Thread Rating:
  • 0 Vote(s) - 0 Average
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5

Does modern cosmology prove the existence of God?

#1
C C Offline
https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/...ology-god/

EXCERPTS: . . . Since the late 1970s, philosophers and religious scholars — along with a few scientists who also dabble in those arenas — have asserted that we can. Known as the Kalam cosmological argument, it asserts that

• whatever begins to exist has a cause,
• the Universe began to exist,
• and therefore the Universe has a cause to its existence.

So what, then, is the cause of the Universe’s existence? The answer must be God. That’s the crux of the argument that modern cosmology proves the existence of God. But how well do the premises hold up to scientific scrutiny?

[...] Does everything that begins to exist, or comes into existence from a state of non-existence, have a cause? If you think about it rationally, it makes intuitive sense that something cannot come from nothing. After all, the idea that anything can come from nothing sounds absurd; if it could, it would completely undercut the notion of cause and effect that we so thoroughly experience in our day-to-day lives. The idea of creation ex nihilo, or from nothing, violates our very ideas of common sense.

But our day-to-day experiences are not the sum total of all that there is to the Universe. There are plenty of physical, measurable phenomena that do appear to violate these notions of cause and effect, with the most famous examples occurring in the quantum Universe.

[...] In other words, there is no cause for the phenomenon of when this atom will decay. It is as though the Universe has some sort of random, acausal nature to it that renders certain phenomena fundamentally indeterminate and unknowable.

[...] You might argue, and some do, that the Copenhagen Interpretation isn’t the only way to make sense of the Universe and that there are other interpretations of quantum mechanics that are completely deterministic. While this is true, it’s also not a compelling argument; the viable interpretations of quantum mechanics are all observationally indistinguishable from one another, meaning they all have an equal claim to validity.

[...] To assert that “whatever begins to exist must have a cause” ignores the many, many examples from our quantum reality where — to put it generously — such a statement has not been robustly established. It may be possible that this is the case, but it is anything but certain.

[...] Did the Universe begin to exist? This one is, believe it or not, even more dubious than the prior assertion. Whereas we can imagine that there is some fundamentally deterministic, non-random, cause-and-effect reality underlying what we observe as the bizarre and counterintuitive quantum world, it is very difficult to conclude that the Universe itself must have begun to exist at some point.

“But what about the Big Bang?” That’s what they all say, right? Isn’t it true that our Universe began with a hot Big Bang some 13.8 billion years ago?

Kind of. Yes, it is definitely true that we can trace the history of our Universe back to an early, hot, dense, uniform, rapidly expanding state. It is true that we call that state the hot Big Bang. But what’s not true [...] is the notion that the Big Bang is the beginning of space, time, energy, the laws of physics, and everything that we know and experience. The Big Bang wasn’t the beginning but was rather preceded by a completely different state known as cosmic inflation.

There is an overwhelming set of evidence for this [...] This represents a tremendous change to our picture of what the beginning of things looked like. Whereas a Universe filled with matter or radiation will lead back to a singularity, an inflating spacetime cannot. ... Remember, fundamentally, what it means to be an exponential in mathematics: after a certain amount of time, whatever you have will double. Then, when that same amount of time passes again, it doubles again, and so on and so on, without bound.

That same logic can be applied to the past: that same amount of time ago, whatever we had was half of what we had now. Take another, equivalent timestep backward, and it is halved once again. [...] That’s what inflation teaches us: our Universe, for as long as inflation went on, can only get smaller but can never reach a size of zero or a time that can be identified as the beginning. In the context of General Relativity and theoretical physics, we say that this means the Universe is past-timelike incomplete.

For all the successes of cosmic inflation, it does something that we can only consider unfortunate: by its nature, it wipes out any information from the Universe that existed prior to inflation. [...] Again, as before, a “Universe that came into existence from non-existence” is a possibility, but it is neither proven nor does it negate the other viable possibilities.

Therefore, the Universe has a cause, and that cause is God? By now, we have certainly established that the first two premises of the Kalam cosmological argument are, at best, unproven. If we assume that they are, nevertheless, true, does that establish that God is the cause of our Universe’s existence? That is only defensible if you define God as “that which caused the Universe to come into existence from a state of non-existence.”

Here are some examples that show why this is absurd. [...] that hardly sounds like the all-powerful, omniscient, omnipotent being that we normally envision when we talk about God. If the first two premises are true, and they have not been established or proven to be true, then all we can say is that the Universe has a cause; not that that cause is God... (MORE - missing details)
Reply
#2
Zinjanthropos Offline
Making these up....

Exploding God Hypothesis......everything that is, bit by bit, is whats left over from that event Smile . Poor God thought he knew everything but realized s/he didn't know what it was like to die, just had to find out. All the info is out there that can tell us how to put god back together. 

One universe leaked into another hypothesis....Our universal boundary or another's compromised by a weak spot allowing prominently posi-matter from another to sweep in. A lot of kabooms early but after that, this is whats left

Quantum level is a boundary hypothesis.... like it says, quantum fuzziness represents where one or more universes bump into another sharing info in the process.

Part of something else altogether hypothesis.... For all we know the universe is part of something else much bigger, perhaps even a living thing no less 

Still presents problem of how everything got started anyways.
Reply
#3
Syne Offline
(Nov 4, 2021 05:41 PM)C C Wrote: [...] Does everything that begins to exist, or comes into existence from a state of non-existence, have a cause? If you think about it rationally, it makes intuitive sense that something cannot come from nothing. After all, the idea that anything can come from nothing sounds absurd; if it could, it would completely undercut the notion of cause and effect that we so thoroughly experience in our day-to-day lives. The idea of creation ex nihilo, or from nothing, violates our very ideas of common sense.

