God, Science and The Clock.

Lafortezza

Originally posted by Shinji

Young men go out to die horribly in ditches because they think "God" wants them to. Their reasoning in these beliefs is the same as yours; they don't have to hold them up to the light of scrutiny because it's FAITH, and somehow it's a virtue to believe blindly in "God" without a damn shred of evidence.

Somehow in the heads of these people it makes sense, possibly they think that it will make them a better person, or it will improve the lives of the people close to them, you'd have to ask them. Maybe they see religion as a war? I don't, so their reasoning isn't the same as mine, because war is not a part of my personal religious beliefs.

I don't feel its a virtue to have a blind faith in a god, its just something people do, usually for reasons they keep to themselves. Agreed, some people do it because they're told its the right thing to do by a priest, but I'm rather talk about people who have made up their own minds.

Am I right in saying that once a shred of evidence appears proving or disproving that there is a god, then it just becomes a matter of fact? How else can anyone hold up a belief or a matter of faith to scrutiny, without some proof to argue about? Is there some kind of Faith that has evidence to back it up?

Originally posted by Shinji

Interesting. Most people I know who are very deeply religious are pretty unhappy about their lives here, so they choose to cling on to the fairytales about the afterlife rather than having the courage to try and sort things out NOW.

I know a lot more athiests who are prepared to "carpe diem" than religious types. And to balance that, I should point out that religion doesn't seem to be the morality exercise it claims to be for most people, either. Without the outward facade of religion, athiests and agnostics tend to just be good people, whereas a lot of the nastiest people I know do bad things during the week and then scuttle off to church on Sunday morning.

Obviously we have experienced the views of different people, for me, members of my extended family (from all generations) and some of my friends would be classed 'deeply religious' by todays standards, all of whom would be the 'carpe diem' types.
And vice versa for those who don't believe in god and/or church.

Originally posted by Shinji

In all too many cases, religion is an IOU written by the morally bankrupt.

Or for some its the hope that by living in a certain way will make their lives and the lives of the people they know happier.
(I'm talking about religion as personal beliefs related to god, the afterlife and how we treat those around us, not the human institutional hierarchy or priests and nuns btw)

L.

Earthhorse

Sorry to start my reply with someone else's words on the issue but Philip K. Dick was a far more eloquent and intelligent man than I'll ever be.

This is from the note to "Faith of our Fathers" from the short story collection "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale".

originally written by Philip K. Dick
The last word, however, on the subject of God may have already been said: in A.D. 840 by John Scotus Erigena at the court of the Frankish King Charles the Bald: "We do not know what God is. God Himself does not know what He is because He is not anything. Literally God is not because he transcends being". Such a penetrating - and Zen - mystical view, arrived at so long ago, will be hard to top.

My own thoughts, formed from the above and discussions with others, are that it does not matter whether he exists. I believe it is more important to ask whether you agree with him.

DeVore

Originally posted by Shinji
Oh sure. But if you put it like that, you're not really talking about "god" any more are you? I mean, "God" is someone who gives a damn what happens here on this rock in the back end of nowhere. "God" sent us prophets and plagues, and "God" gets all upset when we kick the dog / don't pray during the angelus / have sex with people of our own gender / tolerate the infidels.

Some overarching intelligence that created the universe, well, that's as possible as a lot of other theories. But God? The watchful, benevolent father of humanity? It sounds to me like you don't believe THAT fairytale any more than I do.

Er, no. Thats silly.

There are 100,000,000 galaxies that we are aware of... in those galaxies there are about 100,000,000 solar systems roughly (those are Hawkings estimates btw, not mine).

Around each solar system we could expect to find half a dozen planets at a guess... and probably one capable of sustaining life.

So thats 10,000,000,000,000,000 planets capable of sustaining life.

Consider a 6-sided die... you're chance of getting a 1 is 1:6.
If you roll it 6 times you expect to get one 1... 12 times and you'd expect 2. You could get none or you could get five 1's.

