You fail at reading comprehension. I mean that the outside deity wouldn't have inspired the current deities. I'm not disputing that there is some sort of creator - although I doubt it has a sex. Plus, I'm sorry, but I'm not like Verithrax to call religion a useless sponge, and Xavius, to claim I'm bringing down Catholicism. I think we should chain him up in a seminary. Besides, some unknowable cosmic soup is going to lose against the belief of an all powerful being. It makes me feel much better, at least, to think that everyone won't just cease when I'm all done here.

That's one of my little theories. For all I know, Noola is god and her little penguin things are just ways of trying to communicate The True Word to us. Actually, that'd be cool.


What's to say there aren't other sentient creatures? I know st-whats-his-face claimed that there couldn't be, because according to the Catholic faith (and a few other christian sects, I suppose. Also according to that nice satanist lady at work the other day.) they'd all require their own saviour and Jesus was unique. But we're assuming that that is wrong. Just a tangent. And no, , really? HUmans and animals? Different? Christ, you've got me there. Here's me having long and detailed conversations with the cat and wondering why it wouldn't answer. What's to say that a creator godit (Godit being my new term for an amorphous being. God is Kethuru, apparently.) didn't create the universe according to science? We might be a cosmic accident. We might be one of a myriad. What proof do you have except some ancient holy book riddled with contradictions? I know that the theory for that is that the Word Was Perfect, and Man Was Not, but what proof do you have? Especially considering how clearly it contradicts modern day knowledge? Which, I admit, could be challenged at any time. What proof do I have that we could not be one of a multitude, or a cosmic accident? Absoloutly none, except evolution, and the proof that it works.

Edit:

Beaver dams can seriously muck up ecosystems and natural areas if they move out of the area. They evolved for a specific purpose. Not to mention that evne when it doesn't do serious damage to a waterway, it's still not healthy. Rust can "harm nature". Pure enough veins of metal rust over time. Factories harm nature because we just don't care - we could minimise it, perhaps, to the same degree of impact as a beaver dam or two, but it'd cost far more. (Yes, I know one or two is an exaggeration, but that's alright. We could seriously minimise factory output. It'd just cost too much for people to do anything but scream "UNFEASIBLE."

"harming nature" isn't exactly an objective thing anyway. "Harming nature" is basically ruining what people like about how the "natural" world is (the human or man-made world is objectively just as natural) and/or causing, still subjective, problems for the humanity of later generations. Nature wouldn't give a crap if the sun exploded tomorrow, nor would it be harmed.

I don't understand what the point of Daganev's post is in general, actually, I was mainly curious about this "after 200 years of scientific progress, "they" are finding X."

@Xavius
I'm not really following. My point was that if something has a beginning, it also has a cause. Not every thing has a cause, but every event has a cause. If something began, that is by definition an event, which requires a cause. I am not proposing change prior to the Big Bang, I am talking about the Big Bang itself - it was an event which occured within time (time is nothing but a comparison of events, so it makes sense that time begins with the first event). So, knowing that, it is a logical assumption that it had a cause.

@Daganev
I am actually not talking about whta came before the Torah. I do not believe that the account(s, depending on how you read it) in Genesis (B'reishis) are meant to be literal. They are written in poetic form, and there is the curious problem of things occuring in different orders depending on which account you read. I believe they are poetic adaptations meant to teach us the spiritual truth - that God created the world through his power and his personal involvement - not so much the literal truth - that God created the world in 7 literal days by actually physically speaking. I am working off of the belief that the Big Bang correlates directly to the events in Genesis (B'reishis), not that it is a separate event that occurred before the beginning of the Torah.

