No, because the physical laws of the universe, as well as time itself sprang into existence at the same time. The big bang also did not "explode out of" anything, there was no space in which to explode out of. You are trying to apply a limited understanding of physics and cosmology to support a conclusion you have already arrived at.
We don't have any kind of conclusive theory of physics, especially as it relates to the conditions around the time of the big bang. You can't draw any kind of conclusions about the existence (or lack) of God from the big bang.
You know, I like the concept of personal responsibility as much as the next guy, but sometimes the problem isn't personal, it's systemic. I know, I know, free will means that anyone, in any circumstances, always has the opportunity to make the one, true, objective right choice. If they make the wrong choice, they should never blame society, or the fact that they were raped by a priest, or whatever. They should suck it up and admit they made a mistake so the rest of us don't have to feel like maybe we have to change the system in any way.
For instance, I could have chosen to be less sarcastic in this comment. I blame slashdot for encouraging this behavior.
Humans are predisposed towards cooperation, not screwing each other over. How would a species that fucks itself over evolve in the first place?
The theory I've read is that genetically we have a cooperative side and a competitive side. Most of the time, we operate in cooperative mode. When things get really tight, we switch over to competitive mode.
Around 4500BC, the Sahara and much of Asia went from being grasslands to desert. The people that had settled there faced famine on a scale never before seen, as in times past, hunter-gatherers just picked up and left when things got that bad. With the surplus and organization that agriculture gave us, we had another option for the first time: go to war.
There is no evidence of fortified towns before this. No weapons that were only for killing humans, not hunting. No mass graves. After that, you see a wave of these things in the archaeological record, spreading out from that epicenter of violence.
The problem was that you had a generation of severely Post Traumatic Stress Disordered adults raising a generation of brain damaged children. Starvation means poor myelin sheath formation over nerves, and brain damage.
What happened is that the competitive mode got locked in, long after it was no longer the most efficient strategy. Most of what we call civilization comes either from this PTSD, brain damaged culture of violence, or the reaction to it.
You can still find tribes in the rainforests of the amazon that have not been impacted by this culture of violence and competition. Look for a book called The Continuum Concept by Jean Liedloff. It talks about her time with one such tribe, and the theory of childhood development she came up with. The kids in this tribe never act out, never rebel, and are completely loving and non-competitive towards each other.
Nice counter example. I was, uh, stating my position more forcefully than necessary in order to elicit more interesting responses. Yeah, that's it. Not trolling. Nope, no, huh-uh.
I agree, patents are in general a good idea. But we need serious reform. Patent portfolios are used as a weapon to stifle innovation and dominate markets. Patents are granted for ridiculously obvious "inventions." The whole idea of patenting business processes and software is counter to the original concept of patents.
You are lucky your competitors aren't like certain large software companies that hold huge portfolios of patents and packs of rabid lawyers to throw at you in just such cases where your innovation might hurt them.
Can't even be bothered to read the summary, eh? The research used a video game to find out that depressed people are bad at spatial memory. It did not show that playing video games cures depression.
And thought to himself, somewhat sadly, "Why won't more people play with my balls? People used to love my balls! My balls were the best balls on the market. Now they just want to play with Bill's balls and Reggie's balls. Damn it! My balls are just sitting on the shelves collecting dust. I'm gonna get fired, and then I'm gonna have to play with my old, dusty balls all by myself."
How is this redundant? Fuckwits. Here, mod this one down too. All you are doing is wasting your own mod points, you can't touch my karma.
You just don't like the fact that I used the phrase "redistribution of wealth" and implied that the wealthy were doing the redistributing. But you don't have anything intelligent to say about it, so you use the mod-stick.
Face it, if you aren't rich, patents aren't doing shit for you, except making products more expensive. By rich, I mean making over $1,000,000 per year. You $200,000 a year folks, you aren't rich, and you never will be. So stop sucking up to them, they are screwing you as much if not more than they are screwing the poor $25,000 a year guy.
If I asked you to come in my house, and provide me feedback on how my living room looks, and you responded "that's the biggest piece of crap I've ever seen," then I would probably censure you and throw you out.
That's very rude of you. You ask someone to come over and give you their opinion for free, which you will then profit from by having a nicer house, and you kick them out because you don't like what they said?
Given our current property laws, that is certainly within your rights. It is also within my rights to stand at the edge of a property waving a large sign saying "Rude person lives here."
