Big Bang Anybody?

[michel92]

I’ll try my best to answer your last question, Michel:

If God is an uncaused cause, then there is no beginning for Him; this is definitional. God did not come from nothing or anything, He was; He exists from infinity. The Bible testifies to this. Faith in what the Bible has to say is the simple rock upon which Christians and other religions based on the Bible rest. Faith in what scientists have to say about the universe is what atheists will claim they believe because it excludes God as an explanation. This is not to say that Christians and theists are “anti-science”, because they’re not. Isaac Newton was a devout Christian, and believed that science brought him closer to God.

The universe is a completely different animal, though. We can observe the universe in a way that we cannot observe God. For whatever reason, He has decided not to be visible to us in the way that the universe is. Apologists will argue empirically that it is impossible for the universe to be an uncaused cause, because if that were the case, the universe would have disintegrated already (I think it’s the 2nd law of thermonuclear dynamics, but I could be wrong). I’m referring to entropy - if the universe is infinite in age, then why are we still here? If the universe is infinite in age, every particle should be evenly distributed throughout the volume of the universe.

I believe the reasoning for the “ultimate cause” for everything will be self-referential. If the ultimate cause refers to another thing as it’s cause, it is NOT the ultimate cause!

I understand what the concept is, but still, it’s illogical to separate god from reason and logic, for a logical person. I mean, only he can be infinite, nothing else? Why is that? Of course, it’s a faith based notion, but put this into the logic field, and we have a problem.

Again, I cannot speak for all atheists, but I don’t have faith in what scientists say. I don’t have faith at all. I believe in reason and evidence, and some things scientists have proven, but other things, they didn’t. One of those things is the big bang, which is just a theory, and I accept that as it is, a theory. Theists, on the other hand, accept what’s written in the bible, coran, or any other, not as a theory, but as truth. That’s something that I think is important to be distinguished.

Either way, I think this debate is very very interesting, and it’s mind blowing to discuss what was the origin of universe, what existed before it, etc. I simply love it.

If the universe is a computer and God a programmer, then powering on the simulation known as our universe is something coming from nothing, because we can only experience things within the simulation and cannot access the true cause of the simulation which is the computer and etc. outside the simulation. The reason then that god can come from nothing and nothing else can is because god, as programmer, as someone controlling the environment variables of our simulation, is the only one that can break the rules of the simulation. Just as in a videogame, someone will cheat codes can do things the simulation otherwise disallows completely.

I understand, then again, a programmer has a mother, right?

In that realm, what came before god? Where are god (I mean, in which dimension, or space)? I’m not saying this is false, but I’m not saying that this is true either; like the big bang, is just a theory. The thing is, I’m not open to the “god theory” because I see no logic about it, and gods as we know today are creations out of faith.

I don’t know if you know the logical failure of omnipotence (somewhat common, specially among atheists), but, either way: if an omnipotent being can create a rock that is too heavy for even him to lift, than he is not omnipotent, for he cannot lift the rock. On the other hand, if he cannot create a rock this heavy, for he can lift everything, he is not omnipotent, because he cannot create such a rock. Therefore, omnipotence is logically impossible. If there’s a being so powerful that were able to create the universe, but who is not omnipotent, then I don’t know why call him god.

[michel92]

triknighted replied on Fri, May 25 2012 7:48 PM

Friedmanite:

Btw, I posted the OP’s post here :http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/28984/big-bang-anybody. Most of the answerers are actual physicists.

This was the most detailed response I found on that forum:

Obviously we can’t see the Big Bang, and we can’t make another Big Bang in our lab (ignore anyone who tells you that the LHC recreates the conditions of the Big Bang, because it doesn’t). So what we do is to devise theories to explain why the universe looks the way it does, and then we do experiments to compare our theory with the real world. If the experiments match our predictions then we feel confident that our theory is correct.

In this case the theory we use to describe the universe is General Relativity. When we make a few simplifying assumptions about the universe and feed these into General Relativity it tells us that our universe is described by an equation called the FLRW metric. We’ve used this to make predictions about the universe, and so far they’ve all been proved true, so we think the FLRW metric really works.

The key prediction of our theory of the universe is the cosmic microwave background. The WMAP satellite has measured this to extreme accuracy and it perfectly matches what we’d expect.

The thing about the FLRW metric is that we can use it to wind time back and calculate how the universe must have been in the past. If we do this we find the universe gets denser and denser and hotter and hotter, until around 13.7 billion years ago the density and temperature become infinite. This is the point we’ve called the Big Bang.

The problem is that we can’t do calculations when physical properties like density and temperature become infinite. That’s because infinity isn’t a number and you can’t feed it into an equation. This means no-one knows what actually happened at the Big Bang. But we can get very close to it. In fact we can get to within 1 picosecond, that’s 10 −12 seconds after the Big Bang. That’s how back the LHC takes us - to get any further back we’d need an even bigger accelerator, which i guess we’ll build some day.

So when you say:

“a point arrives where the scientists give up”

*well that’s quite correct, and there’s an excellent chance we’ll never know exactly what happened at the moment of the Big Bang itself. However if we can calculate back to 1 picosecond after the Big Bang and get the right answers then you’d have to concede that if our theories tell us that the Big Bang happened then it probably did.

Incredible…I did not know that xD