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This is a better way of expressing a thought that I've had for a couple years now. Indulge me in this thought experiment. Religious figures and scientists both

This is a better way of expressing a thought that I've had for a couple years now. Indulge me in this thought experiment. Religious figures and scientists both argue over how the universe was created. Religious explanations often posit that some sort of higher power created the universe but fail to provide the story prior to that. The same is true of science with its big bang. I argue that these stories perhaps tell us about the early universe, but not how it was created. Now think for a moment, can you construct a sentence that is at all logical, that doesn't move the goalposts or do any linguistic trickery, that could possibly describe where our universe came from? Don't worry about it being true, just a reasonable sentence that obeys the laws of cause and effect? I believe that human language has not yet reached a point where it could describe anything like that. If that has true we have debated for centuries about a question that even if an individual knew the answer they would be unable to express it to anyone else.

psyc 5y ago
I could say, for example, that our universe was created when a 5th dimensional alien named Parkus Mersson ran universe.jar. But that only expands the notion of universe. I don’t think I can make the kind of statement you mean without regressing to something else that needs explaining. IOW, why is there something rather than nothing.
salawat 5y ago
404. The requested multiversal namespace was not found. Do you wish to create it? Y/N
positus 5y ago
Consider: There is an uncreated God who is self-existent and immutable. He has no end or beginning and contains within Himself fullness of being. From him all things derive their being. He doesn't "exist", he just *is*; that is, His being is underived. Everything else derives their existence from Him. There has never been a time when he has not been, because he is self-existent apart from time; time itself is something He has made. So there wasn't "story prior"; there was just God. This is the God that Christians worship, who added to his eternal nature the nature of a man in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus testified to this, saying: "Before Abraham and Isaac were, I AM."
- Banana699 5y ago
  >He doesn't "exist", he just is This is meaningless, the verb 'is' literally means 'to be', i.e. to exist. How can someone/something/God not exist and yet 'be'? This is a very widespread problem with the Abrahamic family of religions (and maybe other religions, but I'm most familiar with this family). When pressed, philosophers and proponents are very adamant about the fact that 'God' is not an entity comprehensible to a human, it's useless to apply plain old physical or commonsense logic to 'him' or try to derive any useful facts about 'him' or just reason about 'him' in any way other than 'he exists and he wants me to say and do things'. But doesn't this, like, invalidate the whole enterprise of worship ? If God is so incomprehensible that you can't even explain why evil exists when he is supposedly all-good and all-capable of enforcing that good, what makes you think he wants or needs worshipping, you just said he doesn't obey any comprehensible rules. You might object that he himself told us to worship him in the $Book, this doesn't work. Even assuming $Book is true and uncorrupted, what makes you think God really means what he says, you just assumed he works by a rule that even humans don't always obey. Maybe God just made himself known to us and requested that we worship him as a joke, you might object that this makes God unacceptably 'Juvenile' for a cosmic entity, but again, this just assumes human standards and social protocols. Etc etc etc.
  - positus 5y ago
    The distinction is that unlike everything in creation, God does not derive His being from an outside source. You and I, and (everything else) are dependent on things outside of us to cause us to be and continue being. We are, out of, something else. Not one of us decided to be born, but through the actions of others we came to be. And we continue to be, because we have food and water and shelter and clothing, etc. God, unlike the things He has made doesn't depend on something else to be or continue being. He has always been. He isn't out of anything but is self-existent; He doesn't exist but rather is. And because He is, everything else (all of which depends on Him to be) continues to be. I hope I've worded that clearly.
