6 ms·

Might as well believe in God if you’re going to believe in spontaneous accidental creation…

by twodave 1y ago

gjsman-1000 1y ago
[flagged]
- tengwar2 1y ago
  How so? If you attribute it to an earlier universe, you are just pushing the problem further back. It doesn't seem to be a proof or even a mild indication.
  - gjsman-1000 1y ago
    The universe casually didn't follow the laws of physics immediately after the Big Bang, an improbable event directly after an improbable event. No explanation has been found, even according to CERN, why everything that was created was not spontaneously annihilated. Attributing that to a divine intervention is the most probable explanation. CERN attributing this to "Some unknown entity" is humorous. One theory (which CERN is using) is to argue that almost all matter was destroyed, and that the current observable universe is merely the tiny leftover due to slight differences in behavior, making the Big Bang look more like the Ludicrous Bang. This, of course, just contributes to religious snickering at how all problems are solved by adding another billion years to the timeline, over and over. https://home.cern/science/physics/matter-antimatter-asymmetry-problem https://home.cern/science/physics/matter-antimatter-asymmetr... Edit to reply: They behave differently; but why there is more of one than the other, remains unexplained; as regardless of how they behave, both should have been initially created in equal numbers. As for Sabine Hossenfelder's quote, that's a religious-faith level cop-out. When science requires faith, should it not be treated as a religion?
    - ben_w 1y ago
      > No explanation has been found, even according to CERN Incorrect. First, let's be clear, "our understanding of the laws of physics" is not "the actual laws of physics". Every physicist knows this. The universe always follows the real laws, physicists are very excited about the difference because it's a chance to win a Nobel Prize. For example, the one in 1980 for the discovery (in 1964, they're slow to award the prize) of CP violation in decays of neutral kaons, which is fancy physics language for "matter and antimatter do not behave the same way". This year, the LHCb experiment in CERN also discovered CP violation in baryons. In fact, this is in your own linked article from CERN: """In the past few decades, particle-physics experiments have shown that the laws of nature do not apply equally to matter and antimatter. Physicists are keen to discover the reasons why.""" That said, personally I like the response from Sabine Hossenfelder: There's nothing to be explained, conservation laws only apply to time-evolution of a system, not to the initial conditions. We don't look for a reason why the mass-energy was non-zero, why do we even need one for why the baryon number isn't zero?
    - guelo 1y ago
      why do the religious like snickering at people so much?
    - lukas099 1y ago
      > Attributing that to a divine intervention is the most probable explanation. You lost me here. It seems humans have a predisposition to believe in divine beings, so this just sounds like taking human biases as a basis for truth. What's wrong with saying, "I don't know?"
- datadrivenangel 1y ago
  Things existing is pretty miraculous! How is any of this stuff here?!?!?
kibwen 1y ago
Why not? If you can't observe it, test it, and reproduce it, then it lies outside the realm of science and in the realm of belief. Until someone figures out a way to experimentally verify the big bang hypothesis (or any other explanation for the origin of the universe or what came "before"), it's entirely fair to attribute it to whatever you feel like, be it a god or anything else. There is no law of the universe that guarantees that science is capable of answering all questions.
- ACow_Adonis 1y ago
  Well, I think surely the entirely fair thing to do is to just admit we don't know rather than make any attribution or imply any possession of an answer to those questions?
  - kibwen 1y ago
    Certainly, that's also perfectly fair. The thing to keep in mind is that some people derive utility from belief in some sort of creator, so ultimately it's an argument of values (specifically, you're looking to argue that people should prefer uncertainty to unprovable (but also undisprovable!) certainty).
  - tstrimple 1y ago
    Humans have created models for things they don't understand throughout human history. Certainly throughout any recorded history. We don't know, but we have a model that fits pretty well and we can guess at the underlying causes. We'll be wrong more often than right, but over time as we get more data and we can test more things, we get a more accurate model. Not necessarily the right model. We may never get that. But based on those models, "guesses" are far more reliable than "The Sun is a god who circles the world". While we don't "know" how gravity works we can explain it and model it much more accurately now than when logos was the explanation. Providing those details is far more useful than a simple "we don't know."
- mjh2539 1y ago
  If you can't observe it, test it, and reproduce it, then it lies outside of the realm of (natural) science and may lie within the realm of mathematics, philosophy, or (gasp) theology. > There is no law of the universe that guarantees that science is capable of answering all questions. There's a name for a more nuanced version of this "law" and there's a good amount of work being done arguing for and against weaker and stronger versions of it: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sufficient-reason/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sufficient-reason/
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
kgwxd 1y ago
