no more fairytales about an eternal universe!

[crowonsnow]

Since according to current scientific cosmology, the physical universe started with the Big Bang, and this includes time itself.

The very word “eternal” means “outside of time”, not “undending.”

Therefore YOUR statement is itself sophistry, if not puerile.

It’s certainly possible that the universe is something very small compared to the Cosmos, perhaps as small as a single electron against the rest of the universe. Sagan described the Cosmos as everything that ever was, is or shall ever be. So in that sense any entities would be part of the same Cosmos. It would not make them any less than they are.

If the Cosmos is the mind of such an entity it takes nothing away from the cosmos, and nor do I see a way to separate the mind from its holder. The cosmos would still be the cosmos. Appreciated this way it is a very unifying observation.

 

[crowonsnow]

ALL human science is based on theoretical conjecture, human relativism and human wisdom which amounts to nothing compared to ineffable wisdom of God.
The Cosmos/Universe is Finite. Even mere human science has shown that great galaxies, stars, and planets die.

But they don’t disappear. The ultimate and only proof that our universe is not eternal would be to be able to somehow remove some of same. We can only pretend that this can happen.

 

[centurionguard]

And the wisdom of God’s, depends on humans to interpret and deliver.

Bit of a catch 22 imo

I see no catch 22. Life and Death is a reality that humans or any other sentient being has any power to change in it’s finite inevitability. Life and Death encompasses all creation living or inanimate.

And the wisdom of God’s, depends on humans to interpret and deliver.

It’s taken theologians thousands of years to come up with scriptural interpretation.
Some people discount the idea of Spirit of God’s Wisdom helping humans, theologians, make interpretations in the capacity of human intellect and understanding in comparison to Gods wisdom. Theologians and the Church Fathers were not haphazard in their scriptural interpretations. If one discounts the Spirit of God hovering over the human race and bringing inspiration to their intellect since the dawn of Gods design of the first humans on this planet, then people are left to their own primitive wisdom and wild assumptions.

 

[warpspeedpetey]

The Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem deals with the possibility of eternal inflation under certain models of the universe. It does not rule out a number of different past-eternal models (such as the Baum-Frampton model). In a recent paper, Paul Frampton discusses why the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem does not show that the universe must have had a beginning:

arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0705/0705.2730v2.pdf

I don’t have any physics degrees, so my ability to argue physics is somewhat limited. But from what I’ve read, the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem does not have the implications that people like William Lane Craig wish it did.

link?

 

[JDaniel]

But they don’t disappear. The ultimate and only proof that our universe is not eternal would be to be able to somehow remove some of same. We can only pretend that this can happen.

Yes, but, we do have entropy.

jd

 

[warpspeedpetey]

Once again Peety…

You are grasping at straws.

your turning out to be my lucky charm, everytime you opo up saying that, i turn out to be right? maybe its just your bad luck at that coincidence, bt im statrting to get a pavlovian response, it happens so often.

Why don’t you spend some time understanding this God you keep defending with your refutions of science.

what ever made you think i havent? im Catholic for a reason after all.

Science is simply a technique that humans use to refute their own desire to lie to themselves. They realize that a human truth, can only be verified, not believed.

? i thought is was a technique to examine our physical universe, im just busy refuting the arguments that pretend science really has anything to say on the issue.

If there is a God, science…cannot do anything but search for her.

her? your ok with a G-d if its a her? thats pretty liberal of you. that just goes to my opinion htat your not really an atheist or agnostic, you know there is G-d, you just dont like the parameters of function involved.

I think you are really struggling with faith

,

you feel threatened by the strenghth of my arguments and the positions i take, i dont mess with you in general, but you consistently seek me out for comment. why? becausse i think you know im strangling atheism by its own belt. rationalism is a 2 edged sword.

because like most people who live in a material world, you have been taught to require proof. You are looking for it. There is none

.

youve seen proof repeatedly, you neither understand the scientific, or metaphysical arguments made, you just insist that there cant be a G-d because you dont like how He operates.

Truth… is a pain in the ***.

i know, you dance a mad jig to avoid a G-d. i did too as an atheist, i just realized too much iwas at stake to be wrong, the issue had to be investigated.

i did and left the other dancers on the floor.

so if you dont have an agrgument to make, and you dont, because you never do, then what did you post for?

 

[warpspeedpetey]

ALL human science is based on theoretical conjecture, human relativism and human wisdom which amounts to nothing compared to ineffable wisdom of God.
The Cosmos/Universe is Finite. Even mere human science has shown that great galaxies, stars, and planets die.

true, but youll never get an athiest to agree to that.

