RE: Arguments against existence of God.
December 5, 2018 at 9:54 am
(This post was last modified: December 5, 2018 at 10:03 am by Cherub786.)
(December 5, 2018 at 9:43 am)unfogged Wrote: The "cause" of the big bang is unknown, and there may be none. You can't extrapolate the laws from within this universe and apply them to something that is completely undefined.
I agree with your last sentence completely.
As for the cause of the big bang or any other model that attempts to explain how the universe began (like Vilenkin's model), there has to be a cause logically.
This is where you have to accept the limitations of theoretical physics and enter the realm of logic and philosophy.
Every effect has a cause. Simple as that.
(December 5, 2018 at 9:47 am)Jehanne Wrote: Professor Vilenkin is one of at least several hundred cosmologists in the World today who are actively publishing, which means that you are cherry-picking your sources, having already settled upon an "answer" you are now in the process of asking "questions".
I'm not cherry picking, only pointing to the general consensus among these contemporary cosmologists that the universe is finite and has a beginning. Very few credible scientists say the universe is infinite and doesn't have a beginning. Some scientists even say the universe has an end and propose the big crunch model.
Our theology of creatio ex nihilo is a radical thought and break from all the classical philosophy and religion before the advent of modern physics and Einstein's theory of general relativity and the proof that spacetime has a curve. The eternality and infiniteness of the universe is dependent on the model of it being absolutely flat. So our medieval theology insofar as the universe being finite and having a beginning and coming out of nothing has been largely confirmed by 20th century physics which is quite amazing.
Quote:as well as a number of other undergraduate texts in physics. It is universally agreed among professional physicists that General Relativity is an excellent model of universal gravitation, but it is also universally agreed that GR is incomplete, and that no physical model, at present, describes the Universe at its earliest moments.
I would suggest the problem is that the universe in its infancy and the big bang as a singularity, its reality cannot be accurately understood under the prevailing framework of what are considered set laws of physics and thermodynamics.
In the end I must emphasize that so much of this is theoretical, speculative and not empirical. But if you combine both logic/philosophy with 20th century physics and cosmology then the case is very much strengthened that the universe has a beginning, is finite and came out of nothing.
Quote:you can ascribe planetary motion to angelic or other invisible beings.
Who says that?
