These memes are very resilient because they have had a lot of time for evolution. For a very long time, theology was the most discussed and debated topic there was. It made up the vast majority of printed work before the enlightenment. With that much focus, they became very refined in the intellectual circles. I would venture to say that the tenuous nature of most “intellectual” God memes is that part of intellectual discourse requires a measured nuanced approach. You can still see this in arguments made by people like Skinner.

At the same time, God memes had a lot of time to develop among the “common” people. These memes were not as likely to be developed amongst equals but rather handed down from religious leaders. Although they were not as subject to debate, they still had to evolve in order to compete with other theologies and the current economic and political landscape. For example, the “holy father” meme works very well in an environment that is trying to promote the “divine right of kings” meme. The “hell” meme also makes a lot more sense if it was developed as something that was not necessarily subjected series intellectual debate, but rather as a meme that could be understood on a visceral level by the uneducated. You still see these memes in the evangelical fundamentalist community. They make zero rational sense but they were never meant to. Also, since they explicitly reject rationalism, they have a habit of spinning off even crazier memes like pushed by this guy.

And I am entitled to hold my opinion: “I define God as the author and guarantor of the laws of science - the agent that (constantly) “breathes fire into the equations, making a universe for them to describe.”

In light of the recent discussion above such a God could be eternal, atemporal or temporal and “if the universe ’started to exist “from” nothing’, then a self-consistent God too could have started to exist from nothing, with the universe; for ‘nothing’ would have prevented it happening.”

Regards,
Garth

When something starts to exist (without anything causing it), it is caused by nothing
(that exists).

Can we say it is caused by nothing? The multiple meanings of “nothing” is confusing. We should not think of this as “nothing” doing an act of causation. Nothing can’t “do” anything.

Nothing only affords a logical explanation for existence. Saying that nothing is a “sufficient reason” is misleading. Well, it depends on how the word “reason” is understood. Sorry!

Eternal “stuff”: As you know there are also other “reasons” for rejecting the eternal.

anything eternal gives us no explanation. So it is not logical and must be rejected.

For all the reasons I have given above I do not agree with this conclusion, even though the universe, God etc., in fact, may turn out not be eternal.

a sufficient reason for existence is that it starts to exist “from” nothing.

Is not this an example of a ‘non reason’ rather than ’sufficient reason’?

Garth

And again, anything eternal gives us no explanation. So it is not logical and must be rejected.

The point is we do know that BB is the start of it all, coming from nothing. Anything
else is excess baggage. Until observations might say otherwise.

However, I a bit fed up of this now. As the quote shows!

Oh man, as long as physicists believe that there can be anything eternal explaining existence, how can we say to religious people there is no eternal god how (who?) created the universe?

I thought I would respond in this thread as the subject here is ‘God’ rather than a discussion of the physical theorizing about the pre BB state.

You seem to have an emotional commitment to your “it starts to exist “from” nothing” conjecture.

First, as I was saying above, the majority of the effort today in pondering the origins of our present universe is to see it as having precedents. Most would think that an eternal universe in whatever form is actually more easy to hold from an atheistic point of view rather than one that had a definite beginning at a first moment of time. Fred Hoyle certainly expressed this opinion over the Steady State versus Big Bang controversy in the 1950’s and ’60’s.

This is not necessarily the case, as in Stephen Hawking’s initial condition hypothesis: “The only initial condition is that there is no initial condition”, He conceived the topology of the BB itself as like that of the North Pole, “What came before the BB?” being the same sort of question as “What is north of the North Pole?” He used a concept of imaginary time to evade an actual singularity and to produce a spherically connected causal web. There does not seem to be much mileage in this approach at present, although it would be consistent with your argument.

However, whatever our view on the origin, or otherwise, of physical time may be, it says nothing about the existence of ‘God’ or not. A significant theological movement today is that of Process Theology in which God changes with time.

So in this view, if God is necessarily bound up with the physical universe, as the author and guarantor of its scientific laws, and if the universe ’started to exist “from” nothing’, then a self-consistent God too could have started to exist from nothing, with the universe; for ‘nothing’ would have prevented it happening.

I find that most religious believers are actually happier with the idea of a non-eternal universe, so your comment quoted above would not seem to apply.

Regards,
Garth

The universe started from nothing and will expand forever.

This was a one off.

That conclusion is model dependent. Cosmological models change with the season, wait for the next SNe Ia type discovery. However, even if this universe is expanding ‘forever’ it does not mean that there were no precedents to it.

In the eternal inflation model, or in Smolin’s Cosmic Natural Selection hypothesis, such universes as ours are constantly budding off one another’for ever’.

Actually I like the once off ‘universe’, it is a very Western, rather than Eastern way of looking at time, but then I am from the ‘West’ and that preference is probably just a prejudice of mine…

Garth

This was a one off. Enjoy while you can.

This universe might be the only self-consistent “thing” that can start to exist “from” nothing. But there may also be others, I don’t know.

Nothing explains a lot!

