Xorak on 25/1/2012 at 08:29

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I don't really scoff at anything regarding existence. I'm ready to believe anything if there's evidence. I was just backing up Renzatic's point because it is valid to a degree.

I don't even believe in God. As I said earlier, (beyond the obvious of explaining the world to primitive man,) I believe religion was purposely used to check the unlimited ego and power of chiefs, kings and despots. Though the religion too sometimes became exactly what it hated, when it would align itself with those secular powers.

God is protection from ourselves. As we push religion aside, we are moving back towards the 'despots' taking over. To me it seems clear, in this society where capitalistic forces push us and we never push back. We're just apathetic slugs basically, moldering away. We have no other way to protect ourselves except by saying 'you don't have the right to do this, because its against what God wishes'. Freedom, equality among all, fairness and empathy were all ideals of Christianity and also of Classical humanists--not of secular leaders. However, as we think ourselves gods, we lose too even that ability to say 'this is what God ordained,' because now we're stuck only with our ineffective selves.

But it's a cycle too, religion will come around again, the need for it will never leave. Probably as we further find fewer planets that harbor life, people will start talking again about the specialness of creation. It'll spark a rebirth.

Nicker on 25/1/2012 at 11:23

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Wrong! God is a word. Helium is a thing and a word. Helium wins.

Nicker on 25/1/2012 at 11:36

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And thennnnnn...



Spot the contradiction. Hint: Look for the special pleading.



Got proof? And which nothing do you mean? The nothing that is the absence of something or ultra-nothing, wherein lives your God?

But when you say that nothing can be infinite you mean except for God, right? Why not the natural, mechanistic universe too? Why does God get a free ride and not nature? Come on, a little consistency here.



Finally an honest question.



What caused God? Oh right, you don’t have to answer that, only science has to account for the ultimate origin. All you have to do is attach words to mysteries.

How about “we don’t know”. That’s the honest answer. Are you really going to tell me that you DO know, based on some semantic floor exercises?



More baseless assertions. You also assert that God can come from nothing or precede nothing or is outside the rules of nothingness, which is essentially begging the question.

But go ahead and tell a physicist that nothing can come from nothing. They’ll tell you that everything came from nothing, including nothing (ordinary nothing, not ultra-nothing).



Which, according to you, can only reasonably be God, which is defined as the thing that is not a thing, in a time which is not a time, and a place which is not a place, from which all things, which are things, were created and which is in all things it created but is apart from its creation and so on.



That’s very likely. It’s called the Universe.

zombe on 25/1/2012 at 13:31

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x_x, looks like a common confusion. This should help => (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdvWrI_oQjY) (Life, the Universe and Nothing, made easy)

I have no problem with "something from nothing". It happens every moment at every place - not that it amounts to much (but neither does the universe :p : total energy of the universe == 0 [a whole lot of physicist claim that based on various observable facts and, frankly, that is the only universe that makes any sense to me]. Btw, all the visible stuff/matter [black holes etc of course too] amounts to less than 1% [dark matter ~30%, dark energy ~70%]).

Pyrian on 25/1/2012 at 15:44

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Certainly the issues have been "addressed" but many have not been solved to any substantial degree (except, all too frequently, at swordpoint), which means they're still problems. If an issue with a moral guideline leaves reasonable interpretation on whether I should love my neighbors or stone them to death (or love while stoning to death if you're insane enough to pull that off), I would posit that it hasn't been solved at all, however often and brilliantly it may have been addressed. I mean, that's kind of the fundamental problem and the fundamental distinction - if it's not falsifiable, you can never test if your interpretation is right or not.

And that brings me to something else. When scientific theories conflict - and oh boy do they - scientists generally admit they don't know which, if either, is correct, or even just "more" correct (typically this happens when the circumstances under which competing theories measurably diverge cannot be achieved experimentally). They have opinions, sure, but they don't know and they know they don't know (...mostly, arguments do get heated sometimes).

Religious people, at least those I've known in America, frequently have a rather uncomfortable certainty in otherwise highly contested bibilical interpretations. Love or stone (or both)? They don't know, but they don't know they don't know, and my suspicion is that both sides of any given argument are rooted more in personal bias than in any sort of advanced scriptural interpretation anyway.

On the Beginning, if there was one...

Does time have a beginning? There's good reason to think it might, and that reason is entropy. But it might not, entropy may very well not be absolute, the universe might do some sort of cyclical thing where every quantum of energy and momentum has always existed and will always exist. That's interesting, but it's not what I want to talk about. Allow me to assume that time has a beginning, a point of absolute zero entropy, a point at which very little (and remotely possibly nothing at all, a pretty theory that unfortunately requires a few too many assumptions, many of which will probably never be falsifiable) could be said about the universe.

People like to ask a seemingly simple question: What caused that beginning of time? My posit: That question makes no sense, it is a fundamentally meaningless question. It has a circular logic loop. It assumes a position which contradicts its premise.

Here's the thing: Cause is causal. (Duh!) Causation is temporal. That means that causation is literally a function of time. It is only meaningful within a temporal framework. A static (i.e. non-temporal) object has no causation within itself, and can have no causation within itself. You might ask who painted a painting, but you wouldn't ask that question of the painting itself. And you can only ask who painted a painting because there is a temporal framework outside of the otherwise static (in this example) painting itself.

So, when you ask what caused time, you are literally assuming that there is some kind of time that exists around and outside of time. And to me, that suggests quite simply that "time" is so built into your thinking that you can't even think outside that box. But what's outside that box, and indeed the box itself, is the eternal, that which simply is, and has no cause (and indeed cannot have a cause, the very notion is inherently contradictory).

Once you make the necessary logical step that the box, that time itself, does not have a cause and by definition cannot have a cause, then such questions as "what caused the big bang" disappear in a puff of illogic. Time has a beginning point, where there was no entropy, no information, no size, (and perhaps no energy and no physical laws, but as far as we can tell those are functionally set and eternal as well), simply because nothing had happened yet. The Big Bang is merely what happens, by our energy and physical laws, when nothing has happened yet.