The chance of life evolving where its sustainable is actually higher then most people think (cf: "The selfish gene" and "The blind watchmaker"). It cant be calculated but there are some very good reasons to believe that SOME form of life is inevitable once you reach the stage of replicating proteins in a protein-soup. That in itself (given the right cocktail) isnt that hard either.

So imho we are probably one of many forms of life over time and space (literally).

So God watches over all these planets and species too?

I dont buy it. I class God as something much bigger then a guy with a white beard and a big stick.

DeV.

bonkey

Originally posted by DeVore
So thats 10,000,000,000,000,000 planets capable of sustaining life.

There's an excellent line at the end of Contact saying more or less the same thing. Cant remember it though and Im too lazy to go dig it up

I dont buy it. I class God as something much bigger then a guy with a white beard and a big stick.

Yup.

The one that always interests me is the incredibly intelligent decision of the Catholic church in recent years to encourage people to challenge their religious beliefs rather than just accepting them blidly.

Why is this intelligent? Simple...because they know how most people will react. If you base your belief on science, or our current understanding of it, you still only get an incomplete picture with certain things to be taken on faith (that word again), or gaps which cannot be filled - leaving plenty of space for the argument of god.

Then that gets coupled with the stark implication of science that [/]there is nothing before birth and after death[/]. Thats scary. Science says conscious thought is a result of some physical process. Remove the physical, and you remove the consciousness - the essence of being.

So....the church knows that most people will find this idea so damned terrifying that ultimately most people will still turn to religion for solace....and the Church is hoping that they stand to gain from the fact that they are willing to enter into discussion with scientists to help make sure that doctrine can be updated to not conflict with science.

Talk about a marketing coup - a religion which is willing to consistently update its beliefs to make sure they dont conflict wish science, but rather reshapes itself to fall neatly into whatever gaps in scientific remain at any given moment.

The giveaway for me is any claim of "divine inspiration". If god/God does indeed inspire the devout, or use the Pope (or other religious demigod/avatar/mouthpiece) as his voice on earth, then why on earth does he keep telling the wrong stuff??? Hardly bloody "inspired" to me. I can tell people the wrong stuff. Does that make me divinely inspired by anything?

I'm with Shinji , deVore and the others on this. Whatever about the possibility of a creator of hte universe, I do not believe in a tinkering, interfering, anthropomorphised God who is infallible but keeps making mistakes, knows everything but tells his devout the wrong stuff, and generally is nothing but a contradiction who we desperately want to believe in so that we think we go somewhere better when we die.

Originally posted by DeVore
PS you guys should see my version of heaven, broadband for everyone, pints don't give you a beer belly, no hangovers, hot chicks tending to my every whim, and extra 2 inches on my...

Some heaven if youre only making your monitor viewing area 2 inches bigger.

Oh wait...thats not what....never mind.

jc

DeVore

Bold bonkey!



Btw, I looked up the reference for that meeting between the Pope and Hawking and it occured in 1981 and he confirms what I stated, the pope instructed them (as catholics) not to investigate the first second of the big bang as that was Gods providence.

Hawking talks about it in one of the earlier chapters of A Brief History of Time and also in one of his short story collections.

I'd love to know more about that!

DeV.

DeVore

Ok, I got a mail back from my mate who works in Gamma Ray Burst research (she's dead smart like )

Thankfully, it hasn't all been figured out yet otherwise we would be out of job!

The dark energy is basically the equivalent of Einstein's cosmological constant that he put it his original theory in an ad hoc way. It then got taken out because there was no fundamental reason for it, except to make the solutions come out nicely. However, recently, Hubble space telescope data showed that in fact the universal expansion is no longer slowing down and that recently in fact, the expansion has speeded up again!! This is attributed to the so-called 'dark energy' (not the same as dark matter). No-one knows yet what the hell it is. To make the theory and the data from various experiments match, you need both dark energy to the tune of about 75%, dark matter of about 15% and the rest in protons and stuff (that's us).

Read the expert's view - Ned Wright is one of the main people involved
in MAP:

http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/cosmolog.htm

So weirdly we're both right...it seems it was collapsing (or was *thought* to be collapsing) and now isnt (or is thought not to be).

