I don't know why the first cause of action is to locate the creators ass so you can kiss it.

I couldn't care less if there is one. If he wants to come have a drink with me and a chat, fine. If I thought he'd done a good job, which at the moment isn't looking likely, I'd say thanks.

What I wouldn't do is grovel around on the floor vaguely in his direction. I don't care what creator or God he is, I'm not worshipping anyone or anything. So this all makes no difference to me.

Quote:You don't know that, but let's assume that for the sake of argument

How can the whole of time be eternal, when some of the past didn't always exist, and the present didn't always exist? By whole of time..I mean all of time that existed. It's obviously not eternal.

Quote:Now it seems to get muddy. You are now treating points in time as objects that live in time? Seems like an inconsistent mix of categories to me

I don't get how you conclude that by me stating a point of time. I'm saying no point of time is eternal and always existed. That's logical.

Quote:It could be an eternal thing made up of an infinite amount of finite pieces?

But this is ignoring the argument and attacking the conclusion. Since I used an argument to show that time is not eternal, then it doesn't make sense to say "what if it's made out of infinite of finite pieces" and use the phrase to reject a conclusion that has been shown by reason.

Quote:Isn't this a trivial statement? Isn't the future no existing yet kind of by definition? 

It would be trivial, were it not that people state time is eternal...but I'm showing none of the past is eternal, the present is not eternal, the future is not eternal, then how can it be said it is eternal when none of it is? It's illogical. We are attributing eternity to a whole thing that none of it is eternal.

Quote:Now when you say "always existed", you must presuppose some other time line with respect to which you can make this statement, otherwise the word always is meaningless. How do you respond to this?

It's to manifest an obvious fact, that time didn't always exist, when none of it always existed. It's logical, it's a clear conclusion.

Quote:I also thought of adding the following argument:


1. A time always has time preceding it except for perhaps the start of time.
2. If there is no start of time, each point of time would be preceded by another point of time.
3. If there is no start of time, no point of time can come into being without a time preceding. 
4. If there there is no start of time, every point of time needs time preceding.
5. The whole of time is every point of time.
6. There would be no time preceding the whole of time where it had no beginning.

I don't understand the meaning of this sentence  starting at "where" in the last point

This is to show I am talking about time in the assumption that it has no beginning. In the assumption that it has beginning, obviously the whole of time is not preceded with time. But if we assume it had no beginning, we reach a paradox where the whole of time has no time preceding it and by logic should have time preceding it. It's a paradox because it's an illogical concept, an impossibility, not possible in any possible worlds.

BGV say in the abstract of their PRL

Quote:Thus inflationary models require physics other than inflation to describe the past boundary of the inflating region of spacetime.

and that is not the same as "time has a beginning" especially in absence of a theory of quantum gravity, which I believe counts as physics other than inflation

(April 12, 2015 at 10:39 am)MysticKnight Wrote:

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(April 12, 2015 at 10:25 am)LostLocke Wrote:  Or at the very least, can you provide physical evidence to back up this this claim?

Although what I've shown is a proof, and just like things in mathematics can be proven but don't need physical evidence, the same is true of this, but here is physical evidence that there was a beginning to time:

.InshAllah., on 13 Feb 2012 - 09:37 AM, said: Wrote:Eminent physicist Alexander Vilenkin recently presented the results of a new paper at an event in Cambridge in honour of Stephen Hawking's 70th birthday: Essentially, modern physics points to a beginning of creation. We already knew this with the Big Bang Theory, but Vilenkin and others have shown that even with multiverse and cyclical theories, you just physically can't avoid a beginning. The New Scientist reports the results:

Why physicists can't avoid a creation event


The big bang may not have been the beginning of everything – but new calculations suggest we still need a cosmic starter gun

YOU could call them the worst birthday presents ever. At the meeting of minds convened last week to honour Stephen Hawking's 70th birthday - loftily titled "State of the Universe" - two bold proposals posed serious threats to our existing understanding of the cosmos.
One shows that a problematic object called a naked singularity is a lot more likely to exist than previously assumed (see "Naked black-hole hearts live in the fifth dimension"). The other suggests that the universe is not eternal, resurrecting the thorny question of how to kick-start the cosmos without the hand of a supernatural creator.

While many of us may be OK with the idea of the big bang simply starting everything, physicists, including Hawking, tend to shy away from cosmic genesis. "A point of creation would be a place where science broke down. One would have to appeal to religion and the hand of God," Hawking told the meeting, at the University of Cambridge, in a pre-recorded speech.

