Orthos wrote:

Lucius wrote:

Orthos wrote:

Lucius wrote:

Universe in a lab is still more reasonable than a magical person - it's theoretically possible.

So is god,

(Just walk away Lucius we've been here before...)

Oh I see, just ignore my argument just because you've lost.
I think that just shows how ignorant you really are. You didn't even read that link I referenced, did you?

Calm down. There's no need to start personalizing and whining is there? Basically, if you haven't got anything worthwhile posting, please don't litter the thread, would you?

Lucius wrote:

Orthos wrote:

Lucius wrote:

Orthos wrote:

Lucius wrote:

Universe in a lab is still more reasonable than a magical person - it's theoretically possible.

So is god,

(Just walk away Lucius we've been here before...)

Oh I see, just ignore my argument just because you've lost.
I think that just shows how ignorant you really are. You didn't even read that link I referenced, did you?

Calm down. There's no need to start personalizing and whining is there? Basically, if you haven't got anything worthwhile posting, please don't litter the thread, would you?

As if this ^^ isn't an inflammatory post! Reported.

I smell tu quoque reeking in this thread.

I'm expecting my cousin to arrive at 9 pm tonight and this time I'm going to be prepared. I'm certainly going to be using the tips from Shrunk and Darkchilde, I'm looking forward to it...

We'll see.

Lucius wrote:

tnjrp wrote:

You are probably refering to the Ekpyrotic Model of the universe as originally proposed by Paul J. Steinhardt and Neil Turok? It's an interesting take on the long-thought-fallen-by-the-wayside cyclic universe that has been developed towards presenting a solid model of a universe that is actually without a begining or an end. It is not however universally accepted, in part because relies somewhat on concepts that are themselves untested. Here's Dr. Steinhardt with a brief introduction to the original concept:
http://wwwphy.princeton.edu/~steinh/npr/

I gave it a read. I also checked on the wiki. It says about some problems with the theory. I'm not to versed in the subject so I understand little.

However, there are major problems with the model. Foremost among them is that colliding branes are not understood by string theorists, and nobody knows if the scale invariant spectrum will be destroyed by the big crunch, or even what happens when two branes collide. Moreover, like cosmic inflation, while the general character of the forces (in the ekpyrotic scenario, a force between branes) required to create the vacuum fluctuations is known, there is no candidate from particle physics. Moreover, the scenario uses some essential ideas from string theory, principally extra dimensions, branes and orbifolds.[citation needed] [7]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclic_Mod ... urok_model
What does all mean?

Another possibility is the no-boundary proposal of Hawking and co

Lucius wrote:I'm expecting my cousin to arrive at 9 pm tonight and this time I'm going to be prepared. I'm certainly going to be using the tips from Shrunk and Darkchilde, I'm looking forward to it...

We'll see.

Let us know how it went.

Lucius wrote:Has science, as of yet, solved the need for God?

It isn't remotely clear that there is such a need.

Do cosmologists or physicists have a model, for our universe, which clearly rules out the existence of God?

No, and nor should they. As far as science is concerned, the idea of god is irrelevant. Until some principle is elucidated that actually requires a god, there is no reason to invoke one. What we do have is models that have explanatory power and don't require a deity.

I've heard of something called the Ekpyrotic Situation but it has not been properly explained to me.

The ekpyrotic (out of fire), or 'brane-worlds' hypothesis is one interesting candidate. Darkchilde has touched upon it above. The collision of the branes (short for membranes, but poly-dimensional, rather than two-dimensional like a membrane) provides the energy, and the matter/energy equivalence provided by Einstein does the rest. Here's a video clip of Neil Turok himself explaining it:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8c1Dy-Cx4s[/youtube]

I would appreciate any helpful information since I'm in an argument (for want of a better word) with a peer, who still believes in God and often cites that there is "no explanation" as to how or why the universe is here.

Well, how is a useful question, and it's really the only question that science is interested in. Why, however, is not a question for science, and nor can it be. Science doesn't deal in why, only how. When a scientist asks 'why', what he's actually doing is rephrasing a 'how' or 'by what mechanism'.

Lucius wrote:The argument I'm having isn't why people need to believe in God (hope for an afterlife and so on) but whether there should be a God.