As always, freedom of the press only applies to those that own a press. Otherwise, you are free (for now) to go find a street corner and shout at passers by.
I get the feeling that even complaining about this issue pisses off a lot of authoritarian-types. It seems there are a number of people in the world who really, really want everyone else to stop complaining about anything that might hurt the profits of a business. We should all just lie back and think of England.
Businesses have a right to do certain things that piss us off. That does not mean that we have no right to complain about it. And the mere existence of other, larger problems in the world also does not remove our right to complain about this one.
When you give someone bread, you have less bread. When you give someone information, you still have it.
The article talks about government funded research. Why shouldn't the people who paid for it have access to it? Why should publishing companies, who often require transfer of copyright and cash payments from authors in order to publish, continue to get fat off public money?
People who think that the public is not entitled to what it pays for, while some random company that adds nothing of value is, are dumbasses. Just saying.
Let's be clear about one thing. This isn't my policy, it's not my department's policy, it's the governor's policy. I happen to think that most of our employees need Internet access, but don't need unlimited access.
On to your points. We could just refrain from giving Internet access to anyone, but there are cases where people need it and it's easier, and cheaper, to give it to everyone but restrict where they can go. We need guards because we run juvenile halls, detention centers, and such-like.
Unfiltering is an issue. For instance, I had problems installing jabber on our servers because of a blanket ban on "IM" related sites. But I had access the next day.
No, we aren't always understaffed and very busy. No, we don't actually screen for novels.
We do most things kid-related that aren't actual schools. In 1992, New Mexico consolidated a number of child and family related programs into one. The core divisions are Protective Services, which investigates child and adult abuse and protects them from further abuse; Prevention and Intervention, which provides child care support, and oversees child care centers, children's mental health agencies and placement services, and Juvenile Justice which operates the juvenile halls and related facilities.
So we are actually a fairly diverse organization. There are numerous reasons people here might need the web. I wouldn't care so much about people using it if they didn't constantly mess up their machines with malware and such. But it's not in our hands, the governor mandated that all state agencies had to use the state's central filtering solution. Perhaps that is a waste of money, but being centralized for all state agencies, it doesn't cost as much as you might think (not counting down time due to legitimate websites being blocked, and time spent unblocking them, which probably also isn't as much as you make it out to be.)
I think global warming is a real problem. I think it's probably caused by humans.
The problem? I also think Al Gore is a pompous ass and his movie was the most boring piece of shit I've ever seen. By the end, I was rooting for global warming, on the theory that it might kill Al Gore. So, does that mean I'm crazy?
Here's an interesting theory along those lines. Synopsis: Glaciation ends, rivers stop feeding the Black Sea (which was the Black Freshwater Lake at the time), evaporation and rising sea levels put it well below sea level. Waters in the Mediterranean overflow the Bosporus. Ten cubic miles of water flow into the Black Sea per day for at least three hundred days.
So we have a huge flood, in the right part of the world, at around the right time for the ancestors of the Jewish people to remember it and write about it in the old testament. And a possible reason Deluge mythology is so universal. A waterfall two hundred times the size of Niagra Falls flooding 60,000 square miles of previously settled land might be something you'd tell your grandkids about.
Are you trying to tell me the big bang was the beginning? How do you know? There are plenty of theories where it is not. And how would not having a beginning break the second law of thermodynamics? The second law states: The total entropy of any isolated thermodynamic system tends to increase over time, approaching a maximum value.
What does isolated mean in this context? It means matter and energy may not cross the boundary of the system. So the second law only applies to systems where matter and energy do not cross the boundary. Which means the second law is not applicable to the big bang.
I'm even more confused as to how relativity would apply.
Nice. Our system is state-wide and mandated by the governor. You should have seen the hoops I had to go through to get jabber set up on our servers, as all sites related to Instant Messaging are blocked off.
We do use transparent proxying and we log all Internet usage. We don't block many sites that are even remotely useful (the jabber thing was a fluke.) being state-wide, it is fairly cost effective and we don't have to worry about it at all, except when it blocks stuff we need, which has only happened once to me and was resolved in less than a day.
