Which, of course, physicists are already doing and no one but creationists finds to be a debatable activity.
It means that time is a physical property of the universe itself, just like matter and space. Speaking of time “before” the universe is just as senseless as speaking of space “outside” it.
Anyway, the short answer to your OP is that while the precise answer to what sort of underlying quantum matrix or multiverse caused or “prexisted” this one, it does not neccessarily need to have “come from” anything or require a beginning. We know this unverse requires a beginning bcause we can tell it’s expanding from an original singularity, but that doesn’t mean the singularity itself needed a beginning or that the cause (for instance in something like brane theory) needs a beginning.
>How do I look for an invisible salt shaker hovering in front of me when I have no known nor theoretical way to test for it?
Sage Rat, I think you’d have to get help from clergy. Meanwhile, are there any questions you have about cosmology?
That’s a very slimey statement. I think that may be the most insidious thing I’ve ever seen on the SDMB, if I’m reading it correctly.
Let me try and explain why:
Charles Manson believed in Helter Skelter. And he was someone who was decently charismatic.
Now if you put 60% of the population in with a charismatic person, there’s a decently fair chance that he’ll be able to convince them of the truthfulness of his message. But you’re not even just saying to go and listen to, but to try and learn and believe.
Certainly I could go to Charles Manson and say, “You know, I have no way to know that you are wrong since I’ve never studied and really tried to follow your teaching.”
But now as you’re reading me write this, you say, “You can’t compare Helter Skelter to Christianity!”
I’m not comparing them. What I am pointing out is that even though we know Helter Skelter is bad and wrong, we have no more objective way to state that by your reasoning than we do Christianity. If we must try and understand and trust that a belief is correct before we can judge it–well by the time we’ve accomplished this, well by your specific criteria, we will already be brainwashed. And so I say that’s a slimey thing to propose.
It becomes even more slimey because if I say, “But there is a way to objectively measure right and wrong via reason. logic, and the scientific method.” Well you can just reply, “Ah, but you say that because you have already been corrupted into believing that these are the solution to everything.”
So I mean, yes, I suppose that I can’t particularly argue. It is entirely possible that there is no objective way to decide morality and reality, and everything is just as we have trained ourselves to believe and I, simply, have been trained to believe differently from you.
Assuming that, though, essentially is just advocating anarchy.
But, brainwashed though I be, I would still have to point out that logic, reason, and the scientific method gave us time to sit around arguing on the internet and live extended, insured lives. It may just be my brainwashed view, but this seems like something I would think most people can appreciate as being definitively a good thing and definitively real.
This is equivalent to asking why Zeno’s paradox isn’t valid. Something can constantly increase but not reach infinity.
No, there’s a reason they call them “vacuum fluctuations” - there’s not “not nothing” at a small scale. In fact, there’s a whole lot of nothing, I don’t think the rates of virtual particle formation are as high as the notion of “quantum soup” would seem to indicate.
I think we’re talking horribly past each other. Are you or aren’t you saying that hypothesizing about the origins of the universe is a useless activity?
No that isn’t a useless activity. Lots of physicists hypothesize about the origins of the universe, as I said.
However, this thread isn’t about the “origins of the universe”, it’s about “why atheists don’t think God is something we should presume to be the origin of the universe.” These are two separate things. Presuming a god is cutting far enough past what we know in science and then several leagues into the unknown beyond, where there’s still an unknown number of possibilities, that hypothesizing it is equivalent to hypothesizing that everyone on Earth is actually a purple elephant under a hologram or any other imaginative fable that could non-theoretically be possible. that doesn’t mean the fable is wrong, nor that people shouldn’t feel free to ponder it or hope for a day when we can test for the fable, just that we’re far enough from that point in terms of what we factually know that it’s silly to presume that it’s more than one fanciful idea out of an infinite number of possibilities.
That is incorrect. The quantum vacuum is not “nothing.” If it were, then it wouldn’t make sense to talk about vacuum fluctuations; after all, how can “nothing” fluctuate?
On multiple occasions, I’ve quoted physicists John Barrow and Frank Tipler, who said, " the modern picture of the quantum vacuum differs radically from the classical and everyday meaning of a vacuum–nothing." Rather, the quantum vacuum contains energy that is continually borrowed and returned as evanescent particles are created and annihilated. It most certainly is NOT “a whole lot of nothing”!
Ah I see, we’re pretty much on the same page there; it was just that your agreement to these statements:
made it seem like you were of the opposite opinion. I believe there’s a similar confusion between you and Napier as well.
The question of why something, rather than nothing, and why this something exists is an interesting philosophical question that is as yet unanswered.
Some of my fellow atheists feel a pressure to claim that there’s no mystery there, just to remove another gap into which a god may hide.
I prefer to simply say that positing the existence of a god does nothing to solve the problem of existence, since all the same questions about the Universe’s existence can be asked about god, and it actually throws up lots of new mysteries.
As the erudite CalD might put it: it’s less sensical 
We need to answer what is on the table before moving on. The origin of the universe, if there is such a thing, is actually on the table. Hence I agreed with that, but had to constantly hedge that beyond that is a silly thing to do.
But so yeah.
Well, OK. Sage Rat, I did miss a critical element of your position, which I think I now understand hinges on a distinction between the history of and the origin of the universe.
You seem to propose an orderly approach to understanding the universe, in which we would satisfy ourselves that there is some kind of origin to be understood before we spent time trying to understand it - is that right?
