Not much of an answer. :dubious:
In as much as he is indicating tacit approval of the impossibility of a logical response to a faith-held belief, I think that is as good and honest a response as you’re liable to get from a believer.
I’m very confused.
A. The universe, or the processes that lead to the creation of any universe (say, branes rubbing up against each other or a local bubble of reality coming into being in the giant multiverse – whatever caused the big bang) are eternal.
B. The processes that led to our universe are not eternal. God set in motion the processes that led to our universe. God is eternal.
I’m seeing people in this thread saying that A is ridiculous while in the next breath saying that B makes sense and is the only logical conclusion. Either way it’s turtles all the way down – it has to be. Somewhere in the chain you run into a wall.
Now, someone explain why or how going through the labor of poofing God the creator from out of left field helps outside of making you feel fuzzy and warm when you go to bed. Also, where may I reach him/her/it? Does he have an e-mail address? I have a long list of complaints that I think he would be interested in seeing – lots of shoddy craftmanship, really.
Occam’s Razor definitely doesn’t say we shouldn’t study the big bang. All it says is that given two models with equal evidence you rely on the one with the least assumptions and extra entities. I wouldn’t bring it up if you fancy the idea of God.
We are receiving the radiation from the last scattering – that’s what the microwave background radiation is, after all. The microwave background radiation is everywhere and has been mapped extensively and fulfills the predictions made by the current big bang model. It is uniform throughout all of space and just by itself is a huge neon sign pointing towards the big bang.
There are lots of other neat things about the big bang model too, like its prediction and mathematical bookkeeping of the ratios and amounts of various light elements, like helium-4 and deuterium. Or the distribution and ages of galaxies and their formations. I already mentioned the red shifting. There are any number of other things; entire libraries and all that.
Cite? Dark matter has been known to exist for decades; the recent observations of the bullet clusters will help fine tune what we know about dark matter and may clarify one group’s former pet hypothesis over the other guy’s, but it has nothing to do with the credibility of the big bang theory.
No a god equivalent - some god, not necessarily having anything to do with our god, or Earth. Perhaps this god cares about some other people, and they’ve gone to heaven, and we’re here until got gets around to cleaning up after the party.
We can pray to oh god somewhere sometime, if you ever get around to visiting please answer my prayers. That’s sure uplifting. :dubious:
Or gods. Let’s not insult the pantheists, here. 
Well, in post #90 I did mention Aton, Vishnu, Thor, Zeus, and those were intended to be merely representative.
It all reminds of of the Deist prayer as revealed by UCLA Professor Eugen Weber.
I hate philosophy. Hate, with the gamma bursts of a billion pulsars. The field is choked with arcane, convoluted language that ultimately says very little of worth. And yet, somehow I find myself reading bits of the works of Aquinas and Aristotle in an effort to bring down this First Mover nonsense. Well, here we go.
So, if you accept A and B, then C logically follows from that, and D from C (in conjunction with the simple observation that the universe is not static). I know nothing of Hume and don’t really care to go down that path, so I’ll leave A alone. This leaves me with B: nothing may move itself. What, then, was Aristotle’s argument, exactly? I found this webpage that seems to be part of a university philosophy course:
In other words, motion is eternal because motion cannot spring forth from nothing. Something must be the source of motion. Time is eternal because it measures motion. If all motion ceased, then time would cease as well. But motion cannot cease because something must cause it to cease, and something must cause that to cease etc. Therefore, there must be an unmoved mover that is the source of all motion, and that is eternal. I wonder what Aristotle would make of modern physics, in which it is said that time did not exist before the Big Bang, and may potentially end with the heat death of the universe – heat death being a state in which entropy has reached its maximum and the universe is completely uniform and dead. And if there is an unmoving mover, why not an unmoving stopper? I suppose that role could be filled by Satan or some other great destroyer, but let’s not get sidetracked.
In other words, things that appear to be self-moving actually have some part that was moving to begin with, so that ultimately something else set it in motion. So basically Aristotle says that nothing can move itself, because that would ultimately require that movement springs from nothing.
This all leads to what I feel are unanswered questions:
Why must motion have a cause? Aristotle argues that the eternal unmoved mover set all else in motion, because nothing can move itself because motion must have a source because motion is eternal. That seems awfully damn circular to me.
Why must time have always existed? Modern physics suggests that time may indeed have a beginning and end, as I stated earlier. If I am willing to say that time has not always existed and may not continue to exist, contrary to Aristotle’s statement, does that destroy the basis of his argument?
Why can’t motion cease? This part of the argument seems utterly stupid, even more than the rest. Hell, plenty of religions have some sort of end times scenario in which one could argue that motion ceases. An unmoving stopper is neither more nor less plausible than an unmoving mover. Again, does an unmoving stopper do that much damage to the argument?
