An infinite progress

[FortyTwo]

The only difference between your view of the universe and mine is that mine contains precisely one less magic man who died on the cross and rose from the dead to pay for all the times we shook our peckers too hard after we took a piss.  

Interesting. Mine contains one less unexplainable, unknowable, uninvestigatable, uncaused, event in the past.

Your point?

[Peebothuhlu]

At work.

  Can't just cherry pick the good stuff. You've got to take everything that's in the mix.  

Cheers.

Not at work.

Forgive me . . . wait . . . that's my job!!!   Still, I did not postulate, in any way whatsoever, a cosmos without suffering or a cosmos that complied with your high ideals and standards. Why attack a position I did not espouse?

Ah..... So perhapse you believe in a malicious, capricious and uncaring diety?

Welcome fellow tentacle sophont! May you be eaten first upon the Great Elders arising!

[FortyTwo]

At work.

 "Before the Plank time" ?

 Isn't 'Plank' just something like the smallest possible measurement 'Of' time and hence doesn't quite have anything to do with 'Before' time?

 Also, since we're now thinking back to such things surely we have to have new concepts and words for things that are litteraly outside of space and time?

 Calling dibs on 'Kitty-thulhu' as the measurement of cuteness!    

I am not postulating anything of the sort. Almost, again by definition, anything that happens in the future happens in time. Progress implies the future, does it not?

---

Ah..... So perhapse you believe in a malicious, capricious and uncaring diety?

 Welcome fellow tentacle sophont! May you be eaten first upon the Great Elders arising!

Okay . . . perhapse? What does "perhapse" mean? Are we now discussing things that have no meaning? In that case . . . gumdrip rodeoo clwnhat!!!! Sophont? That implies a potentially reasoning equivalency to our own. That's a pretty far stretch to equate that with "infinitely complex".

[Peebothuhlu]

At work.

Yes 'Time' is a 'Thing'.

Gravity and speed distort it.

Our future of may continue unitill "A big rebound" Everything recompressing into a 'New bigbang' (Seeming unlikly given reality's increased expansion). Complete heat death hence endless darkness and cold entropy. A big 'Rip' where the rest state of fundamental particles 'Drop' to a lower state hence creating an entirely new reality over and replacing our own.

All of these ideas simply being 'Brute physics' with nothing else attached.

---

 "Before the Plank time" ?

 Isn't 'Plank' just something like the smallest possible measurement 'Of' time and hence doesn't quite have anything to do with 'Before' time?

 Also, since we're now thinking back to such things surely we have to have new concepts and words for things that are litteraly outside of space and time?

 Calling dibs on 'Kitty-thulhu' as the measurement of cuteness!    

I am not postulating anything of the sort. Almost, again by definition, anything that happens in the future happens in time. Progress implies the future, does it not?

---

Ah..... So perhapse you believe in a malicious, capricious and uncaring diety?

 Welcome fellow tentacle sophont! May you be eaten first upon the Great Elders arising!

Okay . . . perhapse? What does "perhapse" mean? Are we now discussing things that have no meaning? In that case . . . gumdrip rodeoo clwnhat!!!! Sophont? That implies a potentially reasoning equivalency to our own. That's a pretty far stretch to equate that with "infinitely complex".

I'm being positivly productive while catching chances to tap away on a phone screen. Hence my disclaimer at the beginning of my posts/replies.

If ridiculing people's spelling errors under duress tickles your Jimmies then maybe I should pass on engaging with you further.

[The Architect Of Fate]

Interesting. Mine contains one less unexplainable, unknowable, uninvestigatable, uncaused, event in the past.

Your point?

Actually yours contains more of the above

[brewer]

Interesting. Mine contains one less unexplainable, unknowable, uninvestigatable, uncaused, event in the past.

Your point?

No, yours contains an alternative, which is fine, believe away. But you'll get no validation from me.

I wonder what you'd believe if you were born in India? It's doubtful that you would be a christian without christian parents living in mostly christian society. And if I'm correct then that means your belief is a societal belief and created by humans.

[Fake Messiah]

"science" has no way to gather ANY information before the Planck time.

Actually, science might have a way to see what happened even before the big bang by using gravitational waves (LIGO):

“This is still speculation, but if we have space-based gravity detectors orbiting the Earth or sun, and we detect radiation from the incident of the big bang, we could run the video tape backwards and therefore get insight into what happened before the big bang. That is, what triggered the creation of the universe,” Mr. Kaku continued. “Of course we don’t know, but some people believe perhaps there was an umbilical cord that connected our baby universe to a mother universe. There are many theories being proposed, but they are not testable. Once we have space-based gravity wave detectors, we should be at the brink of being able to test for the impossible, that is, the world before the big bang.”

https://observer.com/2016/02/michio-kaku...-big-bang/

[pocaracas]

I am a Christian. 

