[HN Gopher] We don't know how the universe began, and we will ne...
___________________________________________________________________
We don't know how the universe began, and we will never know
Author : nsoonhui
Score : 185 points
Date : 2022-08-27 13:29 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (backreaction.blogspot.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (backreaction.blogspot.com)
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| But isn't Webb calling the BBT into question?
|
| Even if we answer how it began there is still:
|
| 1) Why
|
| 2) What was there before that?
|
| 3) And before that?
|
| It's the rabbit hole only hallucinogens can close.
| cdelsolar wrote:
| Why is there even such a gigantic universe? Like what is the
| purpose of it - why was there a Big Bang? If I really think hard
| about these questions it makes me uncomfortable and anxious.
| TrispusAttucks wrote:
| I used to ponder this too much as a child. Why is there
| something instead of nothing.
|
| The most satisfying answer for me was that you must first
| define nothingness. But the moment it's been defined
| nothingness ceases to be. It seems to me at least that
| somethingness (suchness) [1] and nothingness are cross-
| reference negation of the other. So it can't be one or the
| other but must be both.
|
| This probably is not making an sense. Later I stumbled into
| Buddhism [2] which seems to have this undefinableness as a core
| of experienced reality.
|
| [1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/suchness
|
| [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tath%C4%81t%C4%81
| h2odragon wrote:
| Why anxious? the answers to those questions, while interesting
| and entertaining, aren't relevant to you today. Just be glad
| you get to experience this tiny little part of the universe for
| the brief time you're here.
| cdelsolar wrote:
| Is the universe gigantic enough and long-lasting enough that
| my consciousness will come back in some form after I die?
| hota_mazi wrote:
| There is no evidence to believe that's true, so you
| shouldn't believe it and assume that your current life is
| all you have. Enjoy it to the fullest while it lasts.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Uncountably many will that differ from you by random degree
| on uncountably many dimensions. How much like you do they
| have to be, to actually be you?
|
| Everybody reading this differs from you by only small
| degree. You differ from yourself-of-yesterday by a
| typically smaller amount, and -of-last-year by a less-small
| amount.
| the_third_wave wrote:
| The universe is as big as it is because of the word size used
| by the machine which runs the simulation. Most of it seems to
| be 'wasted space' but that is just a consequence of the large
| word size needed to have an accurate enough simulation.
| hota_mazi wrote:
| Why do you need a reason? Maybe there is no purpose. The
| universe just is, period.
|
| If you look at an ant, do you ask yourself "Why is this ant
| here?".
| drewolbrich wrote:
| In a gigantic universe, it's statistically more likely that
| something interesting like you will happen in it.
| sparkie wrote:
| > Why was there a Big Bang?
|
| Big assumption to make there. The big bang is a theory and it
| is not at all _proven_ to have happened.
| nelblu wrote:
| I read this somewhere else so it would be nice someone can
| quote the origin, but think of it this way - you were dead for
| billions of years before you were born, you weren't anxious
| then. once you are dead you won't feel the anxiety again, so
| why bother worrying about it now when there are a whole lot of
| other things you can do.
| suction wrote:
| adaisadais wrote:
| Is there infinite?
|
| Tough for finite things to try and understand much less
| comprehend such a simple and complex quandary.
|
| What happens if there really is infinite no beginning and no end.
| Or what if there is an Alpha and Omega - such a beautiful thing
| to not understand.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I think that this is the TL;DR of the whole piece:
|
| _> So if you read yet another headline about some physicist who
| thinks our universe could have begun this way or that way, you
| should really read this as a creation myth written in the
| language of mathematics._
| kevinventullo wrote:
| The key difference from religion being the word "could".
| cwalv wrote:
| We sometimes also rule out other ways it "could" have
| happened, because they're further from our current paradigm,
| or just harder (or maybe impossible) to verify. In this
| sense, it may not be a "religion", but there is an element of
| "faith"
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Faith is believing without objective evidence. Yet if there
| is evidence of a possibility then there is no faith
| involved.
| cwalv wrote:
| I wouldn't say that faith is believing without objective
| evidence. It's believing without certainty
| [deleted]
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| The Christian bible (Hebrews 11:1) and Merriam Webster
| appear to disagree [0].
|
| [0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/faith
| revskill wrote:
| Thinking in microservice, the universe began as a monothlic, and
| for scalability reason, it starts split into multiple galaxies.
|
| In software engineering, we do have black holes, it's where the
| code is a mess, untestable.
|
| So, in conclusion, the universe were born as a dense mess, from a
| "strange" matter , from there all basic physic atoms were born.
| 734129837261 wrote:
| "We don't know how fire comes to life, and we will never know."
|
| "We don't know how to defend ourselves against beasts, and we'll
| never know."
|
| "We don't know how disease spreads, let's just hug it out, we'll
| never know."
|
| "We don't know how to fly like a bird, we'll never know."
|
| "We don't know how to land the booster of a rocket, we'll never
| know."
|
| "We don't know how to cure that form of cancer, and we'll never
| know."
|
| What a ridiculous defeatist attitude. History has proven that, so
| far, we've been very reliable at figuring out things that were
| deemed impossible.
|
| I'd say we already know. It would be infinitely arrogant of us to
| think we're the originals. We're likely inside an inescapable but
| observable simulation, inside a simulation, repeat for any
| unknown number of times. That's probably how "the universe" (our
| universe) began.
|
| Our parent universes probably have far more complexities to them
| that have been stripped from ours, for the sake of computational
| simplicity. Perhaps the actual originals, or any of our parent
| simulators, know exactly how the universe came to be. We might
| figure it out, too.
| danwee wrote:
| What seems arrogant to me is to think that we, as human beings,
| can know everything given time and space.
| TaupeRanger wrote:
| None of those things are impossible based on known physics.
| Traveling backwards in time to observe the beginning of the
| universe, and/or somehow existing outside the universe in order
| to do the observation, is impossible. Could we learn new
| physics that make it possible? Yes, but it is still a totally
| different class of problems than the ones you listed. Those
| were ONLY a question of knowledge. The problem at hand is a
| question of both knowledge AND the laws of physics actually
| allowing for that knowledge to be had. There was never any
| reason to assume that we would be unable to cure a certain type
| of cancer with the right knowledge alone.
| kretaceous wrote:
| I agree that the title is kind of defeatist and I'm not against
| scientific research on finding the source of universe, heck I
| optimistically hope humans find it within my lifetime. That
| said, all your examples are really miniscule and dare I say,
| easy, as compared to the scale of understanding the universe.
|
| You present an interesting semi-fictional point on simulation.
| pilaf wrote:
| > We're likely inside an inescapable but observable simulation,
| inside a simulation, repeat for any unknown number of times.
| That's probably how "the universe" (our universe) began.
|
| That's just deferring the question. If we're a simulation
| inside a larger universe, then how did that universe begin?
| Although I'd argue if we're in a simulation then we're still a
| part of the host universe, even if kept in isolation, and it's
| that host universe we should ultimately care about when asking
| the big questions.
| IAmGraydon wrote:
| "We will never know" is such a contradictory statement. On the
| surface, it implies the limits of our knowledge while
| simultaneously indicating that the author possesses the
| omnipotence required to know what humans will learn throughout
| the entirety of our future. Add it to your list of things to
| never write.
| jmyeet wrote:
| I think "fatalistic" is a better word than "contradictory". I
| otherwise agree.
|
| There are a lot of misconceptions about the Big Bang. The
| Universe is a metric space. The "metric" part here is
| deliberate, specific and technical. It really means that given
| two points the metric can tell us what we call the "distance"
| between them. Abstract maths deals with spaces that do and
| don't have metrics.
|
| The best explanation I've heard of the Big Bang is not that the
| Universe originated from a single point but rather the metric
| between all points in the Universe at the time of the Big Bang
| was 0.
|
| There's an open question about whether the Universe is finite
| or infinite. I mean the actual Universe not the observable
| Universe. This is almost a metaphysical question since we'll
| probably never know.
|
| We don't really know how gravity and space acts in such extreme
| environments but with black holes (that we also don't
| understand at the quantum level) we have plenty of examples of
| admittedly less extreme but still exxtreme corollaries. It is
| kind of mind-bending though. One description I read says that
| time acts like space and space acts like time within the event
| horizon. As in, you can see light entering the black holes
| behind you but that's the past and we can view the past all
| around us (eg distant galaxies are us viewing the past).
| Towards the singularity is the "future" and we can no more see
| that than we can see any future.
|
| We, as sentient beings, have a difficult time comprehending
| things beyond our existence. What I mean is that before we were
| born, we didn't exist. After we die, we don't exist. We can't
| really comprehend that intuitively because our perception of
| the world is predicated on our cognizance. The past is easier.
| Stuff happened before we were born. But now we do exist. So at
| some point in the future we won't exist. How can you comprehend
| your own lack of existence?
|
| I feel in some ways similar about the Universe. Our
| observations are predicated on concepts like "time" and "space"
| that at some point didn't exist. How do you reason about the
| lack of existence of space let alone time when everything we
| know is predicated on that?
|
| Still, I too feel like the author is too pessimistic about how
| much more we can learn here. Assuming we aren't extinguished in
| the next few centuries (which is actually more difficult than
| it sounds at this point) we are going to be here for an
| inconceivably long time. Given our understanding of the
| Universe, that's likely to be >10^100 years. That's a long time
| to figure stuff out.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| Perhaps, if there is a God, he does not desire us to learn
| about him by knowledge or by science, but by love for him and
| seeking him out.
|
| For who is man to say, that man must only learn about God
| through objectively verifiable facts, because man said so?
| Perhaps this God wants seeking. If we were born without eyes,
| color would still exist, but we would never perceive it, and
| how would we believe it if someone said it did exist?
| Zigurd wrote:
| Our knowledge of the cosmos, in just a few hundreds of years,
| expanded from the Earth, Moon, planets and stars of the
| firmament, a kind of cozy neighborhood, to that of
| unfathomable numbers of galaxies stretching out to
| unimaginable distances of space and time.
|
| Strange that gods who were so occupied with matters on this
| planet, who live in a nearby heaven up by the firmament of
| stars, are also still credible candidates for "creator" of
| the universe.
|
| The real universe is so much more vast and so much more
| strange than any scriptures had ever imagined. One could be
| forgiven for excusing that underestimation of the universe as
| a limitation of the imagination of man.
|
| In other words, "the god of the gaps" has to keep finding new
| gaps to fill, and the gaps are ever less tenable.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| You're taking an unbelievably literal interpretation of a
| faith you don't believe in and literally projecting it on
| to the parent comment as a form of criticism. Safe to say
| that I don't think you can expect a response from them.
| Zigurd wrote:
| My view of gods as being too small for the universe is
| grounded in the history of religions. If the OP is making
| up a new god for the newly discovered gaps, he faces no
| such limitations.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| Right. You're grounding your statement in the view that
| theology cannot evolve with the times, and that any claim
| that it does is actually, in fact, a falsehood. That
| itself is a major assumption on your part.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| Are they really less tenable? Because, if there be a God,
| on the judgement day present in many of the religions we
| know, he might point out that the sheer complexity of the
| universe should be a sign of his existence. What are the
| odds? Are the odds actually in favor of man's theory, or is
| man desperately clinging to a theory to avoid him? Is it
| actually good science as designed, or rather any excuse no
| matter how implausible will suffice? Good science looks at
| the odds and makes a conclusion. Bad science looks at the
| conclusion and ignores the odds to bias towards a result.
|
| Edit: Furthermore, this said God might point out on said
| day the lack of any aliens, or other life, as another sign
| that the universe was made for man, and nothing else, and
| the sheer enormity of it should be yet another sign. For if
| the universe was not large, would it be more easy to deny?
|
| Edit 2: You might dismiss the above, and these aren't the
| best arguments that could be formulated, but it is more to
| show that your presupposition that a larger universe
| disproves his existence is untenable.
| 0134340 wrote:
| >man's theory
|
| Theism is man's "theory". Either way, we enter a paradox,
| if you believe in gods then the theories of man
| ultimately came from gods, ie, a perfectly logical system
| only produces logical output.
|
| This whole thread pretty much wound up like I predicted
| while reading the article. Author implies with certainty
| that science is uncertain in a specific field and it's
| invaded by people certain of their beliefs in other
| fields, ie, if science has a kink in it then gods exist
| for certain.
|
| For god of the gaps argument never fails to amuse me.
| melling wrote:
| Someone wrote an article so people can waste hours debating
| this, accomplishing nothing. When will people learn?
| throwoutway wrote:
| Well there are some who claim to know, and will argue that
| "it happened this way" when in reality it's a guess, based on
| some assumptions, and measurements, fit to a model. We don't
| know everything, and it's worth the contradiction to point
| out the fallacy of those who postulate
| benreesman wrote:
| Hossenfelder is a polarizing figure. "Lost In Math" was a
| thought-provoking book in the tradition of the other string
| iconoclasts (Smolin, Woit, Rovelli, roughly "the Perimeter
| crowd"). "Three Roads to Quantum Gravity" was the last general
| audience book that Smolin did before he'd fucking had it and
| did "The Trouble with Physics". Woit went straight for the
| jugular with "Not Even Wrong".
|
| These people have (for better or worse) burnt the ships with
| the people of their generation who write grants and sit on
| tenure committees.
|
| Hossenfelder's pivot to "wildly over-credentialed pop-sci
| YouTuber" is interesting. My gut flinch reaction is like,
| "you're better than this", but... I have not walked a mile in
| her shoes, and if this is an end-run around a corrupt job
| market for particle/high-energy people who won't won't get on
| board with The Landscape? Maybe more power to her.
|
| I give that context so that people will know (my opinion on)
| the backstory for why she's in an adversarial relationship with
| The Academy.
|
| The "will never know" phrasing might be unfortunate. But the
| epistemological principle goes back to Hawking at least:
| "asking what happened before the Big Bang or where it came from
| is like asking what is north of the North Pole".
|
| It's a fun thing to theorize about, but the Big Bang is almost
| definitionally "the bound on observable causality". It's not a
| statement about what we won't ever know, it's a statement about
| what's _knowable_.
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| The trouble with Hossenfelder isn't so much that she rejects
| string theory, lots of people do that. No the problem is that
| she's pivoted into declaring the entire enterprise of
| cosmology and particle physics pointless, when she says
|
| """How about you wait, and we talk again in 10 billion
| years."""
|
| this is not so much a joke as a thinly disguised a deeply
| held conviction. There's no need for a secret cabal to
| explain why someone who clearly thinks the job should not
| even be done has trouble finding further employment in an
| extremely harsh job market.
| benreesman wrote:
| You sound very knowledgable about this, so I guess I'm
| mostly addressing any readers of this thread when I
| recommend Lost in Math as a prerequisite for making that
| judgement. Of the four I mentioned, it's the most personal
| / autobiographical / reflective.
|
| She's obvious pissed off, and that should be taken into
| account when evaluating her assertions. Woit is _way_ more
| pissed off, and probably the better mathematician. Smolin
| seems like, sad and resigned more than angry, but he also
| got a great gig wither Perimeter (which he might still
| hold?), which has to soften the blow.
|
| Frankly my layman's knowledge of all this is badly dated,
| because after decades of avid interest going back to
| childhood I got so dispirited about it I've kind of stopped
| paying attention outside of a few bright spots
| (Deutsch/Marletto have my rapt attention).
|
| So I don't doubt you that lots of people reject Stringworld
| now maybe even to the point of that being a fairly
| mainstream view, but 10 or 20 years ago that was a CLM at
| best and usually tenure-track suicide, and there's a whole
| generation of people who did in fact operate under the
| dictates of something that could, with a little poetic
| license, be called a "cabal". Dismantling the scientific
| method to admit the Landscape was, at least to an avid
| outsider, dogma not long ago.
|
| I'm enheartened to hear that people are starting to try new
| stuff again, but it's not difficult for me to have sympathy
| for people who just kinda gave up.
| kosh2 wrote:
| You can exchange "We will never know" for anything that we
| currently think of as impossible then.
| jjcon wrote:
| And yet it is provable that there are things we know we can't
| know
|
| https://youtu.be/HeQX2HjkcNo
| verisimi wrote:
| Define 'know'.
|
| Is it something you have personally verified and found to have
| been the case as you established the principles in play, or is
| it (at the other end of the spectrum) that a science paper says
| such-and-such and you read a summary on HN?
| coldtea wrote:
| > _On the surface, it implies the limits of our knowledge while
| simultaneously indicating that the author possesses the
| omnipotence required to know what humans will learn throughout
| the entirety of our future_
|
| That's no contradiction though.
|
| A contradiction would be "I know everything about X" and at the
| same time "There's a limit to our knowledge of X".
|
| It's no contradiction to claim that there are limits to our
| knowledge but still claim to absolutely know Y about Z.
|
| In other words, the idea that "there are limits to our
| knowledge" is not incompatible with the idea that we fully know
| this or that. You just mean that those limits only apply to
| other things.
|
| (Heck, in math we can even prove that some things can never be
| proven, thus both implying limits to our knowledge and that we
| know something with 100% certainty).
| bumbledraven wrote:
| > in math we can even prove that some things can never be
| proven
|
| No we can't. We can only prove that certain formal systems
| cannot resolve certain statements. We might still invent
| other formal systems that are acceptable to us and that _can_
| resolve those statements.
| lanstin wrote:
| And for those other systems, iF they embed arithmetic, we
| can effectively produce a statement that is visibly true
| and which that other system cannot prove.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _We might still invent other formal systems that are
| acceptable to us and that can resolve those statements._
|
| That's irrelevant, though, because a mathematical proof or
| a statement X is considered in the context of a specific
| formal system (and any isomorphic system).
|
| Proving that S can't be proven under formal system F will
| always be true regardless if you are able to prove the same
| statement in the formal system Z.
|
| For example, you can't say "I just disproved that triangle
| angles add to 180 degrees" just because you've proved they
| add to more than 180 degrees under a non-flat surface or
| non-Euclidean geometry.
|
| People saying "triangle angles add to 180 degrees"
| implicitly already mean "under Euclidean geometry and in a
| flat plane". It's just left implied, because it's goes
| without saying that they mean it within the system they
| expressed the problem and did the proof in.
| jackmott wrote:
| DemocracyFTW2 wrote:
| That's a very narrow reading of it. There's always an implicit
| "to the best of our current knowledge" caveat with every sound
| scientific statement. And it's true, to the best of our current
| knowledge, we can never know what it's like inside a black hole
| or very close to the time our universe began because the
| physics that we know tells us no person or probe can ever go
| there and come back to tell. If you're no so generous as to
| accept the implicit caveat you just end up being fun at parties
| because you go around and tell people to "never say never and
| always avoid always".
| 0134340 wrote:
| That reminds me of her article, very narrow. She seems to
| imply scientists, or at least scientific theories, implicate
| certain universal origins when really they're implying "to
| the best of our current knowledge". I think most everyone
| that's scientifically literate, and you'd think it'd be
| common knowledge among most of HN crowd, knows that
| scientific theories of universal origins aren't certain but
| here we have a whole article of the 'well awkshually' party-
| pooping you're talking about. She does seem pretty certain
| about uncertainty though which tells the tale that she's not
| beyond the paradox either.
