Current science; fraudulent thinking (Introduction)

by dhw, Sunday, May 24, 2015, 17:44 (3470 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: Of course time as we know it exists in this universe. But you insist that time itself began with this universe, while you simultaneously insist that something preceded this universe. (The contradiction is not resolved by juggling with the word “timeless”, which can mean independent of time or unaffected by time.) If the universe came from something, that something must have existed BEFORE the universe, and my concept of time is a movement from before to now to after. What is your concept of time?-DAVID: We are back to the same discussion as before. I believe in an uncaused first cause. The time we experience is in this universe. We have not and probably cannot imagine 'before' this universe. But if there is a first cause there is a 'before'. We experience time in this universe as a series of sequential events.-I know the time WE experience is in this universe, and we experience it as sequential events (cause and effect). You are convinced that first cause energy planned this universe and caused it to happen. In your scenario no-one can possibly know what plans and series of sequential events your uncaused first cause might have got up to in the eternal “before”, and so nobody can state as you do that time did not exist. Only atheists with their equally irrational belief that a universe can spring ex nihilo can claim that time began with this universe. You both shoot yourselves in the foot: you because you cannot reconcile belief in a ‘before' with belief that time did not exist; they because by denying the possibility of earlier universes, they increase the odds against chance producing life.-Xxxxx-I have fallen behind in this discussion, but the exchanges between David and Tony suggest to me that David is beginning to see the flaw in his thinking: -DAVID: God had to take timing events into account, but again not in the way we think about time. -Since by your own admission we cannot know how God thinks about anything, you are in no position to claim that he has a different concept of time from our own. Therefore you have no justification for asserting that time as a sequence from past to present to future, cause and effect, did not exist before the Big Bang (if it happened).