Universal Elegance and Correspondence

[Starman]

Two things are incomprehensible, not just to me, but to mankind, I say.
The first: That this elegant universe made itself out of nothing.
The second: That some Intelligent Creator made this universe.

Everyone chooses his own incomprehensibility. As for my part, I cannot fathom how nothing could have produced matter, energy, physical constants of insuperable precision, correspondence between countless overlapping realms, beauty, and all the rest around us.

An Intelligent Creator simplifies the incomprehensibility, rather than making it more complicated, as Richard Dawkins likes to claim.
He is beyond the purview of science or understanding, forever outside them in fact.

Either you must use science to explain how nothing scientifically made everything, or else you realize the elegance of I Am.
I Am can't be explained.

Life has been arranged tutorially for us. Thousands of years ago, men discovered fire, weapons, clothing, and primitive tools.
Today we fly miles above the earth in comfort, while listening to music from orchestras long since gone. Had you described this
to Beethoven or Mozart they would have thought you a lunatic.

The gravitational constant, precise to within one part in 10 to the 10 to the 120th power.
An exceedingly fast speed of light, for effective radio communications, for amplifying the power of nuclear fusion, dependent as it is on c.
A relatively slow speed of sound, the better to hear stereophonically, and to discern direction of sound sources, by virtue of perhaps 1/10,000th of a second differential in hearing between right ear and left.
On and on the beauty and elegance of nature goes, from the submicroscopic to the supermacroscopic. We do not know everything about anything.
To think that all this developed on its own seems to me far more absurd than that it was the product of an Intelligent Creator, Who imbued humans with a smattering of His rational and creative powers.

Equilibria operating pervasively. Useful sources of materials, from burnable fossil fuels, to massive oceans, operating as sources of food, oxygen, transportation, and entertainment and quite different and distinct from anything else we have seen in or outside our solar system.

Nothing is too wonderful to be true. - Michael Faraday

The universe is full of magic things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper. - Eden Philpotts

 

[none]

I've heard singularity thrown around as the precursor to the universe and it is not nothing.

 

[skepticalbip]

Gods are the answers our ancient predecessors invented to explain what they could not understand. Their questions included why there was day and night, where humans came from, what is death, how do plants grow, why does it rain, why do volcanoes erupt, etc. etc. Over the ages, humanity learned some of the answers so no longer had to imagine gods to explain those particular phenomena. Gods were relegated to the remaining as yet unexplained phenomena. Following ages squeezed gods into smaller and smaller niches as humanity learned more about the nature of reality.

Today, a still unanswered question is, is the universe eternal without beginning or end, or if it had a beginning, how did the universe began and how will it end. Does either require a god to explain? Is god just a comforting crutch for those who can’t emotionally accept the simple answer, “we just don’t know…. yet”?






Why is this in the science forum?

 

[Starman]

I've heard singularity thrown around as the precursor to the universe and it is not nothing.

What was the ultimate source of the singularity?

 

[bilby]

I've heard singularity thrown around as the precursor to the universe and it is not nothing.

What was the ultimate source of the singularity?

Nobody knows.

But it is highly unlikely to have been a talking snake, a giant donkey's sneeze, or anything else dreamed up by pre-scientific cultures of goat-herding desert nomads.

Anybody who has an idea, hypothesis or claim for what happened before the Planck time is kidding themselves; it is currently known that this is not currently known. Don't let them kid you, too.

 

[Starman]

Today, a still unanswered question is, is the universe eternal without beginning or end, or if it had a beginning, how did the universe began and how will it end.

No, your "still unanswered question" has long since been answered. It had a beginning. The problem was that when Georges Lemaitre posited the "primordial atom," scientists rejected it because they did not want to face the ineluctable implication. It took years to let go of the Steady State Theory, and accept the Big Bang.
Scientifically, it will end with heat death. Earth has only five billion more years before our sun burns out. Less time in front of us than behind.

Does either require a god to explain? Is god just a comforting crutch for those who can’t emotionally accept the simple answer, “we just don’t know…. yet”?

The "comforting crutch," it seems to me, is the pretension by some that they ultimately have nobody to answer to for their actions, that there is no basis for morality, that you can do anything you want here. Alan Turning became an atheist only after his boyfriend died. Rational? Isaac Asimov became an atheist only after his prayer to pass a science test did not deliver Asimov a passing grade. Rational? Certainly not in my opinion. Asimov was so irrational, so anti-science and unintelligent that he never rode in commercial aviation, the safest mode of transportation, by far safer than automobiles, per passenger mile.

