So, whatever started off the universe is what you call god? That essentially just means that you have defined god to be whatever it was that started off the universe. Tautologically, you are correct, but I’m not sure that it has any sort of use.
Interestingly, when I was down a rabbit hole of youtube videos a while back, I saw an explanation that lets the entire universe start off from a single virtual Higgs Particle. I cannot find this video, and I have no idea how reasonable their idea is, but maybe calling it the “God Particle” was more informative than the coiners of that term originally thought.
I don’t have the same problem with infinity going to the past as well as the future. Our universe is bounded at the Big Bang Singularity, and in some ways, asking what came before that is like what’s asking what is north of the North Pole. But not all singularities are the beginning of something. 1/x has a singularity at 0, but it still extends infinitely in both directions. If you were approaching it from the positive side, heading towards the origin, (like looking back in time), you’d say that there can’t be anything that exists prior to it, as it approaches infinity until it breaks down at 0. If time is simply a coordinate, and not something that actually has to “happen” then there is no problem with time stretching infinitely into the past, any more than the number line stretching infinitely in the negative direction means that you can’t ever get to 0.
I used to play these games in middle school. I grew up in an area dominated by evangelicals, and those kids were relentless. After I got tired of dealing with them honestly (and kindly–I would say that I was an atheist but that I respected their religion and even believed it was a force for good in the world, only to see them swiftly and conclusively disprove that), I started messing with them instead. I’d say shit like “sure, I believe in God. I mean, God is good, right? Well, I believe in good.” Or “God is love, right? I totally believe in love. I love my boyfriend, my parents, my hamster…” It was no more or less than they deserved, but I grew out of it as soon as I got away from them. Never thought I’d see the tables turn, and have religious folk tell me that anything I do believe in is God.
ETA: Also, has anyone already posted this Calvin & Hobbes strip? It’s almost as funny as @Sam_Stone’s post:
And we have not yet been able to make Life in the Lab. Sure we can create many of the building blocks of Life, but not Life yet (afaik, science marches on). It is a reasonable assumption that that was how it worked, but it is still just a hypothesis.
You can talk about negative time all you like - theorized infinities are fine and dandy. Theoretically speaking the number line stretches to infinity in both directions. However you can’t have actualized negatively (or positively) infinite time, any more than you can have a two-by-four that is infinitely long.
Which is to say, sure, you can chart time back into the past without limit - but the timeline can’t actually extend that far. Similarly you can talk about something growing without limit - but at any given time, it’s always a finite size, and will always be a finite size no matter how long or fast it grows.
I’ve often thought that a new Messiah who managed to convince all the religions of the world that they were the Messiah would be pretty convincing.
So, someone who becomes the Pope, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Dalai Lama, hailed as an Imam, etcetera, etcetera, ad infinitum. Yeah, that person is probably legit.
But that’s just an assertion.
AIUI, cosmologists are leaning towards the position that the universe is infinite in scale, so whatever principle makes infinities impossible in physical reality is apparently one that cosmologists are unaware of.
Let’s take a step back.
My perspective is that existence itself is indeed the biggest question in philosophy*, that it’s unsolved and, right now, appears intractable. IMO it doesn’t help at all positing that the universe has existed for infinite time, or saying “the universe just is”, or other common “solutions” because they all actually leave an explanatory gap.
But I don’t see how god fills that gap. It doesn’t explain anything, it needs its own explanation that is just handwaved as not needed by definition.
The god hypothesis makes much more sense as just a human bias towards anthropomorphizing, it doesn’t seem to get us anywhere in terms of understanding the universe, whether we’re talking scientifically or philosophically.
* Of course, some people would say whether there is a God is the most important question in philosophy. But that’s only because they consider it tied to all the actual important questions: how can anything exist, what is consciousness etc?
In itself, the question of whether a powerful diety exists is not very important IMO.
We should never be afraid to say, “We don’t know”. Science isn’t a promise to kmow everything. Science doesn’t promise the ultimate truth. As Feynam said, maybe the universe is like an onion, and as we peel away layers we’ll find more layers, and that will keep going until we get tired of peeling.
Science is simply the best methodology we have for discovering facts about the universe. It’s hard, and requires eternal discipline to keep from fooling yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool.
Also paraphrasing Feynman: When starting a journey of discovery, it’s stupid to assume you know what you’ll find when you get there.
The difference between the scientists and the pious is that while the statement, “We don’t know and we may well never know,” might bug the former, they don’t feel compelled to make up an explanation out of whole cloth as do the latter.
It’s more an application of the definition of “infinity”, really.
And as best I can google, cosmologists are falling pretty solidly into the category of “We can only see so far, and we’re pretty sure it’s bigger than that. We don’t see an edge. That’s all we know.”
