h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Is time linear?Or did the future all ready happen?Isn't the past present and future all one and the same?
If time is not linear wouldn't God be able to know the future?

Yes, God would. And an omnipotent & omniscient God wouldn't need to perform this experiment/duty/whatever.

As existing as a part of someone else's dream: do dreams have consciousness? Why is this dream so linear to us?

No one can prove anyone else's consciousness. Only their own.

As for the question that time is a solid: perspective. Time is what it appears to be to us. We cannot change it, and see it as so. A being outside time could change it, and undoubtably has a further dimension it cannot change.

-jb

Well maybe God, in all his omnipotence, found that his omniscience made life too boring, and removed it from himself.

What point exactly are we arguing? That God exists, or that God exists exactly as the Bible says? The Bible, even if it was originally written by God (which I strongly doubt, but this is besides the point) has definitely lost something in the translation (ie why would an omnipotent God demand so many sacrifices as are mentioned in the Old Testament?) and so probably isn't the text we should be talking about.

Why must we start with the question "Is there and omnipotent and omniscience being?" rather than the question "Is there a God?"

Must God be both omnipotent and omniscient? I think omnipresent alone would be a good Godly definition.

Here we go...

An act of creation, by definition, implies a creator. So we have to ask ourselves: was the universe created? And the answer is: Maybe. Pretty good odds, in fact.

The universe, as we understand it, acts as an entropic force. It's spreading out, and cooling down. And over the last five years it has become increasingly evident that it will continue to do this forever.

The only possible way in which the universe could exist without some kind of anti-entropic "push" at some point is if were enclosed and null-entropic, that is, if it were a paradox.

Put it this way: if the universe doesn't collapse back in upon itself at some point, there probably is a "God" of some sort somewhere in the past.

Now some people might say "But wait, that proves nothing. Isn't it equally likely that the cosmic egg simply sat around for an undisclosed amount of time, then exploded? Either way, you're dealing with impossible to prove infinitives." And that would be very correct, if it weren't for one tiny problem: "Why did the Big Bang?" There couldn't be any internal forces, as there was no space or time for them to act in. And there couldn't have been any external forces (Because otherwise, what's the point? The universe contains everything there is, including an infinite number of parralell twins.) Quantum mechanics even break down at that size, ruling out the theory of uncertainty.

When you try to explain the beginning of the universe using only science, God starts looking pretty damn good.

When you say that the universe was created by a sentient being, it begs the question "Who created God?" And who created him, and who created that guy, and who created...

Einstein proved that space is curved. Imagine space as shaped like an egg. All the matter of the universe is gathered at one end of it, and the overwhelming mass of it all causes it to destabilize and explode. You have your Big Bang. Now if space were linear, those particles would continue to drift infinitely apart, and never see each other again. But space is curved, so the particles seperate for a time, and then begin to come back together at the other end of the egg. All life anywhere is instantly destroyed as the mother of all supernovas forms again... until it explodes, and the cycle begins anew. By the time the universe begins to contract, however, humans should have experienced an Extinction Level Event, and, barring technology to send people to colonize othere planets, a distant memory in the span of the universe.

"If the universe doesn't collapse back in upon itself at some point, there probably is a "God" of some sort somewhere in the past." - Fear not, it will collapse again.

This is precisely why atheism is no more 'valid' than theism. Each one requires at least some measure of faith. Agnostics are the only ones who can really claim to refuse faith. To say that God does not exist because there is no evidence for Him is quite frankly ridiculous. An absence of proof almost never proves the opposite. I could just as easily say that the Great Green Arkleseizure theory is the truth because there is no evidence to the contrary.

Therefore, atheists have just as much of a burden of finding proof for their views as do theists. You can't just say that there is no God because none of the religions of the world work (in some peoples' opinions). The failure of a religion does little more than show the futility of that particular religion, not the nonexistence of God.

The problem of evil is only a problem assuming that God is not doing anything to combat evil. From a Christian standpoint, God has been continually following a (successful) plan to destroy evil once and for all -- this plan reached its fullest in the person of Jesus. Of course, it takes some faith to accept that God knows what He is doing in this plan...

