Beginning this universe (Introduction)

by dhw, Thursday, December 06, 2012, 19:31 (4371 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: I am in no position to dispute the Big Bang theory ... I depend entirely on the experts! My point is that if nothing can come from nothing, we have a possible infinity and eternity of universes (individual cosmoses) before the Big Bang, and an infinity and eternity of possible combinations to give rise to life. This vastly shortens the odds against chance, but of course I am needling you because a deliberate, consciously planned beginning of some kind is so essential to your theism!-DAVID: The 'possible infinity' phrase is the atheist's out to save chance. We can only know our universe. Conguring up all the rest is just that, an invention to avoid using only what we can know, because that leads to a strong impression of design. Straw man magic! Please let us use what we see and learn as we exist in our universe, whose space time curves back on itself so even though it is expanding there is no edge we can reach, and certainly not see through to all your magical universes and cosmoses and bubbles.-Hey, they are not MY magical universes and bubbles ... they are Leonard Susskind's. I was quoting from the website you referred us to, in which this professional physicist also says that "a beginning, if it did occur [NB, he sees it as a hypothesis], is likely to have been so far in the past that for all practical purposes the universe has been around forever." He is not talking about 13.7 billion years, and he does seem seriously to consider the possibility of other universes. Why shouldn't he? An eternal pre-Big Bang seems unlikely to have been a total vacuum (what can go bang in a total vacuum?), whether you believe in God or not. So why should I believe one physicist and not another? Until they reach a consensus, it would be absurd for me as a layman to take sides.-Indeed you yourself constantly insist that nothing can come of nothing, and you accept that there must have been something before the Big Bang. You believe it was a self-aware form of energy (= God) that has been there forever (doing what, I wonder). If we "can only know our universe" and the rest is "an invention to avoid using only what we can know", the atheist will argue we can "only know" the material universe as it is, in which case your God is "an invention to avoid using only what we can know." In other words, the theist is in exactly the same situation as the atheist. But be comforted, dear David, I've saved a place for you up here with us don't-knows!