In any case, we don't block Slashdot so I'm okay.;-)
Our team hasn't put any money or time into this. It is a statewide initiative mandated by the governor. And it isn't just about wasting time. If someone is watching porn and wanking off at work and a client with kids walks in, we're talking HUGE lawsuit. Heck, even if an opposite sex coworker walks in, the state is in for a lawsuit. For that matter, all it takes is a careless click on a goatse link at the wrong time and the state is facing a lawsuit. Then there is the malware issue. And the bandwidth, we're in New Mexico, you know, the home of Sandia National Labs and Los Alamos, you'd think we'd have bandwidth out the wazoo (this is a technical term, generally understood to mean OC48 or above;-) but we don't. We have over a hundred branch offices all over the state, and they all connect to our database, application, and file servers over the same pipe that carries YouTube.
First, we have limited bandwidth. People watching YouTube would seriously impact productivity. Second, the state being as it is, trying to discipline people for excessive usage would cost more than simply blocking access. Third, we deal with children. Having counselors downloading porn would look... bad. Fourth, we do not allow people to bring in novels to read during work hours, why should they be able to browse the web? Fifth, some of our employees were at one point in time our clients. They are still kids, and not very well socialized kids. They need boundaries.
Blocking access to unnecessary sites saves money by keeping our limited bandwidth free and helping to ensure that employees don't waste time.
How does the number of abuse cases we investigate per week compared to our number of employees tell you anything at all about whether we are wasting money or not? Did I mention what type of abuse cases were involved? Do you even know how we operate and what sorts of special conditions might apply to an agency such as ours?
Finally, why are you so angry? You're not that guy who has a beef against all child protection agencies everywhere because one took his kids away, are you?
I wonder, was there ever a leading official of a monastic order who was named Arthur? Seems likely, right? I wonder what Prior Art would have to say about all this...
As we have a centralized filtering solution, the cost is spread out across state departments. As far as the cost, well, this is the state. People are going to find ways to waste time with or without Internet access.;-)
We filter heavily. Not any technical sites, but games, shopping, many message boards, and sex of course. Some blocked sites can be accessed using 1/2 hour discretionary time. Not the sex sites of course, but shopping and such-like. This is mandated statewide, and not up to the individual IT departments.
I work for Child, Youth and Family Development. We oversee the foster programs, youth activities, and detention centers. Even with all the filtering, we are investigating several net abuse cases per week. We have about 2,500 employees statewide. Most of the abuse cases are from the detention center guards.
All in all, I agree with filtering in this case. This is the state, and we are browsing on your dollar. Many state employees feel no compunction ripping off the tax payer through laziness or outright theft. I'm not one of them.
What do you all think? If you had a chance to vote on a ballot initiative (assuming your state is not one of those still stuck in the stone age and actually has ballot initiatives) mandating filtering for all state employees in your state, would you vote for or against?
According to this logic, the universe does not need a creator capable of comprehending the universe it creates. A large set of less intelligent entities could create a universe without even meaning to, if they each intelligently pursue their own selfish ends.
There are many problems with the "complexity needs an intelligent designer" line of thought. First is the definition of intelligence. Intelligence isn't a thing, it is a spectrum of behavior. There is no clear line one can draw that defines intelligent behavior. Intelligence is a concept created by humans. We have seen many processes that look intelligent but where there is no actual thought going on. The homeostasis of the human body, or the planet, for instance.
Second, there is the infinite regress problem. Why would an intelligent designer not also need an intelligent designer? If the designer does not need a designer, why then must the universe need one?
Third, there is the thorny issue of free will as it relates to intent and causation and the supposed properties of a divine being. An all powerful, all knowing being would not need to act, and it would have no desires. Desire indicates an attachment to something not present. To an omniscient, omnipotent being, everything is know, and there is nothing to achieve. So, while there certainly may be an intelligent designer, it necessarily would have none of the characteristics commonly ascribed to a deity. It would just be a larger, more powerful version of us: something that is finite and limited, that has desires and takes actions based on those desires, and it does not know the outcome of those actions.
Finally, our model of causation is limited. In our modern minds, causation happens in the scope of time, in a linear fashion. But even the ancient Greeks had a more comprehensive model of causation. They had four words for cause: root cause, material cause, efficient cause, and final cause. And that is still only a model. We don't really know how causation works, how can we say that the universe requires a cause when we don't really know what that word means? As an example, who is to say that the final configuration of the universe is not also the cause of its beginning?
Slashdot Mirror
No, because the physical laws of the universe, as well as time itself sprang into existence at the same time. The big bang also did not "explode out of" anything, there was no space in which to explode out of. You are trying to apply a limited understanding of physics and cosmology to support a conclusion you have already arrived at.