Add to this the impossibility of eternal existence (for a number of reasons). One is that eternal existence has no explanation. If we insist on logic we are forced to reject it.

Why eternal existence instead of nothing is the one you should explain.

It is you who “ends up believing in anything” for ‘anything’ can also come from nothing, if there is ‘nothing’ to prevent it.

I would see a sufficient reason for the existence of a physical object at a time tn the causal components at time tn-1 that formed the object at time tn.

Let us look at concepts of time, here I have ordered events in a causal web along a time-like axis tn, tn+1, tn+2 etc. In the standard GR theory the existence of a singularity at t0 appears to mark a first instant and indeed the universe may have simply have started to exist “from” nothing.

If that were so then one interpretation of the data might reasonably be, “What a miracle!”

However this is not the only possibility.

Many workers in the field believe that the existence of the singularity signifies the breakdown of the GR theory at this event, and as an alternative, suggest that through the Planck era quantum effects create a bounce, a tunnel from a previously existing universe. Thus the existence of our universe in its earliest moments is derived from the existence of a previous one, and that from an even earlier one ad infinitum.

A further possibility might be to recognise different definitions and ways of measuring time itself. If We can define two physically significant times as follows:

Sample two photons, one emitted by a caesium atom the other sampled from the peak intensity of the CMB radiation.

The first, an “atomic” second, is defined as the duration of exactly 9.19263177×109 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom.

The second, a “photonic” second, is defined as the duration of exactly 1.604×1011 periods of the radiation corresponding to the peak of the CMB black body spectrum.

Both systems of time measurement are physically significant and agree with each other in the present era, although they will diverge from each other at other times.

When compared to the atomic standard, the “photonic” clock in the linearly expanding model, extrapolated back to the earliest moments of the BB, diverges to (-) inifinity as atomic time t->0.

Thus in this model we can recover “an infinitely old universe” within an apparently finite (as measured by an “atomic” clock) BB paradigm.

Furthermore, if ephemeris time is that measured in the “photonic” system, as it is in a certain suggested alternatives to GR, then the Pioneer spacecraft will appear to have an anomalous sunwards acceleration of cH or 6.69×10-8 cm.sec-2; such an acceleration aP = (8.74±1.33)×10-8 cm.sec-2 is actually observed. (Allowing for drag and radiation non-inertial forces and uncertainty in H.)

Thus in one time system the universe started to exist “from” nothing, and in the other it has always existed. Both descriptions of time lead to the same self consistent and ‘existing’ universe, but it the second perspective on time there is no explanation for the universe’s existence, it always ‘was’.

Garth

Postulating anything that has no explanation for its existence, where does that leave you? You end up believing in anything.

We need a logical explanation for existence. Nothing else will do.

You give your explanation, just keep it logical. Then you can convince me.

Garth

We cannot explain existence using existence. That’s circular logic. We could choose to believe that stuff (like God or math or the universe) just exist like you do. That means we are taking a position (without any proof!) that no explanation is possible. This is what I would call stupidity (sorry!). Why on Earth should there be no explanation for a simple question “why something rather than nothing”?

So simply avoiding the circular logic and refusing to accept the “no-explanation-possible”, one is forced to conclude that something comes “from” nothing.

And again, a reality that can’t be explained (also meaning it is not self-consistent) does not exist.

Well, prove that the no-explanation-possible theory is correct, and I’ll change my mind.

Firstly, given that you think you have a logically watertight case that proves everything had to come from ‘nothing’, that it just ‘jumped out’ of the void in full working order complete with a set of mathematics, physics, biology etc., I think actually the onus is on you to prove your assertions that lead to that conclusion.

The assertion I find most problematic is your conviction that the self-consistency of a system requires the existence of an explanation of that system’s existence.

This of course begs the question of what constitutes an explanation (“sufficient reason”) for existence. That notwithstanding, I can envisage a mathematical system, such as an arithmetic, that is self-consistent but the existence of which is left unexplained, for it is simply there (’true’).

Secondly, would not reality itself be self-inconsistent by your own argument because its existence had no ‘apriori’ cause or explanation? The fact that ‘in nothing’ there was ‘nothing’ to prevent it from coming into existence does not in itself constitute an explanation for its existence. That is why I found your conclusion absurd, in the sense of the argument being self-contradictory.

Garth

I have already proven my stuff:

“1. How can something be consistent while not being explainable? If something cannot be logically explained, even in principle, it will be non-logical. That means again it will not be self-consistent.

2. If a sufficient reason for the existence of reality cannot be given (even in principle), by the same argument the existence of reality will be illogical and contradict itself. So the conclusion is that there is a reason.

The only way to break the circular logic around the question of why reality exists, is to realize that it comes “from” nothing. ”

This disproves your stuff, by the way.

your whole argument and its conclusion hangs on the assertion:

For something to exist a sufficient reason must be afforded

Prove it.

I make the following assertion:
‘A thing can exist without there being a sufficient reason for its existence, it always has been in existence and always will exist’, it simply ‘is’.

Disprove this statement.

Garth