It seems to me that this is possibly a restating of the chestnut “Why is there something instead of nothing,” to which I have not heard a good answer, except possibly the authoritarian “There just is.”
And whatever you do, don’t go to some weird south pacific island and ask a monkey priest that question, because if you think about it long enough, you’re REALLY not gonna like his answer 
That’s a reference to a Raymond Smullyan recreational logic book btw.
hmm… well I suppose that there is something instead of nothing purely because we are living in a universe where there is something, and so anything we have in our something could only explain itself within a universe that does exist. Answer: we can’t know why there is not nothing, because being something we can’t acheive nothing.
haha, I think that’s basically a longer version of “it just is” but w/e 
Oh, jeez, here we go.
So do you deny the point of my post: YOU MAY BE WRONG?
As an scientist I’m sure you know that some of the most dangerous things a scientist can bring to the table are preconceptions bias.
What moment are you talking about? There was no moment when there was not a Universe.
It may amuse those of a historical bent, by the way, that the first person to posit the explanation that time is part of the Universe and began with it was neither modern nor a physicist, but St. Augustine. Dude did a lot of thinking, and a lot of writing.
Perhaps a poor choice of words. I simply meant to demarcate pre-big bang, big bang, and post-big bang.
Thanks for the St Augustine info. Do you know in which of his writings it can be found?
And some of the most dangerous things anyone can bring are mistaken assumptions.
Where does my post say non-believers cannot be wrong?
The problem I have with your propositions are the same as many others (evolution versus creationism; Moon hoax versus Moon landings).
You make it sound as if two opposing ideas have equal validity just because they are opposed. You ignore the evidence.
Evolution and creationism are not two equal theories. There is a mass of evidence for one and none for the other.
Some people believe Jesus was the Son of God.
Some don’t.
Some believe the Pope is God’s representative on Earth.
Some don’t.
Some people built amazing Pyramids because they believed in Ra.
Some people think the World is 6000 years old.
There is no evidence for any of the above.
Which do you think we should believe?
My position, of course, is that there is no reason to believe in any religion at present, since there is no evidence for any of them.
If evidence comes along, I will change my mind.
magellan01, some people think the World might have been created last Thursday. Do you agree with them?
If not, could you be wrong?
If you could be wrong, don’t you have to classify this belief as likely as any other?
How about: Something had to cause everything. Except, perhaps, the Universe.
Is that really any different? if you can accept one “causeless” thing, why can’t you accept 2 causeless things? If you can accept 2, then why not 3, etc?
And of course, as others have noted, we can simply say that we don’t know the cause, and leave it at that. It could be God, it could be anything. But we have no reason (ie, evidence) to believe it’s God rather than anything else.
glee: I don’t think I was assuming anything. My implication that you were denying my point, i.e., that “non-believers” can be wrong, was deduced from your restatement of my two admonitions.
In the first one, talking to “believers” you kept in the possibility that they may be wrong. But in the second one, to non-believers", you deleted that possibility. Was I therefore incorrect to conclude that non-believers being wrong is not on the table.
I know you are pointing to degrees of certainty and that evidence increases that certainty. But why leave the possibility of being wrong out of it all together. Do you not think it is healthy—from a scientific standpoint—to acknowledge ignorance as well as kowledge? In fact, isn’t that the first step to acquiring true knowledge?
I’m sorry if I dismissed your point to quickly. But I just don’t get why, with the relative small amount of kowledge we have about the beginnings, those of an empirical bent are so quick to dismiss the possibility of theism playing a role in the grand scheme of things.
And just to clarify, I do not mean to point to any religion. The point I was making stands even if every religion known to man is 100% incorrect. It is even possible that the big bang happened and IT was willed by a creator.
Yes and no. The only thing that causes me to lean to the God playing a role position is, ironically, science. I cannot see the laws of the univers being broken willy-nilly. The scientist in me believes that the law of causality is undeniable and consistent. The only exception would be interference from something outside the laws of nature, an entity of a higher order.
I know that this can very well be wrong, but I find it a bit easier to wrap my head around than the law of causality being suspended with no outside influence.
