Nothing (General)

by George Jelliss , Crewe, Monday, November 30, 2009, 17:02 (5284 days ago) @ dhw

dhw says that Stenger's claim: "Not only does the universe show no evidence for God, it looks exactly as it would be expected to look if there is no God." is silly. -There is nothing silly about this at all. In the preface to "God: The Failed Hypothesis" he writes: "The process I will follow is the scientific method of hypothesis testing. The existence of a God will be taken as a scientific hypothesis and the consequences of that hypothesis searched for in objective observations of the world around us. Various models will be assumed in which God has specific attribiutes that can be tested empirically. That is, if a God with such attributes exists, certain phenomena should be observable. Any failure to pass a specific test will be regarded as a failure of that particular model. Furthermore, if the actual observations are as expected in the absence of the specified deity, then this can be taken as an additional mark against his existence."-This seems eminently reasonable. The only problem is that religionists often postulate a God who works in mysterious ways that are supposedly beyond our comprehension. Such a God by definition cannot be tested for. It is surely very questionable whether such a concept is philosophically sound. If a God can't be tested for and has no understandable effects, can it be said to exist?-As a simple example. If there is a benevolent God howcome all the nastiness in the world? One would "expect" something very different from this hypothesis. Nothing new in this argument of course, but it is still strong.-I don't see why dhw is bothered by Stenger's arguments anyway. He's an agnostic and doesn't know if there is a God of any sort or what such a God's properties might be if it did exist, and therefore he cannot provide any testable predictions. He just hypothesises that there might be something in some hypothesis or other that soemone might come up with.-
dhw also asks: "If the Big Bang really did take place, and if the universe was created "ex nihilo", what went bang?" -The name "Big Bang" was a derogatory term given to the expansion theory by Fred Hoyle who favoured a Steady State theory. It is the universe itself, or the universe in its primordial state, that went Bang. Because of Guth's inflation theory the Bang is now thought to have been even bigger than was thought in Hoyle's day. The rapidity of the inflation explains a lot of the uniformity.-DT raises the related idea: "Beyond our expanding space is what I conceive of as absolute void. Nothing, into which this universe is expanding."-The human mind, and indeed I should imagine any alien mind, has difficulty thinking about the universe (which is everything there is) without envisioning it as being within something else, a larger universe, even if that larger universe consists of "nothing". But the whole point of the expansion theory is that the universe isn't "expanding into" anything, it is just expanding in the sense that the distances between the galaxies are increasing. Distance, i.e. space, only exists within the universe. -If we allow the concept of a "nothing" that exists outside the universe, it would not have the properties of space, i.e. it would not be possible to measure distances within it, since it would then be a real space of some sort and not a "nothing". But this type of philosophically absolute nothing is not really a useful concept, it just leads to paradox.

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GPJ