Thank you for your criticism I really enjoyed reading it. (sorry for the delay, I have been very busy with school-work.)

Yes, I thought about this, but if this god is omnipotent, what role should logic have? For example, gravity governs our existence, could god not just do away with the idea of gravity entirely? Sure nothing would make sense, and nothing would work, but he can't be bound by laws, even if he made them.
If God wanted to make a square triangle, then the instant he made the triangle, the definition would change. I did not want to go into conflicting all[attributes] because not everyone's idea of a god is omnibenevolent ect. But I do believe that we can take the all-perfect approach. In other words if God is all-perfect in, he can't create imperfection. But the thing is, that perfect and good are subjective. Also, imperfection wouldbecome perfection, and only in the eyes of God would it really matter. There are certainly flaws with the first paradox bit, but I plan to sort them out in my next edit.

Some would say that time began at the Big Bang, but the Big Bang theory does not attempt to describe the origin of the universe, but how the universe developed from a singularity. Nor does it attempt to explain what initiated the creation of the universe, or what came before the big bang or even what lies outside of the universe. Nothingness is, on extremely small scales, in physics, due to the laws of quantum mechanics and special relativity, nothing is really a boiling brew of virtual particles on a time scale so small that you cannot see them. We cannot measure virtual particles directly, but we can measure their effects indirectly. For example we can chart the effects with mathematic calculations, of the particles in a proton. The empty space, accounts for 90% of the mass of the protons. So time is infinite. And the point is not null.

"the coming into being of the universe, as discussed in modern science . . . is not just a matter of imposing some sort of organization . . . upon a previous incoherent state, but literally the coming-into-being of all physical things from nothing."

It is said that an argument is what convinces reasonable men and a proof is what it takes to convince even an unreasonable man. With the proof now in place, cosmologists can no longer hide behind the possibility of a past-eternal universe. There is no escape, they have to face the problem of a cosmic beginning.

The universe began from a state of infinite density. . . . Space and time were created in that event and so was all the matter in the universe. It is not meaningful to ask what happened before the Big Bang; it is like asking what is north of the North Pole. Similarly, it is not sensible to ask where the Big Bang took place. The point-universe was not an object isolated in space; it was the entire universe, and so the answer can only be that the Big Bang happened everywhere.

"Almost everyone now believes that the universe, and time itself, had a beginning at the Big Bang."

"The processes described here do not represent the creation of matter out of nothing, but the conversion of pre- existing energy into material form."

The violent microstructure of the [quantum] vacuum has been used in attempts to explain the origin of the universe as a long-lived vacuum fluctuation. But some authors have connected with this legitimate speculations [sic] far-reaching metaphysical claims, or at most they couched their mathematics when they maintained "the creation of the universe out of nothing." . . .
From the philosophical point of view it is essential to note that the foregoing is far from being a spontaneous generation of everything from naught, but the origin of that embryonic bubble is really a causal process leading from a primordial substratum with a rich physical structure to a materialized substratum of the vacuum.

He can exist in time, but not infinitely. I was assuming that god was infinite, so in order for him to be infinite, he would need to be in another realm or an alternate universe where none of our logic applies. Including time.

Theologikos;145297]I am having trouble quoting you for some reason, so I will go by paragraph/section.

When I looked up the word, I couldn't find any definition that meant anything other than the Descartes view of omnipotence. I understand why Christian philosophers would want to change the meaning, but I don't know why they just say, he is omnipotent in regard to the laws of nature. Which is what they are saying it's just that they don't want to admit that their God isn't outside of a logical omnipotence. But I also don't understand where they even get these attributes for their God either. :/ The Bible doesn't seem to indicate an omniscient or an omnipotent being especially one who is benevolent. (But that is a discussion for another thread) So am I to go by their definition which isn't really omnipotent at all or what we set it out to be? I think they should create another word that means exactly what they are saying in order to avoid further confusion. :/ Until then, they should stop changing the definition of omnipotence.

In regard to the next part, (this will just cover the rest)
Firstly, please explain the difference between 'nothing' and 'nothingness'. :listening:

You are referring to a beginning of time and space, but we only say that the Big Bang was the beginning of time and space because that is the only useful thing to measure time off of. If the universe Time before that is pointless to us, because if it goes forever, we can't measure off of it. So Hawkins is saying that the beginning of time, (for purposes of usefulness) began at the Big Bang. We all know that the universe must have a beginning and that it's time is moving in a ray, but there was time before it because nothing, is active. That was the point.