| sigmoid10 wrote:
| This just falls completely apart when you look at the history
| of physics. Einstein for example is usually considered to be
| one of the smarter people, and even he thought it would be
| impossible to ever measure gravitational waves directly. He
| simply could not foresee the future developments of quantum
| mechanics, like lasers or squeezed light states. And yet here
| we are. Even if the author was the best physicist in the
| world (and if you look at her papers she certainly isn't by a
| long shot), you should never trust any statement like that.
| This is not just detrimental to science outreach (these
| things capture young people's imagination after all), it's
| also pointless to argue about them when we know that we
| almost certainly just lack imagination ourselves. Noone alive
| today can tell what will be possible in 100 years, period.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| I hate this way of thinking. Einstein never thought that
| it's impossible to measure gravitational waves, he just
| couldn't imagine any way we could ever make instruments
| precise enough to do so.
|
| However, measuring the state of the singularity that
| probably existed before inflation, or even more so,
| measuring anything about how that in itself came to be, is
| explicitly impossible given our current theories. As
| impossible as building a space ship that travels faster
| than light, or measuring the precise position and velocity
| of a particle.
|
| These are not technological issues: finding a way to do
| them would mean a completely new paradigm in science. So
| any paper that attempts to prove these things without
| presenting a new paradigm is doomed to the "we will never
| know" bag.
| twiss wrote:
| Sure, but that's an example of measuring something that's
| happening now. It's not quite in the same category as
| measuring something that happened 13.7 billion years ago.
| sigmoid10 wrote:
| Well, first of all these gravitational wave-creating
| events happened billions of light years away and thus are
| already a way to view the universe billions of years ago.
| Going back and looking even further into the past is just
| an example of what _seems_ impossible to us right now.
| But in the grand scheme of things, we have no clue what
| 's possible as evidenced by the history of physics. On
| top of that, there are actually pathways towards
| understanding things like string theory or the big bang.
| Einstein by comparison was not disingenuous when he made
| that statement, since the theoretical and experimental
| work didn't even show a possible path to imagine the
| future. Of course that doesn't mean that these other
| things will pan out in the future (e.g. stuff like
| astronomically-sized colliders or mathematical bottom-
| up/top-down proof approaches), but saying that anything
| we do today definitely won't ever work out, no matter
| what, is either incredibly naive, misinformed or outright
| slanderous towards these areas of research.
| synu wrote:
| I watched the video, and the sense I got was you don't need
| to bother to read anything where scientists talk about having
| figured out what happened at the beginning of the universe
| because we can never know. This seems to explicitly exclude
| the possibility that there could ever be a discovery you
| might read about that would change that.
| twiss wrote:
| She explicitly says that the scientific method is
| insufficient to give an answer to this question. So reading
| anything written by scientists won't give a conclusive
| answer. I think it's implicitly hinted that you might as
| well read something by a religious person, or a
| philosopher, or anyone with a random theory, as none of the
| theories can be proven or disproven by the scientific
| method, and so all of their answers will be equally
| (un)satisfying.
|
| It's theoretically possible that we'll one day find some
| other method of finding out the truth (perhaps a god will
| descend from the heavens and tell us? or perhaps we manage
| to find a bug / exploit in the simulation?) but personally
| I find it unlikely.
| pronlover723 wrote:
| She did make an appeal to simplicity, claiming that
| simpler is better, and she stated that religious origins
| are way more complicated so while they can't be proven
| wrong, if you accept the idea that simpler is better then
| religious explanations are unlikely to be true.
| twiss wrote:
| Yes, in the context of an example where the scientific
| method does / did work, and provides a simple
| explanation, namely evolution. Her argument is that in
| the case of the origin of the universe, the scientific
| method doesn't work, instead. That doesn't make the
| religious "method" better, but also not worse.
| bandyaboot wrote:
| Honestly I find "it's unknowable" to be a pretty
| satisfactory answer. Mostly because to me it points at
| something that seems almost obvious the more I've thought
| about it. Even if it were possible to see past the "Big
| Bang", what possible reason is there to think that would
| be the end of the rabbit hole? As mind bending as it is
| to think that the trail is infinite, it's even more mind
| bending to imagine that it's not.
| DemocracyFTW2 wrote:
| Well to quote user mensetmanusman: "Per thermodynamic
| axioms, incompleteness is implied by the arrow of time and
| information atrophy. This would imply an unknowable
| beginning."
|
| I think 'never' should be understood in this way--either
| there's something wrong or fundamentally incomplete about
| our theories, or we can not know certain things. Barring
| groundbreaking advancements in understanding akin to
| quantum physics and relativity theory, physics tells us so.
| Since the papers discussed do not establish such a new and
| testable theory but still go and discuss things current
| science cannot access, they cannot taken to be science.
| Doesn't necessarily mean they're wrong or uninteresting. I
| don't think she excludes the possibility that a
| groundbreaking discovery could be made that changes that.
| But the papers were not written in a time that knows of
| such a discovery.
| synu wrote:
| Ok, yeah maybe I could see that. But it's kind of a
| confusing message - don't read or take this research on
| this topic seriously, except in case some research on
| this topic comes that you should read and take seriously.
| bardworx wrote:
| Per PBS SpaceTime, humanity has been able to recreate
| conditions 0.000001 seconds after Big Bang (arbitrary
| number), in particle accelerators. But to add an extra 0
| would require the energy output of our universe.
|
| The implication is that we simply don't have enough
| energies to recreate similar circumstance in a particle
| accelerator and we cannot "see" past microwave background
| radiation. As such, as of now, there isn't a straight
| path to understand the Big Bang further in any context.
| tux1968 wrote:
| A more charitable reading would be "appreciate that all
| such theories are necessarily humble and limited; unless
| the entire context of science and human understanding
| becomes fundamentally and dramatically transformed"
| jschveibinz wrote:
| I see what you did there. ;)
| bagels wrote:
| Do you mean omniscience?
| kristopolous wrote:
| There's unknowable material real facts that nobody will ever
| know though.
|
| I read into one a few years ago when I was trying to find when
| the last American slave died.
|
| The problem is they were considered property so no
| documentation or birth records were produced. The lack of
| record keeping made this an impossible question.
|
| The last documented one was in the 1930s but the last civil war
| veteran died in the 1950s, surely there was some baby of the
| 1860s that was born into the system that probably survived
| until at least the Montgomery bus boycott or Brown v. Board.
|
| But this is something I discovered is a factual statement
| that's impossible to verify and will never be resolved.
| [deleted]
| yibg wrote:
| I don't know if the statement is correct in this case but in
| general saying "we will never know" about a subject which we
| have incomplete knowledge isn't a contradiction.
|
| I can say, we will never know what the first human that got to
| North America had for lunch on their 20th birthday, and I think
| that's as true as it could reasonably be. Sure maybe we'll
| invent a time machine or some other technology in the future
| that invalidates it, but if you apply that logic then nothing
| can ever be stated as a fact.
| ithkuil wrote:
| Furthermore there is the complication caused by ambiguous
| problem statements. In your example, how we define the first
| human that got to North America? Which immigration wave? What
| if there were immigration waves that were completely wiped
| out without leaving any effects of the subsequent
| populations?
|
| What is the 20th birthday? According to which calendar? (Leap
| days etc)?
|
| What is lunch? Not every people subdivide their meals in a
| predictable way that you can pinpoint to what "lunch" is
|
| Etc etc
|
| EDIT: forgot the most obvious: define what counts for human.
| It's not clear cut to distinguish boundaries between species
| goldenkey wrote:
| Furthermore if a human time travels back to the past and
| then sets up shop and lives amongst the first humans, maybe
| they are the first human? Semantics and ambiguity have a
| way of making unspecific questions paradoxical
| 0134340 wrote:
| Very few things about the origins of the universe can be
| stated as fact at this point so "we will never know" isn't a
| "fact" either. Implied certainty on either side seems pre-
| emptive.
| yibg wrote:
| I'm not questioning that part. I don't know if stating that
| we'll never know about the origins of the universe is
| correct. I tend to agree personally that it seems
| premature.
|
| All I'm saying is that making (nearly) absolute claims with
| incomplete knowledge is not a contradiction.
| [deleted]
| martinko wrote:
| > I can say, we will never know what the first human that got
| to North America had for lunch on their 20th birthday, and I
| think that's as true as it could reasonably be.
|
| if there is a large mirror a few hundred light years away we
| might be able to see his lunch in the reflection ;)
| omegalulw wrote:
| Not necessarily. The signal-to-noise ratio drops the
| farther you get away.
| Inu wrote:
| Depends on the field, Godel's theorems make claims of
| impossibility.
| throwawayacc2 wrote:
| In full disclosure I haven't read the article yet, I will do so
| after this comment. But reading, I just wanted to mention
| something that sprang to mind.
|
| Godels incompleteness theorem.
|
| In that case, we know for sure that we will never find a list
| of complete and consistent axioms for all mathematics. We do
| not need omniscience for this, it's something we know for sure
| we will never learn.
|
| I think there are more examples, I remember one of my
| professors mentioning off the cuff he believes P vs NP will
| never be proven one way or another because it's most likely one
| of those problems that simply don't have a solution. Or, maybe
| the Heisenberg uncertainty principle is another example. We
| know for sure there are limitations on the knowledge we can
| have.
|
| I don't think it's unfair to imply a limit to our knowledge.
| I'm not saying the universe's beginning necessarily falls into
| this category, I honestly don't know. But there are for sure
| classes of problems that by their very nature cannot be known,
| or cannot be known with certainty.
| _aavaa_ wrote:
| "Finite picture whose dimensions are a certain amount of space
| and a certain amount of time; the protons and electrons are the
| streaks of paint which define the picture against its space-
| time background. Traveling as far back in time as we can,
| brings us not to the creation of the picture, but to its edge;
| the creation of the picture lies as much outside the picture as
| the artist is outside his canvas. _On this view, discussing the
| creation of the universe in terms of time and space is like
| trying to discover the artist and the action of painting, by
| going to the edge of the canvas._ This brings us very near to
| those philosophical systems which regard the universe as a
| thought in the mind of its Creator, thereby reducing all
| discussion of material creation to futility." -- James Leans
| Kranar wrote:
| This is just about the most shallow critique of the article you
| can make, and it's unfortunate it got so much attention.
| Guy2020 wrote:
| t6jvcereio wrote:
| We will never know! Stop asking questions, that's not how science
| is done!
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| I dont think we can get there.
|
| First, we would need to solve time. I am not sure if we are able
| to grasp it. Then we must figure out what happened at T-1 or T-2,
| which I think will be simple once we understand time.
|
| The theory creates a start and then explains the progress from
| there. but not what caused it.
|
| In theory of the cylinder than the universe travels to that is
| good but it does not explain how everything came to be.
|
| We have a simple to state problem. There was nothing, then there
| was something.
|
| Much like in Genesis ""And God said, Let there be light: and
| there was light.""
|
| Instead:
|
| Science says there was a big bang and from that everything was
| created. and we have figured out a model to explain (most) of the
| evolution since the big bang. Which means we can say no god did
| it.
|
| But the way the story begins is in my opinion quite similar.
|
| In one version god is used to explain what created us. Which then
| leads to the question of who created god and to answer that we
| need to figure out time.
|
| (I am aware that there are equations that explain what was at t-1
| or explain that there was nothing and even asking the question of
| what was at t-1 is crazy. I do not have the background that could
| allow me to understand the equations, but every which way you do
| it you end up with a question of what started it, or what was
| before what was the trigger to get it going.
|
| Perhaps you can say that the universe has always been there,
| forever, sometimes it shrinks sometimes it expands, and we have a
| nice perpetuum mobile.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Why does there have to be time before The Big Bang?
|
| IIUC, the hypothesis is that everything was packed into one
| super-dense black hole.
|
| Wouldn't there not be any time?
| flatiron wrote:
| The way we currently view time there was no time before the
| Big Bang. No space = no time
| conviencefee999 wrote:
| Please stop construing your religious beliefs with sciences.
| Sometimes the answer is simply we do not know.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| The story's title isn't explicit about the means by which the
| knowledge is gained, nor exactly which details are being
| sought.
|
| I think it's a mistake to treat the scientific method as the
| only plausible source of knowledge. My opinion is obviously
| based on a particular worldview, but so is a claim that the
| only useful source of knowledge is the scientific method.
| me_me_me wrote:
| the god of gaps is more and more god of cracks
| jahnu wrote:
| > We have a simple to state problem. There was nothing, then
| there was something.
|
| Natural language is woefully inadequate to express these
| issues, but believe it is a mistake to state the problem like
| this. There can be no concept of "before" if there is a T0.
| Perhaps the "why is there something rather than nothing?"
| version comes closer to what we are asking.
| hprotagonist wrote:
| to which the current best though unsatisfactory answer is
| "because!"
| Ralfp wrote:
| Hawking's history of time actually anwsers this question
| with ,,we don't know and don't have any information from
| before big bang we can access to use in research".
| treeman79 wrote:
| Watching tons of PBS Spacetime the only theories oI see is that
| Universes are constantly being created with different
| properties, with an externally rare one having the right
| conditions for life to be possible.
|
| Still leaves the same questions as to why a bunch of universes
| are being created or where the energy comes from.
|
| End of day there isn't anything I've seen other then a true all
| powerful God or equivalent being responsible.
| jondeval wrote:
| I sense you just expressing your view on the matter, but I
| think that this is a very weak argument for God's existence.
| It's completely plausible that we will at some point in the
| future have good materialist explanations for the existence
| of energy or the size of the multiverse etc.
| me_me_me wrote:
| Unlike in Genesis, the light was not created before sun.
|
| Grafting god onto science by cherry picking things that were
| guessed while throwing away all the incorrect statements is a
| bit disingenuous, no?
| tzs wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photon_epoch
|
| That was around 9 billion years before the Sun.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| Is this satire? Or are you literally being so literal?
| singularity2001 wrote:
| the radius of the visible universe is about 14.0 billion parsecs
| (about 45.7 billion light-years), while the age of the universe
| is 13.787 +- 0.020 billion years. I must have missed out on some
| caveats to the speed of light.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| You did - space-time can expand with unbounded speed, and that
| is what happened in the early universe. Remember that the big
| bang is not some point in space-time which we are moving away
| from, it is a point in space-time that has expanded to the size
| of the current universe (and keeps expanding).
|
| The speed of light is only a limit on how fast matter/energy
| can move through space-time.
| ksidudwbw wrote:
| The speed of causation is also so unintuitive imo, but also a
| must to make anything make sense logically. After watching
| many hours of youtube i still cant wrap my head around it.
| Say you're accellerating 1g forever you never reach the speed
| of light for other observers.. Whats cool about gravity is
| that the spacetime 'train tracks' are tilted slightly into
| the earth so youre pulled down, but the earth is resisting
| tou going into it. Just waving your hands around is the same
| feel as playing with magnets
| tsimionescu wrote:
| I think the most intuitive explanation I've seen for _c_ is
| that in fact everything always moves at a fixed speed, _c_
| , in space-time - either through space or through time
| (from past to future). You can neither increase nor
| decrease your total speed, you can only change its
| direction - the larger the space-only component is, the
| smaller the time component is.
|
| Additionally, mass deforms space-time such that a little
| bit of your motion towards the future is directed to the
| center of mass instead.
| drran wrote:
| You just discovered the Big Bug theory.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| Ignoramus et ignorabimus.
| ryaneckh wrote:
| We may have a better understanding someday though.
|
| Roger Penrose's Cyclic Universe theory is quite intriguing to me,
| but unfortunately still doesn't answer the question if there was
| an initial created universe or an infinite amount of prior
| universes (aeons).
| nyc111 wrote:
| I'm happy for physics that finally someone from their ranks is
| trying, at least trying, to say that cosmology is a hoax. I've
| been writing this for ages. Here's one article I dug:
| https://notlar3.blogspot.com/search/label/Big%20Bang
| amriksohata wrote:
| In Hindu scriptures there are many many universes that are
| bubbles perspiring from a particular form of Vishnu as he lies
| down. With each breath the universes are formed and destroyed,
| for us the time is very very slow but at his level he is
| literally breathing in and out and the bubbles come and go.
| ISL wrote:
| Never is a strong word.
| jacquesm wrote:
| "The issue is that physicists can't accept the scientifically
| honest answer: We don't know, and leave it at that."
|
| This sentence jumped out for me. Is there some kind of crusade
| going on that I have missed the beginning of? This feels like a
| strange sentence in this piece and feels like a (misguided)
| attack.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Sabine H. That's her horse.
| Victerius wrote:
| She's fantastic. She doesn't hesitate to call out the physics
| community on its idiosyncrasies. She is a necessary check and
| balance on the mainstream body of researchers.
| XorNot wrote:
| I'm increasingly sceptical. She's not in research anymore
| but has found success running an "I know what I'm talking
| about" contrarian blog.
|
| If she was a software developer we'd rightly start to
| wonder about grand pronouncements coming from someone no
| longer practicing in the field.
|
| When your market doesn't exist if you actually agree with
| anyone, the incentives start to be questionable.
| jahnu wrote:
| > She's not in research anymore
|
| What are you talking about?
|
| She is still publishing proper research papers as
| recently as this month!
|
| https://arxiv.org/search/?searchtype=author&query=Hossenf
| eld...
|
| Some people pick up weird ideas about her and I really
| wonder why.
| XorNot wrote:
| So you're right - Research Fellow at Frankfurt Institute
| of Advanced Science [1]
|
| However her broad ranging commentary which tends to take
| the tone of "this field should listen to me but doesn't"
| as is the case with this article (and a few others she's
| done such as about the LHC[2] or black-hole information
| loss[3]) leaves a sour taste in my mouth.
|
| [1]
| https://www.fias.science/en/fellows/detail/hossenfelder-
| sabi...
|
| [2] http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2020/10/particle-
| physicists...
|
| [3] http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2022/04/i-stopped-
| working-o...
| mhh__ wrote:
| She's basically a check and balance on public perception of
| research, she isn't a particularly influential physicist
| pygy_ wrote:
| Yea, the intractable mystery is the existence of spacetime.
|
| Whether time has an origin, and whether we can measure how
| distant it is from us are questions that could be answered.
| willis936 wrote:
| Yes but you missed the beginning because the origin is almost
| as old as the age of enlightenment.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_of_the_gaps
| tsimionescu wrote:
| I think she justifies the "attack" towards the end of the
| piece, where she talks about the many theories that purport to
| explain how the universe began. Her point is that you can
| always create a coherent mathematical model that "explains"
| this, but since it is logically impossible to check it, you're
| not proposing a scientific theory.
| deepsquirrelnet wrote:
| I don't often go looking in Astronomy or cosmology journals,
| but I'd be surprised if either scientists were trying to
| publish articles like that -- or if they were, that they
| could pass peer review.
|
| On the other hand, if you are working on theories that can
| extend into the early universe, it's not unimportant to try
| and figure out where the model breaks down. Maybe t=0 isn't
| possible, but t=1s? 1ns? 1ps? How much can we feasibly
| describe?
|
| I'd argue that not exploring the limits of models is also bad
| science. Knowing the limits is a fundamental part of
| communicating a model.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| > I'd be surprised if either scientists were trying to
| publish articles like that -- or if they were, that they
| could pass peer review.