 

[warpspeedpetey]

But they don’t disappear. The ultimate and only proof that our universe is not eternal would be to be able to somehow remove some of same. We can only pretend that this can happen.

you should read the abstract, the physicist involved are well respected, their argument makes sense to me when explained.

and they seem to think it is proof that this particular universe must have a temporal bound, a a beginning.

 

[warpspeedpetey]

The Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem deals with the possibility of eternal inflation under certain models of the universe. It does not rule out a number of different past-eternal models (such as the Baum-Frampton model). In a recent paper, Paul Frampton discusses why the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem does not show that the universe must have had a beginning:

arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0705/0705.2730v2.pdf

I don’t have any physics degrees, so my ability to argue physics is somewhat limited. But from what I’ve read, the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem does not have the implications that people like William Lane Craig wish it did.

something else i should mention is that the authors state their interpretation, both in the abstract and in later speeches.

they are pretty clear that it means this kind of universe had to have a beginning.

 

[JimG]

Since according to current scientific cosmology, the physical universe started with the Big Bang, and this includes time itself.

The very word “eternal” means “outside of time”, not “undending.”

Therefore YOUR statement is itself sophistry, if not puerile.

I think the OP was using the word “eternal” in the sense having no temporal beginning or ending, rather than in the theological and philosophical meaning of existing with no extension in time.

In any case, the Big Bang does seem to imply a temporal beginning, and in my view, that is likely–that the universe began as a singularity.

However, others have postulated that the Big Bang may have been preceded by a Big Crunch, as a prior universe collapsed into a singularity, and that the process could repeat endlessly.

And from a theological standpoint, divine creation ex nihilo does depend on the universe having a temporal beginning or a temporal ending. So it is strictly a scientific and cosmological matter.

 

[Omyo12]

The Cosmos is everywhere all the time. We cannot even begin to fathom a way to remove even the tiniest piece of it. It is a brute fact that does not change.

Faced with the Cosmos, arguments against its eternity amount to sophistry at best.

When discussing the nature of time and the universe, you can take two roads:

the Philosophical (which includes Theology)
or
the Scientific.

The Big Bang marks the beginning of time and space in our universe. It is a temporal beginning. “What was before” is a non-question since how can there be something before the beginning? Its like asking what’s south of the south pole?

So you’re left with a cause. What caused the Universe to begin? Or if you prefer, why was the big bang?

As Immanuel Kant once asked, if the universe itself is eternal, why did it take an infinite amount of time to get where we are today? On the flip side, he also asked if the universe is finite, why did it take an infinite amount of time to begin.

Of course taking the latter, time begins within the beginnings of the universe, so back to the south of the south pole example.

For the former, could it be that we exist inside a super string bubble in an infinite sea of the higher dimensional multiverse? (String Theory is a beauty to study)
However, this is a hypothesis at best and is one of the many many theories inside the study of superstrings.
Even then, why is this multiverse?

Your belief in an eternal universe is a philosophy and does not hold any more ground than in the existence of God.

So sometimes I wonder. What exactly is gained by denying the the eternity of the Cosmos?

Well, one could also ask what is gained by denying the existence of a god? It doesn’t even have to be a personal god. I mean the “god of the philosophers” or the “first cause”

 

[JDaniel]

The Cosmos is everywhere all the time. We cannot even begin to fathom a way to remove even the tiniest piece of it. It is a brute fact that does not change.

Faced with the Cosmos, arguments against its eternity amount to sophistry at best.

So sometimes I wonder. What exactly is gained by denying the the eternity of the Cosmos?

Crow:

The removal of a piece of it is simply not a criterion for the universe’s eternality, past, present and future. You have created a strawman that is simply wrong. (See below.) If the arguments for a beginning of the universe are merely sophistry, then the vast majority of modern scientists are sophists too.

filer.case.edu/~sjr16/advanced/cosmos_bigbang.html

jd

 

[Don_Schneider]

What is infinite is potential. What is finite is experience. How many novels are left to be written? How many songs to be composed?

What is the arena where everything takes place? It is consciousness. Hinduism would capitalize the word. It is their concept of Brahman, the underlying formless reality of being. (“I AM WHO AM”) The material world is the illusion. It is an epiphenomenon of consciousness and not visa versa as the Western world, both religious and scientific, believes.

Without consciousness, there would be nothing to attest that anything exists. Therefore, according to atheistic Western thought, matter bounced around the universe for an incomprehensibly long time without any awareness of it. That is a theory that can never be proven because there was no consciousness to attest to it.

No one can disprove that the entire universe (or “multiverse" if the MWI of QM should be correct) was not created five minutes ago complete with memories and records. No one can prove that the past is stable as we intuitively assume.

