How the Universe Became Something out of Nothing

[Ben]

How the Universe Became Something out of Nothing:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=2R16cXQBndQ&list=UU2Xd902w9u5_2oa7SHFSvZw&index=2 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2R16cXQBndQ&list=UU2Xd902w9u5_2oa7SHFSvZw&index=2)

[Fyusian]

So basically his argument is "my belief is that this universe came from nothing but I have no evidence for it but you should believe me because I say so" and this is different from blind faith and religion how exactly?

He's a self-declared "militant atheist" so I'm going to disregard most of his opinions which have a clear agenda. Militant atheists have been trying to wipe out of the concept of god since the French Revolution but recent science has revealed that faith is hard wired to the brain, it's in our evolution so it's never going to happen, even atheists have their own religiosity in how they preach their views.

Atheism and religious beliefs of any sort have no place in science. Freeman Dyson and Albert Einstein both knew this, the former a Christian, the later an agnostic but their religious beliefs did not influence their work.

[buttslinger]

It is folly, methinks, to discount the fact that I was something long before I heard about the Garden of Eden or the Big Bang Theory. In my eyes, Dinosaurs and superNovas and Jesus are all just different pages on a THICK book that is my worried mind. It doesn't bother me at all the Bible or my Physics books are flawed, it bothers me when people ask me to donate money to their Church or Space Program, or Political Campaign.
Just like Chemistry and Physics cover two areas, ....that which is here, before our eyes, and that which isn't, ...I see the Sciences as covering the physical world, and Religion covers the spiritual world.
I actually don't think scientists say the Universe came from nothing, they say it came from a little ball.
I think the real question is whether the Universe FORMED 13 billion years ago, approximately, or nine months before your birth, approximately. The real question is do you want to spend the next three years reading every scientific book on the Universe that exists, or sit cross-legged on the floor looking for God.
I'm guessing the majority of people here aren't THAT interested, and only come down here to the Politics and Religion section for a breather before they dive back down into the SHEMALE SECTION!!

[fred41]

Just like Chemistry and Physics cover two areas, ....that which is here, before our eyes, and that which isn't, ...I see the Sciences as covering the physical world, and Religion covers the spiritual world.


Yeah, but if you're going to simply use that criteria, then I would have to say "At the very least,I can tell the physical world exists (unless all of my senses are an illusion), but the spiritual world, wellllll....let's just say no one ever sent me a snapshot of that."....

[buttslinger]

Yeah, but if you're going to simply use that criteria, then I would have to say "At the very least,I can tell the physical world exists (unless all of my senses are an illusion), but the spiritual world, wellllll....let's just say no one ever sent me a snapshot of that."....
As I understand it, Chemistry covers the things you can hold in your hand, but Physics covers forces you can't see, like why an apple falls from a tree. When I say spiritual world, I'm not talking spooks, I'm talking about dreams and life experiences. For me, everybody belongs to a Religion you can't deny called LIFE! Life is nothing, Life is everything.
Physics is based on more than faith, but if you joined a Zen Monastery for four years and followed the rules, I'm quite sure you could realize God live and in Person. Just like you can get a degree in Physics in four years.

[sukumvit boy]

Thanks Ben , nice clip of Lawrence Krauss , I've heard his presentation before and it always strikes me as eminently straightforward and commonsensical.

[sukumvit boy]

LOL ,yeah , just stop by the Politics and Religion section to loosen up and decompress in the Higgs Field for a few minutes. Clears the head so I can go back to the chick dick pics.

[fred41]

As I understand it, Chemistry covers the things you can hold in your hand, but Physics covers forces you can't see, like why an apple falls from a tree. When I say spiritual world, I'm not talking spooks, I'm talking about dreams and life experiences. For me, everybody belongs to a Religion you can't deny called LIFE! Life is nothing, Life is everything.
Physics is based on more than faith, but if you joined a Zen Monastery for four years and followed the rules, I'm quite sure you could realize God live and in Person. Just like you can get a degree in Physics in four years.

Labeling anything you want a religion doesn't make it so...therefore I can easily deny it. I don't believe dreams and life experiences are spiritual...unless you believe in a soul - and I don't. I also believe me living in a monastery for four years may bring about greater patience and perhaps the ability to see things with greater clarity, and yes...I may claim I see God, or perhaps learn to make some poetic connection to my existence in such a state allowing me to experience God...or simply going along with what all the other monks believe after coexisting for so many years (as most tribal humans do)...but it still wouldn't make it so.
It's also a good reason why anecdotal evidence is not scientific proof.

