Cosmology: Latest theories of everything (Introduction)

by John Kalber, Tuesday, August 08, 2017, 01:08 (2452 days ago) @ dhw

Sadly, I tend to lose track of which post is which. Used to have a memory like a steel trap, but at 86 it just isn't so. I have saved my answers but can't find the questions! I like to write in Word where I can usually save stuff OK. When I punt around, the question (it seems to me!) has become lost somewhere in the fantastic threads you manage!
I am very keen to continue using your site and it is important (to me) that I maintain the highest ethics in correspondence. Just saying this so you know why sometimes your points may seem to have passed unregarded.
I have few, if any inhibitions, having served as a uniform PC at Bow Street, Greys Inn Road and West End Central until my promotion to Sergeant in 1959. I then spent 7 action filled years at the long closed Commercial Street station (Brick Lane, Jack the Ripper and the insane Kray twins - plus a whole lot more violence, scumbags etc. Thousands of busy bustling people with pickpockets abounding in Petticoat Lane and Spitalfields market - I think they are all gone now. That is enough about me at this point anyway.
Coming to your points: I don’t see why you can’t have both (no magic involved) since they are perfectly reconcilable. Forgive me, but your views on what a possible God may have done, or known in advance, is hardly an answer.
A theist may have both, but an atheist cannot. Here I must say that my comment is being mangled a bit. My remark was just about as hypothetical as my atheism can get in trying to give some sympathetic understanding of a sensible religious belief. Were I to embrace religion at some point that would quite probably reflect my then belief.
Perfection is ‘perfect’ regardless of its origin. The baseless imagining of criteria for ‘perfect Universes’ is, frankly, very silly. This sort of ‘diversionary’ suggestion should live only in science fiction. Nothing ‘wrong’ with enjoying impossible tales but they have no place in a reasoned discussion.
Our Universe must, unavoidably, be accepted as perfect because there is no possible way we can genuinely and honestly, even in imagination, envisage an alternative – we have absolutely no ‘criteria’ for this whatsoever. You can talk until the cows come home but that is the ‘everything’ of what you can do! If you think I am closing the door on that issue, you are 100% right!
You, of course, may open any door you choose, but I see no prospect that I would follow.
“ And yet you believe that living beings can be produced by an impersonal and unconscious force which works automatically”.
Of course I do! The only force known in absolutely any form of creation are the acts of what I, rather lovingly, denote as Mother Nature. Whilst I am open to consideration of future possible discoveries, they will not be found by illogical imagination.
Until some properly evidenced discovery is made logic suggests that Mother Nature does it alone and unaided by any other than the known laws of our rather marvellous Universe.
The ‘rules’ operating our Universe are simply the intrinsic effects of a complex but complete unity. The presence of an author is neither needed nor possible. We get hooked up on a fantasy treading that path.
There are indeed no ‘rules’ as such. The ‘rules’ we speak of are purely human descriptive inventions, explaining how things work in terms we can understand and use to accomplish what we may wish to do – nothing more.
You have admitted that “there is nothing that we know of that can explain how life came about”, and I have pointed out that despite our own conscious intellect, we still cannot create a living being from scratch.
Thank you for pointing this out. This was a mistake in presentation. Our present abilities reflect the level of our present society. That has so very little to do with our potential capabilities.
Yesterday only birds could fly – need I say more?
You decry faith, cracking on that it bespeaks an irrationality. In some cases that is so, but I declare that if it is entirely dependent on already established fact, it is a totally rational premise and - this type of faith - is often rewarded with (sometimes) irrefutable proof thus demonstrating that particular faith as having been rational in the first place!
A last point: the Big Bang, contrary to your suggestion, is – consciously or unconsciously – a product of the religious tendency imbued into the Royal Society by Sir Isaac Newton during his 20 years reign as President. To be more than a ‘possibility’ it requires the intervention of a God’s almighty powers, overturning all known physical laws. This is reflected in the superstitious idea that there may be ‘something’ out there.
The leading scientist of his day, Sir Fred Hoyle (of Steady State theory) was blackballed because of his publically avowed atheism. Were it otherwise, he would have acceded to President of this religion dominated Society.