(March 23, 2015 at 11:53 am)YGninja Wrote:Ah, WLC missing the elephant in the room, as always...
The universe, at Valenkin's "start", was a bunch of elementary particles, fields (since Higgs, these include the particles, too), and little more.
From these building blocks everything we know has been made... has been created - with or without a conscious cause, things have been created - stars, galaxies, planets, nebulae... bacteria, birds, humans.... chairs, TVs, iPhones, Artificial intelligence....
The "everything that begins to exist has a cause" refers to these things and the causes are, at the heart of it, fields, for the most part.
Concerning the universe itself, the fields and elementary particles, we cannot apply the same principle.
I mean, maybe we can, but we don't know if we can, so it's best to refrain from pronouncing anything about it.
Maybe some form of field created the fields we know of... maybe not. (I'm leaning to some sort of field - the quantum vacuum camp seems to lead that way)
If we overlay the possible absence of the temporal coordinate on the non-universe thing that would "cause" the Universe into existence, then the word "cause" loses meaning, too.
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But I prefer the part where, even granting that yes, there may very likely be a cause to the Universe, who can say it's a conscious cause?
Who can say it's a god?
Who can say it's the particular god the Abraham allegedly first encountered and described to the people?
Who can say it's the god that impregnated a virgin girl in the middle east and whose son then had to die to atone for the problems generated by the first man that god had made a few years earlier?