Why is this in the science forum?

The origin of the universe has long been part of the search for knowledge, or "scientia."
The fine-tuning of many physical constants demand analysis and explanation. The demand of purely naturalistic explanations for observations is antithetical to real science.

 

[skepticalbip]

No, your "still unanswered question" has long since been answered. It had a beginning. The problem was that when Georges Lemaitre posited the "primordial atom," scientists rejected it because they did not want to face the ineluctable implication. It took years to let go of the Steady State Theory, and accept the Big Bang.
Scientifically, it will end with heat death. Earth has only five billion more years before our sun burns out. Less time in front of us than behind.

No. It hasn't been settled. The current most accepted model is the "Big Band with inflation" model but it is far from the only proposed model and the model itself has several real problems. There are also several very different "oscillating universe" models. Oscillating universe models describe an eternal cyclic universe.

The Sun burning out is very, very far from the end of the Universe. The total life spans of main sequence stars like our sun are a "blink of an eye" when compared to the assumed life span of the universe. In fact, our Sun is at least a second generation star, maybe a third or fourth generation star and the gas ejected during its death throes will end up in future generations of stars.

Does either require a god to explain? Is god just a comforting crutch for those who can’t emotionally accept the simple answer, “we just don’t know…. yet”?

The "comforting crutch," it seems to me, is the pretension by some that they ultimately have nobody to answer to for their actions, that there is no basis for morality, that you can do anything you want here.

The Christian idea of morality is based on fear of burning in hell if the commandments are violated - this serves Biblical law. Humanist ideas of morality are based on fairness and caring - this serves the betterment of humanity.

Alan Turning became an atheist only after his boyfriend died. Rational? Isaac Asimov became an atheist only after his prayer to pass a science test did not deliver Asimov a passing grade. Rational? Certainly not in my opinion. Asimov was so irrational, so anti-science and unintelligent that he never rode in commercial aviation, the safest mode of transportation, by far safer than automobiles, per passenger mile.

WTF? People are strange. People base decisions on all sorts or irrational ideas, even Christians. And I would question the source of your information about those people's motives for their decisions.

Why is this in the science forum?

The origin of the universe has long been part of the search for knowledge, or "scientia."
The fine-tuning of many physical constants demand analysis and explanation.

God is not an explanation. It is only deferring the explanation one more step further. "We don't know... yet", inspires more consideration and inquiry into the problem. "God did it" is an answer that halts inquiry - until some non-believer decides that it needs a better explanation.

The demand of purely naturalistic explanations for observations is antithetical to real science.

Where did you study science? I ask because that is one of the sillier ideas I have heard about science from those who don't understand the scientific method.

 

[ryan]

The most humbling thing is that what we know may be infinitesimal. And worse yet, science might just be a temporary understanding of an infinitely small part of reality.

So my gut tells me that there has always been something, but who are we to know how/why universes begin? We have no other example except our own universe. If we see one tree grow ten feet tall, we would be silly to think that all trees must grow 10 feet tall.

Why can't it just be an illogical truth that something came from nothing? It goes against all intuition, but then again so did a lot of other discoveries.

 

[Brian63]

What created God?

Did anyone or anything create God, or did God just exist without anyone or anything have initiated it?

At some point, we have to have to realize that the way the universe functions itself is different from the way that things *inside* the universe function. Things *inside* the universe need to have a prior cause for their existence, but that does not mean the universe itself is bound by that same rule. At some point, something just exists without us humans beings knowing the how and why. Maybe over time we will find out more as we go, but maybe there will be some element that we just never will know. In that environment, having an answer of "I don't know" is more accurate and helpful than having an answer of "I don't know, therefore goddidit."

Brian

 

[Archimedes]

I've heard singularity thrown around as the precursor to the universe and it is not nothing.

What was the ultimate source of the singularity?

What's the ultimate space of the intelligent creator?

 

[Keith&Co.]

WTF? People are strange. People base decisions on all sorts or irrational ideas, even Christians. And I would question the source of your information about those people's motives for their decisions.

Is the 'DISrespect for authority' logical fallacy formally identified?? A famous atheist had a phobia, therefore his atheism is irrational, to imply that everyone's atheism is irrational?


