Why BELIEVE, shouldn't we KNOW?

[razeontherock]

2 questions that may be a bit off-topic, but seem to be of interest here:

Actually, that one (originally made by Aristotle) has been refuted. It is wrong. All you have to do is look at the night sky. It is dark. If the universe has always been here, the night sky would be white.

I have a nagging suspicion the explanation of this is simple, but why?

There cannot have been a series of bangs followed by big crunches; the Second Law of Thermodynamics prohibits that.

How so?

 

[s_s]

2 questions that may be a bit off-topic, but seem to be of interest here:

I have a nagging suspicion the explanation of this is simple, but why?

Light travels constantly. If it had been doing so forever, it would have penetrated everywhere and darkness wouldn't exist. At least, that's what I immediately thought. I've not heard that argument before.

 

[ebia]

Light travels constantly. If it had been doing so forever, it would have penetrated everywhere and darkness wouldn't exist. At least, that's what I immediately thought. I've not heard that argument before.

A bit of thought about what light is and how it works ought to show the fallacy in that thinking. There is light going through pretty much every point in space, but not much and not from every direction. The points in the sky that appear bright are those direction where there is light arriving at the observer from that direction.

 

[pocaracas]

Could you back this up please? Or explain how evolution has been working for millennia? Because there is no proof of this, and you can't use an unworkable and unprovable idea to claim that an existing and living God does not exist.

There's no proof of evolution?
I think you should visit this section of the forum if you wish to discuss evolution with someone:
Creation & Evolution - Christian Forums

As far as this thread is concerned, evolution happened and is happening all around us. Just ask any hospital staff about MRSA.

 

[pocaracas]

I have a nagging suspicion the explanation of this is simple, but why?

Light travels constantly. If it had been doing so forever, it would have penetrated everywhere and darkness wouldn't exist. At least, that's what I immediately thought. I've not heard that argument before.

A bit of thought about what light is and how it works ought to show the fallacy in that thinking. There is light going through pretty much every point in space, but not much and not from every direction. The points in the sky that appear bright are those direction where there is light arriving at the observer from that direction.

If the universe has always been here and no big crunch has ever happened, then all bodies in space will have occupied pretty much everywhere at some point and, supposing most of them emitted light, you'd see light coming from all these places. So you'd get a roughly uniform background of luminescence, coming from stars far, far away from a very, very long time ago.

Originally Posted by lucaspa

There cannot have been a series of bangs followed by big crunches; the Second Law of Thermodynamics prohibits that.
​

How so?

The second law of thermodynamics states that all systems tend to a state of equilibrium, where their entropy is maximized. According to this, it's impossible for the universe to "self reorganize" into a crunch.. it will always just drift apart.
But the equilibrium of the Universe is mostly dependent on gravity... and we haven't accounted for all the dark matter out there generating gravity and potentially pulling everything back together.

 

[ebia]

If the universe has always been here and no big crunch has ever happened, then all bodies in space will have occupied pretty much everywhere at some point and, supposing most of them emitted light, you'd see light coming from all these places. So you'd get a roughly uniform background of luminescence, coming from stars far, far away from a very, very long time ago.

since the universe has not been around always it's hypothecal, but I'm not sure what your model is. In a finite universe it only takes a finite time for light to get to here from even the furthest point, so what happened further back than that would not be consequential. What we see now depends on what was going on at each point at precisely the time ago corresponding to the distance away from us that point is from us.
. What happened at that point before or after is irrelevant.

 

[pocaracas]

since the universe has not been around always it's hypothecal, but I'm not sure what your model is. In a finite universe it only takes a finite time for light to get to here from even the furthest point, so what happened further back than that would not be consequential. What we see now depends on what was going on at each point at precisely the time ago corresponding to the distance away from us that point is from us.
. What happened at that point before or after is irrelevant.

Yes, but you have infinite points in any direction, so, postulating that the universe has always been here, any such direction will have had infinite sources of light traversing it and odds are that, at this moment, for any direction, we should see at least one of them.

