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Stephen Hawking Says Universe Created from Nothing
mr_3ntropy writes "Speaking to a sold out crowd at the Berkeley Physics Oppenheimer Lecture, Hawking said yesterday that he now believes the universe spontaneously popped into existence from nothing. He said more work is needed to prove this but we have time because 'Eternity is a very long time, especially towards the end.' There is also a Webcast available (Realplayer or Real Alternative required)."
Your support for his argument uses faith in human progress to say that we will be able to prove it.
Could you give me the algorithm by which I can determine whether the thing is possibly solvable?
As a Christian, I believe that God could have created Earth with a green sky if he had wanted to.
What keeps me from this line of thinking is the fact that all evidence points to the sky being blue, which is not green. If there were a verse in the bible that said "God made the sky blue," I would also consider that relevant evidence to counter your suggestion otherwise.
Correct me if my assessment is wrong, but it seems like you respect Christians who are willing to consider an infinite past. If they were ignorant of (1) scientific research on the topic, and (2) the very first verse of the very first book in the Bible (which refers specifically to a "beginning"), then your line of reasoning has some merit: they would be open-minded people, an admirable trait.
Not all Christians believe that the universe was created 6000 years ago.
The word "irrelevant" in your post seems to be flamebait, since there is a verse in the Bible that has to do with the origin of the universe happening at a point in time, and that therefore your use of the word only makes sense as an indicator of your opinion of the Bible, or of each of its verses, regardless of their subject matter.
The reason that I, as a Christian, believe that God, who is outside the universe with its space/time/matter/etc., created the universe at a particular time in the finite past is (1) he told us that's what he did (in the Bible), and (2) it is what we observe scientifically.
Yes, God could have created the Earth with a green sky, but he didn't. He could have created a universe of infinite time, but he didn't (at least, he didn't do that with ours).
I consider your "useful calibration" to be irrelevant.
...because "hacker" sounds way sexier than "code drone."
I am an agnostic and by no means a religous person. However I believe that statement to be wrong.
The Bible contains all sorts of statements that we currently believe to be false.
There is a huge difference. Religion, modern science, whatever are all believe systems. They have axioms which we must believe, then build up structures on those. Every now and thenscience encounters something that does not fit (eg relativity) and we need to adjust our axioms and belief systems and update science.
There are also scientific heretics. They don't, typically, get physically burnt any more. They just get ridiculed by others, don't get published or get fired from their academic positions.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Well, unless he changes his views sometime soon, he's going to be pretty much discredited. Not unlike a biochemist who merely states that DNA would be near impossible to form via Darwinian evolution, so everyone gets pissed and starts shouting 'Evil theist who doesn't believe in a biological theory that was formed before while everyone thought that cells were simple solid blobs! Attack!' Anything scientific that merely hints at theism having creditability is thrown out, partly because science is business, partly because no one wants to hear that maybe, just maybe, there is a supreme being(s) that exists outside of the realm of known/currently perceivable scientific knowledge. I, for one, find it to be hilarious that theophobia is the only thing keeping Darwinian evolution from being seriously challenged, as Darwin, being a man of science who had the balls to stand up to religion, would have wanted, and would probably do today (after shitting himself once he realized that his theories were being so abused by idiots who take his theory as a law). Now, we'll probably see the same thing happening to the Big Bang theory.
I wonder where else Hawking can get a job?