The Physics of God and the Quantum Gravity Theory of Everything

May I refer you to:

http://www.hawking.org.uk/the-beginning-of-time.html

The first cause argument is either the universe started at the beginning of time and when there is no time there is nothing; or we create a god. The choice is yours. Which one is more far-fetched? If you choose god, then what caused him (or her)?

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Originally Posted by Stavros

Trish, your enthusiasm for the subject is expressed in language of elegance and intelligence. However, I think you also recognise that when cosmology and physics set aside the mathematics and the chemistry of the universe, the conceptual problems remain that enable people to insist or maybe just conjecture a, or the crucial formative role of 'God' -the most obvious question being: What existed before the big bang? Plenty of believers in world religions understand the concepts of gravity, black holes, sunspots, dark matter, and so on: but reach a blank page or a brick wall when language seems to run out explanations, and mathematics as it were, returns to zero. How does science describe the universe before the Big Bang?

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There is no definite answer to the question, if it is a question, "What happened before the big bang?" because there is no definitive theory or confirmatory experiment.

Let's just take the classical equations of GR (nothing else) as solved by Friedman, Walker etc. for a homogeneous, isotropic universe. Those models describe a universe without a beginning. Time is like a open interval: at a certain instant you can say, "The universe has been expanding now for two seconds." Earlier you might have said, "The universe has been expanding now for 1 second." Earlier still you might have said, "The universe has been expanding now for 1/2 second." Still earlier, "The universe has been expanding now for 1/4 second." But at no time can you say, "The universe has been expanding now for 0 seconds," or "The universe just began expanding," or "The universe just came into existence now," because there is no time zero...there is no time outside the universe...no time before the universe...just like there is no space outside the universe and no matter outside the universe. The universe doesn't need a container to exist within, neither a container of space nor a container of time. I kind of like this model. But as I said, it's not definitive. There are others (though not the majority of cosmologists) who hold out for a "time before it all began."

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Originally Posted by martin48

May I refer you to:

http://www.hawking.org.uk/the-beginning-of-time.html

The first cause argument is either the universe started at the beginning of time and when there is no time there is nothing; or we create a god. The choice is yours. Which one is more far-fetched? If you choose god, then what caused him (or her)?

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Martin, thanks for the link, which both provides the explanation I was looking for, while failing to confirm that it is true - by which I mean absolutely true. As with the eloquent answer Trish supplied, these explanations are locked into a language which by its nature is not and never can be absolutely true. The key point (as I read it) that Hawking makes is this:

Since events before the Big Bang have no observational consequences, one may as well cut them out of the theory, and say that time began at the Big Bang. Events before the Big Bang, are simply not defined, because there's no way one could measure what happened at them.

The key concept which makes this argument vulnerable, is the idea of measurement, of the beginning of time -and indeed, time itself- as a measurable thing. In the 1930s Wittgenstein argued that language cannot describe anything absolutely, but that society agrees that the rules of grammar give what language is being used for its intelligibility, even if these rules, and words and meanings, are temporary:

But let's not forget that a word hasn't got a meaning given to it, as it were, by a power independent of us, so that there could be a scientific investigation into what the word really means. A word has the meaning someone has given to it. (Wittgenstein, 'The Blue Book', [Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1972: 28]).

In another discussion of time, Wittgenstein imagines logs floating down a river, and an observer noting when they bang into each other, and the way the observer appears to be measuring time to notice a difference in the frequency with which the logs bang into each other:

But if we say time passed more quickly between logs 1 and 100 than between logs 100 and 200, this is only an analogy; really nothing has passed more quickly. To say time passes more quickly, or that time flows, is to imagine something flowing. We then extend the simile and talk about the direction of time. When people talk of the direction of time, precisely the analogy of a river is before them. Of course a river can change its direction of flow, but one has a feeling of giddiness when one talks of time being reversed. The reason is that the notion of flowing, of something, and of the direction of the flow is embodied in our language.
http://tomclarkblog.blogspot.co.uk/2011/03/wittgenstein-and-river-of-time.html

Could it be that one reason why Hawking cannot -or does not- speculate on life before the measurable beginning of the universe is because he doesn't have the language to describe a condition without time -or rather, there is no agreed language to describe it, and the point of disagreement is that whereas science 'understands' infinity as literally impossible to measure, religious believers insist that this is precisely the point of understanding God, but who themselves commit what for science is the heresy of not asking questions of God but of merely submitting their silence as proof of their belief?

