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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)."
Sounds like his speech was Much Ado About Nothing
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
Hawking is such a hack.
the interesting thing about theories is that they all attempt to explain something. why there are bumfights between bible thumpers and scientists three times a day over these things has always mystified me.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
That's not how it really happened... But when they were come into the Void, Ilúvatarr said to them: 'Behold your Music!' And he showed them a vision, giving to them sight where before was only hearing; and they saw a new World made visible before them, and it was globed amid the Void, and it was sustained therein, but was not of it.
It sounds to me like someone just discovered the Burger Joint at the Beginning of the Universe.
Many thanks to Douglas Adams.
All men can fly, but sadly, only in one direction--Down.
It would add some credibility when I tell my girlfriend that the porn in my browser history came ex nihilo.
Enormous turtle farts. Then nothing. Then the Universe. Before that, I would say turtles all the way down, but there was no down. It was turtles all the way flammix, especially in the direction of Zorch. Believe me. I was there. At least, I'm sure I was, in at least one of the parallel turtles.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
In this house we obey the law of thermodynamics.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
What is eternity? You're on the checkout line at a supermarket. There are seven people in front of you. They are all old. They all have two carts and coupons for every item. They are all paying by check. None of them have ID. It's the checkout girl's first day on the job. She doesn't speak any English. Take away fifteen minutes from that, and you begin to get an idea of what eternity is.
Thank you, Emo Philips.
Mr. T pitied this fool on 27 July 1992.
The linked article at The Daily Californian barely touches on any of the stuff mentioned in the /. summary. Do we have to listen to the webcast to get any of the good stuff?
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
Nothing is the only thing that can flow from nothing. Because it is no-thing. It is what rocks dream about.
If there was nothing there in the beginning, there would be nothing now.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
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The article points to his overall speech to be filled with satire. It's hard to say what he was trying to get at, and is he serious? "The universe was built from nothing, but we can't prove it because that would take too long".
Is he joking or is he serious? I have a bolder conclusion:
"The universe was built from SOMETHING. Since time is seemingly infinite in both directions, I'll never be able to prove it, but I know I'm right".
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
universe spontaneously popped into existence from nothing.
So how long till it pops out of existence?
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
He used the analogy that they were like bubbles in the water. Ok, where did the water come from?
This sounds a lot like... *drumroll* blind faith to me.
This is the same sort of blind faith that most atheists pompously deride the religious for. In fact, based on this summary, it would be called something to the effect of a "load of religious bullshit" if it came from a preacher. Oooh, theoretical physicist says it, so we'll hear him out!
Please, you're acting like a bunch of laymen waiting for the latest ruling or revelation from the priest.
*Sigh* Go ahead, mod me down because I actually pointed out the obvious.
You don't have to be an astrophysicist to have beliefs about cosmology. And we shouldn't be looking to Hawking to determine our own beliefs on anything that doesn't have to do specifically with physics (which his message increasingly strays away from). We should all evaluate the evidence for ourselves as time permits rather than worshiping whatever opinion he holds. Somebody on these forums once told me that no scientist was ever completely right (well put) and this means that we shouldn't worship any of them the way we do him. When you become obsessive over a scientist, the person becomes more important than the ideas themselves, and this can only interfere with an objective analysis of his statements.
Clearly, Hawking is taking advantage of the stage he's been given to act as more of an entertainer than a physicist. That's his right, but people should not be under any illusion that he knows the answer more than anybody else right now. There is far too much anomalous data in astrophysics today for anybody to say that they have the answer. People like him will gloss over this fact and leave a sense that we understand more of the universe than we in fact do. But the problems remain and his message is not even very new. In fact, there's really no practical reason for him to be giving these talks other than to make money for himself. People already know his theory very well. It's the basis for every single NASA press release and every single astronomy class taught in every single school in the world. Maybe what we really need is for the astrophysicists to spend more time on the problems, collaborating with the various peoples' of the domains that they work within, and less time demonstrating that they've mastered the art of public relations.
"A man cannot begin to learn that which he thinks he already knows." --Epictetus, 1st Century A.D.
That's right up there with that Hispanic fella that rose from the grave.
If you chose #2, it's turtles all the way down...
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Okay, so universes are bubbles inside a pot of boiling water? Wouldn't that imply that there is something outside of the universe?
...Or is he just testing how far he can go before people stop the "OMG! It's Hawking! Everything he says is right." crap?
I guess you have to watch the webcast because TFA doesn't say that. If anybody wants to summarize here that would be great.
IIRC from A Brief History of Time, Hawking theorized that time, a dimension, didn't exist 'before the universe' because it doesn't make sense to ask about time any more than the other three dimensions of spacetime before TFU existed. He had some maths explanation about how the time dimension approached 0 and curved back on itself (somebody more fresh elaborate...), and I think he got the Pope to concede time after time-0 to nature.
Maybe he's proposing a new theory here, reflected in the webcast?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
No kidding. This is the first time in nine years that I've read a Slashdot submission and literally thought that shit just blew my mind.
The problem is that whether you are a physicist or philosopher or theologist or anything else, it is equally as valid and confusing to the human mind to conceive of the requirement of something prior to the universe as well as nothing. The concept is so abstract and impossible that neither seems right nor wrong.
Now, I'm not a physicist. I'm not even particularly smart, for that matter. However, from what I have heard, Hawking is somewhat less than seriously regarded among scientists as he is among layman. To us, he's the poster boy for absolute genius. Among scientists, I don't think he even made the list of top twenty scientists of the 20th century. And I seem to recall that his announcement over the whole bet he had on the theory of black holes was snickered at in all corners.
Don't get me wrong. I am a big Hawking fan. I think the guy is stunningly brilliant and has done amazing things despite his progressively debilitating affliction. I just take any claims or discoveries announced by him with a glacial grain of salt.
Maybe we could ask Paris Hilton, too.
Among celebrity experts she is most definitely the biggest authority on the science of creating something from nothing.
And there was still nothing, but at least you could see it.
Have gnu, will travel.
Duh.
"Eternity is a very long time, especially towards the end."
Sure, it may feel like an eternity, but that's what it takes to get a decent table at Milliways.
When you have nothing left to burn you must set yourself on fire
It would seem you have backed yourself into a corner here.
We are all just people.
Wonder if he ever thought about these string theorists who say there are infinite parallel universes. Does he think there are infinite parallel universes, all popping into existence from nothing?
So if the universe formed out of absolute nothing that makes it Christian-centric? I don't get it. Short of "a big guy got some dirt and molded it into a ball and made some magic incantation and life appeared on the ball", I don't see what religion has to do with it.
If you ask a cosmologist, he/she would say that universe was created from nothing. If you ask Physicist (Quantum mechanics), he/she would say, universe is "nothing" (it is just a perception created by our consciousness). The problem here is that science equations don't work in nothing (because there are no science equations in nothing). Our equations (as they exists today) have relevance only when there is a physical reality (even if that reality is simply a perception). Also, we can't have nothing, since we are inside a physical universe (and "nothing" is outside of it), so the theory cannot be verified.
Hope this clarifies few things, or does it confuse even more?
To be fair, this cuts both ways (liberal and conservative). I frequently see comments that people assume are antagonistic and feel that the antagonism is in the ears of the, um, belistener.
As someone with a fairly good training in physics, I read this statement to be a commentary on Hawking's annoyance with the question of what came before "time" began. Many religious people have attempted to reconcile the Big Bang with Judeo-Christian beliefs by having God be responsible for the Big Bang. I think that such an allusion should not be taken as necessarily antagonistic.
Ben Hocking
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This is total nonsense. See Alexander Franlkin Mayer's web site at http://www.afmayer.net/
I can't remember the exact numbers, and it is less than the general population, but a rather significant percentage of scientists believe in God. I just thought I'd throw that out there.
Ben Hocking
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Although TFA doesn't actually discuss the hypothesis that "universe spontaneously popped into existence from nothing" (I suppose you'd have to go to the webcast for that), Hawking's use of the phase "that he now believes" implies that this is something new, and that he's in the process of developing it.
In fact, the idea is decades old, and has been popularized in several widely read books.
I recollect Gamov's book, "My World Line", wherein he recounts a time he and Einstein were crossing the street in traffic while discussing how an energetic universe could have arisen. Gamov pointed out that since gravitational energy was negative and the energy of matter was positive, they could balance and a universe could form without a net input of energy. The idea struck Einstein so forcefully that he froze in the middle of the street while he considered it.
I don't know much about physics in general, let alone quantum physics but I seem to recall hearing or reading that neutrons and protons "pop in and out of existence". Maybe I misunderstood what I heard.
However, if that's the case what makes it such an outlandish suggestion that the universe came about in the same manner (aside from the "nothing can come from nothing" argument)? Perhaps it's easier to imagine that the microscopic particles can pop in and out of existence because they seem so small to us. Is it naive of me to think that scale has such a role in our perception of possibility?
I just read this here:
Apart from the quarks that constitute the nucleons (i.e. neutrons and protons) (these are called "valence quarks") there also exists a "sea of quarks", which continually pop into and out of existence due to quantum fluctuations.
Can someone with a background in physics explain how this is possible?
I am probably stronger than Stephen Hawking, but neither of us is strong enough to lift my house. Stephen Hawking is probably smarter than me, but neither of us is smart enough to explain how the universe popped into existence. If Hawking thinks he can explain the origin of the universe, maybe he's not so smart. If he's just guessing, well, I can just guess too.
Some years ago there was a documentary series called "The Creation of the Universe," with Timothy Ferris. They talked about this theory that the universe could have sprung into existence from out of nowhere. He said of the idea, "It sounds incredibly unlikely, but then it only ever had to happen once."
In the beginning, there was nothing, which somehow exploded.
I wonder if I use bold in my signature, people will notice my posts.
I don't think we will ever answer these kinds of questions, no matter how long we study them - why does anything *exist at all* - space, time, matter, energy ? Surely it makes more sense for nothing to exist, ever.
On the other hand, if nothing exists at all, then there are no laws of physics, so maybe there is nothing to prevent something from coming into existence spontaneously.
But then, if something can come into existence spontaneously, what prevents it from spontaneously not-existing ?
And what do we even mean by existence ? How do we define it ?
Hawking has certainly benefitted -- in terms of his popular appearance -- from ALS. It is quite reasonable to wonder whether his work is truly valuable. In the long term, I think that we'll see that he hasn't made any monumental contributions to astrophysics or theoretical mathematics that are comparable with Guth's idea of inflation or with the Atiyah-Singer index theorem. However, he has contributed numerous less profound ideas: black hole radiation, some singularity theorems (with Penrose), and some ideas about black hole entropy and cosmology. In Kuhn's picture of scientific progress, Hawking's work is more "puzzle solving" than it is a paradigm shift.
At the same time, Hawking's ideas have been interesting and novel during the entire length of his career. He's a brilliant man on the forefront of a fascinating subject. Even if his ideas are epoch-defining or accurate, they are always worth thinking about.
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I think Hawking's been stealing from the internet: http://wiki.battlemaster.org/index.php/Light_of_Fo ntan#No_Space
Right, Maxwell, Newton, Pascal, Kepler, Faraday, etc. I'm sure you wouldn't descend from your lofty perch to talk to such as these.
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This something from nothing crap has always bothered me. It almost as bad as the claim that 99% of the universe was created in the first day. The rate of expansion is increasing, right, so did the universe slow down at some point?
I thought one of the tent posts of the big bang theory was that you could never look beyond it.
Anywhile, I still think we will figure out that our universe is at least two universes coming together. Taking Steve's analogy, imagine what happens when two soap bubbles combine. The can be floating along very slowly and then wham, their attraction brings them together and they merge. Imagine if they were different colors, say red and yellow. Our universe is the emerging orange part. At least I hope we are in the orange area. A single point of orange that grows very rapidly and when looked at from the inside would look like a cone.
My prediction is that eventually, everything will be orange and the rate of expansion will slow.
I needed a new sig.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
I could not determine from reading the article that Hawkings suggested the universe came from nothing. Unless there is something more obvious in the webcast, I suspect this is just a bad interpretation of what he was trying to communicate
To the philosophical issue of "nothing", I will say this. There is no such thing as nothing! Much has been said about nothing, but insofar as nothing is intended to mean "no thing", then what the hell are we even talking about? Seriously, as soon as you have given a point of reference to something that is suppposedly "nothing", then it can no longer be an instance of "nothing". Evaluate the following statement: "nothing doesn't exist." You should realize that if nothing DID exist, it would no longer be "nothing", but instead be some existent THING.
The idea of nothing is just a psychological device that humans use to blanket their psyches from the anxiety produced by the unknown and the not understood. The term "nothing" is akin to cosmological terms like "black holes", "dark matter", and "dark energy". I suggest that the real reason these things are "black" and "dark" is because the light of human awareness has yet to illuminate what is actually going on there.
So terms like "nothing" really only mean... "We intuit that something is going on, but as of yet we cannot fathom what that might be." Instead of saying "we simply don't understand what is going on at this time" we give things an almost occult identity: "it must be dark matter!". This is why, ultimately, I classify science in the same category as religion. When we cannot understand something, we posit a "mysterious force" that we "believe" must be there in order to explain the world that is around us.
The reason why the "hard problems" of science continue to be "hard problems" is because you cannot solve a problem with the same limited mind that created it. We keep asking "where did the universe come from?" because we still believe that time and existence are linear. We believe that things have a "set beginning" and a "set end". We believe all things are effects of some previous cause. We believe these things so much in the same manner that people used to believe that the Earth was the center of the universe. And just like then, when someone points out that maybe that is NOT the way things actually work, they get branded a lunatic.
and we are stuck it very long repeating time loop
Mainstream Christian creationism explains the universe as being created in it's current mature state by God. That's not ex nihilo, unless you classify God as nothing.
How exactly is what Hawking says related to creationism?
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
I'd like to know which end is longer, Dr. Hawking?!
Let's just say I have a wager on the answer...;-)
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Keep in mind that the creature in #2 could be from a Universe that actually makes sense, and did not pop out of nothing. Imagine that an Intelligence in some artificial Universe (say WoW) begins trying to make sense of its surroundings- WoW has physics entirely different from our own, has creation ex nihilo on a regular basis, has no entropy, and the laws of the Universe re-write themselves with every patch. Furthermore, WoW has only been around a finite amount of time. What would such a creature think of the world? Would it see some Divine will behind the chaos of its existance? Or would it be unable to imagine a world other than its own?
Something that created our Universe wouldn't necessarily be bound by our laws of physics, but would presumably still have its own limitations.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
"with a glacial grain of salt"
Actually glaciers are made of fresh water.
Also, the universe is bounded by nothing, therefore, infinite in every direction.
=:P
...the thought of accountability after death... wahhh!
Wow-- really cool find.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Bravo!
Ben Hocking
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One of the reasons that there is even anything being discussed here is that Genesis very strongly resembles current cosmological theory and mindset. If "religious writings", which in this case are inferred the Book of Genesis of the Judeo-Christian Bible, bore absolutely no resemblance to scientific evidence, then this post would not have been made. Or necessary.
But it does!
The problem is that an 3000+ year-old book which could be subtitled "A WAY WAY Briefer History of Time" still looks like Hawkings theories is what keeps this reparteé alive, feeds the faith of the "religious scientists" and irritates the crap out of the "non-religious scientists".
Because when it gets down to the highly theoretical stuff like this that no one will ever truly be able to prove, its not much different than religion.
You would be right, if and only if Hawking was talking about things that couldn't ever be proven one way or another. At that point, he wouldn't be doing any sort of physics anymore, he'd be somewhere off in that grey area where it borders philosophy and religion. (I call this area "Wankersville", but that's just me.)
