(November 8, 2013 at 11:13 am)MindForgedManacle Wrote:No, it's escapable so long as you realize that when physicists talk of 'laws', they don't mean prescriptive dictates, rather than just descriptions of how things behave under certain conditions. [/quote](November 8, 2013 at 2:34 am)Jesus is Lord Wrote: Anthropocentrism is not escapable. Athiests and theists alike view the world through filters. The criticism of anthropocentrism is like one fish calling another fish wet. The question is - how does a universe which all physicists would agree is deeply ordered, begin from nothing? If it did not begin from nothing, explain what preceeded it without invoking anything supernatural.
"...how things behave under certain conditions" is not the same thing as "how things behaved under a given condition." The kind of science we practice is fundamentally predictive in nature. "how things behave under certain conditions" is predictive generalization. It reflects inherent order in the universe.
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And of course, you "conveniently" ignored my explicitly non-supernatural account of the origin of the universe. Dishonest much?
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----You were one of the only people who actually tried to answer my original question - thank you for bringing up your answer again, and I apologize for skimming.
How does subscribing to the B-theory allow the universe to exist any more than A-theory? Since you choose an a-temporal stance, the question must be rephrased for you:
"Why is there a universe, rather than nothing?"
If we ascribe temporal dimensions to objects as though they were physical dimensions inherent to the object, then your view of the universe would require all things to have infinite temporal dimensions. How would you avoid this? It must be avoided, as all the finite elements of the universe that we can actually study do not have unlimited temporal dimensions.