I suppose it was my fear of heights that drove me to realize that all anyone offered in response to my questions were platitudes and accusations that I shouldn't even DARE to ask it.

Good thing i'm not claustrophobic, I might have become a socialist.

 

[Starman]

What was the ultimate source of the singularity?

What's the ultimate space (sic) of the intelligent creator?

For people who constantly parrot their own *intellectualism,* there certainly are a lot of simplistic mistakes, not just of logic, and science,
and rationality, but of such trivial matters as copying what someone else has written or said. The above is simply another such example.

Please search YouTube for "A Matter of Gravity," by Professor John Lennox, of Oxford University. He answers many of your questions, as well
as those of Stephen Hawking and Richard Dawkins.

 

[dystopian]

Everyone chooses his own incomprehensibility. As for my part, I cannot fathom how nothing could have produced matter, energy,

Your inability to fathom something has no bearing on whether that something is true or not, however. Nor is it a particularly interesting thing for others to hear.

physical constants of insuperable precision,

Uh... precision as compared to *what*? Them being "precise" in relation to themselves is absolutely irrelevant, since no matter what they are, they will always have this 'insuperable precision' in relation to themselves. Is it the constant part you can't fathom? Would it somehow make more sense if those physical constants were entirely arbitrary from moment to moment (and thus not constants)?

correspondence between countless overlapping realms,

What the hell does this even mean?

beauty,

Beauty is meaningless; it is just an arbitrary thing you decide on. 99,9% of the universe consists of an empty void... the absence of something is not particularly beautiful. Then much of the rest of the 0,1% of the universe is filled with barren rocks.

and all the rest around us.

But again, why is this relevant?

An Intelligent Creator simplifies the incomprehensibility, rather than making it more complicated, as Richard Dawkins likes to claim.

It DOES actually complicate things. Why? Because you're still faced with a universe we know reached its current configuration through entirely natural means. We understand how stars and galaxies are formed; how planets come abound and even the complexity of life that we observe here on earth. These things happened as a result of a complex chain of events; a chain that is not in any way shortened (ie; reduced in complexity) by *adding* a creator at the start of the chain. By adding a creator, you've added a completely superfluous step to the explanation, thus adding complexity. Even more troubling is that you then need to explain the existence of this creator, requiring the addition of even more complexity to the explanation.

An intelligent creator does *not* simplify explanations, it just appears to do so to people who don't want to think too hard about the consequences of having an intelligent creator as part of the explanation.

He is beyond the purview of science or understanding, forever outside them in fact.

Then he simply can not exist. All things that have existence in any shape or form in our universe are within the purview science. And no, placing the creator outside of our universe does not put him beyond the reach of science, because by creating the universe he would inevitably have left behind evidence of the method of his creation. And that is assuming that all he did was create the universe and then never interacted with it in any way; if he has in fact interacted after creation, then the amount of evidence he must have left behind of this interaction will multiply.

Either you must use science to explain how nothing scientifically made everything,

Except that's a strawman argument; an absence of an intelligent creator does *not* imply that things were created by "nothing" (or indeed, 'created')

or else you realize the elegance of I Am.
I Am can't be explained.

Nonsense. The question you're posing is 'Why is there something instead of nothing?'; however what you fail to understand is that this question is NOT answered by positing a creator god. You're still left with the exact same unanswered question.

Life has been arranged tutorially for us.

No, it really hasn't.

Thousands of years ago, men discovered fire, weapons, clothing, and primitive tools.
Today we fly miles above the earth in comfort, while listening to music from orchestras long since gone.

These are things we can do because the universe makes scientific sense; it conforms to natural laws that we can understand and shape to our own use. If the universe were created by god, we might expect a universe more arbitrary in nature.

Had you described this to Beethoven or Mozart they would have thought you a lunatic.

Perhaps. Although not if you explained it properly. Indeed, Beethoven and Mozart would be far more likely to believe you than regular people because they were already familiar with the idea of recording music through the means of notation. In fact, machines capable of reproducing sound from sheet music date back to at least the 15th century (Barrel Organs for instance); and both of these men would certainly have been familiar with such things. It is not a huge leap to go from understanding how a barrel organ can perfectly produce the exact same song every time you run the sheet through it, to accepting the idea that a more advanced future technology could work along similar means to reproduce the sound of an orchestra.

The gravitational constant, precise to within one part in 10 to the 10 to the 120th power.