However, there's a difference between something that cannot ever be proved, full stop, and something that can't be proved or disproved right now, due to the limitations of our understanding and our equipment.
There was a time, as recently as a hundred years ago, when debates about whether light was a particle or a wave would have seemed like wanking. However, they were not -- because we now have an (well, at least a partial) answer to that question, it's just that the theoreticians exceeded the reach of the experimentalists for a few centuries. Debates such as those, which get answered eventually by experimental evidence, are wholly different from debates which can never be settled (and, IMO, are a pointless waste of time that humanity should just move the hell along from).
It's pretty clear that Hawking realizes that what he's postulating can't be proven or disproven right now, but he's not putting it out there as an article of faith, either; he's saying that at some point in the future, between now and the heat death of the Universe, we'll probably be able to test it experimentally. That's a lot different than religion.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Do you want to have atheism tainted by what atheist Communist regimes did to religious believers? How about the Christians who were massacred by Communist regimes because their views were called "counter-revolutionary?" And before we forget, how about that French Revolution where secularists did unto the Roman Catholic faithful as they believed had been done unto them, except it was done in fa, far worse numbers?
Get over yourself. You don't live in a theocracy or a country that is becoming theocratic. If you actually think that, then it shows you don't know a bloody thing about the Bible. The only "theocracy" in Judao-Christian history was pre-kings Israel, the only time where religion directly ruled the population. Ever since then, there were spheres of authority that caused the religious bodies and state to interact, often reinforcing one another. That, however, is not "rule by God," but rather rule by religion and a state.
If you want to argue that America is becoming a religion-inspired Fascist state, we could toss back a beer in agreement. An actual theocracy, well, I leave it to you to read the Mosaic Law and tell me that our legal system and government looks anywhere near what is spelled out in the Torah.
I thought the numbers I saw were higher, but that might be the difference between US and world scientists. Anyways, assuming your number is right, 20-25% is still a significant percentage. That's all I'm saying. You can be a "real" scientist and religious.
Ben Hocking
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Now that the brightest of the brightest agree that everything was created from NOTHING (the first one from a scientific community), its time for everyone one of us to claim which God created the first. Let the war begin.......
Well, if you believe in an omnipotent God, then it follows that God could have created EVERYTHING just 15 minutes ago; including your memories, the internet, this website, ad infinitum. No human can prove otherwise. Sure, Descarte could prove his existence, but could he prove that he had existed at breakfast that morning? Not likely.
Not sure about the rest, but Newton and Kepler were most certainly not athiests.
blah blah blah
But, you do have to make some axioms before you can make any theorems. At some level, we all have things we believe in. Whether or not those faiths are "blind" is a matter of argument. Feel free to disagree, but I most likely won't respond as I've got a shockingly large number of replies to respond to for what I thought was a fairly benign statement. Additionally, I've had this argument enough to have a pretty good idea where it's going... ;)
Ben Hocking
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Are we sure it's not just a hideously complex genetic programming simulation? Maybe he's just looking back to before the start of the run...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
couldnt they just give you the text and let windows text to speech engine say it? It would almost be like if you were there!
MISSING - Sig file. 2 years old black and white and very funny. If found please email me.
True to Type, I've not heard the fine lecture, but would assume that Hawking is saying that mathematics and logic may be used to show coherently that there need not have been a First Cause. I doubt he's talking about any kind of religious creation.
Sounds pretty monumental to me:
"Stephen Hawking Says Universe Created"
Something I suggest to Christians to try to fathom their beliefs is that perhaps God exists outside of time and space and that God could have created the universe with an infinitely deep past; ie there is no reason for a Christian to believe that the universe is any specific age or that 'creation' happened at a specific time.
Some Christians readily soak this up while others just stare blankly before quoting some irrelevent bible verse. Its a useful calibration.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
My favourite Asimov tale. I wonder what computer on this earth is pondering the question of the eventual heat-death of the universe?
"Causality is an aspect of the universe" therefore: "The universe itself (or whatever caused it, ad infiniwhatever) requires no cause"
;)
gee, that was tough. And only figured out several thousand years ago...
Interestingly: even if causality exists within our universe, it does not exist in any universe which does not exist. Draw your own conclusion, so long as it's the same as mine.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
That was one of my early experiences in physics. I later diverged from that viewpoint, but I don't think it was a stupid viewpoint to hold.
Which doesn't disagree with my original statement. I'm referring to the kinds of thoughts you mention in the first paragraph. I've struggled with my faith a lot. I did not arrive at my current agnosticism lightly. (To stifle further argument on a semantic issue: when I say "agnosticism" it means not believing in God. Call it atheism if you like. I really don't care. Much.)
Ben Hocking
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We can observe "something". That "something" being the universe around us.
So the three options about the known "something" is that it either came from "something", or came from "nothing", or that the "something" was both "always" and "never".
Hawking postulate simply rules out that "something" came from "something else", because ultimately if "something" came from "something else", then you never answered the original question, because you are now trapped in a loop asking what the original "something else" came from. Which whittles the issue down to two options: "Something" came from "nothing" or "something" was "always".
It's easier to rule out that something was always given that E=MC^2 and C^2 is actually just another way of representing the other two dimensions, time and space (C is the minimum plank space and minimum plank time reference frame). If those measurements are observed and other physics tells us that time, and energy has constraints, as well as time being finite on the "something" end, then I would agree with the logic that it is unlikely that "something" was "always".
Which leaves the last option of that "something" came from "nothing".
Although you can belong to "organized" religion and be religious, I feel it is the exception rather than the rule. When I say "religious", I'm referring primarily to your type of religion.
Ben Hocking
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It seems to me that accepting anything on blind faith is pretty much a defining character of humanity.
A person may be a scientist, but they are a human first. And the human need for theological security (after life, intangible reward/punishment system, moral guidance, etc...) means that some things will be explained in a matter of religion until such a time that science can prove it.
On a side note, I have never held that Science and Religion directly rule each other out. Just because you believe in a God(s) doesn't mean that your deity of choice did not create the laws of physics that us mere humans strive to unravel. Me personally, I'm an agnostic. I look for logic explanations of the behavior of things I experience in life. Science did not create those experiences, it just describes them.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
the universe spontaneously popped into existence from nothing
This made a lot of people very angry, and has been widely regarded as a bad idea.--Douglas Adams
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Well, you mention Pascal, who made (in my estimation) one of the most idiotic statements on religion, ever.
There's nothing new about this. People have been saying for thousands of years that the universe was created ex nihilo. Hawking is just a little late jumping on the bandwagon ;-)
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
So in theory then, at any given moment, an entire universe can erupt into existence? Is the void between the electron orbits of the oxygen atoms in front of me capable of producing this Big Bang? damn, as if global warming warmongering wasn't enough stress...
Speakers should try to use their speech carefully to get across the point they're trying to get across. If what they say can be taken the wrong way, then they should change what they're saying in order to convey their message correctly. That's not censorship or "political correctness", it's just good speaking and/or good manners.
Listeners should try to give speakers the benefit of the doubt and not try to force their prejudices onto the speaker. Try to find the nugget of value in what is being said. That's what I would call good listening skills.
Ben Hocking
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Ve are nihilists, Lebowski!
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Is Hawking a deist?
Slashdot = Sarcasm
Now that you mention it, that does ring a bell. I looked it up on Wikipedia and found that it was a Roman Catholic Priest Georges Lemaître. I do not believe he was a Creationist, however. Unless you're using that term very loosely.
Ben Hocking
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Actually assuming that earth is round, and that christians don't live at the polar areas, god would be shaped as a torus, existing around earth (as people pray upwards.)
SSSSSSCCCCIIIIIEEEENNNNCCCCEEEEEEE!!!
Yes, his post did suggest that, but the Bible suggests that it has already been proven. There is a big difference between an idea looking to be proved right or wrong, even if we can't do it yet, and one that has declared it's self to be truth.
No it doesn't. Reread his comment and try again. He says that we will "probably" be able to prove it. So it's not in the pile of things that definitely can't be proven, or in the pile that definitely can be proven. It's in the third pile - todo. The comparison was with religion which is squarely in the first pile.
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I believe Asimov made this same prediction (? do we call a guess at what happened in the past a "prediction"?) in his book Atom. Or perhaps in another book; anyway, I'm sure Asimov said this a long time ago. He said he though it had to do with random fluctuations in ratio of matter to antimatter in a particular space (or something like that. I'm not much of a physicist).
but "why does the universe exist" isn't really a question that can be answered with scientific i.e. empirical methods.
All of our information about the big bang indicates that all of the matter and energy in the universe is moving away from a central point, and thus we can infer that in the past all of that matter was compacted at that point.
These simple observations don't do anything to answer how that matter got there in the first place. That Hawking statement that the universe came from nothing, is just to say that the simplest explanation about something we have no information on whatsoever, (like the universe before the big bang) is to say that it doesn't exist. There's no actual information whatsoever to back up Hawking's claim, but there's no *emperical evidence* to contradict it, and it's very simple, so some are apt to take it seriously.
However, there *do* seem to be some *logical* contraditions in the idea that the universe came from nothing, or at the very least there are some very difficult questions that must be answered before you can just say "the universe came from nothing." If the universe just happened, it implies that something causally weird is going on i.e. that the universe is self caused or somehow uncaused. Self causation, or necessitation is the sort of thing that was historically attributed to god by Descartes and others, although some philosophers, like Spinoza, who thought that the universe *was* god necessarily attributed it to the universe as well.
However, the statement "came from nothing" seems to imply uncaused, which is a more difficult thing to grasp, because a self caused thing exists necessarily from it's own essense, but a thing with no cause has a very uncertain existence. Frankly, I'm a little iffy on what "uncaused" even means. It seems to indicate something that isn't causally, or logically necessary, but is somehow possible and manages to obtain. If that's the case, it seems to suggest there *is* no determining factor that made that possible event obtain, which is a hard thing to understand and accept.
To me it almost makes sense to suggest if that all possible universe might necessarily exist (in a loose sense of the word exist) somehow. The only reason that I can think of for this, is if the Spinozan notion that limitations such as nonexistence imply the existence of something else to constrain them, and that existence of all things is sort of the "default." However, even that seems like an unnecessary sort of thing to be true about the universe.
Something I suggest to Christians to try to fathom their beliefs is that perhaps God exists outside of time and space and that God could have created the universe with an infinitely deep past; ie there is no reason for a Christian to believe that the universe is any specific age or that 'creation' happened at a specific time.
Some Christians readily soak this up while others just stare blankly before quoting some irrelevent bible verse. Its a useful calibration.
The difference is that there are Christians who are not textual Biblicists; the folks who get all wound up about dinosaur fossils and the Big Bang, and about science in general, are only those who draw their entire belief system from the words written in (usually a particular translation of) the Bible. Since the Bible is not even internally consistent, this leads to a lot of problems in their philosophy, as well as certain ridiculous assertions about the age of the world, etc.
Christians who take a less literal approach, which includes most of the modern major Christian sects, don't run into as many problems with science impinging on their faith, because they're not tied quite so tightly to one single tome. Catholics have literally tons of philosophy, written by various saints, popes, &c., to fall back on when the Bible seems to contradict either itself, or reality as determined empirically: they don't have to muddle it out themselves.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
0 = 1 + -1
0 = 2 + -2
0 = x + -x
etc...
Within nothing lies the possibility for everything.
I came up with that on an acid trip 20 years ago. Surely someone has applied a real scientific approach to this? Brownie points to anyone who can point me to it...
If the universe popped into existence, could it pop out of existence too?
Someone else responded with the exact opposite observation. I.e., the "hard" sciences tend to be less religious than biology. Not exactly relevant to the current discussion, but IIRC, he/she is right. (Never heard any numbers for metalurgy, however.)
No doubt true in some cases. Maybe many or even most. Speculation, of course. However, there are those who have thought hard about it and genuinely believe in God in some form or another. You can be a "real" scientist and religious.
Ben Hocking
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'Do you know what eternity is? Do you know what eternity is? I mean, do you know what eternity is? There's this mountain, see, a mile high at the edge of the universe and there's this little bird-'
'What little bird?' said Aziraphale suspiciously.
'This little bird I'm talking about! Anyway, every thousand years this bird-'
'The same bird every thousand years?'
'Yeah.'
'Bloody ancient bird then.'
'Anyway, every thousand years this bird flies-'
'-limps-'
'Flies to the mountain and-'
'Hold on, it can't fly to the end of the universe. Between here and there's loads of' the angel waved a hand expansively if a little unsteadily 'loads of buggerall, dear boy.'
'But it gets there anyway.'
'How?'
'It doesn't matter how.'
'It could use a space ship.'
'If you like.'
'But if it is the end of the universe we're talking about it would have to be one of those trips where your descendants are the ones who get out at the other end. You've got to tell them, you've got to say, when you get to the mountain you've got to...what have they got to do?'
'Sharpen its beak. And then it flies back-'
'-in the space ship-'
'and in a thousand years goes and does it all over again.'
'Seems a lot of trouble just to sharpen a beak.'
'But when the bird has worn the mountain down to nothing then,' Aziraphale opened his mouth. Crowley just knew he was going to make some comment on the relative hardness of birds beaks and granite mountains. 'then you still won't have finished watching The Sound of Music!'
Aziraphale froze.
'And you'll enjoy it. You really will.'
'Hold on-'
'You won't have a choice.'
'Wait-'
'Heaven has no taste.'
'My dear boy-'
'And not a single sushi restaurant.'
-from Good Omens
Your assumption that since it is out of science's scope it doesn't exist is no doubt based on your materialistic world view.
...because "hacker" sounds way sexier than "code drone."
Remember when we thought there was only one continent, one planet (and a flat one), one sun, one galaxy? Now we have the concept of multiple (even infinite) universes! I wonder who will discover the first external universe.
We should adopt a naming convention for new universes.
Views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the author.
Or is it just speculation?
Is there an experiment we could perform that would prove or disprove this hypothesis? Is there a mathematical model that makes this plausible?
Hawking has a lot of profound ideas, but I'm not convinced by any of it.
Next they'll be telling us that we humans evolved from monkeys!
for sale
I'm a self-modifying sig virus
No true SCOTSMAN would talk to a scientist, either!
I said no... but I missed and it came out yes.
return !proven && !disproven
http://www.skullsecurity.org/blog/
yeah.. i got karma to burn.. but this was also the very first thing that came to mind when i read the article and synopsis.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
A more succinct defense than I would probably have been able to come up with myself. Thank you.
I think what's causing confusion is that there are some questions which are absolutely not empirically testable, by definition, regardless of what scientific equipment you might ever be able to point at the task. The question of whether there is a God is one of these. There's just no way to do it; there's no test you can perform which would invalidate God, because you can always back God up slightly and find a place for Him.
There are other questions, the great majority of questions, which may be or even probably are empirically testable, somehow, we just can't perform (or even conceive of) the test methodology right now. "What happened before the big bang" is one of these. I've no idea how you would actually test it, but there's no particular reason why you couldn't in the same way that the God-question is by definition untestable. It's just really, really hard, and would probably require some sort of fundamental redefinition of how we conceive the universe(s). But not absolutely impossible from the get-go.
