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We don't know how the universe began, and we will never know
311–320 of 610 posts
Re: We don't know how the universe began, and we will never know
#312Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't follow you. Can you elaborate?
Alice: "So, we're all agreed, the word 'god' just means 'base reality'?" Bob: "Yup." Christine: "Sure. And because this base reality exists, that proves I was right all along about Jesus: he did die for our sins." Dhvan: "You mean it proves me right about Brahma." Eris: "…the horned god." Freya: "…Ragnarök." and so on.
Yup. I see what you mean and I do think in practice conversations may proceed this way. And I think you are illustrating well the point I made above.
The key idea though is that if you make a dispassionate analysis of what this base reality must be, you find that it has certain 'attributes'. So for example, anything that has horns would not be good candidate for base reality since the contingent concept of 'horn' would need to be explained by, and derive its very existence from something much more simple. So that simpler thing would be the less bad candidate. Etc.
Re: We don't know how the universe began, and we will never know
#313Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
This reasoning does not hold up. Science does not claim the universe needs a cause to come into existance. Your premise is already wrong. Science tries to come up with explanations for the observed reality in our universe. It does not claim to know what is outside the observable universe or what laws of physics exist or don't exist there.
You follow the extremely common logical fallacy that because you want there to be a reason for the universe and you wanting there to be something before the universe then that means there has to be a god?
A big leap based on unproven assumptions.
Who says time does not extend outside the universe? Where's the proof that a universe can't cause itself? Why can't it be governed by the same laws?
Science does not claim to have all the answers but just then jumping to the conclusion that there has to be a god? Nah.
What if there indeed was a God but is now gone? What makes you assume that he cares about us and our morals? What would he think of people that claim he has spoken to them? Why would he create all the sickness and pain in the world? Would it mean there's some extremely sick and perverted being out there that just likes to watch innocent women being raped? Clearly he could prevent that. But then again why do religions assume that their god is good willing? Clearly he can't be that with all the shit going on because if he willed it into existance then all that is on him.
Re: We don't know how the universe began, and we will never know
#314Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who would do that? What does it prove to do that? Describe a metaphysical house that could never exist. One with mc esher stairs and melted clocks everywhere. Who would do that? What would it prove to do that? Yes computers can be a waste of time.. what's your point? You want me to tell you how to improve science with computing to save you from simplicity, or should I just instead do it...
What did you mean by "simplicity" when you wrote: > She redefines science to require simplicity, when it simply doesn't require it. The point of my example is to show that you don't add unnecessary complexity if you don't need to. But if you think that weather and plasma physics are examples of "ghastly complex" things, you're not talking about the same category of complexity as the one every scientist will argue aga…
You're not adding the complexity, it's out there. One would hope we're aiming at modelling nature.
The human body is incredibly complex and making simple theories about it doesn't help so much. As you said, Go is incredibly complex and it took ML to tackle it.
ML is a good case, is it simple or is it complex? The ideas we use to communicate the program are simple enough. It's polynomial regression or it's a neural network. Understandable ideal simple terms, but what the program practically executes is much more complex.
Why ditch understanding what's going on under the hood so that we can live in the land of ideal simplicities? Those usually come last after you get what's going on and have refined your practicalities down.
We need better tools for everything and we're not going to get there by ignoring the practical and complex parts.
Sabine is happy to kill off looking at complexity because Penrose is hypothesizing about the nature of life under the guise of pre-big bang physics.
Okay I get her relationship to Penrose.. why do I have to stop exploring complexity again? Cause it's not divinely simple.. and/or because she said so?
But again I admit I waste my own time and maybe yours, we wont merge our views. The eagle never lost as much time as he did, talking to the raven.
Re: We don't know how the universe began, and we will never know
#315Ignoramus et ignorabimus.
Re: We don't know how the universe began, and we will never know
#316Therein lies the True eternal distinction between Reason and Faith. Reason is that which can be known and where it ceases becomes Faith. They are separate parallel structures, to mistake one for the other is folly. We know that everything we can see originated as a single point of one uniformly distributed substance. We know that everything we can see will return into one uniformly distributed substance (Heat and red…
>Reason is that which can be known
Nah. Reason is just the best model we have at the time, given the evidence that we have.
For example, Newtonian physics is a pretty darn good way of looking at the universe and it works well. It was thought of as "known". But of course, I'm sure everyone here knows that Einsteinian physics replaced Newtonian physics with a more accurate model of the universe.
Faith is different in that it is based on no evidence. For example, in christendom, they say there's a heaven, with no testable evidence, or that there's a god, let alone the one that they think exists as opposed to Kali or Uhuru-Mazda, or the other hundredss of thousands of gods that have been professed to be real.
>Belief is Necessary to fill in the gaps between creation cycles (Or its rejection entirely).
eh....despite what the author says, it is conceivable that a scientific solution could be found for the creation. But with faith, just saying "God done it" is something that requires no work, no new knowledge, and not even an attempt at new knowledge. Belief is something necessary when one is just too lazy to try to figure out the actual solution, or to disprove one's belief and accept that it is wrong.
Re: We don't know how the universe began, and we will never know
#317Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Yes, in the context of an example where the scientific method does / did work, and provides a simple explanation, namely evolution. Her argument is that in the case of the origin of the universe, the scientific method doesn't work, instead. That doesn't make the religious "method" better, but also not worse.
Re: We don't know how the universe began, and we will never know
#318I 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…
Watching tons of PBS Spacetime the only theories oI see is that Universes are constantly being created with different properties, with an externally rare one having the right conditions for life to be possible. Still leaves the same questions as to why a bunch of universes are being created or where the energy comes from. End of day there isn’t anything I’ve seen other then a true all powerful God or equivalent being…
I sense you just expressing your view on the matter, but I think that this is a very weak argument for God's existence. It's completely plausible that we will at some point in the future have good materialist explanations for the existence of energy or the size of the multiverse etc.
Re: We don't know how the universe began, and we will never know
#319Earlier 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?
Because the whole premise and foundation of religion is that you ought to believe things absent evidence and without good reasons (that’s what faith is). If you have good reasons to believe something you give the reason; religion does not and should not, especially with its centuries-long history of malice and suppression towards free and scientific thought, deserve any credibility when it comes to matters of facts.
This argument always depends on what kinds of evidence you accept and trust as valid for faith. One big test for that is trusting any of the holy books as evidence for something faithful.
It's really weird to watch science and science-like ideas grow out of faith and religion, then the faith be blamed for 'persecuting' science after a certain philosophy took over in the late 19th century.
Re: We don't know how the universe began, and we will never know
#320I wonder if we really want to know, or if we'd rather enjoy speculating for all eternity. Seems like the journey is more fun than the destination.