An initial cosmological singularity . . . forms a past temporal extremity to the universe. We cannot continue physical reasoning, or even the concept of spacetime, through such an extremity. . . . On this view the big bang represents the creation event; the creation not only of all the matter and energy in the universe, but also of spacetime itself.

"At this singularity, space and time came into existence; literally nothing existed before the singularity, so, if the Universe originated at such a singularity, we would truly have a creation ex nihilo."

On such a model the universe originates ex nihilo in the sense that at the initial singularity it is true that There is no earlier space-time point or it is false that Something existed prior to the singularity.

Isn't a vacuum just the absence of matter, and gas pressure? If so, I don't see how, before the Big bang that nothing isn't a vacuum :perplexed:

by no means a simple empty space"

"it is a mistake to think of any physical vacuum as some absolutely empty void."

My position is that, if the Big Bang was initiated by nothing and that nothing inn QM is something, then nothing existed before the Big bang, and that, that nothing was active, creating time.

I mean infinite as in eternal, In the case you are referring to I am talking about his existence. IF time is eternal, and nothingness can create time, then nothingness always was. So if nothingness always was, it is infinite. In fact, already existent time is creating itself now. And there is hypothetical time being created as well. We know that the hypothetical time has passed because we are here, but God can't have been there because it hasn't happened yet. It has happened, and it hasn't happened. As illustrated in my diagram.

"If taken seriously, the initial singularity is in head-on collision with the most successful ontological commitment that was a guiding line of research since Epicurus and Lucretius,"

"a metaphysical hypothesis which has proved so fruitful in every corner of science that we are surely well-advised to try as hard as we can to eschew processes of absolute origin."

But assuming that nothing doesn't create time at all, but a change in state does, God couldn't have created anything.
[from another post]
In addition, even if you didn't need time for something to exist, you need time for something to change state. The states are nonexistence to existence, So for a creator to create anything, she would need to create time first and foremost. But any attempt to create anything would be impossible unless time existed. If time existed without needing to be created, then whatever may have created anything else is not and cannot be the basic reason for everything.

---------- Post added 03-28-2010 at 06:44 PM ----------

Just because "you" don't see the evidence doesn't mean it isn't there.
Not all Indians are good trackers.

One of the greatest evils of science is giving people the illusion that they know far more than they do.

That sounds okay, if the value of religions is to demonstrate that the believer is ignorant. But other than pointing to ignorance, what is gained? Being ignorant doesn't imply that there're gods, does it?

No, it has to do what you mean by 'Omnipotence.' As I say, except for Decarte God has always been defined as not being able to do the logically impossible, even way back in Aristotle's time.
It's pretty much been an official staple at least since 1100 ad with Anselm defined his belief in the existence of God using the phrase "that than which nothing greater can be conceived"
But even BEFORE then, "omnipotent" is never used in the Bible,
the Bible never claims that God can do all things.
In fact, the Bible makes a point that there are things that God cannot do. The Bible says that God cannot commit sin. God cannot lie.
Therefore, biblical omnipotence does not mean that God can do all things. God cannot do anything that is contrary to His holy character.
However, God can do anything that He determines to do. This is a true meaning of omnipotence - the ability to do anything that one sets out to do.

Thats been understood for thousands of yrs. In fact, except for Decarte, its been the ATHEIST's whose been trying to define omnipotence to include the ability to do things that are, by definition, impossible.

I have no idea where you looked up the word but just look at wikipedia, it's clear : Omnipotence - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I really have no idea what 'nothingness' is - sounds like some sort of metaphysical construct.
But pure nothingness "precedes" all being, as birth precedes life. Absolute nothingness has no properties at all and therefore no potentialities. It is devoid of possibilities, as it is of everything else (which is why something can't come into being from nothing).

I quoted several notable experts on the subject - time BEGAN at the big bang. There was no time, matter, or energy casually prior to the bigbang.

I have no idea what 'Nothing is active' means, but the vast majority of scientists agree there was no time casually prior to the bigbang.
P. C. W. Davies comments,
As Barrow and Tipler emphasize,

No, I thought my quotes made this very clear.
According to present-day understanding of what is called the vacuum state or the quantum vacuum, it is ",[1] and again:
- Astrid Lambrecht and Chris Ray

According to quantum mechanics, the vacuum state is not truly empty but instead contains fleeting electromagnetic waves and particles that pop into and out of existence.



"Nothingness" in QM is indeed something (Quantum Vacuum), but that something did not exist casually prior to the Bigbang.



