'm trying to say is that it just makes more sense to me that something exists for all eternity rather than someting like our universe spontaneously coming into existence. I don't understand what's so laughable about that.

Semtex

11-20-2006, 04:14 AM

The universe exists on a hyperdimensional kid's hyperadvanced computer. It is a hyperdimensional version of the Sims, which he watches on his 3 dimernsional monitor.

theblackkeys

11-20-2006, 06:10 AM

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My personal belief, however, is that there is something outside of our unviverse that is eternal. Something out of nothing seems very irrational to me.

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LOL

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Yeah yeah. Just read the rest of post. What I'm trying to say is that it just makes more sense to me that something exists for all eternity rather than someting like our universe spontaneously coming into existence. I don't understand what's so laughable about that.

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Yeah, I don't either.

evank15

11-20-2006, 06:26 AM

[ QUOTE ]
Zero is not nothing, nothingness is not nothing, it's just as big as infinity, at least in potential.

Wonder what a lunch table with Ramanujan and Einstein and Hawking and Francis of Assisi along with a Taoist priest and a Mohawk shaman would be like.

I know where that's coming from. It took me years to even be able to condense that into the above first sentence.

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Nice M51 avatar. I did a qbasic simulation (designed in 1988!) with that galaxy and its companion a few days ago.

CaseS87

11-20-2006, 06:36 AM

this thread is stoopid.

FortunaMaximus

11-20-2006, 07:12 AM

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Zero is not nothing, nothingness is not nothing, it's just as big as infinity, at least in potential.

Wonder what a lunch table with Ramanujan and Einstein and Hawking and Francis of Assisi along with a Taoist priest and a Mohawk shaman would be like.

I know where that's coming from. It took me years to even be able to condense that into the above first sentence.

[/ QUOTE ]

Nice M51 avatar. I did a qbasic simulation (designed in 1988!) with that galaxy and its companion a few days ago.

[/ QUOTE ]

Thanks.

Eh. "Nothing" can be seen as a inverse square of everything.

And since it's not naturally negative, there is no loss, and if it doesn't exist, neither does everything.

Or something, ehh. LOL. The bottomless stew.