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Why Does The Universe Exist?
Mr.Newt writes "You may wonder why we're here. Britain's Astronomer Royal, Martin Rees, thinks he has it figured out. As a small part of a large multiverse, everything has to be perfect for life as we know it to exist. " Just reminds me of the Python song: "Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's..."
...we consider it perfect by our own standards. I'm sure there are other forms of potential consciensness (perhaps not even "living" as we know it) that could not exits in our Universe that would consider our enviornment pretty crappy. People always seem to forget that we have a very, very narrow viewpoint, and that any and all value jedgements we make are inherently skewed because of that.
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Feminism is the wild notion that women are human beings.
I have two problems with this line of reasoning.
First, there's the problem of selection bias. We have a sample size of precisely 1. If other universes exist, we have no way of observing them and seeing if the exhibit the same properties. So for all we know the other universes did happen and we just happen to be in the one that produced us. There's no cosmic mystery there.
The analogy of the 21 guns missing fails because we are able to observe the causal process before and after, and we have some experience that guns are supposed to hit. We have no such information about the origins of the universe. For all we know, there is some underlying interconnectedness to the 6 numbers that make it inevitable that they take the values they take.
Secondly, we have no way of knowing that our form of life is the only one possible. A universe with different constants might not produce us, but it might very well produce other things that fit a more expansive definition of life. If you're going to make expansive statements about the "multiverse," it's absurd to act like Carbon-based human life is the only possible kind.
More fundamentally, our knowledge is limited by our perceptions. We will almost certainly never know what happened "before" the Big Bang. And unless there is some radical change in physics as we understand it, we will never be able to observe other dimensions in the "multiverse." Therefore, this sort of pseudo-philosophical musings, while interesting, are never going to reach any closure. You can always posit the existence of multiverses and extra dimensions and invisible unicorns. But if you have no evidence for their existence, they are no more than musings.
It's because 'creationism' tends to carry a lot more baggage than just the concept of a creator existing. Typically, creationism encompasses the 6,000-year-old-earth nonsense, and that's what educated, reasonably intelligent people find absurd.
If you want to posit the idea of a creator who started the whole process rolling, that's certainly a possibility. One without evidence, of course, which is where faith comes in, but certainly possible. After all, scientists can't explain, as you said, where the mass came from in the first place.
That leaves a person with the unanswerable question of who created God. The religionists say, "He always existed," and find that acceptable, while simultaneously finding unacceptable the idea of universe (or metaverse) always existing. Whatever.
Science, of course, when faced with a question that is unanswerable at the present time says, "We don't know." So it's not quite accurate to say that atheists take things on faith. Not in the religious sense of the word 'faith', in any case. They accept that which has evidence. It's a perfectly honest approach to take. Believe what you know, and say to the rest, "I have no evidence, and therefore I do not believe." With time and new evidence, that can change.
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Private Essayist
Indeed - if the Big Bang happened, then why? Did everything just come from nothingness one day?
A simple answer is that science cannot predict anything before the Big Bang, because it is a singularity, meaning a discontinuity in a universe otherwise governed by continuous mathematics. Paths of stars, quasars, and galaxies can be computed back in time up until then, until you reach a point where volume is zero, making density infinite. It's certainly valid to point out that science cannot say anything about what may have happened before then.
However, there is another very intriguing possibility: the concept of time before the Big Bang is meaningless.
A two-dimensional analogy is the surface of the earth. For a long time, people assumed the earth was flat. Why would they think anything else? There was the ground, down below, and the sky above, and things fell down. As a result of this assumption, they knew that it must either be infinite, so that you could just sail and sail and sail forever without seeing the same place twice, or there must be an edge you could fall off of. Most people assumed the latter.
But we know now that there's a third possibility - the surface does indeed go on in opposite directions without ever coming to an edge - IN TWO DIMENSIONS! If you add a third spatial dimension, it is suddenly simplified to a surface which wraps around in all directions and connects back to itself, forming a smooth surface. Are there any boundaries - any "rough edges" or discontinuities at the north pole, like you would worry about with a flat earth? No! It's all a nice, self-contained package, with no beginnings or endings to worry about.
Now let's keep this analogy in mind as we talk about the nature of time. Until very recently, time was a very straightforward concept to us - it just plods on at a normal pace. If it's 12:00 Mountain Time for me and you're in New York, it's 12:00 Mountain Time for you, too (and 2:00 Eastern). If we stand far apart and fire two guns, we can make them fire at the same time, right? Well, no. I'll hear mine first, and you'll hear yours first. Well then we just put the judge halfway in the middle right? Well, no. We have to take into account relative speeds (such as the linear and angular motion of the planet we are standing on). The point is that, when you really examine it, the concept of two events occuring simultaneously is an imaginary, invented concept.
Our concept of time has been shown to be a distortion of reality which is built into our perceptions of the universe. Common sense tells us there is a universal clock, by which it is the same time no matter where you are. This is the foundation upon which Newtonian physics is based, and works well when you are not dealing with very large speeds.
The theory of relativity discarded this, and that theory has huge implications for the nature of time - namely, that it is inextricably tied to space, as a four-dimensional space-time. The Newtonian laws still work of course, but they are a special case of a much more general set of laws, and work when the speeds involved are insignificant relative to that of light. It is very hard to think in these terms, since our minds are wired to think in three dimensions with a constant forward-moving time.