Again; and? The gravitational constant being... well, as constant as it is... is NOT a sign pointing towards a creator. If it were NOT so constant, then THAT would be really weird and suggest that there's something god-like screwing around with physics.

An exceedingly fast speed of light, for effective radio communications, for amplifying the power of nuclear fusion, dependent as it is on c.

You're joking right? The speed of light is really NOT "exceedingly fast". And it's REALLY *not* fast for things like effective radio communications. If we were to have an outpost in the nearest star system it'd take freaking EIGHT years and change to ask them a question and get a reply, and Alpha Proxima is just a stone's throw away by interstellar distance measures (to say nothing of galactic or intergalactic standards).

A relatively slow speed of sound, the better to hear stereophonically, and to discern direction of sound sources, by virtue of perhaps 1/10,000th of a second differential in hearing between right ear and left.

And if the differential was greater or less, than our brains/hearing mechanics would've evolved the exact same ability, just tuned to a different standard. There's no finetuning there, however much you want there to be.

On and on the beauty and elegance of nature goes, from the submicroscopic to the supermacroscopic.

Again, this is entirely subjective and meaningless. Do we ignore all the incredibly ugly stuff; stuff which vastly outnumbers the 'beautiful' stuff? Whose measure of beauty do we go by? Yours? Or mine? You may seem some beauty or elegance in a mountain, but someone else just sees a big pile of rocks with no special meaning.

We do not know everything about anything.

So, your answer to not knowing everything, is to make something up instead?

Equilibria operating pervasively.

And what equillibria are you talking about? If you imagine our planet/solar system/galaxy/universe is in a state of equillibrium you are sorely mistaken.

Useful sources of materials, from burnable fossil fuels, to massive oceans, operating as sources of food, oxygen, transportation, and entertainment

...again, this is the finetuning argument, which is a joke. What you're doing is the equivalent of a puddle of water marveling at how the hole in the ground is perfectly designed for it to fit in. Earth only SEEMS like it was designed for us because we *evolved* in this environment and adapted to it. If earth instead had flesh-dissolving oceans of acid, we would probably be saying the EXACT SAME thing, because we'd have evolved to adapt.

and quite different and distinct from anything else we have seen in or outside our solar system.

And now you're just demonstrating your ignorance. Did you really think Earth was the only place we know of that has oceans, or burnable fuels? Mars used to have oceans. Europa *has* oceans; in fact, Europa has more water than the Earth does. Titan has seas of liquid hydrocarbons; which are similar in composition and which we can use the same way as the fossil fuels here on Earth. Oh; and here's a fun fact, just Europa has more water than we do, so too does Titan have more burnable fuel on it's *surface* than all the known gas and oil on our entire planet.

And outside of the solar system we've cataloged no less than *47* planets existing within the habitable zone of their stars; and that's after we've only been looking for a few short years and despite how incredibly difficult it is to detect them. Now that doesn't mean that all or even any of them have water or life on them... but it does demonstrate that the basic configuration that allow for life is by no means unique to Earth; and might indeed be common.

No, Earth will turn out to be nothing special. Not finetuned for us; and not unique.

 

[dystopian]

The Sun burning out is very, very far from the end of the Universe. The total life spans of main sequence stars like our sun are a "blink of an eye" when compared to the assumed life span of the universe. In fact, our Sun is at least a second generation star, maybe a third or fourth generation star and the gas ejected during its death throes will end up in future generations of stars.

Indeed. Starman's notion that the universe has less time ahead of it than in its past is absurd; should it be the case that there's no 'big rip', as some have proposed. Stars like our sun burn for a relatively short time. Red Dwarfs, however, which appear to be by far the most common type of stars, live for so long that there isn't a single red dwarf in the universe that has even left its toddler years. Some Red Dwarfs have a potential lifespan ranging from 6 to 12 *trillion* years. They will keep on burning long after all the galaxies have lost cohesion.

 

[Kharakov]

God is not an explanation. It is only deferring the explanation one more step further. "We don't know... yet", inspires more consideration and inquiry into the problem. "God did it" is an answer that halts inquiry - until some non-believer decides that it needs a better explanation.

I don't think that "God did it" is a research stopping point, but perhaps I don't understand why someone would stop researching a complex phenomenon simply because someone or something is the cause. If I say "the fundamental laws of nature caused X", this is hardly a good enough explanation, even if it is true.