Aquinas seems to have a different take on why nothing can move itself. I found a different, but only slightly less baffling translation, here:
I honestly don’t know what the hell that means. Is he saying that a thing cannot have the potential to become two different things? That’s clearly false. I can ignite wood to make a fire; under one set of conditions I create ash and under a different set of conditions I create charcoal. I can carve it into a duck, I can make methanol, I can bury it and maybe it will turn to stone in a few hundred thousand years.
Maybe he’s saying that once a potential has been realized and motion has occurred, other potentials, especially opposing potentials, are locked out. That’s true in some cases, but not all. Instead of wood, let’s consider the chunk of bronze mentioned by Aristotle in my link. Bronze can become a statue. Yeah, but I can melt the statue back into a chunk of bronze too. I can take a statue of Demeter, representing the harvest and fertility, and transform it into a statue of Ares, representing war, or of Hades, representing death.
Maybe it means something else altogether? Fuck if I know. In any case, I don’t see how it then follows that a thing cannot move itself, or alternatively that something cannot be created from nothing. Quantum theory predicts that under certain conditions a matter/antimatter pair of particles – say, an electron and positron - may appear where none were before. This is more a case of energy spontaneously changing into matter than of matter springing forth from nothing, but even so it would seem to contradict the idea that a thing cannot move itself.
Therefore, I don’t think it’s proven that nothing may move itself. As this is the B premise of Aquinas’ syllogism, it is also not proven that there must be a First Mover.
I suppose I was hoping for an admission that this:
is a false dichotomy - that Captain Carrot is correct in that we don’t know what laws might apply to the universe as a whole, from outside the universe, and that a bifurcation between “taking it on faith that there is a physical explanation” and “assuming there is an unmoved mover” is not warranted. The correct answer is “none of the above” - we do not know at this time.
I would hope that a believer could give better than a 2-word answer.
I suppose that could be true. But free will is at least influenced by other movers, right?
Yes, but we do have an understanding now of how it behaves. So if you want to take it on faith that there’s some heretofore unknown physical property that would explain this, fine. That’s certainly possible. It’s just not consistent with our current understanding of the “causality” of the universe.
Are you under the impression that I’m arguing logically for the existence of a Christian God? :dubious:
Perhaps you can read my answers throughout the thread. I don’t think I’ve held my cards to my vest, and I believe I have allowed for the possibility that there is some physical circumstance that we don’t understand–one that would initially at least appear to contradict our understanding of the linearity of cause and effect in our universe. I certainly don’t know. I do know that an unmoved mover is more logical–for me–in the context of what we currently understand about cause and effect in the universe. But perhaps we don’t understand all we need to, for sure. But an unmoved mover is certainly a logical conclusion, one that some refuse to grant, even in a form that does not demand a particular type of a God (others clearly do acknowledge this as a logical possibility, even if they don’t feel it likely). I find that form of orthodoxy interesting.
What more would you like?
Let me word it differently, as a question: Do you (anyone) take it on faith that we will ultimately find a physical explanation that will negate the logical conclusion of an unmoved mover? Or do you feel that the syllogism that concludes in the unmoved movers is a non sequitur, even without any other physical explanation? Or something else?
**PC ** has a point. Even if free will is affected partially by outside forces, that suggests there’s a kernel of “true” free will in there, which would by definition be an unmoved mover. That it then goes on to be influenced by outside things doesn’t mean it was caused by outside things.
You’re slicing away influences but claiming that influences remain. Keep slicing away the influences and if nothing remains then we do not have free will.
If we don’t have free will then we are meat computers and a lot of religious thinking goes down the drain. If we do have free will then we contain an unmoved mover. We are god equivalents. That deflates the impressiveness of the idea of there being one great unmoved mover.
How can that which has no goal, not achieve that non-goal? How can the ascertain of a lack of belief lead to failure? What does atheism have to do with science, or the creation of the world?
What does this have to do with atheism?
I guess what’s still bothering me about your responses is that several of us have pointed out that while cause and effect apply within this universe, that we have no evidence that they apply to the universe as a whole. The concept of time breaks down at the big bang, and does not extend beyond it. You continue to refer to a “logical conclusion” that the universe must have a creator, without acknowledging what we’re saying. The logic that every effect must have a cause is dependent on time. If time is absent, that logic does not apply. I suppose it’s o.k. if you disagree, but could you at least acknowledge the point?
Let’s break this down: What you are really saying is that there had to be something that happened before the big bang. This is something that has come up in countless discussions, and to borrow a response that others have used many times, asking what happened before the big bang is like asking “What is north of the North Pole?”
We simply don’t know what, if anything, is outside of our universe. It could be God, it could be another universe, it could be a WalMart, or it could be a purple chicken. Besides which, let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that there is a realm outside of our universe that is eternal (I don’t care for this “unmoved mover” philosophical jargon). That still in no way proves that this thing is God. So even if it were a valid point, it doesn’t invalidate atheism.
I don’t think so. Not if all those exercising free will were created (in an earthly sense). They don’t get to exercise free will except that some movement created the circumstance.
Tell me what you mean by “time breaks down,” please.
So you don’t believe humans have free will? Kinda takes a big chunk out of religious morality don’t you think?