Someone once said "Don't think about Infinity, it will drive you mad".
The GB often think about it, one of them at least drives around in one. ( an Infiniti).
Infinity and god - why wait to create the universe?
by Simon 108 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
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*lost*
Love science, it explains so much too us about how the world works, and what is.
It cannot explain to us the 'why' though.
So many mysteries, so much too ponder.
Aren't we so lucky to be humans rather than oooh I dunno, sheep (for example).
What exactly caused the big bang.
these are things I ponder much, but when I go that far back, I have to stop, it becomes 'head-wrecking',
more study and research,learning and understanding will be needed for me to even attempt go there.
Simon - sent you a pm, did you get it ????
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EntirelyPossible
because of the necessary change in status quo of the gravity to start the universe
How do you know there was a change or status quo? You are making a lot of assumptions, such as that outside of our expanding spacetime, there is time. It seems very commonsense to think there MUST be something like our time for the very reasons you say, but if relativity and quantum mechanics has taught us anything, it's that common sense goes out the window in the fundamentals of nature.
You are making a statement about something not fully understood and saying something like it must exist in a region we understand even less about and making that statement because common sense. However, common sense did not in any way predict the standard particle theory, that matter and energy are the same, that space and time are the same, electron waves or that black holes could evaporate due to virtual particle pairs popping into and out of existence
Now, that's an impossibility.
It not really, it's simply bad logic, saying there could be a universe in which two mutually exclusive things exist, which, by their very definition cannot be. It's like saying non-wet liquid water or non-frozen ice.
It cannot explain to us the 'why' though.
What 'why'?
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EdenOne
EP, the problem remains.
If you unchange X, it will remain X ad eternum. But if X changed, you must conclude by deduction or observation that something caused it to change. That's the principle of causality. The absence of a cause is an impossibility in physics. The fact that presently you may be unable to identify the cause of the change in status quo of gravity that brought about the universe, doesn't render it an impossibility. There is inevitably a timelike interval between an effect and its cause, and the effect inevitably belongs to the future of its cause. Therefore, the gravitational conditions that determined the emergence of the universe necessarily had an a priori cause, and there was a time interval between the two. Therefore, time precedes the beginning of the universe. Infinity does exist. We just cannot comprehend it. And that's ok.
"The chaos is an order yet to be deciphered" - José Saramago.
Eden
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Phizzy
Are we approaching this from the usual human viewpoint that we are so very important. Assuming that before "our" universe nothing existed.
Could it be that before our universe there were many more ? a constant, infinite, procession of big bangs followed by big crunch followed by big bang ?
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Seraphim23
Actually I think we can comprehend infinity, which is why we scratch our heads when logical contradictions like something from nothing gets postulated as being a viable/comprehensible view, as is being done here. Infinity is comprehensible but the non-comprehensible part comes in when one tries to press the finite with the infinite. It’s like oil and water, the two don’t mix which is what happens with physics which normally deals with finite things. Put these two together then, and only then, does compressibility go out of the window.
Quantum foam or whatever else it gets called still exists even if you take time away, which leaves you with no explanation for why there should be quantum foam of which the universe arose from before time began. Why and how does quantum foam cause time to begin? To say there is no answer is the same as saying there is an infinite God. To say we don’t yet know is the same as a theist saying God exists in a way we don’t yet know.
Both atheists and theists have a problem here because logic has literally run out, yet valid questions remain and they really are valid. With a theist it is how can we be here at all when God must still be waiting to create us because infinity is forever. It would take forever to get to this point in time. With the atheist it is calling something science that goes way beyond anything even remotely comprehensible or logical, as with saying nothing or a quantum form requires no explanation and then it can start time through some occurrence that must have happened before time. All this just to avoid the something from nothing paradox, however is it really word games to avoid the fact that atheists are at this point forced to do what they criticise theists for doing, namely using magic to get something poofing out of nothing. Both camps are in trouble with logic here which leaves what? A logical contradiction just like infinity does when it gets forced up against feeble human attempts to explain all things. Even though I am a theist I don’t hold with fundamentalists of the theist or atheist persuasion. Logic and reason fails you both ultimately and infinity looks at you and laughs.
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Comatose
Phizzy great point. Like that idea.
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EdenOne
Phizzy,
I thought many times that would be the answer ... a never ending cycle of creation / destruction of physical universes.
Eden
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DeWandelaar
When the universe started, time started BUT still... it was a start... and when something starts there is a point BEFORE that...
Also... something needed to accelerate all the actions required to get the cosmos created.
Our shortcoming is that we live in certain "dimensions" and I see them as borders... borders that men can not cross but the spiritworld can.
That is the problem solely with science... it has boundaries and can only discover things within these boundaries.
Although I do not believe in the doctrine of the JW's I still believe in God... I still believe this all was created...
God is not bound by time... we are... he isn't. In his opinion things have already happened... Can you understand that? Infinity in Maths goes both ways: it goes back in "time" (forever and ever) and it goes forth in "time (forever and ever). There are professors (within science) who are searching for Prime Numbers ... they haven't found them all yet because of technical boundaries but they KNOW they are there. Same goes for the elements in the Periodic Table ... there are still gaps... but they know that somehow there are more elements (yet... not discovered).
These two examples show something: we have (technical) boundaries... we can not even create the supercomputers yet to discover a "simple" number... so how on earth can we, with our brains, state that we can understand "infinity" ... we can't... so the statement in the first post is in my opinion incorrect.
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Seraphim23
I agree with you in much of what you say Dewandelaar except I think it is really the finite we have a problem in understanding. I know it sounds strange but for instance as an example we know that A x B is always going to be the same as B x A where and A and B are ordinary numbers. I don’t have to do to the sum an infinite number of times in order to see if this always holds true for every set of numbers. Why is this case? because humans have the ability to understand mathematical rules. I don’t have to count all the numbers of infinity to know this will always be the case for every number. Of course doing so would be impossible but we don’t need to. So the ability to understand rules is an understanding of infinity. The rules themselves, as opposed to the understanding of rules as these are two different things, is where the problem is, due to the fact that one rule depends on another and so on, until infinite rules are reached if that were possible to do in finite time. So if one is attempting to use mathematical rules, or their cousin, physical laws, to explain all of reality as with a scientific theory, the theory will eventually lose explanative power the more it attempts to explain as rules increase to encompass more and more. This may not be obvious yet but it will become so more and more in the future.