At least, that's how I see it. Maybe lucaspa will explain it better.

 

[ebia]

Yes, but you have infinite points in any direction, so, postulating that the universe has always been here, any such direction will have had infinite sources of light traversing it and odds are that, at this moment, for any direction, we should see at least one of them.

At least, that's how I see it. Maybe lucaspa will explain it better.

Sorry - there are too many unclear things in that for me to figure out what you mean to say. Are you presupposing an infinitely large universe?

We know, of course that the universe has not been around forever because red-shift shows that it is expanding, and therefore tracing that expansion backwards tells us its age.

 

[pocaracas]

indeed.
We were just supposing what would happen if the universe had always been around, with no big crunch-big bang cycles.

 

[Ishraqiyun]

Isn't the more common understanding now that there were will not be a big crunch but instead there will be a big freeze / heat death as matter spreads out more and more tenuously?

 

[pocaracas]

Isn't the more common understanding now that there were will not be a big crunch but instead there will be a big freeze / heat death as matter spreads out more and more tenuously?

10 years ago, you would be right.... but then someone discovered that dark matter is in a lot more places than previously thought.
Dark matter is currently under hot debate. There's still no consensus as to how much of it there is, but they know it's there and it affects other bodies we can see.
Some claim a lot of the universe is dark matter. According to this wiki article (Dark matter - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) only about 5% of the universe is made up of ordinary matter!! O.O

 

[razeontherock]

If the universe has always been here and no big crunch has ever happened, then all bodies in space will have occupied pretty much everywhere at some point and, supposing most of them emitted light, you'd see light coming from all these places.

2 problems I see with this:

1) Light travels; it vacates the path of it's wave, correct?

2) It is assumption that all of space would have been occupied, even if the Universe had "always" been here. (Which by the way, it has. Since time is a property of our universe, saying there was a time when it wasn't here is meaningless) Yet because of 1) above, even if every single point in space had been occupied by a light emitting body, said points could have become dark by now.

The second law of thermodynamics states that all systems tend to a state of equilibrium, where their entropy is maximized. According to this, it's impossible for the universe to "self reorganize" into a crunch.. it will always just drift apart.
But the equilibrium of the Universe is mostly dependent on gravity... and we haven't accounted for all the dark matter out there generating gravity and potentially pulling everything back together.

Well I do hope Lucaspa will address these, but it seems to me we'd need a theory unifying quantum mechanics w/ Einstein's relativity before we could say too much about this. I know gravity is called "the weak force," but it still seems to me it would have to overcome momentum from the BB at some point. Apparently that's an old idea now ...

It also seems to me that a continuous cycle of big bang / big crunch is a form of equilibrium

Anyway, back on topic: why don't we know? G-d calls us the sheep of His pasture. Sheep are loyal, loving, and DUMB. He encourages us to learn, rather than spoon-feeding us.

 

[razeontherock]

Dark matter is currently under hot debate. There's still no consensus as to how much of it there is, but they know it's there and it affects other bodies we can see.
Some claim a lot of the universe is dark matter. According to this wiki article (Dark matter - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) only about 5% of the universe is made up of ordinary matter!! O.O

Why is this not related to background radiation, (CMBR?) which is apparently a black body?

 

[paul becke]

The interesting thing about light, to me, is that, travelling as it does at an absolute speed, irrespective of an observer's speed of motion in the same direction, and although it interacts wth space-time, its reference-frame is clearly exogenous; just like the stream of particles emitted by the Singularity. It does not originate in space-time and does not belong to it. And I find it interesting that major religions, from sun-worshippers to the present day, associate light with the divinity. Not merely the sun, but light, itself.

I once read that light's proper reference-frame is a vacuum. But no space is a true vacuum, containing particles, even in it emptiest state, and in any event, space evidently constitutes a pole of the space-time continuum.

 

[pocaracas]

2 problems I see with this:

1) Light travels; it vacates the path of it's wave, correct?

