Quote Originally Posted by KittyKatz286:
See KillerB that's why I think you're a moron. Because I try so hard to explain that I'm just saying it's one of the possibilites, but you immediately assume it's the only thing. That is why you are an idiot, not because you believe in a higher being, because you are incapable of understanding simple English.
As for Rostos, I am not Hawking, but I did watch the documentary on when he explained it. I have no desire to rewatch it to explain it to you, but he explained something to the extent that at the quantum level, matter and anti matter pop in and out of existence rapidly and our universe was formed by this appearance and disappearance happening rapidly, the matter and antimatter canceling each other out, except for one tiny particle, which became the big bang. Don't quote me on that and I may be a little off on its specifics, but essentially that's the theory. Tests have been done that show that particles are registered as appearing in multiple places at the same time; specifically light particles. When you look at the light, it appears in a straight line, but when you record the test results without actually looking at it, you see it appear in multiple places at once.
Read and LEARN
The argument that nothing exists is based on a bookkeeping trick: if the positive energy of the universe and the negative energy of the universe exactly balance out, then the net energy of the universe is zero; therefore, nothing exists! This is like saying that if you go on a round trip journey in which the return leg retraces the outbound leg, then your net motion is zero; therefore you haven’t gone anywhere! Marianna, you’re absolutely correct that the illustration of the hole and the dirt pile actually proves the exact opposite of Hawking’s claim, for even though the volume of the dirt equals the volume of the hole, that in no way implies that the hole and the dirt pile do not exist (you might fall in the hole and break your leg or sit on the dirt pile)! In the case of the universe, you still need a cause to explain the origin of the positive and the negative energy in the first place, even if when summed together their net balance is zero.
2. There are instances of something’s being created from nothing observed in nature; therefore it is possible for the universe to have been created from and by nothing. John, you are absolutely correct that the quantum vacuum which spawns so-called virtual particles is not nothing. To characterize this sea of energy filling space as nothing is so egregious a misrepresentation that those who do so are guilty, I believe, of a deliberate distortion of science.
Marianna, you are also right to remind us that it is far from clear that there are not, in fact, deterministic causes of the appearance of virtual particles. Such behavior is indeterministic only on some interpretations of quantum physics, like the so-called Copenhagen Interpretation, but there are other interpretations of quantum physics which are thoroughly deterministic and are empirically equivalent to indeterministic interpretations, and no one knows which, if any, of these competing interpretations is correct. Naive realism about the Copenhagen Interpretation would be rash and unjustified.
Moreover, the primordial vacuum state out of which our visible universe may have emerged cannot, by Hawking’s own admission, be eternal in the past but had an absolute beginning, which seems to point to an ultramundane cause of the universe’s origin.
3. Before the Big Bang, the universe was a black hole. Time doesn't exist in a black hole; therefore there was no time for a god to create the universe. I’m rather shocked by both your reports that Hawking was apparently plumping for the standard Big Bang model (perhaps with an inflationary era) which features an initial cosmological singularity rather than for his own theory, which features a non-singular origin to spacetime. Let’s grant for the sake of argument that the singularity was a real physical state. The claim seems to be that since the initial cosmological singularity is a boundary point to spacetime rather than a point of spacetime, therefore there was no time at which God could have created the singularity.
But this conclusion follows only if we equate time with physical measures of time. This reductionistic view is clearly wrong. A sequence of mental events alone is sufficient to generate relations of earlier and later, wholly in the absence of any physical events. So if God were counting down to creation, “. . . , 3, 2, 1, Let there be light!” God would exist in time even if He were not in physical time (that is, the physical measure that stands for time in the General Theory of Relativity). So there could be a time at which God created the initial cosmological singularity, even if that moment is not in physical time. Even if God is, as you both say, timeless sans creation, His creating the universe can be simultaneous with the cosmic singularity. Such an appeal to metaphysics is not illicit because Hawking is making a metaphysical claim that God cannot create the universe because the singularity is not in physical time, a reductionistic move which no theist should accept.
In any case, even if we do accept this reductionistic move, all that follows is that God did not create the universe at a time. We can still say that God’s creating the universe was coincident with the singularity (that is, they occur together at the boundary of spacetime), and by creating the singularity God created the universe.
Finally, John, as to your question about scientism, the point is that there are truths which we grasp that are not scientifically accessible, among these aesthetic truths. The defender of scientism is forced to deny that there are any objective aesthetic judgements. Recognizing this fact simply raises the price of embracing scientism: you have to deny that anything—any scene, any music, any art—is really beautiful. If someone wants to hold that, fine; but for many of us the price exacted by a consistent scientism starts to look too high to pay. There’s no reason to adopt scientism, so if you think that there are objective judgements of beauty, as many of us think, you will reject the narrow epistemology of scientism.
Why would I be scared of a fictional story
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