What did it all started with?

FrumiousBandersnatch said:

I don't believe it, I don't know the answer - but I'm suggesting it as a simpler alternative to positing an inexplicable creator. IOW I think it's a better hypothesis, by reasonable criteria for a good explanation.

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Everything we experience as art or mechanical has a creator. To suppose that the universe is the exception seems silly.

renniks said:

Everything we experience as art or mechanical has a creator. To suppose that the universe is the exception seems silly.

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I think you're making an enormous category error. All of the creators of those things are humans. Therefore, god is human? Or, more likely, along with all that art and mechanical stuff, god was created by humans as well. Both option are more parsimonious than positing an invisible, all-powerful being that created the universe.

The IbanezerScrooge said:

I think you're making an enormous category error. All of the creators of those things are humans. Therefore, god is human? Or, more likely, along with all that art and mechanical stuff, god was created by humans as well. Both are more parsimonious than positing an invisible, all-powerful being that created the universe.

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Lol, yeah, we created the Being that created everything!? The fact that there is art and order and mechanisms galore that keep our world functional, when the smallest deviation would mean we would all be dead in an instant, all leads me to believe that Someone made this world to be exactly what it is. When I find something as simple as a cut stone wall in the woods, I know without a doubt that it was made by humans. But I'm supposed to look at the complicated mechanism that is my own body and suppose it just happened by some cosmic accident?

renniks said:

Lol, yeah, we created the Being that created everything!? The fact that there is art and order and mechanisms galore that keep our world functional, when the smallest deviation would mean we would all be dead in an instant, all leads me to believe that Someone made this world to be exactly what it is. When I find something as simple as a cut stone wall in the woods, I know without a doubt that it was made by humans. But I'm supposed to look at the complicated mechanism that is my own body and suppose it just happened by some cosmic accident?

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The world hummed along just fine for 4 billion years without our art or mechanisms. We are not what's keeping it "functional". If anything we are are a detriment to it. The way you frame things is just your own incredulity. Believe what you want, but don't act like you do so for good reasons and everyone who disagrees with you is deluded.

The IbanezerScrooge said:

The world hummed along just fine for 4 billion years without our art or mechanisms. We are not what's keeping it "functional". If anything we are are a detriment to it. The way you frame things is just your own incredulity. Believe what you want, but don't act like you do so for good reasons and everyone who disagrees with you is deluded.

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I never said we were keeping it functional. Someone certainly is, though. And he's intelligent. We are tiny specks of dust trying to understand what we can not possibly grasp.

renniks said:

Everything we experience as art or mechanical has a creator. To suppose that the universe is the exception seems silly.

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What seems silly is highly subjective and a poor guide to the world - e.g. there's plenty of demonstrable modern science that seems silly to the uninformed.

The universe is neither art nor mechanism as commonly understood; you may decide to interpret it as such (they are arbitrary human categories), but it is not like the art and mechanisms we are familiar with so it is an error to infer that it is alike in other specific respects that support your argument. For example, if you accept that houses are made by people, and I live in a cave that I call my house, it is clearly fallacious to suggest that therefore caves are made by people.

Also, our experience of the infinitesimal parts of the universe we have knowledge of bears no necessary relation to the universe as a whole.

So what you have there is an argument from incredulity and an argument from false equivalence compounded with a fallacy of composition. Pretty good going for two short sentences!

renniks said:

The fact that there is art and order and mechanisms galore that keep our world functional, when the smallest deviation would mean we would all be dead in an instant, all leads me to believe that Someone made this world to be exactly what it is.

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If you were consistent with this equivalence argument, you would see that it is equally true that no 'someone' of anyone's experience could manage such a feat - human endeavours are characterised by their fallibility - so you must add properties such as omnipotence and perfection, both impossible for any 'someone' of anyone's experience; i.e. special pleading for acceptance of that (false) equivalence. This argument can only seem rational if you already believe in a magical supernatural 'someone'.

It's also, to a degree, an argument from ignorance and/or incredulity, in that we already have a general understanding of how simple fundamental physical laws can produce the complexity of structure and function we see around us. To be sure, there are gaps in that understanding, but we know enough to see that they are bridgeable.

FrumiousBandersnatch said:

It's also, to a degree, an argument from ignorance and/or incredulity, in that we already have a general understanding of how simple fundamental physical laws can produce the complexity of structure and function we see around us. To be sure, there are gaps in that understanding, but we know enough to see that they are bridgeable.

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You can't have laws just spring out of nothingness. That's not something that happens here in the "real world" either. We ARE ignorant. We see the tiniest tip of the iceberg and think we understand the universe? We don't even understand what makes up our own bodies on the molecular level. Gaps? Yes, gaps the size of the whole universe. We are tiny little amoebas pretending we rule the world.

renniks said:

You can't have laws just spring out of nothingness. That's not something that happens here in the "real world" either. We ARE ignorant. We see the tiniest tip of the iceberg and think we understand the universe? We don't even understand what makes up our own bodies on the molecular level. Gaps? Yes, gaps the size of the whole universe. We are tiny little amoebas pretending we rule the world.

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Your use of the term "We ARE ignorant" should read "I am ignorant".
Your level of ignorance is not the standard by which one evaluates science.

As an example your are ignorant about the term 'nothingness' and how it has a very different meaning in science and how the scientific theory of 'nothingness' has been confirmed by experiment.

The concept of nothing is very much tied in with the modern or non classical version of a vacuum which is a quantum field in the lowest energy level.
You can’t divorce a field from nothingness or a vacuum.

