An Explanation of the Big Bang and Evolution that doesn't exclude God.

Not if the existance of a God is impossible (which I find quite likely).

It's been conceded by many creationists and ID people that the spontaneous arisal of life is not impossible, merely unlikely. (Then they bring out a lot of zeroes)

/Z

 

Zap,

I don't think anyone thinks it "merely" unlikely, but incredibly improbable; hence, the title of Richard Dawkins' book, Climbing Mount Improbable.

(Now, here, for anyone unfamiliar with Dawkins, he is an atheist and "common descenter." My mention is not intended to infer otherwise.)

And, I know of no creationist who thinks it possible at all. I think you are misconstruing the idea that certain chemical processes might have been possible with the idea that common descent is considered possible.

There's a vast difference. VAST.

It's like suggesting that because entropy decreases occur that we can legitimately hypothesize the quantom leaps entailed in everything from an organized and highly complex universe of integrated systems under sway of physical and chemical laws all the way to repleat irreducible complexity in a spontaneously generating/self-organising organism and the necessary life-sustaining ecosystem, are therefore actual rational potentials.

 

Improbable still means possible.

Yet I see no logical possibility for God (as described by theists) to exist.

/Z

 

Zap,

Of course you don't, which is attributable to "spiritual blindness" per admonition of scripture.

God is fully inconceivable to any mortal. So, it is understandable you have difficulty with the concept.
Everyone does to extents. Hence the need for revelation in our lives.


As far as what's "possible," well, an adult cow could sponataneously materialize in the sky and plummet to earth.

That would certainly be an easier feat than the creation of an entire universe from completely nothing, the ensuing integral self-organization and the incipient proto-cell's self-creation repleat with reproductive capacity and ability to assimilate sustenance and needing billions of years.

The fact is that first proto-life would have necessarily been almost as complex as the poor falling bovine.

 

The fact is that first proto-life would have necessarily been almost as complex as the poor falling bovine.

not at all. a mammal has all sorts of complex, specialized systems on a number of scales. a virus, on the other hand, is not really any more complex than any number of naturally occurring chemical reactions.

 

I think a lot of us are writing about things we have little knowledge of.

BTW, is the unit of entropy Joules?

 

Brooks - What you're neglecting is that the chain does not begin with primitive life. Each step of the chain, from the coalescence of particles into atoms to the formation of chemical compounds to the emergence of self-replicating systems was an evolution. It all got built up through stages of development. For the cow to pop into existence in the sky would be very ulikely, but if there sky were a warm environment replete with amino acids, it would not be so unbelievable for proto-life to form in the sky, given sufficient time. It's a logical chain of developments from one step to another; nobody's assuming that anything just "appeared," except for whatever the source of the universe was in the first place.

-Paul

 

Certain individuals above: Guys, do we actually need non-theists arguing about exactly how much God doesn't exist?

FWIW, abiogenesis apparently comes in two flavors: Pasteur's, and modern. Take your pick.

 

Every logical system has to bottom out somewhere in order to avoid eternal recursion and total irrelevance, as you say.

Not exactly what I say.

I say no system of logic does ever truly bottom out. Not even a devinely based one. Any bottom is by definition chosen arbitrarily.

Can you name a system that really bottoms out? Your examples didn't suffice, in my opinion.

I think the first thing the intelligent mind needs to do is concede this, and know that any capital T truth is unattainable by definition. It may even be so that capital T truth is logically self-contradictory and is just a dumb idealistic notion we humans have (we have plenty of THOSE )

Okay, but C.S. Lewis is very sharp. I've seen arguments of his that seemed to appeal to such fine logical niceties that the subject matter became irrelevant (most notably in "The Problem of Pain," I thought), but I've never yet seen him turn out half-baked illogical goo.

Not illogical goo, but logical goo based on an arbitrary choice he turns a blind eye to seeing it's arbitrary.

His "argument from reason" is just a variant of the above endless recursion problem (only pertaining to reason, not truth). Bubba loves to bring it up. But I do not see the argument as valid, since his arbitrary choice to bottom out the "trustworthiness of reason" at the devine is just that - arbitrary.

Okay . . . this is special relativity plus the observer principle of the Copenhagen Interpretation?

It's the Andersson interpretation. (I.e. mine). Somewhat tonuge in cheek, but still a "food for thought" things.

