I believe in science as much as the next guy. Heck, I’ve had theories and have tried to prove them since I was six years old. It was only as I have grown older that I have found others who have had same theories.
But seriously, one thing that always bothered me was: Why the big bang?
I mean, even if we had the theory of everything, we still wouldn’t know the *why[i/]? Since nature wasn’t as we know it before the Big Bang, what was it?
Don’t any of you wonder? Very many times I look at the cosmos in awe, but still, in the back of my head, the quesion lingers, why?
I simply can’t believe in a naturalistic universe, because a naturalistic universe doesn’t explain its origins.
(Neither does God, but I don’t believe in God either.)
The big bang seems supernatural to you, to me, to most anyone who is honest with themselves. However, that doesn’t mean it IS supernatural. Suppose we bring a computer back to the ancient Greeks. Even the most learned men of the time would claim this strange device was “magic.” Don’t dismiss something as supernatural because it is beyond your comprehension.
Supernatural: Beyond nature
I believe what Beeruser is trying to say is that since the Bigbang did not follow the laws of nature when it occured, then doesn’t that mean it was supernatural (but not divine).
Hell no, I don’t understand it. But that doesn’t make me think of supernatural origins. Everything I do understand so far has natural origins, so I think it’s unlikely that the Big Bang will be the first thing that’s supernatural (if I were to someday understand it).
Why do you think the BB didn’t follow natural laws? My guess is that they may have been different from post-BB natural laws, but still natural.
I was just making an example. Who says that in 2000 years we wont understand the origins of the big bang. True, there may have been different laws of nature, but what is to prevent us from understanding those. It isnt supernatural, its just different from our “natural”
The big bang would have to have been of ‘supernatural’ origin. Einstein’s theory says that matter cannot be separated from space and time. We tend to think of the big bang happening in already existing space and time, but that may be way limited. More probably space, time and matter were all initiated with the big bang. In other words, there was no space into which the universe is expanding. The space in the universe is being created while the universe is expanding.
I don’t that’s quite accurate. You see, by studying what currently exists and how each part interacts with the other parts, we can extrapolate what happened before. That extrapolation, however, fails at the Big Bang. That doesn’t mean that the Big Bang gave birth to nature; it just means that we can’t track nature any farther back than the Big Bang. The Big Bang is sort of the horizon of our knowledge; we can’t see anything past it, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that nothing exists past it.
The cause of the Big Bang, and the circumstances preceding it, are unknown. We have no basis for believing anything at all about those causes and cirucumstances, natural, supernatural or otherwise.
The only honest rational answer is to profess our ignorance, and hope that new techniques reveal evidence from which we might draw rational conclusions.
I am in over my head here but from what I understand, the origin point of the universe is a singularity, like a black hole, from which we can recieve no information. However we can extend our knowledge asymptotically closer to the big bang, and test our theories in particle accelerators. However, just because we may not know what happened at the zero point, does not mean it was not a natural event following natural laws, which may or may not have been the same laws existing a micronanosecond later.
Bored, I think supernatural doesn’t just mean beyond nature in a general sense. I think most people use it as reffering to the intervention of some powerful spiritual entities.
Califboomer, Beware of the God of the gaps. Throughout the history of science, theologians have found areas where science couldn’t explain what was going on and said “here is God.” They were always embarassed when Science eventually found laws to describe the phenomenon in question. Also, doesn’t it diminish God somewhat to reduce him to popping up in esoteric corners of the universe?
The Big Bang, as we now understand it, is a singularity. What it was before it was the Big Bang is impossible to reconstruct. Once you think about it, the Big Bang, more than being the event that started the chain of events leading to our existence, is the boundary defining the edge of the universe itself. Look far enough into the distance, fifteen billion light-years or so, and there it is. Actually, you wouldn’t be able to see it, since it’s moving at the speed of light, but you’d theoretically be able to see its immediate aftermath. (Or possibly not, if the theories of inflation being tossed around these days are correct, but I digress.) There is no way to see beyond it, though. Or looking at it another way, the universe is a static four dimensional hypersphere, and we are moving through it, thus giving the appearance of “time”. To a multi-dimensional outside observer, the universe would look like a 4D marble. Who made it? Why is it there at all? Who can say? We’d have to step outside the universe and take a look around in order to know. So, to science as it exists today, the question of what caused the Big Bang, and all the other questions of the existence of God and the like, are unanswerable.
Heck is where you go when you don’t believe in Gosh.
It’s my understanding there was no universe before the big bang. That is why science can’t even speculate as to its origin, because they are limited to the natural laws of physics, which presumably did not exist before the bang. It is thought that space, time and matter all came into being with the big bang.
Our current physics is capable of describing the events of the Big Bang back to the tiniest fraction of the first second of creation, before which it breaks down. So you could say that it’s ‘SuperNatural’ in the sense that it is currently outside the scope of our ability to understand the universe. That doesn’t mean it will always be that way. As someone else said, until our understanding changes we can’t say *anything about it. It certainly doesn’t require that we believe in God.
To illustrate his proposal that the universe is finite with no boundary, Stephen Hawking compares the big bang with the North pole. Time corresponds to latitude. Asking about before the big bang is like talking about latitude on the other side of the North pole. You cannot talk about time before the universe. Time (and space) came into existance with the universe. Time is an artifact of the universe.
Before our universe came into to being there was only a void. The void extends infinitely in all dimensions space, time, and possibly the other 7 that are believed to exist. It makes no sense to talk about events within the void. Events need references and there are/were no events within the void. In fact, it makes no sense to even talk about what was within the void - by definition there was nothing within the void. The void just was / is / will always be.
Supernatural? Absolutely, in as much as nature, as we know it, is defined by the contraints within our universe. Anything outwith our universe, by definition, will be supernatural.
While that doesn’t help answer the questions that trouble you, perhaps it will help to show the futility of asking such questions. [wink]