Evolution and the Pope

You sound a little like a brainwashed crazy person. You seem to be saying that it is just a mystery we have to accept it and once you accept it then it will be obvious. That is circular logic at its best. You also seem to be saying I should ignore what my senses tell me, namely that I see beginnings. You also seem to be saying to me that I should ignore my mind when in seeing all these beginnings around me I assume the universe has one. Anytime someone tells me to ignore my senses, including common sense I get a little nervous.

Quote: Evenbob

Once you accept it, the world becomes easy to understand.

It might help me to understand why you think this way if you develop this a little bit and share with us how a mysterious universe that exists without beginning or end helps to understand the world.

Quote: FrGamble

Are you really so obtuse as to deny the fact that everything we know, including ourselves (and yes even our souls), have a beginning? If nothing can come from nothing then where did everything come from? If the universe has always existed wouldn't that disprove your supposed fact, because if the universe does exist then something came from nothing?

We don't know that everything has a beginning. We think the universe began at the Big Bang, but we don't know 1) what came before, or 2) whether the concept of "before" even makes sense in this context.

We can argue abut it, but without evidence all arguments are pointless.

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The only way you can hold to the idea that nothing comes out of nothing is to posit a ultimate beginning from a being or force that uniquely is exempt from this fact. A spiritual being or force that has existence in itself, as its very nature, with the power to create all things.

In writing we call this a McGuffin: a device to explain away something without giving a cogent, credible, coherent, logical explanation. You're saying everything must have a beginning and come from something, except God who can be eternal and come from nothing. IT's the creator argument all over again: the universe is so complex it requires a creator, yet somehow the creator isn't so complex as to require one.

The universe exists. That's a fact. Why does it exist? We don't know. And that's a fact, too.

Not too long ago it seemed limits to the universe and what it contains did not exist. It made sense to suppose space could be infinitely large, and the things it contains infinitely small. And I mean "infinitely" literally: that there can be no end to the universe, nor something minimally small. We've learned better since. The universe has a fixed size, though it's expanding, and matter/energy can only be so small.

In time we may learn why the universe exists, how long it has existed, whether it can exist in some other form or has existed in some other form, etc. or we may not.

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You believe against all the evidence that the universe is eternal and has always existed.

What evidence is there that the universe is not eternal?

Yes, we know 13 off billion years ago the primordial atom expanded in a Big Bang. But we don't know a lot else: did time exist before the expansion? If it did, how long did the primordial atom exist before it expanded? If time didn't exist, how did it come to do so? Did the primordial atom come into existence when time did, or did it predate time?

These are some of the questions which need be answered if we are to determine whether or not the universe is eternal.

Now, just to give you something to think about: perhaps the universe is finite in time and space, but existence is not.

Quote: FrGamble

You sound a little like a brainwashed crazy person. .

You mean because I don't have an invisible
secret friend that loves me and grants me
wishes if I pray to him makes me crazy?

Think about what you're saying. Mental
institutions are chock full of religious nuts.
Never heard of atheism pushing anybody
over the brink. Never been a non-believers
war. It's religion that's the problem, not the
lack of it.

Quote: FrGamble

You also seem to be saying I should ignore what my senses tell me, namely that I see beginnings.

You see beginnings because you want to see them.
I used to see them too, then they started to disappear
and the world started to open up. You begin to see
possibilities in everything, instead of man made
road blocks that religion sets up.

Quote: Evenbob

Never heard of atheism pushing anybody over the brink. Never been a non-believers
war. It's religion that's the problem, not the lack of it

Yep, you certainly see what you want to see and you must truly be crazy to say some of the things you do. The 20th century was the bloodiest century in human history and more human beings were killed in the non-believers' atheistic wars in that century than all the other so called religious wars combined.

Quote: Nareed

Science has little to do with purpose and meaning and morality. The people who try to use science to refute religion are missing the point. It's like using math to refute art, or music theory to refute a political position. In all three cases what one needs is philosophy, not science.

Where did my good friend Nareed who started this thread with the above post go. Why be so pessimistic about discovering the beginnings of the universe. Again we don't need scientific evidence nor is it possible to obtain such evidence when talking about the why of the universe. Your good thought provoking questions about what existed before the universe began are philosophical and theological questions and they cannot be answered by science. The idea of a non-contingent being is not a circular argument. It is a logically necessity for there to be something rather than nothing. The argument is that something that did not need to be created, but rather has existence in itself, as the unmoved mover, or first cause needs to exist or we find ourselves in the impossibility of an infinite regress. It doesn't have to do with the complexity of the universe or anything like that and it is quite simple.

Quote: FrGamble

The 20th century was the bloodiest century in human history and more human beings

No group has ever gone to war BECAUSE they
were atheists. They might have been atheists,
but that wasn't what the war was about. Their
wars are always about something else, never
their non belief in god.

Quote: FrGamble

The argument is that something that did not need to be created, but rather has existence in itself, as the unmoved mover, or first cause needs to exist .