My first thoughts, which I have to keep short, because I don't have more time at the moment:
1. Things do not always happen because of a reason in a quantum world.
2. Time is a dimension. Along with 3 physical dimensions we know (and perhaps some we don't), it forms a closed stage we call Universe. Looking at it from that perspective does not alienate time as something that must be accounted for separately, but just as one of the parameters of the universe.
3. On the topic of additional dimensions - that might be the place you are looking for with your energy reasoning.
4. Also, in point 1 you call the second law of thermodynamics to prove that it doesn't apply to the universe as a whole, so you claim universe must be open or it had a beginning. You don't seem to take a different explanation into account - that this law is simply wrong in a universal sense, meaning it does not always apply.

@Kashim
1. I always find it interesting that people bring up quantum physics while discussing the Law of Causality. It is true that there is no observable cause for some of the events which occur in various quantum experiments. This does not mean that there is no cause. I have not yet heard of any quantum physicists suggesting that the Law of Causality is now defunct and should be rejected, they simply admit that we do not know what is causing these events.
2. I agree that time is a dimension related to space. I separated it out merely for the sake of simplicity, to say by direct statement that I believe time began when the universe began, rather than leaving it to implication.
3. I am not following this, but then I'm far from a physicist. Do you mean that the universe might be receiving an influx of energy from another as-yet undiscovered dimension?
4. I have to echo what has already been said, that the Laws of Thermodynamics seem to work best in a universal sense. There is always the possibility that all of the "laws" we hold as truth could be wrong, but if we worked on that assumption then logical/scientific progress would be imposible. In order to place any reasonable faith in any scientific or experimental conclusion, we have to assume the accuracy of the related laws.


@Verithrax
1. I actually don't assert that gravity nor causality exist outside of time. However, I would assert that a causal relationship does not equal a temporal relationship. A cause and effect might occur simultaneously, rather than one after the other. As for a physical force or agency, I agree 100%. Outside of time and outside of (not technically "before," though that word would make more logical sense) matter and energy, there could be no physical force or agency. We can observe that the beginning of the Universe, as an event which occurred in time and space (at their very beginning), must have had a cause. We also observe that no physical/temporal force or agency could have existed outside of this. So, the only logical conclusion is that there is something extra-temporal and extra-physical that must have had an effect.

2. I am actually asserting that the universe is a closed system, which is why it can not have existed forever. In a closed system, usable energy continuously decreases. If the universe, as a closed system, has existed eternally, then there should be no usable energy left. I mentioned the open system because I have heard that as an alternative many times before. People say the universe is eternal, but it is an open system so the law of entropy does not apply. I was just preempting that argument by saying that if they grant that an outside source of energy must be acting on the universe, then we have reached the same conclusion anyway and further argument isn't worthwhile.

3. I agree that this "agency" is not necessarily the Judeo-Christian God. I intend to form a step-by-step series of threads, starting with this and working up to the idea that this agency was the Judeo-Christian God. At this point, I am just hoping to establish that some external agency must have existed. I am not even going to postulate (yet) about whether this agency had any will of its own - perhaps it was simply an extra-temporal and extra-physical "force" (for lack of a better word) without any consciousness. All of those will come later, for now I just want to establish that something extra-temporal and extra-physical must have existed and had an effect on the beginning of the universe.

When I drop an object, it falls. I may then ask, "What causes this object to fall, seemingly of its own accord?" The simplistic answer is gravity. But what causes gravity? What is the chain of causality that makes the object react in the way it did? There is no agency there, obviously. There is what we call the "force" of gravity, although when you get right down to it, there's no such a thing. It's just part of the nature of the universe that space behaves the way it does and the phenomenon we observe as gravity occurs.

Likewise, unless you can positively demonstrate a causal agent, there is no need for any extra-anything force for the Universe to have a beginning. If the Universe had a beginning, then it is perfectly reasonable to say that doing so is part of the nature of the Universe; there need not be an external agent to cause it to begin, just like there need not be an external agent to keep the galaxy spinning. If the Universe is eternal, then there is no initial state that can be considered. However, "decrease of usable energy" is an unreasonable simplification. Given an infinite scale of time, energy may become usable again - If the universe is infinite in time, then all possible events have or will take place. The current state of affairs is one such possible event.