|
| The article we're discussing itself even links to one such
| paper [0]. All of the others she mentions are also
| published works - Penrose's CCC [1], the ekpyrotic universe
| [2], Hawking's no-boundary state [3] etc.
|
| > On the other hand, if you are working on theories that
| can extend into the early universe, it's not unimportant to
| try and figure out where the model breaks down. Maybe t=0
| isn't possible, but t=1s? 1ns? 1ps? How much can we
| feasibly describe?
|
| Sure, but this is a different thing. Many of these are
| adding elements to the existing theories, and then predict
| a new initial state given the modified evolution laws.
|
| [0] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10714-021-02
| 790-7
|
| [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1808.01740?context=astro-ph
|
| [2] https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0103239
|
| [3] https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.07702
| XorNot wrote:
| The point of publishing those articles is...to publish
| them though. Like, you have an idea, you write it up,
| submit it and note that it can fit known data but isn't
| currently testable. Done, and _important_. Maybe it goes
| nowhere, maybe it inspires someone, but the point of
| journals is in the name: they 're _journals_ of work in
| the field, shared so the community can explore and
| benefit from them.
|
| They're not publications of "what is definitely true",
| they are fundamentally explorations of what could be, or
| the more important "this is kind of interesting where
| could it lead?".
| tsimionescu wrote:
| > note that it can fit known data but isn't currently
| testable.
|
| But the thing is, theories about the beginning of the
| universe will never be testable, they aren't just not
| _currently_ testable.
|
| So, if your theory has no novel predictions about the
| future, but it adds extra parameters to obtain a
| different prediction about a past which exists beyond
| what can be measured, then you're wasting your time
| creating this theory, and wasting reviewers' and readers'
| time publishing it; and you're wasting money researching
| it.
|
| This is what Sabine usually writes and complains about -
| research money being spent on research that is at best
| unlikely to bear any fruit, and at worst navel-gazing,
| especially when there are very real problems in physics
| that are not receiving significant research.
|
| This is why she complains about people researching the
| beginning of the universe, or black hole entropy, or
| grand unified theories, or the hierarchy "problem", or
| looking for supersimmetry or for WIMPs in ever larger
| particle accelerators.
|
| Instead, she wishes more people were researching the
| measurement problem, non-linearity in quantum mechanics,
| high-energy physics through radio-telescopes instead of
| particle accelerators, to name a few things.
|
| Now, I don't know anywhere near enough to say that she is
| right, but I do believe she is not _trivially wrong_ ,
| like you seem to be suggesting.
| nfRfqX5n wrote:
| from what i've read, physicists gladly accept what they don't
| know and make a point to admit that
| elevaet wrote:
| The purpose of science is to try to understand the world. Even
| if we never can answer how the universe began, I hope we never
| give up trying.
| brightball wrote:
| Agreed completely.
| ncmncm wrote:
| The job of science is to tackle answerable questions. There
| are lots of these not started on yet.
|
| Maybe save the unanswerable questions for after.
| Ygg2 wrote:
| It's the honest answer.
|
| Our best cosmological theory applied backwards results in
| singularity. That's bad. See her droplet example.
|
| According to maximally projected Penrose diagrams in
| singularity time and space evert into the multiverse. You move
| in time and space flows around you.
| https://youtu.be/4v9A9hQUcBQ
|
| And according to our other most successful theory, space-time
| is divided into chunks. And boiling. Opposite of infinitely
| divisible, smooth relativistic space-time.
|
| Not to mention if we go with current astronomy theory, we end
| up with unexplained dark matter and dark energy, that give
| different answers depending on the methodology.
| neffy wrote:
| Early pixel blob analysis (I don't know a better way to put
| this, check Figure 5 in the paper) from the James Webb:
|
| https://arxiv.org/pdf/2207.09428.pdf
|
| Suggests that the universe may be older than the Big Bang
| theory predicts. There are a lot of qualifiers on both sides of
| this, so I would suggest sitting back with some popcorn and
| enjoying the spectacle of a lot of primate descended life forms
| earnestly debating something that in many cases they couldn't
| even be bothered to read up on.
| consp wrote:
| Haven't read the article but I remember some mentioning these
| analysis are quite useless without spectra. Maybe someone
| more knowledgeable can explain this.
| ben_w wrote:
| I can't open that link right now. If that's what I'm
| expecting it to be, the abstract begins "Panic!" as part of a
| disco pun?
|
| If so: https://youtu.be/I7lxzS6K9PU
|
| and: https://youtube.com/shorts/1S2CxPUZDOY?feature=share
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| I honestly never cared for Hossenfelder's science communication.
| She's far too dismissive and dishonest in representing
| theoretical views she disagrees with. And I don't necessarily
| have the physics understanding to pick these biases out too
| easily.
|
| I think Sean Carroll for instance does a much better job at this
| when he interviews people whose views he disagrees with in his
| podcasts, which happens quite frequently.
| [deleted]
| TheBlight wrote:
| I have a similar difficulty in listening to her. I think she
| does it to provoke interest but it has the opposite effect on
| me.
| koshnaranek wrote:
| I enjoy it. There are a lot of communicators who shy away from
| giving their own opinion about anything that isn't the
| overwhelming consensus. They might be wrong after all. It is
| refreshing to have somebody actually disagree with something
| and then back it up.
| green_on_black wrote:
| It depends on what you mean by "back it up", especially
| regarding rigor. The more "surprising"/disagreeable an idea
| is, the more rigor we (or at least _I_ ) expect of the
| arguments.
| UmbertoNoEco wrote:
| agree but be aware carroll swings way way way way to the other
| extreme especially about the pet theories he happens to like:
| multiverses ; the everett interpretation of qm ;boltzmann's
| brains and so on
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| Yes, he's opinionated. But he regularly interviews people who
| disagree with him and does a good job at both asking them
| hard questions and helping them explain their own view. And
| when he does agree with them, I think he does a decent job at
| playing devil's advocate and challenging their position.
| emerged wrote:
| [deleted]
| aurelien wrote:
| This universe became just in universes bubbles explosion. One
| day, we will be able to determine which of the marbles of
| universes in the universes bag of marbles collide to create this
| one new marbles. Sciences is here to go further, not to stop
| thinking at the edge of one way of think.
| aaaaaaaaaaab wrote:
| Ok, then how did the "marble bag" came into existence?
| yesco wrote:
| It arose from the dream of a flying space turtle
| kevinventullo wrote:
| Maybe it stops being science and starts being math, but I don't
| think that means we should discourage people from doing it. That
| said, I am sympathetic to an argument that we may not need to
| _fund_ such inquiries.
|
| "We will never know" sounds overly pessimistic to me; I could
| imagine someone from the 10th century claiming we will never know
| the trillionth prime number.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| I think that the evolution of physics has actually been a
| series of discoveries of new things that are _impossible_. We
| used to think that many things were possible if only we knew
| the right spell, or invoked the right god, or just worked hard
| enough.
|
| Then as people studied nature more thoroughly and
| systematically, they started observing laws that simply can't
| be crossed - conservation of energy, conservation of momentum,
| the increase of entropy , the limited speed of causality, the
| uncertainty principle - to name some of the bigger ones. All of
| these have put limits on something we used to think of as
| unlimited.
|
| There are many more non-existence proofs in math as well - so
| even in pure math, you can't escape this accumulation (probably
| the most famous such problem, one long attempted that
| ultimately proved impossible, is "squaring the circle", or in
| modern terms, the fact that pi^n is irrational for any rational
| n).
| danwee wrote:
| > "We will never know" sounds overly pessimistic to me; I could
| imagine someone from the 10th century claiming we will never
| know the trillionth prime number.
|
| There are tons of stuff we as human beings we'll discover and
| be pretty confident about it. There are other things we'll
| never know. I think that's part of being human, to know our
| limits.
| folsom wrote:
| I am sure all pot smokers know the answer. The observable
| universe is in a much larger universe with many like itself.
| Sometimes universes collide and form a new universe. There is an
| infinite stack of these much larger and much smaller universes
| (more like a fractal tree actually); some are hot and some are
| cold but even cold universes can collide make a hot universe.
| lioeters wrote:
| Soma drinkers, lotus eaters, born-again mushroom enthusiasts..
| We know how the universe began, trillions of different ways.
| Creativity and imagination are as much part of fundamental
| physics as quarks and entropy.
| draw_down wrote:
| luis8 wrote:
| We will know at the end of it and we will recreate it.
|
| Or at least I hope that's the outcome
| dominojab wrote:
| papito wrote:
| Just say "unlikely to". Leave some room for success, bruh.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| And guess what: it doesn't f*ing matter.
| deanCommie wrote:
| It's true. Nothing "matters".
|
| Alternatively, and secularly: It may be the ONLY thing that
| matters.
| gibsonf1 wrote:
| What if it never began and has simply always existed? That is the
| likely scenario, as the moment you think about it beginning, you
| again face beginning from what? What was that called before the
| universe other than the universe?
| skissane wrote:
| If the universe is infinitely old - well, what's the
| probability that, untold (yet finite) aeons ago, a planet
| existed just like this one, in which history unfolded in
| exactly the same way, even the pettiest details of our lives
| being _precisely_ the same? I think the probability is
| arbitrarily close to 1 - not just that our lives have happened
| exactly the same before once, but an arbitrary - even infinite
| - number of times - and we should expect will again in the
| future. Would it follow that Nietzsche was correct in his
| doctrine of eternal recurrence?
|
| But if there exist an infinite number of copies of myself, all
| exactly the same - why should I consider myself to be any one
| of them individually, as opposed to all of them equally? If
| they are all the same, are they not identical? In which case -
| the past isn't infinite after all - rather time is finite and
| circular.
|
| Another way to put it - any finite spatial volume must contain
| finite information (see the Bekenstein bound) - hence can only
| exist in a finite number of distinguishable states. Given
| infinite time but only a finite number of possible states to
| visit in them, it has to visit the self-same states again and
| again - an infinite number of times
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Well, there's also the possibility that the universe occupied
| some single state (say, the singularity posited by the big
| bang theory) since t=-inf to some t0 when it exploded, and
| that the dynamical laws are of such a nature that it can
| never return to that state.
|
| Right now, the prevailing model of cosmology (lambda-CDM)
| basically says that the universe can never return to an
| earlier state, as it is constantly expanding (and that
| expansion is accelerating). In this model, the universe has
| an infinite number of possible states, and is in fact
| guaranteed to never visit a previous state, even though it
| has an infinite future ahead of it.
| skissane wrote:
| > Well, there's also the possibility that the universe
| occupied some single state (say, the singularity posited by
| the big bang theory) since t=-inf to some t0 when it
| exploded
|
| What's the actual difference between these two positions:
|
| (A) the universe was in state X for an infinite amount of
| time, then suddenly transitioned to some other state Y
|
| (B) time began at t=0 with the universe in state X, and it
| immediately transitioned to some other state Y
|
| They seem effectively identical, with seemingly no way for
| us to tell them apart. (B) seems simpler than (A), so by
| Occam's razor we ought to prefer it to (A), unless we have
| some specific reason not to. What could such a reason be?
| Well, I suppose (A) might lead to simpler mathematics.
| However, in actual fact, I don't believe that's true; and
| even if it were, it still might be reasonable to conclude
| that the "infinite static before-life of the universe" was
| just a mathematical artefact, without any physical reality.
|
| Other problems with this view: (i) time is usually
| understood as a succession of instants which are somehow
| distinct - could an infinite succession of instants, all
| exactly the same as each other, actually count as "time"?
| (ii) why, if the universe had existed forever in a single
| state, did it suddenly transition to a new one? That seems
| harder to explain than the universe just existing with a
| finite past.
|
| So, I think an infinite past only really makes sense if the
| infinite past involved an infinity of distinct universe-
| states - which I think might lead to the consequences I was
| suggesting.
|
| > In this model, the universe has an infinite number of
| possible states, and is in fact guaranteed to never visit a
| previous state, even though it has an infinite future ahead
| of it.
|
| Let me present a variation on the Boltzmann brain argument:
| the universe is vast, yet the volume of it which is
| actually relevant to humans is quite small. Humans cannot
| ever know or care about the state of the universe as a
| whole, only that subsection of it we can somehow observe-
| which is at most the observable universe; but, if we accept
| the possibility (even only as exceedingly unlikely) that
| nature is deceiving us (other galaxies don't really exist,
| it is just randomly arranged photons which by amazing fluke
| are exactly the same as what we'd observe if other galaxies
| did), the knowable subsection could be a lot smaller. No
| matter how stupendously unlikely such as scenario may be -
| so long as its probability is not strictly zero, in an
| infinite future, any constant non-zero probability is going
| to converge to unity.
|
| Consider the current state of this galaxy - does Lambda-CDM
| guarantee that the universe will never visit a future
| state, which contains a Milky Way-sized volume, whose state
| is exactly the same as the state of this galaxy right now?
| You can repeat the question for "solar system-sized volume
| with exact same state as our solar system has right now" or
| "Earth-sized volume with exact same state as Earth has
| right now". Or a volume with the same size as the current
| observable universe, and the same state as it?
| blooalien wrote:
| > "What was that called before the universe other than the
| universe?"
|
| If it was "before the universe" then it wasn't called anything,
| because there was nobody here to give it the name "universe"?
| pixl97 wrote:
| Then we have a lot of explanation needed as to why entropy was
| low and smooth between 13 and 14 billion years ago.
| ksidudwbw wrote:
| A random tear in infinitely dense nothingness. Might be a lucky
| one-off
| al_mandi wrote:
| The universe provably did not always exist.
| danwee wrote:
| Our human brains cannot grasp the idea of "it simply always
| existed".
|
| Imagine a non-human being (e.g., "god", "beings from another
| dimension", "beings from an advanced civilization", etc.)
| telling us the theory of everything (with maths and all, if you
| want), and the end saying: "btw, there is no origin, and no
| end. Realiy has always existed". Do you think our scientists
| (or any other kind of curious human being) will say "Alright,
| got it. Won't keep investigating then. Thanks!". That won't
| happen, our human brains cannot understand that concept, and
| there will always be the "but how does it work?!"
| aaaaaaaaaaab wrote:
| Just because everything within this universe has some preceding
| cause doesn't mean that the universe itself can't have a
| beginning without anything preceding it.
| jondeval wrote:
| This is an interesting and important point. I'll attempt to
| rephrase your point slightly differently:
|
| Everything we observe in the universe has a sequence of
| linear causes stretching backward in time. However we can't
| be sure from these observations that Universe (or multiverse
| or something similar) itself has been caused in a similar
| way. -- I hope I got that right.
|
| But is the physical universe (or multiverse or something
| similar) that we experience a good candidate for the uncaused
| base reality that just exists?
|
| A good reason to think not is that universe is composed of
| stuff and parts that change relative to each other. If
| something changes, ie goes from potential to actual, then
| there is something that is more actual, or more real, from
| which we should be able to explain the change.
|
| Another way to say it is that we may not know what base
| reality is, but in order for it to be a good candidate for
| 'the' base reality, it should be completely simple. And the
| universe as whole, by all appearances, is quite complex.
| LiberationUnion wrote:
| liendolucas wrote:
| Alright finally an explanation on why all the other explanations
| work. To me the most convincing theory how the universe began is
| this one: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=l4Wbb1cqubo
| jondeval wrote:
| My strong opinions, weakly held:
|
| * God is not a good hypothesis for any secondary cause. The
| creation of space-time as we currently understand it must have
| had a secondary cause. Let's patiently keep looking for a
| scientific hypothesis (theoretical or empirical) that is an
| incremental improvement on what we already know.
|
| * Religious people who conceive of God as the creator, believing
| that the word 'creator' refers to the creation of the universe at
| some point in the past, are completely misunderstanding the use
| of the word and need to do some more homework.
|
| * Non-Religious people should stop conflating 'metaphysical'
| statements with religion. Can we agree that we need to make
| metaphysical statements from time to time if we are having a
| conversation to understand something 'about physics'?
| jjcon wrote:
| > Religious people who conceive of God as the creator,
| believing that the word 'creator' refers to the creation of the
| universe at some point in the past, are completely
| misunderstanding the use of the word and need to do some more
| homework.
|
| Can you explain what you mean here - I couldn't follow
| pronlover723 wrote:
| I took it to mean "god is somewhere, you need to explain how
| that somewhere and god themselves came into being"
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| "misunderstanding the use of the word"
|
| Aka, I've used someone else's redefinition of the word away
| from the vernacular understanding, to redefine it to support
| my view of the world. See also "recession."
| jondeval wrote:
| Not quite. Although I fully understand the feedback. There
| are 2 equally valid senses in which the word creator can be
| used. Both conform to standard definitions but each used in
| a different sense.
|
| I tried to add clarity in the response above. Thanks!
| jondeval wrote:
| Sure. I'll try.
|
| There are two senses to understand the word creator. I'll
| illustrate both by analogies to the way 'we' create as
| people:
|
| (1) A violinist is creating the music that you are currently
| hearing. Here and now in the present. (2) A painter created a
| painting in the 19th century, and you can see the artifact on
| the wall in a museum.
|
| In the case of (1) the creator brings the song into being out
| of nothing. More or less, don't squabble over sound waves.
| :^). When the violinist stops playing, the music stops. Here
| and now in the present.
|
| In the case of (2) the painter finished the work 'at some
| point in time' and we can have all sorts of interesting
| conversations about when exactly the artifact was created.
| Did the painter really paint it in the way some book said
| that he did? Does the painter maintain any connection to the
| painting after it's finished? etc.
|
| You see, if the proper sense of the word creator is actually
| (1). Then all discussions about (2) are distractions.
|
| So, it's important to remember that, for example,
| knowledgeable Christians refer to God as the creator in the
| sense of (1). There may or may not be some interesting
| discussions to be had about whether God is a creator in the
| sense of (2) but they are conversations about secondary
| causes, and very much irrelevant to God's existence and the
| role as the primary cause.
| maleldil wrote:
| > knowledgeable Christians refer to God as the creator in
| the sense of (1)
|
| How does this relate to the idea of creation in 7 days?
| Doesn't it imply that creation is something that happened
| in a particular point in time (ie the first 7 days in
| time), like (2)?
| tsimionescu wrote:
| > So, it's important to remember that, for example,
| knowledgeable Christians refer to God as the creator in the
| sense of (1)
|
| I am very curious why you think that - given that the Bible
| and all common teachings of it that I've ever seen very
| explicitly define God as the creator in the second sense
| (Genesis very clearly describes past events - not just Let
| there be light and so on, which could be taken as metaphors
| for every day dawning, but also Adam and even and all of
| their descendants, which are described and were understood
| throughout history as ancestors, not metaphors). The Jewish
| calendar is even numbered since the year of creation.
|
| Also, while I'm now atheistic, I received at least basic
| Eastern Orthodox education in school, and the very explicit
| notion there was that God was the creator of the universe;
| I also know modern Catholic teaching explicitly names God
| as the cause of the Big Bang itself, or whatever else
| science finds to be the mechanism by which the observable
| universe formed.