But our day-to-day experiences are not the sum total of all that there is to the Universe. There are plenty of physical, measurable phenomena that do appear to violate these notions of cause and effect, with the most famous examples occurring in the quantum Universe.

[...] In other words, there is no cause for the phenomenon of when this atom will decay. It is as though the Universe has some sort of random, acausal nature to it that renders certain phenomena fundamentally indeterminate and unknowable.
Notice the sleight of hand they play there. Start by talking about "comes into existence from a state of non-existence" then supposedly refute it with the behavior (atomic decay) of something that obviously already exists. The premise is not that every single occurrence has a deterministic cause, or even cause and effect in general. It's that things that "begin to exist" must have a cause. So at best, this is a red herring, not a refute.

Quote:[...] Did the Universe begin to exist? This one is, believe it or not, even more dubious than the prior assertion. Whereas we can imagine that there is some fundamentally deterministic, non-random, cause-and-effect reality underlying what we observe as the bizarre and counterintuitive quantum world, it is very difficult to conclude that the Universe itself must have begun to exist at some point.

“But what about the Big Bang?” That’s what they all say, right? Isn’t it true that our Universe began with a hot Big Bang some 13.8 billion years ago?

Kind of. Yes, it is definitely true that we can trace the history of our Universe back to an early, hot, dense, uniform, rapidly expanding state. It is true that we call that state the hot Big Bang. But what’s not true [...] is the notion that the Big Bang is the beginning of space, time, energy, the laws of physics, and everything that we know and experience. The Big Bang wasn’t the beginning but was rather preceded by a completely different state known as cosmic inflation.
This is obviously equivocating between Big Bang and hot Big Bang. The Big Bang is a term for the beginning of our universe, prior to inflation. Either this author is ignorant of that or intentionally trying to mislead people.

Quote:That same logic can be applied to the past: that same amount of time ago, whatever we had was half of what we had now. Take another, equivalent timestep backward, and it is halved once again. [...] That’s what inflation teaches us: our Universe, for as long as inflation went on, can only get smaller but can never reach a size of zero or a time that can be identified as the beginning. In the context of General Relativity and theoretical physics, we say that this means the Universe is past-timelike incomplete.
This is essentially just arguing Zeno's paradox, which we all know does not keep anyone from traveling any distance, no more than it creates an actual infinity to the universe's origin. Inflation does not claim that the universe could never have been zero size (according to the originator of inflationary cosmology, Alan Guth), no more than Zeno's paradox proves you cannot move.

What they're doing here is assuming an inflating spacetime model that violates the weak energy condition.

The weak energy condition stipulates that for every timelike vector field, the matter density observed by the corresponding observers is always non-negative
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_con..._condition


A negative matter density is considered unphysical, so they're really straining credulity here.

Quote:Therefore, the Universe has a cause, and that cause is God? By now, we have certainly established that the first two premises of the Kalam cosmological argument are, at best, unproven. If we assume that they are, nevertheless, true, does that establish that God is the cause of our Universe’s existence? That is only defensible if you define God as “that which caused the Universe to come into existence from a state of non-existence.”

Here are some examples that show why this is absurd.
  • When we simulate a two-dimensional Universe on a computer, did we bring that Universe into existence, and are we, therefore, the God(s) of that Universe?
  • If the Universe’s inflationary state arose from a pre-existing state, then is the state that gave rise to inflation the God of our Universe?
  • And if there is a random quantum fluctuation that caused inflation to end and the hot Big Bang — the Universe as we know it — to begin, is that random process equivalent to God?
[...] that hardly sounds like the all-powerful, omniscient, omnipotent being that we normally envision when we talk about God. If the first two premises are true, and they have not been established or proven to be true, then all we can say is that the Universe has a cause; not that that cause is God...
  • When we simulate anything, we are doing it with existing things that had their own causes that, by extension, also cause the simulation.
  • We cannot say what cause the initial state that kicked off inflation, so trying to equate that to god is arrogant and unscientific.
  • The universe "as we know it" is an equivocation when most people understand that the Big Bang kicked off inflation. Trying to place the beginning of the universe, or god, after inflation is intellectually dishonest.


This whole article is rife with logical fallacies and no actual support for its arguments.
Reply


Possibly Related Threads…
Thread Author Replies Views Last Post
  Article Anti-modern anti-Semitism C C 1 72 Jun 18, 2023 09:16 PM
Last Post: Magical Realist
  Does the modern world know ancient Buddhism or has it simply invented a new version? C C 1 153 Nov 5, 2022 07:31 PM
Last Post: Yazata
  Process theism + The divine hiddenness argument against God's Existence C C 2 104 Jul 2, 2022 12:45 PM
Last Post: Kornee
  Belonging among the beasts & gods in Mayan cosmology C C 0 64 Oct 12, 2021 04:22 PM
Last Post: C C
  Rubenstein rethinking modern cosmology leaving no room for gods (video) C C 0 135 Jan 24, 2020 09:27 PM
Last Post: C C
  Does God have an Agenda? (nondualism) C C 0 312 Jun 9, 2018 07:45 PM
Last Post: C C
  God's emotional wealth is contingent, but the cost of our destruction to God is nil Ostronomos 1 385 Jun 4, 2018 07:00 PM
Last Post: Ostronomos
  Does it Sometimes Seem that God Doesn't Care? Science Knows Why. Yazata 1 417 Mar 15, 2018 04:06 AM
Last Post: Syne
  Zen and everyday existence Magical Realist 1 249 Feb 8, 2018 09:50 PM
Last Post: Leigha
  Easier to Prove an Evil God? Zinjanthropos 24 2,863 Nov 9, 2017 08:37 PM
Last Post: C C



Users browsing this thread: 1 Guest(s)