RE: Is the universe God?
February 3, 2014 at 4:21 am
(This post was last modified: February 3, 2014 at 4:30 am by Alex K.)
(February 2, 2014 at 10:20 pm)Lek Wrote: I was trying to make the point that either everything was either created or it always existed. So if everything that is material hasn't always existed, then it came into existence at some point from nothing (or maybe something non-material). So either it created itself or something non-material created it. When I spoke of God I was speaking of the characteristics of the christian God. You could assume it was something beyond what the universe is made from. The point is that it points to something other than the material world.
Have you even tried to read+comprehend what others and I have written?
Far from. What do you mean by "come into being" when there is no preexisting Universe in which a temporal process can take place?
The problem here is also, when you say the Universe has a beginning, you talk about time as measured by the timeline within the universe. This does not allow you to draw conclusions about the origin of the universe or time itself.
Your separation into material world and "something other" is completely bogus as well. If it has any interaction with the known material world, it is part of the material world, but with a new kind of physics. If it doesn't have an interaction with the known material world, well, then it doesn't.
Quote:What I'm trying to do is open closed-minded people to the possibility that something may well exist that is beyond the scope of our ability to find it through scientific discovery.
That is obvious already to anyone doing a bit of science. For example, everything beyond the horizon 50 billion lightyears away is now probably causally disconnected forever, and we will never find out what is going on there. It is possible that my favourite interpretation of quantum mechanics, Everett's relative state formulation, really is realized in nature. Will we ever be able to even in principle find out whether it is truly so? Maybe not.
Quote: Why is it not possible that a non-corporeal being could reveal himself to humanity?
It sounds like it is perfectly possible if you find a sensible definition of non-corporeal, there's just no evidence for it whatsoever that such a thing has occurred. That is a most important point.
I could for example claim that an invisible crow (his name is Prometheus, ironically) is sitting on my left shoulder and is going to feast on the liver of every dead soul (forever) who doesn't give me 10000 Dollars, giving you unimaginable agony in all eternity. It's true I swear, pn me for details for the money transfer. Don't believe me? Well, maybe because there is not a shred of evidence for it, and you're being a good skeptic all the sudden.
Your fuzzy word games about origins and so on are meaningless because of what I and others have said above, and do not allow any conclusions about God.