We don't have any kind of conclusive theory of physics, especially as it relates to the conditions around the time of the big bang. You can't draw any kind of conclusions about the existence (or lack) of God from the big bang.
You know, I like the concept of personal responsibility as much as the next guy, but sometimes the problem isn't personal, it's systemic. I know, I know, free will means that anyone, in any circumstances, always has the opportunity to make the one, true, objective right choice. If they make the wrong choice, they should never blame society, or the fact that they were raped by a priest, or whatever. They should suck it up and admit they made a mistake so the rest of us don't have to feel like maybe we have to change the system in any way.
For instance, I could have chosen to be less sarcastic in this comment. I blame slashdot for encouraging this behavior.
Humans are predisposed towards cooperation, not screwing each other over. How would a species that fucks itself over evolve in the first place?
The theory I've read is that genetically we have a cooperative side and a competitive side. Most of the time, we operate in cooperative mode. When things get really tight, we switch over to competitive mode.
Around 4500BC, the Sahara and much of Asia went from being grasslands to desert. The people that had settled there faced famine on a scale never before seen, as in times past, hunter-gatherers just picked up and left when things got that bad. With the surplus and organization that agriculture gave us, we had another option for the first time: go to war.
There is no evidence of fortified towns before this. No weapons that were only for killing humans, not hunting. No mass graves. After that, you see a wave of these things in the archaeological record, spreading out from that epicenter of violence.
The problem was that you had a generation of severely Post Traumatic Stress Disordered adults raising a generation of brain damaged children. Starvation means poor myelin sheath formation over nerves, and brain damage.
What happened is that the competitive mode got locked in, long after it was no longer the most efficient strategy. Most of what we call civilization comes either from this PTSD, brain damaged culture of violence, or the reaction to it.
You can still find tribes in the rainforests of the amazon that have not been impacted by this culture of violence and competition. Look for a book called The Continuum Concept by Jean Liedloff. It talks about her time with one such tribe, and the theory of childhood development she came up with. The kids in this tribe never act out, never rebel, and are completely loving and non-competitive towards each other.
And what do they ask me to do? Play video games... sigh.
Nice counter example. I was, uh, stating my position more forcefully than necessary in order to elicit more interesting responses. Yeah, that's it. Not trolling. Nope, no, huh-uh.
I agree, patents are in general a good idea. But we need serious reform. Patent portfolios are used as a weapon to stifle innovation and dominate markets. Patents are granted for ridiculously obvious "inventions." The whole idea of patenting business processes and software is counter to the original concept of patents.
You are lucky your competitors aren't like certain large software companies that hold huge portfolios of patents and packs of rabid lawyers to throw at you in just such cases where your innovation might hurt them.
Can't even be bothered to read the summary, eh? The research used a video game to find out that depressed people are bad at spatial memory. It did not show that playing video games cures depression.
And thought to himself, somewhat sadly, "Why won't more people play with my balls? People used to love my balls! My balls were the best balls on the market. Now they just want to play with Bill's balls and Reggie's balls. Damn it! My balls are just sitting on the shelves collecting dust. I'm gonna get fired, and then I'm gonna have to play with my old, dusty balls all by myself."
How is this redundant? Fuckwits. Here, mod this one down too. All you are doing is wasting your own mod points, you can't touch my karma.
You just don't like the fact that I used the phrase "redistribution of wealth" and implied that the wealthy were doing the redistributing. But you don't have anything intelligent to say about it, so you use the mod-stick.
Face it, if you aren't rich, patents aren't doing shit for you, except making products more expensive. By rich, I mean making over $1,000,000 per year. You $200,000 a year folks, you aren't rich, and you never will be. So stop sucking up to them, they are screwing you as much if not more than they are screwing the poor $25,000 a year guy.
They are about redistribution of wealth, from those that have less to those that have more.
If I asked you to come in my house, and provide me feedback on how my living room looks, and you responded "that's the biggest piece of crap I've ever seen," then I would probably censure you and throw you out.
That's very rude of you. You ask someone to come over and give you their opinion for free, which you will then profit from by having a nicer house, and you kick them out because you don't like what they said?
Given our current property laws, that is certainly within your rights. It is also within my rights to stand at the edge of a property waving a large sign saying "Rude person lives here."