If you give a proverbial typewriter to the proverbial monkey and allow him infinite time, he will eventually type out the complete works of every human author, in chronological order, an infinite amount of times. Infinity is mind-bogglingly big. Big enough for you to get the exact same lottery results an infinite amount of times over, in a lottery with an infinitely long string of digits. Big enough for anything to happen, an infinite number of times. If the Universe is infinite, causality breaks down simply because virtually any event can emerge just out of the normal fluctuations of the state of things; uncertainty takes over.

However, evidence seems to indicate that that's not the case.

Actually, I think that's a perfectly reasonable question - what caused gravity to begin? Once the Universe exists, it is logical to say "that is the way the Universe is," - in which case we only look for causality when something goes against the status quo (i.e. an "event"). The object falling is an event; gravity continuing t pull is not an event. The fact that gravity still pulls right now like it did a second ago does not require a cause. The fact that gravity ever began to pull does require a cause, just as it would require a cause if gravity ever stopped pulling.

You suggest that the Universe might have popped up because that is the nature of the Universe...there is no argument I can really think of against this, except that it seems logically nonsensical. At the moment of its inception, the Universe had no nature, so to say it was inceived by its own nature doesn't make much sense; there was no nature yet.

As for the discussion about the Universe having infinite time, I believe you had it right in your first sentence, then detracted a bit from that:



So, even given infinite time, in order to assume that a given event would occur given infinite time, you must first demonstrate that it is a possible event. The reason we consider heat to be completely unusable energy is that, so far as we know, it is impossible for it to be converted back into a usable form (thus the Second Law). If this is an impossible event, then it cannot occur even given infinite time. To make the jump and say that the Universe is eteral requires that either the Universe is an open system, the Law of Entropy is not true, or that heat can somehow be converted back into usable energy is actually possible. Unfortunately, there is no evidence for any of these three, si I agree with you in that there isn't any indication that the Universe is, in fact, eternal.

I feel the desire to state that you are all wrong and direct you to watch The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya

And in doing so, you'd be wrong. The object didn't begin falling of its own accord - gravity was always pulling on the object. The proper question would be "What ceased to prevent the object from falling?" and the answer to that is simple - you let go.

Also, I find it interesting that someone (forget who) is suggesting that an event must have caused the beginning of the universe (and thus the beginning of time). That'd imply that something happened before the universe was created, but for anything to be "before" anything else, time is required.

That would be Mitbulls, but he specifically clarified that something outside of time, rather than "before" it, was the Original Cause. He just threw out the phrase "before time" as a simplification for communication purposes, but he really did already answer that point.

"Yet" only makes sense if time exists. Before the Universe, it doesn't. Imagine, if you will, a flat universe. It has two physical dimensions, plus time. To an observer inside that universe, it appears that said universe is in constant motion and perhaps expansion. It appears completely inconceivable that time has a beginning, and even that something must exist outside of the universe or before time. To a hypothetical observer in a three-dimensional space much like hours, in which that universe has been immersed, it appears as a self-contained object. While we don't traverse time the same way we traverse space, it can be considered a dimension like all others. and because of that, it's easy to imagine the universe as self-contained in time, as well.

It's part of the nature of a paper sheet that it starts at a particular point in space and ends at another particular point in space. The sheet's edges are harder to define in time, of course. But a subatomic particle has edges in time - if you perchance happened to have a sheet of four-dimensional graph paper, you could plot its motion through three-dimensional space and through time, with start and end points.

The sheet doesn't even need edges in all directions - a regular sheet of paper has four edges. A Möbius strip has two.


Possible and impossible are only truly meaningful concepts in a mechanical universe. It seems possible, even likely, that this isn't one - it's an universe of averages. On average, of course, the laws of physics we observe at the macro level - Like the Second Law of Thermodynamics - behave as they do. However, given infinite time, we locate the spikes on the curve - the sheer accumulation of random events that produces apparent violations of the laws of physics.

