Created???

[Marcus]

I then asked it to analyze MG's question in terms of fairness:

Signs of Possible Manipulation or Bias
Leading Outcome: The instructions specifically ask for weaknesses in arguments against God and then for arguments that “supersede” them, which presumes that the pro-God arguments will be stronger or more valid. This could be seen as steering the A.I. toward a particular conclusion.

A good call by perplexity. MG didn't just ask for weaknesses in the anti-God argument or strengths in the pro-God argument, he specifically begged the question, assumed that pro-God arguments supersede the anti-God arguments.

Not only that, I think he used something about the Francis Collins book he's 'reading' in the prompt, NOT the OP. After he posted his A.I. 'response to the OP,' he wrote this:

Food for thought. In another thread on Summertime Reading I brought up the title of a book I just finished called, "The Language of God". Collins makes some of the same arguments for God and points out some of the counterarguments to the arguments some folks make to try and disprove a Creator.

It sort of comes down to a matter of faith/choice. Francis Collins agrees...but he thinks there are some pretty good arguments. Some of them stated above...

I bolded the sentences that in my opinion give it away.

[sock puppet]

I then asked it to analyze MG's question in terms of fairness:

Signs of Possible Manipulation or Bias
Leading Outcome: The instructions specifically ask for weaknesses in arguments against God and then for arguments that “supersede” them, which presumes that the pro-God arguments will be stronger or more valid. This could be seen as steering the A.I. toward a particular conclusion.

A good call by perplexity. MG didn't just ask for weaknesses in the anti-God argument or strengths in the pro-God argument, he specifically begged the question, assumed that pro-God arguments supersede the anti-God arguments.

Not only that, I think he used something about the Francis Collins book he's 'reading' in the prompt, NOT the OP. After he posted his A.I. 'response to the OP,' he wrote this:

Food for thought. In another thread on Summertime Reading I brought up the title of a book I just finished called, "The Language of God". Collins makes some of the same arguments for God and points out some of the counterarguments to the arguments some folks make to try and disprove a Creator.

It sort of comes down to a matter of faith/choice. Francis Collins agrees...but he thinks there are some pretty good arguments. Some of them stated above...

I bolded the sentences that in my opinion give it away.

It seems MG 2.0 is chronically afflicted with dishonesty, and is trying to put the A.I. lipstick on a prevaricating pig.

[Physics Guy]

I don't think there's any rationally best answer to the question of why there is anything. The usual preference for making minimal assumptions would seem in this case to mean preferring the assumption that nothing exists, and that is so wrong that for me it takes the shine off the whole strategy of making minimal assumptions.

The hypothesis that everything just happens to exist, and always has, is first of all no answer to the question of why everything exists. It doesn't even answer the specific form of "why" that refers to cause and effect. Within physical causality, eliminating a beginning of time does not actually avoid the need for initial conditions, because the need is not really for conditions at the beginning of time, but rather for conditions at any one moment of time. Mathematically, determinism means that any instant determines all of time, before and after, and so a condition at any moment implies a condition at all other moments. Even if there is no beginning, there has to be a condition that picks out the actual history of events from all of the possible histories that the laws of nature allow, and this required input beyond the laws themselves is just as large, regardless of whether or not time has a beginning.

Secondly, the eternal universe hypothesis does not fit well with what we observe. We see entropy increasing, and it is hard to see why the heat death of the universe should not already be infinitely far in the past, if the universe has always existed. We see the light from distant objects systematically Doppler-shifted to lower frequencies just as if the whole universe has been expanding for fourteen billion years from a small initial volume, if not zero. And in our longstanding best theory about the large-scale structure of spacetime, solutions that fit that observed pattern, and that do have time itself beginning with a zero-size universe, are virtually inevitable.