Belief in anything is completely trivial unless you act based on those beliefs. No one is going to waste time worshiping, or murder someone over, the "nothing" from before "something".
arbll 1y ago
Anything outside of what we can observe will always be based on faith anyway. We'll probably never understand what's "before" the big bang, wether it make sense to ask that question or why something exists rather than nothing.
pharrington 1y ago
Which God? Vishnu? Ra? Amatarasu?
- ben_w 1y ago
  Prince Philip? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_Philip_movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_Philip_movement
- hshshshshsh 1y ago
  Assume God exists. Various isolated cultures are going to come up with different names for God. This like saying which Sun? Surya, Ra or Helios? All are different names of sun. But there is only one sun.
  - nathan_compton 1y ago
    On the other hand, there are a lot of stars and different cultures might give them different names and yet there really are many of them. Furthermore, assume God doesn't exist. Lots of cultures might invent god for various reasons and they'd naturally have different names and attributes for them, which in fact seems to be the current state of affairs. In fact, if we assume God exists and is actively in communication with humans, its actually a bit weird that different human cultures would have different conceptions and names for that being. Why didn't it just give everyone the same name and information?
    - hshshshshsh 1y ago
      Why do you think God will have a name? Name is used by humans to identity a person among a lot of other persons. Why will God have a name if it is the only thing in existence? To answer the question of why humans give name to God. It's to make god more relatable so that they can workshop it. And use devotion to come closer with it. Look up Bhakti Yoga.
      - yibg 1y ago
        How about just having one God vs many? If there is a single omnipotent being, why do various cultures have multiple gods? And why do different cultures’ gods tell them different things?
kobalsky 1y ago
You're confusing belief with accepting the current scientific consensus.
duped 1y ago
There's quite a big philosophical difference between "there exists a point beyond which it is possible to make observations" and "the universe was created by an omnipotent being"
- hshshshshsh 1y ago
  Am omnipotent being is a necessity for making observations. A lot of religions considers consciousness as God.
  - nathan_compton 1y ago
    I don't see how this is. It seems eminently reasonable that observation can simply be performed by sub-omnipotent beings.
    - hshshshshsh 1y ago
      Life is one omnipotent being. It's just ego, thoughts and social identity that creates the illusion of multiple beings. But ego and names are made up. Separation just thoughts. The more life believes in thoughts it becomes divided. But the waves and ocean are one.
      - 47282847 1y ago
        An illusion is something that disappears when you see behind it, no? How goes it for the illusion of the both of us being connected but separate beings? I think at the very least it would require consent of both parties to merge, so as long as I don’t believe it, you have to live as a being separate from me, and as such it stays „an illusion“ for you that we are one; merely an idea, a potential option maybe, no? You can declare Life to mean the complex interplay of every living organism, but I don’t see how you can go as far as to claim our physical and mental separateness is not there at all? After all, we need boundaries between „us“ to not be utterly alone. I like to think even of „my“ body more as a federated system, like Life maybe but on a smaller scale. I have some influence on it but not full control. In fact, one could say the polarities in the physical realm are Nature (towards separation, entropy; Kaos) and Life (actively working towards one, requires energy to keep matter ordered; Order).
nathan_compton 1y ago
I don't think so - god is substantially less parsimonious. But in the end, I think you're sort of using two different notions of belief as if they were the same. I believe (lowercase b) in all sorts of stuff, scientific and otherwise, but believing in God typically indicates some kind of act of faith, which is to say, ultimately, to believe in something despite the absence of evidence for it and for some deeper reason than can be furnished by a warrant of some kind. I can believe in the spontaneous generation of the universe in the lowercase b sense of the word without really having anything to do at all with the latter kind of belief, which I think is kind of dumb.
- mjh2539 1y ago
  Historically, in the West at least, the ability or inability to reason one's way to the existence of God determined whether you needed to rely on faith or not. https://www.vatican.va/content/pius-xii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xii_enc_12081950_humani-generis.html https://www.vatican.va/content/pius-xii/en/encyclicals/docum...
  - FeteCommuniste 1y ago
    Nice, paragraph 5 and he's already into "evolution is fiction and commies love it."
    - mjh2539 1y ago
      You didn't read closely enough. He is condemning the notion that evolution explains the origin of all things (as ridiculous as that sounds...it was a kind of ontological darwinism; no reasonable person holds this opinion today).
- skellington 1y ago
  Sort of like believing that we have free will.
zthrowaway 1y ago
The Big Bang theory was created by a Catholic priest. So yes.
- mcswell 1y ago
  And the Big Bang was created by the priest's God.
lukas099 1y ago
To me, calling the unknown "God" is imposing a term loaded with human preconception and biases in exactly the place you don't want those things.