|
| Also, while many do accept the possibility of miracles,
| even some commonly recurring miracles (like the
| transformation of bread and wine into the body and blood of
| Jesus Christ during Holy Communion during every Sunday
| Mass), the working of the natural world is accepted as
| ordained by God, but not personally directed by Him - this
| is quite explicit at least in Catholicism and Orthodoxy,
| where any direct intervention of God on Earth is seen as a
| miracle, usually related to a Saint.
|
| Note: I am not saying that there are no Christians that
| believe what you are saying, or that it somehow runs
| counter to Christianity. I am only saying that I don't
| think it is a common understanding of Christianity, even
| one limited to more literate/knowledgeable Christians; e.g.
| I don't think the Pope believes what you are saying.
| akomtu wrote:
| On this note, did you know that the official age of the
| universe is 432 x 10^15 seconds and the diameter of the
| universe 7 x 432 x 10^15 light-seconds? An amazing coincidence.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| > So if you read yet another headline about some physicist who
| thinks our universe could have begun this way or that way, you
| should really read this as a creation myth written in the
| language of mathematics.
|
| I thought that was very insightful. Today people try to pawn of
| all sorts of opinions as "science" by covering them with the
| language of science.
| akprasad wrote:
| But, after all, who knows, and who can say Whence it all
| came, and how creation happened? the gods themselves are
| later than creation, so who knows truly whence it has
| arisen? Whence all creation had its origin, the
| creator, whether he fashioned it or whether he did not, the
| creator, who surveys it all from highest heaven, he knows
| -- or maybe even he does not know.
|
| -- _Nasadiya Sukta_
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasadiya_Sukta)
| eis wrote:
| What is the supposed insight? Seems just regular confusing
| religious babble with no substance
| ratsmack wrote:
| >religious babble
|
| Why is religion held in such contempt when there is so much
| science that is just as much "babble", but held in high
| regard?
| michaelmrose wrote:
| Basically because whereas some science will ultimately turn
| out to be useless malarkey ALL of religion is useless
| malarkey that we have been dealing with for thousands of
| years. Worse than not adding value such "babble" has been
| at various times a bulwark for all sorts of evil men and
| backwards looking philosophies. Some of us are tired of
| society being held back for the sake of old men's words
| given unearned weight by being backed by the weight of
| lies.
| eis wrote:
| I think the ratio of babble to sound reasoning is much
| better in science than in religion. That being said, there
| is also a lot of science babble and we should call it out
| and try to keep it at a as low amount as possible.
|
| The core tenets of science are pretty sound. Religions are
| based on a lot of completely made up stuff. They are not
| 100% bad of course. But we seriously can do much much
| better than that.
|
| I think there is a reason why the concept of religions
| evolved. They might have been an important tool in early
| societies. But they are very very old tools and I don't
| think we need them anymore. They come with too many
| dangerous problems.
| tresqotheq wrote:
| >But they are very very old tools and I don't think we
| need them anymore.
|
| The societial problems that once solved by religion is
| worse than ever. It is true that current religions cannot
| solve it, because they have been "fact checked" out by
| the new religion of "science" with scientists as the new
| holymen, but that is a separate discussion.
|
| The point is, we need a solution to those problems more
| than ever, but we truly cannot hope to find one.
| eis wrote:
| Science is not a religion. Scientists are not holymen as
| evidence by the constant questioning of their theories by
| other scientists. That's the whole thing science is
| about! Relentless checking of hypothesis through
| experiments that match reality.
|
| I agree strongly with you that we need a solution to
| these problems as currently we don't have one. I disagree
| though that we cannot hope to find one. Hope dies last :)
| al_mandi wrote:
| > Religions are based on a lot of completely made up
| stuff
|
| Did you survey all religions to make such claim? And it's
| not like you don't need axiomatic bases that need to be
| accepted as is to base science on. There's a lot of "I
| think" and assumptions in your post that are not backed
| up by evidence, and some even contrary to reality.
|
| This is a good starting point to expand your horizon:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=If3cNUixEBM
| eis wrote:
| > Did you survey all religions to make such claim?
|
| That is the definition of religion. They are believes
| that relate to supernatural beings and sprituality. They
| cannot be proven or disproven. > And it's
| not like you don't need axiomatic bases that need to be
| accepted as is to base science on.
|
| Correct, there are axioms - assumptions - which the rest
| of the logical system is based upon. Same as for example
| in Mathematics. The assumptions are much more reasonable
| than for example assuming there is a God because they
| result in expirically testable predictions.
|
| I have started to watch the video you linked to, I have
| not finished it yet but the beginning was pretty good and
| the presenter seems well spoken. But by about minute 10 I
| already noticed a lot of logical fallacies. He is
| (rightfully maybe) accusing certain famous people in
| history of wrong logical arguments but then he quickly
| makes the same plus a lot of ad hominems thrown in for
| good measure. For example the claim that the "four
| horsemen" of science think that replacing mosques and
| synagogues into starbucks would make society all peaceful
| is frankly just ridicolous. Then he immediately follows
| it up by claiming if there is no religion then there is
| no morality. This is completely baseless. I am not a
| religious person but I do have morals. I'm not running
| around trying to torture people just because I don't
| believe in a supernatural being. I'm going to watch it in
| full because listening to the other side of an argument
| is the best but I have to say this talk is going south
| very fast IMHO :(
| [deleted]
| al_mandi wrote:
| > They are believes that relate to supernatural beings
| and sprituality. They cannot be proven or disproven.
|
| That's not 100% true. There can (and is) proof and
| evidence for validating religious claims. You're
| conflating belief in the unseen (with evidence) with
| blind faith without evidence, those are two different
| things.
|
| > I am not a religious person but I do have morals.
|
| He mentions that non-religious people can have morals
| later in the lecture.
| eis wrote:
| > That's not 100% true. There can (and is) proof and
| evidence for validating religious claims. You're
| conflating belief in the unseen (with evidence) with
| blind faith without evidence, those are two different
| things.
|
| Any religion who claims there is a God does not have
| proof of such. If there was real experimentally testable
| and unambigous proof than scientists would need to accept
| that.
|
| What does belief in the unseen with evidence mean?
| > He mentions that non-religious people can have morals
| later in the lecture.
|
| So he is contradicting himself then. I'm now at minute 30
| but there are so many logical fallacies it's really hard
| to watch.
|
| The example with the kid asking why the mother is boiling
| water and apparently science not being able to explain
| the "why" ("because I love you") or the reason of why the
| universe exists: he then turns around and just claims
| religion can give you the correct answer which clearly it
| can't because there are different religions that would
| give you possibly different answers and they can't all be
| right at the same time.
|
| He claims science cannot "prove" emotions or other
| workings of our brain. Well I think we're getting closer
| and closer to understand how the brain works. We already
| know that emotions are in part controlled by substances
| like hormones. We don't know 100% of it but we're working
| on it.
|
| He further goes on to claim that science cannot provide
| morality. He again gives no evidence of this. Why can't
| we derive morals from logical scientific arguments?
|
| Another claim is that science could not explain why
| someone would go and help a drowning kid. Once more no
| evidence. How about us being evolutionary programmed to
| keep our offspring alive to increase chance of the
| survival of our species? Just earlier to that he claimed
| animals have no morals. But that is the exact same
| behaviour that animals are showing...
|
| I can't also follow the argument about science needing to
| find all possible combinations of DNA mutations that show
| the transition from apes to humans. Why does it need to
| show every minute step? How does that show religion is
| correct instead?
|
| The constant flood of strawmans is impressive at least.
| I'm at minute 30 and not sure if I will comment more on
| it, it is very tedious because there is just such an
| enormous amount of illogical argumentation.
| al_mandi wrote:
| > he then turns around and just claims religion can give
| you the correct answer which clearly it can't because
| there are different religions
|
| His point is that experimental science is not in the
| domain of answering "why" in that sense. It's a
| metaphysical problem outside the realm of science. The
| question of finding which religion is true is a separate
| issue. You don't want to fall in the genetic fallacy when
| making such an argument.
|
| > Well I think we're getting closer and closer to
| understand how the brain works.
|
| No one is saying we shouldn't work on it. But this sounds
| like the "science of the gaps" argument that atheists
| make fun of theists for using when the former claim "God
| of the gaps" fallacy.
|
| > Why can't we derive morals from logical scientific
| arguments?
|
| Show me how. He talks about how different cultures agree
| that certain things are acceptable and others aren't. And
| he gave the example of harming or sacrificing children.
| If we agreed tomorrow that such practice is ok, in a
| secular society there is nothing prohibiting such action.
|
| In Islam, we have something called the Fitrah, a natural
| disposition to certain things, such as acting "good" (we
| need a benchmark for that obviously, but in a Judeo-
| Christian Western world, it's quite obvious), or the
| innate belief in a Creator. This falls under that, and
| animals also have instincts.
|
| I think you're missing the forest for the trees. He
| states the argument at the beginning, and then gives
| examples. You don't have to agree with each and every
| example, but the point stands.
|
| Experimental science cannot answer things beyond what it
| is designed to do.
| eis wrote:
| > His point is that experimental science is not in the
| domain of answering "why" in that sense. It's a
| metaphysical problem outside the realm of science. The
| question of finding which religion is true is a separate
| issue. You don't want to fall in the genetic fallacy when
| making such an argument.
|
| That is a wild claim. Science is very much in the domain
| of answering "why". Science is selfcontious enough to
| know it can't answer everything. Religion claims the
| answer "why" but there is tons of claims without proof
| and often impossible to disprove and so a very sneaky
| tool. I don't know what genetic fallacy you are refering
| to. > No one is saying we shouldn't work
| on it. But this sounds like the "science of the gaps"
| argument that atheists make fun of theists for using when
| the former claim "God of the gaps" fallacy.
|
| As I said, he claims science cannot explain emotions
| without providing any evidence whatsoever and anyone who
| is following science even a bit should clearly see that
| it seems entirely possible that we will be able to
| understand it all. He wrongfully accuses science and uses
| this accusation to make us seek the answer in religion
| instead. Terrible. > Show me how. He
| talks about how different cultures agree that certain
| things are acceptable and others aren't. And he gave the
| example of harming or sacrificing children.
|
| I gave you an example. Protecting children serves an
| evolutionary goal. We can find more logic scientific
| reasons for this behavior. The presenter then brings an
| example of standing up for an old lady in the bus.
| Equally here we can make arguments like "if people behave
| this way then it will increase their own quality of life
| when they are older". A young person giving up their seat
| is a minor inconvenience to them but the gain for the old
| person is much bigger because they might experience a lot
| more relief when sitting down. This behavior could be
| explained as an optimization of quality of life of the
| society.
|
| If different cultures agree on certain acceptable
| behaviors then that hints at other reasons than religion
| because different societies have different religions.
| Which one is the right one? > If we
| agreed tomorrow that such practice is ok, in a secular
| society there is nothing prohibiting such action.
|
| Again logical fallacy. There is nothing inherintly
| preventing a religious society from commiting atrocious
| acts as evidenced by religious sacrifices. What if we
| agreed tomorrow to form a religion which required that
| red haired kids be sacrificed by the age of 10? How is it
| being decided by a religious group any different from a
| secular group? Your claim that a secular group can't have
| morals is absurd and baffling. > In
| Islam, we have something called the Fitrah, a natural
| disposition to certain things, such as acting "good" (we
| need a benchmark for that obviously, but in a Judeo-
| Christian Western world, it's quite obvious), or the
| innate belief in a Creator. This falls under that, and
| animals also have instincts.
|
| If we behave similar to animals in some regards is it
| that we do that because of our instincts or do animals
| have religious believes? If Islam has some rules that
| make you behave well then that's great. But it does not
| mean that you need Islam to behave well.
| > I think you're missing the forest for the trees. He
| states the argument at the beginning, and then gives
| examples. You don't have to agree with each and every
| example, but the point stands.
|
| I don't think so. I bring arguments and explanations why
| his claims don't hold water and his examples are not
| evidence for his claims. If you want then we can go more
| into some specific examples. >
| Experimental science cannot answer things beyond what it
| is designed to do.
|
| Once more: that science cannot explain something is _NOT_
| evidence for any other random unprovable explanation like
| the existance of a god.
|
| I would btw like to ask you: would you agree that some
| parts of Islam might be wrong or do you believe it is
| 100% correct?
| eis wrote:
| I finished it now. It did not get any better. Most of his
| arguments can be boiled down to "science can't explain
| that so it must be god". No.
|
| Towards the end he shows a lack of understanding of
| statistics. He claims if any infinitesmally small change
| to the laws of nature would have caused an uninhabitable
| universe then it must have been specifically designed the
| way it is. He brings several examples that actually are
| all the exact same argument.
|
| The mistake here is that he assumes that there was only
| one random try at creating this universe and that we
| cannot have been sooo extremely lucky. There is no reason
| to believe that there was only one try. What if there
| were a large number of tries? If all the other tries
| resulted in uninhabitable universes then of course us
| being in the lucky version must make us think this was
| not random chance.
|
| Example: ask a large number of people to flip a coin ten
| times. Eventually you will reach someone that actually
| flipped ten times heads in succession. What would that
| guy think? Clearly that's not a normal coin and you
| designed the whole thing to be like that because what are
| the odds of him flipping ten times heads? He does not
| know about the other thousand people you had play this
| game that didn't get ten times heads.
| al_mandi wrote:
| > There is no reason to believe that there was only one
| try.
|
| Exactly what he mentions in his talk, on what are you
| basing this belief? It's a metaphysical claim that is
| outside the realm of science. You just proved his point.
| 0134340 wrote:
| It seems like he's wanting to borrow science or at least
| some logic when it supports his argument but when it
| comes to the gods, he wants to say they exist outside of
| science and logic. This is a common argument and it's not
| ultimately falsifiable, ie, 'I say it's true because you
| can't prove otherwise'. And so too do invisible flying
| fairies exist who render themselves outside the realms of
| science due to magic pixie dust.
| eis wrote:
| Erm, what? I _disproved_ his point. He claims because us
| being in this unlikely universe is proof for a design.
| No, it 's a logical fallacy as I outlined in the example
| of flipping coins. The video presenter is the guy who
| flipped 10 times heads and claims "See! God made this
| happen!" Can you please point to the exact time in the
| video where he mentions multiple tries? That would
| contradict his own point about the low chance and hence
| design.
|
| He _assumes_ there was only one "flip of the coin".
| There is zero reason to assume this and so his whole
| argument falls because when his assumption does not apply
| then mathematics tells us there is absolutely nothing
| special about finding ourselves in that "unlikely"
| universe because actually when taking a step back it
| isn't unlikely, it is pretty much guaranteed - completely
| without anyone designing it that way.
| mbg721 wrote:
| Depends on the religion. Catholicism has many problems,
| but you won't get far accusing it of being insufficiently
| methodical.
| wizofaus wrote:
| > I think the ratio of babble to sound reasoning is much
| higher in science
|
| You mean lower surely?
| eis wrote:
| Correct, I have edited the comment. Thank you.
| al_mandi wrote:
| Because they're following the religion of scientism.
| nnoitra wrote:
| And what's the religious viewpoint?
|
| Some omnipotent being did it and he cares about the
| sexual life of humans?!
|
| That's bizarre as well, better to just say that at this
| point we don't know.
| al_mandi wrote:
| You're straw manning when you say things like "cares
| about the sexual life of humans". I highly recommend you
| watch this to broaden your horizons:
| https://youtu.be/If3cNUixEBM
| nnoitra wrote:
| There is simply put no evidence for the existence of God.
| Neither philosophically nor rationally.
|
| And it's not a straw man argument. God in Islam cares
| about foreskins and sex and if you disbelieve in him he
| sends you to hell for eternity.
|
| Don't send videos tell me your arguments, you can speak
| for yourself.
| al_mandi wrote:
| Did you watch the video? You keep straw manning.
|
| You expect a detailed and nuanced response in 1 paragraph
| on HN?
| nnoitra wrote:
| No problem, here's my email: lumbdak@gmail.com.
|
| If you are so sure then let's discuss it.
| al_mandi wrote:
| You're simply trying to diverge from the discussion when
| evidence is presented to you, by outright ignoring it.
| The video I posted presents rational and philosophical
| evidence (among others) for the existence of God.
| judah wrote:
| There is a great deal of evidence, philosophically and
| rationally, for the existence of God.
|
| The Big Bang, first theorized by theoretical physicist
| and Catholic priest Georges Lamaitre, states the universe
| sprang into existence 13.7b years ago; it was not eternal
| as previously thought.
|
| And we know from observation that everything that begins
| to exist has a cause for its existence.
|
| This suggests that the universe was caused. Since the
| universe can't cause itself, its cause must be outside of
| the universe. It must be immaterial; not made up of the
| stuff of the universe. It must be timeless and not
| governed by the laws of the universe. And it must be
| exceedingly powerful to create all the energy that kicked
| off the expanding universe with its billions of spinning
| galaxies, stars, and planets.
|
| A powerful, immaterial, timeless force outside of the
| universet that caused the universe to exist. This points
| to God.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| This is just a big bag of bad logic. It's going from
| their may be other factors beyond our present
| understanding of physics to their must be a being with
| volition. It's like seeing the massive complexity of a
| hurricane and from that deducing that Zeus must exist and
| demands a goat on a certain Thursday every year to avoid
| him blowing your crops away.
|
| There is every reason to believe our present theories are
| presently insufficient because this is a very hard topic
| and no reason to believe that the universe is caused by
| something immaterial or timeless much less something with
| volition and purpose. There are multiple theories that
| you could read about if you wish that require neither
| cause nor volition.
| al_mandi wrote:
| I think you're responding to the wrong poster, I accept
| that God exists :-)
| Zizizizz wrote:
| The kalam is not a good argument
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDr3EnciHjw
| eis wrote:
| This reasoning does not hold up. Science does not claim
| the universe needs a cause to come into existance. Your
| premise is already wrong. Science tries to come up with
| explanations for the observed reality in our universe. It
| does not claim to know what is outside the observable
| universe or what laws of physics exist or don't exist
| there.
|
| You follow the extremely common logical fallacy that
| because you want there to be a reason for the universe
| and you wanting there to be something before the universe
| then that means there has to be a god?
|
| A big leap based on unproven assumptions.
|
| Who says time does not extend outside the universe?
| Where's the proof that a universe can't cause itself? Why
| can't it be governed by the same laws?
|
| Science does not claim to have all the answers but just
| then jumping to the conclusion that there has to be a
| god? Nah.
|
| What if there indeed was a God but is now gone? What
| makes you assume that he cares about us and our morals?
| What would he think of people that claim he has spoken to
| them? Why would he create all the sickness and pain in
| the world? Would it mean there's some extremely sick and
| perverted being out there that just likes to watch
| innocent women being raped? Clearly he could prevent
| that. But then again why do religions assume that their
| god is good willing? Clearly he can't be that with all
| the shit going on because if he willed it into existance
| then all that is on him.
| eis wrote:
| Science is not a religion. If scientism means thinking
| that science is the best tool we have right now to
| explain reality then I guess yea I'm pro science. But
| it's very far from a religion.
|
| BTW science does not claim to know it all or even be able
| to know it all. In fact it is an important part of
| science to find the limits of science.
| tresqotheq wrote:
| >Science is not a religion.