Well, this makes the common mistake of running from 'is' to 'ought' with no justification. Again, this isn't a question that science is really interested in, so it isn't asking it.

A God that apparently needs to be there to make the universe.

Apparently? To whom?

In any event, this is classic 'god of the gaps', and a categorical misunderstanding of what the word 'universe' really means. The universe is 'all that exists' including, if such a thing has any basis in reality, any deity. The universe = existence. Whatever exists is part of the universe.

Now, you may well hear cosmologists using the word to apply to that which arose from the big bang, but there are several reasons why they do this. Firstly, when cosmologists talk, they're usually talking to other cosmologists, or to people who know what they mean when they're using the word, so a lack of rigour in this instance is not usually a problem. Secondly, they aren't used to having their words equivocated by the credulous, or at least not to their faces.

The history of the word actually presents all the clues you need. When the word was first applied, it was thought that that which could be seen with the naked eye was all that there was. Indeed, this was the case until the early 20th Century. When Edwin Hubble first trained his eye on what were thought to be stars, he discovered that they were actually galaxies, so the universe suddenly became much bigger. The word still meant 'all that exists', though. Nowadays, we understand that the universe is expanding, and that at one point in the past all the energy/matter in the universe was concentrated in a very small area, or more accurately, that the space containing it was very small. After the first formulation of the big bang model and arising from Relativity, it was thought that, due to the inextricability of space and time, and the proper treatment of them as a single entity, that everything, including time, began at the big bang. That's no longer the case and, in expert circles, it hasn't been for quite some time. We have several models on the table that treat time as an underpinning property of existence, and not confined only to our local cosmic expansion. The ekpyrotic model is one. Alan Guth's inflationary model is another. The former is, in principle, testable, owing to predictions of blue-shifted gravitational waves, that may turn up in the LHC's gravitational wave detectors if the achieved energies are high enough to probe to the relevant scales. Ultimately, though, time is a feature of the universe, as are whatever dimensions exist, extended or otherwise. What this means is that, in real terms, we have no justification for asserting that time began at the big bang. Even if there really was a singularity as pictured by most when discussing such things (a singularity is really more like a mathematical anomaly than an actual physical object, although the actual physical object is not falsified), and even given the idea that time stands still at the singularity owing to the huge relativistic mass, that does not mean that time doesn't pass, only that the singularity doesn't experience it. After all, there are entities inside our cosmic expansion that don't experience the passage of time, such as photons and, indeed, all particles lacking rest mass.

Alan Guth, proponent of one of the two front-running models currently on the table for cosmic instantiation, has this to say:

Alan Guth wrote:So far, it's been made to sound, I think for the purposes of simplifying things, that until the cyclic model, all scientists had believed that the big bang was the origin of time itself. That idea is certainly part of the classic theory of the big bang, but it's an idea which I think most cosmologists have not taken seriously in quite a while. That is, the idea that there's something that happened before what we call the big bang has been around for quite a number of years... In what I would regard as the conventional version of the inflationary theory, the Big Bang was also not in that theory the origin of everything but rather one had a very long period of this exponential expansion of the universe, which is what inflation means, and, at different points, different pieces of this inflating universe had stopped inflating and become what I sometimes call pocket universes.

He goes on to say:

What we call the Big Bang was almost certainly not the actual origin of time in either of the theories that we’re talking about. … The main difference I think [between the inflationary theory and Neil and Paul's theory] is the answer to the question of what is it that made the universe large and smooth everything out. … The inflationary version of cosmology is not cyclic. … It goes on literally forever with new universes being created in other places. The inflationary prediction is that our region of the universe would become ultimately empty and void but meanwhile other universes would sprout out in other places in this multiverse.

The argument with this fellow of mine, usually boils down to, "we have no explanation why the universe exists, therefore God did it."

Well, the completely invalid 'why' aside, what your friend is actually saying is, 'We have no explanation for the existence of the cosmos, so I'll make one up, or borrow one that somebody else made up'. Not a very compelling argument. We don't have a rigorous explanation for the mechanism behind gravity, so it's invisible pixies holding everything down and keeping the planets in their orbits. When framed like that, it's clear what a ridiculous line of thought it is.

It is somewhat irritating because once I hit that wall, you can't really seem to go beyond it with this argument.

