The Kalam Cosmological Argument
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Oh no there is no possible cause, that can give different results from identical situations, sans randomness. It isn't a problem of finding the cause, there can't be one for fundamental reasons I outlined above.
Furthermore I am not disagreeing with them, I'm disagreeing with the dumbed down cartoon popularization for people who don't know math version. There is no singularity in the big bang theory (the FLRW metic if you wear big boy pants). It is nothing more than a time evolution equation for transforming a system from an initial state (hot gas) to a final state (what we observe). The starting point is not a singularity, the ending point is not a singularity, and there is no singularity in the points between them. Look at the equations, where is the singularity? There isn't one. To confuse matters even more, many scientist speak of the initial condition (hot gas) as the beginning of the universe. Other scientists refer to the surface of last scattering as the beginning, which happens 1000's of years after the initial condition of the big bang theory. So yes, it is easy for you to quote mine popularization of science websites to contradict what I've said. Go do the math, no singularities!
You're actually committing a false premise fallacy. Your entire premise that there is no singularity because of the equations is false. We cannot mathematically describe singularities, hence the reason they're singularities. All of our physics breaks down and is no longer applicable in a singularity, negating math from describing them. This is why we're currently trying to study them, to try and understand them so we can describe them.
You can continue asserting that there is no singularity at the Big Bang, but all of contemporary cosmology disagrees with you.
Shock of God - "Your entire premise that there is no singularity because of the equations is false."
No what I have pointed out, ad nauseum, is that the creation of the universe (or the big bang) is not the same thing as the big bang theory. The big bang theory has no singularities AS IT STARTS WITH A HOT, EXPANDING GAS. It would be like if you had a equation to model the weight of a child given his age, but starting at age 5 and ending at age 18. You might complain that this model doesn't work for children who are in the process of being born. Well duh, of course it doesn't, it was specifically cooked up not to deal with that. The big bang theory starts with a hot expanding gas. It has nothing to say about where the gas came from, why it is expanding, or even why it is hot. There are other theories that address those questions, but they are not the big bang theory. In the same way our model for the weights of children contains no information about birth, the big bang theory contains no singularities; because even if there was a singularity, the big bang theory starts long after that.
Gas did not exist at the moment of the Big Bang, as there were no physical particles. The Big Bang involves an initial cosmological singularity, from which the Universe expands, inflates, and then expands as it is doing today. I don't think you really understand the Big Bang theory.
"According to the standard theory, our universe sprang into existence as "singularity" around 13.7 billion years ago."
SOURCE: http://www.big-bang-theory.com/#sthash.ykRLph5D.dpuf
"
again notice you are using the big bang, and the big bang theory interchangeably, they are not. I have pointed this out several times. So, I have no alternative but to assume you are doing it on purpose. So I'm done.
The Big Bang theory describes the Big Bang, from the Planck wall (10^-43 seconds after the Big Bang) to recombination (380,000 years after the Big Bang). They are obviously related.
look at what you just said!
"The Big Bang theory describes the Big Bang, from the Planck wall (10^-43 seconds a̲f̲t̲e̲r̲ the Big Bang..."
Y describes event X after event X .... lunacy
Because we can't describe what happens at singularities, at least not until we have a theory of quantum gravity.
I have not seen proof of premise #1. "Everything" is completely universal and, as such, impossible to prove. I would hardly call it irrefutable.
Name off any object. It began to exist, and it had a cause of its beginning to exist. If something which comes into existence has literally no cause, then by what means does it even come into existence?
Speaking of objects is too high an order in the composition of anything. Let's talk matter and energy. It could have just always existed and has merely perpetually changed form.
I should think this possibility would be obvious.
There's been too much written here for me to comment on everything, but there are some interesting ideas floating around here that I found humorous.
Humorous Thing #1: The blatant, careless, thoroughly reckless tendency of creationists to hijack and manipulate any modern idea in theoretical physics for the purpose of demonstrating the existence of an old man in the sky. SoG uses the Penrose-Hawking theorem and the BVG theorem as seemingly incontrovertible evidence that the Universe began to exist. But what's worse, I didn't see a single person here bring up the immediate objection, the objection which led Hawking himself to abandon his ideas with Penrose: these results only apply to a classical spacetime with general relativity. They do not incorporate quantum effects, and hence they cannot be a final description of the emergence of the Universe, or of reality itself. SoG, clearly I can tell that your understanding of physics is so superior to mine I shouldn't even bother. But how's your sense of history doing? Did you happen to read this book called A Brief History of Time? It came out in 1988, and if you'd read it you may have come across the following gem by Hawking:
"So in the end our [Hawking and Penrose] work became generally accepted and nowadays nearly everyone assumed that the universe started with a big bang singularity. It is perhaps ironic that, having changed my mind, I am now trying to convince other physicists that there was in fact no singularity at the beginning of the universe—as we shall see later, it can disappear once quantum effects are taken into account."
Humorous Thing #2: What do Roger Penrose, Stephen Hawking, Alan Guth (some of the people cited by creationists in favor of their beliefs) along with thousands upon thousands of other professional physicists have in common? They're atheists. Here is Hawking himself last year:
"Before we understand science, it is natural to believe that God created the universe. But now science offers a more convincing explanation. What I meant by 'we would know the mind of God' is, we would know everything that God would know, if there were a God, which there isn't. I'm an atheist." (http://www.nbcnews.com/science/space/im-atheist-stephen-hawking-god-spac...)
Humorous Thing #3: The Cosmological Argument has already been defeated several dozen times over in the history of modern philosophy (starting with Hume in the 18th century). I've posted my own refutation of it in this forum. It exists now more as a cautionary tale in how to avoid bad philosophy, rather than as anything that should be taken seriously.
/End of my two cents
I'm just going to continue documenting the absurd things that have been stated in this thread at my leisure...
Humorous Thing #4: The suggestion by SoG that logic and mathematics are the same thing. Apparently he missed the first half of the 20th century in philosophy, where analytic philosophers attempted to base mathematical reasoning in logic and completely failed. Forget all of mathematics: even a consistent formal system for arithmetic was not possible, as shown by the Incompleteness Theorems (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/goedel-incompleteness/). However, the attempt to reconcile mathematics with logic was still an impressive failure, in the sense that it lead to huge achievements in other areas (like the emergence of programming languages later in the 20th century). A wonderful example that philosophy can sometimes have spectacularly useful results, even though it may not solve some initial fundamental problem.
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