No, it does not. The universe has always been here
in one form or another and always will be. It's us
who put limitations on it. Better hurry, life is short,
misery or paradise await you after death. God is
watching and judging and waiting to punish or
reward you. Poppycock. The universe you are part
of could care less what you do or don't do. Look
around, it's obvious. Our ego's run amok and we
dream up hundreds of reasons for us being here.
All religions are true if you believe they are, and none
are true if you believe that too.

Bob, you always ask me for proof for what I believe and I try unsuccessfully to show that logic, science, philosophy, and common sense experience create a preponderance of evidence making it reasonable to believe what I believe. Yet you just shout out a bunch of poppycock about the universe has always been here in one form or another and then you offer absolutely nothing to support your position. Could I please simply ask you to do what you continually ask me to do and attempt to prove it.

Also if they did not go to war because they were atheists and for their non belief in God why did they find it so important to persecute, torture, and kill believers? Also do you think that there is any connection to the fact they were atheists that led to those wars being so particularly ghastly, evil, and destructive? Finally, do you think their non belief in God led them to believe instead in some other type of gods such as the state, power, money, greed, or material things?

Quote: FrGamble

Where did my good friend Nareed who started this thread with the above post go.

You realize it's very unlikely 99% of the people who read this thread will find that statement believable? ;)

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Why be so pessimistic about discovering the beginnings of the universe.

I'm not pessimistic. Fact is we may never know because it's not possible to know.

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Again we don't need scientific evidence

yes, we do.

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nor is it possible to obtain such evidence when talking about the why of the universe.

Yes, it is.

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Your good thought provoking questions about what existed before the universe began are philosophical and theological questions and they cannot be answered by science.

Maybe not. But they're not answerable by philosophy, either. What we learned from the Scientific Revolution is that explanations are no good without evidence to back them up.

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The idea of a non-contingent being is not a circular argument.

No, it's not. But it isn't much of an argument, either. More like a non-sequitur or a monkey wrench.

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It is a logically necessity for there to be something rather than nothing.

Not at all.

According to conservation laws as we currently understand them to be, there should be equal amounts of matter and anti-matter in the universe. Yet if there were, then the universe would have existed for a brief interval before it annihilated itself (pause: what if that did happen multiple times "before"?). This means either 1) our understanding of conservation laws is wrong, 2) equal amounts of antimatter do exist but can somehow be kept apart from matter most of the time, or 3) conservation laws were different, or non-existent, in the early universe we can't yet quite probe.

The point is we could as easily have gotten nothing out of the Big Bang than something.

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The argument is that something that did not need to be created, but rather has existence in itself, as the unmoved mover, or first cause needs to exist or we find ourselves in the impossibility of an infinite regress. It doesn't have to do with the complexity of the universe or anything like that and it is quite simple.

A long regress need not be infinite, merely long. See, a house is made of brick, which is made of different minerals, which are made of molecules, which are made of atoms, which are made of nucleons and leptons, and the nucleons are made of quarks and gluons (the leptons are elementary particles). That's a rather long regress, which, BTW, in the XIX century would have stopped at minerals followed by many unknowns.

IN history some events are obscure or poorly documented. So we may know that X person did Y action, but we don't know why, nor what X expected to gain. These bother historians no end (and history readers, too). So they try to fill in the gaps with "maybes." Maybe X was drunk that day. Maybe X came under the influence of Z temporarily. Maybe X became insane that day. Maybe Y was just part of the plan and we're missing Y2 which would then make perfect sense. Maybe X didn't even issue that order but someone else did.

At this point I like to say "Maybe it was alien space bats." Because that has as much chance of being true as any of the other "maybes."

So why is there something rather than nothing?

Fact: we don't know.

Maybe: Hell, I could throw "maybes" around all day long. maybe dark energy reaches a peak and collapses, whereupon the universe implodes at superluminal speeds. Maybe dark energy is powered by the flow of time, and when time reverses direction the universe collapses. Maybe there is no dark energy and inflation never stopped. Maybe entropy is dark energy, Maybe the hidden gods did it all. Maybe time flows forwards and backwards in alternating cycles but we can't tell the difference. Maybe god did it all. Maybe you're a simulation I created. Maybe I'm a simulation you created. [blasphemous maybe removed]. Maybe god is an advanced human being who travelled back in time, using the power of a compressed galaxy gone hyper-nova, to set things moving. Maybe it's all a conspiracy of electrons (whatever that means). Maybe every black hole is a new universe. Maybe every nucleon is a new universe. Maybe the universe is contracting but our section of it is expanding.

See? Which of these is true and how can we tell?

Just to throw a little ammunition to the Padre. We know nothing about dark matter other than it is necessary for our models of the universe to work. I was watching a documentary last week and the scientists in it claimed that it was necessary for the formation of galaxies or they would never hold together.

It seems like there are a lot of things similar between dark matter and God. Maybe they are the same.