<Neo>Whoa.</Neo> ::After much puzzlement:: Oh, okay--I think I get it. This isn't technically "relativity" because nothing's moving relative to anything else. Space is getting stretched out, and we get stretched out with it . . . like if you picked up the ink of a cartoon with Silly Putty and then stretched it.

Exactly.

Which means, nothing's really happening, and whoops there goes the Big Bang theory. (An alternative approach to abolish big bang is to ressurect a version of the "tired light" theory, i.e. that light redshifts due to loss of energy to space itself, not due to any doppler effect. This loss of energy manifests as the 3K background radiation)

Normally (as if anything involving relativity seems normal) if a meter were getting bigger, the observer would be slowing down, and time would be getting longer. But you need to be moving *relative* to something for that to happen.

Exactly. To yourself time is always moving at a constant rate, because whichever space-time vector you happen to be travelling along, you perceive the forward direction as time.

(See my little primer on relativity a few posts up, the napkin thing )

In your scenario, the universe is just getting scaled bigger--all the size ratios remain the same, so nothing's "moving." If this were happening, we'd never really notice. BTW, are you imagining that the mass of things is increasing, or just that we're getting thinner and longer?

No change in mass. The only thing that "preceives" this change in size (dimensional stretch) is space itself. The only side effect of this stretch is that stuff travelling at maximum speed (i.e. photons) through this slowly bending medium get a bit loopy (redshift).

I don't know that we could get infinitely thinner and longer, without our mass increasing, before noticeable, bad things started to happen . . . the molecules in our bodies would be getting further apart too, and eventually we'd be pulled apart.

Not if the size of molecules get bigger, and hence also the range of nuclear forces. I.e. to us, to anything in the universe (at sub relativistic speed) it's a NO-OP. A do-nothing operation. Nothign is really happening at all. You have to be a photon to detect it.

but my understanding is that things are moving away

 

Hades: energy is measured in joules. Entropy is in joules per unit temperature.

I don't know that we could get infinitely thinner and longer, without our mass increasing, before noticeable, bad things started to happen . . . the molecules in our bodies would be getting further apart too, and eventually we'd be pulled apart.

I've actually heard it argued that the universe could end with a "big rip." Essentially, forces between particles are transmitted by other particles which move at the speed of light. So, in the event that the speed of light is a constant over the life of the universe, it's possible that atoms themselves would get ripped apart if the speed of light weren't adequate to continue transmitting the strong force over the distance between the particles making up nuclei. What a way to go, eh?

 

MasterZap wrote: I say no system of logic does ever truly bottom out. Not even a devinely based one. Any bottom is by definition chosen arbitrarily.

Can you name a system that really bottoms out? Your examples didn't suffice, in my opinion.

A computer program *has* to bottom out in the motherboard. A computer's logical proccesses are fixed, and it can't pop itself out of a recursive loop like we can. A human can sit there and think, "Oooh, what if we live in a Matrx within a Matrix within a Matrix within a Matrix . . ." and then eventually say, "Oh, never mind I'm bored," and go off to play video games or something. A computer that gets stuck in a loop where it's saying, "Program A has to go ask program B; program B has to go ask program C; program C has to go ask program D . . ." would completely cease to function if it didn't bottom out in the motherboard, which essentially tells the recursive process: "I am God. Now shut up."

Ditto for our brains, although those are much more complex. We cannot "get outside" the physical limitations of our minds, which means we "bottom out" somewhere. We'll never know where, of course, since by definition we can't get outside our minds to see what our minds can't see. However, unless you believe that the power of the human mind is infinite, there has to be an equivalent of a "motherboard level." The distinction between "eternal recursion" and "we can't be totally sure of anything, but we can be pretty darn sure of X, Y and Z" is the difference between Sartre and Kant. Sartre wrote about "nausea," the feeling you get when you realize that nothing has any substance, and could mutate into something else at any moment. He felt that the human mind was like Silly Putty--it could take any shape. Since it met with no limitations, it never bottomed out. Kant felt that the mind was more like one of those old Stretch Armstrong toys. Its shape is quite variable, but there are certain limits. He considered these limits to be the physical aspects of our perceptions--which are inaccessible to our consciousness, preceisely because consiousness is not a physical phenomenon--but which are nevertheless there.

In "Out Of Control," Kevin Kelly suggests an experiment to test the validity of the mind/body duality theory. Put yourself in a sensory deprivation chamber and stay there for as long as you can stand it.

