Why must the beginning of the universe be perfect?

Great Debates
#1

Why must the beginning of the universe be perfect?

It seems that nearly all theories of the beginning of the universe, and the arguments of proponents of all of them, assume that the beginning of the universe is all-encompassing and perfect.

Let me give an idea of what I mean:

  1. God created the universe. Why not an entity neither all-powerful nor all-knowing?

  2. The universe was created in the big bang, an event in which all matter and time itself originated. Why couldn’t the big bang just be the manifestation of a trivial event, with vast amounts of time and matter outside of it?

One could argue that if the creation of the universe isn’t all-encompassing, then it is not really the creation of the universe, but this just leads to the question of why we regard everything we see as everything that exists. This in turn leads to the question of why we think that everything we see should coelesce into something perfect (symmetrical and beautiful).

What seems plainly obvious to me is that there is no example anywhere of a perfect object. Every object has its particularity and its quirks which originated in the manner of its creation. Why do we suppose that the universe does not have such quirks?

Every direction we look in space is rich with unique detail.

If you explore a fractal like the Mandelbrot set, despite the fact that every part of it is uniquely shaped (differentiated at least by reflection), the over-all sense is that it is predictable. Not so the universe – every piece seems crafted all to its own. Compared to the universe, the Mandelbrot set seems as sterile as an equilateral triangle.

To my mind, the best we can hope to accomplish is to understand our place in our specific environment, and any notion that our environment is all-encompassing or perfect only serves to limit the flexibility of our thought.

Disagreement?

#2

The universe is everything, so if the big bang occured within space and time, it would not be the creation of the universe, since the universe must include that space and time within which the big bang occured.

The scientific view is that the Big bang as the start of the universe means that the big bang created space and time, but nothing much about that can be thought of as in any way perfect. It was messy, hot, and by no means uniform in all places within the explosion. If the explosion had been perfect, perfectly uniform and smoothe then the Universe now would still be perfectly smoothe but the universe is full of galaxies and atoms and other imperfections which are what makes the Universe interesting and capable of forming processes complicated enough to be considering the way the universe was created.

From the Christian/Jewish religious point of view, God made the universe out of chaos. Was that chaos perfect? Why consider the universe is perfect in how it was created, God created the universe how she wanted it to be created. But it is perfect only in that it is a perfect rendition of what God wanted to create. Not perfect by any metric we might want to use to describe perfection.

#3

I think it is useful to distinguish between the universe as we see it, and the totality of the universe. It seems very plausible that what we will never have detailed knowledge of anything but a very small piece of the universe. But it makes more sense to talk about the origin of what we have knowledge of than to talk about the origin of everything. And that, by-and-large, is what people do – we talk about the origin of all that we know.

My point is that what we know may be very assymetric and ugly due to its origin in a complex context that we will never have access to.

What I’m hoping for is someone to defend the argument that symmetry and beauty ought to play a role in our theories about the origin of the universe.

Bippy the Beardless wrote: “From the Christian/Jewish religious point of view, God made the universe out of chaos… But it is perfect only in that it is a perfect rendition of what God wanted to create. Not perfect by any metric we might want to use to describe perfection.”

That is an interesting stance, and I’d like to see more about that. I (ignorantly) believe that a major goal of Christian/Jewish religions is to try to see God’s perfection clearly. Even more interestingly, I wonder why it is described as perfection at all when it seems so imperfect. Buddhists seem to have something here, in seeing our consciousness of the world as an imperfection.

#4

[quote]
Even more interestingly, I wonder why it is described as perfection at all when it seems so imperfect.

[quote]

Either someone deliberately altered it, or your angle is imperfect. I vote for both.

#5

Yes, absolutely, but not for the purposes of your OP. The reason that the beginning of the universe has to be perfect is that, if there was any beginning, then there was nothing prior to it. Your postuation may be correct that what we thinkg of as the whole universe is just an infenitessimal part of the real, wide, older, bigger, stranger totality of existence that’s really out there. But even if that’s so, if that bigger totality has a beginning at all, then that means that before that beginning, there wasn’t anything extant. Ergo, the genesis had to be “perfect” – whether the Big Bang is the beginning of the universe or something much greater, longer ago and un-guessed at was the beginning of the UNIVERSE.

–Cliffy

#6

I honestly have no idea what you are on about here. What is not symmetrical and beautiful about the big bang? What is not symmtetrical and beautiful about the Earth, the Sun, the Moon? And what has “perfection” got to do with it anyway? Is your only defintion of perfection symmetrical and beautiful? Can things that are not symmetrical be perfect?

And what do you mean the beginning of the universe is perfect?

#7

I’m left-handed yet perfect so… yes.

#8

As I am also left-handed and perfect can we now say things do not have to be symmetrical to be perfect … or beautiful?