Re: Universes, was Re: Venus- why not a good planet to view?

Bullseye wrote:
On 17 May 2007 01:34:34 -0700, Martin Brown
<|||newspam|||@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:

On May 16, 10:17 pm, Bullseye <b...@xxxxxx> wrote:
On Wed, 16 May 2007 20:42:28 GMT, pau...@xxxxxxx (Paul Schlyter)
wrote:

>If you want to invoke some kind of creator to "explain" how the
>universe came to be, you're really replacing a hard problem - the
>origin of the universe - with an even harder problem - the origin of
>your creator. How was God created? Did SuperGod create God.

>"Explaining" the origin of the universe with God or some other creator
>does not solve the problem -- it's merely a way to stop asking and
>stop wondering.

I don't have to try to invoke any creator to explain anything. The
majority of humankind including scientists believe in a god.

A god or gods - monotheism is by no means universal and previously
polytheism was the norm. And just because most people believe
something does not make it correct. In the past most people believed
the Sun went around the Earth.

As a scientist it is not possible to say how many, N god(s) there are
because there is no convincing evidence one way or the other. Claiming
to know the correct value of N the number of gods cannot be based on
scientific reasoning.

Agnosticism is the only truly scientific position on this - we simply
do not know. And there is no credible scientific evidence one way or
the other. People will still argue for their position from a state of
perfect ignorance though.

And despite not being able to know N we can amazingly still work out
from information theory the probability of people believing in the
value of N >= 0 even in the complete abscence of any evidence.

As an obvious example I doubt there are any takers for believing in
exactly -1 gods (ie. minus one gods).

I lean
more to the kind of god that scientists believe in, that is some sort
of unknown creator or "force", as opposed to the religious kind of
gods, but that doesn't matter, I'm not putting down religions. You're
the one that has to try to invoke a godless universe, and are in the
minority. Don't you feel silly believing that the universe just came
up on by itself?

We can detect quantum fluctuations in the vacuum of our own universe
with virtual particle-antiparticle pairs springing into existence
spontansously and disappearing again quickly enough to satisfy the
uncertainty principle. That is unless one of the pair falls into a
black hole and the other escapes. Quantum fluctations in the vacuum
have even been measured in the lab - look up the Casimir effect.
Experimentally verified by Lamoreaux in 1996.

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Quantum/casimir.html

So it isn't all that much of a leap to consider the possibility of
universes to arising from fluctuations in the hypothetical N-
dimensional hyperspace vacuum that current TOEs favour. The challenge
will be to find measurable predictions of the competing models that
can be verified observationally. If there is a God he may well be
relegated to choosing the handful of fundamental constants that
determine how the universe(s) will behave.

And there are already multiverse theories around that allow for a
hierarcy of fractal universes nested like Russian dolls that would
evade this problem completely by spanning the entire parameter space.

A god that created a god, that's interesting, but we'll have to get to
the first creator before we get to that :) But it just shows you what
I said before, we may be like chimps trying to figure out how to get
to a banana. The chimp is very far from figuring out anything about
the universe. But so far in our evolution our intelligence tells us
there obviously has to be a creator. You just have to look in on Earth
and see what's happening here to see there's obviously a creator. Of
course these are all just opinions :)

Nothing is ever obvious. The world is full of blindingly simple wrong
answers to difficult questions.

And religions stock answer to everything "Because God made it so" has
very limited predictive power and utility.

Science attempts to understand how the universe works but it cannot
answer the more profound question of "why are we here?". That is
unless we find Gods signature on every snake scale (shades of the
forensics in the film Bladerunner).

Regards,
Martin Brown


The best way to figure out if there is a creator is not by trying to
find proof from science and looking out into space but looking in on
Earth and it's events.

True--and since there's no evidence in those events of any deity mucking about here, there's no evidence of said deity. Just lots of books proposing the existence of lots of deities, and people proposing that the rest of us give money to the proponents of the religions based on those books. Religion is profitable.

--
Pat O'Connell
[note munged EMail address]
Take nothing but pictures, Leave nothing but footprints,
Kill nothing but vandals...
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: The logic of atheism
    ... ``real'' and /does/ directly interact with the universe is beyond ... If you'd care to take a whack at it, try this one: ``All but God ... theistic argument for a supreme creator and see where it leads. ... But Grand-God's own existence ...
    (talk.atheism)
  • Methodological Materialism and Philosophical Materialism
    ... scientific explanation for the origin of the laws of nature and the ... the concept of a creator of the universe. ... or the creator is actually the Invisible Pink ... You have not demonstrated that emotional preference for a belief in God ...
    (talk.origins)
  • Re: The scientist as idiot
    ... God of the Universe, then it would be a natural interest for a person ... the existence of a similarly complex entity like a creator not ... where they describe that the billion-digit DNA code in each cell is ...
    (sci.physics)
  • God: The Failed Hypothesis
    ... Physicist Victor Stenger has just served up a second course of delectable arguments for the non-existence of God. ... The Failed Hypothesis, Stenger runs through the standard rational and biological arguments against any sort of meaningful deity, but he does much more. ... In plain, easily understood language, Stenger lays out the evidence from cosmology, particle physics and quantum mechanics showing that the universe appears exactly as it should if there is no creator. ...
    (soc.culture.indonesia)
  • Re: Chez Watt: Re: The Seed
    ... universe can be made to fit *any* book. ... people around you will judge you and so will God one day soon. ... have no reason to believe the claims that any religions make about any ...
    (talk.origins)