Sooner or later, your mind will become unhinged from reality. People who have really done experiments like that have hallucinations; they think bugs are crawling all over their skins. Without the physical world to anchor it, a mind fractures. In fact, it invents imaginary sensory stimuli to keep itself going. That's some pretty good evidence that we do "bottom out in our hardware."

Of course, erasing the mind-body duality isn't a typical theist position, although it's actually perfectly orthodox, at least in some denominations. The pope wrote a long article condemning the "modern gnosticism" in which only personal opinion has any merit. For that matter, two people in the Old Testament . . . I can't recall their names right now, because I'm a tired insomniac, are considered to have been taken up bodily into heaven before their death. One is a prophet . . . either Elijah or Elisha. I get them confused. One is this other dude who "went walking with God" one day and apparently went home with him. If you're Catholic, you also belive in the Assumption, which is the same thing. So there are physical bodies in heaven, they're just different from earthly bodies.

The thought that the mind is really a kind of software program that could be "downloaded" from one physical form to another suggests that there would really be no fucntional difference between us and true AI (C-3PO as opposed to Deep Blue), and that you might be able to "transmit" yourself through a conduit of some kind, a la the Matrix, so long as you were "poured" into a suitably physical body.

I played a character like that in a Matrix RPG for a while . . . she was an exiled p

 

The pressure of everything, the 3 fundamental forces (of 4) that can have repulsive forces, especially at the small distances involved.

Pressure? What pressure? Nothingness is not dense,therefore it is incapable of pressure


You are stretching that so far it is not funny. This is an entirely different argument than the one over antimatter. You asked why there is mater if it should have been destroyed by antimatter, and I answered it. Please explain why what you just said has anything to do with that specific question?

A) An equal amount of matter and anti-matter must have been produced by the explosion.
B) Once the antimatter came into contact with the matter, both would have been neutralized
C) If those two fatcs above are true, then there is no reason in my mind why matter existed at all, much less left our planet is nearly perfect condition for life


Um, for there to be an 'explosion' there must be something to explode, so there was something at the time of the big bang.

If that is true, then Big Bang goes out the window. It obviously didn't create everything, and had matter been present at the time of the Big Bang, wouldn't have the Bang destroyed it?


Maybe not but mater did exist during the big bang.

Again, you're tossing your theory out the window.



Because the 2ed law of thermodynamics was not violated. The heat transfer (and therefore negative entropy) involved in such atomic and chemical bonds more than makes up for the order of those bonds.

Actually, yes it was. The 2nd law of thermodynamics also states that disorder must increase in a system. How then could a chaotic explosion render a universe so perfectly designed? It spits in the face of entropy.

 

Blue Jedi

dwelling above the circle of the earth

A circle is a 2D object, the earth is a 3D sphere.

And if the word for circle can also mean sphere, then the Bible is vague on the issue.

There it is folks, the energy to create the universe that was orginally devoid of all matter, resided only with God himself.

So if a scientist said that the energy and power for the universe just always existed, would you be happy with that answer? No explanation of anything else, just that the energy and matter was eternal.

There is also still the question of exactly how God made the universe, how He (apparently) transferred that energy from Him to the physical world.

Undomiel

You need to explain your thoughts on time a little bit more to me before I can really understand.

Einstein proved mathematically, it was possible to define a sort of temporal state of eternal being, in this dimension, for matter.

PPOR (or explain what you mean by eternal). Einstein showed that time moves at a different rate depending on gravity and relative velocity.

Once lightspeed is achieved, time stops and matter becomes (light) energy.

He proved that you can't locally go faster than light.

ophelia

The apparent contradiction is a semantic sleight of hand involving the word "omnipotent." All you have to do to qualify as God is to be able to do all possible things.

Doesn't work. I am God then. I am omnipotent because I can do all possible things, and anything I can't do in impossible (or I can do and choose not to). It is impossible for me to change Darth Brooks mind (I just don't have the experiences he has had). However we will not count that in defining omnipotent since it is not possible.

Basically everything in omnipotent with that definition.

True omnipotence is sterile--it's 100% potentiality and 0% actuality. This would suck. I could see why God would want to change this. The moment God started creating things, he began limiting his power so that creation might exist. The same concept lies behind the reason why humans have free will. For that matter, the same applies to Jesus' Incarnation and crucifixion. God has the ability to be omnipotent, but he willingly relinquishes that power to allow for our existence.