To separate questions into these categories doesn't require any faith in human capabilities at all. I'm not arguing that we will ever perform any of these tests -- we could all be wiped out by an asteroid, superflu, or nuclear war, and that would be the end of us (in fact, I suspect that it's probably more likely that we'll be extinct as a species before we have the capability of answering such fundamental questions) -- but that wouldn't invalidate the fact that there are some questions which cannot be tested, ever, by anyone.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
There is a very notable exception which also makes me wonder if the entire assertion is based on a false premise. Francis Collins, the leader of the Human Genome Project, is a professing Christian and involved in a field that most would not expect a Christian to be involved in yet alone leading. I highly recommend reading the linked article if you want to see how a Christian views the scientific world. I wonder, sometimes, if the reason why we don't "see" a lot of Christian scientists these days is due to the prejudice of the current scientific establishment.
I believe in de-evolution. God made the world perfect, man fell, and its been going downhill ever since!
It's important to note that when a scientist says "This will be provable someday", what he means is, "It will be testable someday" which in turn means "It will be falsifiable someday." This means, in particular, that he is allowing for the distinct possibility that it will be disproved. Therein lies the difference.
The Bible contains all sorts of statements that we now know to be false, in the sense that they contradict all available evidence. The religious respond by going into elaborate contortions to maintain their beliefs (see, for example, "God put the dinosaur fossils there to test us"). Scientists change their opinions. For example, before the wave-particle duality of light was understood, it was widely believed that light was a wave -- and because waves travel through a medium (like ripples in a pond, for example) it was widely believed that light also traveled through a medium -- a medium scientists called the "luminiferous aether". Its existance was widely believed in. And yet, experiments showed that this "aether" did not exist. What did scientists do? They changed their minds.
Religious people never change their minds. Or rather, those that do are called heretics, and up until recently were frequently burned at the stake.
I was thinking of the 40% number, although I do also remember that the number in the NAS was significantly lower. Still 7% is 7%, and 3.3% is 3.3%. They do exist, even in the highest echelons. Again, that's all I'm saying.
Ben Hocking
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Nothing contains everything. It is a complete lack of definition and boundaries. That is a definition, and therefore does not apply to nothing. Therefore, lacking all definitions and boundaries, it must also contains all possible definitions and boundaries.
You aren't familiar with nothing, you are familiar with the lack of something, which is very, very different. Nothing doesn't lack anything, nor does it have anything.
As soon as you say anything about nothing, that is false, because you have defined it and by extension its opposite, and now it is something, not nothing.
You are stuck in dualistic, subject/object thinking. You can never understand the true void while you still think that you are you, separate from the Universe around you. You are not a little man inside your head, listening through your ears and seeing through your eyes. The sense of self is another sense, like smell or thought. Like the sound track printed on a film strip, your sense of self is just another track in the recording.
You aren't what you think you are, and this certainly isn't what you think it is.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
You don't seem to have understood my post, so I'll try to explain what I mean a little more carefully.
You claim hypocrisy on the part of atheists for not accepting religious beliefs but accepting Hawking's unsupported word. But Hawking coming up with some wild-sounding speculation is not the same as a religious figure preaching centuries-old articles of faith.
First, consider a hypothetical Church of Science (or whatever) where Hawking is a priest. How could Hawking come up with his far-out models of universal origins without deviating from the accepted doctrine of his church? I claim that he couldn't, and that he would become a heretic. Hawking is taking a position against the establishment, whereas the normal role of priests is to be in support of the establishment. When atheists criticize the church, they often refer to its authoritarian nature which, in the extreme, is manifested by theocracy. It just wouldn't make sense to weigh the same criticism against Hawking, who would be the first victim of such a system.
Second, compare Hawking's message to those that are most despised by atheists. He's just telling a crowd of people (his fans) about some of his latest thoughts. He's not trying to "preach" in any sense of the word. He has no political or social agenda. He's not even asking that anyone accept his words on faith alone. It's not as if people are going to insist that textbooks be rewritten as a result of this. There's really nothing to get upset about. Contrast that with the agenda-driven religious right.
I hope I've clarified my position. I didn't claim that the US is a theocracy. In fact, I intended to claim the opposite. I also didn't claim that religion has a monopoly on oppression and cruelty, just as (I presume) you're not claiming that Hawking supports religious intolerance.
well good for him, I say. Many people denounced as heretics were actually more Christian than the Church. Church and Christianity are two different things.
blah blah blah
When science produces something out of absolutely nothing it ceases to be a science and becomes a religion.
A religion - or quantum physics...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Just 3-4 random examples will do.
Ben Hocking
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quote: "If one believed that the universe had a beginning, the obvious question was, what happened before the beginning," Hawking said. "What was God doing before He made the world? Was He preparing hell for people who asked such questions?"
...
my god, what the hell ist wrong with this statement? jeeeeesus, those believers
Insha'Allah, my friend. and Mazal Tov, for good measure.
That is the theory of relativity in action.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
GEORGE: Come on, how hard is that? Look at all the junk science these days. You want an idea? Here's an idea. A higher being, of incomprehensible power created it.
Hawking: Scientists don't like the idea of higher beings.
GEORGE: But it is a being of incomprehensible power.
HAWKING: That is not for everybody.
GEORGE: I know, but it's incomprehensible
HAWKING: That would make me look like such a schmuck.
GEORGE: All right, forget that idea, it's not for you....Okay, okay, I got it. How about the Universe is created from nothing? Every scientist tries to make it about something, how about making this about nothing?
HAWKING: Yeah and...?
GEORGE: And people say hey it's about nothing, they look at their meaningless lives, and sort of just agree.
"I don't think it's selfish, to eat defenseless shellfish." -NOFX
Quantum theory already predicts instant creation of matter for a very small amount of time from nothing. Universe simply got create as a quantum fluctuation where time before "universe" didn't exists, so the normally very small amount of time that matter can be created could then be infinite since time means nothing before universe. And then, quantum theory stills apply inside the newly created universe.
God (if...) didn't create universe : he create rules.
I can definitely prove that hydrogen and oxygen combine in a ratio of two volumes H to 1 volume O. I can definitely prove that the majority of Canada geese fly south for the winter.I can definitely prove that I am not the Queen of England. Random enough for you?
Hmm, here, try this. It's the Halting Algorithm. I'm not sure when it'll be done, though. Let me run the Halting Algorithm on it. Hrm... one more try...
Just because he is so smart doesn't mean he should get away with shit like this. Its like seeing a press release on candidate X or reading about company X's response to their recent product failure. He now has the position that will let him answer something with nothing and people will actually swallow it.
You've just been spending too much time at Digg, that's all.
Your mind is clear / The things that you fear / Will fade with how much you / Believe what you hear
Further worrying is Hawking's statement that "forever is a long time". We do not have "forever"; time is but a property, linked to gravity and space, and the universe moves towards entropy. The end of gravity, the end of mass, the end of space, and thus, the end of time, perhaps all reducing itself to a singularity from where it all began, starting the cycle again. Or not. Who knows. The universe is not infinite though, and thus, neither is time.
At some point we just can't know, and this will always be an issue of theory and metaphysics. Still, the idea that the universe arose without a cause is just mind-bogglingly illogical. I can't tell you what that cause was, but if the article is accurate, I have to disagree with Hawking here.
One possibility is that the universe has always existed in some form, and the "big bang" is just the expansion outward after entropy eventually leads to the cessation of all matter, leaving all the energy contained at a single point in space. Another is that it was born from a black hole or some sort of wormhole from another universe (leaving the question of how that one was formed unresolved). Of course, there's the God theory too, with some interpretations seeing God as a humanoid creator, and others, as the totality of existence and then something more, making the very nature of reality itself part of God. (Sufism, Hinduism, Kabbalism, among others). This creates the odd logic trap of making God beyond causality. Which really isn't any more illogical than Hawking's position when you think about it.
We went home. Now I wish we had bought some while it was on sale.
About the universe waking up from nothingness, and creating itself. This means we could have skipped 2,000 years of religious wars, standardized on Hinduism, made it Open Source and still had the New Age movement with its interesting drugs.
technical writing / development
At what point do we stop looking at Hawking as some demigod genius, and realize that he has gone absolutely crackers?
At the point where he decides to push everyone out of the spaceship and fly to Jupiter...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Ben Hocking
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This is actually quite interesting. Wikipedia (and Google) says that the Star Diaries were first published in 1971, but the theory seems like it might be a little older. Although Lem didn't write this as a scientific paper, in my opinion he must have had some experience in this field and/or some documentation to base off of. Anyone in the science community willing to inform an ignorant like me? That, or he's just a really smart guy (which he, of course, is).
"We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams [...]."
- Meher Baba, Discourses (first published in the late 1930's)
http://www.meherbaba.com/
What you're referring to is known as Fundamentalism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamentalist_Chri
Religion and Science aren't opposites, and don't nullify each other.
To test whether something can come from nothing, we must have _nothing_ (not just vacuum), thus negating ourselves, thus negating the experiment. It is equally impossible to disprove the "something from nothing" postulate.
We're starting to veer off into areas that are going to quickly resemble a bad Michael Crichton novel, but the question wasn't "can something come from nothing," but "where did the universe [by which we mean, this one, that we're in now] come from," which aren't the same.
The reason the latter isn't prima facie impossible is that (perhaps) you could at some point find multiple universes, and observe or otherwise gain intelligence about the birth of our universe from another one. That may well be impossible under any conception of the universe or multiverse as we currently understand it, but the photo-electric effect would probably have seemed pretty impossible to Isaac Newton, too. Having to turn everything we know about how everything works completely upside-down is a tractable requirement and problem; empirically determining whether God exists is not.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
No, the religious nut-cases do that. They are the ones you always hear about in the media. You don't hear about the millions of reasonable, open-minded religious people who are capable of realizing that the Bible doesn't actually say how old the earth is and Genesis 1 was meant to be poetic rather than a scientific account of how God created the universe.
Celebrate the finer things in life
Divide by zero
-FL
You're right, it's a bit of a tautology, isn't it.
:)
Although when I first read Andromeda Strain, I thought it was good. But I was young, and foolish.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
May he be touched by His noodly appendage. Ramen.
Actually, it reads like TFSummary was much ado about something wrong. I went to a lot of trouble and such and RTFA'ed, but I don't see anything from the summary in the article.
I see a mention of "inflation," and a poke at the God Team, but I don't see any mention of "nothing." (If somebody has a transcript, I might be bothered to look for the promised proclamation, but I certainly couldn't find it in the article.) Mr. Hawking has apparently just pretended to have an understanding of the un-understandable problem that sits at the beginning of anyone's understanding of everything: something exists, where nothing used to.
Sure, the idea of an abrupt Creation, or "Design," of the universe lets us joke about what God was doing before he got around to Creation, but the metaphor of water (or, let's suppose, some kind of cosmic stew) boiling into steam/universes leaves us with the same problem that we had in the first place: where in the [space larger than a universe] did the water/stew come from?
As I read it, the exact same problem has been reached again - and Religion and Science both require a leap of perfect faith over the gap that is The Beginning of It All.
The universe is, pretty much by definition, 'that which exists'. If it wasn't created from nothing, but from something, that something would comprise part of the universe at an earlier time. Meaning that there was no creation in this instance, just a change of state.
So what else could the universe be created from, but nothing?
I strongly agree with your statement. Many of my classmates don't like to speak with me, or even "look down" on me for my un-Christian views. In addition, I've had multiple girls refuse to date me simply because I'm not Christian. Although one could argue that the girls are using that as an excuse to just not date me, I'm talking about the cases when I've become very close to the girl, and the next logical step would be to date.
Whatever the case may be, I certainly have heard people at least claim that they don't want to spend time/go out/talk with me because I'm not Christian. People think it's wrong to discriminate based on race, but when discrimination occurs based on religion (on a small scale, I'm not talking about the holocaust), it's suddenly justified because that's part of the religious doctrine?
I used to be Christian, and at my church, we were told as kids to only have close friends with people within the church. Having friends with anyone else would supposedly cause us to turn away from the "truth" and fall into temptation.
For sufficiently ignorant values of "religious", of course. Some religions people never change their minds, but this number is far fewer than you probably think.
Heretics are labeled not because of religion, but because of the political perversion of religion effected by churches and state religions. Heretics are a threat to a power structure or organization, not religion.
A few people beat him to it
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
that made sense. Is the basketball court I'm in infinite? I throw a dart, and the dart hits the wall. There is "something" there, and therefore that's not the edge of the court, ergo my court is infinite. If there was a big wall at some point that nothing could get around, that would seem to be the end of the universe, at the very least in any way that is at all relevant to us (By definition). So I think those greeks need to go back to the drawing board.
Relax I just want some peanuts.
What created the Nothing that created the universe?
And since you just defined Nothing as the starting point of the universe, you just defined nothing!
How much is your data worth? Back it up now.
If that's not the case, then atheists and Christian's both believe God is nothing. That's quite a bit more common ground then either side seems to be aware of.
But if God is nothing...
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
You are correct, certainly, in that it's quite a bit less ridiculous than it may first appear. However, with our without context, the whole thing is something a supposed 'scientist' should be trying to stay far, far away from. Science is about considering truths for which some evidence exists, not about considering truths that would be convenient.
In case you want some practice thinking about this, here are some games that might help. ;)
Ben Hocking
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Arthur C. Clarke is famous for saying that sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. I daresay with quantum physics and quantum cosmology, we're starting to get there.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
Or, you might just mean that men are capable of science, too. What if I had said "Many 'real' scientists are women"? Would you infer that I was implying that women are better suited to science than men?
Why?
Not even close. Read what else I've written if you want to infer what I was implying. My statement is no different than the statement that "Many 'real' scientists are women". I.e., being a woman or being religious does not preclude you from being a scientist. There's a difference between arguing from correlation and arguing from existence. If you say there are no three-legged dogs, then all I have to do is show you one three-legged dog to prove you wrong. I am in no way implying that most dogs have three legs, or that three-legged dogs are superior. Got it?
Ben Hocking
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Amen.
The greatest thing you'll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return.
I thought you were going to make me have to go all Google or something!
Ben Hocking
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"No, the religious nut-cases do that. They are the ones you always hear about in the media. You don't hear about the millions of reasonable, open-minded religious people who are capable of realizing that the Bible doesn't actually say how old the earth is and Genesis 1 was meant to be poetic rather than a scientific account of how God created the universe."
So the Bible is false?
No one has a right to their *own* opinion. They have a right to the TRUTH.
Or so you may think.
"all broken things dream of repair" - chris letcher
At a small enough scale, it seems that they do. Virtual particles that are constantly arising without cause and disappearing are fundamental to quantum mechanics. So if universes can start small and "inflate," it could be happening all the time. Unless they interact with this universe, we wouldn't see them.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
On top of that, and I should mention I am not a...biblical/religious/whatever Christian expert, all of the "statments known to be false" that I've heard referenced here on Slashdot and in other discussions about similar topics, have all been verses taken anywhere from slightly to grossly out of context from what any unbiased reader simply reading along would come to understand as the meaning. In all the cases, though, however small the contextual misunderstanding, it's been one large enough that anyone who knew much about the bible would be able to point out the misunderstanding and debunk the argument.No, the religious nut-cases do that. They are the ones you always hear about in the media. You don't hear about the millions of reasonable, open-minded religious people who are capable of realizing that the Bible doesn't actually say how old the earth is and Genesis 1 was meant to be poetic rather than a scientific account of how God created the universe.
From what I've seen so far, there are dangerously few people who actually bring a solid argument to the table that takes more than 10 seconds to deal with. Most of them are just something they heard their friend say, who got it from some webpage that was so grossly biased it was laughable to say the least. There's one I can think of right now that is something like "1000 & 1 fallacies in the bible" that I saw someone on
This reminds me of a joke I heard about a man who didn't care about context. He prayed to the Lord, "Father, please give me a message", dropped his bible on the floor, and placed his finger on a random verse on the page. It read "Judas went and hanged himself". He dropped his bible again, placing his finger on some point in the page. This verse said "Go and do the same." He was sweating by now, afraid of what was next. So one last time he read a random verse from a random page and it said "What you do, do quickly." Point is, you can come away with some pretty crazy ideas about the bible if you don't take more than five seconds to figure out the context.
