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We don't know how the universe began, and we will never know

backreaction.blogspot.com

201–210 of 610 posts

Re: We don't know how the universe began, and we will never know

#201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is simply put no evidence for the existence of God. Neither philosophically nor rationally. And it's not a straw man argument. God in Islam cares about foreskins and sex and if you disbelieve in him he sends you to hell for eternity. Don't send videos tell me your arguments, you can speak for yourself.

Did you watch the video? You keep straw manning. You expect a detailed and nuanced response in 1 paragraph on HN?

No problem, here's my email: lumbdak@gmail.com.

If you are so sure then let's discuss it.

Re: We don't know how the universe began, and we will never know

#202

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My pet theory: Something has always existed. There was no beginning. No origin. No first cause. No t=0. No start. It's always been there. What was before that? That. And that. And that. Always that. And the Second Law of Thermodynamics is not absolute and can be broken.

> My pet theory: Something has always existed. There was no beginning. No origin. No first cause. No t=0. No start. It's always been there. What was before that? That. And that. And that. Always that. Your pet theory is the view of Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and the Roman Catholic Church. The mistake that people make (you can even see it in this thread), is that they start with some preconceived conception of God, wi…

> The more productive approach is to recognize and acknowledge the necessary existence of a base reality. Then you simply assign the English word 'God' as a reference pointer to this base reality.

You can, but I'm not sure how "then" onwards is going to help — the people I've seen conflating these things before will still conflate them after doing this.

Re: We don't know how the universe began, and we will never know

#203

“We will never know” is such a contradictory statement. On the surface, it implies the limits of our knowledge while simultaneously indicating that the author possesses the omnipotence required to know what humans will learn throughout the entirety of our future. Add it to your list of things to never write.

That's a very narrow reading of it. There's always an implicit "to the best of our current knowledge" caveat with every sound scientific statement. And it's true, to the best of our current knowledge, we can never know what it's like inside a black hole or very close to the time our universe began because the physics that we know tells us no person or probe can ever go there and come back to tell. If you're no so gen…

I watched the video, and the sense I got was you don’t need to bother to read anything where scientists talk about having figured out what happened at the beginning of the universe because we can never know. This seems to explicitly exclude the possibility that there could ever be a discovery you might read about that would change that.

Re: We don't know how the universe began, and we will never know

#204
post #154

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But that doesn't get us any further than "We don't know yet." It doesn't prove or disprove anything. By the same line of reasoning one could say there is no time at all and all our memory of the past is an illusion generated by a simulation. The linked video talks about this: there are an infinite amount of theories that one can come up with to explain the current state and it might not be possible with our current u…

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Re: We don't know how the universe began, and we will never know

#205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what's the religious viewpoint? Some omnipotent being did it and he cares about the sexual life of humans?! That's bizarre as well, better to just say that at this point we don't know.

You're straw manning when you say things like "cares about the sexual life of humans". I highly recommend you watch this to broaden your horizons: https://youtu.be/If3cNUixEBM

There is a great deal of evidence, philosophically and rationally, for the existence of God.

The Big Bang, first theorized by theoretical physicist and Catholic priest Georges Lamaitre, states the universe sprang into existence 13.7b years ago; it was not eternal as previously thought.

And we know from observation that everything that begins to exist has a cause for its existence.

This suggests that the universe was caused. Since the universe can't cause itself, its cause must be outside of the universe. It must be immaterial; not made up of the stuff of the universe. It must be timeless and not governed by the laws of the universe. And it must be exceedingly powerful to create all the energy that kicked off the expanding universe with its billions of spinning galaxies, stars, and planets.

A powerful, immaterial, timeless force outside of the universet that caused the universe to exist. This points to God.

Re: We don't know how the universe began, and we will never know

#207
post #204

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What does having texts with some degree of interpretation have to do with whether those texts are true or not? Sounds like a genetic fallacy.

> The existance of these monsters does not prove religions don't create issues. Or what's your claim?

My claim is that without religion, we'd be in a far off worse place.

Re: We don't know how the universe began, and we will never know

#208

I dont think we can get there. First, we would need to solve time. I am not sure if we are able to grasp it. Then we must figure out what happened at T-1 or T-2, which I think will be simple once we understand time. The theory creates a start and then explains the progress from there. but not what caused it. In theory of the cylinder than the universe travels to that is good but it does not explain how everything cam…

Unlike in Genesis, the light was not created before sun. Grafting god onto science by cherry picking things that were guessed while throwing away all the incorrect statements is a bit disingenuous, no?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photon_epoch

That was around 9 billion years before the Sun.

Re: We don't know how the universe began, and we will never know

#209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you watch the video? You keep straw manning. You expect a detailed and nuanced response in 1 paragraph on HN?

No problem, here's my email: lumbdak@gmail.com. If you are so sure then let's discuss it.

You're simply trying to diverge from the discussion when evidence is presented to you, by outright ignoring it. The video I posted presents rational and philosophical evidence (among others) for the existence of God.

Re: We don't know how the universe began, and we will never know

#210

“We will never know” is such a contradictory statement. On the surface, it implies the limits of our knowledge while simultaneously indicating that the author possesses the omnipotence required to know what humans will learn throughout the entirety of our future. Add it to your list of things to never write.

Someone wrote an article so people can waste hours debating this, accomplishing nothing. When will people learn?
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