rationalskepticism.org

DavidMcC wrote:

Just A Theory wrote:

DavidMcC wrote:

Thomas Eshuis wrote:
Another big problem with creationists is they keep insisting on a 'why' question. As if there must be some intelligent plan behind the universe and it cannot just be.

A. There are two basic meanings of "why": "what was the cause?" and "what for?". You are obviously ignoring the former in favour of the latter. Still, you're in good company, because Richard Dawkins made the same oversight, years ago. Perhaps you even got it from him.

The former definition of 'why' ("what was the cause?") was addressed in my post. It is functionally equivalent to asking "how did" which reflects a need for certainty which, absent a time machine, cannot be achieved for events in the deep past.

It also fundamentally assumes that there is a cause for everything lest the question lead to infinite regression halted only by the assertion that there must have been a First Cause (so beloved by creationists).

At some point it's OK to say "I don't know" or "We don't know yet". In scientific circles, this is seen as a virtue and a spur for further research. In creationist circles, those statements are an increasingly small place within which to shoehorn their god.

Obviously, the universe isn't "for" anything. However, it is scientificlly absurd to argue that it always existed (a mistake that some astronomers continue to turn a blind eye to, perhaps because they mistakenly think that it would involve a god to be otherwise).

I heartily recommend you read the book "The Arrow of Time" by Sean Carroll which addresses precisely the statement that you have made above. In the book, a possible solution is to examine the postulated heat death of the universe which bears striking similarities to a vast Boltzmann gas. Given sufficient time, an ideal gas can assume highly implausible configurations and a static, unchanging universe certainly has that time. That is, the universe we observe could possibly be a statistical aberration in an otherwise unchanging low energy state.

Worth a thought anyway.

Others think that it was a case of something from nothing when it was created in a "big bang", which is equally absurd. This is why I prefer my own cosmology, in which the "big bang" was from the collapse of a massive body (almost certainly one of many) within the "mother universe" (itself formed in a "very big bang", but directly from the proposed hyperspace continuum, under the law of quatum gravity.
The reason our own universe cannot have formed that way is the lack of synmetry in the laws of physics, as well as various other factors, discussed in the LQG thread (pp 6 & 7).

You are, of course, welcome to propose any cosmology you prefer. There's at least as little evidence for yours as there is for any others

Actually, far from "at least as little" there is actualy more reason to accept my cosmology over others, because they fail to make sense of any of the experimental evidence about the universe. The stand-alone universe simply can't be correct - it's an irrational model.