Why we believe

[Grasshopper]

Well I hope I didn't start with a goddidit attitude.
I was simply explaining MY reasoning on how I think the universe had a creator.

Everything I write is going to be disrespectful for you then because all I write is going to be in the favour of a theistic/deistic view

[Alex K]

@robvalue,

To my knowledge, current inflationary models don't have no singularity (?). Your point may still be valid though.

[robvalue]

Don't have no singularity? Was that an intentional double negative? I'm confused. Sure, my terminology may be way off, I haven't studied it in a lot of detail.

---

GH: We won't find arguments disrespectful, that's a very unlikely thing here, as long as they are not just a giant ad hominem attack. (Anyone is welcome to disagree as always, I don't ever mean to preach on the board's behalf, just going by my experience.) From an atheist point of view, we are discussing entirely imaginary concepts. So no matter what pieces you put on the board, and when, it's all just a game to us in that respect.

I think the point is that if you have decided that every argument you make must necessarily lead to a certain conclusion, or else you have formed it wrong, then that shows innate bias and is likely to produce logical fallacies.

[Alex K]

Well I hope I didn't start with a goddidit attitude.
I was simply explaining MY reasoning on how I think the universe had a creator.

I think that's what some people call a goddiddit attitude

Everything I write is going to be disrespectful for you then because all I write is going to be in the favour of a theistic/deistic view

Bah, who cares about atheist fee fees , the only thing I find disrespectful is if someone wastes my time by being wilfully obtuse.

[robvalue]

I also like the argument for unintelligent design. If we were designed, we were designed really, really poorly. And our environment, the universe, is almost entirely deadly to us.

[Alex K]

I meant a single negative, no singularity. The usual extrapolation into the past which leads to a singularity is cut short by inflation.

[robvalue]

OK cool I don't understand that, but I am confident you know your stuff on this subject and I do not. Do you think my overall point is valid, in your opinion? That the Big Bang results were inherently exotic? (Trying to scrape some credibility back with that obscure word. Unless it's the wrong word. In which case, pretend it was a really cool word.)

[Alex K]

OK cool I don't understand that, but I am confident you know your stuff on this subject and I do not. Do you think my overall point is valid, in your opinion? That the Big Bang results were inherently exotic? (Trying to scrape some credibility back with that obscure word. Unless it's the wrong word. In which case, pretend it was a really cool word.)

Ok, for full disclosure I must mention that I'm technically not a cosmologist but a high energy theorist, so this is not my exact field of expertise, but let's say a closely related field in which I've dabbled from time to time. Imagine a Guitar player playing Base. As far as my historical understanding goes, the notion of a singularity came from the fact that, if you take the universe as is now with matter, radiation and a cosmological constant and you evolve the so-called Friedman-Equations backwards, you end up with a universe that becomes hotter and hotter, at some point dominated by radiation. The radiation dominated solution has the strange property that the scale factor, which roughly speaking measures the size of spatial distances, reaches zero in the finite past. This is the singularity of classical cosmology. However, we know that this picture can't be quite correct, because it would not accomodate the relative uniformity of the cosmic microwave background, and having a universe as flat as we observe it would be very unnatural in this scenario. Therefore, people have proposed to have a short era of ultrarapid expansion called inflation at some point in time in the very early universe - the universe then keeps evolving as usual after inflation ends, but the naive backwards extrapolation of course becomes invalid at that point. The question is now, what happens before inflation. Does the universe after all further go towards a singularity before that? What happens there is model-dependent and highly unclear, but from what I've seen, there is no reason to think that an ordinary singularity occurs as would in a radiation dominated universe without inflationary epoch. Of course a singularity of classical relativity would be called into question by quantum gravity, but I'm arguing that there isn't one even in the classical non-quantum picture.

The world is however quantum mechanical, and this would also concern the fluctuations of the gravity field and inflation field - these quantum fluctuations are then what's visible in the microwave background,

and what ultimately gives rise to the large scale filament structure of the universe.



Every dot in this picture is a galaxy, and the more narrow filaments are a result of a few billion years of gravitational clumping, as is nicely illustrated in the millenium simulation.

So in this picture, the large scale development of the Universe is directly subject to quantum randomness either way.

Ok now I'm done hijacking the thread with physics again. But you asked for it


p.s.

one more thing: whether the laws of physics themselves were selected randomly is not clear. In a multiverse scenario that would be the case, but that's speculation.

[Grasshopper]

I also like the argument for unintelligent design. If we were designed, we were designed really, really poorly. And our environment, the universe, is almost entirely deadly to us.

I like to think of unintelligent design too. However I think here people are focusing much more on how many flaws there are in the universe than on the opposite, and man is that negative.

Someone said something about how the eye makes an image upside down and has a blind spot. Well how about the fact that it can see over a million versions of colour? It makes an inverted image but that is fixed by the brain.

So in cases, yes the universe is not perfect but the fact is despite all those flaws and deadliness- we're here and we're alive. And we are here because the Earth for the most part is not deadly (on land, our natural habitat). Despite the fact that the universe is so deadly-we made it. Life formed because one planet at exactly the right distance from the sun went from fiery to rocky to watery to icy to watery again hosting an abundance of species that were born, died out, some evolving into us. Maybe we'll evolve into something greater or just die out.
I think the flaw in my first post was my use of the phrase we were made to be born. When I said "we" I didn't mean humans. I meant life as a whole. But I understand what flaw you thought that was.
But I still don't think we're accidents . . . No sir!

[Alex K]

Someone said something about how the eye makes an image upside down and has a blind spot. Well how about the fact that it can see over a million versions of colour? It makes an inverted image but that is fixed by the brain.

Also the sensors point somewhat backwards, which results in the blind spot. The fact that it nevertheless sees a lot of colors etc is a simple result of evolution. One gets stuck with strange accidents like that, but then continuous natural selection works to keep optimizing based on that - what you end up with is a very well-optimized cludge.