Meanwhile, you can go ahead and vegetate, not caring about anything at all nor progressing towards any goal. Meanwhile, I'll actually attempt to be something other then useless.
The scientific method can be applied to anything. "Why is a painting beautiful?" That's not a scientific question. "Why is a painting beautiful to some humans?" That is a scientific question that could yield very interesting and important insights as to how we work.
Leonardo DaVinci tried very hard to explains such things as beauty and found out many useful things about human anatomy and symmetry as a result. That and his art is considered by many to be beautiful.
Everything in life should be sibjected to the scientific method at some point or other. If for no other reason, at least because it's there and could lead to wonderful insights. The very same insights responsible for the device that lets you sit there and be a lame troll on slashdot(admittedly a double edged insight).
And that which we have not, can not, or have found no reason yet to apply the scientific method should definitely not be defaulted to a text older then the currently established civilizations anyways.
Old texts are meant to be studied to draw new conclusions. Not followed blindly in the absence of alternatives.
Many are assuming that Hawking is proposing that the universe came into existance from complete nothingness. This isn't what he was saying at all:
From the article:All this is is a simple analogy to represent the way in which the universe came into existance, it says nothing about what caused it to do so. In fact, even in his analogy, the bubbles are caused by extreme heat through a medium in a transitional state. This most definitely is "something".
In a discussion with one of the more thoughtful news anchors at my work, I was caught making the following statement, "everything must have an origin", but in actuality, we have no proof of that. Traditionally, when we talk of creation, we are really refering to a transformation of something into something else. We've never actually seen creation, in the purist sense of the word, so we have no way of proving that anything ever was created.
I have come to believe that there never has been nothing. Some form of SOMETHING (be it matter, energy, time, or what-have-you, since we're talking multi-dimensional proporties outside of our existing concept of reality) has always existed. Time could very well simply be a property unique to our universe, so "eternity" may have no real meaning whatsoever. But in any case, something has always existed in some form or another. It is impossible to come to any conclusion otherwise. Even if you take into account that physics, reality, space, and time, as we know it, may very-well only exist inside our universe, there must be some form of physical properties, be they very different, outside our universe, and changes in those properties were the cause of our universe.
Simply because one is busy concentrating on the creation of a bubble in boiling water doesn't mean that you can completely disregard the existance of the boiling water, or the energy coming off the stove, as part of what went into creating the bubble.
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
Not true: mathematical theorems are true (capable of absolute proof) within their own axioms, and mathematics requires a priori axioms. As Wittgenstein might say, this means they convey no information, but simply recapitulate their axioms in increasingly complex forms.
The same condition does not apply to experience, thus leaving room for the skepticism that puzzled the mathematically-inclined Descartes. Yet the "cogito" has a notorious problem, along the same vein as Wittgenstein's analysis of mathematical truth: "I exist" is necessarily true in grammar, because of the assumptions made by "I." It conveys no information in language, and is a phenomenological report, no more provably true or false as a condition of existence than numerous competing phenomenological or grammatical analyses that posit the non-existence of a "I" (Buddhism is a ready example.)
The cogito sure does "make sense," though, and this is because experience suggests it.
Tags != Comments, and -1 (Troll) != -1 (I Would Respond Angrily To This Poster So They Must Be Trolling)
Hey, RPGs are useful frameworks to describe all sorts of behavior, since they are simplified frameworks for a world. MMORPGs are particularly interesting because you can study all sorts of emergent behavior, especially forms of economic and social interaction.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
But for everyday use I agree, for practical purposes those things are correct. (well, H and O does not actually combine 2:1 by volume, but 2:1 by atom-count, but we'll let that fly.)
is that the universe continually goes between existence and non-existence.
;)
its stuck in a crash/reboot-loop. its just that it takes so LONG to reboot, we don't notice it during our lifetimes.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
No, the religious nut-cases do that. They are the ones you always hear about in the media. You don't hear about the millions of reasonable, open-minded religious people who are capable of realizing that the Bible doesn't actually say how old the earth is and Genesis 1 was meant to be poetic rather than a scientific account of how God created the universe. I have karma to burn, so here we go. The difference isn't poetic. It's just plain wrong. Creation as described in the bible, taken literally or poetically, still cannot measure up to any common scientific theories on the matter.
I do not think they are at all synonymous. I can see why you inferred that, but it was not at all implied. That was a non-sequitor on my part.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
"I exist" is necessarily true in grammar, because of the assumptions made by "I."
Really cool argument I wasn't aware of. However, anything you substitute for "I" would work. Imagine "I" am really, in fact, some kind of hive mind (Minsky would love that). The unitary feeling of consciousness is what "I" depict to "myself" as I. The concept of the cogito is, impersonally, "At least one self-consciusness exists". Would it fit better?
-- Patent no.123456: A way to personalize
- Things we know are wrong (i.e. can disprove). These are called either lies or obsolete models, depending on the context.
- Things that we don't yet know are wrong (i.e. those which can have experiments tested to falsify them, but so far no experiment has given contradictory results). These are called theories.
- Things that we can never know are wrong. These are called religion.
None of these are 'right' and none can be provable. Gradually things move from set 2 to set 1, until set 2 asymptotically approaches an accurate model of the universe.I am TheRaven on Soylent News
From TFA: "It expanded in a million trillion trillionths of a second."
As in, a million seconds?
As someone already pointed out, doesn't this mean that the bible is false? Who decides which part is poetic and which part factual? If Genesis is just a story, then what makes any of the other chapters any more reliable? If you take away the bible, then what is left of christianity?
Now don't get me wrong, I think being a decent person and helping others is a good thing. I just don't see what religion has to do with it.
and none of them were anywhere close in interpretation.
Litteraly true or not being contradicted by facts when interpreted in a very specific way.. those are 2 entirely different things.
And since you can always change your interpretation to not contradict known facts, that means you can forever maintain that the Bible contains only true things. Oh, and the bible isn't unique in that...
I believe you quite demonstrated the point of the GP.
Matter of fact is, context or not, the Bible claims that god created the world in 6 days and then took a day of rest. No amount of interpretation is going to change that, and realizing it is not a factual truth but a poetic description isn't jusr interpretation, it is also realizing that there are things in that Bible that are factually wrong, no matter how much you may dislike saying that.
This all doesn't change that its a book that provides inspiration and wisdom for many also. A story doesn't have to be true to tell its message well.
You can hypothesise that since it has happened for all hydrogen and oxygen tested so far[1], and then create a theory that it will probably happen with any sets of hydrogen and oxygen in a 2:1 ratio[1]. This theory could then be disproved by finding two hydrogens that wouldn't combine with one oxygen (or one oxygen that wouldn't combine with two hyrdogens).
If you did that, then you would have followed the scientific method, and you could call your resulting theory science. You would not, however, have proved it, because science never produces proofs (mathematics does, if you're that way inclined...).
[1] In a given range of temperature and pressures.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Scientist: "My wife loves me and I love her." You: "Really, prove it empirically. You're no scientist."
Right. I know I love my girlfriend, but I only strongly suspect she loves me. I have no proof. I can't read her mind. How many people have been cheated by their loved ones?
Prove you exist, that your reality is more than just a mental delusion on your part.
I know I exist for myself -cfr.the Cartesian cogito, but of course I can't prove it logically to you. And yes, my reality could be a mental delusion on my part. Nothing illogical with it, I don't blindly trust in the reality in front of my eyes, from a logical point of view. I behave as it really exists, however, because it's the simplest thing to do and that requires less unproven assumptions until I get proof of the contrary. Believing in external reality simply requires the existence of external reality itself. Believing, let's say, in the Matrix requires believing (a)in the never seen Matrix (b)in a fictional reality built by the Matrix. I choose Occam's Razor.
-- Patent no.123456: A way to personalize
Good, that's why I shouldn't have to pay any taxes!
Table-ized A.I.
This guy just needs to give it up. I deserve to be modded down for saying that but I just find him harder and harder to take serious lately.
... or roller, as the case may be.
+0 Meh
I for one welcome nothing from nowhere.
Table-ized A.I.
The Bible contains statements that we know to be false because they contradict each other. For instance, compare the first chapter of Matthew with the second chapter of Luke, both of which have the genealogy of Jesus. How come there are missing generations mentioned in one of them but not on the other? A man can have several sons, but not several fathers. Therefore, at least one of the gospels, either Matthew or Luke, or both, is proved by the Bible itself to contain false statements.
> I can definitely prove that hydrogen and oxygen combine in a ratio of two volumes H to 1 volume O.
Nope. All you can show is at some specific time, at some particular place, with some particular collection of hydrogen atoms and some particular collection of oxygen atoms appear to your instruments and interpretations as combining as a ratio of two volumes H to 1 volume O.
Likewise you can't prove the geese thing. And how do you know you're not the Queen of England, but just dreaming that you're not?
Yes, his post did suggest that, but the Bible suggests that it has already been proven.
No. The bible suggests that the Universe was intentionally created, and that the Creator chose to reveal himself to us. No proof beyond "I say so."
Genesis, fluffy weird stuff
<literal>common sense stuff</literal>
Of course! What could be clearer! Thankfully the Bible is very clear about what is not currently true i.e. 'poetic'.
Please explain to me how you manage to deal with the omnipotent-benevolent problem or the can-see-the-future and we have free will problem in 10 seconds..
Infinite time means everything that can happen, will. You being you is absolutely incidental. You do not exist.
Nothing is actually something, because in order to think about nothing, it has to be something, and the thought of nothing contains the energy of it.
So I don't think it makes sense, for a scientist as smart as Hawking, to come up with a foolish theory that you can get something from nothing, if thats the case he should also be able to give us unlimited energy from nothing. The everything from nothing also means anything from nothing, everything is energy, so energy from nothing is what he'd have to prove to make his case.
I don't think he can prove that energy can pop in, so his theory to me in bullshit until he can pop in unlimited energy proving it.
So, you're basically making it all up as you go along?
At some point, somewhere, the entire internet will be found to be illegal.
The universe exists when it became self aware, before that it did not exist, and if it loses self awareness it dies.
So far, there is no such thing as "random", or "nothing", so these terms make no scientific sense and should never be used in a scientific debate about creation, or anything else really. Either everything in the universe came from something else, or the universe came into existence from observation, There is absolutely no evidence that anything can pop in or out of existence, I've never seen that into a lab, and unless he's talking about some quantum particle doing the time travel or being in two places at once, I'm not exactly sure what experiments he has done to prove it.
So his theory so far, even if he tries to back it up with math, would never really be able to prove that randomness can exist. What it can prove is the universe started out as perhaps less ordered, but order comes from observation, the more observers, the greater the order, and this is even shown on the quantum level.So yeah, I welcome Mr. Hawkings diversity of thought on this issue, because many people who don't want to believe a God created the universe, and who want to maintain an essential strict materialist view, may appreciate his ideas.
However, if you believe in God, or you don't believe anything is ever random, then there must always be an observer and a controller to bring order.
I read his article, it's heavy on theory and speculation, it's mostly philosophy and theory. If you want an alternative you can look for what the beep do we know on Google Video and you'll get more opinions on what the universe is. Some believe the universe exists only due to observers observing matter into existence, and some think the universe exists because of strings, and some thing the universe exist only because of matter.
I think there was a time where there was no matter, but this does not prove there were no observers, because the observers could have come from another dimension, or another universe, or even from the quantum, which is not exactly solid, but which does exist.
Descartes would ask - how do you know the rules of logic are correct (obviously, I mean in the physical, not logical sense)? What if all humans share the delusion that logic is correct? Theorems are merely the selective application of the rules of logic on a set of sentences.
With the "cogito", however, I can't find a way to argue, because by arguing, I would be proving my own existance.
Without the proofs presented in the discussion then maybe I can get away with writing this:
There probably wasn't nothing to begin with since "nothing" implies that you can put "something" into it by our everyday experience. That's a lot of functionality to begin with for free. Instead assume it starts from a void which can't hold any information.
Rules (i.e. X interacts with Y by doing A when C occurs) for a computer are data that tells the system which actions it should take. It is no coincidence that data (information) is required since every explicitly chosen action requires an informational constraint to pick it over every other possible action. Without this constraint any one of the possible rules may be selected according to whatever probable bias exists in that context. So information is saved (not required) if the system doesn't have to choose a specific rule.
The structure of the system determines what rules it can enact at this higher level (as opposed to actions at a particle level...). Structural form is also a particular selection over all possible structural forms and thus requires an informational constraint to specify. If structural form is unspecified then the amount of information required to represent the various configurations is saved.
Existence of a represented object is specification and simulation of its state and behaviors, where choosing to represent it or not takes information in terms of selecting the rules and state to represent it or not. If this is left unspecified then this particular information is saved.
If the universe is indefinite about existence of things, about specifying any of the parameters discussed and others then no informational constraints are required, which is no more or less than what is allowed or disallowed by a void. Remember in quantum physics the unspecifiability of particle behaviors except after measurement? About the infinite futures and/or pasts, and schrodenger's cat and infinite universes and so on? There is unspecified things even in our perceptions but this is not the undecideability of the void but rather the rules that allows us to exist in the domain it supports. In our case it is our perceptions as entities based on rules and state in only one of the possible forms that allow us to observe the stateful events to happen in this subset to the whole of all possible things.
We're living in one of the infinite possible universes under one of the infinite conditions that our particular consciousnesses could manifest in or at least interact with from somewhere else. That is the basis of how things "exist" from our perspectives and that we're able to interact with them and share the space with others and so on.
The void by its simple nature is unchangeable, it's timeless, it can't be found, seen or interacted with and it supports everything by being indecisive about everything. Ok! The above is really half assed, but it seems reasonable except several glaring omissions and I'm not sure how one would go about proving it unless one can assume the void and find out one of a set of possible ways that "we" got "here".
Nothing really would, for the same reason: the grammar of "existence" precludes any such formulation from conveying any information about what it is that exists.
This used to give people skeptical fits, until philosophers in the latter half of the 20th century, for the most part, were persuaded that some concepts are just beyond the capacity of language to express. There's no reason to doubt the experience that "I exist," it just appears impossibly difficult to defend this empirical proposition with language.
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HTH
Hear, hear! How scientists can claim the "Big Bang" as an event with no extraneous cause is less subject to disbelief than "And God created light" is beyond me. I agree with Skeezix that the fundamentalists with their 6,000 year old Earth are completely out to lunch. But I would like to suggest the following analogy:
Many /. regulars have played games such as SimCity. Let's consider a time when computing power is sufficiently advanced that the entities created in a "SimWorld" have awareness. What would their cosmology be? Would they eventually create their own "Big Bang" theory? And in a sense, would that be right? Was their world created when you decided to create it, to them out of nothing? Or are you the "God" of their world that you created, in your own image? And, considering you have the ability to direct the fate of their world, irrespective of their will or desire, are you not, by any standard definition, a "God"?
Further, many people cite the misery of the world - Hitler, Stalin, Iraq - as proof that an "omnipotent, omnipresent" God does not exist. But, in a sufficiently complex Sim game, could you pay attention to every issue and every parameter at all times? Clearly not, as many current SimCities die, and at an infinitely lower level of complexity.