But why does science find it hard, or impossible to describe something that is not measurable, perhaps beyond mathematics?

The paradox of language is that we agree that words can mean something that can be verified, and something that cannot be verified. Wittgenstein would argue that it is entirely possible for someone to describe as a memory something that 'happened tomorrow': I do not know what will happen tomorrow, but I can argue that I remember on the 1st April that I expected an event to happen on the 2nd April that happened, because I remember it -in reality, once they have passed, there is no difference between the 1st or 2nd of April, I am therefore able to argue, linguistically, that I was able to remember an event that 'took place' in 'the future'. I think this is crucial in religious belief where the belief in eternity is a necessary component of the spiritual comfort that believers seek: that life has meaning and has always had meaning, that we never 'really die' but just move on to another condition. I once had a genial argument about the existence of God with a Muslim (to be specific, an Ahmadi) and he said, as I recall it: 'there has to be a God, otherwise life would be meaningless, and that would be unbearable'.

Or as Borges put it:

Perhaps universal history is the history of the diverse intonation of a few metaphors.

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Since events before the Big Bang have no observational consequences, one may as well cut them out of the theory, and say that time began at the Big Bang. Events before the Big Bang, are simply not defined, because there's no way one could measure what happened at them.

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Idon't really see Hawking going with that form of argument. It seems to me he has given a number of theoretical arguments leading to the conclusion that the universe has a finite age and that time itself, being a constituent of the universe, cannot ...as it were...predate the universe. To say that "time existed before the universe but since we can't observe it" is an entirely different thing.

Penrose on the other hand conjectures a universe that is reborn periodically and each incarnation leaves traces in the CMB of the next.

It’s not that the infinite and the immeasurable are impossible to describe in mathematics.

Indeed, a major and well developed branch of mathematics known as set theory is devoted to the description of infinite cardinal and ordinal arithmetics. It includes countable infinities, uncountable infinities, inaccessible cardinals, Wooden cardinals and concepts pertaining to infinity whose contemplation would make Christ himself go cross-eyed.

Moreover, quantum theory is full of quantities that are immeasurable in principle.

The problem is nature herself and how we respect our own integrity when we endeavor to describe her. Do we fit nature to our most cherished beliefs? or our most ingenious ideas? or do we tailor our ideas to nature? Sure we can always carve out a niche for the gods. As long as the consequences of their shenanigans don’t conflict with observation or intrude upon the light of reasonably established knowledge, no scientist will pay them much in the way of professional attention (Tipler being a notable exception).

The classical cosmologies of Lemaitre, Friedman, Robertson and Walker are self-contained. For each of those models, time is internal...existing within the universe...not without. For these men, there was no time, nor space before the big bang.

Lemaitre took this to mean God existed timelessly and without extension. That He somehow is responsible for the existence of the universe, but that He didn’t create it by a process that took place in time...for that would require the prior existence of time.

Lamaitre’s idea a fine and noble, but baroque and unfunctional add-on to the cosmological understanding of those models. There is simply no need in science for hypothetical contortions that account for nothing. Whether or not they fill a “spiritual” need is not a public question. Whether or not they are metaphysically true, meet a higher truth etc. is not the business of science.

It is however, the business of every higher truth to be downward compatible with the lower levels of reasonably certain knowledge. When claimed scientific knowledge conflicts with claimed spiritual knowledge we have an epistemological problem that can only be settled by examining the scientific claim with the methods and ethics of science. Likewise when spiritual knowledge conflicts with the peaceful pursuit of life, freedom of belief etc., we have an even more serious problem. But when there are no conflicts, people can choose whatever higher knowledge meets their spiritual needs. Go hog wild.

i am god and you are nothing. Assume the position, or i will destroy you. Well, i can negotiate if you show some kind of appeasement gestures...
Yours,
god

http://0.tqn.com/d/humor/1/0/k/L/-/-/gods-child.jpg

i have written a book, between 26 and 19 hundred years ago, and if you don't follow it rigorously, despite its countless contradictions, i'll drown you all, you cockroaches...

i am god

and you are not...

What the hell are you people talking about?? Everybody knows that the Earth is a huge flat disc, set on the backs of 5 giant elephants, who are in turn standing on the back of a really huge turtle. All else is a hoax.