2) It is assumption that all of space would have been occupied, even if the Universe had "always" been here. (Which by the way, it has. Since time is a property of our universe, saying there was a time when it wasn't here is meaningless) Yet because of 1) above, even if every single point in space had been occupied by a light emitting body, said points could have become dark by now.



Well I do hope Lucaspa will address these, but it seems to me we'd need a theory unifying quantum mechanics w/ Einstein's relativity before we could say too much about this. I know gravity is called "the weak force," but it still seems to me it would have to overcome momentum from the BB at some point. Apparently that's an old idea now ...

It also seems to me that a continuous cycle of big bang / big crunch is a form of equilibrium

I was assuming infinite time, literally: the Universe has ALWAYS been there. So on any line of sight, you'd get infinite stars... at least some would still be seen now... I guess.

Why is this not related to background radiation, (CMBR?) which is apparently a black body?

CMBR is supposed to be the remnants of the big bang:

Cosmic background radiation is well explained as radiation left over from an early stage in the development of the universe, and its discovery is considered a landmark test of the Big Bang model of the universe. When the universe was young, before the formation of stars and planets, it was smaller, much hotter, and filled with a uniform glow from its white-hot fog of hydrogen plasma. As the universe expanded, both the plasma and the radiation filling it grew cooler. When the universe cooled enough, stable atoms could form. These atoms could no longer absorb the thermal radiation, and the universe became transparent instead of being an opaque fog. The photons that existed at that time have been propagating ever since, though growing fainter and less energetic, since exactly the same photons fill a larger and larger universe. This is the source for the alternate term relic radiation.

Anyway, back on topic: why don't we know? G-d calls us the sheep of His pasture. Sheep are loyal, loving, and DUMB. He encourages us to learn, rather than spoon-feeding us.

God calls us that? and you're ok with it?
And he wants us to be dumb, but also to learn (and become smart)? Another paradox?

 

[pocaracas]

The interesting thing about light, to me, is that, travelling as it does at an absolute speed, irrespective of an observer's speed of motion in the same direction, and although it interacts wth space-time, its reference-frame is clearly exogenous; just like the stream of particles emitted by the Singularity. It does not originate in space-time and does not belong to it. And I find it interesting that major religions, from sun-worshippers to the present day, associate light with the divinity. Not merely the sun, but light, itself.

Curious, isn't it?
How about neutrinos?

I once read that light's proper reference-frame is a vacuum. But no space is a true vacuum, containing particles, even in it emptiest state, and in any event, space evidently constitutes a pole of the space-time continuum.

I'm sorry, but I didn't understand this very well...
In vacuum , light travels at the speed of light in vacuum (commonly called 'c'), which is very close to the speed of light in air, but not quite.
Considering we're in vacuum, regardless of the speed of the observer (always less than c), light will always travel at 'c', relative to that observer.
It's a bit counter-intuitive, but it's just one of the many counter-intuitive things about physics at the extremes.
Our intuition didn't evolve to cover those situations...

Then you say "space evidently constitutes a pole of the space-time continuum." I have no idea what you mean by this...

 

[lucaspa]

10 years ago, you would be right.... but then someone discovered that dark matter is in a lot more places than previously thought.

About 15 years ago it was observed that the expansion of the universe was accelerating. What that meant is that the gravity is no longer sufficient to stop the expansion and have it reverse. The universe is going to expand forever and the ultimate end (assuming nothing else happens before then) is heat deat.

The "name" given to the force expanding spacetime is "dark energy".

Dark matter is currently under hot debate. There's still no consensus as to how much of it there is, but they know it's there and it affects other bodies we can see.

Actually, there is consensus on how much there is. What is under hot debate is exactly what it is. However, it is known that the amount of dark matter is insufficient to counter the expansion and cause the universe to contract again:
8. G Tarke and S.P. Swordy, Cosmic Antimatter. Scientific American, 278(4): 36-41, April 1998.
11. LM Krauss, Cosmological antigravity. Scientific American, 280: 52-61, Jan. 1999. discusses cosmological constant to explain accelerating expansion.
17. LM Krauss and GD Starkman, The fate of life in the universe. Scientific American 281: 58-67, Nov. 1999.