Might as well believe in God if you’re going to believe in spontaneous accidental creation…

gjsman-1000 1y ago

[flagged]

tengwar2 1y ago
How so? If you attribute it to an earlier universe, you are just pushing the problem further back. It doesn't seem to be a proof or even a mild indication.
- gjsman-1000 1y ago
  The universe casually didn't follow the laws of physics immediately after the Big Bang, an improbable event directly after an improbable event. No explanation has been found, even according to CERN, why everything that was created was not spontaneously annihilated. Attributing that to a divine intervention is the most probable explanation. CERN attributing this to "Some unknown entity" is humorous. One theory (which CERN is using) is to argue that almost all matter was destroyed, and that the current observable universe is merely the tiny leftover due to slight differences in behavior, making the Big Bang look more like the Ludicrous Bang. This, of course, just contributes to religious snickering at how all problems are solved by adding another billion years to the timeline, over and over. https://home.cern/science/physics/matter-antimatter-asymmetry-problem https://home.cern/science/physics/matter-antimatter-asymmetr... Edit to reply: They behave differently; but why there is more of one than the other, remains unexplained; as regardless of how they behave, both should have been initially created in equal numbers. As for Sabine Hossenfelder's quote, that's a religious-faith level cop-out. When science requires faith, should it not be treated as a religion?
  - ben_w 1y ago
    > No explanation has been found, even according to CERN Incorrect. First, let's be clear, "our understanding of the laws of physics" is not "the actual laws of physics". Every physicist knows this. The universe always follows the real laws, physicists are very excited about the difference because it's a chance to win a Nobel Prize. For example, the one in 1980 for the discovery (in 1964, they're slow to award the prize) of CP violation in decays of neutral kaons, which is fancy physics language for "matter and antimatter do not behave the same way". This year, the LHCb experiment in CERN also discovered CP violation in baryons. In fact, this is in your own linked article from CERN: """In the past few decades, particle-physics experiments have shown that the laws of nature do not apply equally to matter and antimatter. Physicists are keen to discover the reasons why.""" That said, personally I like the response from Sabine Hossenfelder: There's nothing to be explained, conservation laws only apply to time-evolution of a system, not to the initial conditions. We don't look for a reason why the mass-energy was non-zero, why do we even need one for why the baryon number isn't zero?
  - guelo 1y ago
    why do the religious like snickering at people so much?
  - lukas099 1y ago
    > Attributing that to a divine intervention is the most probable explanation. You lost me here. It seems humans have a predisposition to believe in divine beings, so this just sounds like taking human biases as a basis for truth. What's wrong with saying, "I don't know?"
datadrivenangel 1y ago
Things existing is pretty miraculous! How is any of this stuff here?!?!?

kibwen 1y ago

Why not? If you can't observe it, test it, and reproduce it, then it lies outside the realm of science and in the realm of belief. Until someone figures out a way to experimentally verify the big bang hypothesis (or any other explanation for the origin of the universe or what came "before"), it's entirely fair to attribute it to whatever you feel like, be it a god or anything else. There is no law of the universe that guarantees that science is capable of answering all questions.

ACow_Adonis 1y ago
Well, I think surely the entirely fair thing to do is to just admit we don't know rather than make any attribution or imply any possession of an answer to those questions?
- kibwen 1y ago
  Certainly, that's also perfectly fair. The thing to keep in mind is that some people derive utility from belief in some sort of creator, so ultimately it's an argument of values (specifically, you're looking to argue that people should prefer uncertainty to unprovable (but also undisprovable!) certainty).
- tstrimple 1y ago
  Humans have created models for things they don't understand throughout human history. Certainly throughout any recorded history. We don't know, but we have a model that fits pretty well and we can guess at the underlying causes. We'll be wrong more often than right, but over time as we get more data and we can test more things, we get a more accurate model. Not necessarily the right model. We may never get that. But based on those models, "guesses" are far more reliable than "The Sun is a god who circles the world". While we don't "know" how gravity works we can explain it and model it much more accurately now than when logos was the explanation. Providing those details is far more useful than a simple "we don't know."
mjh2539 1y ago
If you can't observe it, test it, and reproduce it, then it lies outside of the realm of (natural) science and may lie within the realm of mathematics, philosophy, or (gasp) theology. > There is no law of the universe that guarantees that science is capable of answering all questions. There's a name for a more nuanced version of this "law" and there's a good amount of work being done arguing for and against weaker and stronger versions of it: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sufficient-reason/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sufficient-reason/