As always, freedom of the press only applies to those that own a press. Otherwise, you are free (for now) to go find a street corner and shout at passers by.
I get the feeling that even complaining about this issue pisses off a lot of authoritarian-types. It seems there are a number of people in the world who really, really want everyone else to stop complaining about anything that might hurt the profits of a business. We should all just lie back and think of England.
Businesses have a right to do certain things that piss us off. That does not mean that we have no right to complain about it. And the mere existence of other, larger problems in the world also does not remove our right to complain about this one.
When you give someone bread, you have less bread. When you give someone information, you still have it.
The article talks about government funded research. Why shouldn't the people who paid for it have access to it? Why should publishing companies, who often require transfer of copyright and cash payments from authors in order to publish, continue to get fat off public money?
People who think that the public is not entitled to what it pays for, while some random company that adds nothing of value is, are dumbasses. Just saying.
Let's be clear about one thing. This isn't my policy, it's not my department's policy, it's the governor's policy. I happen to think that most of our employees need Internet access, but don't need unlimited access.
On to your points. We could just refrain from giving Internet access to anyone, but there are cases where people need it and it's easier, and cheaper, to give it to everyone but restrict where they can go. We need guards because we run juvenile halls, detention centers, and such-like.
Unfiltering is an issue. For instance, I had problems installing jabber on our servers because of a blanket ban on "IM" related sites. But I had access the next day.
No, we aren't always understaffed and very busy. No, we don't actually screen for novels.
We do most things kid-related that aren't actual schools. In 1992, New Mexico consolidated a number of child and family related programs into one. The core divisions are Protective Services, which investigates child and adult abuse and protects them from further abuse; Prevention and Intervention, which provides child care support, and oversees child care centers, children's mental health agencies and placement services, and Juvenile Justice which operates the juvenile halls and related facilities.
So we are actually a fairly diverse organization. There are numerous reasons people here might need the web. I wouldn't care so much about people using it if they didn't constantly mess up their machines with malware and such. But it's not in our hands, the governor mandated that all state agencies had to use the state's central filtering solution. Perhaps that is a waste of money, but being centralized for all state agencies, it doesn't cost as much as you might think (not counting down time due to legitimate websites being blocked, and time spent unblocking them, which probably also isn't as much as you make it out to be.)
I think global warming is a real problem. I think it's probably caused by humans.
The problem? I also think Al Gore is a pompous ass and his movie was the most boring piece of shit I've ever seen. By the end, I was rooting for global warming, on the theory that it might kill Al Gore. So, does that mean I'm crazy?
Here's an interesting theory along those lines. Synopsis: Glaciation ends, rivers stop feeding the Black Sea (which was the Black Freshwater Lake at the time), evaporation and rising sea levels put it well below sea level. Waters in the Mediterranean overflow the Bosporus. Ten cubic miles of water flow into the Black Sea per day for at least three hundred days.
So we have a huge flood, in the right part of the world, at around the right time for the ancestors of the Jewish people to remember it and write about it in the old testament. And a possible reason Deluge mythology is so universal. A waterfall two hundred times the size of Niagra Falls flooding 60,000 square miles of previously settled land might be something you'd tell your grandkids about.
Well, I don't set the policy, but if I had to guess I'd say it's because web filtering is cheaper and easier than strip searching people.
Are you trying to tell me the big bang was the beginning? How do you know? There are plenty of theories where it is not. And how would not having a beginning break the second law of thermodynamics? The second law states: The total entropy of any isolated thermodynamic system tends to increase over time, approaching a maximum value.
What does isolated mean in this context? It means matter and energy may not cross the boundary of the system. So the second law only applies to systems where matter and energy do not cross the boundary. Which means the second law is not applicable to the big bang.
I'm even more confused as to how relativity would apply.
Nice. Our system is state-wide and mandated by the governor. You should have seen the hoops I had to go through to get jabber set up on our servers, as all sites related to Instant Messaging are blocked off.
;-)
We do use transparent proxying and we log all Internet usage. We don't block many sites that are even remotely useful (the jabber thing was a fluke.) being state-wide, it is fairly cost effective and we don't have to worry about it at all, except when it blocks stuff we need, which has only happened once to me and was resolved in less than a day.
In any case, we don't block Slashdot so I'm okay.
It's a kind of work/study program for unemployable kids. What do you suggest as an alternative?
