Rather than hijack CalD’s thread, I thought this point might be worth a separate thread:
I could equally rewrite this from the opposite side: “If the universe is the result of a purely physical process or event, how did the environment in which that process or event happened come to be?”
IOW both are equivalent. Or are they?
I believe the standard answer is that it always was, time being meaningless before the Big Bang.
Valete,
Vox Imperatoris
You mean like Theists saying that Og is Eternal?
The answer to the OP is very simple.
We don’t know yet, but as soon as we gather enough evidence to form a scientific theory, it will be presented, o.k.?
We don’t know. It doesn’t matter to the question of whether or not god exists.
I don’t know. I don’t even know if the question makes sense.
No. There is no reason to suppose an intelligent creator just because you don’t know what caused something. It could just as well be the case that universes are created all the time by some unknown “extra-universal laws”. There’s definitely no evidence for a creator, but we do know that our current universe exists.
We don’t know yet, though there certainly are a few theories floating around, some of them even more bizarre than simply declaring some divine being did it.
My personal feeling is that we won’t know within my or my (unborn) children’s lifetimes, though some theories might become better developed. There could very well be extra-universal laws we don’t yet understand, like Superfluous Parentheses mentions.
I don’t ascribe to the “god of the gaps” mentality, though. As there are logical explanations for everything else we understand up to this point, I see no reason to assume that there won’t be an explanation for this as well.
There’s something important to note here: Have you noticed that many hard-line religious people always seem to have an answer for everything, no matter how absurd that answer is? Every question must have an answer in the Bible, and if there isn’t one they will invent an answer that is supported by the Bible. Scientists, on the other hand, know how limited our knowledge is, and have no problem admitting that there are things that we just don’t know yet. We don’t know the context of the Big Bang, and perhaps we never will . . . but that doesn’t justify creating a context (God) based on no evidence whatsoever.
We just don’t know (yet).
Does it even matter? What possible gain could there be from determining what happened before the BB? Will it help us avoid the BC, or the next big universe fart? Wouldn’t the money spent researching this be far better spent on something more important, like the energy crisis? Or are scientists hoping to stumble on some wonder cure-all energy transformation system by accident, like it seems happens in a lot of major discoveries. Have they got a specific objective, other than to see if quarks are hairy, or lemon-flavoured?
And say they do find god? What if his name isn’t Allah? Are you going to tell the Muslims?
I think the two views described in the OP are not symmetrical.
One view is the argument that complexity requires a designer and therefore there must be a designer. What is wrong with it is that, since the designer now requires another designer, the argument hasn’t actually fixed the problem that supposedly demands that argument.
The other view has the same effect of passing the problem along by one stage, to needing an environment in which the process could happen. But nobody who is working on the origin of the universe problem is offering a final answer. It is business as usual for scientists who while working out a problem generate more questions than they answer. They may argue that some specific step must have happened in a certain way, but they won’t try to argue that their position is correct because no questions remain.
Not really. Well, unless you’re a pantheist, because the Universe isn’t the result of “a purely physical process or event”, it IS that event. It is its own environment.
And before you ask, it arose from nothing. This is not unusual. It happens all the time, all around us. Plato and Aristotle were just plain wrong.
That’s an…unscientific attitude. What was the point of NASA or the LHC? A lot of times, the point of knowing is to know, so that we can expand our knowledge from a more informed understanding of the nature of the world.
Valete,
Vox Imperatoris
It’s a very pragmatic one though. The Universe is going nowhere; meanwhile we have got serious issues closer to home. Investigating the stars should be something we are doing in our retirement years, not while there is shit to be done now.
One day astronomers are going to discover everything and find themselves out of a job. What will they study then? Couldn’t their intelligence be put to better use?
It’s not really pragmatic at all. What makes you think that astronomers, for example, can be put to use solving energy problems? And there is always going to be a thing we “need” to solve right now; if we followed your train of thought a hundred years ago, we would never have explored the cosmos or discovered the secrets of the atom. Do you seriously think that astronomers are close to being “done”? By the way, they also thought this one hundred years ago, i.e. that science had almost finished learning everything to be learned (before they even knew how babies were made, naturally). Besides, what if, by seeing if quarks are “hairy or lemony”, they find a source of energy we can tap into to solve our problems? Not that you even could tell all scientists, “Go solve the energy crisis!” and get anything done faster than it is now; science just doesn’t work like that.
Valete,
Vox Imperatoris
Cite for the latter sentence?
Actually, don’t bother, since within the universe there’s no such thing as nothing once you get to a very low level. So that latter sentence is unprovable.
>The Universe is going nowhere; meanwhile we have got serious issues closer to home. Investigating the stars should be something we are doing in our retirement years, not while there is shit to be done now.
Ivan, this sounds like an excellent reason for you to work on the shit to be done now, not a reason to stop astronomers from doing astronomy.
It’s human nature to be curious, and it’s the nature of knowledge to not be neatly partitionable. Many people would agree that the calculus is very useful to the engineers and scientists now being put “to better use”, and some would have argued against Newton wasting time inventing it to figure out the orbit of the Moon, which would have been useless. I second Vox’s comment that science doesn’t work like that. Like Faraday said, during a demonstration of electricity when someone in the audience asked him what good it was, “What good is a baby?”
And what does this have to do with my OP? Nothing.
This is a thorough red herring. Nowhere does my OP mention the Bible. Or the Koran. Or any other religious tract.
“what designer created the designer?” and “what process created the process” : yes I think there are equivalent questions. But we have no evidence for a designer, so there’s no reason to assume one.
As for the question itself : I don’t know. I don’t even know if the universe is a result of anything. And the fact that I don’t know doesn’t allow me to make up an explanation on the fly, and if the explanation doesn’t make any more sense (since we’re still caught with the same issue : “and what created that?”), not only it’s completely arbitrary but also it isn’t an explanation at all.
And I don’t even have a reason to believe we will someday be able to know. The universe doesn’t have to make sense, and even less to make sense for us. Our brain allowed us to escape the claws of big cats, there’s no reason to believe it is able to understand the universe, even assuming the universe is understandable. Great apes can make tools and apparently have a conscience of themselves, but they’re unable to understand many concepts obvious to us. We too must have limitations, even though many people like to believe we don’t.
Nice one! I can’t argue with that last bit. 
As for the rest, perhaps if you can describe a possible practical application for the knowledge gained from studying far off galaxies and such, I might be more inclined to buy your argument.
Double post deleted