Stenger\'s Cosmology refuted (Introduction)

by dhw, Saturday, March 22, 2014, 16:40 (3899 days ago) @ George Jelliss

Dhw: You will both, I hope, forgive me for my ignorance, but the issue is indeed what came before our own particular time and space. 

GEORGE: "Our own particular time and space" is the only time and space known to exist. Cosmology is about investigating the evidence for the beginning of everything. If time has an origin then there can be no "before", no "past".
-"If" does not make a theory into a fact. Cosmology cannot investigate the evidence for the beginning of everything without making the absurd assumption that everything sprang from nothing. If it did not spring from nothing, we must accept that there was something BEFORE the beginning of our universe, and so our universe cannot have been the beginning of everything, and the sequence of past to present to future (my preferred definition of time) must have existed. But of course we have no means of finding out what that something was. Scientists and philosophers may writhe and wriggle as much as they like in trying to define a nothing as a something which is also a nothing, but this hardly constitutes evidence, let alone what you go on to refer to as "facts".
 
dhw: If, as David and I have agreed, energy is the source of everything, how do you know that energy has not been producing matter for ever and ever, with our own universe just one "event" in an endless sequence of "events"? 

GEORGE: I would say that without time and space mass and energy cannot exist. They only come into existence when the symmetries are broken. 
Of course you can have any sort of fantasies you like about there having been other universes and other times and spaces. This is only natural for a writer of fanciful fiction. We on the other hand are going by the facts we know.
-Your own fantasy is no less fanciful than any other. The "fact we know" (or think we know) is that our universe had a beginning. What brought about that beginning is the subject of endless speculation, and your hypothesis that there was no "before" might ... in my view ... be better phrased as 'we have no way of knowing what, if anything, was before'. However, unlike myself, you appear to believe in your fantasy of everything from nothing, since you argue that our universe was the "beginning of everything", including time, and you extrapolate conclusions from it which you seem to think are also factual ("there can be no before"). The irony here, in the light of your differences with David, is that the hypothesis of countless past universes seems to me to offer more support than a one-off universe to the idea that eventually chance could come up with the right combination for life.