If I say that the Peano axioms create links between the exponential function, pi, cosine, sine, and various other phenomena, this hardly means that one has no further to look than the Peano axioms. In fact, one can look beyond the Peano axioms, and see that there is a fundamental value to discipline and law that underlies the axioms, or perhaps take the idea of following rules to generate specific outcomes in various directions.

 

[skepticalbip]

God is not an explanation. It is only deferring the explanation one more step further. "We don't know... yet", inspires more consideration and inquiry into the problem. "God did it" is an answer that halts inquiry - until some non-believer decides that it needs a better explanation.

I don't think that "God did it" is a research stopping point, but perhaps I don't understand why someone would stop researching a complex phenomenon simply because someone or something is the cause. If I say "the fundamental laws of nature caused X", this is hardly a good enough explanation, even if it is true.
.

For Christians, "god did it", is an ultimate answer, "we can not know the mind of god". For Christians, even questioning the "mind of god" is a sin. For a physicist, the answer "the fundamental laws of nature caused x" brings up the questions of what exactly are these fundamental laws, how do they relate to other fundamental laws, can they be incorporated into other fundamental laws, how did they cause x, how does x relate to other phenomena, etc. etc.

"Goddidit" is a final answer.
"We don't know" inspires investigation. And any new finding that answers the original "we don't know" only brings up more questions so more "we don't knows" to be investigated.

 

[Keith&Co.]

An Intelligent Creator simplifies the incomprehensibility, rather than making it more complicated, as Richard Dawkins likes to claim.
He is beyond the purview of science or understanding, forever outside them in fact.

If the creator cannot be understood, that would rather obviously make all the question he's the answer to incomprehensible. So there's going to be a certain minimum amount of permanent incomprehensibility, no matter what. This doesn't simplify incomprehensibility, it just gives the theist an excuse to say that the incomprehensibility is okay.

This would be okay with you, clearly, since you start off with an argument from incredulity and then enshrine it. Not a very compelling reason for anyone else, though.

 

[fromderinside]

Man has sooo many timescale issues. If one accepts that by chance given the nature of our universe that such as man is possible naturally then you're on your way to explaining why this might be an elegant universe.

 

[funinspace]

The Sun burning out is very, very far from the end of the Universe. The total life spans of main sequence stars like our sun are a "blink of an eye" when compared to the assumed life span of the universe. In fact, our Sun is at least a second generation star, maybe a third or fourth generation star and the gas ejected during its death throes will end up in future generations of stars.

Indeed. Starman's notion that the universe has less time ahead of it than in its past is absurd; should it be the case that there's no 'big rip', as some have proposed. Stars like our sun burn for a relatively short time. Red Dwarfs, however, which appear to be by far the most common type of stars, live for so long that there isn't a single red dwarf in the universe that has even left its toddler years. Some Red Dwarfs have a potential lifespan ranging from 6 to 12 *trillion* years. They will keep on burning long after all the galaxies have lost cohesion.

Well...Starman didn't state that the universe would go poof, he said the earth only has 5 billion years left before Sol burns out.

 

[skepticalbip]

Indeed. Starman's notion that the universe has less time ahead of it than in its past is absurd; should it be the case that there's no 'big rip', as some have proposed. Stars like our sun burn for a relatively short time. Red Dwarfs, however, which appear to be by far the most common type of stars, live for so long that there isn't a single red dwarf in the universe that has even left its toddler years. Some Red Dwarfs have a potential lifespan ranging from 6 to 12 *trillion* years. They will keep on burning long after all the galaxies have lost cohesion.

Well...Starman didn't state that the universe would go poof, he said the earth only has 5 billion years left before Sol burns out.

It is difficult to tell exactly what Starman meant since he has so many erroneous beliefs about scientific understandings and models. But, since the subject was about the universe (its origins and end), I assumed that he, like many Christians, believed that the fate of the Earth defined the fate of the universe. He mentions "heat death" which is a description of the final fate of the universe untold mega-trillions of years into the future as though "heat death" meant our Sun burning out so the end of Earth. A fairly typical Christian understanding is that the creation of the Earth was the beginning of the universe and its end will be the end of the universe.

No, your "still unanswered question" has long since been answered. It had a beginning. The problem was that when Georges Lemaitre posited the "primordial atom," scientists rejected it because they did not want to face the ineluctable implication. It took years to let go of the Steady State Theory, and accept the Big Bang.
Scientifically, it will end with heat death. Earth has only five billion more years before our sun burns out. Less time in front of us than behind.