Physics and the universe - A universe without cause

The creation of the universe.

When discussing with religious people, the discussion often steers into evolution and whether or not it's real. This in turn leads to the discussion regarding the beginning of the universe, since many religious people can't tell the difference between the fact of evolution and the theory of the big bang. I'm going to talk about the beginning of the universe and leave out the evolution, mainly because I'm interested in the quantum mechanic part of the big bang theory.

Whether or not you're religious you've probably talked about the beginning of the universe if you've ever discussed religion. I've experienced one particular argument among many religious people, namely “The big bang theory is stupid because something can't come into existence from nothing”. While that sounds rational to most people, the opposite has actually been proven. In the world of quantum small particles are very unpredictable, meaning they may exist at point A and suddenly exist at point B instead. They come and go out of existence.
Apply this principle to the big bang theory; since the universe was smaller than a proton, the laws of quantum mechanics applies which means that the universe can and most likely has just popped into existence.

The existence of time and space.

So, what caused the big bang? As some of you may know, space and time are woven together; together they're called space time. The bigger the distortion in space time caused by an object, the slower the time goes.


(Excuse my drawing skills).

As you can see, the black hole (which is extremely dense) distorts the space time far more than the earth; causing time to slow down the closer you get until time itself stops. You can see differences in time here on earth aswell. The clocks on the satellites which circles around the earth actually goes faster than the time on the surface of earth, due to the fact that they're further away from the distortion.

With that said, let's travel back in time. The longer back in time we travel, the smaller the universe gets. This has also been proven due to the fact that the universe is expanding in such a way that it appears to expand from a single point. The universe at the beginning of time was an extremely small, extremely dense black hole. Which in turn means that time itself, just like modern day black holes, didn't exist. You can't get to a time before the big bang because time itself didn't exist, there was no before the big bang. There is no possibility for a creator, because there was no time for a creator to have existed.


Now, I ask you here on Fakku who are religious; how do you tackle the above text? Does your and your religion's view accept an alternative beginning where the universe could simply have popped into existence? If not, how do you explain quantum physics?
Do you believe in the big bang? If so, what caused it? Do you accept the possibility of a universe without cause?



My main source of information was the documentary Did God create the universe? with Stephen Hawking, I encourage everyone who is interested in the subject to watch the documentaries in which he's involved and read his books.
There are also a lot of good documentaries with the physicists Brian Cox.

^ this. I take my physics from Physics professors.

Are you implying that what I wrote is wrong? And since I used a documentary with Stephen Hawking as my main source of information, are you implying that Stephen Hawking isn't a professor in physics? I'm pretty sure he has a PhD.
I won't spend an hour watching something you posted without giving a proper reason; your comment was rude and you didn't comment on the actual thread. Please, get some manners or get out.

Oh dear, learn to use your enter button! Edit and split it into paragraphs, that's not readable. Once you've done that I'll read through it and reply.

Well, first of all; how did this God create the universe without time? Time itself began at the big bang, meaning time didn't exist before it. Also, religion itself is a paradox. If God created the universe, who or what created God? Since religion derives from humans, one can only assume this God was supposed to be human or human like. I doubt you agree he/it was smaller than a proton, hmm?

Second of all; the text mentions how he created light, water and the separation between water and the heaven. What about helium, methane and other elements found on other planets? We know light just doesn't come into existence without a source, there is a star. The star is processed by fusion creating huge amounts of energy, which in turn sends out photons (light). In the text, it describes God as the source of light which is false. It tells how God just created light, not how God created stars. We know how stars are born, and we know that it created elements and sent it out through the universe.

The text you quoted seems to assume that the earth is the only world in this universe, and then excludes the creation of other elements. That is a rational thought so early in history when religion was invented, but now we've discovered other planets. We know how the sun works, we have walked on the moon. We've sent robots to other, distant planets.

Religion and God is irrational and obsolete.

Edit:


I'm not sure what you're trying to say, but matter at the level of quantum can come into existence from nothing. Something related might be Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. Either way, check out the documentary I referred to.

Sorry. I actually wasn't trying to say anything negative towards you. I was actually just saying there's an hour long lecture explaining the current physicist understanding of the universe, how quantum mechanics affects what they feel is 'nothing'. Laurence Krauss is a Physics professor who writes books to help laymen understand what is understood in physics, so he addressed the whole "Universe from nothing" misconception. It's actually my favorite one to give theists who give the cosmological argument. It was more an addendum to your post than anything detracting from it.

Alright, it's no problem. It was just a misunderstanding.

It looks interesting though, I'll check it out tomorrow. Thanks!

And do you know why? Because when christianity came into existence, humans didn't know anything about the universe. You can't make things up about things that you don't know exist.

