Og

Gravitational Time Dilation (wikipedia)

At singularities where density is infinite (0 volume + any mass) such as the big bang theorizes as the origin of the universe, time has no real meaning in any sense that we can grasp from our perspective.

This realization of the nature of the universe is UTTERLY non-intuitive. It is the result of looking at space/time with a desire for understanding the nature of all things. It turns out that the universe is quite different at the extremes than the life we experience. Our little chunk of space and experience on the earth is within a realm of accelerations that do not make these effects apparent.

This illustrates that the notion of "before" the beginning of the universe as nonsensical. Whatever time is and whatever space is, it has the properties expressed in the theory of general relativity as quoted here.

This observable fact about the universe makes deist arguments and first cause arguments gibberish. Causality has no meaning at a singularity nor is our language really capable of describing this notion of a singularity and the behavior of time around it. Instead we meet with the anthropocentric notion that time is persistent around all phenomena. The notion of an event that has no "before" is something that we CAN NOT GRASP.

Whatever the nature of the universe, we know that first cause is NOT something useful when trying to understand what the cosmos is about. It is a product of our anthropocentric minds on our little pale blue dot.

__________________
Vi veri veniversum vivus vici. (By the power of truth, I, while living, have conquered the universe)
The self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships
You & I, no distinction. - Tat Tvam Asi
Become Who You Are

Og

Continuing with the first cause argument is like looking at a cube and saying "loud!" (in a case where your auditory regions of your brain are not receiving non-standard input from your visual brain).

The existence of the first cause argument is more evidence of the "man created" nature of god as a concept. It's derived from the causal nature of man's existence and the vast amount of time before and the perceived vast amount of time after any individual time.

Deism and first cause/prime mover arguments are products of an ignorant past. We may have an ignorant present, but we are less ignorant than before. Get with the times.

This is why philosophy/religion without science is psychotic.

__________________
Vi veri veniversum vivus vici. (By the power of truth, I, while living, have conquered the universe)
The self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships
You & I, no distinction. - Tat Tvam Asi
Become Who You Are

Og

I'll do this here instead. The point is one of perspective. It's the reason that people thought the world was flat a long time ago. It wasn't an erroneous claim. It was based on observation.. People looked at the world and the curvature is so big that it looks flat from their perspective. Aristotle and Ptolomey figured that an eclipse was the earth casting a shadow on the moon and saw that it was circular and another scientist of the greeks tracked the length of shadows on sticks in the ground at two separate places over a year and calculated the circumference of the earth with great precision.

The deist/first cause/prime mover argument is like this. We live in a part of space where gravitation is fairly constant and fairly run of the mill compared to the emptiness of intergalactic space (low gravity) and the massive gravity of neutron stars and black holes. So much like the flat earth theory was based on our observation of the earth from our vantage point, the first cause argument is related to our vantage point where gravitation is concerned. People don't age at different rates on earth. Your clock tends to run virtually the same wherever you are on the surface of the earth (small differences to do with elevation from the gravitational center of the planet).

So just as the flat earth people didn't have an intuition for sphere planet, we don't have an intuition for general relativity (unless you're a cosmologist and are steeped in this stuff all the time). The non-intuitive (because we don't live with it) notion is that time is a property of matter. To us, time is constant and we don't experience differentials in it. To the cosmos, this is NOT the case and it has been experimentally proven.

Time is a property of matter and travels at different relative rates based on relative velocities and gravitation. Again.. this is experimentally proven and can be demonstrated for anyone as FACT.

The point of this whole thing is that the big bang extrapolation says that the universe comes from a singularity. But as general relativity demonstrates, at a singularity, time has no meaning.

So, in fact, observation implies a singularity as source of the universe. Observation also DEMONSTRATES that time is a property of matter and moves inversely proportional to gravitational field.

So science shows us that at a singularity, time has no meaning. Saying "before" the big bang is GIBBERISH.

I call it anthropocentric because people live in constant time world on earth and think that time is constant and that everything is caused. They think of black holes as just being really dense objects with high gravity that pulls on matter and have no understanding of the TIME slowing property of black holes. Anthropocentric in this case is that people assume that time is some all pervasive constant of the universe. That is our local perspective just like flat earth perspective of the past.

So the conclusion that there must be a prime mover is NOT a valid conclusion. Whatever is true, causality does not apply at the big bang in any sense that we could understand. This is not stuff that I'm making up.. It's in stephen hawking's "Brief History of Time" and other literature.

Does that help clear things up?

__________________
Vi veri veniversum vivus vici. (By the power of truth, I, while living, have conquered the universe)
The self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships
You & I, no distinction. - Tat Tvam Asi
Become Who You Are

pseudonous

I agree we with most of what you say but it seems to me science is philosophy. Any philosopher since Kant that was not a scientist or a scholar of scientific thought did not understand the purpose of philosophy. Also, I think deism is religion mixed with science.