 

[lucaspa]

Why is this not related to background radiation, (CMBR?) which is apparently a black body?

Because dark matter is around galaxies and affects the orbits of the stars within those galaxies. It is matter but does not emit light. That's OK, planets, asteroids, interstellar hydrogen, etc. also don't emit light.

The CMBR originated when the universe became transparent about 300,000 years after the Big Bang. It has been traveling since then. As space expands, it also stretches the wavelength of the photons. The CMBR started out with very short wavelengths, up in the x-ray region of the spectrum. The wavelength has now been stretched so that it is in the microwave region.

Does that answer your question? If not, keep asking.

 

[lucaspa]

I want to believe in god, but I don't have any solid evidence, or proof! I don't like the concept of believing in God just because it makes life easiyer. help!

Then ask and keep asking God to communicate with you. Some people call it prayer, but it can be a mental request or even a demand. Keep at it and see if you don't eventually feel/experience a communication back. Listen for the "small, still voice".

In the meantime you are limited to trusting the personal experience of others, whether written down in scripture or what living theists tell you about theirs.

 

[lucaspa]

Someone claimed to have had such experience. I can't disprove it so, I'll just accept it as it is. Subjective experience

Sounds like you are dimissing it. As you are using the term, all evidence is "subjective". That is, what we personally experience.

The concept is always there, you just have to be born in this society. By the age of 5, at the latest, a child has that concept well known, even if they come from a family of atheists and if they themselves are atheist.

Which shows that having the concept doesn't equate to putting experience into that concept.

Why? Why are they not wrong when they accept it as divine? How do you know?

That wasn't quite your claim. What you claimed was that they would not accept it as anyting other than divine. That part isn't true. The reason they accept it as divine is the same reason science accepts theories: they falsified every other alternative they could think of. You are thinking theists don't test their experience to see if it could be something else. That's the part that isn't born out by the evidence. Many have come to the experience very skeptical, thinking it must be anything but divine.

There are lots of concepts out there. So you can't say the people that concluded the experience was of deity did so because they had the concept.

Now, could all those experiences be wrong? Yes. That's one reason it's faith. Could all the atheists be wrong? Yes. That's one reason it is a faith.

Yes, kids can find logical flaws in the blink of an eye...
But there aren't many logical things in faith, are there?

Oh, there can be. Just because it is "faith" doesn't exempt you from reason. It may be counter to what you have accepted as "normal" or "common sense", but then so are of the discoveries of science.

Just because some people do become atheists, doesn't mean that there aren't others who keep their faith just because they've gotten used to it. I'm not saying ALL, I'm saying "some people". Human psychology is a tricky business, there is never a "one size fits all" rule.

But now you are in a position that you can't use this to deny the validity of the personal experience as evidence.

I sure hope you see where you mistake a concept of the divine for a belief system.

And where do you think I did that? I was commenting on logical flaws in atheism. How did you make the jump to this?

Nowhere have I said that everyone having personal experience of deity was Christian. Or Jewish. Or Muslim. Or Hindu. I said there were commonalities about the experience, not that the experience resulted in the individual belonging to a particular religion.

Well then, Buddhists experience something completely different and Egyptians experienced something else for over 4 millennia...

That isn't what I said nor is it implied. I said the experiences were not consistent with the tenets of the religions. But then again, there is no reason every religion has to reflect the personal experience of deity.

I will say I must retract my statements about Buddhism. Looking into Buddhism more carefully, the experiences described would fit within that particular belief system. Buddhists do have room for the divine, but not identical with the concept of the Abrahamic religions.

The argument stands: it's a matter of interpretation (considering the experiences are all of similar origin and nature).

You just negated your own argument. It's may be a matter of interpretation of what religion you belong to, but it is evidence of deity.

remember how all other religions were wrong?

