Is it possible that the universe could be eternal??...

[Jehanne]

Your posts have been getting caught in the spam catcher.  Reposting immediately, results are the same.  A staff member has to fix it.  Slow your roll stoner boy.

Also, read and follow the rules.  There's a link at the top on the page.

I don't know of any rules that I've broken, generally as long as you're being a decent person, you don't have anything to worry about on most forums. However calling someone a 'wonderfuck' right off the bat would definitely be considered flaming. And for no other reason than that they have a different opinion than you. This sort of thing must be common practice here and that rule must be ignored when its Atheists targeting Theists.

Classic 'I hate God so therefore I hate you' atheist mentality.

If someone here is being abusive, just ignore them. Or, better yet, ask them to state their reasons, and carefully consider their statements and your replies.

[Angrboda]

Because whether there exists a case of an actual excluded middle depends upon the specifics under discussion, not some bollocks about "Aristotlean dialectics" (*) which presumes to establish a generalization, nor by seeing whether there is or is not an actual case of the excluded middle in a totally different context, such as in the paper you quoted.  Mister Agenda posited that there are two possibilities, either the universe had a beginning or it didn't.  You suggested that a model of the universe that is finite but unbounded violates the dichotomy that Mister Agenda posited.  Upon his asking how a universe with no temporal boundary in the past was in any sense not a universe without a beginning, you obliviously simply posted a link to the Wikipedia article without answering his question.  The Hawking-Hartle proposes the universe did not have a beginning and thus is simply a species of beginningless universe, not a third possibility.  Thus the dichotomy that Mister Agenda posted is valid.  None of the shit you've posted has addressed that point.

Now, you can either apologize for your slander, or explain in what way your responses to me are relevant to the question of whether the Hawking-Hartle universe is or is not categorically distinct from universes without a beginning in general.

(*)  The quote from Locke you posted is a form of Liebniz' Law and has no relevance to the discussion.

Slander?  As in (from Merriam-Webster):

1: the utterance of false charges or misrepresentations which defame and damage another's reputation
2
: a false and defamatory oral statement about a person

Leibniz was critical of Locke, writing a point-by-point rebuttal in 1704.  I am not sure that anyone has ever claimed that Locke pilfered from Leibniz.

Leibniz's Law is, per Wikipedia, known as the "Identity of Indiscernibles" (PII).

The Hawking-Hartle model is not "simply a species of beginningless universe".  In their model our Universe is finite but started out just as space and no time.  I doubt that idea would have floated with either Locke or Leibniz given their idea of the PII.  Locke goes on and on about motion in his Essay, and so, I think that he would have found the idea of space without any time to at least be odd.

[arewethereyet]

I don't know of any rules that I've broken, generally as long as you're being a decent person, you don't have anything to worry about on most forums. However calling someone a 'wonderfuck' right off the bat would definitely be considered flaming. And for no other reason than that they have a different opinion than you. This sort of thing must be common practice here and that rule must be ignored when its Atheists targeting Theists.

Classic 'I hate God so therefore I hate you' atheist mentality.

If someone here is being abusive, just ignore them.  Or, better yet, ask them to state their reasons, and carefully consider their statements and your replies.

Might be best not to ignore staff.  But go on with trying to run the forum.

[Mister Agenda]

Imagine what Lerner might have been able to come up with had he gotten his graduate degree. So many years as a science writer instead of as a working scientist.

[LinuxGal]

100 galaxies out of the 200 billion estimated galaxies in the known universe. That's it. No other galaxy outside of our local group is moving towards us. Isn't that strange? 199,999,999,900 galaxies surely can't all be heading away from our galaxy. Because we are not the center of the universe from which the Big Bang expanded from.

I see your problem.  You think the Big Bang had a location in Euclidean three-space and that we are presently near that location.  That's wrong.

Picture a balloon expanding, with ants crawling on the surface.  They can't even look in the direction of the "big bang" let alone get there.

[Angrboda]

100 galaxies out of the 200 billion estimated galaxies in the known universe. That's it. No other galaxy outside of our local group is moving towards us. Isn't that strange? 199,999,999,900 galaxies surely can't all be heading away from our galaxy. Because we are not the center of the universe from which the Big Bang expanded from.

I see your problem.  You think the Big Bang had a location in Euclidean three-space and that we are presently near that location.  That's wrong.

Picture a balloon expanding, with ants crawling on the surface.  They can't even look in the direction of the "big bang" let alone get there.

Oops. Gotta call my bookie again.

[LinuxGal]

New space-time appears, dynamically, in the interstices of existing space-time.  This creates the illusion that everything is moving away from you.  It happens.  Beings on a galaxy ten billion light-years away also think everything is moving away from them, and they're not even Catholic.

Time doesn't exist.

Time is to energy what position is to momentum.  Do you claim that the positions of particles are not real?

[Jehanne]

If someone here is being abusive, just ignore them.  Or, better yet, ask them to state their reasons, and carefully consider their statements and your replies.

Might be best not to ignore staff.  But go on with trying to run the forum.

I'm not trying to run the forum. I have been here seven years, and have been a Donator for many years. Everyone here, new or old, deserves a voice in how the forum should be run. As I have mentioned before, if Tiberius wants to hand ownership of the forum over to me, I will ensure its survival for as long as I am physically able to.

[LinuxGal]

Also, nothing in science says the universe had a beginning and the earth wasn't formless it was as much an elongated spheroid as it is now.

Our Earth is 4.543 billion years old; the Universe (or, its latest incarceration) is 13.7 billion years old.  The Genesis account has the Earth there from the very beginning.

[Jehanne]

At that time Brian May had not yet received his PhD in astrophysics; he was, technically, still a graduate student.