One can find loopholes, in a sense, to try to salvage the possibility that the universe has always existed. Throughout the past hundred years or so of physics, however, and still today, those potential loopholes have been and still are mere speculations unsupported by any evidence whatever. The speculations could turn out to be right, but at this point there has never been any actual reason to believe in any of them beyond the prior philosophical preference for an eternal universe. The simple walks-like-a-duck take on cosmology, without any wait-a-second-hear-me-out-now-it-still-could-be excuses and stories, remains the conventional Big Bang theory in which time itself began fourteen billion years ago or so.

(One wrinkle that has been added to the original Big Bang model is so-called inflation, which simply adds the detail that the earliest stages of the expansion of the universe accelerated exponentially, for a (very) little while. Inflationary cosmology adds reasons for this brief, early wild ride, and it explains some important things, so technical discussions often distinguish between the original Big Bang model and the improved inflationary version. As far as discussions like this thread are concerned, though, inflation is still just the Big Bang.)

[sock puppet]

I don't think there's any rationally best answer to the question of why there is anything. The usual preference for making minimal assumptions would seem in this case to mean preferring the assumption that nothing exists, and that is so wrong that for me it takes the shine off the whole strategy of making minimal assumptions.

The hypothesis that everything just happens to exist, and always has, is first of all no answer to the question of why everything exists. It doesn't even answer the specific form of "why" that refers to cause and effect. Within physical causality, eliminating a beginning of time does not actually avoid the need for initial conditions, because the need is not really for conditions at the beginning of time, but rather for conditions at any one moment of time. Mathematically, determinism means that any instant determines all of time, before and after, and so a condition at any moment implies a condition at all other moments. Even if there is no beginning, there has to be a condition that picks out the actual history of events from all of the possible histories that the laws of nature allow, and this required input beyond the laws themselves is just as large, regardless of whether or not time has a beginning.

Secondly, the eternal universe hypothesis does not fit well with what we observe. We see entropy increasing, and it is hard to see why the heat death of the universe should not already be infinitely far in the past, if the universe has always existed. We see the light from distant objects systematically Doppler-shifted to lower frequencies just as if the whole universe has been expanding for fourteen billion years from a small initial volume, if not zero. And in our longstanding best theory about the large-scale structure of spacetime, solutions that fit that observed pattern, and that do have time itself beginning with a zero-size universe, are virtually inevitable.

One can find loopholes, in a sense, to try to salvage the possibility that the universe has always existed. Throughout the past hundred years or so of physics, however, and still today, those potential loopholes have been and still are mere speculations unsupported by any evidence whatever. The speculations could turn out to be right, but at this point there has never been any actual reason to believe in any of them beyond the prior philosophical preference for an eternal universe. The simple walks-like-a-duck take on cosmology, without any wait-a-second-hear-me-out-now-it-still-could-be excuses and stories, remains the conventional Big Bang theory in which time itself began fourteen billion years ago or so.

(One wrinkle that has been added to the original Big Bang model is so-called inflation, which simply adds the detail that the earliest stages of the expansion of the universe accelerated exponentially, for a (very) little while. Inflationary cosmology adds reasons for this brief, early wild ride, and it explains some important things, so technical discussions often distinguish between the original Big Bang model and the improved inflationary version. As far as discussions like this thread are concerned, though, inflation is still just the Big Bang.)

Per the first underlined verbiage, is "why" not a question that only pertains to a creation (actually just transformations, i.e., processes) and not to the hypothesis that everything just happens to exist?

As to conditions, such as "if not for X, then space, time, matter and energy would not exist?" Does that not also rest on assuming the basic premise that at one point in time in the past nothing existed?

Could distance (a measure of space) and time be just man-made constructs to help our feeble minds understand that the expanse of space is limitless and time a measure of slices of a beginning-less and endless eternity? Time began with the Big Bang 14b years ago? Sure, we don't know enough about what preceded the Big Bang, and so have no markers against which our notion of time measurement could be applied.

