Introducing The Universal Religion

[Alex K]

SoC,
No!
Causation is a concept which only has meaning inside a Universe with a timelike dimension and and lower than maximal entropy. Your sentence concerning "causing time" is meaningless.

You define God as the "sphere.....", but provide neither an argument why such a thing is necessary, and if we assume it is, why it is anything Godlike at all (a very unlikely proposition) in your favourite sense.

[Cato]

God is the eternal context or the sphere into which everything that exists begins to exist and is from then on sustained within existence.

Prove it or get the fuck out.

SoC is the new King of Unsubstantiated Claims.

SoC,
Enough of the goddamn preaching. Repeating 'God exists' 800 different ways doesn't make the proposition any more tenable, it just makes you tedious.

The sphere bit was cute, and perhaps too specific for your gambit. Why can't God be a pyramid, a cube or even an oblate spheroid?

[Tonus]

There's only a problem once you delete the entire reason for the existence of all the objects and processes that were described, it was set up very nicely but now you ruins it.

It's only a problem for someone who needs god as an emotional crutch.

[Sword of Christ]

Causation is a concept which only has meaning inside a Universe with a timelike dimension and and lower than maximal entropy. Your sentence concerning "causing time" is meaningless.

The universe didn't exist eternally in itself if it had a beginning therefore something else beyond the universe did exist eternally and was the cause of the existence of the universe. You this something you can just logically figure out there's no faith involved at this stage.

You define God as the "sphere.....", but provide neither an argument why such a thing is necessary, and if we assume it is, why it is anything Godlike at all (a very unlikely proposition) in your favourite sense.

Not a literal sphere it's a figure of speech. But you can think of the universe as the playing pitch and a game of football is taking place on the pitch. We know that the pitch didn't always exist therefore the pitch was made by something else and it was made by someone with the intention of a game football being played on the pitch. If you knew nothing about what was outside the pitch you could at least figure that much out on your own without having to be told.

SoC is the new King of Unsubstantiated Claims.

I am substantiating the claims by explaining God necessary existence using facts and logic. We can't even possibly ever substantiate the existence of God via the scientific method given the nature of what God would be, but we can still figure this out even without any special revelation.

Enough of the goddamn preaching. Repeating 'God exists' 800 different ways doesn't make the proposition any more tenable, it just makes you tedious.

I'm not preaching/repeating God exists I'm explaining the necessity for Gods existence here.

The sphere bit was cute, and perhaps too specific for your gambit. Why can't God be a pyramid, a cube or even an oblate spheroid?

Everything needs to take place within a certain sphere of activity but the sphere of activity for everything will have to be eternal because nothing else would have existed to do anything at all in the first place, from nothing nothing comes.

[Alex K]

Causation is a concept which only has meaning inside a Universe with a timelike dimension and and lower than maximal entropy. Your sentence concerning "causing time" is meaningless.

The universe didn't exist eternally in itself if it had a beginning

Stop right there. First of all you don't know that it had a beginning. The spatial singularity, which you get by naively extrapolating backwards in time a radiation dominated universe in the Lemaitre-Friedman-Robertson-Walker Ansatz, is not real. Even if it had a clear temporal beginning as seen from the inside, this does not mean that something beyond the universe exists eternally: the word "eternal" isn't even defined in the slightest sense if you don't have a timeline independent of what you call our universe. If you have one, then the Big Bang isn't the beginning of that timeline and your argument has gone away.

therefore something else beyond the universe did exist eternally and was the cause of the existence of the universe. You this something you can just logically figure out there's no faith involved at this stage.

It is true that there is no faith involved. Merely stringing together words that do not mean anything in the context in which you use them

You define God as the "sphere.....", but provide neither an argument why such a thing is necessary, and if we assume it is, why it is anything Godlike at all (a very unlikely proposition) in your favourite sense.

Not a literal sphere it's a figure of speech.

Oh I understood that of course, let's not be silly

But you can think of the universe as the playing pitch and a game of football is taking place on the pitch. We know that the pitch didn't always exist

See above

therefore the pitch was made by something else

I've said it ten times now and I'll tell you again: causality is a meaningless concept outside a universe with a timelike dimension and low entropy

and it was made by someone with the intention
of a game football being played on the pitch. If you knew nothing about what was outside the pitch you could at least figure that much out on your own without having to be told.

No, your analogy does not work because time and space exist outside the pitch, and because we *know* the football pitch is human design.