idoubtit 5y ago
> Religious figures and scientists both argue over how the universe was created. I haven't seen much arguments about this. In most civilized countries, religions have stopped to make factual claims about the "antediluvian times", because all their previous claims were proven false. For many decades, scientists have almost stopped arguing with religious figures. The tendency is that scientific people are less permeable to religious beliefs, and religions are almost powerless in scientific domains. Lastly, religions don't argue, internally or with each other, over the origin of the world. > Religious explanations often posit that some sort of higher power created the universe but fail to provide the story prior to that. The religious explanations failed to satisfy you, but at least some of them provide a consistent explanation. For instance, Genesis states that their god was there from all eternity, then at one point he created the world. You may dislike this "story before that", but it is clear and consistent. > The same is true of science with its big bang. It's not true. There are several theories about the origins before the big-bang, or at the big-bang. Science does provide the stories you long for, but at the same time science asserts that these are just hypotheses, and that it's highly probable that models in this domains are won't ever be proved.
- schoen 5y ago
  > For instance, Genesis states that their god was there from all eternity, then at one point he created the world. Hmmm? It doesn't state anything about what happened before the creation, or where God came from. It starts with "in the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth" (or "when God began to create heaven and earth") and nothing in Genesis mentions any moment or occasion prior to that. Are you thinking of other aspects of Jewish or Christian tradition that aren't derived from the text of Genesis?
feoren 5y ago
> describe where our universe came from ... that obeys the laws of cause and effect All you've done is ask a trick question, like "prove Fermat's Last Theorem without using any math". The problem is you used the words "where", which means "a place in the universe", and "cause and effect", which means "tracing the causes of something backward in time", with "time" again existing only within this universe. It's a little like Zeno's Paradox of Achilles and the tortoise. All we've found is that this particular way of asking the question or describing the question is insufficient. Obviously in order to prove Fermat's Last Theorem, you need to use math. Obviously to talk about anything "external" to the universe, you need to use something that is not a "where" within this universe and does not follow the cause and effect defined within this universe. The question is: is it, therefore, useful to ask the question, given that we are stuck in this universe? No. It's not.
coldtea 5y ago
>that obeys the laws of cause and effect Why would it need to obey those laws? What made them "laws"?
heavenlyblue 5y ago
They don’t lack the language, they lack knowledge beyond that. As anything beyond that is down the rabbit’s hole of “everything is possible” and thus the story is as boring as the 10 season of your sci-go show when they have reached beyond unifinity of galaxies and you just can’t make a proper narrative about something that no longer has any reference to the viewers
benlivengood 5y ago
> Now think for a moment, can you construct a sentence that is at all logical, that doesn't move the goalposts or do any linguistic trickery, that could possibly describe where our universe came from? Don't worry about it being true, just a reasonable sentence that obeys the laws of cause and effect? Mathematical realism ala Tegmark's level 4 multiverse is a concrete example; if mathematical consistency causes existence then the big bang and our universe have a definite, understandable cause.