It's not unreasonable to suggest, IMHO, that God did create our universe many millions (billions?) of years ago, and like a gardener, tends to different sections of it at different times. When he turns his attention to our planet, he may see a tendency towards evil, and so he sends or directs a Hammurabi, a Moses, a Lao-Tzu, a Jesus, a Buddha, etc. That this direction doesn't come as frequently or dependably as scientists would like for proof is of no matter to Him.
To me, this view reconciles evolution and creationism, and allows me to worship God without denying the physical evidence that the world is millions of years old.
What was once true, is no longer so
Who said anything about humans doing it?
And it doesn't take "faith" to guess that technology and knowledge will progress. One just has to look back to see the trend and project into the future. It's all a gamble anyway.
Give me a break. I give a shit less what media has to say on the subject.
What he said is exactly in line with my personal experience talking to any and every religious person I have ever had this debate with including friends, my parents, my friends parents, people at work, people in religious irc chat rooms. This isn't a small number of people I have actually debated religion with a fair amount of people (I use to get a kick out of debating this when I was younger.. I don't anymore.. People are free to believe what ever they want to believe and what ever it takes to get them through life is fine with me. It's whatever). No I don't think they represent all religious people. Not even close. But in my personal opinion I do think people who do this are in the majority. People like you are few and far between my friend at least in my personal experience. And I wouldn't call the others nut-casses they just don't have any other way to deal with something they can't explain so they explain it away.
A lot of people have tried to answer that, and the best answer seems to be that you can't. Language is a convention that attempts to engage the world; it doesn't describe it in any way that is obliges reality to conform, because the "rules" of language are contained within that language's use. Logic is an axiomatic way of approaching language, and its truths only have certainty within the system's axioms. It endures because it generally seems to work better than competing systems, as far as helping us accomplish empirical goals.
Not exactly: you would only be proving (in the sense of certainty) the existence of existence. It's the kind of subtle bastard of a distinction that kept 19th century philosophers awake into the morning. The point of more recent philosophical thought is that you can't doubt the experience of existence, but there's always a way to attack its certainty in language, because language does not conform to experience in a way that gives its propositions inherent certainty outside of the appropriate rules of grammar.
If you're interested in these philosophical issues, I would recommend Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. People slate it as difficult, but it seems to me that many of these people are looking too hard for an epistomological system (a theory of knowledge) in the book, although none is either asserted or contained therein. Indeed, the author generally avoids technical language, yet managed to become perhaps the most influential 20th-century philosopher.
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I've come up with a little experiment which would empirically prove the existence of God, if he deicdes to show up and take part. A negative result would simply prove that God either does not exist or does not wish to take part in my experiment.
To start with, we pray for God's intervention in our experiment. Next Experimenter 1 flips a coin 1024 times and writes down a 0 for HEADS and a 1 for TAILS.
Experimenter 2 then generates 1024 bits with a quantum random number generator. These bits are non-deterministic, so its supposed to be impossible to know what they will be beforehand.
Now we compare the bits. There's a 1 in 2^1024 probability that every bit compares.
We can also do the experiments in opposite order to control for say, evil spirits. Or we could do them in sync. And yes, I'm entirely serious.
To prove or disprove the Genesis story, one could set up a large telescope 6000 light years away and watch history unfold. We'd just have to figure out how to get it there quickly.
In other words thing about it like this. What is faith and why is it so important to a lot of religious people?
Most religious people I have talked to have told me I just need to have faith. The ones who don't try to explain things away like I described usually answer everything by just telling me I need to have faith.
It seems to me that a lot of religious people don't want to try to question anything they just want to accept what they think and have faith.
This is total flamebait. Verses taken out of context to try to suggest that the Bible teaches that God created man for bestiality.
For reference, here's the rest of the account in Genisis 2 (KJV):
20 And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field; but for Adam there was not found an help meet for him.
21 And the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof;
22 And the rib, which the LORD God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man.
23 And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.
24 Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.
25 And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.
...because "hacker" sounds way sexier than "code drone."
I guess the whole protestant reformation passed you by.
un-ALTERED reproduction and dissimination of this IMPORTANT information is ENCOURAGED
What do you call Christianity then? It as after all routed in historical events and as Paul said, regarding the resurrection, if it never happened then Christians are to be pitied because they are trusting in a lie.
God defeated evil on the cross and Jesus will return.
10 words, not even 10 seconds.
Matter of fact is, context or not, the Bible claims that god created the world in 6 days and then took a day of rest. No amount of interpretation is going to change that, and realizing it is not a factual truth but a poetic description isn't jusr interpretation, it is also realizing that there are things in that Bible that are factually wrong, no matter how much you may dislike saying that.
No, it's myth (in the real, dictionary sense, not the common usage), not wrong.
Some people really do need to realize that ancient literature is not a scientific journal.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
That's partially true. What science does do is tell you what the limitations on god(s)(ess)(es) are, as in lightning doesn't come from Thor. As science advances, the gaps that possible god(s)(ess)(es) can hide in decrease, although there will probably always be a hole where god can be argued to exist.
There are 11 types of people, those who know unary and those who don't.
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After all, as has already been discussed many times in this thread, a Catholic Priest was behind the original formalism of the Big Bang! No, I do not dispute your statements whatsoever. My point was merely that one's scientific views do not have to dictate one's religious views. However, yes, they will often influence them. Unfortunately, the reverse is also sometimes true.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Religion and Science aren't opposites, and don't nullify each other.
Yes they are and no they don't
Science says there is no god. Religion says there is a god. How can there be a more opposite point of view?
My guess is you are one of those who think that science and religion will converge some day, right?
But in your mind it will be that science bends towards a god, and that your point of view remains unchanged. Obviously religion cannot afford (literally $$$) to claim there is no god.
As far as nullify each other you are certainly correct. They cannot and never will nullify each other. One starts from the fundamental principal that there is a god. Any additional arguments are secondary at best and insignificant to the argument. The other side will move with the times, change the point of view, modify as is needed, and adapt as new observations are added to the debate. In other words one side admits they don't know everything and the other side demands that some dude who wrote a book thousands of years ago had everything figured out. We all choose which of these two arguments makes the most sense.
"Truth is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations"
Partly at least.
I have believed as long as I could think that the universe is nothing. All of it's contents percievable and impercievable (important) sum to absolutely nothing. Nothing is everything and vice versa, because with nothing ELSE to relate "everything" to, "everything" doesn't exist.
It's only within certain contexts, limited portions of the whole, that anything's definable.
I also believe that the impercievable portion of space time is infinite, and consists of everything that could ever be.
The idea isn't disprovable, is useless, but it gives me piece of mind somehow --like I've realized something important.
It is rooted in some (actually quite few) historically accurate events, and yes, they are trusting in a lie.
Stephen Hawking is a gimp who can't even go to the bathroom without help so what does he know? Actually now that I think about a lot of our supposed science revolutionaries seem rather dubious. - Einstein was a poor paten clerk who couldn't even progress beyond a junior position. - Newton came up with his ideas after being smashed in the head with an apple. - Franklin electrocuted himself plenty of times - Tesla died poor and penniless - Faraday was a bookbinder without any education at all. I think at this rate I'm on the road to becoming the next great scientist you should all give me the money and Nobel prize now to save yourself the trouble later. (I think it goes without saying that I'm joking.)
I may agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to face the consequences of saying it.
What do you call Christianity then? It as after all routed in historical events and as Paul said, regarding the resurrection, if it never happened then Christians are to be pitied because they are trusting in a lie.
You can be reasonably certain that a man in ancient palastine and egypt went around teaching people. via historical texts and what not. You cannot use the same texts to say he came back from life. You can prove CaoCao likely existed in the era of the romance of the three kingdoms via historical texts. You cannot prove he could fly and execute massive AOE attacks with his mace. You can prove a swordsmith who used masamune as a "brand" exissted through historical texts. You cannot prove his swords were eternally peaceful and calm.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
I find it rather interesting that religious people discount some stories in the Bible as being poetic, symbolic, allegory or parables when the evidence and rational thought show them to be lacking. However, the miracles performed by Jesus are not seen in this way - they are taken as an accurate factual account of events.
The Bible does not signify which stories belong to which categories, so the whole thing is open to interpretation and argument both between individuals of a denomination and between the various religions themselves. As no proof can be claimed by either side they both take the "moral" high ground and proclaim it is their faith. It seems the more you continue to believe in the face of increasing evidence to the contrary, the more faithful you become. Faith is seen as a virtue.
It is not a great leap to reject all evidence and totally believe in the "word of God" and be considered a true believer (many moderates would consider this view fanatical). Belief without evidence or proof can, and is, used to justify many atrocities against humanity and will be the undoing of our species if we continue to tolerate it.
Most religious people are "mostly harmless" (to quote a famous atheist). The problem is religion harbors and encourages fanatics. Sept 11 is one horrific example of this and the American response just as bad (remember, George Bush said "God told me to invade Iraq").
Read Sam Harris's "End of Faith" and "A letter to a Christian Nation", Richard Dawkins "The God Delusion" and watch Brian Flemming's "The God who was not there". Keep an open mind, question what you *really* belief and make a decision.
I don't make predictions, and I never will.
Also, the universe is bounded by nothing, therefore, infinite in every direction.
This is way simpler in 2D, so for a moment assume you can't grasp elevation, only a flat earth. Now, you can walk in a straight line around the earth never hitting a bound and yet you can go infinitely far - you'll just be walking in circles because there's a dimension you're missing. The same can happen in 3D space - you set out in one direction, but even if you travel in a straight line, space curves.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
think of this from a philosophical viewpoint, rather than physics...
If a "nothing" can create something, then its not nothing.
I suggest what he is proposing is a new type of something.
I'm an atheist, and I can deflate the "can-see-the-future and we have free will problem" but doing so in ten seconds will not really do it justice (for a good explanation check out Freedom Evolves by Daniel Dennett): you have a mistaken conception of what "free will" is. (Also I don't believe in a being who can see the future, but that's not necessary for solving the problem)
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Some people really do need to realize that ancient literature is not a scientific journal.
If it's the word of God, it should be utterly timeless.
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Like everyone else who holds this view, you're confused.
Science doesn't say there is no God, it says that the existance of a God is not necessary to explain the universe, at least for now. Accordingly, science is nontheistic, not atheistic.
It is important to understand this distinction. In doing so you will be able to see the futility and redundancy of this 'debate'.
"Stephen Hawking Says Universe CREATED from Nothing" ... ;)
Really?
No, just a Slashdot gaffe perhaps
Descartes himself all but acknowledges that the cogito is pretty useless... right where he says:
"If it is ever found that the speed of light is anything other than infinite then it may be said that I know nothing in matters of philosophy".
I think thats just about a done deal nowadays, no?
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Religious people never change their minds. Or rather, those that do are called heretics, and up until recently were frequently burned at the stake.
How very american....
People are still burned (or stoned) in some parts of the world.
Since empirical and philosophical are mutually exclusive, one would think that if an philosophical empiricist existed, we would enter some kind of twilight zone where military intelligence would make sense...
Philosophical and empirical are NOT mutually exclusive. Half of the "modern period" of philosophers (roughly those from Descarte through Kant; post-Kant is not considered "modern", oddly enough, but "contemporary") were labeled "empiricists", and emphasized how the only way we can come to knowledge of anything is through experience and observation. Those sorts of philosophers (such a Locke, Hume, and Berkeley) laid the foundation of the philosophical world view which underlies all of today's science. Don't forget, what we now call scientists were once known as Natural Philosophers, i.e. people who conduced a reasoned study of the natural world.
So philosophy is not exclusive of empiricism. Empiricism is itself a philosophical position, and (rightly so, in my estimation) the dominant one of today's academic world. But it took a lot of arguing about how it's possible to know anything before that consensus was settled upon, and were it not for philosophy we would not have the rigorously empiricist science that we have today.
Also, if you want a hardcore empiricist who took "I think therefore I am" seriously, look into Berkeley. He believed that the only things which existed were minds (as he could self-evidently tell that his own mind existed), and the things perceived by minds. He argued vehemently against the existence of a mind-independent material world (that is, something apart from the mere appearances of things) on the grounds that you couldn't observationally tell whether it was there or not, i.e. that it's a non-empirical idea! All you can know are your ideas, your sensory perceptions; so he concluded that talk of a material world was literally nonsense. So just being an empiricist doesn't prevent you from wandering off and cooking up "crazy" philosophical ideas, either.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
To be more blunt, Religion and the church are moral and political opposites.
Science is not at odds with religion, science is at odds with the church.
If you can read this, I forgot to post anonymously.
Hawking thinks he can predict all that exists about "our universe", not before it was made, not after. His talk is about getting close to being able to mathematically describe how it expanded from "nothing" and how the basic irregularities of that "inflation" now give us all we know. He's working backwards from galaxies and irregularities in the microwave background to show that there is a theory that can explain how this irregularity can exist and was started. Whether there was something before is inconsequential, like trying to go "south" of the "south pole". It simply does not exist. It is nothing. Is that so hard to fathom :-)
Please....(/sarcastic)...
Obviously science cannot say there is no god. This is a completely unprovable concept. Science cannot say there is no Santa, no tooth fairy, and no easter bunny, or as you would put it ("at least for now").
My guess is you would make a distinction between the tooth fairy and God. You cannot prove one exists and the other does not. Neither can science.
Am I "confused"? Well, "like everyone else who holds this view", you can continue to believe in the tooth fairy, 70 virgins, reincarnation, god, or whatever else you choose to believe in, and I'll do the same. We will both be long dead before we have an answer to any of these questions so neither of us will ever know.
"Truth is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations"
Obviously my friend you don't know any Southern Baptists, or worse. Members of the Holiness church.
The original had three piles, provable, might be provable and unprovable, but it is an error to put God's existance in pile three. This is because God's existance is provable by God though not by man. So, for this particular question you want pile 4. Now there is scripture, read recently in church, that talks about not testing God, but you don't even have to look that far. When we are doing physics, we are working with the reproducible. We are, as Einstein put, trying to read the mind of God. We are not trying to change God's mind. To physics, an action of God's that turns up in an experiment is an anomaly. It does not repeat and you have to disregard the data.
While it is not OK to test God, it is OK to bargin with God as Abraham did, and this is especially so when you are trying to help out other people, at least this seems to be when God comes into the stories in a give and take kind of way. But, once you are at the bargining table (trying to change God's mind) your questions about God's existance are pretty much answered. Moses found the expereince so overwhelming that he started wearing a veil.
People have every reason not to beleive in God and every reason to believe in God. The trouble is not God but reason. It is not equiped for the miraculous so it is just not terribly useful when dealing with Someone who only acts through miracles.
So, as you experiment, you can find out things like wow, random really can be random, how odd, didn't think God would throw dice. But, your set up has to throw out any evidence of God's intervention in the experiment.
Jesus Christ (haha), ANOTHER religious debate on the internet. *Gesture left*
WHO NEEDS SHIFT WHEN YOU HAVE CAPSLOCK/ DAMN1
Next up, Stephen Hawkings announces his new perpetual motion machine. Afterall, we don't need these stupid Laws of Thermodynamics, do we? ;-)
Nicely put. While none of the piles (we'll go with yours rather than mine as your explanation was better) are "right", some of them can contain proven things. You just have to remember that all proofs are relative to base assumptions. So you are correct that nothing can be proven completey, but it is safe to say that within certain paradigms (in the original sense) we can make proofs.
Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
Luke's list (Luke 3:23-38) from David to Jesus has 43 names: David, Nathan, Mattathah, Menan, Melea, Eliakim, Jonan, Joseph, Judah, Simeon, Levi, Matthat, Jorim, Eliezer, Jose, Er, Elmodam, Cosam , Addi, Melchi, Neri, Shealtiel, Zerubbabel, Rhesa, Joannas, Judah, Joseph, Semei, Mattathiah, Maath, Naggai, Esli, Nahum, Amos, Mattathiah, Joseph, Janna, Melchi, Levi, Matthat, Heli, Joseph and Jesus.
r d-of-god-part-2.html
Matthew's list (Matthew 1:2-16) from David to Jesus has only 28 names: David, Solomon, Rehoboam, Abijah, Asa, Jehoshaphat, Joram, Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, Hezekiah, Manasseh, Amon, Josiah, Jeconiah , Shealtiel, Zerubbabel, Abiud, Eliakim, Azor, Zadok, Achim, Eliud, Eleazar, Matthan, Jacob, Joseph and Jesus.
Moreover, only 6 ancestors appear in both of these lists: David, Shealtiel, Zerubbabel, Eliakim, Joseph, Jesus.
Luke's list has 43 generations from David to Joseph (or Mary, as Christians claim), but Matthew's list has only 28 generations from David to Joseph. That would mean that if Luke's list is indeed Mary's genealogy, then Mary would be 15 generations younger than Joseph. 15 generations is a lot of time even if the average age at which all of Mary's ancestors gave birth to the next generation was just 10 years, in which case Mary would be 150 years younger than Joseph! That is clearly not the case.
Let us assume that Matthew's list got shorter because of loss in translation, and other errors. If that is true, let not the evangelists admit that Bible is true (i.e. inerrant) in the literal sense. Hence it has to interpreted, in which case, they should not hold it as evidence against scientific evidence.
The most holy book, has 15 errors in such a short passage. Many of those errors could be claimed to be because of human intervention. Then what does that say about the amount of strain we should have when living exactly by its preaching?
Does it make sense that The Holy Word of God given by God so that ordinary men may live by its above-human-logic morality, is infused with silly logical errors so that we may be confused by it? This is not strictly a valid argument in Christianity because God the Potter can choose to make the pot anyway he wishes.
Using common sense to figure out what is literal and figurative in the bible as many evangelists do today, requires arbitrary line drawing. Don't you see how this works? The universe is earth-centric... wait, science disproved that, so that must have been a metaphor. The earth (and universe) are only 6000 years old... wait science disproved that, I guess that must have been a metaphor too. I've got an idea... why not look at this like you would any other source of information: fairly. If the claims made in the bible show themselves to be wrong, then stop making excuses for it and treat it like it is: an unreliable source of information.
The only reason people started believing that the bible should be interpreted symbolically is because all of its claims turned out to be ludicrous... not because the bible states or implies that it should be interpreted this way.This is a dishonest and bias way to analyze data. If I came up with an explanation for something which was later disproved, you wouldn't automatically assume that my data was just figurative would you? So why do people do this with the bible? If you look at anything in a figurative sense, you can make any crazy statement a truth.
God is just the line in the sand which separates the known from the unknown. As science continues to answer these unknowns, the line keeps getting drawn further and further back until God becomes obsolete. The only important question left will be, "are you willing to let go?"
http://edwinjose.blogspot.com/2007/03/is-bible-wo
Mod parent up. Interesting point.
Most people aren't thought about after they're gone. "I wonder where Rob got the plutonium" is better than most get.
"Real scientists don't bother to argue with religious people any more than they'd bother to argue with the guy on the corner talking to a leprechaun. You can't exactly reason or argue or even discuss with people who claim that they talk to invisible, omnipotent, omnipresent beings that live in the sky."
Flamebait modding of the parent just reinforces the point that religious fanatics (which are arguably a vast majority of the religious communities) cannot and will not engage in an argument or discussion that they do not think they can "win".
I had a several Sociology and Social Science Professors who maintained that: "Christianity (religion) is an incorrigible proposition" Which is to say whatever you assert / argue / say only serves to make their cases and convictions stronger.
The reason many "real scientists" will not argue with the religious, is they acutely realize (generally through prior experience or encounters) that it is a complete waste of their time, ultimately the argument on which the religion is based relies on no observable or provable fact or phenomena.
The Bible has two creation stories - and they contradict each other.
... the Lord God formed man")
The more well known story - I will call it Creation A - is described in Genesis 1 to 2:3. The other story - I will call it Creation B - is described in the rest of Genesis 2. Consider some of the differences:
Creation A
- Man created the sixth day
- Man created after the plants
- Mankind created in God's image
- Many humans created, of both sexes ("male and female He created them"), but not woman from man
Creation B
- Man created the first day ("in the day the Lord God made the Earth and the Heavens
- Man created "when no plant of the field was yet in the Earth"
- Man created from dust (no mention of "God's image")
- One man created first (Adam), then one woman from the man's rib (Eve)
Hmm, I re-read my original post, and saw nothing talking about vegetation. Could you please show me where I said that?
Not true: mathematical theorems are true (capable of absolute proof) within their own axioms, and mathematics requires a priori axioms. As Wittgenstein might say, this means they convey no information, but simply recapitulate their axioms in increasingly complex forms.
That is the most insightful thing I've read on slashdot in a long time. In essence nothing is provable. Which isn't to say that such recapitulations are useless.
Qxe4
Is he confirming he is in the Inflationary Universe theory as described by Alan H. Guth? I believe he might be leaning towards that theory or some variant of it.
- Dragonlord Warlock (aka Dion) "So many computers.... so little time...."
Please explain to me how you manage to deal with the omnipotent-benevolent problem or the can-see-the-future and we have free will problem in 10 seconds..
Well good, you've come up with an objection that a complete answer would take more than 10 seconds to produce. But the short of the long is that our definition of "good" and "bad" is different from God's definition. Our view and understanding is finite, his is infinite. So when all we can see is the evil in something, God very well may have it happening for a reason you or I cannot see. A simple example would be God giving your grandfather a heart attack. This leads to you calling your wife, who, instead of going to the grocery store after picking up the kids from school, rushes straight home, and in doing so avoids a collision with an 18-wheeler.
The most important thing we can't forget is that God's chief goal is the glorification of himself, not our comfort. How he chooses to accomplish this is up to him. Sounds conceited and cruel a lot of the time. We're welcome to think it is, but as Paul said in Romans 9,
But indeed, O man, who are you to reply against God? Will the thing formed say to him who formed it, "Why have you made me like this?" Does not the potter have power over the clay, from the same lump to make one vessel for honor and another for dishonor? What if God, wanting to show His wrath and to make His power known, endured with much longsuffering the vessels of wrath prepared for destruction, and that He might make known the riches of His glory on the vessels of mercy, which He had prepared beforehand for glory, even us whom He called, not of the Jews only, but also of the Gentiles?" [NKJV translation, ESV is more easily readable but GNPBC.org seems to be down]
Point is, God created us to further his glory, and he will use us to do it: we can either gratefully be a part of his work, or be a part of his wrath. Either way brings him glory, but why he only has chosen some of us to be saved ("be a part of his work") and not all is beyond me and any other human to understand. Many times the pain he puts in our lives is for a very good reason, often times to bring us to him in a way that would never have been possible without the pain. This can lead to many a deep theological discussion, but the core of the matter is this: He created us to be satisfied. As John Piper says at the end of many of his sermons, "Because God is most glorified in us, when we are most satisfied in him."
As for the free will/all-knowing-God issue, I haven't figured that one out myself and I don't think anyone has. This would be an example of where human logic falls short-- can we honestly expect it to be universally applicable, to a God beyond space, time, and far beyond what we can imagine? You don't have to forsake logic to be ok with the idea of God, you just have to understand that, while logic flows out of his character, there may be some things that we do not and may not ever understand. What matters is if the rest of what we believe about him comports with itself and him.
We all have assumptions; they're necessary if we want to do anything or get anywhere. But as we just said, what's important is that the things we believe or assume comport with the other things we believe and assume. We assume the existence and infallibilty of logic so that we can make conclusions. But doesn't logic forbid us from assuming things? Here is a believe which does not comport with itself. In a point, it's utter foolishness when you break it down. Now say we introduce God into the equation: We assume the existence of an all powerful and all knowing God. He becomes our basis for our logical reasoning, and then gives us a book which explains why people do evil things, why we are never completely satisfied with the newest and greatest, _and_ goes on to show us the way out of our predicament that we can't seem to fix ourselves. Now which is more silly? Assuming something that forbids you from assuming, or assuming something that g
Nothing does not have energy,or dimensions stashed in his pocket.
Its just absence of anything.Universe started from the same causes which created time/3-d space bubble,but these causes are something,and likely been a natural process(bursting from unknown dimensions).
I thought it was Seinfeld!
However, here you get into a small problem. If you have no need of a creation event, there is nowhere to have this "nothing" from which the Universe supposedly spawned. Even a nothing has to be somewhere, even if that somewhere is nowhere. It is meaningless to talk about what happened prior to time, because without time there can be no "prior". Likewise, if there is no creation event, you START with the Big Bang and can dispense with the need of this nothingness.
Personally, I would tend to go for the idea that time (but not space) is a closed loop. (Yes, it is possible for only time to be closed, provided there is a stable solution to the wormhole equations.) If you allow matter and/or energy to be slingshot back to the start, and thus have a Universe with a variable mass, many of the problems in cosmology (an apparently variable speed of light, and an apparently variable Hubble Constant for example) stop being problems. These would be the normal and expected consequences of such a system. By having time strictly bounded, we can eliminate a lot of the problems that occur in other cyclic models. (We can also eliminate the need for an inflationary model, which causes no end of headaches, because the start of the loop can be placed AFTER the point in time that inflation would be expected to finish. This allows us to avoid all kinds of strange things, like superluminal velocities, twelve dimensions of space, a wholly even Universe forming structures, etc.
The problem with cosmology is that many theories add more paradoxes and conundrums than they resolve. This is generally not considered a good sign, and has led many to question the validity of much of cosmology. I think it reasonable to trust cosmologists to have a pretty good idea of what observations are supporting, so the only solution I can come up with is to conclude they are holding some single assumption to be true that is, in fact, completely wrong. Everything else is correct, but that one assumption. Then it becomes inevitable that everything would have to be almost - but not quite - right, which is what we see.
My guess is that the entire theory of everything between the Big Bang and the end of the Inflationary Era is the assumption that is invalid. No, not the model, the theory that such a period of time even existed. If we eliminate that entire period of time, we eliminate virtually all of the problems. Eliminating problems is generally a Good Thing and usually a sign of being on the right track. However, we would now have to explain how you can suddenly get this fairly complex, non-uniform structure, without introducing ANY problems to replace the ones that are now unnecessary. Looping time is one possible solution, there may be others. All that seems obvious at the moment is that if an assumption needs any kind of unsolvable problem, it's probably wrong.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Neither the "Big Bang" theory nor "Creation" will be proven conclusively ever, I think.
To my knowledge there are no statements in the Bible that have been proven to be false. Can you give an example? Dinosaurs DID in fact exist according to the Bible. And a massive flood at Noah's time would have probably created the fossils we've found. But that's really immaterial.
Every person should just decide what they want to believe; then we don't have to spend years of time and millions of dollars to try and prove something that is not of much use to us anyway.
Sorry, my comment was in reply to your post in which you made the statement:
Yes they are and no they don't
Science says there is no god. Religion says there is a god. How can there be a more opposite point of view?
Again, science says nothing of the kind. Athiests, on the other hand often use science to attack religious dogma. Clearly you hold the the athiestic viewpoint, which is why you've completely missed mine, and assumed that since I don't agree with you I must have religious beliefs. Nothing could be further from the truth.
So my point, since you missed it, is that question of God or no God is completely irrelevant. Believe in one or the other if you must, but honestly, you'll be better off if you simply dismiss the question and rid yourself of belief entirely.
But doesn't this go back to the "turtles all the way down" question? If we assume that God created the Universe, because it's so improbable that it would happen spontaneously, isn't it then upon us to ask where God came from? Is it not just as improbable that He would have popped into existence from nowhere?
If we assume that He is more complex than the Universe (wouldn't something that could comprehend enough to build the Universe necessarily have to be more complex than its creation? I guess this is arguable), isn't it even more improbable?
...or am I missing something?
nope, you're absolutely right there. the trouble with wacko god believers is, they define god as perfect and then rape logic to somehow force everything to make sense. "your child died at the age of 2 after having been eaten by maggots for a month and screaming in pain? rejoice, because that saved your grandmother from being hit by an 18-wheeler!" well hoorah. our logical faculties are all we have to understand this world. presupposing the existence of the christian god always seems to end with dogmatic crap.
The first 18,5 minutes of the Webcast are more or less a - at times funny - commercial for Berkeley (and for Hawking). The speech itself is similar to the one he gave at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. A transcript can be found here:t ml
http://hayadan.org.il/english/hawking_in_israel.h
What if your existence is just a figment of your imagination? Cogito, but sum doesn't follow.
Speaking for myself, I am alright with only living in a state of mind. I fully agree with Blake:
"Man has no Body distinct from his soul; for that call'd Body is a portion of Soul discern'd by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age."
When science approaches the limits, I have a feeling that it may often cease to be meaningful and join the religions in pointlessness, like this Hawking-speech. I too used to like to stare into the abyss, but when it began to stare back, I became dizzy, flinched, and decided to forget about it and engage myself in nearer things. Reality is way overrated, and in reality, it just isn't all that it's thought to be. At the end of the day (also at the beginning of the day, and the remainder of the day, for that matter) all you can trust is your feelings, yet even they may betray you now and then. Remember: Always look on the bright side of life!
-Lasse
Recent research into the origins of the universe by highly regarded scientists show that Stephen Hawkings' hypothesis about the universe popping up from nothing is completely and perfectly wrong. The proof for this will be provided by several lengthy studies to be funded by left over funds not used after finding that there is no life on Mars, so those programs will no longer be necessary.
More funding and time will be necessary, as to prove this, it will take several million years, but that's okay, eternity is a really long time, expecially the part that lasts forever, so given enough monkeys, and typewriters, the proof should present itself quite readily.
In the beginning when God created the Up Quark, the Down Quark, the Top Quark, the Bottom Quark; then the Charm Quark, the Strange Quark; also he made the Tau Neutrino, the Muon Neutrino, the Electron Neutrino. Then he saw that the mattercules where good. Then he made the number one, and separated it from 0. Then he made Latin so that he could coax the rest of the crap made from nothing...
Something witty goes here.
The universe was called into being by the laws of nature. Since these laws are everywhere and always, obviously an infinite number of universes have been called into existence, all of them obeying the same laws of nature in every respect. Thus they all are exactly the same, right down to your lack of shoelaces.
See for example this article: http://www.tothesource.org/5_16_2006/5_16_2006.htm with more details here: http://www.geraldschroeder.com/age.html
In it Gerard Schroeder argues that those 6 days were periods of time measured from the point of time around the Big Bang, and that they just happen to expand to billions of years when viewed from our time-frame. You may or may not buy his argument, but its interesting.
Something else that is interesting is that from before science ever questioned a literal six-day creation (from our point of view) that Jewish scholars were interpreting them as not being literal 24-hour periods as well (not because they were making excuses but because that was what they saw as the natural interpretation of the text)
To a good scientist, it shouldn't matter what they believe in. You could believe in the FSM. Doesn't matter. Science is about what works, not "truth". I observe something. Is it repeatable? Can I construct a model that predicts other things? Is it the simplest model that predicts the things I want to use?
So, how does any of that relate to the evolution of humans story?
* Did you observe it?
* Can you repeat it?
* If you constantly adjust your theory for "found" evidence rather than making *experimental* predictions and then refining, is that science, or being an O.J. Simpson defense attorney?