[Esquilax]

Everything needs to take place within a certain sphere of activity but the sphere of activity for everything will have to be eternal because nothing else would have existed to do anything at all in the first place, from nothing nothing comes.

Leave aside the kind of intuitional sense that "from nothing, nothing comes," has, and actually examine it. Are you saying you know everything there is to know?

If the answer is no, how can you possibly claim that there is no case in which something comes from nothing? Especially when you then go on to claim that your god is eternal, which means he literally did come from nothing.

[Alex K]

Leave aside the kind of intuitional sense that "from nothing, nothing comes," has, and actually examine it. Are you saying you know everything there is to know?

If the answer is no, how can you possibly claim that there is no case in which something comes from nothing? Especially when you then go on to claim that your god is eternal, which means he literally did come from nothing.

You are waaaay to pessimistic, Esquilax: we know that this principle doesn't hold microscopically even within our own universe! We have quantum indeterminacy, which generates events such as particle decays at apparently random times, vacuum fluctuations etc. But even in a hypothetical mechanistic and deterministic universe, an arrow of time separating cause and effect only arises as a statistical artifact if you have a state with many particles and low entropy. For example, in a simple mechanical system of say two or three particles acting with forces onto each other, there is no concept of direction of time, or even cause and effect. Case in point: If you have a simple solar system simulation of sun and earth without friction, you could never tell whether time runs forward or backwards. This only happens when you have a statistical ensemble which is not in thermal equilibrium (entropy not maximal).
Cause and effect are only ever about going from a less likely configuration of particles to a more likely one given certain constraints such as total energy. Transporting our intuition of such things which we get from living in a macroscopic world with a big energy source above us, to such things as "creation of universes" etc. is completely specious.

[Sword of Christ]

Stop right there. First of all you don't know that it had a beginning.

The universe is 13.7 billion years old it has an age it had a point of creation. Yes there may well be other universes but they all had a beginning as well so that's moot.

Even if it had a clear temporal beginning

It did if it has a definite age or time in which it existed. No-one puts the age of the universe at infinity.

this does not mean that something beyond the universe exists eternally

Something will have to be eternal in itself and it isn't this universe if it has a definite age and so has an actual starting point. If something starts to happen then something else made it start to happen.

: the word "eternal" isn't even defined in the slightest sense if you don't have a timeline independent of what you call our universe.

God exists outside and beyond time as he is eternal without a starting point or an end point, this would be necessary to cause time to begin to exist.

If you have one, then the Big Bang isn't the beginning of that timeline and your argument has gone away.

The big bang is where God causes space/time to exist when it otherwise would not exist. Creation out of nothing or ex nihilo. If the the theory fits the facts.

It is true that there is no faith involved. Merely stringing together words that do not mean anything in the context in which you use them
[quote]

God isn't a concept that can't be supported by logic and reason whether or not you disagree with the logic. But if you don't have a logical alternative that would be better than God then the argument in favor of Gods existence is going to win out on that criteria. The only real alternative is a beginningless universe but this wouldn't have an age/start and everything that could ever happen would only happen once an infinite amount of time has passed which is the same thing as never happening. You will ideally need something that does not exist within the time and is not in itself subject to the passage of time having had no begining to set-up the passage of time into which all events will then occur. Setting up the passage of time is an act of creation of something that otherwise would not exist.



[quote]
I've said it ten times now and I'll tell you again: causality is a meaninless concept outside a universe with a timelike dimension and low entropy

What you just said there is meaningless from what I can tell. Using words like low entropy doesn't help you in this context. Any scientific term you want to use is confined to description of a process that occurs within the universe as we observe it. The universe as we observe it exists for some other reason and there are no scientific terms for it.

No, your analogy does not work because time and space exist outside the pitch, and because we *know* the football pitch is human design.

We would know something had to exist outside the pitch in order to have brought the pitch into being even if it was impossible to ever observe anything outside the pitch. You could observe how the the pitch was built and whats it's made from and that's what science does.

[Esquilax]

The universe is 13.7 billion years old it has an age it had a point of creation. Yes there may well be other universes but they all had a beginning as well so that's moot.

How do you know that the only alternative explanation is multiple universes, and how do you know any potential alternative universe would have a beginning?

Stop asserting, and start demonstrating. If you can't, then just stop asserting.

[LostLocke]

Something will have to be eternal in itself and it isn't this universe if it has a definite age and so has an actual starting point. If something starts to happen then something else made it start to happen.

And that something was the singularity.