Atheism and the existence of peanut butter

[Angrboda]

I didn't invalidate your argument for no reason but because it contained an example of the fallacy of equivocation which makes your argument invalid.  

How can it be equivocation if I explicitly said, repeatedly, that time belongs to the spacetime...? Any sane mind can apprehend the idea of a succession of causes of effects. The fact that you need the additional time dimension to accept this possibility is simply your lack of imagination, nothing else.

And surely you must have noticed, you're repeating the word "equivocation" quite a lot recently.

Since it, fluxnaub, has nothing to do with time, temporality, "prior", or any related temporal concepts then it's pointless as an object tion to Hawking-Hartle. 

Um.. Nobody here is objecting to Hawking-Hartle's model, I am not sure to whom you're writing this. This model suggest that, simply put, there was only space and no time near the beginning of the universe.

More importantly, this model implies that the universe didn't exist forever.

https://www.hawking.org.uk/in-words/lect...ng-of-time
Quote: "In this lecture, I would like to discuss whether time itself has a beginning, and whether it will have an end. All the evidence seems to indicate, that the universe has not existed forever, but that it had a beginning, about 15 billion years ago"

Quote: "In fact, James Hartle of the University of California Santa Barbara, and I have proposed that space and imaginary time together, are indeed finite in extent, but without boundary."

So this model is not exactly on your side, as you might have noticed.

This is just a bare assertion and can be dismissed if you can't support it.  Do you have an argument or evidence that something caused spacetime?

I simply used the causality principle, which you seem to have conceded to. Or am I mistaken?

I'm not the one arguing semantics, but seeing as you've doubled down on causal order not requiring temporal order

Exactly. There can be a causal order without the need of time. 

 If a cause does not need to temporally precede its effect, then it's possible that something created within this universe caused our universe to exist, forming a sort of temporal loop.  I don't have a problem with that if you don't.  You've provided yet another way the universe can exist without a creator.

Seriously, @Angrboda ?

If you use the word "temporally", then you are placing yourself inside the universe, in which case a cause has to temporally preceed the effet.

Outside the universe/spacetime, there is no temporal order anymore, and we're left with causal order.

Well, you are clearly arguing that causality within the universe obeys different laws than it obeys outside the universe, so I have to wonder where you are getting your information about causality outside the universe from? You can't use causality within the universe as a model, because you've denied that one can form an induction from intra-universal causality because the two do not behave identically.

But that's a small matter, as I was more concerned with your statement, bolded below, which you made:

The word "prior" here is, as explained before, in a causal sense. If causality holds outside of spacetime, then something (X) caused the spacetime. A new definition of a "time" or, even better, a sequence of events, is simply the sequences of all causes and effects that ever happened, and we assign to each element of this causal chain a rank i. If A causes B, and B causes C, then A would "happen" at rank i=0, B at rank i=1, etc. This is really simple and there is nothing incoherent about it.

This is just a bare assertion and can be dismissed if you can't support it. Do you have an argument or evidence that something caused spacetime?

First, what justification do you have for thinking that causality operates outside of spacetime? You seem to be advancing a full-fledged physics about things beyond this universe that I don't believe you can support. Second, what "principle of causality" are you referring to here? And third, what argument or evidence do you have that something caused spacetime?

I'll respond to the rest of this later after you have clarified these matters.


ETA: Oh, and if outside spacetime a cause does not need to precede its effect, there are additional loops that can be created, such as two universes creating each other.