I have to say that as a layman with an interest I think dark matter is a questionable concept and I think it will eventually be shown to be unnecessary.


DeV.

smiles

Hmmm... I used to have discussions like this with various people in the last few years, including 80 year old genius priests, 15 year old weirdo brainies and my dad

In the end the way I see it is that faith and religion are two totally different things.

Religion is a social experiment... and I think, in general, it works. The idea was to help create some sort of social order out of chaos, etc. Take the Ten Commandments:

1. Thou shalt have no other gods before me
2. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image
3. Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD thy God in vain
4. Remember the sabbath day and keep it holy
5. Honour thy father and thy mother
6. Thou shalt not kill
7. Thou shalt not commit adultery
8. Thou shalt not steal
9. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour
10. Thou shalt not covet any thing that is thy neighbour's

Beyond the first 3 purely religious ones, they're basically good rules for keeping society in some sort of general order.

Belief in a God is faith, it requires no religion or religious aspirations, for me I just *know* intrinsically that there is something more.

Originally posted by DeVore
So thats 10,000,000,000,000,000 planets capable of sustaining life.

A discussion I had with my dad last week surprised me (it actually started from us talking about that 10,000,000,000,000,000 planets capable of suporting life), he's what I would call a good catholic and yet he said that he would have no problem with "God" being some sort of higher power (as in extra-terrestial - from those 10 billion planets capable of supposting life, etc, there's bound to some a species advanced enough to have looked in on everyone else!) - that God could be some sort of alien caretaker who every so often looks in on us and gives us a little push in the right direction just to let us grow. (The examples he gave were that how the **** would Leonardo DaVinci just imagine helicopters... he suggests that the thought was "planted" in his brain by god/higher power while he was spaced out on drugs). Another point he believes in is that evolution doesnt necessarily contradict his beliefs, he accepts evolution but puts it that some kinda of higher power touched one of those species of apes and gave them a push towards something more, then left us for a couple of millenia to cop on and grow up...

If you think about it, we've barely been able to look outside of this planet for 50 years and yet "science" claims to have some of the definitive "proof" of the lack of an existance of a god, call me a science sceptic.

If I remember correctly Stephen Hawkings correctly in "A Brief History of Time" he said something along the lines of that hes not disproving the existance of a God, just merely limiting the amount of things that he could have done or when he could have done them.

<< Fio >>

DeVore

Exactly Fio.

However I'd say two other things:

1. I dont think Science is trying to disprove God. I think religious types are paranoid about that because for millenia the great religions have tried to prosletyse members away from the other great religions. They see science as a new "religion" and well, if you are a hammer ... everything looks like a nail.

2. I'd go further about religion being unrelated to God and say that the best parts of religion are the moral codes they originally tried to install in society. Thats a Good Thing [tm]. However there are parts of religion which are specifically encoded to establish self-perpetuation. Stuff thats designed to trap people emotionally, spiritually etc... Guilt. Sin. Forgiveness. Monotheism. Infallibility. Indoctrination.
These things are bad and may have been necessary before when the (well-meaning) religious leaders were trying to distribute the Moral Code but arent needed now and have become the reason rather then the vehicle.

I believe a time is coming when mankind is smart enough to logically see *why* we should act in a moral way without the threat of God or Hell. At least I'd like to hope so.

DeV.

mike65

Y'know I was going to contribute a lengthy, deep and meanfully post on this topic but then remembered others on BBC2 and Channel 4 can make much better programmes about the big questions than I can write about same...(know your level!;) )

Mike.

DeVore

why do you think their opinions are "above" yours? 'mon mikey, share with the group

DeV.

mike65

Dev I'd have to start thinking hard - that hurts!

Anyway whats to say? Is there a God/god well maybe, I'm an athiest not becuase I'm lasped
but because I never saw/felt anything to suggest such an entity exists. So
I belive the universe we inhabit was created by natural phenomenon, the only real argument is whether the current universe is the only universe and how it came into being, was it the big bang or does the universe "breath" ie gets larger then smaller but always exisits/has exisited (Oh and then theres the how many universes are there, debate).