|
| What is the difference between a holy man who _claims_ to
| have the word of god, and a scientist who _claims_ to
| have followed the "scientifc method"?
|
| Modern human _believes_ the latter. That is the
| difference.
| dr_hooo wrote:
| You have to believe the claims of the former, while you
| can verify the claims of the latter yourself.
| tresqotheq wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32621532
| craftsman wrote:
| The difference between the two claims is whether they are
| verifiable.
| craftsman wrote:
| I can't reply to the question I was asked, so I reply
| here:
|
| How many have I verified? I'm not sure of the #, but I've
| verified much of classical physics, chemistry,
| astronomical observations, and lots of things in
| electronics (some of which rely on quantum mechanics) and
| electromagnetism.
|
| But as I said, they question is not whether you or I have
| personally verified everything, but whether they are
| verifiable in principle, by anyone. The claims of
| chemistry, physics, astronomy, etc, are verifiable. The
| claims of a holy man are not.
| tresqotheq wrote:
| > The claims of a holy man are not.
|
| How come? The claims of holy men are verified by other
| holy men.
| tresqotheq wrote:
| Tell me, how many scientific "claims" that you rely on a
| day to day basis, have you verified personally?
|
| Or How many such claims can be verified with a single
| average person's limited resource?
| wizofaus wrote:
| Why do you think that matters? You might as well ask
| "what makes you trust your own perception when you verify
| scientific claims"? As it happens, literally every time
| you switch on a light you are, in fact, verifying
| multiple scientific theories. Not to mention interacting
| with your phone or computer to type your HN comments.
| tresqotheq wrote:
| >what makes you trust your own perception when you verify
| scientific claims"
|
| Because it is with my own perception that I sense the
| rest of the world with it. So that is all that one should
| care. Let me know if you don't get this. I ll elaborate..
| wizofaus wrote:
| One of main reasons the scientific method has been so
| successful is because it forces us to challenge our
| assumptions that our perceptions of the world are
| correct.
| craftsman wrote:
| See my sibling for my first reply.
|
| My second reply is that it's important whether things
| derived from two different claims actually work.
|
| Make two hospitals: one which follows standard Western
| medical practice, and the other which does not and
| instead performs prayers over its patients. I can predict
| which hospital will have better patient outcomes.
| tresqotheq wrote:
| > I can predict which hospital will have better patient
| outcomes.
|
| That is quite besided the point. The point being every
| patient who goes there _believes_ the hospital us doing
| western blah blah blah...
|
| Let me simplyfy it even more. The common mans dependence
| of "science" is based on beliefs. Just as it was on
| religion at an older time.
|
| That scientific method is more trust worthy, does not
| make that dependence not based on belief. That is the
| weakest link in the chain, and that link is common to
| both science and religion.
| craftsman wrote:
| You seem to have a view that the world consists only of
| (a) people who claim things, and (b) people who believe
| them, and that there's no difference between types of
| claims.
|
| The claim of someone who says they have the word of god
| is hearsay and there's no way to figure out whether they
| do or not. The claims of someone who says they've
| followed the scientific method are verifiable by others.
| If they claim that their experiments show tiny blue
| tetrahedrons make up all matter, other people can check.
| Nobody can check if god talks to the first person.
| tresqotheq wrote:
| And if "people" are limited by resources, say if someone
| need an LHC to verify something..what really is the
| difference...?
| craftsman wrote:
| The difference is not only in whether they are
| verifiable, whether they are verified, but also whether
| things which are produced from them actually seem to
| work. Religious claims fail at all three: they are not
| verifiable, they have not been verified, and they don't
| seem to work.
| tresqotheq wrote:
| Moving goalposts much?
|
| > which are produced from them actually seem to work.
|
| Oh yea, religeious things also _seem_ to work. For
| example, prayers and other religeous offerings. That is
| how these things survive so long.
| al_mandi wrote:
| Proper religion and science do not disagree. I am a
| person of faith (which is backed by evidence), and my
| faith pushed us to seek knowledge. The Islamic Golden age
| is a testament to that fact.
|
| Scientism is not what you defined. From wikipedia (which
| I take with a big grain of salt)
|
| > Scientism is the opinion that science and the
| scientific method are the best or only way to render
| truth about the world and reality.
|
| Watch this to get a different perspective on the matter:
| https://youtu.be/If3cNUixEBM
| nnoitra wrote:
| Yes yes and sperm comes from between backbone and ribs.
| al_mandi wrote:
| Sounds like another straw man (answer here by the way
| https://youtu.be/rvrqwD4I9Nc). Did you watch the video I
| posted earlier?
| [deleted]
| michaelmrose wrote:
| Faith by definition isn't something which can be backed
| by evidence otherwise it would by definition just be a
| type of science. It would be the study of God via
| experimentation, accumulation of evidence, and logical
| extrapolation. There are religious folks that are big on
| logical deduction and extrapolation but they all start
| with terribly unlikely axioms pulled straight out of
| their ass or equally made up fictions rendered sacred
| somehow by the passage of time.
| al_mandi wrote:
| > Faith by definition isn't something which can be backed
| by evidence
|
| There is evidence backed belief in the unseen, and there
| is blind faith. So your claim that by definition faith is
| without evidence is not correct.
|
| Secondly, even science needs to accept certain axioms as
| a given so that we can build upon them.
|
| Scientism is believing that the only way to arrive at
| truth is through experimentation, which is a false view.
| There are many things we accept, even though we cannot
| prove them through experimentation.
|
| Watch the lecture I posted to broaden your horizons.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| Science chooses minimal axioms and builds the flesh of
| the world based on the existing bones ready to revise
| when new bones are discovered.
|
| Religion chooses a substantial set of axioms derived from
| a mixture of philosophy and fantasy dreamt up by our pre
| scientific ancestors who thought bad smells caused
| disease then makes many forms of revision sinful. A set
| of beliefs without ability to revise everything from the
| ground up will forever be limited.
| al_mandi wrote:
| Just because the sets are of different size does not mean
| one is incorrect. You're also straw manning by talking
| about pre ancestors and bad smells.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| It took him 8 minutes to actually set himself up to
| actually start talking and the first thing that came out
| of Dr Ali's mouth is a lie. He said of 4 prominent
| authors promoting atheism that he described as the four
| horsemen of atheism that their primary argument is that
| god isn't good ergo god isn't real. This...just isn't
| true. It's a gross reduction. I'm 8 minutes in and your
| speaker's only substantial point is a lie.
|
| Now we go on to a false rant about Islam being inherently
| peaceful when it didn't arise in a peaceful time nor
| promote what we would today think of as peace, atheists
| being bigots, random comparison of atheism to
| antisemitism. Some hate for the Beatles. Comparison of
| Beatles fandom to satanism. I have to admit that this is
| entertaining. Having someone smart enough to read books
| and speak well while being absolutely committed to
| falsehood is like watching someone dress up their dog as
| a human being. The forms are there but not the substance.
|
| People have been declaring society was going to hell in a
| hand basket for at least the last several thousand years
| and were we really going to hell we should have long
| since arrived in perdition. It is common to mistake
| change in social norms as decay instead of progression
| because one who is anchored in a particular set of mores
| and forms is unable to see the value in change. They
| perceive only the losses and never the gains.
|
| Your speaker declares that a fiction is the root of all
| morality and I find myself unimpressed with his insight
| because people hold all sorts of beliefs including none
| at all and this seems positively uncorrelated with their
| observed degree of morality and decency. He has it in
| fact entirely backwards and the necessary fictions we
| create to explain our world our rooted in our essential
| nature as sympathetic and empathetic creatures. We look
| at our fellow man and see the need to care about them as
| we do ourselves and thus we elevate that concern to a
| natural law and produce something better than ourselves
| to defend it.
|
| If we were inherently so lawless the need for law and
| justice as each society understands it wouldn't flow so
| effortlessly from our pens or spring so readily to our
| minds.
|
| The reasoning is simple we developed a mind too complex
| for direct meta analysis of all its internal workings and
| a need to work beside others of our own species as
| complex as ourselves and the tools to understand and
| predict their behavior works well turned inward.
|
| We perceive the difference between a desired state and a
| present state even if its not actually physically painful
| as suffering and produce a society where at least an in
| group minimizes suffering because its adaptive surely but
| also because we live not in the world but in our own
| heads in a model of the world constantly rewritten full
| of individuals we imagine with the same tools we use to
| imagine ourselves. If we destroy them or diminish them we
| must necessarily live in an internal world wrought in
| part of the blight we have brought about which we must
| perceive again with the same internal tools we use to
| experience ourselves. All evil and harm is self
| mutilation.
|
| For a being capable of sympathy and meta-cognition
| morality would seem to come naturally even if the end
| results differ wildly in thoughts, results, and methods.
| Assigning it ex post facto to the god you created to
| enforce it is the tail wagging the dog. It's illogical
| because empathy came millions of years before your
| particular species of god.
|
| 13 minutes in and his argument seems to be that it would
| be really bad if God weren't real ergo God then some
| people who promoted atheism were bad dudes ergo we must
| reject atheism. This mirrors the exact argument he first
| falsely put in the mouths of his opponents and then
| helpfully debunked.
|
| Now we are suggesting that atheism suggests that survival
| of the fittest be applied as a moral principal rather
| than a description of the evolution of life on Earth.
| This is a tired trope. If rabbits are different degrees
| of brown and the browner guys blend in better and the
| coyotes each more of the other fellows then more browner
| rabbits will on average breed over time leading to
| browner rabbits. Trying to apply this moralistically
| towards human beings is both a misunderstanding of
| humanity, ethics, and science. We don't need Jesus or
| Allah to tell us this is a bad idea.
|
| At 16 we segway into shitty parts of American history
| with a sideline into why Muslims are better because they
| don't kill women and children. Notably given the
| religious make up of American leaders these actions were
| largely perpetrated by people who also believe in God.
| This is neither here nor there but keeping score on that
| point seems pretty important to him.
|
| At this point it looks like its important to him to
| establish a hierarchy of morality Islam > Christianity >
| Godless.
|
| Since I don't have all day I'm going to skip from minute
| 18 to 45. Ok now we are proving the existence of gods we
| have the same tired arguments about a watch implying a
| watch maker and various aspects of our solar system being
| particularly amenable to life. One would expect such a
| discussion to happen on worlds,solar systems, and
| universes that themselves are amenable to our kind of
| life while silence is likely to reign in environments
| were life is impossible or unlikely.
|
| If he had read more of the books he degrades by the "four
| horsemen" of atheism he might already have good answers
| to these arguments. Likely he has but he hopes you will
| click a youtube video and sit back and passively absorb
| re-enforcement of your existing beliefs than actually
| reading a book yourself.
|
| I watched at least half the lecture you posted and I
| found it deceptive, manipulative, and ill founded. It did
| a reasonable job of lobbing critiques at America's
| geopolitical actions which one might say are fairly easy
| targets but a poor job of addressing any big questions.
|
| May I suggest you read something written by one of the
| "four horsemen" of atheism?
| al_mandi wrote:
| > He said of 4 prominent authors promoting atheism that
| he described as the four horsemen of atheism that their
| primary argument is that god isn't good ergo god isn't
| real. This...just isn't true.
|
| How is it a lie? It's a summary, sure, he can only go
| into so much given the time. He shows a book by one of
| them and the title is a giveaway of that summary.
|
| > false rant about Islam being inherently peaceful
|
| Based on what are you claiming that it is false? If you
| confusing peaceful with pacifist, then Islam is not
| pacifist.
|
| > nor promote what we would today think of as peace
|
| Then inform us what we would today think of as peace.
|
| > It is common to mistake change in social norms as decay
| instead of progression
|
| It's easy to see the social decay over time. Of course
| each generation is experiencing such a decay when they
| compare it to the previous generations, but we clearly
| see how things are speeding up. Just look at the ills
| that we see in so called "developed first world nations",
| the mental illnesses, the decline of morals, the
| normalization and over sexualization of behaviors, all
| the way to children, the destruction of the extended
| family, then the nuclear family. It's quite obvious where
| things are heading. This is not fear mongering. When you
| have someone like Kraus saying that he cannot find a
| moral argument against incest, then someone with half a
| brain should think about what this means.
|
| > Your speaker declares that a fiction is the root of all
| morality
|
| I'm not sure where he said that.
|
| > Trying to apply this moralistically towards human
| beings is both a misunderstanding of humanity, ethics,
| and science.
|
| No it isn't. From a purely secular and atheistic world
| view, there was nothing wrong or bad about horrific
| historic events like the Holocaust, the nuclear bombs,
| rape, Epstein, etc. I think it was one of those "four
| horsemen" who said that rape is not good or bad, but it's
| just a phenomenon like the spots on a cheetah. Even this
| atheist biology professor claims that there is no
| ultimate foundation for ethics from an atheistic world
| view: https://youtu.be/EqK_JPts26k?t=182
|
| That is the only logical conclusion to arrive at from an
| atheistic world view, at least he's being honest with
| himself. More atheists should be honest with themselves
| as well and we'll see how things end up.
|
| > We don't need Jesus or Allah to tell us this is a bad
| idea.
|
| Based on the above, we sure do.
|
| > while silence is likely to reign in environments were
| life is impossible or unlikely.
|
| Yet, we exist. So our world is clearly viable for hosting
| life. I'm not sure what you're getting at here.
|
| > Likely he has but he hopes you will click a youtube
| video and sit back and passively absorb re-enforcement of
| your existing beliefs than actually reading a book
| yourself.
|
| He's a professor and a scholar of biblical hermeneutics
| with field specialties in Sacred Languages, Comparative
| Theology, and Comparative Literature. He doesn't "hope"
| anything. It seems you're straw manning because you think
| we in Islam shy away from debates or discussion. That
| couldn't be further from the truth.
|
| > May I suggest you read something written by one of the
| "four horsemen" of atheism?
|
| Like the time where Dawkins falsely and cringely claims
| that Islam teaches that salt water and sweet water don't
| mix? I've watched lectures for those people, and their
| arguments are straw men, or just outright lies that shows
| their ignorance and malice especially when it comes to
| Islam.
|
| Bear in mind that this lecture was just to have people
| expand their horizons, especially those that think that
| science is going to answer everything. It won't. There is
| so much material out there by good people who have torn
| down these atheistic arguments. People like Youtube these
| days, so I recommend Mohammad Hijab and Sami Ameri. I
| have lots more who speak Arabic, but I think this is not
| the right audience for them.
| wruza wrote:
| I'm only 10:33 into this video and already facepalming so
| much. The guy starts with explaining logic basics, which
| is cool, then goes to blaming some people "leading the
| atheist movement" (whom I never really listened to and
| agree that they devote too many of their attention to
| fight religion, but hey everyone chooses their own way)
| and then summarizes "if you don't have any moral
| authority then what's your moral anchor" backing it by
| some citation of classics lacking any context. Right
| after talking about logic and how these atheist leaders
| manipulate it. Then goes to repeat some worship nonsense.
|
| Don't expect many people to watch this hour long blah
| blah blah.
|
| Edit: beared with it to 19:18 and stopped, sorry, this
| guy is full of populistic bullshit he tries to refute.
| Does god exist or not, we will not know ftom this. But
| you are literally following a fanatic.
| al_mandi wrote:
| eis wrote:
| You don't need to post the video numerous times. I have
| commented on it on one of your other replies.
| > Proper religion and science do not disagree.
|
| What makes a proper religion? And can you tell me how it
| agrees with science? > I am a person of
| faith (which is backed by evidence), and my faith pushed
| us to seek knowledge. The Islamic Golden age is a
| testament to that fact.
|
| Well for me personally, curiousity pushed me to seek
| knowledge but each to their own.
|
| My problem is that any religion who believes in an all
| powerful God quickly runs into logical problems. Here is
| one quick example and I'd love for you to explain to me
| where my reasoning went wrong: 1. Assume
| there is an omnipotent being called God 2. If God
| is omnipotent then he can create two other omnipotent
| beings that have the following two goals: 1. destroy the
| other being 2. protect itself from being destroyed.
| 3. Clearly both of these created beings cannot both
| achieve their goals because they cannot both destroy the
| other and at the same time protect themselves. 4.
| If these beings cannot do what they were created for then
| clearly they cannot be omnipotent. 5. If God cannot
| create such beings then clearly he himself is not
| omnipotent
| al_mandi wrote:
| > What makes a proper religion? And can you tell me how
| it agrees with science?
|
| One that is backed by proofs and evidence. Islam does not
| disagree with science.
|
| Your argument is not very different from can God create a
| rock so heavy that He cannot cary it? The answer is
| simple, it's a logical absurdity to even go there. God
| told us about his Attributes, and we are not to hold Him
| or His Attributes to our worldly logic.
| eis wrote:
| > One that is backed by proofs and evidence.
|
| I have seen zero proofs for the existance of god. Not in
| your video or anywhere else. If such proof existed then
| that would be the biggest scientific breakthrough in
| history and it would be the absolute focus for science to
| understand more.
|
| > Your argument is not very different from can God create
| a rock so heavy that He cannot cary it? The answer is
| simple, it's a logical absurdity to even go there. God
| told us about his Attributes, and we are not to hold Him
| or His Attributes to our worldly logic.
|
| Yes it's the same argument. I can't follow your logic
| though. You just claim that we cannot comprehend the
| concept of god. You say that logic cannot be applied. If
| we cannot comprehend god and have to give up logic then
| why would we follow the word of certain people who
| claimed that god spoke to them? How can we tell apart a
| true prophet who really was contacted by god from a
| random imposter? To tell those apart would mean we
| already know what god would or would not say. But if god
| does not have to follow logic then how can we deduce what
| is correct or not?
|
| As you see once you leave the realm of logic the whole
| house of cards falls.
|
| Another thing you could deduce from your argument btw is
| that god created humans intentionally in a way that they
| cannot comprehend. Isn't that painting god in a pretty
| bad light?
| 0134340 wrote:
| >worldly logic
|
| So your argument stems from illogic? Surely you don't
| admit such do you? When I was religious, religion
| captured me by thinking 'that makes sense'. It used a
| minor amount of logic to convert me but ultimately it
| failed because it didn't stand up against my rigors in
| the end. Religion wants to ultimately refrain from the
| rigors of logic but when confronted, how does it defend
| itself? That's right, it tries to use "logical" arguments
| just like in the video you linked.
|
| If you want to deny logic then the guy you're arguing
| with is just as right as you think you are because he has
| justification to be illogical. That is the problem with
| making unfalsifiable claims like the gods exist outside
| of logic, you basically admit to a tie, at the very
| least.
| Fezzik wrote:
| Because the whole premise and foundation of religion is
| that you ought to believe things absent evidence and
| without good reasons (that's what faith is). If you have
| good reasons to believe something you give the reason;
| religion does not and should not, especially with its
| centuries-long history of malice and suppression towards
| free and scientific thought, deserve any credibility when
| it comes to matters of facts.
| [deleted]
| barrysteve wrote:
| This argument always depends on what kinds of evidence
| you accept and trust as valid for faith. One big test for
| that is trusting any of the holy books as evidence for
| something faithful.
|
| It's really weird to watch science and science-like ideas
| grow out of faith and religion, then the faith be blamed
| for 'persecuting' science after a certain philosophy took
| over in the late 19th century.
