'God' is Impossible

The Time-Zero Imprint,
Or Not, Of the Hand of God!

Well, in the previous section, we were ‘lucky’ that the mass density measurement turned out to be zero and thus did not violate the conservation of energy. Was it really ‘luck’, though? No, for it was fact, plus it should ever be that ‘luck’ will never fail when one is on the right track.

The Grand Designer, God, supposedly inserted the design of the universe at its creation—so, we should therefore expect to see some degree [even any degree, actually] of order possessed at that zero-time.

This expectation of order is often expressed in terms of the 2nd law of thermodynamics: the total entropy or disorder of a closed system must either remain constant or increase with time. Now, was the universe always a closed system or was order imparted from the outside by God at the beginning?

Prior to 1929, the ‘necessary’ outside influence was a strong argument for a miraculous creation. Then this stock-market of an idea crashed, for Hubble discovered that the universe is expanding, the galaxies moving away from each other. Thus, an expanding universe could have started in total chaos and still formed localized order consistent with the 2nd law.

But, did it? Of course, due to this 2nd law, the total entropy of the universe must increase as the universe expands; however, the maximum possible entropy increases even faster, leaving increasingly more room for order to form.

The reason is that the maximum entropy is that of a black hole. The expanding universe is not a black hole. Back at the earliest definable moment, the Planck time, the universe was confined to the smallest definable region of space, it having the radius of the Planck length. As must be the case, the universe at that time had lower entropy that it has now; however, that entropy was as high as it possibly could have been for an object that small. Note that this is because a sphere of Planck dimensions is equivalent to a black hole, from which no information can be extracted.

How is it, then that this ‘maximal’ entropy when the universe began can be ever increasing ever since? It is because the entropy of the universe now is higher for its current size, but not maximal, as we said, since it is no longer a black hole.

Also, remember that there is no time interval that can be defined that is smaller than the Planck time. This is implied by Heisenburg’s uncertainty principle, again showing that no information can escape. Thus, there is no need for a theory of quantum gravity to describe the physics earlier than the Planck time.

The definition of time is: that which is counted off as an integral number of units of the Planck time. This is discrete, but we can, as in calculus, treat it as continuous in mathematical physics since the units are small compared to anything we measure in practice.
So, we extrapolate through the Planck intervals. Because we can do it ‘now’, we can do it at the earliest Planck interval where the big bang’s description begins. At that time, the disorder was complete; it was maximal.

Thus the universe began with no structure. None. The universe has structure today since its entropy is no longer maximal. The universe thus began with no organization, either designed or otherwise. In fact it was chaos! There was no initial design built in to the universe at its beginning! There was no time zero imprint left by a Creator.

Lucky are we again that there was not even a hint of an imprint at the ‘creation’? Yes and no, for the facts can never fail in this endeavour.

Now, if it could have turned out otherwise, then we would have provided some evidence for a Creator. This would have only been if the universe was a firmament, as it is in the Bible, instead of an expanding one. This ‘revealed’ Biblical universe would have had a high degree of order imposed at the beginning from the outside, it then being a universe whose entropy was lower than the maximum allowed in the past.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

But are these you mention above indeed just analogies?

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Note that you are at the outset making the assumption that matter can not exit independently of God. It is also possible that God created the physical universe to be a standalone self-supporting system that is not eternally reliant upon him for the maintenance of it's existence. So even if I accept the existence of God in the first place (for the sake of argument) you are further requiring me to accept an additional assumption which, as far as I can tell, is supposed to be part of the conclusion.

I can accept that there is no requirement for God to be a system, and therefore no requirement to frame him dualistically. But what you can't legitimately do is insist that there is no dualism in nature, if we define nature as all that exists (God and the physical universe). This is because you insist that God is not a system, which makes him fundamentally different from physical reality even if physical reality is eternally reliant upon him for it's existence, and also because you have insisted that we can't properly and completely merge God and physical reality into the kind of "oneness" that would, by virtue of physical reality being a system, make God a system also. Instead your oneness is a oneness and a difference simultaneously, which is inconceivable, and as I have already pointed out, you can't legitimately appeal to inconceivability to demonstrate that you are correct.