Jayhawker Soule

What "properties expressed in the theory of general relativity" apply before 1 Planck time? Furthermore, while causation implies a 'before', emergence does not, and it seems perfectly reasonable to me that a Deist might see a theological/religious significance in the creative capacity captured by the paradigm of emergence.

Og

How does emergence not imply a cause or source? From what did it emerge?

Also, the point was not that we know exactly the properties of the event of the big bang (and basically can not know given that there is no vantage point from which one can observe a singularity). The point is that as we approach the big bang, time dilation is a real phenomena.

I was not meaning to imply that we know the exact details of what's going on at a singularity, but what's clear is that time/causality do not behave normally (as they do on earth). First cause arguments generally say that all things require a cause. This is a statement based on most of classical science. Modern cosmology illustrates both that this is not the case and that the cosmos has a finite age.

__________________
Vi veri veniversum vivus vici. (By the power of truth, I, while living, have conquered the universe)
The self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships
You & I, no distinction. - Tat Tvam Asi
Become Who You Are

Jayhawker Soule

It implies a quality (or, if you wish, a capacity). One can argue, as does Hawking and others, that "before the big bang" is a cognitively meaningless concept, while simultaneously noting that out of this 'initial condition' emerged all that we see around us.

At the same time, it might be wise not to over-state what we know. For example ...

Quote:

Bojowald works on loop quantum gravity (LQG) – a theory that seeks to unify the otherwise incompatible theories of general relativity and quantum mechanics. In LQG, space-time is made of tiny interconnected loops, each only 10 -35 metres across, that form a smooth fabric much like a shirt's fabric is smooth even though it is woven from separate threads. Bojowald and his colleagues have run the equations of LQG backwards and shown that they can avoid the singularity. They showed that as the universe collapses, it reaches a point at which it bounces back in a big bang, and the process repeats. Cosmic 'forgetfulness' Does that mean that one day we can, either mathematically or via observations, know about the pre-big bang universe? To answer this question, Bojowald developed a simple LQG model to determine the limits of what we can know. In his model, he assumed that the physical properties of the universe were the same everywhere and that the kind of matter it contained did not interact with itself. The model included gravity but not radiation. The model showed that most, but not all, of the information about what came before the big bang gets irretrievably lost through the big bang transition. And in a perpetual cycle of big bangs and crunches, this information loss means no two universes are ever the same. Bojowald calls this "cosmic forgetfulness". Cosmologist Paul Steinhardt of Princeton University says that Bojowald's model is right in principle. "It's important to lose some information, but not everything," he says. Thomas Thiemann of the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Golm, Germany, says that although some of Bojowald's assumptions may turn out to be too simple, the model is "the cleanest derivation of a pre-big bang scenario that any physical theory has delivered so far". [source]

Apparently discussions of a "pre-big bang scenario" are alive and well.

I assumed that you were implying that "Whatever time is and whatever space is, it has the properties expressed in the theory of general relativity as quoted here." I'm merely pointing out that your assertion is false for t less than one Planck time and that general relativity is an emergent quality.

Gettin' In Tune

Thanks for your reply Og. Your words were helpful. I understand much of what you said, but have some questions. For now, I will leave many of my questions for later.

I need to "dumb" things down before I continue with this thread. I know this is an oversimplification, but let me throw this out there.

In essence, time did not exist before the Big Bang. I can grasp this concept.

My simple question is, where did this ball of matter come from?

Og

That's cool. A different theory is needed, but the universe does behave as described by general relativity on some levels (particularly as you approach the big bang) and the Planck length theory needs to be continuous with general relativity (just as quantum electrodynamics is continuous with classical physics). That is, they must feed into one another at the appropriate size scales.

But what is clear is that the question:
is not necessarily valid as a question as people assume. People assume that causality applies at all times because it does on earth. People take the deist argument because they assume ahead of time that the notion of "Before" always applies (because it does here). What should be the approach of people who take this argument is to wait until the evidence is in or to participate in the high energy particle physics that gives us insight into this question.

__________________
Vi veri veniversum vivus vici. (By the power of truth, I, while living, have conquered the universe)
The self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships
You & I, no distinction. - Tat Tvam Asi
Become Who You Are

Jayhawker Soule

It is a perfectly valid question, and one that continues to intrigue cosmologists and theoretical physicists. It is, perhaps, the question that drives String Theory and its many derivatives.

People take the deist argument because they infer intent. I do not. But the argument that general relativity in some manner disproves supernatural agency is naive at best.