The material world is the result of consciousness fragmenting itself. Whereas once there had been a blank page, a line is now drawn down its middle so that we now have the concepts of left and right, or up and down (dualism). This illusion (the line is not real and the substrate structure retains its inherent essence as one) which the Hindus call maya is the source of all suffering, the illusion of separateness. To be separate is isolation; to lack something. It is to be vulnerable. It is life as opposed to death; existence as opposed to non-exsistence. (“And they saw that they were naked.”) It is something to lose.

Our dream characters do not exist (or at least not within the reality of the dream experience), yet they can seem very real in a transient manner. The only difference is that the illusion we call life endures much longer, but not eternally.

Life is the “play of God.” It is tantamount to solipsism (which also can never be disproved). But it is not radical solipsism where one or more of us actually believes that we personally are the only one who exists and are imagining all else. Rather, it is a universal solipsism in which we have successfully convinced ourselves that we have an objective, independent existence from all others. By way of analogy, if we have two characters within a dream their seeming separate beings are in truth but manifestations of a single source, a single being: the dreamer.

“Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream. Merrily, merrily; merrily, merrily, life is but….” Perhaps who ever composed this well known folk ditty had been more philosopher than songwriter. It is, after all, perhaps the best known *round *in musical history.

While science might one day account for the existence of all else, there is one concept it can never account for: existence. Scientists are tantamount to dream characters who can explain the logic within the dream, but can not understand the origin of the existence of the dream itself.

 

[anEvilAtheist]

something else i should mention is that the authors state their interpretation, both in the abstract and in later speeches.

they are pretty clear that it means this kind of universe had to have a beginning.

They do indeed show that certain kinds of universes must have had a beginning. They show that null and timelike geodisics which have a positive average expansion rate cannot be eternal:
Borde-Guth-Vilenkin:

Our argument shows that null and timelike geodesics are, in general, past-incomplete in inflationary models, whether or not energy conditions hold, provided only that the averaged expansion condition Hav > 0 holds along these past-directed geodesics.

But this does not show that our universe has a finite past. You would first have to establish the rate of expansion before Planck time. If you can prove which theory of quantum gravitation is correct, and that theory leads to our universe having a positive average rate of expansion, then we’d be getting somewhere.

 

[crowonsnow]

While science might one day account for the existence of all else, there is one concept it can never account for: existence. Scientists are tantamount to dream characters who can explain the logic within the dream, but can not understand the origin of the existence of the dream itself.

Existence really is a dopey word. It’s a word that appeals to a person with nihilistic tendencies, someone, who for some reason holds that there should not be a cosmos, despite every observation to the contrary. That’s just plain weird.

I actually used it several times in the original OP but then removed it for clarity. I think it’s usage is an excellent example of sophistry in action. It’s like saying the moon goes through phases because it’s in the nature of the moon to go through phases. It doesn’t add any knowledge.

I’ve even heard presuppositionalists make the claim that ‘existence exists.’ What silliness.

Even if I wanted to pretend or dream that there wasn’t a cosmos, which is exactly what people who believe in magical creators do, I still need a cosmos to do that.

 

[crowonsnow]

Well, one could also ask what is gained by denying the existence of a god? It doesn’t even have to be a personal god. I mean the “god of the philosophers” or the “first cause”

Gods are magical beings, things we pretend are real so that we may have an explanation for something of which we are ignorant. Magical beings can explain everything, which is precisely why they don’t explain anything.

The use of magical beings to explain our observations is another excellent example of sophistry. Basically, when we become ill we should not blame the evil spirits. When we misplace our keys we should not blame mischievous gremlins.

Also, for a good observer, I don’t think there is much of a distinction between philosophy and science.

 

[crowonsnow]

Yes, but, we do have entropy.

Which is to say we do have motion. But do we?

 

[JDaniel]

Which is to say we do have motion. But do we?

Crow:

Unless the scientists are dead wrong or, are lying to us - assuming you are speaking in reference to entropy. If you are speaking about motion in some other way, that would be a different subject, I think.

jd

 

[crowonsnow]

Crow:

Unless the scientists are dead wrong or, are lying to us - assuming you are speaking in reference to entropy. If you are speaking about motion in some other way, that would be a different subject, I think.

I’m just not allowing the use of language to limit my musings and observations, odd as that may sound.

 

[Don_Schneider]

Dear Crow,

“Even if I wanted to pretend or dream that there wasn’t a cosmos, which is exactly what people who believe in magical creators do, I still need a cosmos to do that.”

If you wanted to cut off your feet, you’d first need to have them. Therefore, your feet must be eternal and uncaused.