In summary, your argument begins with an assumption, uses it to support the conclusion and finally tries to iron out the problematic nature of the conclusion by appealing to the fact that it's an incomprehensible reality.

Like I previously mentioned, you can believe whatever you want to believe, and I'll even accept that there is some chance you may be right, since I am after all an agnostic atheist who can't say for certain that God doesn't exist (or that he is this, and definitely not that). But if you continue to insist that anyone who doesn't embrace Achintya Bheda Abheda isn't examining the question of God properly, then I'm going to call you on it every time.

Even if I accept all of your prerequisite assumptions, only sort of.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

How can that be?

I have noted several times that "system" is only a meta-level concept, but nobody seems to take note of that.

Why not?

 

It's part and parcel of omnipotence really. It would be impossible to argue that God couldn't do it without implying that there were limitations to his ability as a designer.

Semantics really. In view of the fact that we are using the word to characterize physical reality, but not God (at least not a holistic concept of God), surely the nature of the difference we are pointing to is rather obvious?

 

"God creating the physical universe to be a standalone self-supporting system that is not eternally reliant upon him for the maintenance of it's existence" is in the same class as "square circles" and "married bachelors".
It's nonsensical.

Only if you take as apriori that Systems Theory is the alpha and omega of explaining things.

God is to the material world like the Sun is to sunlight.
God is to the material world like the flower is to the smell of the flower.
God is to the material world like the person who cleaned the room is to the cleaned room.
God is to the material world like the author is to a book he has written.


It seems that the problem you have with these examples is as follows, to show on an example:

God is to the material world like the author is to a book:
Yes, but where did the author get the paper and the pen to write the book, for he certainly didn't make them from nothing? And if we use the analogy of the author and the book, are we then not saying that matter from which the Universe exists, exists externally to God, precedes God?

Or with the Sun and sunlight example, we could introduce issues of where the Sun came from, or that they don't seem different enough because both are physical, and so on.

Yes, this is an objection, and it is also where the analogy breaks down.
But we must understand that if there would exist a perfect analogy for something, then that very thing we are trying to explain and the analogy would be one and the same. A perfect analogy would be a mere tautology.

So for the sake of understanding analogy as such, I have provided several examples above.
Can you come to some conclusion of what they all have in common?

 

Deists wouldn't agree with you.
Also if one considers God purely to be the "original cause" then this also holds to Rav's suggestion... God causes... God does not interfere.
To use LG's example... it is much the same way that the sun no longer interferes with sunlight once it has been created.

In each case the analogy is of a system giving rise to a product that owes its existence to that system and then lives an independent existence.

So how can any of these be used as an analogy for a non-system giving rise to a product that is dependent upon that non-system, as LG suggests?

LG has claimed God is not a system... so the weakness of using a system as an analogy should be obvious.

If one tries to use inappropriate or inadequate analogies, the fault is not with the one trying to understand but with the one insisting on the analogy.

 

Yes, one of the connotations of 'Deity' is that of a non interfering God who didn't further attend to what He created, yet this creation still took know how for great detail in the foreseeing that it will function after it blooms. This still requires a system of mind.

My latest posts are the developing of the superfluous disproof of a God who actually does ongoingly manage and intervene in the universe, these posts here just for completeness and because He is the God most often referred to by the main religions. However, He has already been cut out at the source by the other disproofs, those being more basic.

 

In the ‘Beginning’… There Was No Cause!

Theist Science

Some Theists use science, too, in ever hoping to obtain an objective proof of God. They recognize the empirical facts of the happening of the big bang, of course, but they say that this big bang demonstrates the existence of a Creator—God.

In 1951, Pope Pius XII was going to make the following statement infallible:

“Creation took place in time, therefore there is a Creator, therefore God exists.”