Many people go the easy route - they take the easiest part from most monotheistic religions - there is a God. Then they add the most simplistic rule to achieve after life - lead a good, moral life (and then when they find out that's still too difficult, it's more - try as best you can to lead a good moral life and if you can't do that , at least don't hurt anyone). Is it bullshit?...Well, following a God you have no reason to believe exists and then discarding the rules listed in written tomes from whence that God came from gives a person like that about as much chance of reaching the promised after life as it does an unbeliever such as myself.
But it's harmless, because at the very least, both of us, try reasonably hard never to hurt anyone...without reason.

[buttslinger]

The only reason people believe in the Big Bang Theory of the creation of the Universe is because it's in books. To me ......saying that the origin of the entire Universe was once the size of a baseball sounds like bullshit!!

[trish]

Thanks for the clip, Ben. Lawrence Krauss is a well-known and well-respected cosmologist. He is published in a great number of highly respected, refereed journals. His approach to science is mainstream, mathematical, logical and empirical.

He is also well-known as an outspoken, perhaps even strident, atheist. His atheism is NOT militant. He NEVER advises NOR suggests that the issues that arise between theism and atheism can be solved by violence or militancy.

Although he argues that science supports an atheistic stance, he does not suggest that the conclusions of atheism are scientifically proven. Owing to their ill-defined vaguenesses, neither the tenants of theism nor the tenants of atheism are amenable to decisive proof or disproof. This is why the issue is never addressed respected, peer-reviewed scientific journals.

The Big Bang Theory (in it’s original guise as conceived by Friedberg, Robertson and Walker) is a scientific theory that is universally accepted by cosmologists, astrophysicists, astronomers and physicists. It is misunderstood by the general public as a theory of the original of the universe. It is NOT a theory of how the universe came to be. It is a theory of the expansion of the universe. That the metric of the cosmos is unstable and therefore either expanding or contracting is a prediction of the general theory of relativity (and the hypothesis that the cosmos is homogeneous and isotropic). The prediction is consistent with observations of the redshift of distant galaxy clusters, the current relative abundances of the elements and the current temperature (and existence) of the cosmic background radiation.

The Big Bang Theory of the Expansion was known (from it’s earliest formulation) to have a limited range of application. This is because the equations describing the expansion have an unremovable singularity. These sorts of singularities in physical equations hint that the equations fail to describe reality as conditions approach those that yield the singularity. What is surprising is that the Big Bang Theory of the Expansion seems to remain tolerably accurate for times up to about ten to power of minus thirty-thirty seconds after the singularity. What happened before remains a matter of speculation. String theory, loop-quantum gravity and other theories offer some suggestions. Some of these suggestions are consider by some as extensions of the Big Bang Theory, but none of them are anywhere close to being as definitive as the original Big Bang Theory of the Expansion.

The question “How did the universe arise out of nothing” presumes there was a time before which there was nothing and after which there was the universe. One possibility is that there was no such thing as time (nor space) ‘before’ the expansion. Perhaps the universe transcends the notions of space and time; that those notions only apply to the portion of the cosmos that we perceive to be the four-dimensional space-time region that is expanding, but there are other portions which are not readily described using these classical concepts.

Specific hypothesis that make specific testable predictions open themselves to possible confirmation or refutation. The hypothesis of the Higgs field has been confirmed by the discovery of the Higgs Particle. We can safely say that the hypothesis of that a community of anthropomorphic Gods living on Mount Olympus who take an interested in our affairs and periodically impregnate our woman who than give birth to superheroes with exceptional powers has been refuted.

Theories that keep changing their goal lines and backpedal predictions that fail to come about are safe from direct refutation, but they undermine their own usefulness. This, I think, describes the current state of the God Hypothesis: it simply makes no useful predictions. Insofar that every particular divinity whose existence would be testable fails detection, the No God Hypothesis is currently the favored conclusion. This is not a scientific proof, and certainly not a logical proof. But I think when asked, “Do you believe in God,” I think it would be misleading were I to answer, “I don’t know,” when in fact I disbelieve in every particular divinity whose existence humans have so far proposed.

