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

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

#271

Post by wizofaus »

eis wrote: post #162
ratsmack wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>religious babble Why is religion held in such contempt when there is so much science that is just as much "babble", but held in high regard?

I think the ratio of babble to sound reasoning is much better in science than in religion. That being said, there is also a lot of science babble and we should call it out and try to keep it at a as low amount as possible. The core tenets of science are pretty sound. Religions are based on a lot of completely made up stuff. They are not 100% bad of course. But we seriously can do much much better than that. I think t…

> I think the ratio of babble to sound reasoning is much higher in science

You mean lower surely?

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

#272

Post by tresqotheq »

dr_hooo wrote: post #258
tresqotheq wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Science is not a religion. What is the difference between a holy man who claims to have the word of god, and a scientist who claims to have followed the "scientifc method"? Modern human believes the latter. That is the difference.

You have to believe the claims of the former, while you can verify the claims of the latter yourself.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32621532

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

#273

Post by coldtea »

bumbledraven wrote: post #240
coldtea wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 That's no contradiction though. A contradiction would be "I know everything about X" and at the same time "There's a limit to our knowledge of X". It's no contradiction to claim that there are limits to our know…

> in math we can even prove that some things can never be proven No we can't. We can only prove that certain formal systems cannot resolve certain statements. We might still invent other formal systems that are acceptable to us and that can resolve those statements.

>We might still invent other formal systems that are acceptable to us and that can resolve those statements.

That's irrelevant, though, because a mathematical proof or a statement X is considered in the context of a specific formal system (and any isomorphic system).

Proving that S can't be proven under formal system F will always be true regardless if you are able to prove the same statement in the formal system Z.

For example, you can't say "I just disproved that triangle angles add to 180 degrees" just because you've proved they add to more than 180 degrees under a non-flat surface or non-Euclidean geometry.

People saying "triangle angles add to 180 degrees" implicitly already mean "under Euclidean geometry and in a flat plane". It's just left implied, because it's goes without saying that they mean it within the system they expressed the problem and did the proof in.

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

#274

Post by craftsman »

tresqotheq wrote: post #243
tqkxzugoaupvwqr wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if the creator exists outside their creation under different laws of physics (if any), who created the creator or how did the creator come to be? (I can’t watch the video right now.)

> did the creator come to be.. Time, and causuality, is a construct inside of our universe. Asking who created the creator is like asking which way is down when you are in outer space..

If you can’t use the concept of causality outside of the universe, then the idea that there’s a creator outside of the universe who caused the universe is already out of bounds.

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

#275

Post by tresqotheq »

craftsman wrote: post #269
tresqotheq wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Science is not a religion. What is the difference between a holy man who claims to have the word of god, and a scientist who claims to have followed the "scientifc method"? Modern human believes the latter. That is the difference.

You seem to have a view that the world consists only of (a) people who claim things, and (b) people who believe them, and that there’s no difference between types of claims. The claim of someone who says they have the word of god is hearsay and there’s no way to figure out whether they do or not. The claims of someone who says they’ve followed the scientific method are verifiable by others. If they claim that their e…

And if "people" are limited by resources, say if someone need an LHC to verify something..what really is the difference...?

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

#276

Post by DiggyJohnson »

Zigurd wrote: post #268
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps, if there is a God, he does not desire us to learn about him by knowledge or by science, but by love for him and seeking him out. For who is man to say, that man must only learn about God through objectively verifiable facts, because man said so? Perhaps this God wants seeking. If we were born without eyes, color would still exist, but we would never perceive it, and how would we believe it if someone said it…

Our knowledge of the cosmos, in just a few hundreds of years, expanded from the Earth, Moon, planets and stars of the firmament, a kind of cozy neighborhood, to that of unfathomable numbers of galaxies stretching out to unimaginable distances of space and time. Strange that gods who were so occupied with matters on this planet, who live in a nearby heaven up by the firmament of stars, are also still credible candidat…

You’re taking an unbelievably literal interpretation of a faith you don’t believe in and literally projecting it on to the parent comment as a form of criticism. Safe to say that I don’t think you can expect a response from them.