But, of course, I'm not particularly inclined to believe the universe as we know it has no beginning.

Hmm, interesting.

You say a couple of words, and the interpretations of those words vary way off course.

In a hope to not derail too much, I just want to clarify a few things.

1. I read the Torah and Genesis in a complex manner. (As I was taught to do in my various schools.) The big Bang, would be the same as the first statement, "The world was unformed and void, and the presence was over the heavens, and G-d said let there be light." That there is my simple understanding of how the Big Bang accured. There was nothingness, and it was unstructured (read virtual particles), an "event" happened from outside of the universe and then BOOM there was light(particles). The idea of not discussing what happened before, is to say that what that outside "Event" was, what existed before the nothingness and the virtual particles, can not be known.

2. When I talk about a creator in General, I am not discussing any particular idea of what that creator might be. I assume two things, which are actually one thing. It is Infinite, and it is not defined by what it is not. (unlike all other things)

These two points are not connected. My first point was simply to remember that even "those people" who would say that they have a tradition passed on to them about the beginning of the World, they say that you can not know the beginning.

The other second point, which is unrelated, is that Humans are special, and unique in the Universe. Not because of some theological concept, but because that is reality. Life on other planets is resigned to the status of microbes.

@Shiri I'll look for those sources for you. I read them in the bookstore. When I go back I'll look for the books again.

Maybe it doesn't need to be said, but there's a response book - The Dawkins Delusion.
Is it actually worth reading anyway? It seems to be nothing more than author's chatter, judging from the four focal points of the book that I find on wikipedia and which are kinda self-evident. Response from religious point of view, on the other hand, might be interesting. What do they come up with?


It only depends on the definition of nature, if someone considers Earth's ecosystem being nature, it sure would be harmed by sun's explosion.


Discovering the truth behind quantum behaviour would probably revolutionize physics, given the most probable explanation right now seems to be that information can be transferred without boundaries (light speed limit). There is no need to ban the law of casuality, but the fact is it doesn't seem to universally apply, even though it does in every other field of science.

While it's quite obvious that we have to rely on our current state of knowledge and understanding, it's just not enough to understand everything about the Universe. That's why all those theories come up and are being considered by scientific communities instead of being immediately rejected, even though Xavius would like to put them on the faeries stories' shelf.

Other dimensions would mean that our observation is limited. Forces we observe in a 3-dimensional world could be just the after effect of something else at work. What would a scientifically defined force be in a 4-dimensional world? It's not just a matter of energy influx, it's a question of whether we can observe existence as a whole in order to understand it. If we cannot, our science will always be fundamentally flawed. Of course, it doesn't really matter unless you attempt to get answers to the fundamental questions, like the ones you want to discuss in this topic. In that case, I feel it is justified to bring it up, especially when religious views are being seriously considered.

I don't think anything exists out of time. We think of things as having beginnings and ends because we have learned this through our own relative experiences as humans, before religion, where most everything in the world around us had some sort of life cycle.

To be honest, my brain turns to mush when I think about the "beginning," or whatever you want to call it. The beginning of the Universe as we know it starts at the Big Bang Theory as far as we can tell, although I think Xavius made mention of something else. It's entirely feasible that the universe just goes through a cycle, and that it eventually contracts on itself when its finished "expanding" or stretching, and then once again explodes and does what it's doing now.

But then you're still left with the question of what came before or what sparked that initial big bang. I'm going to be honest and say that I believe in intelligent design to an extent, only so much as the universe is so intricate and things are only random or just are because we can't comprehend them/explain them in any other way. Whatever it was that initiated the big bang, whether you call it a god or just some sort of...force, exists not outside of time, but outside of our understanding of time because it goes infinitely backward and infinitely forward.

And my brain is spinning again.