Heres a thought - suppose everything we know life the universe and eveything is in fact inside say, a sealed biscuit tin, and that one day (one of our days) someone in another much bigger universe opens it up and suddenly we are overwhelmed by the view flooding in to our world. That'll blow your mind!

Anyway, I'm not anti other ppl believing though I'm hostile towards organised religion. But for me even
if I dont understand the science I'd sooner belive in that, rather than
think or rather assume that its all part of Gods plan.

Also if thee is a God why should he/she/it be any good at its job? Maybe God tried to create stuff but discovered it could'nt or at least got it wrong (why else do we have needless body parts!).

I'm rambling here....

Mike.

yossarin

The root of this discussion seems to be two views of god:

1: God as a big beard in the sky, who has made us in his image, and is *even now* prompting and cajoling us with a metaphorical pointy stick, testing his work.
All aspects of creation are constantly under his control, and everything is a test.

2: god / some entity as a initiator, he started the ball rolling but doesn't interfere, and is (maybe - you know not the time or the hour when ) watching us to see how it all turns out.

Whats intersting to me is that both versions seek to explain humanity, and provide a reason / justification for us to be what we are - constantly seeking to expand our horizons, trying to question everything in an effort to understand why anything, etc. I think thats what god *is* to us - the search for understanding, and to better ourselves. This brings us back to science - Science is the search to approximate or understand life through various disciplines. Maybe god was the first science.

anyhoo - this is my ratty looking faith. I believe in continuity, and structure, and patterns. having hope in anything means that you believe in somthing.

ps - funny redmeat last week

<edit>
pps Dev - I think that it might be the other way around - if you (the church) are a nail, eveything looks like a hammer
</edit>

ykt0di9url7bc3

I dont buy it. I class God as something much bigger then a guy with a white beard and a big stick.

this is fun!


consider that most of western society and maybe the world considers an "aliens" ( beings from another world) as "little green men"....we naturaly look for ourselves in an object/life/religion

more than likely God is unfathomable, beyond our wildest dreams/expectations because those dreams/expectations are ours....

and Shinji...dinosaurs are very simple to greek children!

smiles

Originally posted by DeVore

1. I dont think Science is trying to disprove God. I think religious types are paranoid about that because for millenia the great religions have tried to prosletyse members away from the other great religions. They see science as a new "religion" and well, if you are a hammer ... everything looks like a nail.

Well, here's where I think there's enough evidence in this thread that Science isn't trying to disprove God, but people are using science as ammunition to try and disprove his existance. ie. There's an evolution/big bag theory thats more than likely correct. Therefore there is no God. etc.

I believe a time is coming when mankind is smart enough to logically see *why* we should act in a moral way without the threat of God or Hell. At least I'd like to hope so.

Thats the problem isn't it? We are a flawed society, survival of the quickest/fastest/strongest may not be quite as explicit but it still exists. If we can take something that will make our lives better then why not, even if it does affect other people negatively?

Thats where religion steps in to add weight to our moral consciousness. Most people don't need it, but then there's always those who dont care who they affect and how other people will matter.

<< Fio >>

DeVore

Good people need to club together to make it unprofitable for bad people to do bad things.

Look at boards.ie... we *should* be swimming in spam ... almost no other community has managed to survive as spam-free as we are. We manage that by being really really nasty to spammers so its not that they have suddenly grown a conscience but because its counter-productive to spam here.

We as a race need to make it counter productive to be an asshole or an evil person... How we do that I dont know but I dont think that organised religion is the answer.

DeV.

CodeMonkey

Originally posted by DeVore
We as a race need to make it counter productive to be an asshole or an evil person... How we do that I dont know but I dont think that organised religion is the answer.

DeV.

Easy. The boards.ie members band together to help you take over the world. Once you are the overlord of this world, you can spank whoever is out of line. Better to have 1 evil dictator than millions of sinners right?

bonkey

Originally posted by smiles
The examples he gave were that how the **** would Leonardo DaVinci just imagine helicopters... he suggests that the thought was "planted" in his brain by god/higher power while he was spaced out on drugs). Another point he believes in is that evolution doesnt necessarily contradict his beliefs, he accepts evolution but puts it that some kinda of higher power touched one of those species of apes and gave them a push towards something more, then left us for a couple of millenia to cop on and grow up...