That's because he's not actually interested in what you have to say. This is often the case. There is no point debating those who are dyed-in-the-wool, other than for the practice. You'll find that most of the critical thinkers here don't actually engage in debates with the credulous, they simply talk past them at the onlookers. It is the undecided that are the target. The apologists for the various formulations of nonsensical wibble are merely grist for the mill, for the most part, or comic relief.

The person I'm "up against" is a Jehovah's Witness. Sadly this man is my cousin. He recently came back from abroad and, after contacting my parents - who seem to think he can "help" my atheism - he won't stop making regular visits.

That's probably because they think his arguments are good. They aren't, of course. They never are.

To make it worse, he always thinks he wins the arguments.

Welcome to the concept of pigeon chess.

Lucius wrote:Understandably but that won't work on someone who rejects evolution and believes Adam & Eve are the first people.

Indeed. If he rejects evolution, the you're going to struggle to explain to him that there were not really any such things as the 'first people'. Some people don't get the concept of gradients. Just in case, though, here's another video, dealing with this specific point:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rb5OEw_q-II[/youtube]

Lucius wrote:

However, there are major problems with the model. Foremost among them is that colliding branes are not understood by string theorists, and nobody knows if the scale invariant spectrum will be destroyed by the big crunch, or even what happens when two branes collide. Moreover, like cosmic inflation, while the general character of the forces (in the ekpyrotic scenario, a force between branes) required to create the vacuum fluctuations is known, there is no candidate from particle physics. Moreover, the scenario uses some essential ideas from string theory, principally extra dimensions, branes and orbifolds.[citation needed] [7]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclic_Mod ... urok_model
What does all mean?

All this is really saying is what is already known, namely that the mathematics at the bounce (when the branes collide) is incomplete. One of the reasons for this is simply that it's rooted in M-Theory, a discipline in which infinities abound. This is much akin to the singularity. Indeed, the mathematical anomaly of the singularity is a lot like this, because all the solutions seem to yield infinities. One of the reasons for searching for a unification of General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics in a quantum theory of gravity is precisely to deal with some of these infinities.

Lizard_King wrote:

Lucius wrote:I'm expecting my cousin to arrive at 9 pm tonight and this time I'm going to be prepared. I'm certainly going to be using the tips from Shrunk and Darkchilde, I'm looking forward to it...

We'll see.

Let us know how it went.

My cousin did show up and this time he wanted to carry on talking about a point which had been made last time. The issue was to do with evolution and he had brought a Watchtower article to back himself up with, which was all about how “wrong” evolution is. I had previously said that if micro-evolution can (and does) happen – which he seems open to accept – then it is only logical that macro-evolution can occur through a build up of lots of micro-evolutions.
His rebuttal came in the form of talking me through this magazine which “revealed” that scientists have never managed to reproduce macro-evolution through radiation or other means.
After he had gone on about it, I contended that even if that was the case, it does not mean you should just fill the gap in with god and claim: “God did it.” It was at that point when I brought up the example of Zeus and other gods. I reminded him that long ago, people attributed storms and other phenomena to gods just because they didn’t understand or know what was actually going on. I pointed out that we would now dismiss such superstitions.
Despite this, my cousin still claimed it was “more reasonable” to believe in his god because of biblical prophecies being “fulfilled.” (He started to talk about 1914 and all the fancy date calculations that show it is so)
After he had finished I asked him if his trusted Watchtower society had ever made any mistakes with prophecies – fortunately he admitted that they indeed have. So I brought up the Deuteronomy 18: 20 -22 Prophet test. He gave it a slow read through.
I concluded that his trusted organization which he clung on to, were obviously ‘false prophets.’
Not to long after this my cousin hastily ended the discussion (he apparently remembered he needed to be somewhere ) but he said he’d “look into it” whatever that means.
In conclusion I now feel quite

Life is good.

Macroevolution? Ask him if he's ever seen a dodo.

Extinction of a species constitutes macroevolution, because it is a change in allele frequencies at or above species level, which is what macroevolution is. Any instance of extinction is macroevolution, because alleles go from a frequency of 'some' to a frequency of 'none'.

Case closed.

