Ska Lagos Jew Sun Ra

If you look at things in the sense the universe itself is God, and has no particular humanlike aspects, then there's truth to this. However, from a Western point of view, what makes God different from Existence is a 'motive'. There is no centralized motive to the universe. Therefore, Judeochristian theories of God are unlikely.

The big bang MAY be the birth of existence, or a continuation of a cycle.

Then again, I'm beginning to lean to the possibility that time is a human invention and the universe has no beginning or end. In terms of dimension, or time.

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Al Pacino = God

Neapolitan

The Universe is created by God, God is not the Universe.

What do you mean "motive?" The God in Judeo-Christianity is not physical matter, nor contains physical matter, God is a perfect Being that transcends Space and Time.

The big bang is the being of the physical universe, "birth" and "existence" are used to describe a sentient being, the universe is not a sentient being.

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Ska Lagos Jew Sun Ra

Not to the Hindus.

I mean this: God created the universe... why? What is the motive to the universe's creation? If we can assume there's one singular force that's more powerful than everything dictating everything, then what's it's purpose?

On what grounds do you make that assumption?

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Al Pacino = God

Neapolitan

It's all how you look at it, God is not "dictating" everything - that's your assumption. God created human beings and they have free will.

I made the assumption that the big bang is the being of the physical universe based on The Big Bang Theory.

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Ska Lagos Jew Sun Ra

How I look at it, assuming there's a God is an act of redundancy, entirely.

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Al Pacino = God

Mr November

Time is a human invention for sure, but the events that it uses as a measure are very real. If the universe has no beginning or end it is infinite, which I have no objection to, though I wont accept it as unquestionable proof since I've never bothered to try and find any evidence, and I probably wouldn't understand any evidence I might find.

Anyway, the whole idea of God is ridiculous to me. And I was just talking about occam's razor before, so I don't see the point of saying God isn't made of matter or whatever. If he/she/it exists in any way shape or form he/she/it is part of the universe and therefore could not have created it.

Calling the universe itself god/God/gods is also kind of moronic to me. It serves no purpose. And even if there were a god/God/gods which had an intent, it still wouldn't make me care about the intent of said force/entity, because the motives would hold no more weight than my own in any way other than the power that enforces them (a power for which there is no evidence).

RVCA

But evidence very much does point to a universe that had a "beginning", and thus time that had a "beginning". While both scenarios (infinite vs non-infinite) are possible, they are not equally probable.

Mr November

I thought that science pointed to a sequence of events that had a beginning? I know that we can only trace the history of the universe to the big bang, but that isn't to say that nothing happened before it... only that all events afterward were the result of it and that there is no trace of history from before it.

All of that is really over my head but let me know if I'm far off.

RVCA

It does as far as I know, I'm not sure where we disagree

Speculating about "before" the big bang is purely philosophical and ascientific, but that's not to say I don't agree with everything you've said so far.

OT: "Big bang" can mean several things. For a cosmologist, it's a theoretical framework which claims that the Universe was hotter and denser in the past. If you push the predictions to the edge, they predict a singularity, or a single point of infinitely dense matter. We don't know anything about this singularity because we know our laws of physics fail before reaching it. Some speculative theories try to go beyond it and predict things like a bounce, the creation of our Universe or some counterintuitive phenomenons.

For a layman, "big bang" is this singularity itself, considered as the creation of the Universe. There was nothing and BANG the Universe was created. But then there are a lot of strange questions that are the crux of cosmology, and as I said before, they are purely philosophical. What was before the Big Bang? Nothing? How can we create something out of nothing? Did time exist before the Big Bang? What does "before" mean then? (The term "big bang" was invented by Fred Hoyle who didn't believe in this theory and wanted to mock it). It doesn't make a whole lot of sense to sit here and argue about these questions because we don't have any evidence one way or the other. You can change many details and go much deeper depending on how philosophical you are. But what we really know is that there was a period of exponential inflation once, and afterwards the temperature was big enough to explain nucleosynthesis. This is more than a single theory, it's a big paradigm that's very very unlikely to be disproved.

According to some studies I've googled, about 95% of cosmologists agree that the standard model of big bang cosmology is the most plausible way to describe the origins of our universe.