First Cause

[warpspeedpetey]

Ok the is not doubt withing academia. I do not consider those to be credible sources.

i dont know how credible they are myself. i am only using their existence to point out that there is doubt, and they are academics. this man, who i do not know lists himself with a PhD. (Brad Harrub, Ph.D.) from this site [(name removed by moderator)lainsite.org/html/the_flood.html](http://www.(name removed by moderator)lainsite.org/html/the_flood.html). his doctorate may be in underwater basket weaving for all i know. but im sure to find more academics if i looked.

though of course, you know they probably would say the same thing about other academics that disagree with them. thats actually the reason i avoid the ‘dueling scholars’ routine. when people make the fallacious argument from authority, not only is it a formal fallacy, it just leads everyone to debating other peoples work that they dont generally understand.

we can observe the evidence that falsifies the flood, it is the exact same, except we don’t need to travel to space.

is there a piece of evidence that proves that there will never, ever, at anytime in the future be a possible explanation for the event? the only thing i can think of short of eyewitness testimony that it did not occur is a logical contradiction. considering that there are number of cultures with the story. what accounts of it there are, seem indicative of some event of some nature did occur.

now we both know that we have different world view, from training yours is very empirically based, while mine from training, is logic based.

so when i ask for the evidence, i mean evidence that could preclude there from ever being any possible explanation in the future.

that way we avoid clarkes first “law”.

Arthur C. Clarke formulated the following three “laws” of prediction:

1.When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

2.The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

3.Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Well it depends how you define magic.

i would say its just a word we use when we dont understand how something was done. this probably isnt the technical definition, but it does describe the situation that we have found to be true so many times. after all 10,000 years in the future, our understanding may well be entirely different from what it is now. they may look back at us as we would cave men. wondering how we could miss so many things that would be obvious to them.

 

[Nozzferrahhtoo]

The fact that we only experience temporal cause and effect doesn’t mean that cause and effect are necessarily temporal.

If we observe something happening one way and one way only then assuming it can happen any other way is pure speculation and nothing more.

The point is that since we have absolutely no examples of cause and effect in any other scenario other than temporally based, then this is all we have to work with. All else is pure speculation.

Therefore since we are talking about the universe in a state when time did not exist, anything we say such as “It must have had a cause” etc etc is nothing more than playful speculation. We are not aware of cause and effect even being possible without a time component.

If of course you can show otherwise, the grounding of the first cause argument would be stronger.

This is a possibility, but it doesn’t match the evidence we have.

We do not HAVE any evidence, that is the problem. Everything we know about the Big Bang is about the event as time approaches T = 0. We have no evidence or knowledge of the singularity at T=0 nor do we know what it did or did not do “before” this point or if concepts like “before” which our human minds are so tied to are even applicable.

If the singularity was eternal, it would not have changed, and as a singularity it would be timeless and not subject to “before and after”.

My point exactly, thank you!

The entire first cause argument is tied to time. As we said before the only knowledge we have of causality is that of it being grounded in time. Anything else is speculation based on no evidence at all.

That given how can you then talk about cause and effect in a non temporal environment. It just doesnt work and you are just engaging in pure speculation based on zero evidence.

Also I am not sure what you mean by “it would not have changed”. Why not? Even if we did imagine there being cause and effect somehow, this does not mean it would not have changed. Cause and effect tells us that, for example, a body at rest needs something to get it moving and a body moving needs something to bring it to rest.

So it is JUST as valid to speculate an eternal entity in a constant state of flux as it is to speculate an eternal entity in one constant state. (not that either are valid as I said, since we have no experience or data of cause and effect in a non temporal plane.