I think what skeptics have succeeded in doing is demonstrating the infeasibility of the Abrahamic god, as well as pointing out that the existence of any deity as an explanation for our existence is problematic at best. We have not, however, succeeded in bridging the gap between intellectuals and lay public in this regard.

Lucius wrote:[snip]
I concluded that his trusted organization which he clung on to, were obviously ‘false prophets.’
Not to long after this my cousin hastily ended the discussion (he apparently remembered he needed to be somewhere ) but he said he’d “look into it” whatever that means.
In conclusion I now feel quite

Life is good.

Now that sounds suspiciously like a retreat...

Well done, mate.

Lizard_King wrote:

Lucius wrote:[snip]
I concluded that his trusted organization which he clung on to, were obviously ‘false prophets.’
Not to long after this my cousin hastily ended the discussion (he apparently remembered he needed to be somewhere ) but he said he’d “look into it” whatever that means.
In conclusion I now feel quite

Life is good.

Now that sounds suspiciously like a retreat...

Well done, mate.

Lucius wrote:


Good stuff, thanks.
The argument I'm having isn't why people need to believe in God (hope for an afterlife and so on) but whether there should be a God. A God that apparently needs to be there to make the universe. The argument with this fellow of mine, usually boils down to, "we have no explanation why the universe exists, therefore God did it."
It is somewhat irritating because once I hit that wall, you can't really seem to go beyond it with this argument.

The person I'm "up against" is a Jehovah's Witness. Sadly this man is my cousin. He recently came back from abroad and, after contacting my parents - who seem to think he can "help" my atheism - he won't stop making regular visits. To make it worse, he always thinks he wins the arguments. It usually goes from this to and to then finally he will be



Help?

This is the best example of writing I've ever seen with the use of smilies. Bravo!

Booze and reasoning don't mix in real time. In face to face discussions and direct messaging.

I wonder what the motives are is in this.

That is if you want a general type mindfuck or a philosophical answer to the "stumper" that your JD friend asks. If it's the latter ether take notes and see what the guys here come up with or invite him to present himself here. Or well er..


P.S.
I used the "F" word for the first time online in several years. Is it the Pinot Grigio of which a whole bottle I've just drunk or is it your deft use of smilies?

I've found a link which talks more in depth about the problems regarding the Ekpyrotic Universe. Here

It says:

One of the central points of the ekpyrotic cosmological scenario based on Horava-Witten theory is that we live on a negative tension brane. However, the tension of the visible brane is positive in the usual HW phenomenology with stronger coupling on the hidden brane, both for standard and non-standard embedding. To make ekpyrotic scenario realistic one must solve the problem of the negative cosmological constant on the visible brane and fine-tune the bulk brane potential with an accuracy of $10^{-50}$. In terms of a canonically normalized scalar field $\phi$ describing the position of the brane, this potential must take a very unusual form $V(\phi)\sim e^{-{5000 \phi\over M_p}}$. We describe the problems which appear when one attempts to obtain this potential in string theory. The mechanism for the generation of density perturbations in this scenario is not brane-specific; it is a particular limiting case of the mechanism of tachyonic preheating. Unlike inflation, this mechanism exponentially amplifies not only quantum fluctuations, but also initial inhomogeneities. As a result, to solve the homogeneity problem in this scenario, one would need the branes to be parallel to each other with an accuracy better than $10^{-60}$ on a scale $10^{30}$ times greater than the distance between the branes. Thus, at present, inflation remains the only robust mechanism that produces density perturbations with a flat spectrum and simultaneously solves all major cosmological problems.

^^This above may as well be written in an alien language for me and would require further explanation. (A PDF can be found:
http://xxx.soton.ac.uk/PS_cache/hep-th/ ... 4073v3.pdf)
This is just a wild shot in the dark but: Would the problems with the theory be solved if The Big Splat™ only happened once

One of the recent theories seems to fill the God of the Gap problem by calling God a hologram projector.


"Let there be light"
Lion (IRC)

Lucius wrote:I gave it a read. I also checked on the wiki. It says about some problems with the theory. I'm not to versed in the subject so I understand little.

Looks like Hack already answered this so there's not much more for me to say that like all other models of pre-Big-Bang cosmology, it's got open theoretical issues as well as being unconfirmed obviously.

WikiPedia gives pointers as to what else to look at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bang#S ... ang_theory