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

kgwxd 1y ago

Belief in anything is completely trivial unless you act based on those beliefs. No one is going to waste time worshiping, or murder someone over, the "nothing" from before "something".

arbll 1y ago

Anything outside of what we can observe will always be based on faith anyway. We'll probably never understand what's "before" the big bang, wether it make sense to ask that question or why something exists rather than nothing.

pharrington 1y ago

Which God? Vishnu? Ra? Amatarasu?

ben_w 1y ago
Prince Philip? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_Philip_movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_Philip_movement
hshshshshsh 1y ago
Assume God exists. Various isolated cultures are going to come up with different names for God. This like saying which Sun? Surya, Ra or Helios? All are different names of sun. But there is only one sun.
- nathan_compton 1y ago
  On the other hand, there are a lot of stars and different cultures might give them different names and yet there really are many of them. Furthermore, assume God doesn't exist. Lots of cultures might invent god for various reasons and they'd naturally have different names and attributes for them, which in fact seems to be the current state of affairs. In fact, if we assume God exists and is actively in communication with humans, its actually a bit weird that different human cultures would have different conceptions and names for that being. Why didn't it just give everyone the same name and information?
  - hshshshshsh 1y ago
    Why do you think God will have a name? Name is used by humans to identity a person among a lot of other persons. Why will God have a name if it is the only thing in existence? To answer the question of why humans give name to God. It's to make god more relatable so that they can workshop it. And use devotion to come closer with it. Look up Bhakti Yoga.
    - yibg 1y ago
      How about just having one God vs many? If there is a single omnipotent being, why do various cultures have multiple gods? And why do different cultures’ gods tell them different things?

kobalsky 1y ago

You're confusing belief with accepting the current scientific consensus.

duped 1y ago

There's quite a big philosophical difference between "there exists a point beyond which it is possible to make observations" and "the universe was created by an omnipotent being"

hshshshshsh 1y ago
Am omnipotent being is a necessity for making observations. A lot of religions considers consciousness as God.
- nathan_compton 1y ago
  I don't see how this is. It seems eminently reasonable that observation can simply be performed by sub-omnipotent beings.
  - hshshshshsh 1y ago
    Life is one omnipotent being. It's just ego, thoughts and social identity that creates the illusion of multiple beings. But ego and names are made up. Separation just thoughts. The more life believes in thoughts it becomes divided. But the waves and ocean are one.
    - 47282847 1y ago
      An illusion is something that disappears when you see behind it, no? How goes it for the illusion of the both of us being connected but separate beings? I think at the very least it would require consent of both parties to merge, so as long as I don’t believe it, you have to live as a being separate from me, and as such it stays „an illusion“ for you that we are one; merely an idea, a potential option maybe, no? You can declare Life to mean the complex interplay of every living organism, but I don’t see how you can go as far as to claim our physical and mental separateness is not there at all? After all, we need boundaries between „us“ to not be utterly alone. I like to think even of „my“ body more as a federated system, like Life maybe but on a smaller scale. I have some influence on it but not full control. In fact, one could say the polarities in the physical realm are Nature (towards separation, entropy; Kaos) and Life (actively working towards one, requires energy to keep matter ordered; Order).

nathan_compton 1y ago

I don't think so - god is substantially less parsimonious. But in the end, I think you're sort of using two different notions of belief as if they were the same. I believe (lowercase b) in all sorts of stuff, scientific and otherwise, but believing in God typically indicates some kind of act of faith, which is to say, ultimately, to believe in something despite the absence of evidence for it and for some deeper reason than can be furnished by a warrant of some kind. I can believe in the spontaneous generation of the universe in the lowercase b sense of the word without really having anything to do at all with the latter kind of belief, which I think is kind of dumb.

mjh2539 1y ago
Historically, in the West at least, the ability or inability to reason one's way to the existence of God determined whether you needed to rely on faith or not. https://www.vatican.va/content/pius-xii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xii_enc_12081950_humani-generis.html https://www.vatican.va/content/pius-xii/en/encyclicals/docum...
- FeteCommuniste 1y ago
  Nice, paragraph 5 and he's already into "evolution is fiction and commies love it."
  - mjh2539 1y ago
    You didn't read closely enough. He is condemning the notion that evolution explains the origin of all things (as ridiculous as that sounds...it was a kind of ontological darwinism; no reasonable person holds this opinion today).
skellington 1y ago
Sort of like believing that we have free will.

zthrowaway 1y ago

The Big Bang theory was created by a Catholic priest. So yes.

mcswell 1y ago
And the Big Bang was created by the priest's God.

lukas099 1y ago

To me, calling the unknown "God" is imposing a term loaded with human preconception and biases in exactly the place you don't want those things.