That is all fine and great, but my point is that many theists say that God is all powerful all the time. They do not make the distinction you are making. I agree with your analysis above, I was just saying that people need to be careful with what they say and how they say it.

Off the top of my head, I can't think of any scriptural references where God set things up so that people *had* to believe in him.

Is there a scripture that says proving God invalidated free will? Or was that just your logic?

The usual divine revelation story involves the human protagonist doubting and being afraid at first, but then deciding to trust. After the human gets to this point, God talks to him. There's always been a choice involved--many people chose not to believe in Jesus.

If you choice to obey, do you have anymore free will?

I think as long as you have the power to decide whether you're having a genuine visitation from God or are hallucinating or dreaming or losing your mind, your free will stays intact.

The problem is that if those are your options (or things very similar to those) you are not truly rejecting God if you think you are just dreaming. It is one thing to say "God, I need to lay off the all night?ers." It is another thing to say "God, I know you exist and all, but I want to go my own way."

No, because you could live in a deterministic universe and still be ignorant.

True, but that does not logically require that free will can exist with complete knowledge.

Faith requires uncertainty, however.

So you don't know for sure, which sound like a lack of information (ignorance) to me.

It also means you have to work for your belief in God, and you alwa

 

Please read what I said about why scientists (and myself) are very sure there was a big bang. I said it to Undomiel in post ~63.

This is what I found:

The whole point of science is to put things under a microscope and study them.

Can you put God under a microscope and study Him?


Scientists may go into an experiment assuming many things, however ideally (and most of the time) those things have been proven in all relevant situations to be true (such as for an experiment involving the motion of things, you can accept that Newton's laws of motion are true). Other experiments are to try to confirm or reject assumptions (if this is true then that should happen).

Can we reconfirm that God exists? Can we do experiments that would go along the lines of 'If there is a God then the results of this test would be whatever?'

Your actual post was longer than this, but this was the portion that caught my attention.

I find it interesting that you insist God and science cannot mix simply because God cannot be confined to a microscope. (the other half of your comment was incorrect. We can study God. It's called theology.) You don't appear to realize that this is the exact same case with Big Bang and evolution. We cannot put these unscientific phenomenons under microscopes simply because they are both founded on speculation.

In that online summary I posted a link to earlier in this thread, it said that Big Bang was first considered through images brought back from the Hubble. That is absurdly unscientific. You see an image, then you guess it must mean this, and suddenyl it is a fundamental scientific principle? Else, I assume you do not believe that people like Newton and Galileo were actual scientists, becasue they believed in special creation? Your thesis is absurd and purely philosophical.

The pressure of all the sub-atomic particles bundled up in the big bang.

The obvious question is, WHAT SUBATOMIC PARTICLES??

PPOR. No it does not. In your proof, don't just have someone saying that it must be, I also demand an explanation why/how it must be.
Actaully, quotes by noted scientists are proof, whcih you have not given for any of your points. To that end, I do not believe you are entitled to more evidence until you can cough up some of your own.

There would still be energy left over which could go into other places. I don't think it is relevant, but it is true.

Actually, it is extremely relevant. Suppose the exact location of Big Bang for a moment. There's the explosion, and all the matter and anti-matter is produced. Now, it is even conceivable that somehow, someway, the antimatter did not neutralize a good portion of the matter, and thus render an earth crippled? I think not.

When an atom formed it itself caused a decrease of (lets just say) 1 unit of entropy. However the heat transferred in making that atom caused 2 units of entropy to be made, so there is still a net increase. That heat is still in the universe, it did not leave.

Whoa. I was not aware entropy could decrease. The 2nd law of thermodynamics says otherwise.

 

EnforgerSG: wrote: Doesn't work. I am God then. I am omnipotent because I can do all possible things, and anything I can't do in impossible (or I can do and choose not to).

Can you do anything except logically definitional impossibilities, like create a square circle, or change _Darth_Brooks'_ mind? If not, you're going to have to withdraw your application for the job.

God *could* wipe the universe out and create one with no logical paradoxes, but that would involve creating a universe with no logic. All logical systems admit paradoxes, because all logical systems can be turned back on themselves recursively, and contradict themselves. That's what Godel's Theorem showed. If you want life to asrise (and stay arisen, instead of popping randomly in and out of existence), you need stable physical laws, i.e., a system of rules. All rules-based systems can be turned back on themselves to create paradoxes. So if you want creation as we know it, you've got to put up with logical paradoxes. Fortunately, paradoxes don't bother anyone but computers, logicians who don't like Godel, and the occasional non-theist on a message board.