I would go further than you in indulging people who want to consider the origin of the universe, or consider “before” the big bang. If you dig into the subject there are all sorts of connecting threads that can defy partitioning our understanding into history versus origin. So I don’t find anything silly about considering the origin or beyond the bang. In fact I think I read something relating to pre-bang fluctuations producing telltale frequency distributions in data from the Wilkerson Microwave Anisotropy Probe in SciAm just a year or two ago, or something like that. So, where exactly the veil completely blocks our view isn’t perhaps so final.
I do like the idea about the OP that scientists are not going to conclude that the lack of an answer discredits science. A failure to explain where everything came from does not suggest we turn to magic instead.
And I also like the way that any science I have read in or about builds a satisfying sense of reason and willingness to question and desire for accurate observations. Perhaps the nicest thing anyone can say about science is that there is no wish among scientists to block inquiry in any area.
I’m just going to throw out a small proof of atheism, and then I’m going to bow out of the atheism debates for the time being:
The origin of the universe isn’t necessarily the begin of everything. The universe is potentially one small fragment of an even greater framework of reality, for all we know.
But, God has always been one step -past- whatever the current scope of our knowledge is. If we discover the origin of the universe, most assuredly God would be moved to before whatever that origin is, and then again when the actual origin of that is discovered. He will always be beyond the scope our knowledge.
Rat’s Proof of Atheism
Part 1: For every time God is moved to a new place in our understanding of everything, the probability of His existence approaches zero. This includes things like Darwinian evolution and the age of the planet.
Part 2: If you don’t believe that it’s just a matter of time before God is discovered by scientific inquest, then you don’t believe in God.
Heh, I was just thinking about this the other day.
Both situations do end up with an existential question that may be ultimately unanswerable - why does anything exist?
However, physics doesn’t pretend to answer this question. All it does it say what things we do know, and what things we don’t know, and what are the most likely mechanisms for the processes we can observe.
“God” claims to answer two questions - why does everything exist, and more specifically, why is it so complex and interesting? There’s several problems with this:
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Whatever physical process caused the universe, it is not necessarily more complex and mysterious than the universe itself. But God is, and therefore as an explanation just creates a bigger problem to solve.
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This would be fine if actual observation of the universe led inexorably to evidence of God - then we’d just be following the scientific method but:
A) The God explanation is not an evidential theory, it is a philosophical one, for which solutions that are more complex than the problem are not appropriate, unlike physical theories, for which complex systems can be appropriate explanations for simpler phenomena.
B) It puts the cart before the horse. If God exists, it should be the inevitable conclusion based on verifiable experimental results. Whereas instead God is being assumed first, and then later all evidence is put through this lens of preconception, and fanwanking and retconning commence to fit everything into that assumption. -
Inevitably God is the God of the Gaps. God is used as the default explanation for that which doesn’t already have an explanation. Every day we discover the true explanation for something and the Gap gets smaller. There’s no good reason to expect that at some point this will stop, and God really will turn out to be the explanation for something.
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In that vein, a lot of things that people think need some special explanation for either are already explained, or are not that mysterious.
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We have direct observation that the universe exists, and that every new discovery we have made has involved a physical process. There’s no reason to believe that this was different at any time in the past.
You’re setting up a straw-man - the “God of the Gaps”.
Nobody would argue that “God” has been used to explain previously unexplainable physical phenomena. But:
Let’s pretend we know every physical fact about the universe. Wouldn’t the question “Why did it even come to exist?” still be relevant? I’m not talking about the question “What physical properties started the Big Bang?”, I’m talking about the question “Why should the Big Bang have occured? What was the point?”
Even better, and the question I have never heard an atheist answer satisfactorily:
“Why did inanimate matter come to contemplate its own existence?”
Nonsense. The purpose of science is to help us understand the universe we live in. If God is not fully contained in this Universe (and most religions believe he is not) then there is no point in holding this view.
It’s like saying “Once I know all of geometry, I know all of mathematics”. Certain parts of mathematics are reflected in geometry, but geometry certainly doesn’t contain everything there is in mathematics.
Nothing in science can ever say “A is morally wrong” or “B is art”.
Sure, science can say - “70% of humans believe that A is morally wrong” based on observation. But the truth or falsehood of “A is morally wrong” can never be determined by science. “A is morally wrong” is either true or false based on something entirely outside of the observable physical universe.
“We don’t know yet, but we will continue to gather information until answers come forth, because we don’t feel that blind supposition without satisfactory evidence does anybody any good in the long run.”
Why shouldn’t the Big Bang have happened? Why does it need a point?
Perhaps it was a random event. Maybe it was inevitable given the preconditions. Regardless, it seems like an area for further scientific query, not wildass speculation of some mythical superbeings.
Why not? Is there something preventing it?
Seriously, I think you’ve left out of few steps here. You may as well ask why does a spermatozoa shop for shoes and watch football. Perhaps you need to consider the intermediate stages. In other words, the key question here is how did inanimate matter transform into living organisms? We can proceed by breaking things down into concepts small enough to be investigated instead of trying to answer everything all at once. In this case, science is rapidly making progress in the field of abiogenesis, which helps to understand the initial formation of life. Once life has begun, evolution can explain how brains are formed.
Cite?
Morals are a concept entirely based entirely inside the physical universe. We invent the concept of morals, and we decide what is right or wrong.
Cite?
Where did you get the idea that there has to be a reason?
You know that geomotery is a subset of mathematics. There is no reason to believe that the physical universe (or multiverse) is a subset of anything else.
That’s because “morality” has no objective value to begin with. It’s all just opinion. As I like to say, it’s basically a personal aesthetic like taste in beer.