And who considers humans special? Oh, right, other humans. I read an interesting article that basically bashed the idea that humans have reached some sort of evolutionary high point. We're different from other animals, sure, but they're also different from each other.

I also did a debate ages ago (nearly 8 years, 8th grade I guess) and was of course stuck with the position that other intelligent life exists in the universe. The number of planets that scientists have been able to discern are habitable number in the tens of thousands, if not more (I'm struggling to remember here). If the universe is infinite, who is to say there isn't something that is either somehow equivalent to us or surpasses us? But that's its own can of worms.

What religious views have been mentioned? I haven't seen any.

I don't know if Christianity is as complex on this issue as Judaism is, but I do know that there is no unified "creation" theory within Judaism.

You have sources saying that Adam was never a physical creation, you have sources saying that Adam was born as an Adult, and you have sources that say Adam was born as a child.

Some say that Trees were created whole, some say they were created as seeds.

Some say the Universe was created 15,340,500,000 years before Adam, (this is based on the laws of Shmita within Leviticus)) some say it was 5 days before, some say it was 6,000 years before Adam.

Each of these numbers are given for theological reasons, not in an attempt to quantify it, but rather an attempt to understand Man's role in this world of ours.

Those who say 15.3 Billion before adam say the focus of our job in this world is G-d's plan, and the advancement of Kindness, and G_d's Kingship, and to focus on relationships with other people.

Those who say 5 days before, say the focus of our job is to live in the here and now and do the best work we can with what we have, and to not worry about the big picture.

Those who say it was 6,000 years before, say that the focus of our job build up the planet and keep it healthy and growing.


Ok, so now you have religious Points of View brought up. Untill now, religious arguments have not been brought up.

Christians I am sure, view these things differently, but those are just a few of the Jewish traditions which we claim to "all be True"

Veo, you share this with the rest of humanity. We are simply unable to comprehend infinity.

Domesticated animals also consider humans special.

Again, sure you could say that the difference between a monkey using a stick to get termites, and a person using a computer to buy food online is the same difference between a Tiger which hunts its food, and a Spider which lets it's food come to it. But I think you would be not thinking clearly if you felt the differences were on the same level.

Or you could say that the difference between ants communicating to each and sacrificing themselves for the group, vs humans who write plays and people who found organizations devoted to helping others, is the same as the difference between the praying mantis that eats its husband, and the dolphin that has one mate for life.

The differences are more than just "on a larger scale" with "more intelligence." It is a difference of purpose of cause, of mechanism.

It would be like saying that a plant which drinks water is the same as an animal that drinks water, and really there isn't much difference between plants and animals.

Daganev, a little misunderstanding - I meant religious as in 'belief in higher power behind the creation of the universe, however defined', not as in any particular religion's dogma. Mitbulls, Yrael and Veo did bring it up (intelligent design etc).

Daganev's quote made me want to address this.

While we may or may not be "special" on a universal scale, we're certainly a hell of a lot better than Neanderthals (if one is to believe what our scientists say). They appear to have existed far longer and achieved much less than Homo Sapiens has (and continues to do).

Ahhh, the "Big Bang Theory." The event they claim stems from something smaller than an atom, and there was no air to carry sound vibrations.

Misnomers aside, do try and remember that Einstein himself refused to believe there was a "beginning" to the universe, and it is normally his work most people follow up on to reach these new conclusions. People state it as "obvious" that this is what must have happened and while he was still alive, some presented him with that. His response? "Your mathematics may be sound, but your physics is flawed."

I think this image deserves to become a meme.

Oh, and about the Big Bang: It's just a name.

Yes, it is highly worth reading, I think. It's nice to finally read something like it, having been bombarded with roman catholic propaganda for years and having to work out everything else largely on my own. I have no idea what "author's chatter" refers to, he cites plenty of sources, some of which I've had the opportunity to check so far.
As for "the dawkins delusion", I may check that out later.


That would seem to be a rather narrow definition of nature though.