I have no idea how "nothingness" (whatever that is) can create time.

seems metaphysically absurd.
Philosopher of science Bernulf Kanitscheider remonstrates, namely, out of nothing nothing comes, which Kanitscheider calls
Actually the effect of the universe coming into being could be simultaneous with the cause, it's called being "co-temperaneous"
You don't need time to create something if the effect is contemporaneous with the cause.
Hope this helps!

In another thread I told you a fact that you were obviously ignorant of - the fact that all religious thought presupposes some sort of idealism. You responded by saying, something like religions need to claim that otherwise they would be proved wrong. Well this may hold if religions were only invented in the last few centuries, but why would they maintain such a thing thousands of years ago in very much pre-scientific eras? The hindu text the rig veda is to my knowledge the single oldest religious scripture known to man, it was composed around 1700-1200 BC, and clearly holds this position. The sanskrit word for the physical world is 'maya' - illusion. Surely if they were just all uncultured savages they would have maintained something very physical and tangible, not something very counter-intuitive like that? Also given the fact that so many of the very greatest ever philosophers have concurred which such a view on the nature of reality, and the external world...:

Transcendental idealism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The World as Will and Representation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

perhaps we should at least have to argue that you should not perhaps be so dismissive of the idea that there may be some truth to the religions. The fact that militant religion attackers like yourself don't even grasp the difference between materialism, and religious idealism, and so argue on materialist assumptions, thus rendering 99% of the arguments ever uttered by them (and 100% of yours on this forum), is quite frankly hilarious.

I notice you keep referring to god as 'she'. This is of course a typically juvenile sort of thing typical of so many atheists. It is something simply designed to provoke, and on the Internet there is a technical name for someone who indulges in such behavior - Troll (Internet) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia . But if I can pick through the childishness, I think a point you have in mind is to draw the attention to God being thought of as male, which you think highlights an absurdity of the idea. Unfortunately if you were to educate yourself on the subject before opening your mouth, you would perhaps have realised that that religions don't actually hold god to be male ( Gender of God in Judaism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Gender of God in Christianity - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia ) referring to God as 'he' is just a convention, albeit a patriarchal one.

Now albeit that the idea that you actually have a grasp of the facts has been the thing disproved, let me even address the argument on the assumption that people who believe in God also have a materialist worldview (which no-one does). Still I'm afraid you can't disprove God. Any argument used to do so must rely on inductive reasoning which is inherently fallible. You could only disprove a materialist god if you had been around since the beginning of the universe, or had managed to survey the entire universe at once etc. You cannot personally even disprove the idea that the stars are just little dots of light just a few miles outside the earth's atmosphere, or that the sun spins round the earth (unless you have a space rocket and we can go up and look for ourselves). You don't know that the laws of nature don't suddenly break down a few hundred miles from the earth. You might say what about the moon landings, rockets into space etc, but how can you PROVE it wasn't all just a hoax to try to trick people? How can you disprove that the laws of nature aren't just a trick played by the devil to appear consistent to trick you? Any inductive reasoning is by it's nature fallible, and so you can never 100% disprove anything with it. Fortunately barely anyone who believes in God is a materialist as well, so that's the end of that then.

Thank you!
I asked what the difference between 'nothing' and 'nothingness' is, because of this statement:
"I think yr confusing 'nothingness' with 'nothing' - the universe did NOT come from nothingness, but from nothing at all."

I didn't know what you meant. :/

I cover your omnipotence question and your time answer in my blog, which is now up.

Also, did you watch the first video?
Perhaps I am interpreting it incorrectly, but krauss stated ". . . What's so beautiful about a universe with a total energy of zero? Well, only such a universe can begin from nothing."

ASP: A Universe from Nothing

What I am saying is that "nothing" in and of itself creates time, purely because time is defined by change. We don't regard this as time because it is useless to us. We don't have any events to compare it to, and we can't measure infinity so it is not important to chart it as the "beginning" of time.

Is there something I am missing here? :perplexed:

Author of this thread is an IDIOT. So is all humans existed or going to be existed.

Humans and IDIOTS are synonymous.

You can't prove speculation in either way.

Words only lie.

OP has lots of energy but he fails to ask right question.

It is not about proving (agree) or disproving (disagree)...

It is about your mind. Is it clear?. Is it over cooked?.

GOD is a belief , you can't prove either way. It will continue to exist on people who wants them. It will not exist in people who do not wants them.

Our thoughts exist for a microsecond....it may not exist next second...

All these are useless waste of time..masturbating with beliefs.

Quit it humans.

Author of this thread is an IDIOT. So is all humans existed or going to be existed.

Humans and IDIOTS are synonymous.

You can't prove speculation in either way.

Words only lie.