I shoudl ask: how do you know? "In my father's mansion are many rooms ..."

Well then, somewhere people have (have had and I assume will continue to have) experiences which are not compatible with the monotheist god of love and compassion, and yet are experiences of the "spirit realm".

Sorry, but the evidence is against you. That Egyptians constructed a particular religion does not say the underlying experiences were different. After all, Christians have constructed some forms of Christianity inconsistent with the experiences, too.

If all others are wrong, then I'd only ask: what makes your experiences so right?

You haven't shown that there are distinctly different experiences. All you've shown are different religions. There is no requirement for each and every religion to be based on personal experience of deity.

Yes, well... we all know how astrophysicists get their guesses... pi ~ 3
If there is more dark mater than hydrogen+hellium, there goes that 98% as well.
But this is of no interest to the thread.

I think it is. It shows how ready you are to dimiss any evidence that disagrees with you, no matter the source. It also shows you are willing to use the fallacies of ad hominem, ridicule, and poisoning the well. The figure 98% refers to what you were referring to: hydrogen and helium compared to the other elements. You thought it was "knowledge", not a "guess". You were just wrong. BTW, whatever dark matter is, it's not any of the elements. Why not, you ask? Because the elements have specific frequencies of light that they absor when light hits them. They show up as dark lines on a spectrum. Dark matter has none of those absorption lines.

And it is permissible why? because no suitable theory ever stood up to any scrutiny.

Nope. Two reasons:
1. For everything after that we have "natural" causes which are sufficient and therefore it is not permissible to hypothesize direct action by God. That direct action would be another "natural" cause. So direct action by God is permissible in science only a) as cause of the universe and b) as explanation why the universe has this order instead of some other order.
2. Theologically, hypothesizing God in a direct role for some continuing part of the existing universe would be god-of-the-gaps.

In science, hypotheses/theories remain possible unless and until they are falsified. If you deny this, then science stops.

Some 500 years ago, the same could be said of lightning. We had no decent explanation for the phenomenon, so god did it. Turns out that NO he has nothing to do with lightning.

What you are stating here is god-of-the-gaps. According to Judeo-Christian theology, this was never permissible. It was J-C that convinced science that there had to be a "natural" cause.

Now, the statement ""he [God] has nothing to do with lightning" is not a valid scientific statement. "God did not do it" is not a valid scientific statement. There you are stating the basic atheist statement of faith: natural = without God. We are going to have to talk about Methodological Naturalism. For now, I'll let you read this statement and see if you can tell me how you know it is wrong:
"The only distinct meaning of the word 'natural' is stated, fixed, or settled; since what is natural as much requires and presupposes an intelligent agent to render it so, i.e., to effect it continually or at stated times, as what is supernatural or miraculous does to effect it for once." Butler: Analogy of Revealed Religion.

I just extrapolate from previous godly claims which fell.... this too shall probably fall.

But you base that extrapolation on 1) faulty science, 2) invalid theology, and 3) an unproven statement of faith. So the extrapolation is worthless. If that is your reason for atheism, then you need to rethink your commitment to it.

how what?
This here universe has 4 dimensions, ok. We can't have more around here.. string theory says we can on some ultra-nanoscopic way, but lets forget about that, since you said string theory is going through a bit of bad weather.

The reason String Theory is in trouble is that those extra dimensions have a limit on how small they can be. Yes, they are "compacted", but they can only be compacted so far. The problem is that the effects those compacted dimensions should have are not there.

On that "outside" of our Universe you so correctly pointed to me earlier, it is conceivable that one can find some sort of Universe where the norm is10, 20, 30, 40, millions of dimensions... mathematically, it is possible (notice, I didn't use physically).

See above. You can't compact those extra dimensions far enough. Even by the math, much less the observations, they can't exist.

Science can tell me that god is not required to explain the physical events which happen in this Universe. And if life was simply a chemical event, then no god s required also, since chemistry is a branch of physics (although chemists won't admit it).