We observe matter changing into energy and vice versa. But what begs for matter/energy having had a beginning rather than simply always (that time thing slipping in again) having existed in one form or another? What made it just 'pop' into existence from nothing, creatio ex nihilo? There, creation, prompts the "why" question. If there is a creator, a god, don't we fall into the trap of an infinite regression and that doesn't answer the question? The only answer that can be is that matter has always existed, and what we see is the result of creatio ex materia? The creation inquiry can never really be completed or with creatio ex nihilo. The study is actually one of transformation ('observing patterns'), not something from nothing.

The philosophical preference for an eternal universe is both logical and pragmatic.

The Big Bang Theory posits a sudden, cataclysmic transformation of energy into matter, pieces of which scattered (propelled by some of that energy) across a wide expense. Of course, entropy is at play. Everything decays, motion slows, etc. without the infusion of more energy. Until the sun might burn out, it provides the earth a daily dose of energy, slowing if not stopping or even reversing the entropic aging process of the earth. Energy is being accumulated in other black holes to perhaps someday get to a critical point where there is another big bang.

When you say reasons for this brief, early wild ride of inflationary cosmology are such reasons for merely another transformation of something that has always existed in one form or another, into a different form? rather than actual creatio ex nihilo?

[Physics Guy]

Why shouldn't "why" be asked about an eternal universe? We often ask "why" about ongoing states, without expecting an answer in terms of an event which produced the state from some previous state. People ask why the sky is blue. There is an answer, and it is not that anything happened in the past to change the sky to blue from another color.

The philosophical preference for an eternal universe is both logical and pragmatic.

Anybody can claim that their favorite assumptions ought to be the default, but nobody likes it when other people do it. If it's so logical and pragmatic, why can't you prove it to someone who doesn't already believe it? For most of history, the Heavens seemed to be unchanging, and so to suggest that they hadn't just always been as they are was to ask for some indulgence from the audience. We know now, though, that the whole universe has changed enormously. It used to be a lot smaller.

Could distance (a measure of space) and time be just man-made constructs to help our feeble minds understand that the expanse of space is limitless and time a measure of slices of a beginning-less and endless eternity?

Vast distances and long durations are indeed hard to imagine, but if anything at all is objectively real, distance and duration are. They are not just figments of our imagination. We can measure them well in numerous ways. Our measurements have even confirmed that actual space and time do not behave just as our intuitions think they should. Distances are shorter if one moves faster: they don't just seem shorter because it takes less time to cover them, but they really are shorter. Moving clocks run slower, and this is not a defect in the mechanism, but a fact about time. Time runs (very slightly) faster with increasing altitude (distance from the Earth's center), and with increasing distance from the Sun.

Space itself can even stretch and shrink periodically. Because gravity is spacetime distortion, that periodic stretching and shrinking is called a gravitational wave. Today we can detect extremely weak gravitational waves, and use them as a new channel for astronomy.

All of that stuff is described in Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, first published in 1916 and still the standard theory of gravity today. So many of its weird predictions have been confirmed with precise observations that there is no question but that the theory has a lot of truth in it. Cosmology, the study of the structure of the large-scale structure of the universe as a whole, is a subtopic within General Relativity. General Relativity is a formidably complicated theory, all contained within one equation that can be written with just a few letters but that gets really hairy when you write out the meaning of each term in full. By the time you finish unpacking the Einstein equation, you have a page full of complicated combinations of rates of change of lengths and times with respect to each other: the geometry of spacetime, which is by no means just fixed, but rather subject to change just like everything else.

On smaller scales we see effects like the rate of time flow changing with distance from mass. This is the gravity that keeps the Earth from flying away from the Sun, and us from flying off the rotating Earth into space. On larger scales what we see is that space is expanding. Some galaxies are moving together, but overall the clear general trend is for all galaxies to be moving apart from each other, because the space between them is growing. We haven't gone way out to cut out a chunk of intergalactic space and watch it grow, but this is not just a hypothesis. We really do see the trend of everything moving apart faster, in direct proportion to how far apart it already is, perfectly fitting the theory that space itself is expanding. Furthermore we directly see that this trend has been going on for billions of years, because the light we see now from the most distant objects has travelled through that expanding space all that time. We don't see a snapshot of now, when we look far away. We see far back into history. So we are really pretty sure that the universe used to be smaller, not in the sense that empty space was always there and things were clumped more closely together, but in the sense that all distances, between all points in space, were just shorter.