Hmmm. Has he been reading the Uplift series by David Brinn????

Seriously though...why is thinking of these things "impossible", but its (in some people's opinion) more plausible that some race managed to create themselves, then wander who-knows-how-long, create our planet/species, nudge us along the way, hide from us, come back, nudge some more, etc. etc. etc.

For me it all falls down at the first supposition...man could not have evolved "by chance" so we were created. Our creators, though, dont need to have the same rigid logic applied to them....because if they did, then how did it all start???? By someone evolving by chance! But if they can do it, why couldnt we?

If you think about it, we've barely been able to look outside of this planet for 50 years and yet "science" claims to have some of the definitive "proof" of the lack of an existance of a god, call me a science sceptic.

Science is such a loose term here, but given that we-re unlikely to stick inside any single discipline, lets use it here, but accept that its a bit vague.

Science attempts to offer models of how things work. It has no idea of the root question - the "why". Its models of how things work are incomplete and known to have limitations, but they have also proven surprisingly accurate in predicting hithertofore unknown "facts".

An example : we split the atom, creating the nuclear age. This was no accident, nor was it divine intervention. It was someone looking at a model of what had gone before, and putting the pieces together to figure out that if A, B, and C occurred, the equations meant there should be a ridiculously big bang.

There was.

It is very difficult, therefore, to say (for example) that the atomic model is incorrect. It may not be what is actually happening, but it calculates effect from cause to as accurate as we can measure and beyond.

To me the age or maturity of the science doesnt matter. its the maturity of its predictions that is important.

After countless thousands of years, religion and its divine intervention can manage nothing significantly better than chance when offering predictions....unless it bases its decisions on information from other fields.

Science, in the terms we are discussing here, is far younger. It is far less popular, less accessible, and less flexible. It is also far more reliable as a model, as it can and has successfully predicted many things in advance - the splitting of the atom, the bending of light by gravity, the existence of background radiation and of its non-uniformity, etc. etc. etc.

The other thing is that science rarely ever claims definitive anything. It can say that its models match observation, and can be predictive, but also acknowledges the gaps in its models, the flaws, and openly admits that the "whole picture" may never be understood.

Religion offers none of this. It claims divine inspiration, and yet is constantly having to revise its version of the truth as its earlier truths are shown to be..well...false. It offers no observable model, nor has it a reliably tested predictive nature. All it has is popularity and age.

I know which I'm skeptical of.

jc

JustHalf

Originally posted by DeVore
I dont think Science is trying to disprove God. I think religious types are paranoid about that because for millenia the great religions have tried to prosletyse members away from the other great religions. They see science as a new "religion" and well, if you are a hammer ... everything looks like a nail.

Unfortunately Tom, there really are people who pervert the tool that is science into the faith which is not. Time and time again I have heard atheist justify their faith, and criticise mine, based on the "fact" that science has disproved God.

I have no problem with science used as it is capable of being used. I have a big problem with things that are not scientific trying to gain the credibility of science by invoking its name (Computer Science springs to mind - I mean, what a joke! ).

When I think of the Pope asking those scientists to not investigate the first second of the universe, I laugh at how ridiculous the request is. How are we to build an idea of what the universe was like from the first second onwards if we don't think about what happened before? It's like the Lord of the Rings with the whole back story of the Ring removed.

I don't start to think "how DARE he ask that?". Lots of people have made pretty crazy requests in the past, and he is an ill old man after all.

DeVore

Yes but those are individuals... going the other way (religions that call themselves scientific) we have the Scientologists, the Christian Scientists and a number of other scary people...

My original point stands that if you had the full manual for a clock I made and gave to you , it wouldnt tell you who I am.

as I said in another thread.

stop...
a. putting god where he wasnt
b. demonstrating that he didnt
c. claiming that he isnt.


I dont know whether "God" exists but *nothing* we discover inside this clock is going to convince me one way or another.