That is all fine and great, but my point is that many theists say that God is all powerful all the time. They do not make the distinction you are making.

That's because the distinction I'm making is completely irrelevant except when answering the very tiresome question of whether God could create a rock he couldn't lift.

*Every* logical system admits paradoxes. You're surrounded by them all the time. Sometimes Windows' Blue Screen of Death is caused by a logical paradox caused when two programs can't do anything until they ask each other first, but since they can't simultaneously ask each other first, they can't do anything. The program hangs or the system crashes. Yet how many of us (who don't have Windows 98) sit down at our computers thinking, "Omigosh, recursive paradoxes are permissible within this system. Bill Gates told me that this system is capable of all the things it says in this manual--but doing the things it says in the manual can result in logical paradoxes, so being able to do everything it says in the manual means it can't do everything it says in the manual! Noooooo!! I'm going to sue!111!!" I mean, who cares?

I think the proper attitude to have is, "*Thank you,* God, for creating a universe with consistent Newtonian laws for all things bigger than about a planck's length, so when I drop a used Slurpee(tm) cup into the trash, it doesn't fly straight up and stab me in the eye with the straw."

I agree with your analysis above, I was just saying that people need to be careful with what they say and how they say it.

Well, I guess we could put disclaimer stickers in every religious book in the world: "Warning: Claims of omnipotence void in the event of a logical paradox," but then we'd have to put a sticker on everything, including our own skulls: "Warning: Claims of self-awareness do not actually include awareness of self-awareness itself. Therefore, this person's assertions of consciousness are unprovable, and may be inaccurate."

Is there a scripture that says proving God invalidated free will? Or was that just your logic?

Wait, you want me to turn to the Bible, that nest of logical paradoxes, for *proof* of something?! Actually, as far as I know, St. Augustine is the first person to really take the subject of free will up. You won't find the words "free will" in the Bible at all. My explanation is pretty much the standard non-Calvinist reasoning why God doesn't come down and shake hands and kiss babies every now and then. Strict Calvinists believe there is no free will, and that God determined at the beginning of time which souls would be saved and which souls would be damned. I don't know why they think God doesn't do baby-kissing. I tried to find out where the idea that proof of God negates free will came from, but only found this at New Advent:

Free will does not mean capabi

 

Citizen Kane

I asked you to read specifically the part I said about why I am very sure that there was a big bang. What you replied to I did indeed say, I am not denying that, but I did not say it anywhere near post 63 (I think it was 62, I miscounted, the ~ means about there). I am not impressed by how you replied to request. However I will reply to what you said...

I find it interesting that you insist God and science cannot mix simply because God cannot be confined to a microscope. (the other half of your comment was incorrect. We can study God. It's called theology.)

Ok, fine. Tell me how we can reconfirm that God exists. Give me step my step instructions how. Tell me how we can put the process God made Eve with in a lab. Explain to me how Christ?s cells were regenerated after the reification. If you cannot do that in more detail than just 'God did' then how can you say that religion and science can mix?

You don't appear to realize that this is the exact same case with Big Bang and evolution. We cannot put these unscientific phenomenons under microscopes simply because they are both founded on speculation.

I personally feel that if you would have read the section I asked you to read, you would not have asked this. (You would have asked other question which is fine.) Big bang and evolution exist because of effects we see today that have no other reasonable explanation. If one would come up, then great. You are right, we cannot study the big bang itself, and any research done about it now is just a theory. However the fact that the universe is expanding now (and we have no reason to assume it was not and suddenly started [Newton's Laws]) pretty much proves that something like the big bang actually happened. Similar arguments can be made for evolution.

On to what I asked...

In that online summary I posted a link to earlier in this thread, it said that Big Bang was first considered through images brought back from the Hubble. That is absurdly unscientific.

That link is also clearly wrong. 'A Brief History of Time,' from the 80's, talks about the big bang and there was no Hubble then.

The obvious question is, WHAT SUBATOMIC PARTICLES??

There obviously had to be something to 'explode' when the big bang banged.