For a while it looked like it might be possible to dodge this problem, by relying on models such as an eternally inflating or cyclic universe, both of which seemed to continue infinitely in the past as well as the future. Perhaps surprisingly, these were also both compatible with the big bang, the idea that the universe most likely burst forth from an extremely dense, hot state about 13.7 billion years ago.

However, as cosmologist Alexander Vilenkin of Tufts University in Boston explained last week, that hope has been gradually fading and may now be dead. He showed that all these theories still demand a beginning.

His first target was eternal inflation. Proposed by Alan Guth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1981, inflation says that in the few slivers of a second after the big bang, the universe doubled in size thousands of times before settling into the calmer expansion we see today. This helped to explain why parts of the universe so distant that they could never have communicated with each other look the same.

Eternal inflation is essentially an expansion of Guth's idea, and says that the universe grows at this breakneck pace forever, by constantly giving birth to smaller "bubble" universes within an ever-expanding multiverse, each of which goes through its own initial period of inflation. Crucially, some versions of eternal inflation applied to time as well as space, with the bubbles forming both backwards and forwards in time.

But in 2003, a team including Vilenkin and Guth considered what eternal inflation would mean for the Hubble constant, which describes mathematically the expansion of the universe. They found that the equations didn't work (, DOI: 10.1103/physrevlett.90.151301). "You can't construct a space-time with this property," says Vilenkin. It turns out that the constant has a lower limit that prevents inflation in both time directions. "It can't possibly be eternal in the past," says Vilenkin. "There must be some kind of boundary."

Not everyone subscribes to eternal inflation, however, so the idea of an eternal universe still had a foothold. Another option is a cyclic universe, in which the big bang is not really the beginning but more of a bounce back following a previous collapsed universe. The universe goes through infinite cycles of big bangs and crunches with no specific beginning. Cyclic universes have an "irresistible poetic charm and bring to mind the Phoenix", says Vilenkin, quoting Georges Lemaître, an astronomer who died in 1966. Yet when he looked at what this would mean for the universe's disorder, again the figures didn't add up.

Disorder increases with time. So following each cycle, the universe must get more and more disordered. But if there has already been an infinite number of cycles, the universe we inhabit now should be in a state of maximum disorder. Such a universe would be uniformly lukewarm and featureless, and definitely lacking such complicated beings as stars, planets and physicists - nothing like the one we see around us.
One way around that is to propose that the universe just gets bigger with every cycle. Then the amount of disorder per volume doesn't increase, so needn't reach the maximum. But Vilenkin found that this scenario falls prey to the same mathematical argument as eternal inflation: if your universe keeps getting bigger, it must have started somewhere.

Vilenkin's final strike is an attack on a third, lesser-known proposal that the cosmos existed eternally in a static state called the cosmic egg. This finally "cracked" to create the big bang, leading to the expanding universe we see today. Late last year Vilenkin and graduate student Audrey Mithani showed that the egg could not have existed forever after all, as quantum instabilities would force it to collapse after a finite amount of time (arxiv.org/abs/1110.4096). If it cracked instead, leading to the big bang, then this must have happened before it collapsed - and therefore also after a finite amount of time.

"This is also not a good candidate for a beginningless universe," Vilenkin concludes. "All the evidence we have says that the universe had a beginning."

http://www.newscient...tion-event.html

NOTE: He doesn't say 'some of the evidence we have' or 'on balance the evidence shows', rather he says 'ALL of the evidence'. And that's not even taking into account philisophical arguments.

So we see scientific evidence verifies philosophical arguments in this case.

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(April 12, 2015 at 8:25 am)MysticKnight Wrote:

(April 12, 2015 at 8:23 am)Chas Wrote: We don't know that time started.   There may have been time before the Big Bang.

I've provided three arguments as to why time did start. 

Read what I wrote.  "We don't know that time started."

Your arguments remain unpersuasive
You have not proved anything, only presented refutable arguments.

I'm about to begin a book by the physicist Julian Barbour called The End of Time in which (I think) he argues that time is a mental construct through which we organize patterns or events. If something like his thesis is correct, Mystic's entire argument fails. Maybe Barbour is completely off base but at least it goes to show that nobody should presume to understand the actual nature of time, as some sort of medieval "units" of indivisible "momenta" that succeed each other to infinity and beyond, when even physicists themselves don't know exactly what to make of it. Many have suggested that events in time and space evolve from an underlying structure of reality to which these concepts don't apply. Call it metaphysical, or first cause, or unmoved mover, or God if you want. But keep in mind that this tells you nothing more about the fundamental nature of reality (much less your everyday experiences) than if you were to refer to every paradox in the intellectual life of humans as The Mysterious Mrs. X. And with the rest of what Mystic said about "love" and "honor" and these ideas being derived from an omnibenevolent being...yeah that's not logic or science, that's theology, or mythos, and worse, it's mythos without any usefulness or pragmatic value to observers who literally find no inherent need or benefit in pretending that Middle World is under the Eternal Unblinking Eye of X. If you want to say this notion comforts you, fine, but there are madhouses full of sufferers who have far more innovative fantasies to offer your creative appetite.