The bible may give you answers, but it doesn't give explanations. As Sagan said, "extraordinary claims requires extraordinary evidence". There are no grounds for the claims in the bible, I don't want answers and then be happy with it. I want answers and rational explanations, that's what separates religion from science.

I just remembered something, what do you think about the fact that the bible isn't absolute? What I'm trying to say is, there have been countless versions of the bible and it has changed significantly over the years it has existed. It's even made up by texts written from both known and unknown people, it's like a wiki for loose assumptions. How come a bible which is supposed to give answers can change so much? The answer for that is that humans wrote it, humans can change it at will if they feel something should be added or modified.

Edit:

The bible has been proven wrong, countless times. We've found skeletons which are older than what the Bible says to be the age of time itself. The fact that the universe is expanding, countless calculations actually proves it wrong.
The evidence against the bible are all around us.

That ties into the omnipotence of God. God is God because He existed without having to be created; only an omnipotent being could do such a thing. Thus, the being that created everything, yet was not created, is God. And the being that is God, despite having created all of the rules of nature, or physics, does not have to abide by them; that is part of His omnipotence.

That doesn't really factor into this discussion, but it's my belief that when people want to discuss religion, they should have some knowledge of theology. Philosophical arguments for and against God have been around for many centuries, and people have given a lot of explanations for why God exists and the qualities of His existence, such as the one I referenced above.

Religion is such a crazy thing; it doesn't have to play by any rules. Because God is all-powerful and can do anything, we can give any sort of reason for why things happens. That's why some people can say that dinosaur bones are there to trick us about the true age of the universe; God could make the bones look millions of years old when really they are only a couple of thousands. He's God, He can do whatever He wants, even distort the laws of nature (though He or His servants would be the only ones capable of doing so). Thus, asking a religious person to disregard this omnipotence of God is futile. God could potentially make it so that tomorrow morning, I wake up as an 8-year-old girl living in Switzerland in 1942, and I wouldn't know anything different than that life.

...If that was the case, wouldn't you expect lots of things in the Bible to be proven wrong by now? Like the whole Genesis 1

Not if science isn't out there to prove the bible wrong. Besides, the bible IS wrong on plenty of things, like, oh I don't know, the sun being made AFTER light was introduced, and night and day existing PRIOR to the sun. Genesis is scientifically inaccurrate, anyone who doesn't concede this is a religious nut.



That's the thing. Some people are satisfied with answers and others want it to be explained.

Have you seen how most math textbooks have the answers at the back?

1:You can choose copy the answers and turn in. (religion)
2:You can work while checking the back to see if you have got the right answer.(religion+science)
3:you can workout the problem and never look at the back. (science)

If the Bible gave the answers, science will never improve because everyone will be relying too on the Bible.


you disingenuous little cunt. Did you literally just fucking say that? Did you literally just say that religion is akin to having the answers in the back of a math textbook already? Here's the facts: Not a single sicnetific advancement can be made to a single holy book. Not a single holy book has EVER inspired a scientific breakthrough, or EVER shown scientific knowledge that went past th knowledge of the days when it was written. The reason the bible doesn't talk about the rest of the universe in its creation myth is because the desert goat herders who wrote it didn't KNOW abotu the rest of the universe. Stars were just flickers of light that made night time pretty to them. that's why to them it took just as much time to make all the REST of the stars as it did to make ONE star(ours). Religion doesn't provide any sound answers to anything. the only thing it does is make bold bare assed assertions about the reality of the universe that are never backed up by evidence, and are constantly re interpreted to mean something completely different when evidence in fact CONTRADICTS anythgin it says. It didn't take long for moderate christians to decide evolution was perfectly compatable with the bible, by simply making the creation myth even vaguer than it is. It didn't take long for people like Schroedinger to come up with exrapolations to say, "Sure, the universe could be 14 billion years old and it would PERFECTLY coincide with the bible's timeline" Despite the fact that NOBODY has ever discovered ANYTHING of scientific importance thanks to the bible. Not a single scientist.

Here's a challenge for you. Look through your bible and find me a scientific breakthrough that hasn't already been discovered. Try and find a profound piece of scientific knowledge inthere that we don't already know. Go ahead.

I already know you can't do it because it's impossible. The book reflected the current scientific understandings of bronze age goat herders and that's it. the last time it was tried was when a mathematician tried to figure out when the bible says the earth was formed, and he got it down to an exact date arond 6000 years back, but that wasn't good enough, because tree ring data supports the earth is at least 11,000 and even young earthers accept tree ring data as accurate, so they extended the calculation to between 10 and 6k. We've found artifacts dated at at least 34k years, and skeletons dated far older than that. The bible isn't a path to fucking truth, it doesn't provide any real answers, it's a bronze age book with bronze age beliefs and values. Fucking hell even BISHOPS will tell you glladly that anyone who tries to say the bible is scientifically accurate is a loon. Anyone who's been in seminary for more thn a year knows the bible isn't the infallible word of god, it's just a book, written by men, many men too, at least 5 OT authors and many more NT authors.

