(April 29, 2016 at 10:29 am)Time Traveler Wrote:(April 28, 2016 at 3:24 pm)SteveII Wrote: I posted this way back in this thread:And I posted this rebuttal 'way back in the thread' which negates your conclusions regarding Vilenkin in his own words...
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For reference, the BVG paper was 2003.
Vilenkin also agrees with Hawking that, "the most promising approach appears to be the Quantum nucleation of the universe from nothing." ~35:15 Furthermore, when asked "Does your theorem prove that the universe must have had a beginning?" by Victor Stenger, Vilenkin replied, "No. But it proves that the expansion of the universe must have had a beginning. You can evade the theorem by postulating that the universe was contracting prior to some time. [emphasis mine]" Vilenkin then goes on to quote the work of Gratton, Carroll and Chen who propose that the universe could very well have been contracting before it started expanding. (Stenger, The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning, p.128).
Clearly Vilenkin doesn't draw the same conclusions about God you do.
And you ignore Jehanne's post on Velinkin:
You should quit trying to quote Vilenkin, because his actual stance on these matters is NOT what you want it to be!
First, the Stenger book predates the Velinkin lecture from my youtube post.
Second, Velinkin is not a theist. Commenting on a promising approach by Hawking (similar to his own), does not change the conclusion of the theorem (which is NOT a cosmology model). Of course he thinks that a further explanation is needed. Did you not see the slide at 35:00? What part of that is confusing?
Regarding Jehanne's post, Concluding sentence of the abstract: "If a black hole population with the predicted mass spectrum is discovered, it could be regarded as evidence for inflation and for the existence of a multiverse." What point is this supposed to be making? If there is a multiverse, do you think that avoids the problems with past infinite?
Regarding Hartle-Hawkings model (which is similar to Velinkin's), imaginary time variables can create a theory without a singularity. But it is not avoiding a beginning (see lecture around 34:30). I like the shell game though of switching out the models to make different points.