(April 12, 2015 at 2:06 pm)MysticKnight Wrote: But this is ignoring the argument and attacking the conclusion. Since I used an argument to show that time is not eternal, then it doesn't make sense to say "what if it's made out of infinite of finite pieces" and use the phrase to reject a conclusion that has been shown by reason.

It would be trivial, were it not that people state time is eternal...but I'm showing none of the past is eternal, the present is not eternal, the future is not eternal, then how can it be said it is eternal when none of it is? It's illogical. We are attributing eternity to a whole thing that none of it is eternal.

First you argue that 'time' is not made of 'finite pieces', then you break time into 'finite pieces'.

(April 11, 2015 at 8:34 pm)MysticKnight Wrote:

Quote:What you have done is said "Existence represents an infinite regression, which is paradoxical.  Therefore, we need a philosophical quantity, X, which solves this paradox."

The problem is that you insist X must be separate from whatever exists.  However, there is now a new system: "whatever exists + X," and you anyway need to explain how this new system originated.

X being separate from whatever exists is obvious, as it originated all things in time through it's power and will. It is eternal, while everything in time is not eternal, and it brought into being, it being the original definition of true existence, the whole universe depends on it's existence and power to exist.

Quote: You will need an infinite regression of Gods.

That doesn't follow, and is in fact illogical to assume.

Quote:[quote pid='918201' dateline='1428798594']
You don't get to break the rules of logic simply by claiming that something must exist which is illogical.  If so, then your idea is itself illogical.

How is an eternal creator illogical?

All of this is summed up with two words. Special pleading.

(April 11, 2015 at 7:18 pm)MysticKnight Wrote: A lot of people say, how do we know that infinite regress is not possible, and that there isn't an infinite chain of cause and effects.

A chain of effects is an effect.
An effect requires a cause.
A chain of effects thus requires a cause.


Now, a chain of infinite effects would be without cause right? But we know a chain of infinite effects is still a chain of effects and each of the effects requires a cause, the whole chains of effects all require a cause. Therefore it's by definition without a cause and with a cause, a contradiction, an impossibility.

Another thing is that it's as if every chain is a person in army that won't shoot unless the person next to him shoots. There being infinite people, all saying, they won't shoot unless the person next to him shoots. But there not being an actual one person who shoots without a person telling him, it would never actualize. 

Another argument is that all of time cannot be said to be eternal. That is the present of time, a lot of the time in the past, for sure is not eternal. It can also be said that no point in time is eternal. If no point in time is eternal, that it doesn't have an eternal existence. To say, "but a point of time always existed" is circular and is obviously wrong as no point of time is eternal and was the point of eternal beginning. 

Now with a beginning, there is beginning. Stating there is real no "before" the beginning, doesn't show that beginning is eternal and thus without cause. Therefore something that is eternal needs to cause the beginning. To say "what is more north then north pole" doesn't make sense, because eternalness is the utmost beginning of beginning, while a point of time, even the first, would need to come into being, and cannot cause itself. 

This shows there is an eternal cause who originated time.  But it's obvious a physical thing cannot simply create time and make the whole universe subservient to time, as it would need time to do that. 

It existing before things subject to time, is none physical being. 

Now this doesn't prove God, but this proves a Creator. And if you guys can accept a Creator to start with, perhaps, you will accept the knowledge of God and his Oneness as well.

This argument is done in the same style as Hamza.  He uses the army analogy.

There's lots of arguments like this and they all have the same problem.

You're saying an infinite regress is impossible I don't know how that would work I've never seen on work it's illogical to my human brain and the concepts I know of.

But then you're replacing it with a creator who also breaks the known laws of physics in so many ways and does things you have never seen done before.

You can't tell me you know how a being would operate outside of time, how and non physical being would have any conscious, how a non physical being who is conscious could create something from nothing while having no time in which to do it in or any time in which to decide to do it.

You're basically saying infinite regress is impossible and we have no other answers but rather than admit you don't know, it's better to pretend there's this guy who can do absolutely everything even things we consider to be impossible, just so that we can have an answer.

SPECIAL PLEADING IS BAD ARGUMENTATION

/thread