I feel a more accurate form of your question should be 'how did whatever banged in the big bang get there?' That is different from 'what banged in the big bang?' which I feel is what you have been asking.

To what I think you are really trying to ask, I have no idea. Maybe a god, maybe naturally it formed, maybe it was always there. I don't know. Currently there is no known way to study that, but there very well could be somehow. There was a time when we could not study cells, then we got the microscope. Something similar could happen here.

Actaully, quotes by noted scientists are proof, whcih you have not given for any of your points. To that end, I do not believe you are entitled to more evidence until you can cough up some of your own.

I realize that a scientist saying 'This is true,' is considered proof, but personally I want to try to understand why that is so. Hence, why I ask for an explanation.

Also you are saying something must happen, and I am asking why (as well as giving my opinion that you are wrong).

Actually, it is extremely relevant. Suppose the exact location of Big Bang for a moment. There's the explosion, and all the matter and anti-matter is produced. Now, it is even conceivable that somehow, someway, the antimatter did not neutralize a good portion of the matter, and thus render an earth crippled? I think not.

Ok, I was not sure if it would be relevant or not (I meant specifically that there would be energy left over).

One question, if in the 'explosion' of the big bang most of the matter and antimatter destroyed each other, but some of each survived, they would not be heading towards each other obviously. So how would all of a sudden a large chunk of anti-matter come af

 

The moment God started creating things, he began limiting his power so that creation might exist. The same concept lies behind the reason why humans have free will. For that matter, the same applies to Jesus' Incarnation and crucifixion. God has the ability to be omnipotent, but he willingly relinquishes that power to allow for our existence.

Well, this is partially correct, except the limiting part. Certainly G-D could choose to limit his 'power' if G-D wanted to, but that would be an option. G-D could have anything, anyone exist without an exchange or loss of energy. It's not like there is a limiting factor or that if enough things were created, eventually G-D would transfer all of his being to everything else. But, that doesn't mean G-D couldn't choose to do that, either. Choice is open and infinity allows G-D to transfer energy ad infinitum without losing anything. Humans will soon understand and believe, after some toying with the notion, that thier existence is not something owed for. A true gift with no expectations in return.

No, because you could live in a deterministic universe and still be ignorant.

True, but that does not logically require that free will can exist with complete knowledge.

Faith requires uncertainty, however.

So you don't know for sure, which sound like a lack of information (ignorance) to me.

Faith doesn't require uncertainty. Uncertainty is an option, as is faith (at it's extent), but the two dont need each other and neither is neccessary. As to ignorance...thats bliss.

But simply knowing that there is a God?

You know, Yoda once said to Luke "you must unlearn what you have learned". Little do people know how much they 'know' but have chosen to forget. Everyone 'simply' knows there is a G-D. But most dont want to be aware of it.

Please read what I said about why scientists (and myself) are very sure there was a big bang.

Big Bang is just a common term applied to 'some' expansion they believe happened. Has anyone continued or said more of the Big Collapse that may have happened before the Big Bang?


more later...

G-D

 

Re: Godel's Theorem--Well, here's a link from Wikipedia, but I don't know how relevant it will seem to the discussion.

Most of my information on Godel's Theorem comes from this book anyway. It's an 800 page book, so a page long summary isn't great, but what can I tell you.

Basically, Godel's Theorem is an "All Greeks are liars" paradox you can use to explode strong logical systems (like a Windows General Protection Fault), and make more flexible, "weak logical" systems scurry away by stepping outside the problem to look back at the problem. But then, the same problem occurs when you step back, so you have to step back again, etc., infinity.

"Bottoming out" means that rather than spinning into infinite regress, there's a point where the recursive process stops, and you say, "No more 'stepping back to look at the problem.' This is so just because it's so." I argue that everybody really beleives that, or at least they behave as if they do, since they'd go insane if they didn't. "Bottoming out" in terms of philosophy is basically a faith position. At some point, you just say something is so because it's so; it's a leap in the dark without "proof."

MasterZap says that a self-aware entity at the base of "bottoming out" is a contradiction in terms, since where does the self-aware entity "bottom out" to? My answer is that it's irrelevant--once you've already taken the step of ending the recursive process by saying "it's so because it's so," all other demands for proof evaporate. One proofless statement is no better or worse than another proofless statement. God doesn't have to go looking for his own God because he *is* God. Duh.