And except the ytreza. The ytreza is an interesting peculiarity of the nonuniverse (which is what unexist when T takes negative values) that causes matter an energy to come into existence and time to take positive values when the oscillating value of t = - pi and the dominant color of the nonuniverse is pink-brown. So, the ytreza is the cause of the big bang. This theory, though I can’t give any evidence to back it up, seems extremely convincing to me.
To those who are sure there’s no specie of intelligent cabbages growing on the moon orbiting around the seventh planet of Orion, I say : you do not have all the information, you may be wrong.
IOW : are we to accept as equally valid any possible concept because we can’t prove with an absolute certainty that it doesn’t exist?
If I can’t say : I’m sure there’s no god, then you can’t say “I’m sure there aren’t any fairies”, either . All hypothesis anyone ever conceived, is conceiving, will conceive or could possibly conceive are equally valid.
You’re taking a agnostic stance “we can’t know whether god exists or not”. But for some mysterious reason, this stance only applies to one concept : “God”, while I’m sure there’s a huge number of things or theories you’re rejecting as false without thinking “I don’t have all informations, so I can’t tell for sure, I might be wrong”. Or else, watch out for the green dragon that conceivably could be hiding under your bed.
If there’s no evidence for the existence of something, I’m indeed going to assume it doesn’t exist until given some evidences. If you want me to tell “there could be a god, I’m not sure”, then tell me that you’re not sure either whether or not there are fairies dancing at midnight in the woods when nobody’s around.
And assuming there is a god, what kind of god is it? Did he die when the universe came into existence? Is he supremely indifferent? Did he leave this universe because he’s busy with some other experiment? Is it evil? Does he only care about the intelligent cabbages from Orion I mentionned above, who happen to be his chosen people? Since, even assuming that “god” exists, we’re still left with zero informations about what this god thing is, it’s, besides being unfounded, an absolutely useless theory.
I personnally thinks that if there’s a god, it’s an eternal non-sentient bacteria-like being with a digestion process that results in it popping a universe from time to time. It’s a concept of god exactly as valid as any other you could come up with. And don’t argue with me : you don’t have all the informations, you can’t know for sure.
Clairobscur: Let me ask you, what percent of all universal knowledge do you think we possess? Of course, I mean we as a species, not such an exceptional smartass as yourself.
I’ll go out on a limb an assume that you’d agree that the maximum extent of your knowledge does not exceed that of Stephen Hawking or some of the other leading cosmologists who have come to the conclusion that it is more likely there is a god than there isn’t. If agree with that, I’d ask if all those who make room for the possibility of an intelligent agent are equally as dumb as I and equally worthy of your bratty dismissal?
I await your enlightenment O’ Magnificent One.
Appeal to authority isn’t an argument. Nor is appeal to popularity or appeal to tradition. These are called logical fallacies for a reason.
You didn’t tell me why I should believe your theory about the origin of the universe or about god for which you’re providing no evidences rather than the ones I made up.
What makes the “god” belief something that I can’t reject because “I don’t know everything” while beliefs nobody share anymore, or beliefs that only a tiny percentage of the population still buy in (and that would include a lot of fantastic creatures, for instance), or beliefs that recently appeared (and there are really weird beliefs out there), or beliefs that I simply made up on the spot can be safely rejected despite you not knowing everything either? There are people actually believing in spirits living in the woods, you know. You don’t know everything. Do you as a consequence refuse to reject this belief? Do you extend this courtesy to every human belief?
If we accept the “god created the universe” theory, what exactly makes the “god is interested in us and good” more likely than “god wasn’t a sentient being”? “god dissapeared” or “the numerous gods couldn’t care less about us”? Why would you assume that this “god” thing could even make sense to us? Would have the slightest interest in us in case it would be sentient and have any interest in the universe? You know about the scale of the universe, don’t you? What makes you think you’re so special that a creator god having even the most remote interest in you is a sensible assumption?
I agree insofar as “matter” required the universe to expand and cool such that the strong force could bind protons and other baryons together. But cosmologists most certainly agree that the singularity at t=0 is the universe at that point.