Hello.
I am not a Christian.
How did you get to be a Christian? Can you remember?

That being said, I am also a human. 

Hello!
I am also a human... not surprising, since, as far as I can tell, only humans are capable of interacting on these forums (or is it fora?)

I have the same flaws as all the rest of you. 

That is doubtful.
Each of us has their own flaws, either physical or psychological.
For example, I have a simple Syndactyly on my toes and, considering that only 1 in ~2000 people are born like this, I'd wager that you do not have this condition.

THAT being said . . . why? Why is your view of the universe, no, of the Cosmos correct?

Why is yours?

Would you rather believe a true thing or a false thing?
How can we tell which things are false and which are true? Or rather, which things that we believe in are closer to the truth and which are further from it? I'd say that the scientific method provides us with as good a tool as we can get for that. Would you not agree?

Now some questions for you to ponder while I take you on a trip back in time.
Think back to my first question. Why are you a christian?
Why is anyone a christian?
What originated Christianity?
I think religions already existed when Christianity appeared... it's pretty well documented... so maybe we should go further back and ask how did religions appear? This is not documented at all.
Keep going back in time and you eventually are forced to acknowledge that the supernatural believing homo sapiens was, at some point, not even a homo sapiens, so very likely as much of a believer as any other animal we see today. Why or how did Homo Sapiens become a believer in the supernatural? Sadly, they didn't have any writing system at the time, so they didn't pass down that information - use your best guess.

We can keep going back, but no longer looking at any belief system.... just animals, dinosaurs, plants, bacteria... eventually no life, just rocks, a newly formed planet around a newly formed star. Further back, we have other stars made of hydrogen going supernova which produced, through nuclear fusion, all the elements we find on Earth and the solar system today. Even further back, we have a young Universe, full of simple particles like protons - which are, basically, Hydrogen nuclei - and electrons and neutrons. All of them merging through gravity in lumps due to some initial inhomogeneities in how all the quarks and bosons first appeared.
How did these quarks and bosons appear? That is the big question, isn't it? There was a Big Bang, so some claim. I'd say it must have been quite big to produce all the matter we see in the Universe... and all the matter we don't see, but can ascertain that is there, the dark matter. As for the bang, well, there was no air to send off any sound

Looking at the sequence I outlined, it looks like things happened in a way that went from simpler building blocks to more complex ones... what could be even less complex than quarks and bosons? As far as I know, the LHC hasn't managed to produce anything simpler.
But there are ideas... one such idea involves quantum fluctuations in space-time that seem to be involved with particle-antiparticle pairs being randomly generated. Could some particularly large localized set of these fluctuations lead to what we call the big bang?
Thinking about space-time as a single "thing" instead of separating space from time, like we usually do, you can then easily circumvent the infinite regress by having this event occur at some particular random point in the 4-dimensional space-time.
Of course, once we reach the stage of attributing things to random fluctuations, I don't think we can go further in simplicity... unless technology, or the theory, provide us with some tools to probe further.
Until then, why attribute to a very complex entity something that seems to stem from ever simpler elements?

The major objection you all seem to raise is the infinite regress. What about the infinite progress? If everything that is designed requires a designer more complex than itself, how does that not imply an infinitely and complex creator?

I'd say that, as far as we are aware of, everything that's designed has been designed by humans.
This narrows down the scope of your usage of the term "design" and automatically prevents its usage in any far reaching cosmic creator sense, don't you think?

But there's a cool idea there, infinite progress - Imagine we keep progressing as a species and eventually gain the ability to generate our own Universe(s). Would we be gods? Would the individual who pressed the button be a god? Would we care about how particular individuals in some planet of this new universe felt about our existence?

[Ahriman]

I don't like the idea of infinite progress. I would like there to be some definite resting point. Infinite progress seems to imply I should be continually, and infinitely, speeding towards some unknown and unknowable goal, and that this speeding process is beyond my control.

[brewer]

I don't like the idea of infinite progress. I would like there to be some definite resting point. Infinite progress seems to imply I should be continually, and infinitely, speeding towards some unknown and unknowable goal, and that this speeding process is beyond my control.

There is a point where personal progress ceases.