And what's this shit about the bible saying it should never be changed? Do you know that's in the ORIGINAL texts? Let me answer that for you: You don't. You know how I know? Because biblical and historical scholars acknowledge that there ARE no original texts to ANYTHING written in the bible, and we don't know who ANY of the authors are.

And to top it all off I have one last thing to say. If you really, are REALLY honest with yourself, you will EASILY see that any religion that has a creation myth, or talks about the world's attributes in any way, perfectly mesh with the scientific knowledge that was ALREADY KNOWN at the time the religion was founded, and do NOT perfectly mesh with current scientific understanding, and if you still think they do, let me introduce you to Bishop Spong and "Why Christianity Must change or Die."

Edit: @ K-1 God isn't omnipotent in the colloquial osense of being able to do ANYTHING he wants, at least no serious theologian believes this anymore. He's omnipotent in the sense of "Being able to do everything possible without being logically contradictory." Essentially, they came up with a cop out to the "Can God make a boulder so big he can't lift it?" question. Also a more easy to understand question this counters is "Can God be both red and not red?" No, because that's logically contradictory, and it's not within his omnipotence.

That's a not math textbook, that's an exercise book that facilitates rote learning of algorithms and matematical thinking for ingrates like you.

Want a real maths book? It goes like this: Axioms, Theory, Proof. Axioms are either self-evident truths or definitions on how to call various mathematical properties.

You'll be surprised how *little* maths assumes as self evident. The question of *how* is a fundamental part of truth, since without *understanding* something, you'll never grasp its true implications and nature... this is why students are taught the proofs of the various mathematical theories, since it's necessary to know *why* they're true, not just accept they are.

Your insistence that the Bible provides "answers" proves how juvenile you are. Have you actually read it?!? I'm an Atheist, but I *did* read it. It's full of inconsistencies and gives moral answers that a modern man can't help but find repugnant. Tolerating slavery, subjugating women to men, genocide... the Bible condones and endorses this at various occasions.

There's no moral justification for the literal, blind acceptance of the Bible as truth. You can't claim the Bible was written by God... it wasn't! It was written by men, even the Bible says a book was written by Moses, Mark, Matthew, Luke, John, etc. The text is full of contradictions.

...if instead regurgitating what has been hammered into your head by suggestive pastor you actually took the time to *read* and *learn* you yourself would realize that the text is not a clear instruction manual.

Looks like I wasn't the only one pissed off by that ignorant statement. I'd just like to make a factual correction here. Moses, by all historical accounts, likely never existed as he was described in the bible. And the New Testament books were not actualy written by Mark Matthew Luke and John and Peter, in fact, nobody knows WHO wrote them specifically, we do know that the Nicean Council had a lot of different stories that they decided via vote would be canonized in their bible, and many books, including books written by the Apostles were rejected in favor of these other ones surrounding Jesus' resurrection. The rejected canon became the apocryphal writings, and in my opinion, are wholly more interesting.

It is also worth nothing that the Bible was around for a long time before the printing press was created, which meant volumes had to be copied down by hand. This has been shown to produce inaccurate reproductions in scholarly books, and I doubt the Bible was resistant to that. All it takes is a copier to mess up one word, and the Bible is different from them on.

Not to mention that through translation, a lot tends to be lost and gained.

I'm very much aware of the history of the Bible. The reason I pointed out these "assumed authors" is because they're mentioned in the Bible itself, so even a devote follower of the book will need to accept the existence of human agency in the book's creation.

I appreciate the will to discuss this topic here, although I'd like you to discuss on a civilized and mature level. Calling someone else a cunt and provoking him/her is not only poor manners; but counterproductive. It makes you and me look bad, since I support science just as you do.

Either way, I do agree that the unknown's reasoning is outright stupid; and I would think that logic won't affect someone like him.




I must ask, did you really think when you wrote that? Is that what you truly believe?
I never said the bible had the correct answers, I merely said that the bible tries to provide answers without reasoning. Religion is an attempt to answer things that seemed impossible to explain; they're loose guesses based on what was then reason to them.
We've advanced beyond that stage, we now know that the bible isn't right. There are plenty of evidence against the bible and religion in general, you're just too blind to see them and accept them.



Hmm, what are you trying to say? You just said that the bible is similar to the back of a math book, yet you say that the bible doesn't have all the answers? Your contradicting yourself.