However, when you make time into another axis along which events are plotted, the Big Bang is no longer an "explosion" but a description of the shape of our four-dimensional universe. As the time component increases, the space component expands. If you consider that time can be curved, just as space is curved by a massive object, the entire four-dimensional space-time can, in fact, be continuous.
In other words, the Big Bang is not necessarily a boundary with a void on the other side that you would "fall into" if you traveled back far enough. It could be more like the north pole - you can go north for a while until you reach the north pole, and then you can't go north anymore. But you're just at another spot on a continuous, curved two-dimensional surface.
The Big Bang could be just another spot on a continuous, curved four-dimensional surface.
This is known as the "no boundary" proposal. It is, of course, a theory - just like everything else in science, and hasn't been proven. It is a very valid theory though, and has been worked on a great deal by such physicists as Stephen Hawking, Jim Hartle, Julian Luttrel, and Jonathan Halliwell.
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Vidi, Vici, Veni
No, when I see hoofprints I think hoofprints. Then I go looking around the area for animals with hoofs. If I find no animals with hoofs, I look for people with wheels imprinting false, hooflike prints in the ground. If after an exhaustive search for years or centuries I have still never seen a horse, nor any other explanation of the hoofprints then I can conclude that I simply cannot answer the question of whether or not horses created the hoofprints based on current knowledge or whether there is another source, artificial or manmade, of the hoofprints.
This is rational deduction. I am assuming zero starting information. Likewise, in our inquiry into the universe, which is a much, much more complicated problem, I assume zero starting information. In other words, I have no idea initially whether the universe has resulted from random processes or an act of God. If I am simple-minded, I will rely on the starting assumptions that others have placed into my mind, whether they are "science governs all" or "the universe was created by God". If I instead seek to embark on a rational inquiry, as I believe great thinkers tend to do, they start with as few assumptions as possible and look at the evidence piece by piece that has been collected over the centuries.
In this particular case the evidence is still inconclusive. This is not a philosophy. I do not philosophically believe that evidence is required to make factual statements. This is a necessity in order to define factual, repeatable results. If instead I make inquiries and answer questions based on pre-existing suppostions, people in different cultures which have had different collective experiences over the centuries will all come to vastly different conclusions. While most cultures would traditionally agree with you that some nonhuman deity or force created the universe, their explanations are not all monotheistic nor do they mesh with your Judeo-Christian explanation based on the Bible.
Me, I'll stick with explanations that are repeatable by any reasonable, rational, logical thinker.
"It's quite fantastic," says Martin Rees, Britain's Astronomer Royal, waving a hand through the steam rising from his salmon-and-potato casserole.
Seconds later he was confronted by a large buldozer, "Yellow" he thought.........
Dirty Pirate Hooker
Here's some trivia for ya: Back in the 1981 The Pope declared the Big Bang did happen, but God is the one who initiated it and we should search back no further than that.
A reference can be found here which is a conversation between The Pope and Steven Hawking (!). The snippet is taken from Mr. Hawking's wildly popular book A Brief History of Time.
Before you get your flamethrowers in a bunch trying to hose me for being an idiot, I suggest you consider the evidence of specific creation based on the concept of intelligent design.
If you're walking on the beach and you discover a watch in the sand, you won't assume that randome processes and time caused this watch to appear. "When you see hoofprints, think horses, not zebras"
The impetus behind most so-called science rejecting specific creation is simply the philosophy of metaphysical naturalism. Naturalism is a religious belief, not a scientific one.
God exists. He created everything. The fact that you are alive and reading this is an example of His grace.
This is not "offtopic" or a "troll" The article asked a philosophical question, and it deserves a philosophical answer.
Regards,
Tom Cooper
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
Let's think about this. Ultimately, the big bang theory that says, at one point in time, all of the matter that is contained in a whole universe was contained in a space thousands of times smaller than the cramped office I'm sitting in now. There are all kinds of wonderful scientific models to explain this. But ultimately, very few people understand everything about how it works. And even those who do understand it all admit that there are a few things one has to take for granted to make it work. And ultimately, this tiny point of mass exploded into a whole universe, and in this universe, the completely random interactions of basic particles formed more and more complex particles which somehow came to life and formed me and my computer, totally randomly (in seeming violation of the idea that the universe tends toward disorder, I might add).
One religious view, on the other hand, is something like, "God created the universe, and guided its formation in such a way as to create the Earth, and humanity." There are still questions, of course, like, "Where did God come from?" or "Why did he do this?" But I don't see how belief in a deity is in any way inherently inferior to belief in science. Both science and organized religion are a matter of faith -- you have to accept what you are tolded by the more learned "clergy."
I'm going to get flamed for this, of course, because the vast majority of atheists get unbelievably upset when they're told that they take things on faith. But that's too bad, because it's one hundred percent true.
As a weak athiest/empirical agnostic, I'd have to say that the jury is out, and probably will be for a long time. There is a gap between perception and absolute reality, and we can only form a characature of reality through theorems that try to logically relate our perceptions.
Of course, some argue (ironically) that logic itself is untrustworthy. Well, then we're up even a bigger creek.
The problem is, humans need squishy things like identities, and meanings, and purposes. In this nihilistic age, unfortunately, we have to create our own identites and meanings and purposes. Find something to believe in (hopefully it is something pleasant) and do some good. It'll probably make you feel better. Whether you believe in a god or not.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?