If you extrapolate all the way back, you conclude that there was a definite time, not infinitely long ago, at which all distances were zero. That moment was also the beginning of time, in the sense that asking what was before that moment is like asking what lies north of the North Pole. That's the Big Bang. It's not about matter or energy popping into pre-existing space out of nowhere, at some random moment after a whole lot of nothing happening, and then flying apart through that space. It's about space and time themselves starting, literally. There is nothing that can be said about the moment of zero size itself, but by a few instants after it we have the whole universe full of all kinds of particles and fields with a lot of energy, everywhere, stretching those tiny distances out.

At least, that's the picture we get if we take General Relativity seriously all the way back. It's not clear that it's reliable all the way back. In fact it almost certainly isn't. We don't know what corrections it might need in those extreme conditions, but they could well be drastic. On the other hand, we have no evidence so far pointing to any particular kind of correction. And the backwards extrapolation according to General Relativity is surely reliable far enough back to reach a much smaller universe than what we have now. Space and time have definitely not just always been the way they are now, even if the picture of them literally starting from zero fourteen billion years back somehow turns out to be wrong.

Something spectacular definitely happened, even if it was not really the beginning of everything but only a dramatic scene in an ongoing show. Okay, spectacular things can happen within the framework of unchanging natural law. Supernovas, for instance. To get a tiny but superhot universe starting to expand, though, you need something much bigger than a supernova. It can't be business as usual. There's got to be one heck of a story to that. Yada-yada won't cut it.

If you had a working Theory of Everything with lots of precisely testable predictions that worked, and this theory explained the whole story of how localized Big Bangs are bound to happen now and then within the eternal multiverse, or something, then this would be impressive. It could well be that there is such a theory, and that one day we will find it. For now, though, if all you've got is the presumption that some kind of eternal framework must be there which somehow explains our expanding universe as an episode, then you're postulating so much, while explaining so little, that I can't see how this hugely vague eternal universe theory is any bit more pragmatic or logical than the alternative that some kind of God said something like, "Let there be light."

And even if we do find such a Theory of Everything that convinces us that there was no true beginning of time, people will still be perfectly entitled to ask why whatever it is that that theory describes actually turns out to exist. Everyone is stuck with infinite regress, not just theists.

[Gadianton]

You can count Thomas Aquinas as one who thought the universe was eternal. That religious preference likely wouldn't have changed if this huge opportunity didn't present itself. If physicists had learned a little theology, then they would have anticipated the problem of an infinite regress of causes, which Aquinas belabors, and gotten ahead of the shocking discovery rather than be left wide open. After getting completely crushed and pulverized with evolution and geology, a tiny ray of hope for the believer.

[Gadianton]

If you had a working Theory of Everything with lots of precisely testable predictions that worked, and this theory explained the whole story of how localized Big Bangs are bound to happen now and then within the eternal multiverse, or something, then this would be impressive. It could well be that there is such a theory, and that one day we will find it.

But even if that happened, people would ask why it's that way and not some other way. "why there is something than nothing" is a different "why" than the efficient cause "why", which is "what was the first billiard ball to hit another ball, such that all the billiard balls ended up in holes?" with the implicit assumption that there must a first billiard ball. If somehow you can get the billiard balls to follow each other in a circle such that there doesn't have to be a first billiard ball and such that they don't all go into holes, then that seems like the only way out. I believe that was Aristotle's first try at a prime mover, a bunch of stars moving in a circle.

I will never understand what a D-brane is, but, I'm pretty sure this idea in string theory is a parallel attempt to Aristotle's, to, in our time, come up with a new set of billiard balls such that they can be put in a logical circle. Our universe was created when two D-branes collided, which is a normal event for branes, and everything makes sense in terms of efficient causes as long as the D-branes experience no entropy themselves (as they are I assume above it) and can ebb and flow indefinitely.

