I know your works. I know that you are unable or unwilling to logically support your views, at least here on this board. I know that wishing, which is what prayer is, is not only useless, but it actually hurts because it wastes time you could spend to actually do something.
I know that you are probably not a bad person. You don’t seem like one. I just think you have a set of beliefs that are utter rubbish.
That is kind of nonsensical. “Time came into being”, think about that. How can something happen, except within the context of time? Events are temporal, meaning they are measured in terms of time. Before “time came into being”, no events could have happened.
The language is a constraint that makes it extremely difficult to discuss things outside the bounds of what we can readily understand, try to use words in a way that fails to generate needless paradoxes and conundra, or at least address them directly.
Yes I do think about time coming into being. I agree it can be confusing, but it is a reality. IMO it is important to keep in mind that time was not always part of reality.
Oh and yes an event did take place which then caused time to became part of reality. That event was the change of states; the Big Bang event.
Yes I agree we have language problems, as we do want to say BEFORE TIME, and IMO it is an error to think there is a ‘before time’; kind like there is no North of North, there is no Before Time.
It is also an important point when Atheists discuss Theist Gods who theists claim their god is not part of time, yet is patient and waits for things.
I think it is important because when we realize the Theist God is having a vengeful and angry moment, that moment is its entire existence since it is eternal and not part of a time line.
The fact is that there was a point that Time did not exist and then Time did exist; IMO it is important to recognize this fact.
Like Relativity and Quantum Theory, it really can’t be described in common-sense terms, but can be described with marvelous precision mathematically, and, better, is corroborated by observation.
And, as you note, theologians make the same kinds of claims about God, and I will add, without the advantage of observational corroboration. If I say, “The Big Bang was outside of the conventional time stream,” they scoff…but then they say, “God is outside of the conventional time stream” – and they don’t have a microwave background to point to. They got nothin’. We got somethin’, even if it isn’t satisfying to our earth-bound common-sense.
Until the day that they offer a mathematical description of God, they’re way behind in the debate.
That’s silly, as well as impossible. The universe is a huge mass of matter that isn’t organized in a way that would allow intelligence; and even if it was organized it’s simply too big to be intelligent; it’s too large for its parts to coordinate thanks to the speed of light.
Well, though, one could argue that the human brain is too large for its parts to coordinate at the speed of neural impulses – a fairly low speed, all in all.
That’s why the brain does a lot of sub-processing locally. Why we have two cerebral hemispheres, for instance, coordinating somewhat coarsely through the whatnot (corpus callosum?) Visual information is processed one place, auditory information somewhere else, etc.
I agree with you, let me reassure you! The cosmos does not have a communications network of any sort, and thus the information cannot be processed. The universe cannot be “intelligent” and the idea is dumb.
But the size of it all isn’t a fatal objection by itself; it might process information very, very slowly!
But for the record, the brain processes locally because there are discrete structures which do the processing, not because communication between different parts of the brain are so slow that it wouldn’t work. The brain passes information between different areas as a matter of course; Complex mental tasks might involve two parts of the brain working together, or maybe similar structures in each hemisphere would cooperate to process the same information.
The only significant barrier in the brain is communication between hemispheres, and only when there is a lot of information to be processed.
Actually it can’t; the universe is literally too big for information to pass from one end to the other at all (assuming it even has a finite size), not just pass slowly. The expansion of the universe and the lightspeed limit ensures that signals from any particular part of the universe physically can’t reach a sufficiently distant part.
A “sufficiently advanced” society might be able to construct a slow thinking “intelligent galaxy” I suppose, but a universal mind is impossible barring FTL communications.
In fact it appears that communication between processing centers in itself is an important part of reasoning. Consider this:
Given that men are not 6.5 times more intelligent than women, the logical implication is that one can get a lot of intellectual horsepower out of those connections between processing centers.
Oops! Yes, correct! I overlooked this. (And this isn’t even counting expansionary phase issues, such as the vastly extended cosmos beyond any possible speed-of-light horizon.) As the nice lady liked to say, “Never mind!”
I have absolutely no such belief, if you intend to mean that something caused all of this for a reason, implying intelligence or forethought.
However, yes, I agree that something caused all of the universe, pure random chance. Not exactly anything I’d waste time worshiping (except maybe at a casino).