This idea comes from a seemingly unrelated topic in classical physics the Simple Harmonic Oscillator (SHO).
An example of a SHO is a weight attached to a spring.
Pulling down on the weight and letting it go results in oscillation.

The Hamiltonian or total energy H of the SHO is defined as;


The first term on the right is the kinetic energy for the SHO in terms of the momentum p.
The second term is the potential energy stored in the spring with frequency ω and displacement x.

In early to mid 20th century scientists came up with Quantum Field Theory (QFT) where the field can be quantized like the energy levels associated with scalar particles such as electrons in atoms.

Each point in spacetime is defined by a SHO.
In this case the quanta of the field are the scalar particles which can be destroyed and created by annihilation and creation mathematical operators defined as follows.


Expressing the Hamiltonian for the SHO in terms of the creation and annihilation operators gives;


Where N is the number operator is defined as;


The state |n > is not the state of a single particle but is the state of the field with n particles or quanta present.
The eigenstates of the Hamiltonian for the field are of the form.


which is analogous to the quantum mechanical equation for a single particle.


Here the energy levels for the field are;


The lowest energy state occurs when n=0 and E = ħω/2 ≠ 0 where there are no particles or quanta which defines the vacuum.
Hence spacetime or a vacuum can never be totally empty and is supported by experiment such as the Casimir effect.
In fact you can get something from “nothing” as the “nothing” in this case is not totally empty.

renniks said:

You can't have laws just spring out of nothingness.

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Nobody suggested they 'spring out of nothingness' - any more than your creator 'sprang out of nothingness'. I'm explicitly suggesting that they've always existed.

We don't even understand what makes up our own bodies on the molecular level.

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We know the bulk of our molecular constituents and what they do - and we know what we're made of at a more fundamental level - up quarks, down quarks, and electrons.

FrumiousBandersnatch said:

Nobody suggested they 'spring out of nothingness' - any more than your creator 'sprang out of nothingness'. I'm explicitly suggesting that they've always existed.

We know the bulk of our molecular constituents and what they do - and we know what we're made of at a more fundamental level - up quarks, down quarks, and electrons.

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So you believe something very improbable by blind faith. Ok.

We don't know, we speculate.
In the realm of quantum mechanics/ quantum physics, there’s nothing straight forward...almost everything is probabilistic. we have to infer that they exist. We have a lot of theories, not any certainty. We could all be an illusion, and all we see could be just faking us out.

renniks said:

So you believe something very improbable by blind faith. Ok.

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Nope. I don't believe any origin story - as I said before, I don't know. But I do know which is more improbable between the universe (that we know exists) always having been around, and OTOH, an inexplicable, undemonstrable, omnipotent, anthropomorphic entity having always been around and creating an unimaginably vast universe just for us(!)...

In the realm of quantum mechanics/ quantum physics, there’s nothing straight forward...almost everything is probabilistic. we have to infer that they exist.

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Who or what is 'they'?

We have a lot of theories, not any certainty. We could all be an illusion, and all we see could be just faking us out.

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Of course it could, for no good reason at all... But stepping over your fatalistic puddle of despair, if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and lays duck eggs, you might as well treat it as a duck until you have evidence to the contrary. It might actually be a small goose, but it clearly isn't a pig.

FrumiousBandersnatch said:

Of course it could, for no good reason at all... But stepping over your fatalistic puddle of despair, if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and lays duck eggs, you might as well treat it as a duck until you have evidence to the contrary. It might actually be a small goose, but it clearly isn't a pig

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What it clearly is, is a universe created by an intelligent being. Proposing that it has no beginning is as messed up as flat earth, at least. Everything points to a beginning and an eventual end of this planet.

renniks said:

We don't know, we speculate.
In the realm of quantum mechanics/ quantum physics, there’s nothing straight forward...almost everything is probabilistic. we have to infer that they exist. We have a lot of theories, not any certainty. We could all be an illusion, and all we see could be just faking us out.

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We can thank quantum mechanics for our modern civilization despite its probabilistic nature.
The maths described in post #69 was the genesis for quantum electrodynamics which led to the development of the microprocessor in your computer or smartphone from which you can communicate your opinions over the Internet.

sjastro said:

We can thank quantum mechanics for our modern civilization despite its probabilistic nature.
The maths described in post #69 was the genesis for quantum electrodynamics which led to the development of the microprocessor in your computer or smartphone from you can communicate your opinions over the Internet.

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Another thing to hate about "progress." Thanks.

renniks said:

Another thing to hate about "progress." Thanks.

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Then its quite hypocritical of you to use something you hate.
Show the courage of your convictions and go live in a cave.

sjastro said:

Then its quite hypocritical of you to use something you hate.
Show the courage of your convictions and go live in a cave.

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I might not go that far, but I may just go live away from technology, except there's always a catch. I need it to make a living.

renniks said:

I might not go that far, but I may just go live away from technology, except there's always a catch. I need it to make a living.

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That's a pretty lame excuse.
You are not making a living using the technology to make posts in this forum.
Your hypocrisy remains...............

sjastro said:

That's a pretty lame excuse.
You are not making a living using the technology to make posts in this forum.
Your hypocrisy remains...............

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Whatever floats your boat. I honestly don't care about your opinion.

renniks said:

Whatever floats your boat. I honestly don't care about your opinion.

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I'm sure it's not only my opinion; using technological progress in the form of being able to construct and transmit a post world wide which attacks technological progress is a stunning example of hypocrisy .