So whether the universe is a ray, starts at a point and then goes forever, or is a circle, the fact that there is something rather than nothing or why that something is the way it is and not some other way, is the perplexing question and there is not much of an advantage by saying "ray" or "circle". In terms of actual physics, as you point out, we have to say "ray" if we care about real physics, what there is actual evidence for.

[MG 2.0]

I plugged your complete post into Perplexity A.I. and then gave the following prompt:



This is what came back:



Food for thought. In another thread on Summertime Reading I brought up the title of a book I just finished called, "The Language of God". Collins makes some of the same arguments for God and points out some of the counterarguments to the arguments some folks make to try and disprove a Creator.

It sort of comes down to a matter of faith/choice. Francis Collins agrees...but he thinks there are some pretty good arguments. Some of them stated above.

Regards,
MG

You must have pretty dumb A.I. app/source if it did not generate Aristotle's Prime Mover theory or Thomas Aquinas' trying to dub God to be the prime mover.

The prompt is part of the equation. The response is the other. Whether one makes some kind of what appears to be 'logical error', in the eyes of the critic, doesn't negate the content of the response. The content in this A.I. response is not simply a "wall of text". It does have value as one discusses the arguments for and against God.

I suppose a person, if intent on doing so, can throw out useful information on grounds of a technicality or perceived error. The problem with that, of course, is that the useful arguments/content are either ignored or put in the category of 'been there, done that'.

I find the arguments for God appealing and useful as I live a life also based on my own experience and thought processes. I realize others are going to see things differently because of their own life experience and thought processes.

That's why some people believe and others don't. It's a equation with various inputs with some inputs being given a lower value by disbelievers while at the same time being given a higher/weightier value by believers. And visa versa.

Regards,
MG

[Marcus]

...For now, though, if all you've got is the presumption that some kind of eternal framework must be there which somehow explains our expanding universe as an episode, then you're postulating so much, while explaining so little, that I can't see how this hugely vague eternal universe theory is any bit more pragmatic or logical than the alternative that some kind of God said something like, "Let there be light."..

Well. It's a bit more logical, at least to me, in that it isn't fully the product of someone's imagination the way gods, fairies and superheroes are.

[I Have Questions]

I find the arguments for God appealing and useful as I live a life also based on my own experience and thought processes. I realize others are going to see things differently because of their own life experience and thought processes.

That's why some people believe and others don't. It's a equation with various inputs with some inputs being given a lower value by disbelievers while at the same time being given a higher/weightier value by believers. And visa versa.

Regards,
MG

That’s not why some people believe and others don’t. Not all inputs are of equal value. For example, you claiming to have a pink unicorn in your garage is not of equal value as you opening up your garage and allowing passers by to see and photograph the pink unicorn.

You might place equal value on those two inputs, but that’s just confirmation bias at work. You start with a belief in God (for whatever reason - fear of death, childhood conditioning, a way of processing the guilt from a lucky escape etc) and then seek inputs, no matter the veracity, that seem to confirm what you already want to believe. Any input that contradicts what you want to believe, no matter the veracity, you dismiss out of hand.

You also dismiss out of hand any and all inputs from sources you think don’t have the intention of confirming what you want to believe. No matter how strong and qualified that source is. And you will place significantly higher value on an input from a source you think is friendly to your starting point of view, regardless of their credibility.

You are exhibit A for confirmation bias.

Others don’t believe in God because they’ve objectively weighed up the balance of evidence from across a variety of qualified sources.

Also, you don’t believe in many variants of what people describe as “God”. You’re a disbeliever in them. If you believed in the idea of God, you’d believe in all the variations of that idea. Why, for example, do you dismiss the Hellenic deities (Gods) in favour of the God of Mormonism, other than because it’s simply what you’ve been brought up with?