DeV.

Talliesin

I dont know whether "God" exists but *nothing* we discover inside this clock is going to convince me one way or another.

What if we find a star-cluster in a yet unexamined galaxy that lets us do join-the-dots to get:

©YHWH 4004 BC. Patent Pending. I'll explain the BC bit in about 4000 years.

yossarin

Dev - to strech the metaphor, I think that your clock would tell us a lot about you.
The choices that you made in its construction would speak volumes about your personality. and gay hair
I think that if you're going to believe in god, then its a reasonable progression to look around you for evidence of his intent.

suppose that we find that the clock has properties that defy the laws of that clock ? That Talliesin is right, and there is a service tag attached somewhere ?

DeVore

Singularities are theoretically just that, areas of space-time that break Einsteins relativity... (ie: the laws of the clock as we understand them).

Quantum mechanics and Relativity are know to be incompatible too..

I suppose if I made a big impressive clock you might think different of me then if I made a small understated clock. But you dont get any specific information regarding my existance or otherwise.... beyond the existance of the clock itself.

Does the very existance of a universe *dictate* that a creator exists? Can the clock have come into existance on its own?


That is a matter of faith because we already *know* for certain that no information from "outside/before" the Big Bang can exist in this universe. Its just not possible.

So, we're NEVER going to know what started it and we're not going to get any more information so, its decision time really... science cant tell us and religion doesnt deal in proof.... so its left to individual philosophy to "decide".

DeV.

JustHalf

This universe is one of cause and effect. Because we live in unidirectional linear time, a cause always precedes an effect. We understand this to be the way of things, and it is certainly difficult to think of things any other way.

Outside this universe, things may very well be completely different. This is far beyond the domain of science (as science requires observation as a base to any investigation).

It seems reasonable to assume that this universe had a cause that preceded creation (though perhaps this could be due to our own prejudices) but to assume that what happened before had a cause that preceded an effect is to assume that the rules of this universe leak out beyond it.

It is better to say that while we remain within this universe, science cannot tell us the answer.

Quite frankly, I don't see how we can rule out what is outside the universe creating itself. It is so far beyond our understanding (for we have zero observation of it) that we cannot know much about it, at least from our own investigations.

DeVore

Right.

Hence my supposition (which started this thread) that no matter what science tells us (even if it told us everything)... cant tell us about the creator (or "cause " as you put it).

I dont think "God" interacts with our universe anywhere NEAR as much as people claim

DeV.

darthmise

Originally posted by DeVore


I have a belief in a superior creator. I dont know what he is, how he operates, what he exists in and I *highly* doubt he gives two ****s about a curiousity of self-replicating proteins like me.
DeV.

Do you not feel like you are taking a short cut to thinking there?
Holding your hands up and saying "well i don't understand how all this is possible so it must be the work of some all powerful being".

Just because we don't have the answer, that doesn't mean there is an answer there to be found.

I'm not attacking your belief system here, and i'm not trying to be confrontational, i just want to know if you yourself feel you base your belief on fear of dying or because the idea of a superior being staves off dealing with the bigger questions while you tackle the ones in your head left unanswered?

DeVore

*mashes head on keyboard*

Havent I just said I consider humans a curious anomaly derived from self-replicating proteins?

I understand more about how the world "works" then most... and not ONCE have I said "well i don't understand how all this is possible so it must be the work of some all powerful being"

The mysteries of the universe will, in time, be explained by science. We will understand everything there is to understand about the "clock" we live in... I am saying exactly the opposite of what you are attributing to me.

I'm saying: When this universe and the way it works is COMPLETELY transparent to us and fully understood my "belief" in a superior force/being/whatever will remain unchanged because I see little here that tells me anything about it. Nothing more then a manual for a clock would tell me about the clockmaker.


You are trying to claim: fear, lack of knowledge or a desire to avoid the question as a rational reason for my "belief".

In response I am saying:

I have a very good understanding of how the world works, particularly in physics and genetics. I have a reasonable grasp of what makes this clock tick. I do not require a "god" to explain it. Nor does its explaination dismiss my "beliefs".