[buttslinger]

One hundred years ago, in 1915, the most respected cosmologists were introduced to Einstein's theory of Relativity, and everything changed in our understanding of the nature of the Universe. The Universe didn't change, our understanding of it changed. Our minds changed. What we believed changed.
While the Big Bang didn't claim to be the Universe springing from nothing, it did say that everything outside the softball sized Universe was nothing, didn't exist, was not there.
It makes sense that a hundred years from now we'll know more, and some things we take for granted as true now will be disproved. Maybe in a few years Trish will get a bump on the head and see God, who knows?
All I know is that I feel incredibly USED and betrayed that Pluto is no longer considered a planet. They LIED to me!!!!!Never again!!!!
The "field of study" in religion is not the Universe, it is the soul, the valley between our physical self and God. In that valley is temptation, desire, dreams, wants, needs. In the Religion Biz, you don't try and understand that valley as much as you try to deny it's hold over you. You don't get sucked in. Only then can you stand before God in Heaven, the God that surpasses understanding. The proof is in the pudding.

[sukumvit boy]

Right...877588877589877590

[Fyusian]

I think this defines many "new" atheists very well:

883167

We haven't even left the confines of our own solar system but apparently there's people on this Earth who will tell me there's no god beyond the universe as well as no life on other planets. Who makes claims like this? A dreamer who can leave their body at sleep and explore the universe with their soul with faster than light travel? Jog on mate, your dreams are not evidence. Or is this someone who is omniscient, therefore God himself?

So either I'm having a discussion with God and he's trolling me on all these sites saying he doesn't exist and he's omniscient so he should know or I'm having a discussion with a religious atheist who thinks his religious belief that there is no god is better than other religious beliefs.

As I said in the other thread:

At the end of the day, despite what any group may claim, no one truly knows all there is to know about the universe. The atheists try to champion science and say "see here, there is no god even though we haven't explored all of our own galaxy let alone the universe and beyond to know anything like this, I'm going to make this absolute claim anyway" and then the religious "my scripture is absolutely right and knows the answers to everything" in reality we're all in the same boat of knowing precious little even these so-called scientists are in that boat.

We haven't even got out of our own solar system for God's sake and there's arrogant people saying "there's no god beyond this universe."

So in this regard I think the atheists can be as arrogant as the religious if not more so. If the multiverse exists, then who is say what this means? Current science speculates that there's different dimensions, realms and universes where the laws of physics could be different. This means realms that we could not comprehend exist perhaps alongside beings that we could not comprehend whom would appear supernatural to us. One could even argue our own universe or another could be alive itself and then the argument falls down to not "does a god exist?" but "how do you define a god?" If a god is a creator then for all we know there could be an infinite number of extra-dimensional beings that fit this description. The multiverse says our universe is a bubble in a bigger bubble filled with other bubbles but what if the multiverse itself is just one more bubble in another?

Lawrence Krauss is like Richard Dawkins. If not for his religious rants, he would be unknown, having made little contributions to science other than his "meme theory" which was highly criticized by other scientists. Krauss is the same. He says a quantum fluctuation from nothing caused the universe and then attempts to redefine what nothing is whilst presenting no empirical evidence for his hypothesis. Even if this is true, how does this support atheism as he argues regularly? The theist can still argue with causality persisting that the spark had to come from somewhere. Alternatively if entire universes with consciousness that form inside them can arise from fluctuations why then not conscious universes which one could argue could be defined as gods themselves?

This "militant atheism" Krauss identifies with seems to be as dogmatic and religious as any faith which is why I cannot take it seriously. Dogmatism and militancy should not be brought into science. Krauss says all scientists should be militant atheists but this invites a clear agenda, bias and doctrine into science. Science should continue how it is with no creed or allegiance to any philosophy and what Krauss may interpret as "evidence against a god" another scientist like Francis Collins may interpret his own discoveries as "evidence for a god" and this is how things should remain. God is a philosophical concept.

All I can say is we should keep an open mind. If you want to say you disbelieve or believe in a god or gods, fine but when you say "I know for certain" you've got a lot to prove, in fact to "know for certain" you have to be omniscient and therefore God himself but I find many atheists here to be quite narrow-minded and arrogant in their thinking.

[hippifried]

Universe:
The sum of everything that exists in the cosmos, including space & time ltself.

The very idea that we finite hairless upright apes can define & measure, or claim to know the origin of the universe just seems like hubris to me. The reality is that all we can measure are limits. Personally, I can't accept limits on the universe as fact. "Out of nothing"? Who says? Beginning? Why is that even necessary? We can contemplate various concepts, & even give them names. But as finite beings, can we truly comprehend eternity &/or infinity? I'm thinking creation stories came about because we can't. If God is eternal, infinite, omnl-everything, & the creator, why does the creator & the creation have to be separate entities? Because we're finite? We've created all kinds of ways to find limits on everything we can perceive, including abstracts like mathematics & time itself. It's all very interesting & whatnot, butteye just can't flnd any kind of faith for myself.

[nitron]

Why isn't there nothing?Why is there something at all. It's obvious...