OP has lots of energy but he fails to ask right question.

It is not about proving (agree) or disproving (disagree)...

It is about your mind. Is it clear?. Is it over cooked?.

GOD is a belief , you can't prove either way. It will continue to exist on people who wants them. It will not exist in people who do not wants them.

Our thoughts exist for a microsecond....it may not exist next second...

All these are useless waste of time..masturbating with beliefs.

Quit it humans.

I think I've shown that virtual particles etc do not pop out from nothing, but are material converted from a quantum vacuum (which as all known physics tells us, did not exist casually prior to the bigbang.)

I guess I'm a bit dense, because the bigbang theory clearly posits a beginning to time (T=0, T=1, T=2 etc) And as Hawking says, pretty much every physicist believes time had a beginning at the big bang.

classical Big Bang model features a time interval which is closed at the Big Bang instant t=0 such that t=0 was a singular, temporally first event of physical space-time

Unless your using the term "time" in a way physicists don't, it seems pretty indisputable.
I don't see how time could cause energy and matter anyway.

According to the law of thermodynamics the universe does indeed have a net energy of zero, since energy is neither created nor destroyed - its in perfect balance.
I don't see the connection between this and something coming from nothing.

The laws of thermodynamics clearly state something cannot come from nothing. But just intuitively it seems absurd that something can come from nothing.
I mean, the premiss out of nothing nothing comes is so obvious that even Hume accepted it without argument, regarding its denial as an instance of unlivable Pyrrhonic skepticism.

Okay, thank you for responding. Naturally, you know much more about physics than I do, so I'm hoping to learn from you.

From my limited understanding, a perfect vacuum is devoid of all matter. But there can never be a perfect vacuum because of quantum mechanics. Right? (probably wrong) In other words there can never be a complete void. But if we were to go into a very remote place is space and section off an area of nothingness, we could observe quantum fluctuations. Before there was matter and gravity and before the big bang, I don't understand how, there are not quantum fluctuations occuring. :perplexed:

Krauss also said that the empty space between protons accounts for 90% of the mass of that proton. Which means that, that empty space is active. Is the empty space in our protons inside of a vacuum of its own? I don't know where a vacuum comes into play here.

This is probably all wrong, so what separates a quantum vacuum from a near vacuum and what conditions are neccesary for this conversion to take place? (how does it happen?) And how do we know that a quantum vacuum, couldn't have existed before the big bang?




Understood. I was just saying that if nothing was possibly active before the big bang, which is what the video seems to denote, and actions create time, then time must've been infinite. But we don't really care if time is infite before the big bang, because for our purposes, the time before the big bang is irrelavent. We wouldn't have anything at all to measure its change with, so going before the big bang is pointless.




I am saying that energy, creates time because energy is movement. :/ Of course this is null if 'nothing' was not moving or even active proir to the big bang. I other words, if everything was frozen in place (everything, even observers) time would have no events to go against; there would be no logical progression so time would've stoped.



Well, only a universe with a total energy of zero can be produced from nothing. And only in a flat universe, can the universe have no energy before it. So they measured the curvature of the universe to determine if it was flat, and it was.




Do the laws of thermodynamics only apply to closed systems? Because according to the video, the universe it open.


I am probably messing up somewhere so I was wondering if you could watch the video from 4:43 to 43:30
and tell me why what he is saying is incorrect. Please watch the video before your response because there is obviously something I am missing.

Once again, thank you for taking the time to teach me, and I really hope I can learn from you.

The universe began from a state of infinite density. . . . Space and time were created in that event and so was all the matter in the universe. It is not meaningful to ask what happened before the Big Bang; it is like asking what is north of the North Pole. Similarly, it is not sensible to ask where the Big Bang took place. The point-universe was not an object isolated in space; it was the entire universe, and so the answer can only be that the Big Bang happened everywhere.

"At this singularity, space and time came into existence; literally nothing existed before the singularity, so, if the Universe originated at such a singularity,

should not be taken too seriously,"

"still no satisfactory theory of quantum gravity,"

"would allow spacetime to be created and destroyed spontaneously and uncaused in the same way that particles are created and destroyed spontaneously and uncaused. The theory would entail a certain mathematically determined probability that, for instance, a blob of space would appear where none existed before. Thus, spacetime could pop out of nothingness as the result of a causeless quantum transition."

"The processes described here do not represent the creation of matter out of nothing, but the conversion of pre- existing energy into material form."

"But what of the laws? They have to be 'there' to start with so that the universe can come into being. Quantum physics has to exist (in some sense) so that a quantum transition can generate the cosmos in the first place."