* It it really the simplest model to postulate unimaginably long timeframes in order to make extremely unlikely and unobservable things seem possible?
Genesis 1 was meant to be poetic rather than a scientific account of how God created the universe.
It would have saved us all a lot of trouble if the writers of Genesis had bothered to put a disclaimer to that effect at the beginning.
Time is curved. There's the whole "spacetime curvature" that general relativity is all about :) And for instance you get things like cosmic strings, which open up the possibility of "closed timelike curves" (CTCs) which would allow you to travel into the past - if such things are allowed to exist.
Also look at other solutions to GR other than the standard FRW model - Godel's metric specifically allows for CTCs and indeed the whole universe is exactly as you describe in terms of ending up eventually where and when you started.
Religion is not in conflict with Science, because Religion talks about unprovable things, whereas Science talks about provable/disprovable things. Apples and oranges, in other words.
In the thought experiment, Alice and Bob can be separated by thousands of light years. If Alice's measurement has a (measurable) effect on Bob's measurement, then it has to be in such a way that no information can be transferred - otherwise superluminal information transfer would be possible and that would lead to violations in the causality ordering principle. (The COP can be simply stated as: if event A causes event B, then in every frame of reference event A precedes event B.)
So, Bob's measurement affects Bob's outcome, and Alice's measurement affects Alice's outcome, but the assumption is that Bob's measurement cannot affect Alice's outcome, the way the experiment is carried out. Does that help?
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Ok, here it goes:
I can go on, but please take 10 seconds to reply to these questions/problems with your religion and then we can talk.
But the concept of time should also exist for God, otherwise God could not have been able to tell the before and after of his creations. The concept of creation itself requires a space/time continuum.
The concept of existence requires time, as well. To put it differently, in order to be able to tell apart different states and thus validate the concept of existence, time is required.
To explain it even further: you can not tell if something exists, unless it has more than one state, and a way to go from one state to another. So the concept of existence requires more than one state, and therefore the concept of time (since one state must come before the other state).
There are 3 probable approaches to the problem:
1) the laws of God's universe were created by another God. This is not possible because it leads to infinite God recursion.
2) the laws of God's universe were created by God himself. This is not possible as well, because God would not have needed to create restrictions on himself.
3) the God's universe has no laws. But if such was the case, then God's universe would not have been able to function. Again, not possible.
So, you see, the concept of God is problematic from all sides.
The roots of science are in ancient Greece, and ancient Greeks were not religious types. They may had the 12 gods of Olympus, but their religion was more for festivities, celebrations and story telling than worshiping.
Then, for 1500 years, Christians hold science and logical thinking down, because science could be used to prove their lies.
thesis - antithesis - synthesis: the porn in the browser history and his girl friend are in fact the same thing.
Tags != Comments, and -1 (Troll) != -1 (I Would Respond Angrily To This Poster So They Must Be Trolling)
What if I had a time machine and when into the past and saw Jesus rise from the dead (or not) or Mohammad rise to heaven (or not). Wouldn't that disprove certain religions?
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
Tags != Comments, and -1 (Troll) != -1 (I Would Respond Angrily To This Poster So They Must Be Trolling)
Not too hard to defeat evil if you're omnipotent. Especially since he created it in the first place, right?
So... when do the effects of evil being defeated kick in?
Heh - somehow I cant shake this image of that Virgin Atlantic guy carrying Stephen in his arms, with Stephen's arms around his neck.
No idea where Hawkins got his ideas from but this is not only old hat: The hat was eaten by a large gerbil some time ago and we're all wearing the t-shirts.
Check http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Dspart for a full discussion on the topic, a peer-reviewed proof and discussion of the consequences.
Love,
0. The large gerbil
2^0.=0.
Not to poke fun in any way, but how can you call buying into someone else's philosophy anything else but nutty? I mean actually believing in the 'official' God, Heaven and Hell, that kind of crap. What I as a non-believer can't fathom is how some of those people can even be as clear as you are on interpreting the bible, and yet still choose it above all else as a guideline for life - they really do *choose* to believe.
:-)
You sound like one of those people, but if I've misjudged you believe me I meant nothing by it. I mean, I don't believe in democracy or economics, let alone religion. I do believe in science, insofar as it is the basis for me sending you this message. The benefits of buying into the other three have yet to be established IMO.
As I see it, you either have the ability to look at it objectively and move on or you have in some way been sucked in. Like any human expression you can experience the bible and take away your own 'revelations', and that's all the bible is, a human expression. It may truly be the second translation of the 'word of God', but even based on that you can't trust it any more than Oprah's book-of-the-week - until you 'believe' in something, one person's opinion on how to live life is as valid as any other's.
What you get from reading the bible will be different for everyone - for me it was a less than pleasant experience. What I don't get is the leap between "Oh yeah, the story of Jobe (sp?) really enlightened me.", and deciding you're going to stop looking for answers elsewhere. So you join a group of people that have decided this particular piece of very old literature is a good enough guideline for life that it supersedes all else. Then these people further sway your thinking through agreeing to interpret things a certain way, depending on your particular church or sect.
I just feel that a philosophy on life is something you can only arrive at by yourself. The scary part to me is that people tell their kids this stuff before they're old enough to take it in any sort of context.
Anyway, you'll probably think I'm Christan bashing, but if not I'd like to hear your response.
It's OK Bender, there's no such thing as 2.
Godel would disagree with you. And if I have to choose between one of the great minds of the 20th century and an AC on slashdot - I'm going with with Godel on this one.
Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
"If it is ever found that the speed of light is anything other than infinite then it may be said that I know nothing in matters of philosophy".
I think thats just about a done deal nowadays, no? He was definitely one helluva computer expert, like when he says that addition is to be preferred to multiplication as being the simpler operation to perform.
i prefer Stephen's work in hip hop"
"E" stands for energy, yo that's me,
I'm a brilliant scientist and a dope MC.
Before you step to me I'd think twice G,
I'm the Lord of Chaos, King of Entropy.
You down with it? I motherfvckin' hope so,
'cause if you're not, I got a motherfvckin' rope yo!
I'll string you up, from a big-ass tree,
with a sign round your neck that says, "Wack MC".
There ain't another motherfucker hard like me,
I'm a universal constant, I'm a singularity.
Got Doomsday at my back with fat-ass tracks,
he pumps funk in the cracks and cuts wax with an axe.
So listen up bitch, 'cause there may be a test,
my style is smooth, but it's hard to digest.
My science is tight, rhymes faster than light,
like a ton of TNT I'm about to ignite.
Chorus:
E=mc,
E=mc Hawking!
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
I would also add Einstein to that illustrious list.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Wow!
I'm so glad you went to seminary. I know you fully understand the theory of "progressive revelation," which states that whereas God does not change, humanity's understanding of him does. Any, decent, theologian would freely admit that the Bible is a running progression of the changing view of humankind towards God. Do not confuse the fundamentalist with the truly educated religious. Any mature, learned, professor of theology would admit, firstly, to the changing nature of understanding -- that's our understanding.
"The Bible contains all sorts of statements that we now know to be false...."
Yes, mod that up.
Please cite these false statements.
Allow me to help (since I'm pretty sure you had none as you gave none):
1. The differing versions of Paul's conversion story on the road to Damascus.
2. The abrubt ending of "Amen" at the end of 1st John to cover added in the first millinium, probably, to help cover the awkward, "idols" addition.
3. The double-Goliaths in Samuel, seemingly placing the giant -- who should be dead -- in two different places.
4. The differing versions of the demoniac in the Gospels (only one in one instance, and two in another).
5. The missing article in the Gospel of John in "and the word was God." This can be interpretted, "a God" and is responsible for massive convulsions in Christianity over the past 2000 years.
All of these have explanations of course, but I like the explanation that, much as we ourselves are and the rest of the world, scripture is, "perfectly flawed."
Lewis points out the "en de nux" of the Gospel where the writer makes the comment, as he's describing the events, that, "and it was night." Lewis points out, being a professor of ancient myth, that the writer is doing one of two things, and only one of two things are possible here:
1. He was writing modern fiction some 2000 years ahead of its time or:
2. He was writing the truth.
You see, the very fact that scripture contains so many errors points to its authenticity -- it was written by people. The fact that the author of the Gospel was actually telling real events -- because ancient writers did not create modern fiction by making-up details such as that -- means that the events really happened.
Scientific statements? Is that what you mean? I honestly want to see the scriptures that details science. I am eager to see the chapter and verse that lays out the scientific method and reveals a theory or, better yet, a proven theory....
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
I didn't take anything away from Derrida that wasn't already clear from Wittgenstein or Rorty, and found some of Derrida's writing so convoluted as to be discouraging. Still, many whose ideas I've come to respect cite Derrida's influence, so I'll assume it's a matter of my Anglophone provincialism interfering with my comprehension of his writing. (This is likely the reason for my failure to grasp Heidegger, although everyone seems to think he's quite opaque.)
I must say, it's nice to have a philosophy chat on /. It's a topic often unfairly denigrated by those grounded in the physical sciences, just as such science is often unfairly denigrated by the philosophically inclined.
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Descartes seems like Russell to me: possessing a penetrating and diverse intellect that enables his legacy to continue shining in mathematics (with its more solid criteria of truth), even as his philosophical conclusions are largely viewed as intelligent and interesting mistakes. I wonder if Russell's mathematical thought will be as sustained, 400 years hence?
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Yeah, that happens when you don't get enough sleep. You start hallucinating.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Can-see-the-future vs free will:
Say you play chess against an insanely good player. He is so good, he knows with absolute certainty every move you are going to make in response to the moves he makes. Let's say this is even a supernatural ability and he has seen the whole game play out in advance. Sure, you have absolutely no control over the outcome of the game. But you certainly had free will over which pieces you chose to move at each turn.
I may twist orthodoxy to partly justify a tyrant. But I can easily make up a German philosophy to justify him entirely.
My point is that you can't prove anything by referring to Buddhist phenomenology, in the same way that you can't prove any phenomenological reports, subject as they are to the limitations of language. I used Buddhism as a one-word substitute for the perspective on conscious experience that opposes Cartesianism. To elaborate: "I exist [supposing the existence of a knower outside of existence]" possesses no more justification in language than an opposing concept such as "There is no I that exists, there is just existence [supposing this knower to be an illusory effect of this existence's nature]." Descartes' attempt to infer a self from the known only makes a statement about the usage of "exist," while Buddhist assertions of non-self only make a statement about the usage of "self." If the cogito were unassailably true, it would be in opposition to the strong conception of anatta, but the truth of either statement cannot be meaningfully asserted because language cannot claim to "represent" reality in the way Descartes imagined.
By the way:
I'm the first to admit that my understanding of precise mathematical terminology is lacking. It's a far cry to assume that I'm not familiar with the philosophy of mathematics, and basing that assumption on something with applicability as narrow as Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem is like asserting that quantum physics shows all reality is the product of conscious observation (shades of Cartesian idealism): it overreaches. Besides, I would hardly consider anything "proven" by Descartes: the whole point is that his phenomenology is unprovable. Cartesianism is interesting for the influential issues it raised, but hardly says anything profound about the intervening centuries of philosophical thought (most of which is, indeed, commentary on Cartesian idealism or Humean empiricism.)Tags != Comments, and -1 (Troll) != -1 (I Would Respond Angrily To This Poster So They Must Be Trolling)
If you are so convinced it is a lie, then Christianity cannot fall under your third category and therefore either isn't a religion, or religion does not exclusively fall under that category.
We can be fairly certain that the disciples died proclaiming the message of the New Testament and that the manuscripts we currently have accurately reflect the original gospels and letters. We can therefore be fairly certain that these people died proclaiming that Jesus rose from the dead. If he didn't, then they died for what they knew to be a lie, which would be bizarre. If he didn't, then his body was still around somewhere, yet none of the many groups with an interest in squashing Christianity were able to produce the body to silence them. It seems more likely that people couldn't produce a body because there was no body and the disciples died for what they knew to be true: that Jesus Christ rose from the dead and ascended into heaven.
I can't prove this, but it seems the most reasonable explanation.
(sic)
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
I have read Meditations: you seem, in multiple posts, to mistakenly interpret my disagreement with Cartesianism as an ignorance of its claims. Of course, something being suggested and "making sense" from our perspective is not an indicator of truth. The problem with Cartesian skepticism ("What if all my sense perceptions are the result of a demon's manipulation," to use Descartes' imagery) is that it demands a criterion of absolutely certain knowledge. It's understandable that a mathematician such as Descartes would think in such terms; unfortunately, no such criterion for reality can be expressed in language, and the question itself a product of misunderstanding the relation between language and the world.
Hence the recommendation of reading Wittgenstein (and Hume, Kant [good luck], and also most of twentieth century philosophy) to understand the reasons why few take Descartes' concerns seriously as anything other than a matter of interest in the history of philosophy. Cartesian skepticism is the Platonic idealism (with its Ideas and Forms) of its time: notable not as a statement about "the true nature of reality" or any such inexpressible concept, but for the implications discovered and contended by those who followed.
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For instance, I believe that Genesis 10 "Table of Nations" is how the Hebrews viewed themselves as fitting into the world-at-large.
I do not believe it is completely factually accurate. Elam being Semitic, for instance, when the facts of archeology tell us they were related to nobody nearby, or maybe to the Dravidians. But not descendants of Shem.
How would the Hebrews know any better? Their guess was probably as good as could be expected.
If the Bible were inerrant, I would expect the Table of Nations to parallel Cavalli-Sforza's work exactly
They already have. God gives the Holy Spirit to Christians to help them live better lives. Thanks to the resurrection they have the promise that they too will rise to be in heaven, rather than suffering the effects of having committed evil acts and go instead to hell.
God could come down and destroy everything evil at any moment. What people don't like to consider is that they themselves would be destroyed in such an act because God is holy and just and must therefore deal with us as people who have lived imperfect lives. The fact that God doesn't destroy the world right now is actually described by the Bible as an act of mercy because it is demonstrates God's restraint in giving us time to repent and be saved by him, rather than being destroyed. Allowing people to live does mean that they will continue to do evil until Jesus returns, but it does mean there is an opportunity for them to be saved, which is God's objective.
...which is already defined: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Dspart
Mssr. Hawking is way behind - even my t-shirt is more up-to-date, lol.
0.
Yes, its just a shame about all that eternal suffering for those who aren't saved. Its quite a harsh punishment for his children that get squashed by a falling piano before they repent, or die as babies, or believe in a different religion, or whatever. Couldn't he have come up with something a little more... forgiving?
When Jesus returns, does this mean that there will be no more evil? Is this because we suddenly lose our free will, or just that only the nice people will be left, and they won't be tempted to do evil, because everything will just be provided for them (removes quite a lot of temptation, IMHO).
If I believed in a God, it would not be this one, sorry.
More to the issue at hand (when was our world, or universe, created): was their world created when you decided to create it, or earlier than that, based on their understanding (even if "perfect") of the likelihood that the initial state you chose for their universe was actually preceded by earlier states (viewing their universe as an automaton, much as we view ours), especially given the likelihood that their consciousness must have arisen long (in their sense of "time") after your choice of initial state was established?
Here's a simpler example. Take the game of chess. Imagine the pieces have some semblance of consciousness of their existence, a consciousness that develops only as a given game is played, to the point where, based on their experiences, they are able to formulate theories about the rules of the game itself, and thus reason, based on what they can recall of their own history, about their own "Big Bang".