Adding a god definitely doesn’t solve the problem of existence, or at least, ultimate existence. To the characters of the book I wrote, I’m god. I created their universe, and without me it wouldn’t exist. Done. Of course that doesn’t explain my existence one whit.
I’m not certain “Why does stuff exist” is that important a question, though. I think it falls behind “does stuff exist”. And once you realize the question has been answered (Spoiler: Yes) then the “why” question needs to accept the premise, “Well, clearly stuff can appear ex-nihilo, because stuff had to start happening at some point”. And once you realize that stuff appeared ex-nihilo, well, isn’t that the answer? Sure there are a lot of details missing, which fish evolved into which ape or whichever, but those are just details.
The question of “Is there a God”, of course, has practical implications: Which baby to you need to sacrifice to get into heaven? Whether that makes it more important from a philosophical perspective is a philosophical question, I guess.
Yeah, I’ll take it back.
I had heard on BBC Radio 4, where a cosmologist was asked how many stars there were, and instead of saying “At least X…”, as I expected, she said that the latest data had made more cosmologists believe that the universe is infinite, and homogenous, and so has infinite stars. She wasn’t just saying her view, she was making a claim about the cosmological community.
I don’t remember what her name was, and I can’t find anything either, so perhaps it was a misleading summary by her.
But again this seems a way of just restating the fact we don’t know.
We understand something when we have explanatory power.
It may be the case that it’s impossible to ever have explanatory power with regards to existence itself. But that would make the statement “we don’t understand how / why anything exists” trivially true, not a misconception. And that was all I was saying.
If we say it’s impossible to know who shot the sheriff, then it’s also very obviously the case that we don’t know who shot the sheriff.
Firstly, the notion of whether something is practical is not the thing that makes it an important question in philosophy. Otherwise how to make bread is a more important question than anything related to the cosmos.
Secondly, you’re making the god question important by adding on premises.
I mean, I could say that whether Teddy Ruxpin was the best 80s cartoon is the most important question, because I have a belief that aliens will come to earth one day and kill anyone that is not a fan of the show. But it is not the question itself, in the abstract that is carrying importance, just things I’ve asserted are tied to it. Which was my whole point.
Okay, then it’s impossible to know how existence started. Because one can always theorize an out-of-context creative agent (sentient or not, intentional or not) whose only interaction with everything we’re aware of was to quietly instigate what, from the inside, appears to be an ex-nihilo event. If you somehow discover that creative force, then its ex-nihilo event might or might not actually be ex-nihilo. And if you answer that question, it just reveals another ex-nihilo that you can’t prove is the real start. You can prove is that there is an ex-nihilo start, but you can never prove that you’ve found it.
Not even a miracle could reveal this - God might not be as omniscient as he thinks. It can literally never be known. If that’s a problem, then you have a problem.
Of course we have a problem. And we should be comfortable with the fact that some things aren’t solved at this time.
And I think your reasoning here commits the “sherlock holmes fallacy”. The fallacy of believing that if we list out all the possibilities that we can think of, and eliminate all but one, then the remaining explanation is true by elimination. It rarely works in the real world, because often our list is incomplete.
I freely state that the problem of existence itself appears intractable. It certainly looks from our perspective that infinite cause and effect, or ex nihilo, are the only two options.
But are they? Both options still leave the same explanatory gap.
If I were betting my own money on which of the 2 options is the way the universe came to exist, I’d bet on option 3
The two options I’m presenting are “Existence started at some point” or “Existence didn’t start at some point”. The lovely thing about negation is that there’s not a middle to exclude.
And the third option you’re grasping for is bootstrapping, ie, time travel. Somebody from the future heads back in time and starts time. It sounds great at first blush - no uncaused cause because it’s a closed loop. The problem, of course, is that it locks you into a time travel model with a fixed timeline. (Which I affectionately call the “Bill and Ted” time travel model.) That’s the only self-consistent time travel model that lets you have previously modified the past you’ve already experienced, and it would be the only one that allows time travel to stand in for a first cause. The problem, of course, is that being a fixed timeline model ensures that your entire space-time continuum qualifies as a static ‘thing’. And this thing…came into existence at some point. Did it spring into existence out of nowhere? Did something that preceded it (in some outer-context form of time) create it? Dunno! But either way we’re back to “ex nihilo” and “not ex nihilo”. And “infinite cause and effect” is gibberish because, seriously, you can’t actualize an infinity incrementally, which is exactly what infinite cause and effect proposes to do.
Reading through this thread, almost every argument boils down to a variant of: “Because the idea of God is not compatible with my pre-conceived notion of reality, any direct proof of God is merely the result of my weakness/lack of knowledge/insanity. Thus, no evidence will be sufficient to convenience me.” This argument is flawed.