| e3bc54b2 wrote:
| > It's really weird to watch science and science-like
| ideas grow out of faith and religion
|
| While there are certain events that can be filed under
| this category, more often than not its the other way
| around. That is, the ideas come outside the religion, run
| contradictory until proven unquestionably, and then the
| religious texts are found to be retroactively always been
| proving the science that was found later.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| That's not really fair. For example, Galileo is often
| given as an example of someone who was persecuted by the
| Church for his ideas - without often mentioning that his
| ideas were championed by the Pope and the Jesuit order
| before some misunderstandings.
|
| Also, a lot of the basis of science comes from members of
| the Church, occultists, or others living in deeply
| fundamentalist environments (Newton being a famous father
| of science who was deeply occult in his thinking; or
| Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, the father of algebra and
| whose name is the basis of the word algorithm, being a
| court astronomer and the head of an Abbasid Caliph's
| library).
| xabotage wrote:
| Where and when, throughout all human history, have there
| been significant populations _not_ subject to a religion?
| It seems strange to suggest that demonstrably
| unscientific belief systems with incompatible differences
| tied mainly to geographic location somehow have a
| unifying impact on scientific progress.
|
| It's kind of like saying a person contributed to science
| because of their hair color while simultaneously
| conceding that people of all hair colors contribute to
| science.
| solarengineer wrote:
| Here's how I understood it: "The Gods themselves are part of
| creation. Even if there were a Creator, he may not know for
| certain whether it was indeed him who created"
| eis wrote:
| But that doesn't get us any further than "We don't know
| yet." It doesn't prove or disprove anything. By the same
| line of reasoning one could say there is no time at all and
| all our memory of the past is an illusion generated by a
| simulation. The linked video talks about this: there are an
| infinite amount of theories that one can come up with to
| explain the current state and it might not be possible with
| our current understanding to prove them wrong.
|
| The problem I have with religious texts is they are very
| vague and evidently open to a lot of interpretation. And by
| talking about things like God and building a logical system
| out of wrong axioms that is then applied to daily life
| choices they actually can create real issues - we've had
| enough of them in history.
| al_mandi wrote:
| > The problem I have with religious texts is they are
| very vague and evidently open to a lot of interpretation.
|
| Which religious texts? Each and every one of the texts
| available for each religion in the world?
|
| > they actually can create real issues - we've had enough
| of them in history.
|
| I think Mao, Lenin, Stalin, etc. disagree with you there.
| eis wrote:
| > Which religious texts? Each and every one of the texts
| available for each religion in the world?
|
| I should have been clearer: religious texts on average.
| Maybe there is some religion out there that is not vague,
| very clear and not open to interpretation. I'd be happy
| to hear about an example and explore it further. But the
| major world religions all have varying interpretations.
| > I think Mao, Lenin, Stalin, etc. disagree with you
| there.
|
| The existance of these monsters does not prove religions
| don't create issues. Or what's your claim?
| al_mandi wrote:
| What does having texts with some degree of interpretation
| have to do with whether those texts are true or not?
| Sounds like a genetic fallacy.
|
| > The existance of these monsters does not prove
| religions don't create issues. Or what's your claim?
|
| My claim is that without religion, we'd be in a far off
| worse place.
| eis wrote:
| > What does having texts with some degree of
| interpretation have to do with whether those texts are
| true or not? Sounds like a genetic fallacy.
|
| You are putting words in my mouth. I said texts that are
| vague and open to a lot of interpretation can cause a lot
| of issues. Especially when those interpretations are used
| to make life choices and doubly so when making choices
| about others. > My claim is that without
| religion, we'd be in a far off worse place.
|
| Please provide evidence for this. Clearly one can have
| ethics and morals without religion. Note: showing that
| some atheists did something wrong is not evidence of
| that. Oh and btw there is more than theism and atheism. I
| wouldn't describe myself as an atheist. Do I know that
| there is no such thing as a god? Nope. All I know is that
| I really can't subscribe to that believe personally but
| who am I to claim either way. I can still strive to be a
| good member of society.
| al_mandi wrote:
| Not all texts are vague and open to interpretation. A
| proper religion with strong scholarly underpinnings like
| Islam has this issue figured out. The Quran itself calls
| out the issue, and Muslim scholars from the very
| beginning have a foundation on which to base rulings.
|
| > so when making choices about others
|
| By living in society, someone is making choices on the
| behalf of another regardless of whether that society is
| religious or secular.
|
| > Please provide evidence for this
|
| We're seeing it today. Look at the rates of depression,
| suicide, etc. in so called "developed first world"
| countries and compare them to war torn "third world"
| countries that are generally religious. Society is in
| moral and ethical decline, and it worries me how much
| longer this can go on before some chaotic event will take
| place.
|
| Without an authority, the very question of what "good"
| and "bad" mean becomes meaningless. I recall one
| atheistic head (might have been Dawkins) who claimed that
| rape is not good or bad, it just is a phenomenon like the
| spots on a cheetah. Or Kraus (and others) who said that
| he could not find a moral justification against incest if
| there is consent from both sides.
| nprateem wrote:
| Most exam questions at university are open to
| interpretation too, but that's language for you.
| [deleted]
| mef wrote:
| I found it interesting as an early example of a similar line
| of reasoning with a similar conclusion.
|
| The Wikipedia link mentions that: "Astronomer Carl Sagan
| quoted it in discussing India's "tradition of skeptical
| questioning and unselfconscious humility before the great
| cosmic mysteries.""
| eis wrote:
| I don't think the line of reasoning is similar at all.
|
| The quoted text just says "We don't know. Hypothetical
| beings higher than us don't know because they came after
| the initial origin. A hypothetical creator might or might
| not know."
|
| I agree with the first sentence but it doesn't give any
| insight really. The reasoning regarding Gods coming after
| creation so they wouldn't know doesn't check out. Maybe
| they are great scientists and found a way to get the
| answer? By implying even Gods don't know you get defeatism
| - how could we mere mortals know? Let's not try.
| throw7 wrote:
| 'Maybe the creator doesn't know what he created.' Meaning he
| suffers from dementia and forgot what he created? I suppose
| that's possible.
| jackmott wrote:
| ickelbawd wrote:
| Ha, maybe.
|
| Or perhaps creation to the creator is like breathing to us.
| Do you remember how many breaths you took yesterday?
|
| Or maybe there is no creator, only a self-creation.
| monktastic1 wrote:
| Okay, this is truly bizarre. I came here to share this exact
| quote (after reading a prior comment about how the universe
| itself may never know), only to find that someone already
| posted it... whose handle is the same one I use on other sites,
| because I share the same initials.
|
| Genuinely thought I'd gone crazy for a moment and posted this
| with an alternate account.
| Bakary wrote:
| I would say it's an unlikely coincidence, but not truly
| bizarre.
|
| - It's common for desi names to start with A or K
|
| - It's common for desis to use initials when referring to
| themselves
|
| - Some desi surnames are over-represented in the population
|
| - People with desi names are likely to come in contact with
| South Asian culture irrespective of their environment or if
| they speak the relevant languages. Or rather, they are more
| likely to have these avenues to begin with if they ended up
| with such a naming scheme.
|
| - There are only so many foundational or well-known texts in
| any culture, so if there is a relevant passage, it has a high
| likelihood of being cited
|
| It's not that different from a Jay Smith and a John Smith
| quoting a relevant C.S. Lewis or Biblical passage and having
| a jsmith handle.
| xwdv wrote:
| I wonder if we really _want_ to know, or if we 'd rather enjoy
| speculating for all eternity. Seems like the journey is more fun
| than the destination.
| aortega wrote:
| If we will never know, then there should be some kind of proof
| that the beginning of the universe is un-knowledgeable, sort of
| like Godel's theory of incompleteness. But there is none, so the
| affirmation is incorrect:
|
| We don't know if we will never know.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Proof requires axioms, and the universe hints towards what they
| are but isn't explicit.
|
| Per thermododynamic axioms, incompleteness is implied by the
| arrow of time and information atrophy. This would imply an
| unknowable beginning.
| c1ccccc1 wrote:
| You got the direction backwards. Increase in entropy means
| that the farther back you go in time, the less information
| the universe has in it in some sense. The initial state of
| the universe would therefore be very simple, having low
| entropy. If the state were simple enough, then in principle,
| we could figure it out in exact detail. The thing that
| thermodynamics says is unknowable is the distant future of
| the universe. We can predict that it will be dark and cold
| and empty and sparsely filled with ever-more red-shifted
| radiation, but it's impossible, even in principle, to know
| the details of exactly where each individual particle in
| going to end up.
| pronlover723 wrote:
| There are plenty of things we will never know and that there is
| no way of ever knowing. Here's some.
|
| Given this 10k year old pot
|
| https://factsanddetails.com/media/2/20120207-JomonPottery.JP...
|
| What is the name of the person that created this pot, What day
| did they create it? Were they in a relationship at that time?
| Did they have children? How many siblings did they have?
|
| There's no way to know. You can theorise time travel to find
| out or you can weasle into believing we'll somehow make
| machines in the future that can measure every facet of every
| atom related to the creation of the pot in such a way as to be
| able to trace their trajectories through time backward but both
| of those are grasping at straws, things that are unlikely to
| ever actually come to pass.
|
| The reality is we'll never know the answers to those questions.
|
| The same is true of how the universe began.
|
| The best we can do is follow our theories of how the universe
| works backward and see where they lead and then try to create
| those initial conditions and see if we get the results we
| expect. It may be impossible to create those initial conditions
| though and even so, we'd be guessing at what those initial
| conditions actually were as we'd be assuming that running our
| calculations in reverse is true describe the actual initial
| conditions whereas they really only describe assumed initial
| conditions.
| moomin wrote:
| I don't think people are understanding the subtlety of what she's
| saying here. She's saying that since there are no predictions to
| be made, there's nothing falsifiable in any of the many theories.
| Worse, if the theories _do_ make falsifiable predictions that
| still will only reduce the imaginative space, not reduce it down
| to one theory, and that instead we choose between theories on the
| basis of how many "constants" they require.
|
| This argument isn't invalidated by possible future discoveries.
| It'll still be possible to generate competing elegant
| mathematical models that only differ in ways that are unobserved.
| everybodyknows wrote:
| A concise shorthand for "non-falsifiable theory" is "faith".
| lisper wrote:
| Only if you choose to believe that a non-falsifiable theory
| is actually true. Otherwise it's not faith, merely a
| hypothesis.
| eterevsky wrote:
| It's somewhat ironic to see this statement from Sabine
| Hossenfelder, who as a quantum super-determinist holds quite
| specific beliefs about the beginning of the universe.
| gorgoiler wrote:
| _Impossibility: the limits of science and the science of limits_
| by John D Barrow -- rest in peace -- is an excellent book about
| the aspects of the Universe we can never know. For example, the
| visible Universe and whether constants are constant.
|
| When this blogger starts by pushing back on philosophers, I think
| they may mean scientists like Barrow, which is a shame because he
| makes for very compelling reading. In fact, have I not seen
| warnings here, from reputable posters, about this Backreaction
| blog?
|
| In any case, I recommend the ahem "philosophy" book heartily.
| westcort wrote:
| We may not know the answer to how the universe began, but a time
| loop at the beginning of the universe is my favorite explanation.
| Gott and Li proposed this model and you can see Gott explain it
| elegantly here: https://youtu.be/raTqAyLikLU
| staindk wrote:
| Thanks for the link. I love how Gott started with simple
| everyday objects.
| westcort wrote:
| He is a great teacher and a really awesome person in general.
| DemocracyFTW2 wrote:
| I for one am glad that Gott has finally joined youtube to
| explain to everyone the meaning of the universe and everything.
| Cool move bro!
| egello wrote:
| The thing about time loop is that, how and when did it began? I
| just can't wrap my head around something being here, there and
| everywhere at all times.
| AnotherGoodName wrote:
| You're right. In fact a time loop has the same something from
| nothing problem any other theory has.
|
| Imagine a flatlander universe. Package up time in another
| dimension and you can represent their entire existence as a
| static 3d cube. Timeloops would just be a static torus in the
| cube.
|
| The same is true of a 3 spatial dimension + 1 time dimension
| universe. You can view it as a static 4d tesseract. Timeloops
| are just a 4-taurus. Where did that 4 Taurus come from? It's
| the same something from nothing problem.
| al_mandi wrote:
| It's a metaphysical assumption, meaning beyond the realm of
| experimental science. Science has inherent limitations, and
| cannot be used to explain everything. This is a good starting
| point: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=If3cNUixEBM
| xabotage wrote:
| How did I know before I clicked that link that it was going
| to be apologetics.
|
| Faith is not a shortcut to knowledge. "Hey, we can't yet
| find the answer to big questions through rational means, so
| let's try irrational means!"
| bigbaguette wrote:
| It's something we learn very early in the philosophy of
| science, is that our vision of the world will always be
| inherently limited by the capabilities of our perception and
| the way we process it
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| There are only two alternatives for the origin of the
| universe: Either creation out of nothing, or no creation
| through eternal existence.
|
| Both are hard to wrap your head around.
| ben_w wrote:
| with time loops. It began half way though me writing this
| sentence -- that's the thing
| c048 wrote:
| That's the thing about time-loops; you don't need to have a
| start and a beginning. There's a good movie about that
| concept; Interstellar.
| [deleted]
| ben_w wrote:
| Interstellar has one, but for that topic I'd suggest
| _Predestination_ :
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predestination_(film)
|
| I'd also suggest watching it before reading that plot
| synopsis.
| Tenoke wrote:
| Interstellar is pretty much nonsense even given the
| premise. Even if you are talking about time travel you can
| easily make something more plasuible than that.
|
| Also Interstellar had information passing from the future
| to the past which isn't really what's typically sufficent
| to consider it a time loop.
| westcort wrote:
| The time loop is allowed by the current understanding of
| physics. The math checks out.
| wheelerof4te wrote:
| Of course we don't know. That does not mean we should stop
| searching for the answer.
|
| But before we try to understand how the universe began, maybe a
| better starting point would be: how did _we_ begin?
|
| Finding out what exactly happened to us that made us different
| than the rest will lead to answers to greater mysteries of this
| world.
| erlend_sh wrote:
| What we do know is that the universe didn't begin from _nothing_.
| It's impossible for something to arise out of nothing, so there
| has always been _something_.
|
| Nothingness is the space that holds everything.
|
| From there it can be argued that the universe began with the
| adjacent possible of nothing.
| danwee wrote:
| Please, how can any human being be so absolute about anything?
| Modern humans emerged ~300K years ago (or at least that's what
| we know so far), so how on earth can we be sure about anything?
| Our science is nice and all, and can help us built amazing
| devices that save lives and allow us to explore... but all we
| have are models. Theories. Zero certainty.
|
| If anything, science is all about: "I have no idea what this
| is, but I have a model that seems to explain certain scenarios.
| Let's stick with it until someone more intelligent than us
| provides a better model". We may be "sure" about certain "laws"
| (e.g,, thermodynamics, speed of light, etc.)... but I think
| it's a mistake to be so absolute about them.
| mannykannot wrote:
| It is not obvious to me whether one could determine if the
| phrase "the adjacent possible of nothing" refers to something,
| as opposed to merely resembling phrases that do. Regardless,
| there is an evocative ring to it.
| speedbird wrote:
| Do we? Please enlighten ...
| dijerido wrote:
| This argument goes back to Parmenides.
| Amezarak wrote:
| I think most statements like this have an underlying
| conceptual problem in that they assume the existence of
| causality.
|
| Since the Big Bang is the beginning of space and time, it
| doesn't make sense to say it "came from" anything - not
| nothing, anything. Nothing could have "caused" it because
| causality depends on there being a before in which the cause
| could take place. Causality breaks down with the beginning of
| time and that causes us a lot of conceptual confusion.
| philipov wrote:
| It's not impossible for something to arise out of nothing.
| Well, what I really should say is, it's not impossible for
| _two_ somethings to arise out of nothing, as long as they have
| opposite charge and annihilate when they come into contact.
|
| I like to imagine there's an anti-universe moving backwards in
| time from the start of the universe, and that's where all the
| unexplained missing baryonic antimatter ended up.
| smolder wrote:
| Put in other words, something is a subset of nothing! This
| idea fits in well with the unprovable MWI as well. If every
| possibile configuration of spacetime exists, and in a
| symmetry where everything has an opposite, doesn't it all
| kind of "add up" to 0? This idea has been in my head since
| high school physics many years ago.
| tadfisher wrote:
| So the universe is a crazy huge Feynman diagram that got
| split at the edge of a black hole? Cool.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| If one redefined nothing as something, then the universe can
| arise.
| jgrowl wrote:
| I think this comment is actually very insightful.
|
| If you assume that 'nothing' is what cannot exist, then
| everything becomes a matter of scale and instrument
| sensitivity
| InCityDreams wrote:
| >What we do know is that the universe didn't begin from
| nothing. It's impossible for something to arise out of nothing,
| so there has always been something.
|
| Got proof? ...and isn't that the whole point of the discussion?
| jgrowl wrote:
| Therein lies the True eternal distinction between Reason and
| Faith.
|
| Reason is that which can be known and where it ceases becomes
| Faith. They are separate parallel structures, to mistake one for
| the other is folly.
|
| We know that everything we can see originated as a single point
| of one uniformly distributed substance.
|
| We know that everything we can see will return into one uniformly
| distributed substance (Heat and red-shifted light).
|
| _Belief_ is Necessary to fill in the gaps between creation
| cycles (Or its rejection entirely).
| As_You_Wish wrote:
| >Reason is that which can be known
|
| Nah. Reason is just the best model we have at the time, given
| the evidence that we have.
|
| For example, Newtonian physics is a pretty darn good way of
| looking at the universe and it works well. It was thought of as
| "known". But of course, I'm sure everyone here knows that
| Einsteinian physics replaced Newtonian physics with a more
| accurate model of the universe.
|
| Faith is different in that it is based on no evidence. For
| example, in christendom, they say there's a heaven, with no
| testable evidence, or that there's a god, let alone the one
| that they think exists as opposed to Kali or Uhuru-Mazda, or
| the other hundredss of thousands of gods that have been
| professed to be real.
|
| >Belief is Necessary to fill in the gaps between creation
| cycles (Or its rejection entirely).
|
| eh....despite what the author says, it is conceivable that a
| scientific solution _could_ be found for the creation. But with
| faith, just saying "God done it" is something that requires no
| work, no new knowledge, and not even an _attempt_ at new
| knowledge. Belief is something necessary when one is just too
| lazy to try to figure out the actual solution, or to disprove
| one 's belief and accept that it is wrong.
| [deleted]
| michaelsbradley wrote:
| "Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit
| rises to the contemplation of truth..."
|
| https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/d...
| hota_mazi wrote:
| Faith is the justification that people give when they believe
| something for no good reason.
|
| You can believe anything based on faith, therefore, it's not
| a reliable path to truth.
|
| Only reason is.
|
| The faster our civilization gets rid of faith, the better off
| we'll be.
| michaelsbradley wrote:
| _Fides et ratio_ was written to address that problematic
| way of thinking (what you just expressed). Maybe give it a
| read.
| hota_mazi wrote:
| Could you outline what's problematic about it here?