And I myself remain open to the possibility of God’s existence. I, and Hawking and Guth, consider that God may well be an unnecessary explanatory entity, and that cosmology does not present a Gap big enough to fit God into. That OP was a defence of the natural explanation of the universe against those who might dimiss such an explanation while holding a supernatural position.
This is because you live in the region of the universe where each time is preceded by a different configuration state. At T=0, there is no different configuration. The universe cannot get any smaller. Since “before” T=0 is thus undefined, it makes no difference whether you consider that singularity be timeless or to have existed for an infinite amount of time previously without change. In neither case does the word cause make any sense.
I suggest that, on the contrary, it is a tiny place.
I am not suggesting this, and neither does anyone I know of. There was NO nothing-to-something transition. There was NO non-big bang existence. The “next moment” is a different place in the universe, just as nothing causes the Earth to expand out towards the equator from the North Pole.
Wrong. Motion and causailty are functions of time.
I hope I can convince you that the arguments are not circular. You must divest yourself of the notion of temporailty and explore time as just another dimension of space. This is not intuitively easy at all, given that time (or its illusion) plays such an enormous role in our everyday lives. Indeed, our cognitive apparatus arguably evolved to produce a “flow of time”, since it allowed us to predict eg. the motion of prey better than cognitive apparatus having no such feeling of temporality. But such understanding does come, with patience.
There are, of course, a great many erudite and respected theists, but can you show me a citation or quote from Hawking where he actually ascribes a greater probability to God’s existence than not? In all of his writings, I have only ever seen him entertain the possibility of God’s existence - an eminently reasonable stance which I myself share (merely ascribing a very small probability to such).
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There is absolutely no reason to assume that something had to have caused the Big Bang. Why? Because there is no reason to assume that causality existed before the Big Bang. Causality is a function of the laws of physics in the universe. Somehow the Big Bang happened and this universe exists. What existed before that is not knowable because we cannot see or measure anything before the Big Bang. Due to the way the Big Bang unfolded we can only see so far back into the past. It took some time for light to be able to penetrate the early universe. In the early stages any light that was emitted was quickly reabsorbed because the density was so great. After the a short period of time the universe became transparent enough for light to exist without being reabsorbed. We cannot gain any direct knowledge of what happened while the univserse was extremely young and dense because light could not escape. So we can only go back so far. Causality exists as far back as we can see but that does not mean that it existed before that. It also does not mean that whatever existed before the Big Bang (if anything) was causal. Heck, we can’t even say that there was time before the Big Bang. Without time there is no causality.
It very well could be that there was no first un-caused causer. It could have just happened. We just can’t know*.
Slee
If I may suggest, it is this notion that the Big Bang happened that causes all the confusion. We do not say that the North Pole “happens”, nor that the universe today “happens”. The Big Bang is now. If it “happened”, it is still happening. I suggest that the words “universe” and “Big Bang” are actually synonymous, and should be used interchangably as such, eg. the Milky Way is one of billions of galaxies in the Big Bang or the red shift of receding galaxies is evidence of the universe, etc.
XOLegato, if you want a really good book which explains the current state-of-the-art in cosmology, and that addresses the Big Bang theory in a comprehensible way, I suggest the ‘Big Bang’ book writtenby Simon Singh.
Magellan… I don’t mean this is an unpleasant, condescending or unfriendly way, but you are perhaps struggling a bit with some basic aspects of theology and theological debate, and the rules of fair argument and reasoning, and this isn’t helping the quality of debate in this thread to get any better. There are many excellent introductory texts which can help you to understand what constitutes a valid argument or fair reasoning, and you might enjoy consulting one or two. I do respect your stance and I appreciate some of the points you are trying to make. But it wouldn’t be hard to make those points in a better way, and one which neatly avoids some of the commoner reasoning errors to which we are all prone, unless we exercise some care.
I think things happen just "be"cause they did. A hay stack can catch on fire and we call that spontaneous combustion. We humans ask why, because we do not want to believe in chance. People years ago have wanted there to be a reason,by the same reasoning one could ask what is God’s purpose, who created the place for Him to be.
Monavis
Monavis
Moderator’s Note: Magellan01, please tone it down. Argue against the other poster’s arguments, not the other poster.