Stenger\'s Cosmology refuted (Introduction)

by romansh , Sunday, March 23, 2014, 17:16 (3898 days ago) @ dhw

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. 
I will let George speak to what he believes and does not believe.-> This, of course, would mean that nothing preceded the universe (no "before") and that everything sprang from nothing. 
There is some evidence pointing to if we add up the energy in the universe then the whole lot comes to about zero. So nothing sprang from nothing ... if this observation is correct.-Secondly it does not just mean time did not precede this universe, but that anything preceding this universe is an incoherent concept. This of course does not mean we cannot model bounces and multiverses and no doubt other weird and wonderful concepts.
> 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. 
We can only go by what data we have and the evidence that corroborates our models. The problem is our models also predict strange things ... at the moment we don't have the acumen to test these.-We have models that do give us mechanisms for how the universe came from nothing. So I don't really understand how you can say this dhw.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Universe_from_Nothing
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ImvlS8PLIo
The problem with models that give us mechanisms for reality is that they just generate more questions at a deeper level.-
> 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.
The speculation that there is a before can be result from a deep misunderstanding of the models we have. -Ultimately we can't know, but we can eliminate nonsense.