It's okay to say that no one created God. He exists outside of time and therefore does not need a beginning. It's not okay to say that about the cosmos since we know it had a beginning. Incidentally, before about the turn of the twentieth century, scientists were quite ready to say that no one created the universe; that it was eternal, which is precisely what you're arguing about God.

I'm not more than a dabbler in physics, so forgive me if my argument is flawed...

It seems to me that, assuming that space is curved like you said, there is no reason for there to be more than a handful of successive big bangs (at most). Let me explain: The first big bang... um... bangs, sending all of the matter in the cosmos hurtling towards the other side of the egg. It continues on until it reaches the widest point of the egg, then it starts collapsing again. Now, the second law of thermodynamics says that nature likes disorder, right? Therefore, the closer those particles get together, the more they're going to resist going back to their highly ordered pre-bang conditions. The universe as a whole will not go from disorder to order. So, the momentum and gravitational forces of the particles shouldn't be enough to carry them all the way to the other side. They should just slow down more and more as they get closer together, eventually forcing themselves back to the middle of the egg where they can all live happily ever after in as much entropy as they can muster.

My understanding of modern theories is that most physicists don't think that the universe will collapse. I could be wrong, though. I'll try to dig up some sources if you like.

The second law of thermodynamics was concieved by humans while the universe is (aparently) expanding. Naturally, it would seem the universe tends towards disorder.

An action causing the creation of the universe does not require thought. It doesn't require an omnipotent, omniscient God.

And unless your definition of God is: 'The universe', God is not omnipresent.

-jb

-An action causing the creation of the universe does not require thought.

...but it does require some sort of catalyst, which no one seems able to adequately explain. If we assume that the pre-bang form of the universe (all matter compressed into the head of a pin) existed ad infinitum before the bang, why would it have suddenly decided to expand? It was quite happy not to explode for all that time.

"An action causing the creation of the universe does not require thought. " - Good for you, good Doctor, there is hope for you yet.

In the model of the universe that I gave you, there is no beginning or ending... just an endlessly repeating cycle of death and rebirth. The Big Bang that we refer to is only the most recent one. As Robert Jordan would say, "There are no beginnings or endings in the Wheel of Time. But it was *a* beginning."

Actually... no.

For a long, long time scientists were operating on the assumption that the universe was both curved and closed. They had a few pretty good reasons for suspecting this, but mostly they just liked the fact that it was so damn neat. It's so damn self-suffucuent and easy to calculate! That should have been their first clue that they might be wrong.

There are three possible states for the universe to occupy: open, closed, and flat. We know it's not flat (How we know is hard to explain). In an open universe, everthing expands forever. In a closed one, everything eventually falls back in upon itself to start over again. Theoretical predictions showed the universe to be just slightly closed. Actual observations showed it to be flat. Very, very flat. Even flatter than we used to believe. We are rapidly approaching a discovery point where even if a universe was technically closed, it might not necessarilly have the practical mass required to snag all the expanding bits.

There are numerous other problems with your theory, like the Dallen paradox, or the enormous inertial/anti-inertial problems inherent in a looping universe. But all theories of the creation of the universe have such problems. Or, to put it another way, the universe isn't obeying it's own damn rules.

That lack, I suspect, is because we don't know all the rules yet. We haven't even begun to learn them. Trying to give shape to something so vast is nearly impossible, because we can't step aside and observe. Lack of perspective. We can only observe the tiny bits that we can see from the perspective of this tiny planet, and we've had an eyeblink's time worth of data collection to analyze.

However, all this is academic, because we have been working on the assumtion that if the universe keeps on expanding forever then God probably exists. But scientists have many theories as to why the universe would keep expanding - mostly involving the "dark matter" which, although it could make up as much as 90% of the universe, we know very little about. What could it be doing? We just don't know. Just like we just don't know whether God exists. And, like I keep saying, we never will.

Now that I don't believe...