But science can't tell you that "life was simply a chemical event". Why did the chemistry happen? Does the chemistry require God to will the chemical reactions to happen? And by "chemical reactions" I mean every chemical reaction every time.

Here we have a limitation of science and the mistake of saying a statement of faith is true without evidence. You are obviously working on god-of-the-gaps. But what if God is not found in the gaps? What if every process found by science also requires God for it to happen?

You haven't thought it thru. I'm a theist, remember? Yet I'm the one that told you about life arising by chemistry. Didn't it occur to you that, if such a thing really did falsify theism, that I would not be a theist?

I was just trying to be succint when telling that tale.

You were also stating a very common misconception of evolution. You still seem to have some:

. There was (and is) no purpose behind it, except survival. Evolution was (and is) not a conscious undertaking.

The first part is wrong. There is very definitely a short term purpose behind natural selection. That purpose is to design the population for the particular environment in the present.

You can't say, by science, "there was no purpose behind it". What we can say is that natural selection has no long-term purpose. But that isn't the same as "no purpose behind it". You can't eliminate that God used evolution for His purpose. You canj't even eliminate that God has influenced evolution over those years. There are, at least, 2 methods by which God can/could influence evolution that would be undetectable by science.

Now, natural selection is an unintelligent process to get design. That is a good thing for Judeo-Christianity in particular and theism in general.

I just care that "no god is required" for it to work.

And once again, you have the statement contrary to science.

If the bible is inspired by god and he wouldn't allow errors in it, then he did control those people's minds.

Notice the "ifs". As it turns out, scripture itself tells us there are errors in scripture. Mark 10 and Matthew 14. So the second "if" is gone. You are basing your argument on Fundamentalism.

You're right... it's the whole town that stones him to death... at the request of the parents?!?!?!

Yep. Of course, today the whole town throws his ass in jail, because not listening to your parents probably means committing a crime. If the crime is severe enough, we will execute the child. So, are we really so far from that?

O god gave us those rules, or men made such rules as they pleased. God's existence being disputed, I choose the option where men made the rules.

It could easily be a mixture of both. Jesus said it was. However, you never disputed the point that, for the time, the rules were liberal.

Actually, you're the one who called it premise first!

And apparently I labeled it correctly. So why the razz? Do you always razz people when they are correct.

Indoctrination plays a large role, yes.

I falsified that and you admitted that above when you retreated to just "some" people.

Belief comes from first knowing that there is something we call god and it can be described as such and such. Then, you experience something which sort of fits this description, but fits nowhere else that you're aware of.... so, logically, god exists (for you).

Read about the personal experience again. Even if people had not had the label "god" to put on it, they would still have 1) an entity they were mentally talking to, 2) an entity that can do things people can't, 3) and entity whose love and forgiveness know no bounds, 4) an entity who intervenes in their life. Whether or not they have the word "god" or concept of "god", they would have invented a word and concept to describe what they have.

You are thinking the concept makes the experience. Instead, the experience makes the concept. Let's take an example. Jump off a step. you fall. Drop an apple. It falls. Do you interpret these experiences as "gravity" only because you have heard of such a concept? NO. The experiences lead you to the concept. If there was no concept of "gravity", you would have to invent a word that would mean the same thing.

I.have.come.to.destroy.everything.
Prepare.to.be.terminated.

Argument from Ridicule. Doesn't negate my claim. Try again.

Actually, the concept of evolution already existed, It just hadn't been applied to the animal kingdom.

Wrong again.

In quantum physics, the atom was first described much like a planetary system, nucleus in the middle, electrons in orbits around it. Then the concept was refined to clouds of electrons around the nucleus, the orbitals. Quantum physics was so mathematical at first that this "borrowing of familiar concepts" was required to understand the complete novelty of the thing.

By your logic, however, the limitation of concept would prevent the novelty. The physicists would have had to interpret the evidence to fit in a concept they already had. Thank you for providing another refutation of your claim.