However, the astronomer/priest Georges-Henri Lemaitre, the very person who had first proposed the idea of the big bang (first calling it a ‘primeval atom’ or a ‘cosmic egg), must have been even more infallible than the Pope, for he wisely advised the Pope not to make the statement infallible.

Lemaitre was indeed as dedicated to science as he was to his priesthood, his big bang theory trying to combine both. He had concluded that an initial "creation-like" event must have occurred.

Now, am I going to give some dumb relation here such as that since God can come from no cause or nothing or have been around forever that so then could have the universe have done so?

No, for while this could very well be, this analysis just shows that the two ‘parallels’ are extremely unequal, one being of a few tiny little dinky-do simpleton quantums of electrons and quarks and the other of an infinitely immense magnitude of the most composite complexity that could ever be.

The view does work, though, as in showing God to be a zillion to one shot, not to mention that we ever see that simpler and simpler simplicity ever underlies complexity.

For religion to just ‘say’ that no cause is needed for God is fine, for they can just say and ever pronounce these kinds of things without proof. For science to do this, though, would turn out just as does the religious result: a duck flying into a brick wall. [The scientist would be a dead duck.]

So, then, some Theists think that the universe must have had a beginning and, if so, that this implies a Creator—God. Well, of course it doesn’t, but one such ‘beginning’ argument was based on general relativity, it being thought that a singularity existed at the ‘beginning’.

First, some background about ‘singularity’ notions: Extrapolating general relativity back to zero time, the universe gets smaller and smaller while the density of the universe and the gravitational field increases. As the size of the universe goes to zero, the density and gravitational field, at least according to the mathematics of general relativity, becomes infinite! This is always bad news for equations, but, at that point, the theists claimed, time must have stopped and, therefore, no prior time could exist.

However, “There was in fact no singularity at the beginning of the universe,” states Stephen Hawking now, for this follows from quantum mechanics, which also is confirmed to great precision, which tells us that general relativity, at least as currently formulated, breaks down (the infinity) even at times less than the Planck time, 6.4 x 10-44 second and distances smaller than the Planck length, so, therefore, general relativity cannot be used to imply that a singularity occurred prior to the Planck time, so it really can’t show the proof of a beginning of time, not that this would be any proof of God anyway.

Well, since this is a great story unfolding here, we won’t even have to worry about these attempts at all, for we will show even that a universe having a beginning need not and does not have a cause.

What place, then, would there be left for a Creative Theity?

 

Confirmation of Science

Confirmations are everywhere, since scientific laws must match and predict the facts of what really happens, repeatedly.

Quantum mechanics, for example, although some of its basis is counter-intuitive, always works out perfectly. We employ and depend on products based on it every day.

The methodology of science is well known, but here’s a big example:

Science ever goes on to astronomical heights. The first supernova since 1572 appeared in some small galaxies nearby, called the Magellanic Clouds. Though its radiation to us began a while back, we saw it alight upon us as a ‘now’—the immerse quantities of energy of the star-stuff maelstrom.

An astronomical technician in Chile stepped outside for a smoke, and being observant, spotted it! He, a mere human standing around out in the dark under the starry sky, detected it, for the large telescopes only look at a small section of the sky at a time.He goes in and tells someone in charge. A large burst of never-detected neutrinos is thus expected.

Astrophysicists call their colleagues deep beneath the Earth’s surface in the United States, Japan, and Europe. They said, “Look in your tanks. You have already made a great discovery.”

They were right. Each of the observatories had detected a few tens of neutrinos at about the same time. Consider the magnitude of this achievement. They had tested all of of physics! They had predicted the events in a star’s death throes by using theories from nearly every part of physics: special and general relativity, quantum mechanics, fluid mechanics, thermodynamics, nuclear physics, atomic physics and elementary particles. If any of these theories had been in error, the prediction of neutrinos would have failed.