psyc 5y ago

I could say, for example, that our universe was created when a 5th dimensional alien named Parkus Mersson ran universe.jar. But that only expands the notion of universe. I don’t think I can make the kind of statement you mean without regressing to something else that needs explaining. IOW, why is there something rather than nothing.

salawat 5y ago

404. The requested multiversal namespace was not found. Do you wish to create it? Y/N

positus 5y ago

Consider: There is an uncreated God who is self-existent and immutable. He has no end or beginning and contains within Himself fullness of being. From him all things derive their being. He doesn't "exist", he just *is*; that is, His being is underived. Everything else derives their existence from Him. There has never been a time when he has not been, because he is self-existent apart from time; time itself is something He has made. So there wasn't "story prior"; there was just God. This is the God that Christians worship, who added to his eternal nature the nature of a man in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus testified to this, saying: "Before Abraham and Isaac were, I AM."

Banana699 5y ago
>He doesn't "exist", he just is This is meaningless, the verb 'is' literally means 'to be', i.e. to exist. How can someone/something/God not exist and yet 'be'? This is a very widespread problem with the Abrahamic family of religions (and maybe other religions, but I'm most familiar with this family). When pressed, philosophers and proponents are very adamant about the fact that 'God' is not an entity comprehensible to a human, it's useless to apply plain old physical or commonsense logic to 'him' or try to derive any useful facts about 'him' or just reason about 'him' in any way other than 'he exists and he wants me to say and do things'. But doesn't this, like, invalidate the whole enterprise of worship ? If God is so incomprehensible that you can't even explain why evil exists when he is supposedly all-good and all-capable of enforcing that good, what makes you think he wants or needs worshipping, you just said he doesn't obey any comprehensible rules. You might object that he himself told us to worship him in the $Book, this doesn't work. Even assuming $Book is true and uncorrupted, what makes you think God really means what he says, you just assumed he works by a rule that even humans don't always obey. Maybe God just made himself known to us and requested that we worship him as a joke, you might object that this makes God unacceptably 'Juvenile' for a cosmic entity, but again, this just assumes human standards and social protocols. Etc etc etc.
- positus 5y ago
  The distinction is that unlike everything in creation, God does not derive His being from an outside source. You and I, and (everything else) are dependent on things outside of us to cause us to be and continue being. We are, out of, something else. Not one of us decided to be born, but through the actions of others we came to be. And we continue to be, because we have food and water and shelter and clothing, etc. God, unlike the things He has made doesn't depend on something else to be or continue being. He has always been. He isn't out of anything but is self-existent; He doesn't exist but rather is. And because He is, everything else (all of which depends on Him to be) continues to be. I hope I've worded that clearly.

idoubtit 5y ago

> Religious figures and scientists both argue over how the universe was created. I haven't seen much arguments about this. In most civilized countries, religions have stopped to make factual claims about the "antediluvian times", because all their previous claims were proven false. For many decades, scientists have almost stopped arguing with religious figures. The tendency is that scientific people are less permeable to religious beliefs, and religions are almost powerless in scientific domains. Lastly, religions don't argue, internally or with each other, over the origin of the world. > Religious explanations often posit that some sort of higher power created the universe but fail to provide the story prior to that. The religious explanations failed to satisfy you, but at least some of them provide a consistent explanation. For instance, Genesis states that their god was there from all eternity, then at one point he created the world. You may dislike this "story before that", but it is clear and consistent. > The same is true of science with its big bang. It's not true. There are several theories about the origins before the big-bang, or at the big-bang. Science does provide the stories you long for, but at the same time science asserts that these are just hypotheses, and that it's highly probable that models in this domains are won't ever be proved.

schoen 5y ago
> For instance, Genesis states that their god was there from all eternity, then at one point he created the world. Hmmm? It doesn't state anything about what happened before the creation, or where God came from. It starts with "in the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth" (or "when God began to create heaven and earth") and nothing in Genesis mentions any moment or occasion prior to that. Are you thinking of other aspects of Jewish or Christian tradition that aren't derived from the text of Genesis?

feoren 5y ago

> describe where our universe came from ... that obeys the laws of cause and effect All you've done is ask a trick question, like "prove Fermat's Last Theorem without using any math". The problem is you used the words "where", which means "a place in the universe", and "cause and effect", which means "tracing the causes of something backward in time", with "time" again existing only within this universe. It's a little like Zeno's Paradox of Achilles and the tortoise. All we've found is that this particular way of asking the question or describing the question is insufficient. Obviously in order to prove Fermat's Last Theorem, you need to use math. Obviously to talk about anything "external" to the universe, you need to use something that is not a "where" within this universe and does not follow the cause and effect defined within this universe. The question is: is it, therefore, useful to ask the question, given that we are stuck in this universe? No. It's not.

coldtea 5y ago

>that obeys the laws of cause and effect Why would it need to obey those laws? What made them "laws"?

heavenlyblue 5y ago

They don’t lack the language, they lack knowledge beyond that. As anything beyond that is down the rabbit’s hole of “everything is possible” and thus the story is as boring as the 10 season of your sci-go show when they have reached beyond unifinity of galaxies and you just can’t make a proper narrative about something that no longer has any reference to the viewers

benlivengood 5y ago

> Now think for a moment, can you construct a sentence that is at all logical, that doesn't move the goalposts or do any linguistic trickery, that could possibly describe where our universe came from? Don't worry about it being true, just a reasonable sentence that obeys the laws of cause and effect? Mathematical realism ala Tegmark's level 4 multiverse is a concrete example; if mathematical consistency causes existence then the big bang and our universe have a definite, understandable cause.