Stenger\'s Cosmology refuted (Introduction)

by dhw, Sunday, March 23, 2014, 16:27 (3898 days ago) @ romansh

GEORGE: 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.

Romansh: First a quick comment on where dhw takes you task on (that's how it read to me) on using an if statement. I disagree with dhw, here ... it is the agnostic thing to do and we can follow the logic and consequences of where an if statement leads us. So I am not sure why dhw would even bring it up.

But the facts we know, I might have worded differently ... I probably would have written something like We on the other hand are going by the data and models we have.
-You have not joined your two dots together. I have brought it up because George's statement "If time has an origin then there can be no "before"..." is a reiteration of his repeatedly expressed belief (he will correct me if I've misunderstood him) that the beginning of our universe was the beginning of everything, including time. This, of course, would mean that nothing preceded the universe (no "before") and that everything sprang from nothing. He claims that the alternative is "fanciful fiction" and he is "going by the facts we know". We do not know that our universe constitutes "everything", and even with your more circumspect wording, we have no data or models that can explain how a universe can come out of nothing. We can only speculate, and scientific and philosophical wordsmiths can only twist themselves in knots describing how nothing can be something can be nothing. The hypothesis that there was no "before" is therefore as fanciful a fiction as the hypothesis that energy has been spewing out universes throughout eternity.