Never? Never is a very, very big word, one I don't really use too often. Put it this way: in all of human history, we have found exactlly one unsolvable problem. Uno. And that's death. Entropy is insurmountable, but it's the ONLY thing that's insurmountable. The C-constant? I can name three ways to travel faster than light right off the top of my head. Heisenberg's principle? Well, granted, you can't ever solve the electron (probably.) But you can sidestep it. Last year I even heard a theory on a possible means to enter black holes without being crushed. Does an open universe prove the existence of God? No, not really. But in trying to explain the creation of an entropic universe we find ourself turning towards an outside source of either matter, energy, or something else, and that's a major problem: The universe, by definition, has no outside.

Well at least, not within my lifetime. The universe's definition is flawed. It has no outside, and yet it's expanding. So where is it expanding to?

Back to the creation. If the creation was the stuff of a sentient being, then unless the being (or beings) so choose, we will never know they exist. If the creation was just a freak of nature, and let's face it, this is just as likely with our supreme lack of information, then we won't know that it was. There is also a third option: that the universe does not exist at all, and this is all a hallucination, or an illusion, sort of like The Matrix or Red Dwarf - the episodes "Better Than Life" and "Back to Reality". But this is very similar to the "There is a God" theory, because it suggests that the universe was created by a sentient being - the Agents in the Matrix, the programmers in Better than Life and Back to Reality, and yourself if you are high on psychadelic drugs. But I feel that none of these help define a creation, ie a start of it all.

I reckon Terry Pratchett came close to an explanation, but since there's no proof, I remain unbiased.

The idea of a sentient creator is so far out in left field that it requires proof. The absence of evidence to support that claim is evidence of absence... there is no God. If a single bit of credible evidence to support him were available, I would revise my stance, but until that time, the full burden of proof lies with the believer.

Proof is in the puddin'

Why make such a commitment? Saying absence of evidence is evidence of absence does not apply to God, just as it does not apply to the JFK assassination, and the absence of evidence concerning evolution theory.

While the following may not quite count as evidence, they are certainly some very strong indicators that the cosmos was created. (Much of this is courtesy of "Show Me God" by Fred Heeren.)

I'm not going to go into much detail because I don't want to be writing for the next several hours. However, I'd be happy to elaborate if someone wants me to. Heeren calls the following "unnatural selections" -- characteristics of the universe that are inexplicably favorable to life and the cosmos as we see it. Basically, if any of these were even slightly different, life (or the universe itself) would not exist. Here we go:

1. the existence of elements necessary for life -- specifically, the improbable formation and resonance of carbon, liquid water, etc.

2. the ratio of proton to electron mass

3. the relative strengths of the four fundamental forces

4. protein formation (Fred Hoyle and Chadra Wickramasinghe calculated that the odds against the formation of all the necessary proteins for life are 1 in 10 to the 40,000th. There are about 10 to the 80th particles in the universe, so this is really really improbable.)

5. balance between gravity and electromagnetic force in stars -- gravity holds stars together, but EM forces allow them to radiate (any deviation from a small range of balances makes them inhospitable to life)

6. the inexplicably low entropy state of the universe at the beginning

7. balance between universal expansion and collapse -- it is (or was) expanding slowly enough to allow for galaxy formation, but not so slowly that it collapsed immediately after the Big Bang

8. slight excess of matter over antimatter -- why weren't equal amounts of matter and antimatter existent in the beginning (leading to total annihilation of everything)?

9. balance between centripetal force and gravitational force in galaxies -- an improper balance would lead to the galaxy either dissipating or crashing in on itself

There is also the question of why there is anything at all. Quantum physics says that matter can be spontaneously generated out of nothing, but it only lasts for a Planck time interval (10 to the -43rd second). Obviously, the universe has been around for longer than Planck time, so all that matter could not have been spontaneously created naturally.

Basically, what I am saying is that the universe appears to exist only under a very strict set of rules that allow its continued existence (as well as ours).

Of course, there is always the failure of evolution to explain the creation of life. I might accept that it can explain the development of life (if I must), but it just can't explain how the whole process got started. Things are just too darned improbable to be random.