Of course, even if you believe that God contains no paradoxes, you have to admit that the created universe does. There can be no square circles in this universe, for instance. Could God make another universe where the laws are different, in which square circles are possible? I guess so, but he'd either have to create it outside this one, or abolish this one and replace it with the square-circle-universe. God cannot simultaneously make this a universe that admits square circles and does not admit square circles.

I don't see that "limitation" as being inherant in God, I see it as being inherant in creation. If you make one thing, you can't simulaneously make it another, opposite thing. That's just how it works. If this limitation really bothered God, he'd just wipe the universe out and replace it with chaos, in which paradoxes aren't possible. Since he hasn't, I can only assume that paradoxes are okay with him.

This probably makes no sense and won't obviously relate to the Wikipedia definition, but I've been awake for pretty much all of 4 days now. Whaddaya want.

 

In that online summary I posted a link to earlier in this thread, it said that Big Bang was first considered through images brought back from the Hubble. That is absurdly unscientific. You see an image, then you guess it must mean this, and suddenyl it is a fundamental scientific principle? Else, I assume you do not believe that people like Newton and Galileo were actual scientists, becasue they believed in special creation? Your thesis is absurd and purely philosophical.

CitizenKane, with such horribly rudimentary knoweledge of what the Big Bang is or even it's history, I do not think you are qualified an opinion.

The red shift, which is the primary clue to the fact the universe is expanding, was detected by a man named Edwin Hubble

The Hubble telescope is named after this distinguished gentleman.

Could you explain or send a link about Godel and his work?

In a word, no.

Douglas Hofstadter took the better of 500 pages (and help from Achilles and the Tortoise to boot) to explain Gödels theorem in such a way that people would get it without either being a complete egg-head with pockeds loaded with slide rulers, nor come out in a straight jacket yellign "gabagaba".

You could probably Google for a summary of Gödels theorem, but it wouldn't really help you truly get it.

I can try, tho.

Some guys had the idea that a formal system could be designed that could express truths, but not falsehoods. Kinda like the Boolean logic we use today, yet much more powerful. (The intended application was on mathematical theorems, I might add, not wether your wife cheat on you or not)

In ultimate principle, they theorized, there would be flawless way to, eventually, detect if a statement was true or not.

Simply by shuffling symbols around according to a non-changing rule book would eventually prove "sure, this is true" or "nope, 'tis not".

Gödel managed to prove this is impossible, by makign the system act upon itself.

In principle, he proved that (Abstract Logical Seatbelts ON, my friend!!!!)

a) Any system strong enough to be able to do this must have certain properties (or it would not be up to the task AT ALL)

b) With these properties, the system would be able to IN ITSELF encode the very rules of the system itself, i.e. the 'language' of the system would be powerful enough to describe the operations (rules) of the system itself.

c) Hence the system would be able to process these rules and say "true" or "false" on all rules

d) The system would also be powerful enough to encode any statement expressable within itself, plus the ruleset needed to show if this statement was a true statement or not. (Since Gödels system worked on numbers, what he did was simply to enumerate each symbol in teh system w. a numeral, and make a rule-set operating on those numbers that was feature-identical to the actual book rules of the system itself)

e) So now you could, in principle, express WITHIN the system, both the systems own rules, but also any given statement to be tested, call it Q. If you tested this COMPOUND statement (Q+Rules), it would have to give the same result as testing Q directly, or the system would prove itself incapable of doing what it claimed (to assert any true statement expressable int the system)

f) Now Gödel used an ingenious self-referential mechanism where he could cause a statement to operate on itself, based around the concept of expanded quotations, according to the principle by Quine. Take this statement, a little command I give you:

"shall thee write, preceeded by it's own quotation"
shall thee write, preceeded by it's own quotation.

Now if you execute this command, you will write

"shall thee write, preceeded by it's own quotation"
shall thee write, preceeded by it's own quotation.

....because I told you to write shall thee write, preceeded by it's own quotation and preceed this with it's o

 

Ive thought this over many times and yeah I consider this a possiblability.
Why God made a Big Bang? Well thats the first question when I get up there isnt it!

 

Ophelia:

You may get a kick of a story I wrote in avery very Gödel/Escher/Bach frame of mind. The story is here but actually is a loose continuation of this cute fairytale about a program, "The Story of One"

It was posted on alt.cyberpunk.chatsubo which was a newsgroup long ago where a virtual bar was played out in a newsgroup format. Wierd, 'twas. (Having read Gibsons "Neuromancer" helps explain some peripheral puns, but isn't required before understanding this tale, reading GEB first would, tho)

Edit: I think even Dart Brooks may enjoy the Story of One ... maybe not the puns, but the theology

/Z

 

Your daily science fact check.

