Howard the Duck

as yet again, I reiterate that the universe just appeared suddenly out of nothing and not the Big Bang

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Malaise is THE dominant human predilection.

[MERIT]

-The universe appeared out of nothing.

-The universe has ALWAYS been, as time is simply a creation by man.

-God created everything.

All of these theories are equally as likely, and equally as far fetched.

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.

jackhammer

Thank you! This thread is not meant for theological debate. By all means create a separate thread but I wanted this thread to be based upon scientific observations and that is what I want to read about regarding other peoples opinions.

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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.

cardboard adolescent

happy stumbling:



Spoiler:

The universe and everything in the universe is a fractal black hole, the universe experiences itself by drawing smaller versions of itself into itself, this is what is known as gravity.

This information crosses the event horizon and then radiates outward, which is known as electricity.

As information travels along this continuous, circular path, it changes. This makes the circle a coil, and results in a universe that is eternal, always different, always the same, in which it is possible to have the illusion of a beginning and end, defined by crossing the event horizon.

The entire scientific enterprise has, until now, been defined by dissection, which is actually explosion. The idea behind dissecting something is that we will understand it better by reducing it to its components. What we are really doing is taking a cohesive unity and blowing it up so that the next fractal level of cohesive unities is revealed. We continue to do this, hoping to get to a bottom level so that we can work our way up, but we never get there.

Explosion is directly related to electromagnetism, whereas implosion is related to gravity. This is why we do not have a good scientific understanding of gravity. The method of implosion is that of meditation, which is the other side of science which many still discard. The method of implosion is to dive deeper and deeper into your own personal subjective experience of reality, and to experience it on subtler and subtler levels. Only this method can reveal that the universe is an infinite fractal in which everything is a manifestation of one consciousness.

This inward journey strengthens the gravitational field which makes a person 'deep' or 'heavy' and as the gravitational field strengthens so does the electromagnetic field, which is the 'shadow' of the gravitational field, and so this person becomes more magnetic, draws others to them into molecular structures, and becomes able to start an organization or even a religion. This is also why people like Jesus or Buddha are often depicted with very powerful and colorful auras. They are essentially supernovas.

Because everything is a constantly-changing fractal, the same patterns play out on every 'level' of reality but their outward appearance is always different. Hence, if we understand the patterns of personal growth and social evolution we can understand the pattern of everything in the universe, the tao.

Ultimately, this leads to the realization that all intellectual knowing is pointless because the flow of the universe cannot be stopped and everything that happens is a part of it. Since this flow will take us exactly where we want to go, there is nothing we have to do, and focusing too much on understanding the flow will actually cause us suffering, because ultimately the flow is incomprehensible.

The ultimate illusion of analysis is that there is an in-flow, gravity, and an out-flow, electricity, but this is just the clearest, paradoxical manifestation of mind: really, there is only flow.

Guybrush

Is this something you personally buy into?

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Something Completely Different

Urban Hat€monger ?

I know that a big bang in my pants is capable of creating life.

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