For starters, this argument relies upon the presumption that a God does not exist. This may seem logical at first due to the presumed lack of empirical evidence in real life. But this assumption by itself is flawed because it runs contrary to the existence of objective evidence (In this case, miracles according to OPs post.) that can now presumably be measured, studied, and rationalized.
Insisting that your weakness/ignorance/insanity is a valid defense in the face of objective evidence is fallacious. If that line of reading was applied to literally anything else, the argument is exposed as faulty. Take for example, that a cure for cancer is discovered in the future. This cure is measurable, studied, and rationalized by the leading scientists of the world. Millions of people are cured of cancer and there are countless examples of the treatment working. If I were to claim that such a cure might actually be a hallucination, hoax, the result of my mental illness, government conspiracy, or aliens, you would (rightly) call me a loon/conspiracy theorist.
If irrefutable, unbiased, scientifically proven existence of God surfaced, choosing not to believe would be just as insane as being a flat earther. If someone would not change their mind in the face of objective evidence, they are either insane or motivated by dogmatism.
As the answer OPs post: A phenomenon that is in clear contradiction to natural law would suffice to at least hint at the existence of the supernatural. (The sun rising in the north, all grass on earth randomly transform into elephants, plants randomly given the ability to talk, etc.)
Well, that’s the fundamental problem, isn’t it? What exactly would constitute “irrefutable, unbiased, scientifically proven” evidence for God? Almost anything you can name could just as easily be the function of hyper-advanced aliens.
Except that we’ve already seen things that were “in clear contradiction to natural law”, and it turns out, we just didn’t understand “natural law” as well as we thought we did. The discovery of radiation, and all the nuclear science that came from that, was in clear contradiction of natural law, which at the time held that elemental atoms were the smallest indivisible units of matter. Eh, not so much, it turns out.
Hell, the entire history of science is just a series of new things that apparently violated natural laws, until we figured out how it worked. And the answer has never been “Goddidit”.
Aliens with both gravity control and sources of energy orders of magnitude greater than what we have could do this.
Nanomachines, and that “orders of magnitude more energy” thing again.
Those explanations are far more plausible to me than any sort of god as we usually conceive of the notion.
Or the “objective evidence” is third hand accounts. I’m not being asked to believe a miracle, I’m being asked to believe someone else’s story of a miracle.
Okay, tell you what. If any of those things happen in the next 24 hours, I’ll be a devout man the rest of my life.
I can think of many others. Let’s say we have a universe in which the scientists have trivially figured out all physical the laws and where it came from and all. In that universe, someone builds a computer, someone else writes a program, and a third person installs that program on their computer and runs “Sim Universe” with our much simpler physics engine installed.
Can you count from 1 to 2? If so, you just actualized an infinite number of real numbers in between. There are inflationary models that say that inflation is what is infinite, that it has no beginning, it’s just the state that the universe has always been in, and will always be in. The collapse of inflation in our bubble has a finite past, and nothing “before” that makes any sense within the framework of our universe. There is also the mostly out of favor idea that the big bang singularity is time symmetric, and that it extends both infinitely into the future, as well as infinitely into the past. Whether or not these conjectures pan out to describe the universe we actually live in is debatable, they may or may not, or it may be something entirely different. The point, however, is that there are options other than your dichotomy, even if we don’t know, or may never know, what they are.
No one has to actually live through the time for it to have existed. There is no actualization that has to occur, it’s just math and a coordinate system that extends equally as far as the number line does.
You seem to be claiming that the bulk of arguments boil down to “I wouldn’t believe it was happening”. I think that most of the arguments actually boil down to “I’d believe it was happening (if it actually was), but I wouldn’t believe that the thing doing it was God”.
If the sun suddenly rose in the north and we weren’t all instantly dead (do you know the forces the earth would be subjected to to drastically alter its axis of rotation??), and we went through the rather cursory steps to verify that this was an objective phenomena that everyone was seeing rather than just, say, some chucklehead quietly moving me to a similar bedroom that’s oriented differently, then you can be absolutely certain that everybody in this thread would promptly agree that something was going on. We just wouldn’t say “Drastically altering a planet’s rotation is something that only God does! See, it’s in the bible that he did all the time back in the bronze age! It must be God!”
Whenever any of us experiences or observes or hears about something that doesn’t seeem possible, something that doesn’t fit with our current set of beliefs or understanding about the world, we have to change our beliefs. But we typically change them as little as possible. We look for the explanation that accommodates that new thing while remaining as close as possible to our previous understanding of the world.
Very few things have only one possible explanation. It’s human nature, and not unreasonable, to look for and settle upon the explanation that minimizes cognitive dissonance, that requires the least adjustment to our previously held beliefs, and perhaps also the one we most want to be true.
