Atheist Ireland Forum

so your robot would spout eternally universes all around ? amazing......

honestly. gimme a break. i wish a serious discussion. yours is not.

This is becoming tedious. You used the lack of spontaneously appearing elephants as "proof" that nothing can ever spontaneously appear. I facetiously used the lack of eternally existing elephants to "prove" that nothing can eternally exist. Do you see what I did there? Do you see?



Because it's not an explanation. It's an invention to avoid an explanation.



Wow! I didn't realise that was the part you had trouble with. I should have. At least the word "mere" offers hope. If your asking can I prove that God (or gods or fairies or zombie dinosaurs) didn't invisibly play with the fabric of the universe, then no I can't, but it's clear that such intervention was not needed and has no explanatory power.



For the last time, when I claim that there is a lack of evidence for something, I can't show you that lack of evidence. I can't point at something and declare that to be a complete and total universal lack of evidence. All I can do is invite anyone who disagrees to display the evidence they claim to have.



You started this thread by essentially demanding that we present our best guesses as facts.



Maybe I need to try a different tack. What sort of evidence would be positive evidence? What sort of thing would in principle satsify you as an answer?



I have. It doesn't get any better. Let me try to deconstruct it for you so you can understand what you've done. You asked for proof of the assertion: "that the natural world is all there [sic] exists". That assertion is functionally identical to the assertion that "nothing outside the natural world exists". Proving that means proving the non-existence of something. Now, there are lots of things I can prove the non-existence of, but a whole class of entities who by definition don't obey any of the rules of reality? Just how am I supposed to do that? The only way is what I tried to do initially, by defining the natural world as anything that exists. It's not a very good solution but then it wasn't a very good question to start with (as I and several others pointed out).



Yes I can but I fear it would be wasted. Basically, we understand how the universe works. There are few or no gaps left for gods to hide in. That is why you have had to retreat outside the universe to find one.



Why would it be? I don't understand why you find it hard to believe a button has always existed but you have no problem believing a sky wizard with a foreskin fetish has.



Only probably? It can be a "spiritual" rock if you prefer.



The secret ingredient is love. Well, why didn't you say so?



So far you seem to have understood very little. I wish there was a way even to get you to understand how much I'm trying to dumb things down for you.



You could test it against the available evidence. If you find good evidence that contradicts it, you can discard it. If not, you can (tentatively) keep it.



If you want. One universe, a billion. It's all the same, seeing as we're both just making things up. Interesting that you find my Robot more amazing than your god. If you were smart enough to reflect on that, you might find yourself with an interesting philosophical conundrum.



How could I possibly take you seriously?

I know I'm jumping into this really late but there are some points in Adonai88's argument that I'd like to take issue with.



Funkyderek is correct, we don't know what caused the Big Bang and by "we don't know" I mean we can't know. It is impossible for anyone, especially yourself who seems to have a detailed idea of how everything came to be, to claim to know something which nobody can know. The Big Bang is not the start of the universe except in the most vernacular sense of the word. The Big Bang marks a change of state in the nature of our universe. We cannot even determine what happened at the Big Bang given our current understanding because we lack a substantive theory of quantum gravity. The furthest back in time that we can examine at the moment is Planck time (1x10^-43 seconds) after the Big Bang. At Planck time after the Big Bang gravity became distinct from the other fundamental forces and our spacetime begins to run forward. However this is entirely distinct from stating that our Universe began to exist at this point. Our universe is not composed entirely of our spacetime and includes a quantum mechanical facet which is timeless. It doesn't need a cause any more than God does. Once we track the expansion of the Universe back to what used to be called the singularity all physical laws break down. However, we cannot state that nothing existed at this point.

As far as cosmogony (the study of origins of the universe) is concerned there are multiple hypotheses concerning what may have caused our spacetime to begin. These include the collision of two previous universes, a cyclic universe alternating between big bangs and big crunches an infinite fluctuating universe. These theories are examined in simple language in Brian Greene's The Hidden Reality. However, our universe can be explained reasonably simply using our current understanding of physics.

"In the distant future, the universe will only consist of massless particles travelling at the speed of light (assuming black-holes evaporate, which we have good reason to believe they do). This "very boring era" will stretch on for eternity, as the temperature of the universe cools to zero, and the density approaches zero. But if you are travelling at the speed of light, an eternity is no different from an instant. Time, as a scale of duration, is physically meaningless. The big big bang may simply be the infinite future of a previous universe."

A primer on the subject can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conformal_map

We don't know what caused our current spacetime to begin but we have determined several possible explanations. We don't however have the capability to gather evidence which would allow us to favour one theory over another. It is not likely either, given our current understanding of physics, that we will ever be able to gather such evidence. Could God be a possible answer to this problem? Sure. If you're going to make that claim, however, the burden of proof is on you to demonstrate that this hypothesis has merit.




You might have had a better reception from the folks round here if you had honestly argued for Kalam from the get go. The Kalam Cosmological argument is fundamentally flawed and a really bad argument although given your links to CARM I can see why it appeals to you. Matt Slick has a lot to answer for. I'll explain in a simple a fashion as possible why Kalam doesn't hold up.

The argument hinges on the idea of something beginning to exist. Therefore there must be two categories of objects in reality, those that begin to exist (BE) and those that don't (NBE). The first thing we can say is that both sets must be populated. If NBE is empty then everything begins to exist and your argument collapses instantly. Secondly, the NBE set must consist of more than one element. If the only element of NBE is God then you're just making an appeal to special pleading, which is a logical fallacy. The problem then becomes if NBE is populated and there is more than one element, then you cannot conclude from the opening premise that the cause is necessarily God.
The second and more damning problem with this argument is that it is usually offered as a follow-up argument to the statement "something can't come from nothing". However for something to be a cause it must act on something. Something acting on nothing is creation ex nihilo which is for all intents and purposes, a magical explanation.




Firstly, since our spacetime began at the Big Bang, any discussion of a "before" the Big Bang is redundant. There is no evidence that there was a time preceding the Big Bang.
Secondly, matter and energy do arrange themselves spontaneously. Radioactive decay is an example of just such an event. Furthermore, since you mention virtual particles, these also represent uncaused events contrary to the premise of Kalam. Although it is technically incorrect to say they come from nothing, they do begin to exist without a cause.




It is not the existence of dark matter which is in question. We have already been able to infer the existence of dark matter from observational evidence particularly with regard to the gravitational effects of dark matter which can be seen in galactic rotation curves. It is rather the composition of dark matter which is the question which needs answering.




Actually what you have described is the argument from silence and unlike the argument from ignorance (a common religious argument), the argument from silence is not always a fallacious argument. The argument from silence holds only if there is no reasonable expectation of positive evidence. For example, Matthew 27:52 describes the events subsequent to Jesus' death and mentions the people rising from their graves and going into town to talk to people. However, there are no non-biblical contempraneous accounts of this event. As a result we can dismiss the likelihood of this event having occurred. This is not an argument from silence since you would expect an event as unusual as this to have been widely documented.

The fundamental problem with your OP seems to be that you have a top-down view of reality which is not how science works in explaining things. Pierre Laplace when he first drafted a solution to celestial motion was asked by Napoleon why he had not mentioned God. In response Laplace replied, sire I have not needed that hypothesis. In studying the world and the universe around us we seek to explain those phenomena like the Big Bang, abiogenesis and evolution. However, when we meet a question which we cannot, for the moment, answer using evidence then the only honest answer is "I don't know." That's how methodological naturalism works by not making any more assumptions than are necessary. If you don't know what the answer is you can't or at least shouldn't plug the gap with whatever passing fairytale most appeals to you.