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| This is what I don't get:
|
| "... if the universe expands today, this means if we look back in
| time the matter must have been squeezed together, so the density
| was higher.
|
| If the universe expands today, how does it follow that it was
| also expanding yesterday, or a million years ago? Maybe universe
| expands, then contracts again cyclically?
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| The reason expansion yesterday is plausible if we see expansion
| is simply that's it's far more plausible nothing so special
| happened yesterday as to change the motion of the _entire
| universe_.
|
| The universe is not a little trickle of water down the wall in
| the bathroom you can easily redirect with your little finger,
| the universe it _really_ big, so you need something equally big
| to make it change behaviour.
| Kerrick wrote:
| The oceans used to seem _really_ big to us too, but each
| rising tide wasn't destined to continue rising--the tides
| turned out to be cyclical, even though we couldn't imagine
| anything but gods or magic to be powerful enough to cause the
| change. Perhaps we're in a similar trough of understanding
| here?
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| I'm not sure I get your point, are you saying the moon and
| the sun, the things we now know cause the tides, are small
| things?
| aaaddaaaaa1112 wrote:
| brabel wrote:
| > If the universe expands today, how does it follow that it was
| also expanding yesterday
|
| The universe is not only expanding, it's expanding faster and
| faster... it's very hard to see how anything could explain the
| rate of expansion could have started off negative, then instead
| of just collapsing into itself, it reverted somehow and then
| started accelerating. The simple explanation is that it has
| always expanded, though at a slower rate, just like in the
| future it seems it will continue to expand at a faster rate.
| vkou wrote:
| > Maybe universe expands, then contracts again cyclically?
|
| It's possible, but you're going to have to come up with a
| theory for why whatever 'force' is driving the expansion goes
| from negative, to positive, and back.
| WXLCKNO wrote:
| We live inside an engine piston?
| vkou wrote:
| And what wheel drives the inner workings of that piston?
| eis wrote:
| Maybe a better analogy would be a spring that goes from
| contraction to expansion and back again? A lot of things
| behave like waves so could it be some space field
| swinging in a wave-like pattern? Is there some evidence
| for the expansion to have also happened say 10B years ago
| in the CMBR?
| kosh2 wrote:
| The only thing that can maybe be understandable for us is an
| infinite universe. What was before 0? -1. What before that? -2.
|
| But how can we ever understand how out of a state of nothingness
| came something? That is where the science "ends" and the door to
| philosophy opens.
|
| Those are similar problems like "Why is there not nothing?", "Why
| are the laws of nature not different?" etc.
| goldenkey wrote:
| In projective geometry negative infinity and positive infinity
| meet :-)
| green_on_black wrote:
| To add to your point, why should there be nothingness? Who is
| to say that 0 is before 1? There's 1/2 somewhere right? And 1/4
| before that, etc.
|
| It's not obvious that there "should" be nothing, rather than
| perpetual something. It's not obvious we should work with
| integers and not the reals. Or the rationals. Or the rationals
| without zero, which cannot exist as a denominator (in the
| common definition of the rationals). It's not obvious that
| we've ever detected zero. And why a line? Why not a circle? And
| even if a line, couldn't it be the limit of a circle whose
| radius tends to infinity? Etc.
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| I think one thing that humans have not come to terms with is the
| possibility that some fundamental fields are essentially dead in
| terms of possible new discoveries that most people will care
| about. That doesn't mean that there's nothing left to do. There
| are minor details in some fields but they are more like
| engineering problems. Physics may be one of those fields and I
| certainly think math is as well. However, it's sometimes hard to
| recognize because there is a core group of people that keep it
| going because it's their nest egg.
| barrysteve wrote:
| Depends what you mean by care about, because the majority of
| praised discoveries are an extra foot on the millipede.
| Precisely because we designed our universities and technologies
| that way.
|
| You can nurture in systems and cultures that break open the
| fundamentals again if you so wish. Most people don't wish it,
| they are happy living out incremental improvement in the city
| and surrounds.
| johndunne wrote:
| I believe this sentiment is what a large cross section of the
| physics community was thinking prior to Einstein's
| breakthroughs.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Physics still has major gaps right in the middle - our two main
| theories of how the world works are mathematically
| incompatible. This leaves room for some significant new
| discoveries that could upend everyone's understanding of the
| world.
|
| Not to mention that both QM and GR in themselves have
| inconsistencies or infinities. GR famously has a singularity in
| the center of a black hole, which means the math doesn't
| actually apply there. QM has the measurement problem, and the
| (probably related) problem of making the laws of motion linear,
| when we can clearly see highly non-linear behavior in reality.
| jb1991 wrote:
| I quite disagree with this. Visionaries come along to unseat
| centuries of limitations, raising the ceiling forever. Those
| visionaries are rare, but there will be more.
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| Maybe, but if you look at the list of famous unsolved
| problems in math, it has been dwindling for a long time. The
| list used to contain problems that undergrads could
| understand. Biology is still like this -- you can take quite
| a few interesting unsolved problems in biology and explain it
| to most people.
|
| Math has a few left like the Riemann hypothesis, but the
| _vast_ majority of new work that has been coming out is more
| like refinements (I say this as a PhD in math who as actually
| read them). We look at history and expect it to repeat
| itself, but if you closely examine math history you can
| actually see a decline. Take the time to truly examine
| "visionary" things that have happened in math and those
| events are actually getting fewer and fewer. I seriously
| doubt there is much left to do that is of interest to more
| than 5-10 people in each subfield.
| galleywest200 wrote:
| Are you suggesting there are no more unknown problems in
| mathematics, that "the list" will not be added to?
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| Well, due to the nature of math there are technically
| hundreds of questions you can ask (specific behaviour of
| the infinite number of diophantine equations, improving
| constants in estimation, whether there exists a prime
| number that satisfies XYZ, etc), but those problems are
| becoming so hyperspecialized that very few people if any
| will care about them. There may be one more paradigm
| shift that is related to stuff that Sholze is doing and
| there is certainly some work to do in proof theory ala
| Voevodky's univalent foundations so we could see a couple
| more things but the vast majority of basic foundational
| work in math is done.
|
| So while we have a few more fundamental problems that
| most people have heard of like the Riemann hypothesis and
| the twin primes conjecture, don't expect to have any more
| of those. (Certainly the more recent ones are already so
| specialized that few people outside the immediate area
| would ever understand or even care about them).
|
| I'm also not sure why there's such a negative view
| towards the end of progress on this site---a lot of
| people seem to take it as an axiom that currently
| "useless" things will eventually become useful but I
| simply do not believe that is the case (and this is
| coming from someone who has published quite a few papers
| in pure math).
| superposeur wrote:
| I'm a big fan of the blog, but disagree with this entry. Her
| argument could be applied to the idea of the Big Bang itself: we
| can never receive light from any further back than the "surface
| of last scattering", so the notion of a hotter prior epoch is an
| extrapolation. The extrapolation is a good one as it uses
| independently-tested laws of evolution, at least to the point
| these laws presumably break down, as she points out.
|
| Similarly, it's entirely conceivable that we may find independent
| ways to test which of the proposed modifications of the evolution
| laws is correct, for instance by using data collected from binary
| mergers. Then, these modified laws would lead to a modified story
| of what happened near the Big Bang. Alternatively, it may happen
| that all but one or a few of the proposed modifications do not
| play nicely with the other forces of nature at a theoretical
| level.
|
| Or maybe not, but we certainly can't rule out this possibility a
| priori.
|
| Moreover, her point about not having a multi-universe data set
| would dismiss all of cosmology as mere "ascience" -- again,
| including the notion of the Big Bang itself.
|
| Instead, I think it likely that the present multiplicity of early
| universe proposals will be pruned as more data becomes available.
| lambdasquirrel wrote:
| > Her argument could be applied to the idea of the Big Bang
| itself
|
| What's wrong with that?
|
| The thing about science is that it cannot pretend that it
| knows. It needs to prove. To which end, I don't think we should
| be supposing that we're going to know. Otherwise we're doing
| religion.
| necovek wrote:
| Science is, effectively, religion/faith in a particular set
| of base presumptions (axioms of set theory or logic theory
| guide all "logical" reasoning). Basically, limits of human
| mind understanding things come with just having to trust some
| things are simply so.
|
| The biggest difference from things more commonly referred to
| as "religions" is that science invites you to challenge all
| these assumptions and look for a better (and smaller,
| simpler) working set that still explains all the phenomena we
| observe at least as well as the sets of axioms we currently
| use. And it knows that all the knowledge we gain is simply
| the approximation of the real stuff, and that we can only
| work to improve those approximations.
| lisper wrote:
| > Science is, effectively, religion/faith
|
| No. No no no no no!!!
|
| Science is a _process_. The result of that process is
| _explanations_ for phenomena. And the reason this matters
| is that the particular explanations produced by the
| scientific process turn out to give you the power to make
| extraordinarily accurate predictions about (certain aspects
| of) the future, and thus give you a tremendous amount of
| leverage in becoming the master of your own fate.
|
| It is absolutely not a religion, except insofar as it is
| the only thing mankind has ever come up with that truly
| gives us the gift of prophecy.
| xabotage wrote:
| No. Faith is belief without evidence or belief in the
| presence of contrary evidence. If we were to suppose the
| "base presumptions" of science were on the same level as
| religious claims, then they could be arbitrarily ignored
| without real-world consequences.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| > Similarly, it's entirely conceivable that we may find
| independent ways to test which of the proposed modifications of
| the evolution laws is correct, for instance by using data
| collected from binary mergers. Then, these modified laws would
| lead to a modified story of what happened near the Big Bang.
|
| Sure, but you have to start from observations of the binary
| merger, not from what you'd like the Big Bang to be like, like
| most of these theories do. Starting from predictions about the
| origin of the universe is unlikely to produce good testable
| theories, since there is nothing to test there. You have to
| look at phenomena that are actually still happening in the
| universe to guide your research, and only then extrapolate.
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| Einstein's equations are time reservable and deterministic,
| so the evolution has only one path and ultimately it doesn't
| matter which end you start at, you'll get to the other unique
| end point regardless. The problem is to get the correct start
| conditions that makes the other end of the path end up
| somewhere plausible.
|
| It is largely a matter of training and temperament if you
| think it's more rewarding to start from the observations of
| current phenomena that all have some uncertainty and
| laboriously work backwards to predict an early universe that
| doesn't match the observations and then have to start over,
| or if you think it's better to start from the distant past
| and work toward the now only to find a problem and having to
| start over.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Sure, the equations themselves lead to the same place.
|
| But this is only true if they are the _right equations_.
|
| If you look at an existing phenomenon that maybe relativity
| doesn't describe well enough, and find some modification to
| these equations that explains it better; and then you go
| and check that indeed this new model explains all known
| observations better - you have a pretty solid new theory.
| You can then expand this theory into the early universe and
| see what consequences it would have for the inflation
| model.
|
| However, if you start from the big bang and want to modify
| Einstein's equations, what will guide you to a better
| model? Most likely you will use your intuition on how the
| universe must have begun - but then, chances are, your
| modified laws will predict entirely the wrong thing about
| the current universe; or, you can add terms to the existing
| equations that have no influence in the current universe,
| but then, by Occam's razor, your theory should just be
| discarded since it explains all observable phenomena
| equally well, but is more complex.
| barrysteve wrote:
| Sabine likes to swing an axe into a tree. Her preaching gets
| tiresome fast though.
|
| She redefines science to require simplicity, when it simply
| doesn't require it. Many solved or solveable problems in science
| are ghastly complex and computers improved or solved them. The
| LHC is a most-obvious example for that category. Do I even need
| to point out the counter-arguments or are we just taking Sabine
| at her word..
|
| This thinking mirrors a cultural-faith shift and has little to do
| with the premise of the article, that we dont know and cant know
| the universe before the Big Bang.
|
| A scientist who doesn't preach is worth their weight in gold,
| usually because they're too busy doing science _to_ preach.
|
| She is the red dressed woman on the Tiber River telling us how
| she won't let this stand anymore. Meanwhile the rest of us just
| get on with it. Accordingly saying this comment was a waste of
| time.
| jessermeyer wrote:
| > She redefines science to require simplicity, when it simply
| doesn't require it.
|
| God wills the Universe into Being. I have explained everything
| completely. What qualities of a selection function do you have
| that would choose a different explanation?
|
| One that doesn't require something more complex than the
| Universe to explain the Universe?
| barrysteve wrote:
| Well it's not so hard to break apart all the presuppositions
| in that sentence, but I know you're not looking for this.
|
| Arguing tiber-river style divine simplicity is best left up
| to the dominican monk gregory pine and his debate partners.
|
| You might be disappointed to discover I was making a
| practical point, not using the ideal-metaphorical language of
| sabine and her culture.
|
| Practically speaking no matter where sabine and the concept
| of simplicity, teamwork and the coming relational tribalism
| goes, one can work on the ghost of the tree she is trying to
| chop down or drag an incomplete, complex part of science
| through the bubble of 'simplicity' out to disrupt the other
| side.
|
| Put more briefly, no matter how simple we all agree 'it' is,
| you can disrupt that bubble with infinite complexity, just as
| easily as she cuts down trees.
| ben_w wrote:
| Sabine, wearing her science communicator hat, necessarily has
| to simplify a lot. Everything of hers that I watch or read is
| simplified science (including her branded Brilliant course),
| and it has to be simplified for me to follow it because I'm a
| software engineer not a scientist and I can't yet do the tensor
| differential calculus of relativity nor the complex-valued
| calculus of quantum mechanics.
|
| But even without that caveat, science has to be as simple as
| possible (and no simpler), because every extra equation or
| variable beyond the minimum is necessarily a worthless
| decoration adorning the core idea. Computers don't always let
| you brute force your way past that extra complexity, but even
| when they do, it never really helps to have it.
| barrysteve wrote:
| I mean gene unfolding, meterology, lhc, fusion, space
| research, ect have all been served tremendously by computing.
| Granted one could say they are temporarily less useful due to
| a local peak of optimization, buut that's a long way from
| throwing out all the sine waves and commiting to perfect
| metaphysics.
| ben_w wrote:
| Take any or all of your examples, and add an extra
| variable: if (unix_time>>128) % 2 == 1 {
| explode(); }
|
| Easy to code, unfalsifiable. Adds nothing to our
| understanding.
| barrysteve wrote:
| Who would do that? What does it prove to do that?
|
| Describe a metaphysical house that could never exist. One
| with mc esher stairs and melted clocks everywhere.
|
| Who would do that? What would it prove to do that?
|
| Yes computers can be a waste of time.. what's your point?
| You want me to tell you how to improve science with
| computing to save you from simplicity, or should I just
| instead do it...
| ben_w wrote:
| What did you mean by "simplicity" when you wrote:
|
| > She redefines science to require simplicity, when it
| simply doesn't require it.
|
| The point of my example is to show that you _don 't_ add
| unnecessary complexity if you don't need to. But if you
| think that weather and plasma physics are examples of
| "ghastly complex" things, you're not talking about the
| same _category_ of complexity as the one every scientist
| will argue against.
|
| It's the difference between saying "go is hard" because
| it took until AlphaGo to make an AI to play it well vs.
| "go is easy" because the rules fit on a matchbox in a
| normal font.
| barrysteve wrote:
| You're not adding the complexity, it's out there. One
| would hope we're aiming at modelling nature.
|
| The human body is incredibly complex and making simple
| theories about it doesn't help so much. As you said, Go
| is incredibly complex and it took ML to tackle it.
|
| ML is a good case, is it simple or is it complex? The
| ideas we use to communicate the program are simple
| enough. It's polynomial regression or it's a neural
| network. Understandable ideal simple terms, but what the
| program practically executes is much more complex.
|
| Why ditch understanding what's going on under the hood so
| that we can live in the land of ideal simplicities? Those
| usually come last after you get what's going on and have
| refined your practicalities down.
|
| We need better tools _for everything_ and we 're not
| going to get there by ignoring the practical and complex
| parts.
|
| Sabine is happy to kill off looking at complexity because
| Penrose is hypothesizing about the nature of life under
| the guise of pre-big bang physics.
|
| Okay I get her relationship to Penrose.. why do I have to
| stop exploring complexity again? Cause it's not divinely
| simple.. and/or because she said so?
|
| But again I admit I waste my own time and maybe yours, we
| wont merge our views. The eagle never lost as much time
| as he did, talking to the raven.
| ben_w wrote:
| As I say, you're using the words "complex" and "simple"
| in a fundamentally different way than Sabine (and most
| every scientist) is using them.
|
| For science and scientists, it's the
| complexity/simplicity of the _rules_ that matters.
|
| You're arguing against a point Sabine doesn't make.
| RappingBoomer wrote:
| or when it will end, despite university profs trying to justify
| their high salaries by confidently predicting exactly what will
| happen to the universe...no one knows, despite lying university
| blowhards telling us that they know everything
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| But isn't Webb calling the BBT into question?
|
| Even if we answer how it began there is still:
|
| 1) Why?
|
| 2) What was there before that?
|
| 3) And before that?
|
| 4( And before that? And so on.
|
| It's the rabbit hole only hallucinogens can fill.
| Victerius wrote:
| My pet theory: Something has always existed. There was no
| beginning. No origin. No first cause. No t=0. No start. It's
| always been there. What was before that? That. And that. And
| that. Always that.
|
| And the Second Law of Thermodynamics is not absolute and can be
| broken.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Understanding what time is and what time isn't can deeply
| affect ones view of the universe. Being stuck down here in a
| gravity well we think of time as a fundamental thing that
| ticks along the same for everyone. But when we start looking
| at things at cosmological scales even the idea of a t=0
| starts to bend and break.
|
| For example look at particle interactions. The vast majority
| of them you can play them forward and backwards and they look
| exactly the same. You wouldn't be able to tell which way the
| video is running. The only way we can tell there is an arrow
| of time is because at some point a field asymmetry occurred.
| In a universe where all fields are symmetrical the idea of
| time simply breaks down and has no meaning.
|
| The history of the Universe channel touches on this in their
| latest video.
|
| Linked the wrong video, this is the one I meant to link:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9m0sz2sUfU
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSCrSkK2HcQ
| jondeval wrote:
| > My pet theory: Something has always existed. There was no
| beginning. No origin. No first cause. No t=0. No start. It's
| always been there. What was before that? That. And that. And
| that. Always that.
|
| Your pet theory is the view of Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and
| the Roman Catholic Church. The mistake that people make (you
| can even see it in this thread), is that they start with some
| preconceived conception of God, with all it's baggage, and
| then they attempt argue for, or against, this concept.
|
| The more productive approach is to recognize and acknowledge
| the necessary existence of a base reality. Then you simply
| assign the English word 'God' as a reference pointer to this
| base reality.
|
| const God = (the one base reality that exists necessarily)
| ben_w wrote:
| > The more productive approach is to recognize and
| acknowledge the necessary existence of a base reality. Then
| you simply assign the English word 'God' as a reference
| pointer to this base reality.
|
| You can, but I'm not sure how "then" onwards is going to
| help -- the people I've seen conflating these things before
| will still conflate them after doing this.
| jondeval wrote:
| I don't follow you. Can you elaborate?