An equal amount of matter and anti-matter must have been produced by the explosion.

Hmm. Curious that you say that, because some guesses about how the universe got to be this way allow for the possibility that the amounts of matter and antimatter are not equal. I've never understood how that could be the case, though.

Whoa. I was not aware entropy could decrease. The 2nd law of thermodynamics says otherwise.

No, it doesn't. It says total entropy cannot decrease in a closed system. If I drop ten coins randomly in a box, then reach in to reorganize them so they're all heads-up, the entropy in the box has decreased. But the box isn't a closed system, because I was interfering with it. For the sake of this argument, you might want to consider the entire universe your closed system.

In that online summary I posted a link to earlier in this thread, it said that Big Bang was first considered through images brought back from the Hubble. That is absurdly unscientific.

That link is also clearly wrong. 'A Brief History of Time,' from the 80's, talks about the big bang and there was no Hubble then.

The theory is older than that. By the 80's, people were already trying to overthrow the big bang model. There are some well-known popular books on the topic.

Furthermore, I believe it was around the 1920's when Hubble first observed that the expansion of the universe seemed to be speeding up.

There obviously had to be something to 'explode' when the big bang banged.

I feel a more accurate form of your question should be 'how did whatever banged in the big bang get there?' That is different from 'what banged in the big bang?' which I feel is what you have been asking.

Well, I'm certainly no big bang specialist, but if I can give my take on it - if you know anything about particle physics, the way particles "pop out" of nothing is energy is converted into a particle and an antiparticle (or sometimes a whole set of littler particles/antiparticles). Energy is all over the place, even in vacuum, and energy can be readily interconverted with matter. Now this doesn't usually happen spontaneously, because you get issues with conservation of momentum, so particles and antiparticles most often result from some sort of collision of particles that already existed. But I like to suspend disbelief and imagine the big bang as some sort of spontaneous version of that process. A bunch of particles and their corresponding antiparticles would spontaneously come shooting out on their respective vectors. So I don't imagine it as a pressure build-up or anything, just a bunch of particles continuing on their merry old trajectories.

 

If I drop ten coins randomly in a box, then reach in to reorganize them so they're all heads-up, the entropy in the box has decreased

As much as I love your defense of thermodynamics... it hasn't.

Which side is up is neither here nor there entropy-wise. Well okay, some theoretical difference in the weight of metal on one side of the coin vs. the other could have a miniscule impact. But please be noted that the order of the coin has no impact on thermodynamical entropy in any way whatsoever. None.

It may have an impact on statistical entropy in information science, which is a different beast, and has little or nothing to do with thermodynamics.

However, had you stacked the coins in a neat pile, it would have been better. Regardless of which sides were up or not.

I say this to underline how easy it is to misunderstand the fuzzy-feely-goody everyday word "order" when it comes to "entropy". As I've said multple times, it's not that simple.

Anyway, your original example would hold if you had said: Assume I have some coins in a box, and I reach my hand in and stack them up, then entropy in the box has decreased. So while the message you intended to convey was correct, your specific example was not.


Examples, applicable for a "room with coins" system:

A stack of coins has lower entropy than same coins all flat on the floor. Even if the coins on the floor all have heads up.

Or more extrememly, a random bucket of coins on the shelf has lower entropy than same coins spread out on the floor, even if the coins are ordered to spell out "Visilivitj was heeere".

/Z

 

Furthermore, I believe it was around the 1920's when Hubble first observed that the expansion of the universe seemed to be speeding up.

The "speeding up"-part was discovered later. Hubble did observed that the universe was expanding.

 

Hmm. Curious that you say that, because some guesses about how the universe got to be this way allow for the possibility that the amounts of matter and antimatter are not equal. I've never understood how that could be the case, though.

I don't remember where I read this, I want to say sciencedaily had an article concerning this.

Basically matter and antimatter are not quite 10% symmetrical. An imbalance having to do with B mesons causes antimatter to decay faster than matter. It resulted in .0001 more matter surviving the BB than antimatter just 1 second after the BB. Had matter and antimatter been 100% symmetrical we would not be here to discuss this.