Our team hasn't put any money or time into this. It is a statewide initiative mandated by the governor. And it isn't just about wasting time. If someone is watching porn and wanking off at work and a client with kids walks in, we're talking HUGE lawsuit. Heck, even if an opposite sex coworker walks in, the state is in for a lawsuit. For that matter, all it takes is a careless click on a goatse link at the wrong time and the state is facing a lawsuit. Then there is the malware issue. And the bandwidth, we're in New Mexico, you know, the home of Sandia National Labs and Los Alamos, you'd think we'd have bandwidth out the wazoo (this is a technical term, generally understood to mean OC48 or above ;-) but we don't. We have over a hundred branch offices all over the state, and they all connect to our database, application, and file servers over the same pipe that carries YouTube.
First, we have limited bandwidth. People watching YouTube would seriously impact productivity. Second, the state being as it is, trying to discipline people for excessive usage would cost more than simply blocking access. Third, we deal with children. Having counselors downloading porn would look... bad. Fourth, we do not allow people to bring in novels to read during work hours, why should they be able to browse the web? Fifth, some of our employees were at one point in time our clients. They are still kids, and not very well socialized kids. They need boundaries.
Blocking access to unnecessary sites saves money by keeping our limited bandwidth free and helping to ensure that employees don't waste time.
How does the number of abuse cases we investigate per week compared to our number of employees tell you anything at all about whether we are wasting money or not? Did I mention what type of abuse cases were involved? Do you even know how we operate and what sorts of special conditions might apply to an agency such as ours?
Finally, why are you so angry? You're not that guy who has a beef against all child protection agencies everywhere because one took his kids away, are you?
I wonder, was there ever a leading official of a monastic order who was named Arthur? Seems likely, right? I wonder what Prior Art would have to say about all this...
As we have a centralized filtering solution, the cost is spread out across state departments. As far as the cost, well, this is the state. People are going to find ways to waste time with or without Internet access. ;-)
We filter heavily. Not any technical sites, but games, shopping, many message boards, and sex of course. Some blocked sites can be accessed using 1/2 hour discretionary time. Not the sex sites of course, but shopping and such-like. This is mandated statewide, and not up to the individual IT departments.
I work for Child, Youth and Family Development. We oversee the foster programs, youth activities, and detention centers. Even with all the filtering, we are investigating several net abuse cases per week. We have about 2,500 employees statewide. Most of the abuse cases are from the detention center guards.
All in all, I agree with filtering in this case. This is the state, and we are browsing on your dollar. Many state employees feel no compunction ripping off the tax payer through laziness or outright theft. I'm not one of them.
What do you all think? If you had a chance to vote on a ballot initiative (assuming your state is not one of those still stuck in the stone age and actually has ballot initiatives) mandating filtering for all state employees in your state, would you vote for or against?
The right to have the corporation sued for the speech instead of the individual making the speech.
According to this logic, the universe does not need a creator capable of comprehending the universe it creates. A large set of less intelligent entities could create a universe without even meaning to, if they each intelligently pursue their own selfish ends.
There are many problems with the "complexity needs an intelligent designer" line of thought. First is the definition of intelligence. Intelligence isn't a thing, it is a spectrum of behavior. There is no clear line one can draw that defines intelligent behavior. Intelligence is a concept created by humans. We have seen many processes that look intelligent but where there is no actual thought going on. The homeostasis of the human body, or the planet, for instance.
Second, there is the infinite regress problem. Why would an intelligent designer not also need an intelligent designer? If the designer does not need a designer, why then must the universe need one?
Third, there is the thorny issue of free will as it relates to intent and causation and the supposed properties of a divine being. An all powerful, all knowing being would not need to act, and it would have no desires. Desire indicates an attachment to something not present. To an omniscient, omnipotent being, everything is know, and there is nothing to achieve. So, while there certainly may be an intelligent designer, it necessarily would have none of the characteristics commonly ascribed to a deity. It would just be a larger, more powerful version of us: something that is finite and limited, that has desires and takes actions based on those desires, and it does not know the outcome of those actions.
Finally, our model of causation is limited. In our modern minds, causation happens in the scope of time, in a linear fashion. But even the ancient Greeks had a more comprehensive model of causation. They had four words for cause: root cause, material cause, efficient cause, and final cause. And that is still only a model. We don't really know how causation works, how can we say that the universe requires a cause when we don't really know what that word means? As an example, who is to say that the final configuration of the universe is not also the cause of its beginning?