I know that I am a curiousity of self-replicating proteins. When this particular clump of matter and self-sustaining system (called Tom) breaks down it will be no more significant then a toy that was wound up running out of steam. I'm pretty sure whatever started all this wont lose any sleep
We dont care when ants die.
So I've faced my own mortality and while it is a terrifying prospect at first it makes you realise that you're here for a "good time, not a long time". It doesnt make me believe in an afterlife, much as I think there may be something more to "consciousness".

Finally I've never backed off from a question in my life and I prefer to examine the big questions rather then find some trite solution for them that saves me the thinking.


So, after all that clarified, I still believe that there is a force out there that is a difference of *kind* from what we understand. (as opposed to a difference of *degree* which would include things such as very very advanced aliens ... which might seem godlike to us but are actually just further down the road then we are...etc)


Clear as mud I'm sure

DeV.

bonkey

Originally posted by JustHalf
It seems reasonable to assume that this universe had a cause that preceded creation (though perhaps this could be due to our own prejudices) but to assume that what happened before had a cause that preceded an effect is to assume that the rules of this universe leak out beyond it.

Indeed. even the use of hte word "before" is misleading, because there was no "before the Big Bang". Not unless there was time before the Big Bang....and seeing as time is one of the dimensions of our universe under current models, this would imply that the universe (or aspects of it) stretch back "before" the universe came into being...which is nonsensical to start.

Oooh....how to describe "before" without a time-reference. My head hurts.

It is better to say that while we remain within this universe, science cannot tell us the answer.

And by definition, we cannot get outside this universe, for were we able to, the universe would not be the universe, but rather only a "structure" within it.

But I understand what you mean

jc

Carpo

My thinking inspired by the subject

It would seem that there is no 'before' the big bang and 'beyond' our universe, as that would imply that our universe is not universal and fits within the framework of something larger. So, 'before' the bigbang there was no time or space or indeed existance for such concepts to exist within, so the idea itself is selfcontradicting.

Now, according to DeVore's analogy, there is nothing in the clocks manual that will tell you anything about the clockmaker. I (slightly) disagree. The one thing it does tell us it that the Clockmaker does not exist within the clock. If he did than he would have popped into existance at the same time as the clock and so couldnt have made it beforehand. Therefore the clockmaker (the creator God) must exist in the 'before' and the 'beyond'.

So... the way I see there are two lines of thought about this.

1. That God is an individual entity or force which created the universe and existance. The problem here is that if God is one thing then there must be 'other' things to define God as being something seperate. But this doesnt work as it renders the universe once again part of a larger framework.

2. That God is ALL that is 'before' and 'beyond'. This means that basically God is the nonexistance, and the nonexistance from which existance is born.

Or am I just wafflin' here?

DeVore

I think yer just waffling but theres nothing wrong in that

I think using human notional constructs like "universe" and "before" and "after" (which, after all are as arbitrary as left and right) leads us to "logical" inconsistencies which we arrive at with a "Eureka! God is dead!" kind of conclusion.

We have limited understanding of the universe even as we know it, I dont think its a great idea to start to use our logic as applied to concepts such as "prior to big bang" etc.... like the laws of physics at a singularity, we know they dont work, we dont know what does...

Quoting myself I said:
I see little here that tells me anything about it. Nothing more then a manual for a clock would tell me about the clockmaker.

There *are* some things we can glean from the clock... which tell us things about the clockmaker...

1. Is it a well made clock?

2. Is it fancy? Decorative? Ornate?

3. Does it run well? (ie: is it constitent?)

4. Is it ordered?


These things might give us a view of the "personality" of the "clockmaker"...


Remember I am talking about something a WORLD AWAY from a guy with a beard and a stick who appears to shepards who may have munched on some dodgy mushrooms.

I'm talking about the energy/force/being/spirit/architect/creator/cause of the creation of the universe because someone or SOMETHING made a *big* *fnckin'* *bang* and I'd like to know what


DeV.

Caesar_Bojangle

I wish i was articulate enough to conjure some thought provoking response but i'm not. I agree completely with Carpo.