| ben_w wrote:
| Alice: "So, we're all agreed, the word 'god' just means
| 'base reality'?"
|
| Bob: "Yup."
|
| Christine: "Sure. And because this base reality exists,
| that proves I was right all along about Jesus: he did die
| for our sins."
|
| Dhvan: "You mean it proves me right about Brahma."
|
| Eris: "...the horned god."
|
| Freya: "...Ragnarok."
|
| and so on.
| jondeval wrote:
| Yup. I see what you mean and I do think in practice
| conversations may proceed this way. And I think you are
| illustrating well the point I made above.
|
| The key idea though is that if you make a dispassionate
| analysis of what this base reality must be, you find that
| it has certain 'attributes'. So for example, anything
| that has horns would not be good candidate for base
| reality since the contingent concept of 'horn' would need
| to be explained by, and derive its very existence from
| something much more simple. So that simpler thing would
| be the less bad candidate. Etc.
| stackbutterflow wrote:
| If time exists then there's always a before. Unless at some
| point time didn't exist. But if time didn't exist and then
| suddenly something started to tick, that's still a transition
| from "no time" to "time" and this "no time" was before
| "time".
|
| These thoughts are driving me crazy. There must be a piece of
| the puzzle we're missing.
|
| There must be something about time that isn't or wasn't
| always linear. Otherwise there's no end to the "who created
| it" question.
|
| It's similar to asking what contains the universe. And what
| contains the thing that contains the universe.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| It feels as if there's a force (?) that we're not yet
| recognizing. Else, it's a crazy infinite loop.
|
| Not that I'm saying this is true (just an example), but is
| the Big Bang simply (?) the introduction of time into the
| then time-less universe? It just doesn't make sense to say
| "The universe started with the Big Bang" when what that was
| prior was the universe but in a different form (or so we
| guess).
|
| So it seems that something else had to be introduced to
| change the nature of the old universe into the new
| universe. Else the "start" is more like a "transformation"
| and even that opens a ton of questions.
|
| My head hurts.
| cf141q5325 wrote:
| >It's the rabbit hole only hallucinogens can fill.
|
| I really love Grant Morrisons theory. Treat yourself,
| especially if you dont want to take that amount of drugs
| yourself.
|
| https://youtu.be/KTMFBYXmvMk?t=282
|
| edit: Alternatively the transcript starting at
|
| >The universe we live in is designed to grow larvae.
|
| till
|
| > There's not one adult on this planet.
|
| http://dedroidify.blogspot.com/2013/09/grant-morrisons-must-...
| indymike wrote:
| > It's the rabbit hole only hallucinogens can fill.
|
| I am stealing this.
| ben_w wrote:
| > But isn't Webb calling the BBT into question?
|
| Only in newspaper headlines. Gell-Mann amnesia effect applies.
|
| https://youtube.com/shorts/1S2CxPUZDOY?feature=share
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| I'm pretty sure I saw something shared on HN last week or so.
| Essentially, what Webb is sending back doesn't look like that
| a BB should look like.
| ben_w wrote:
| The YouTube link I provided is to a professional astronomer
| and science communicator and she is _explicitly_ saying
| JWST data does no such thing and that reports claiming it
| does are wrong.
| sys_64738 wrote:
| For decades they told us it was the Big Bang and we believed
| them.
| tuyiown wrote:
| <<they>>, <<us>>, <<we>> ? no matter what your beliefs are, I
| urge you to figure out where it comes from, by who, and how
| your beliefs are shared.
| sys_64738 wrote:
| I don't have a prevailing interest is how the universe was
| formed. The subject matter doesn't interest me. What does
| interest me is that the generally accepted position of all
| scientists who worked in this field said "Big Bang" was the
| de facto position. Until is suddenly isn't.
|
| That just throws the whole reputation of all those scientists
| into doubt with the average Joe.
| tjpnz wrote:
| The Big Bang theory is still very much the de facto theory.
| The JWST findings while interesting are just one data point
| and they'll be further investigated. But it's way too early
| to say that BBT is dead.
|
| Scientists are constantly finding better theories for
| explaining things and I think the population in general
| understands and accepts that.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Everyone should be willing to change their position often
| and without shame. Scientists in particular should not be
| elevated for holding unmovable conclusions about anything.
| They must be open to evidence proving their theories wrong.
|
| Those who prefer blind trust in unchanging authorities will
| be disappointed.
| Ninjinka wrote:
| God
| tuyiown wrote:
| ... or anything else
| webmobdev wrote:
| Which one? The Hindu / Buddhist / Sufi Islamist philosophy of
| everyone being connected and being reborn / recycled comes
| pretty close to the scientific postulation that _" energy is
| constant and can neither be created nor destroyed but only
| converted from one form to another"_. So when we die, our
| energy conserved in our body becomes something else. The caveat
| of the first law of thermodynamic is that all this happens only
| _" in a closed system"_. So is God within this system, a part
| of the system and part of the energy in this system (which
| would mean that when we attain _Moksha_ / _Nirvana_ and escape
| the cycle of rebirth / reconversion, we become a part of
| God)?. Or is God outside this system?
| gwd wrote:
| The conclusion of her article:
|
| "So if you read yet another headline about some physicist who
| thinks our universe could have begun this way or that way, you
| should really read this as a creation myth written in the
| language of mathematics. It's not wrong, but it isn't
| scientific either. The Big Bang is the simplest explanation we
| know, and that is probably wrong, and that's it. That's all
| that science can tell us."
| indigodaddy wrote:
| "That's all that science can tell us."
|
| Currently perhaps. There's a ton of big brains out there and
| even more yet to be born.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| Right.
|
| And since we created God, we're The Masters of the Universe.
|
| Cue He-Man music.
| sagivo wrote:
| Looking at a static stone and deducing where it fell from _may_
| work based on the current rules you know today but no one tells
| you these are the _only_ rules. We have to look at science as
| best guess for the moment and not as absolute truth.
| yewenjie wrote:
| Any theory of everything has to fall into one of the options of
| Agrippa's Trilemma -
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%BCnchhausen_trilemma
| [deleted]
| gcau wrote:
| Things like the big bang seem to be things after the beginning of
| the universe. In the same way, the issue with a god is "who
| created god, and who created that who created god...". If he's
| eternal, who/what made him eternal? We have the same problem in
| science, and I think any explanation/theory would have the same
| problem. Also, I dislike that when some physicists explain this
| they say, "sure, you can get something from nothing" and then
| change the definition of 'nothing' for their explanation to work.
| I feel like it's a disservice to not just admit mayyybe we don't
| know some things. Disclaimer: not a physicist and maybe missing
| something.
| [deleted]
| danwee wrote:
| Indeed. We'll never know the beginning of everything; science
| cannot accomplish that, religion cannot provide satisfactory
| answers, and philosophy will always leave you half empty half
| full.
|
| That being said, discovering things is fun, so as human beings
| we should not stop doing science/religion/philosophy/etc ever.
| [deleted]
| aliasxneo wrote:
| In the case of the Bible, it makes it explicitly clear that God
| is uncreated. Asking the question, "Who created an uncreated
| God?" doesn't make much sense in that case.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Of course, but then immediately leads to the question: if we
| admit that it is possible for God itself to be un-created,
| why can't the universe itself be uncreated as well?
| ssr2020 wrote:
| The reason for easiness in regard to the complete otherness
| of His Essence and His unrestrictedness is this: most
| certainly, the Maker of the universe is not of the same
| kind as the universe. His Essence resembles no other
| essence at all. Since this is so, the obstacles and
| restraints within the sphere of the universe cannot hinder
| Him, they cannot restrict His actions. He has complete
| disposal over the whole universe and is able to transform
| all of it at the same time. If the disposal and actions
| that are apparent in the universe were to be attributed to
| it, it would cause so many difficulties and so much
| confusion that neither would any order remain nor would
| anything continue to exist; indeed, nothing would be able
| to come into existence. For example, if the masterly
| art in vaulted domes is attributed to the stones of the
| domes, and if the command of a battalion, which properly
| belongs to its officer, is left to the soldiers, either
| neither of them would ever come into existence, or with
| great difficulty and confusion they would achieve a state
| completely lacking in order. Whereas, if in order for the
| situation of the stones in the dome to be achieved, it is
| accorded to a master who is not a stone himself, and if the
| command of the soldiers in the regiment is referred to an
| officer who possesses the essential quality of officership,
| both the art is easy and command and organization are easy.
| This is because, while the stones and the soldiers are
| obstacles to each other, the master and the officer can
| look from every angle, they command without obstacle.
|
| from Quran's Light
| aliasxneo wrote:
| That was a popular theory for a long time, although I think
| it's declined over the years. I don't recall the reasons
| why, though.
| krapp wrote:
| Probably the Big Bang and evidence of inflation and the
| CMB. There is a lot of credible evidence that our
| universe had a definite beginning.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Note that I wasn't arguing against the big bang, or even
| cosmology itself. I was only pointing out that the
| concept of God doesn't add anything to the conversation.
|
| It's also important to note that the big bang theory
| completely leaves open the question of what there was in
| the tiny tiny universe before inflation. Basically, the
| current BBT describes how the universe evolved starting
| from some time t=t0 + 10^-36 seconds. But that leaves a
| gap after t0 but before this time.
|
| Finally, the question of existence from nothing is
| traditionally extended to the supposed singularity that
| existed at t0 as well, though that is on shaker ground.
| krapp wrote:
| I was just suggesting a reason why the solid state theory
| of the cosmos fell out of favor - evidence to the
| contrary.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Sure, but this thread wasn't referring to the solid state
| theory - it is referring to the philosophical problem of
| creation from nothing.
|
| That is, in our usual life, everything that exists comes
| from something else that exists. But we can't easily
| apply this rule to the very beginning of the universe (be
| it the big bang or whatever other model).
|
| So, the question is - how do we handle this? Thomas
| Aquinas said that this is itself proof of God's
| existence: the universe did not exist at some point, then
| God created the first thing. Of course, the next logical
| question is - ok, then how does the rule apply to God?
| And the religious say - well, the rule doesn't apply to
| God, only to creation.
|
| But, if we accept that the rule isn't universal, then we
| can also choose not to apply it to the beginning of the
| universe. Instead, we can tweak the rule to say that
| everything _except the singularity at the beginning of
| the Universe_ is created by another existing thing; the
| singularity itself was always there and requires no
| explanation. This is perfectly consistent with the Big
| Bang theory, and is in fact how most scientists
| conceptualize it (or, they say that questions about the
| origin of that singularity make no sense, since time
| itself began once the singularity started inflating, but
| this is philosophically similar).
|
| Of course, we can posit anything we want about that
| singularity and its past (if any), and we will never
| contradict another theory, since there is no remnant in
| the existing universe of what came before inflation, so
| whatever theory we want will be consistent with the
| current universe.
|
| Did a different universe collapse into that singularity,
| perhaps one with slightly different constants of nature?
| Sure, why not. Was it a regular black hole in another,
| larger, universe that still exists, but which is too far
| away from us to be detectable in any way now that space-
| time has expanded so much? Possibly, why not. Did gods
| and demons fight until they a powerful sorceror cast a
| spell to imprison them into single point, where they and
| there magic were ground to dust and exploded in the
| inflation? Perfectly coherent with all known physical
| theories.
| hota_mazi wrote:
| There are also hypotheses stating that the universe has
| always existed and that the Big Bang was just a phase
| change.
|
| This blows away all religious arguments trying to plug a
| creator in there: since the universe was never created,
| it doesn't need a creator.
| ibn_khaldun wrote:
| The attributes between the universe and The Creator would
| need to be differentiated.
|
| In other words, the properties of that which is uncreated
| would need to be defined so they can be distinguished from
| something that is created. These properties have to be
| understood and accepted as an exclusive set that cannot be
| "distributed" or "shared" among other beings; in order to
| dispel the notion that there can be multiple uncreated
| beings or beings that are created that share attributes
| with The Creator.
| kthejoker2 wrote:
| To be clear, it makes a ton of _sense_ to ask such a
| question.
|
| The underlying assumption to the question is why only one
| thing is allowed to be uncreated .. ? Are there others like
| them, much like here on Earth where we have many authors
| writing many books? The Bible doesn't answer those at all, it
| starts _in media res_ (despite its first three words!)
|
| (I have other complaints about such a God but)
| ARandomerDude wrote:
| The Bible very explicitly teaches that there are no other
| gods. Here is one passage among many.
|
| Isaiah 44:6-8 ESV
|
| Thus says the LORD, the King of Israel and his Redeemer,
| the LORD of hosts: "I am the first and I am the last;
| besides me there is no god. [7] Who is like me? Let him
| proclaim it. Let him declare and set it before me, since I
| appointed an ancient people. Let them declare what is to
| come, and what will happen. [8] Fear not, nor be afraid;
| have I not told you from of old and declared it? And you
| are my witnesses! Is there a God besides me? There is no
| Rock; I know not any."
| hota_mazi wrote:
| Yes but why should we care what the bible says,
| especially when what it says contradicts science?
| tresqotheq wrote:
| > it says contradicts science?
|
| contradicting science is no great flaw. "Science"
| contradicts itself from time to time.
| craftsman wrote:
| It would be more accurate to say that science corrects
| itself. At any given time there are ideas which appear to
| have been verified as much as possible, others which are
| near speculation, and others which are quite uncertain
| with evidence for and against.
|
| What I think the parent means by contradicting science is
| rather different: the Bible says things which go against
| ideas which we believe have been verified by evidence,
| but the Bible won't be changed to reflect that
| understanding. On the other hand, science will change its
| idea of what it thinks to be true as more evidence
| becomes available. Nobody changes things in the Bible.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| In other places, it says pretty explicitly that there are
| other gods:
|
| Pslams 95:3 ESV
|
| For the LORD is a great God, and a great King above all
| gods.
|
| Psalms 97:7 ESV
|
| All worshipers of images are put to shame, who make their
| boast in worthless idols; worship him, all you gods!
|
| Deuteronomy 32:8 NRSV (less henotheistic in other
| translatins)
|
| When the Most High apportioned the nations, when he
| divided humankind, he fixed the boundaries of the peoples
| according to the number of the gods;
|
| And there are others. We know pretty clearly from
| historical sources that the early Jews were henotheistic
| (recognized the existence of other gods, but only
| worshipped YHWH), and that is preserved in the oldest
| parts of the Old Testament. Even Genesis often uses a
| plural when God talks about his works - today that is
| often explained as talking about himself and the angels
| or even the holy trinity, but it is very likely it
| originally referred to the god of Israel and the other
| (lesser) gods in the heavens.
| kirse wrote:
| _the issue with a god is "who created god, and who created that
| who created god..."_
|
| It is if you assume God is bound to the chain of causation, but
| obviously any creator is likely unbound by the system of laws
| in which his creation exists, the same as when we create a
| video game we stand apart from it. I always liked the Dr.
| Quantum Flatland as an example of god-like capabilities wrt
| dimensionality:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEVEKL1Fbx0
| tqkxzugoaupvwqr wrote:
| Even if the creator exists outside their creation under
| different laws of physics (if any), who created the creator
| or how did the creator come to be?
|
| (I can't watch the video right now.)
| shukantpal wrote:
| That question assumes the default state is they didn't
| exist already
| simondw wrote:
| But how does this "uncaused cause" add anything to our
| understanding of the cosmos, beyond adding one more
| entity?
|
| Why not say that God was created by God_1, who just
| already existed?
| ssijak wrote:
| seems like both your Gods were created by a SuperGod who
| is programming the simulation in Python
| Keyframe wrote:
| recursion is one of the possible explanations as well. No
| beginning, no end.
| tresqotheq wrote:
| > did the creator come to be..
|
| Time, and causuality, is a construct _inside_ of our
| universe. Asking who created the creator is like asking
| which way is down when you are in outer space..
| craftsman wrote:
| If you can't use the concept of causality outside of the
| universe, then the idea that there's a creator outside of
| the universe who caused the universe is already out of
| bounds.
| tresqotheq wrote:
| > who caused the universe is already out of bounds.
|
| "caused" can mean a different thing. Imagine causualty in
| a 3d FPS video game, and the creation of the game itself.
| Though they are similar in semantics, one is different
| from the other.
| SAI_Peregrinus wrote:
| By the same logic the universe itself (as opposed to its
| contents including the laws of nature) then the universe
| isn't necessarily bound to the internal system of laws, and
| all the same arguments can apply there with no need for a
| creator!
| draw_down wrote:
| zugi wrote:
| In his famous talk "A Universe from Nothing", Lawrence Krauss
| makes the same point, if slightly less definitively. ("We may
| never know", and that's okay -
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ImvlS8PLIo)
|
| By analogy he describes how, due to the expansion of the
| universe, Milky Way residents 100 billion years from now will be
| unable to observe the cosmic background radiation or any galaxy
| but our own. Civilizations wil evolve, invent science, use the
| best tools possible, and incorrectly conclude that the universe
| consists of one single galaxy alone in a vast sea of empty space.
|
| When we triply rewrite hard drives, we understand that
| information can be destroyed. Sometimes the universe does the
| samething. Sometimes information is irretrievably lost.
| GrigoriyMikh wrote:
| I enjoyed the video. But clickbaity title with "we will never
| know" disgusts me.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| But that is the whole point. It's a question outside what
| science can ever know, even in principle.
| rwbt wrote:
| Reminds me of something Karl Popper philosophized about. I'm
| completely butchering it ofcourse, but it goes along something
| like this - Every scientific theory is waiting to be falsified by
| future generations. He concludes that everything in Empirical
| sciences cannot be proven, but instead they're only falsifiable.
| mxkopy wrote:
| John Wheeler popularized the term "it from bit" and the idea of a
| participatory universe. The limits of human observation aside, it
| could be that the universe itself doesn't really know how it
| began. If a superheated plasma is indifferent to being in a 5
| dimensional black hole as opposed to a state where only space
| exists, then, in a sense, there isn't any difference between the
| two explanations (given that the plasma is the entire universe).
|
| There's this phenomenon in science where you think something is
| arbitrary, it could've happened in any number of ways. Then you
| do some digging and find out there is actually only one possible
| way for it to happen, none of the other ways make logical sense.
| And it's not a matter of initial state or anything, but of
| geometry or something.
|
| Sometimes, after I put down the crack pipe, I wonder if there is
| only one possible way for the universe to exist, and knowing it
| isn't a matter of observation, but of abstraction, that irreal
| logical constructions are actually not abstract enough to explain
| the universe, etc.
|
| Maybe a variable initial state doesn't make logical sense at the
| end of the day. Maybe the numbers we have to plug into the models
| to make them work are like pi or the zeros of the zeta function,
| maybe they just fall out of some result in group theory or sth
| idk
| goldenkey wrote:
| After I pick up the crack pipe from my HN brother, I come to
| the same conclusion. Most questions aren't even answerable in a
| cosmic context because they become ill formed at that level.
| stakkur wrote:
| After requesting the crack pipe from my fellow traveler, I
| conclude that the answer doesn't matter. The universe Is.
| honkdaddy wrote:
| Putting down my bong and loading another, I remark to the
| travelers that the human brain is the only set of atoms in
| the universe which wonders why they are there. All the
| other atoms seem perfectly happy to exist at all.
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