So, the laws of nature known to us on Earth must be the same hundreds of thousands of light years away and also the same back when that star exploded hundred of thousands of years ago.

 

Wisdom? From you? Laugh.

I have already made all the points I had to make. It isn't beginning. I have already ended it.

Maybe you have more savvy than LG:
http://www.sciforums.com/showthread.php?t=106754&page=5
Read the thread (something LG couldn't handle), specifically UD and SW interaction, then get back to me.

 

Up to what exactly? Can you reiterate?

 

This really does make me laugh everytime I hear it. My posts respond to all points put to me. Shame you theists don't have that commitment too.

How so? It is just an observation of human nature.

I have already covered these points in this thread. You guys seem unable to cover all the points, and able to ignore the fact your points are covered.

Thanks for the wonderful explanantion. What would we do without you?

Ahhh. Heaven now. So your belief imposes structures on its subjects. Do you believe in Heaven then? Where is this Heaven you speak of? Fixing down beliefs, and fixing down those beliefs to structures that haven't been proven to exist requires one to take a 'leap of faith'. This basically means that the believer thinks something exists, or is real, something that has no proof of its existence. This is not something a sane person does.

You do realise believing in a god that is unproven is insane? It is self-delusional, and is a wholly willful exercise of the instinct to need something more to feel safe/free from the stress of life. BELIEVE me, I do get that. I respect it as far as people have the right to it. Just don't pedal your delusions to me in some illogical attempt at legitimising a belief that is totally unfounded in the real world.

I am covering lots of bases I already have here in this thread. I hope you appreciate my spending time to reiterate my thoughts in case you missed them.

What stereotype do you think I hold. if you have read this thread and read my response you would see I hold no such preconceptions. Each belief is different.

What is the nature of your belief?

So give me your take.

I do not attempt to define god. I just wait for evidence of gods existence. This does not define god. It just means the doors are open to contact. If god is a reality. If god is something. Then that something has the possibility of being capable of leaving traces of its existence. I wait for said traces. until then I am not willing to believe in a maybe. It would just show me as being a complete dumb ass.

No idea.

Anyone who fixes down a belief is making assumptions if that belief is unprovable.

Wrong. You really haven't followed this thread have you? I am fighting against deluded and illogical dumbass belief.

Wrong. I am looking for proof. It seems the logical place to start, to ask theists. They purport to have proof, so I ask to be included in this thought process, to measure its validity for my life. Is that wrong?

If you believe, what is your proof? Why not offer it up?

 

Additional. Directed at squirrel. How can I take you seriously and believe your belief is rigorously applied with a sensible take on the universe when you can't even depress the 'shift' key on you keyboard to capitalise your i's or I's ???

 

i'm putting you on ignore..you are not fun to argue with.

 

Have you thought about what you're claiming here?

Is it insane to believe that you can claim: "god is unproven"? Isn't it just as self-delusional, and just something to let you "feel safe/free from the stress of life"? Where that life includes the troubling question of the existence/nonexistence of a god?

But you are attempting to define what the question is, and what the answer should look like. Although that last seems to remain in the "rather vague" category of descriptions. If you are waiting for evidence, shouldn't you have an open mind? How can you be remotely certain what the evidence will be like, or that you've found any?

 

I have already covered these points with you Arfa.

 

That seems like an easy way out for you right there. I forgot that debate is all about self satisfaction. Seems a theist's life's core is about self satisfaction; satisfaction that belief seeks/brings. I thought debate is about finding the truth of a subject?

Put me on ignore; just as you put reality on ignore.

 

I suppose if you don't find me 'fun' to argue with then it's decided. God exists. You win.

 

Have you really?

I don't think so. I haven't seen anything convincing. And I still think you're begging the question: Is it ok to say you aren't attempting to define God, but then define God as something which isn't "proven". Then to use that as the basis of an argument that claims its "insane" to believe in something which isn't "proven" without offering the slightest hint as to the nature of this "proof"?

I think it's at least a little bit crazy, dude.