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

#277

Post by gjsman-1000 »

Zigurd wrote: post #268
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps, if there is a God, he does not desire us to learn about him by knowledge or by science, but by love for him and seeking him out. For who is man to say, that man must only learn about God through objectively verifiable facts, because man said so? Perhaps this God wants seeking. If we were born without eyes, color would still exist, but we would never perceive it, and how would we believe it if someone said it…

Our knowledge of the cosmos, in just a few hundreds of years, expanded from the Earth, Moon, planets and stars of the firmament, a kind of cozy neighborhood, to that of unfathomable numbers of galaxies stretching out to unimaginable distances of space and time. Strange that gods who were so occupied with matters on this planet, who live in a nearby heaven up by the firmament of stars, are also still credible candidat…

Are they really less tenable? Because, if there be a God, on the judgement day present in many of the religions we know, he might point out that the sheer complexity of the universe should be a sign of his existence. What are the odds? Are the odds actually in favor of man's theory, or is man desperately clinging to a theory to avoid him? Is it actually good science as designed, or rather any excuse no matter how implausible will suffice? Good science looks at the odds and makes a conclusion. Bad science looks at the conclusion and ignores the odds to bias towards a result.

Edit: Furthermore, this said God might point out on said day the lack of any aliens, or other life, as another sign that the universe was made for man, and nothing else, and the sheer enormity of it should be yet another sign. For if the universe was not large, would it be more easy to deny?

Edit 2: You might dismiss the above, and these aren't the best arguments that could be formulated, but it is more to show that your presupposition that a larger universe disproves his existence is untenable.

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

#278

Post by bardworx »

synu wrote: post #257
DemocracyFTW2 wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well to quote user mensetmanusman: "Per thermodynamic axioms, incompleteness is implied by the arrow of time and information atrophy. This would imply an unknowable beginning." I think 'never' should be understood in this way—either there's something wrong or fundamentally incomplete about our theories, or we can not know certain things. Barring groundbreaking advancements in understanding akin to quantum physics and…

Ok, yeah maybe I could see that. But it’s kind of a confusing message - don’t read or take this research on this topic seriously, except in case some research on this topic comes that you should read and take seriously.

Per PBS SpaceTime, humanity has been able to recreate conditions 0.000001 seconds after Big Bang (arbitrary number), in particle accelerators. But to add an extra 0 would require the energy output of our universe.

The implication is that we simply don’t have enough energies to recreate similar circumstance in a particle accelerator and we cannot “see” past microwave background radiation. As such, as of now, there isn’t a straight path to understand the Big Bang further in any context.

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

#279

Post by craftsman »

craftsman wrote: post #263
tresqotheq wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Science is not a religion. What is the difference between a holy man who claims to have the word of god, and a scientist who claims to have followed the "scientifc method"? Modern human believes the latter. That is the difference.

The difference between the two claims is whether they are verifiable.

I can’t reply to the question I was asked, so I reply here:

How many have I verified? I’m not sure of the #, but I’ve verified much of classical physics, chemistry, astronomical observations, and lots of things in electronics (some of which rely on quantum mechanics) and electromagnetism.

But as I said, they question is not whether you or I have personally verified everything, but whether they are verifiable in principle, by anyone. The claims of chemistry, physics, astronomy, etc, are verifiable. The claims of a holy man are not.

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

#280

Post by pronlover723 »

twiss wrote: post #225
synu wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

She explicitly says that the scientific method is insufficient to give an answer to this question. So reading anything written by scientists won't give a conclusive answer. I think it's implicitly hinted that you might as well read something by a religious person, or a philosopher, or anyone with a random theory, as none of the theories can be proven or disproven by the scientific method, and so all of their answers…

She did make an appeal to simplicity, claiming that simpler is better, and she stated that religious origins are way more complicated so while they can't be proven wrong, if you accept the idea that simpler is better then religious explanations are unlikely to be true.
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