Now, we know what the "usual" starting point is for a proper game of chess. Let's assume, for purposes of this discussion, that there is no earlier state that is possible (although, in chess, technically there could be -- though pawns can't go backwards and most other pieces can't advance past them from behind, knights can, so there could be a "start minus 1" position in which a knight starts out placed in front of the row of pawns and moves to its usual starting place to create the "start" position).
And let's assume the pieces remember enough, and learn enough quickly enough, to formulate a theory that the actual starting position we typically use is their "Big Bang".
Does that mean it is necessarily the starting position?
Of course not. You could set up a chess board with the pieces in a subsequent position, even one that can not be reached from the "proper" starting position (and thus not be a proper subsequent position) -- such as one in which a pawn is on its own first row -- and, by the time the pieces were "conscious enough" to formulate their theories, they might have insufficient recollection of their own history to be sure that there was no time prior to that (atypical) starting point you chose.
So their reasoning about a "Big Bang" could still be theoretically quite legitimate, but that still would not deny the fact that you, as a deity figure vis-a-vis their world, created their "world" in a shorter period of their time than they reasonably believed.
In essence: you'd still be their deity, even if their science, based on their understanding of, and reasoning about, the world you created for them, led them to believe in fallacies.
Our universe is, according to modern science, not terribly different. It operates according to certain rules (it is essentially an automaton, composed of numerous subautomatons, whether chess pieces and squares, or quarks/strings and space), it has underlying randomness ("pieces" move at the direction of an entity unknown and unknowable to the pieces themselves -- this distinguishes chess and our universe from Conway's Game of Life, in which there is no randomness once the initial position is set), and it allows pieces some degree of interaction.
Obviously this analogy gets stretched when considering just how chess pieces would be convinced of their history, be able to learn and reason about their world, etc.
In our universe, however, scientists tell us that all our experiences, thinking, and so on is potentially solely the result of the very same automatic processes that govern what is external to "us" as individuals.
So "whatever" created our universe definitely, according to our science, would, in the chess analogy, has the power to not only set the initial pattern of the board, but the initial patterns of thought -- the degree o
Practice random senselessness and act kind of beautiful.
I believe that bit about eternity is a Woody Allen quote. Did he credit it? Pretty annoying if not...
ThosEM
Actually, it would be more accurate to say that the aether believers slowly died off, until only the "waveicle" believers were left. Not a lot of people actually changed their minds.
There are some differentiators between science and religion. But between scientists and religious people...not so much.
I should re-read that one. My only memory of that work revolves around its cutting first-person exposition of sin's nature and workings (to use an older vocabulary.)
The way I remember it, the guy in the book was not even a sinner, just an endlessly miserable dude who is unreasonably sensitive and protest to pretty much everything, from the way people behave to 1+1=2, but embraces his toothache as the "proof" of his existence (Nietzsche was fond of Dostoevsky, and also wrote about his pain that is always with him and he counts on that faithful friend to be there like his pet, or something similar).
I didn't take anything away from Derrida that wasn't already clear from Wittgenstein or Rorty,[...]
I'm not very familiar with Rorty, so I should read some of his stuff. I found some logical positivists that I read somewhat repulsive in their over-eagerness to destroy metaphysics, kind of too aggressive due to the lack of argumentation.
[...]and found some of Derrida's writing so convoluted as to be discouraging.
Perhaps it takes some time to get used to it. What I like about him is the rigor with which he dissolves the rigour of strictly logical thinking.
You should read Derrida. You can try to read it too, [...]
This line is Derridian: "You" in the previous line has no fixed meaning: it refers to two different persons, but also to a single person, and who is "you" is determined within the context. If we simplify it to state: "You should read Derrida. You should read Derrida", we have by the repeating of one sentence twice both insisted that some "you" should read Derrida but also produced two messages to two different people which might mean two different things to each of them. But surely we can close the meaning by the context? Not quite, claims Derrida, because there is no "universal context" (that would come from within metaphysics) in which every sentence or a text have determined, or fixed, meaning. He goes further: attempts to fix the meaning can be deconstructed (in this case for instance, "to fix" means to make it stable or permanent but it also means to cheat), via showing all kinds of different ways in which a certain power structure is attempting to remain in power by constructing an appropriate context (trivial examples: DRMA is good for kids, Microsoft does not mind the piracy of their software; nontrivial example: over-and-over again since Plato implied or stated superiority of the spoken word over the written word), or suppressing what they deem to be undesirable or bad behavior (like masturbation etc).
Still, many whose ideas I've come to respect cite Derrida's influence, so I'll assume it's a matter of my Anglophone provincialism interfering with my comprehension of his writing.
In the context of Anglosaxon philosophy, one classic is "Limited Inc", about Austin's speech act theory ("How to Do Things With Words"). Very amusing, fun, and with deep implications... Generally, any full-proof system has a crack through which one can get out of it: Austin wrote something like: for simplicity I will restrict myself to spoken utterances, and sure enough, Derrida asked why and deconstructed it (in contradistinction to "analyzed it", "criticized it" or "read it in a certain way", all of which can sometimes be also deconstructed). So he went on about the parasites (which are something bad, right? Dostoyevsky's character can also be labeled as a parasite within the society), how the copyright establishes the authorship (which also means the identity of the author), the connection between corporations and academia, and so on. Most of his books I read were in English and, as always, some bits would have been better appreciated when read in French but it seems that most of it gets through.
(This is likely the reason for my failure to grasp Heidegger, although everyone seems to think he's
Interesting that you'd denigrate one unfair sweeping generalization by making another.
There are quite a few (million) of us here in this country who have no trouble with that concept. We just don't make a lot of headlines because we generally aren't into making fools of ourselves.
The rest of your point is spot on, of course. I sort of expect right-wingers to push their version of Christianity as the only real kind. However its truly sad to see agnostic liberals helping them. This is the battle the "Christian" right is really fighting when they say all this patently silly stuff. They are just using you to facilitate their attempt to take over all the churches in this country.
Sometimes a scientist has to speak in ways that a layperson would understand. IMHO, a good scientist should almost always do that. Just my opinion, but translating something from what only 1% of the population can understand to something that over 50% can understand is a valuable talent.
seg fault
We can be fairly certain that the disciples died proclaiming the message of the New Testament and that the manuscripts we currently have accurately reflect the original gospels and letters. We can therefore be fairly certain that these people died proclaiming that Jesus rose from the dead. If he didn't, then they died for what they knew to be a lie, which would be bizarre. If he didn't, then his body was still around somewhere, yet none of the many groups with an interest in squashing Christianity were able to produce the body to silence them. It seems more likely that people couldn't produce a body because there was no body and the disciples died for what they knew to be true: that Jesus Christ rose from the dead and ascended into heaven.
I can't prove this, but it seems the most reasonable explanation.
Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by incompatance. Remember that the gospels were written by leading church figures at least 70 years after the death of Jesus. Just look back at accounts of events 70 years ago to see how information can be distorted through time and retelling. For instance a large number of people beleive and have written about how JFK was not assasinated by oswald. Or that the moon landings did not occur. Now imagine 300 years from now a group of historians selected only "fake" moon landing accounts to include in their definative 20th century history. The bible is the same. The new testiment was written by a biased third partys after the fact, editoralized by another biased third party to form the bible. There are numerous surviving account of Jesus that do not describe his ressurection. they only cannonized those that agreed with the dogma of the early church.
Even modern news stories are hearsay and third/second party reporting which is often wrong on the details. If you have ever been involved in a local or national news story, it's ridicoulous at how many detail they can get wrong. Drug dealer described as innocent by standards, innocent bystanders painted as gang related, or a perfectly correct statement played up to be a some farcical claim (Al gore's claim to have been instrimental in the creation of the internet is true, it was twisted to say he invesnted it and used as a mark against his character). It's ridicoulous to think that ancient religious scholars/church heads were any better at getting the details right and the bar for belief was a lot lower. Someone like uri geller claims super natural powers and performs some party tricks and today we disect his methods and expose him. If he did so back in new testiment palastine and he might either be considered a evil sorceror or a prophet.
As well, your logic would also mean you must beleive the koran is 100% true since it had a similiar situation. written by thrid parties about a holy person after his death with miraculous events attributed to him. As well as numerous third party account as the romance of the three kingdoms.
You need a more critical eye when evaluating ancient works. You cannot give a book a free pass because you assume the author beleived what he was writting.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
I've heard you buy hydrogen peroxide in your local drugstore.
That's different. 1+1 ain't empircally proven to be 2, it is *defined* to be 2. (or more precisely, given the normal definition for the symbols 1, +, = and 2 this is a true statement.
Nonsense. Scholarly opinion is that they were written before the end of the first century. Paul's letters are dated around the 60s AD and attest to the same events as the gospels. Luke, the author of the eponymous gospel was also the author of the book of Acts and was a companion of Paul, meaning that his would have been written fairly early. He also was very scholarly in researching the gospel, speaking to eye-witnesses of events, etc. Mark probably came before Luke and is traditionally assumed to have originated from Simon Peter's testimony. The gospels really aren't very divorced at all from the events they describe, especially when you compare them to other historical documents which are much more divorced, yet are accepted as accurate.
What do the eye-witnesses say? They say these events occurred. What do the eye-witnesses of the resurrection say? That it happened. The gospels don't record society's collective view of what happened; they record eye-witness accounts, so it is not a matter of myth, but rather of reliability of witnesses.
It would be very strange to take the minority view. I fact, you would expect myths to become more prevalent as time goes on, and in the case of the gospels, the apocryphal ones appear after two or centuries, claiming that Jesus didn't die or didn't rise. If you have no accounts of an event, one rooted in eye-witness accounts and recorded within a couple of decades of the event and non-eye-witness accounts from centuries alter, which would you deem more trustworthy?
There is no such thing as a neutral source. Just because they believe it happened doesn't make them liars. If you want evidence that an event happened, then rule that evidence from people who believe it happened is inadmissible, then of course you're going to conclude that it didn't happen. Would be a terrible way to reach a conclusion though. Given the pressure on the writers and their sources to recant what was claimed, it is obvious that they believed what was written and given that they were in a position to whether or not it happened, they were either deluded in their hundreds, or were correct and true.
The canon was formerly ratified relatively late, but was already in broad use for a long time and the gospels themselves weren't seriously doubted. Certainly no-one doubted the doctrine of the resurrection.
Such as? If you're talking about the gospels of Thomas or Mary, they are from centuries later and are massively unreliable. Do you have any sources from the first century saying that Christians did not believe in the resurrection or that anyone had disproved it? If not, then you're working form sources that are much less reliable than the gospels.
They canonised the ones accepted as reliable by the church. Quite a sensible, scholarly thing to do.
The babies thing is a contentious issue and there is some debate about whether they are actually saved or not. As far as the rest go, the punishment is in proportion to the crime which is failing to give glory to God. The crime in this case is in proportion to how much God deserves glory. As an infinitely glorious being, it is infinitely sinful to fail to give him glory and therefore deserving of a terrible punishment. In fact, it demands such a punishment from an infinitely holy God.
What could be more forgiving than punishing his own innocent son in our place? He can't simply pretend there was no crime. That wouldn't be forgiving - it would be unjust. If a crime is committed than a holy, just, good God must punish it. You cannot demand that God deal with evil, then expect him to overlook for any you may have been responsible for.
Yes.
No; it is because Christians are transformed to be more like Christ and develop the same will as him. People won't want to sin and will see that a life lived for God is more glorious and more rewarding and more pleasurable than a life lived against him.
Christians aren't defined as 'nice people,' and aren't saved on the basis of being nice. Christians are those who have repented and been forgiven. 'Niceness' is a product of being saved, not a cause of it. In a sense that means that only nice people will be left, but it is no way a reflection on people prior to salvation. There are plenty of people who are 'nice' without being Christians and plenty of Christians who have lived lives that aren't 'nice.' But everyone has failed to give glory to God, so everyone needs saved and only the saved can be made 'nice' enough for God's standards.
You chose to believe in God depending on how much you like him? That's interesting because Christians are frequently criticised for believing what they want, rather than believing on the basis of evidence. I believe in the Christian God based on evidence and would you ask you to reconsider and make your decision based on evidence rather than emotion.
not because they were making excuses but because that was what they saw as the natural interpretation of the text
Just to clarify my previous post on this, I don't see most interpretations as 'excuses' anyway. What I tried to point out is that the meaning of the book does not depend on it being litteraly true, and that the fact that it is not shouldn't be of much concern. That said, there is also little point in denying it, and those who do usually end up looking like fanatics.
At any rate, how well a story communicates an idea seldom depends on the story being litteraly true, rather it depends a lot more on how well the story communicates the idea to its intended audience. If for example the creation story in the Bible is to say that the actual creation of the universe took an insignificant amount of time compared to the lifetime of it till now, then it does a good job I guess.
Ah yeah, and that was an interesting point of view you refered to.
I can think of one possibility that was left out, God exists without cause, created the universe and chooses to interact within its laws most of the time but occassionally does things the way He wants anyway, disregarding the rules He established, thus miracles.
The problem you describe isn't a problem with God exactly, it is a problem with causality. People believe that there must be a cause for every action. Turtles all the way down and so forth.
The attraction of a belief in a primary creator is that it steps outside of the cause/effect relationship. If there is a God who is not an effect, but exists simply as a permanant entity, then that makes it possible for there to be a primary cause. If not, then there needs to be a cause for God or a cause for the existance of the universe. The universe seems bent on this cause/effect pattern in those things we can observe so we tend to believe that either the universe exists outside of a primary cause or God exists outside of a primary cause. Since we observe cause and effect with all things related to the universe, we tend to believe that there must be a cause for it. Since we don't have an observable God to test, it is easier to believe that there is something that we cannot understand about God than something we can observe, the universe.
Of course if we can accept that either the universe or God exists without a primary cause then all these issues go away and we get to replace them with a whole new set. If we have to accept something is a primary cause and doesn't have a cause itself then we are right back to the faith question, God or the universe without a primary cause. The universe needs a cause because it is inflexible in how it can exist, but God has the advantage because we ascribe the ability to exist without a cause to God.
Don't care for that? Well then, we have to decide that physics is insufficient to describe itself which also means that the arguments against God (from scientific points of view) don't apply by the same logic.
Turtles all the way down. Personally I find that a belief and interaction with God do me more good personally than a belief that the universe exists without primary cause. I guess its a practicality thing.
B) Eliminate all the stupid users. This is frowned upon by society.
You know, it's a universe, about nothing! Nothing? That's right, Nothing! For example, what did you do today? Created a black hole. See, that's an episode...
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1 apple + 1 apple = 2 apples is math just as much as 1 + 1 = 2 is.
Empirically, you can never be sure, so it's not proven. Even if you 1000 times take one apple, and then another, and find you now have 2, how can you *know* this will happen the 1001th time ?
You can't. Math can tell you it will, but then you lack proof that the math is applicable to the apples.
This is philosophical anyway, as I said, for all *practical* purposes, there are lots of statements that are "proved" to be true. I feel pretty confident in claiming that we have proof that australia exists, evenothugh none of this proof is 100% irrefutable.
No. What he's described is religion. Or, what religious people try to pretend isn't religion, but nevertheless is.
Think of this phrase: "[A particular idea] is not inconsistent with my faith".
This is supposed to be a conciliatory phrase uttered by the religious to convince the non-religious that their faith, in that instance, will not interfere with science. How very nice of them. But what happens when it does become inconsistent with that persons faith? Which changes first? That persons faith, or that persons neutrality towards science?
What you're describing as "fundamental Christianity" is merely that part of one religion which is currently at odds with the rest of society, and disagrees with more science that other religious people.
The ways of gods are mysteriously indistinguishable from chance.