That is not fair.
You can't have it both ways.
If God can be eternal then why not also the Universe, with no need for a God to create it?
God is Impossible
- Thread starter Prince_James
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That is not fair.
You can't have it both ways.
If God can be eternal then why not also the Universe, with no need for a God to create it?
Second Law of Thermodynamics.
I agree.
It could certainly be either way.
Since it is possible that God could be eternal, however, that invalidates your logical impossibility, no?
I never quite understood why people claim that the Second Law of Thermodynamics invalidates the possibility that the universe can be eternal, and no one has really been able to explain it to me.
Can you please elaborate?
The second law is commonly misstated, which is why most people are confused about it, which is why theists think it has anything to do with the possibility of life.
Commonly, the 2nd law is stated as an increase in entropy. Or, a breakdown in order. Both statements are confusing the issue.
What the 2nd law says is that energy flows downhill. (the law was stated in words 50 years before it was ever put in mathematical terms)
My favorite example is a complex shore. Imagine a seashore, and how the waves create bands of various material. The hard, packed sand will be up in the newly dry band, the small shells will form a band, and there will be a line of sea-foam, and another band of bigger shells, and some soft and mushy sand in the undertow region. So much order! It looks to have been designed by a creator! It violates the 2nd law!
Let's even ignore the fact that this is not a closed system (there is energy input from the waves). Even though this is the main mistake made regarding the 2nd law, I want to explain how it isn't even the most egregious. The main mistake is to not understand that all systems are unique, so you have to figure out which direction is the downhill flow of energy.
In the case of the seashore, the downhill state is this nice series of ordered bands. It would take extra energy to push the larger shells over the small-shell band. It would take extra energy (uphill, if you will) to wick more moisture from the mushy sand up to the hard, packed sand. The neatly ordered state you see is the downhill state of energy.
Too often, people think of gases and heat when they think of the 2nd law. Indeed, the downhill state for these things is usually uniformity. The mistake is to think that this must then apply to all other systems. It doesn't work that way. I would be willing to bet that complex life is the downhill state of a warm and wet ball of rock. Maybe not technological life, but surely biology in general. I would also propose that when matter is clumped together, it is in a downhill state, since gravity is the overwhelming force in the universe (even if it is the weakest). It would take a lot of work (uphill) to keep matter evenly distributed in the universe.
To One Raven: I haven't looked back on the previous page, I just thought of another way to phrase our string problem at work, and wanted to keep from double-posting. Here is a better way of looking at the "halving" example I gave earlier.
As long as the size of your bit is NOT EQUAL TO ZERO, there is a finite number of bits of string. By halving the bits, over and over, you will never get to ZERO. You will approach it, like a vertical asymptote, but you will never get there. You will only ever be correct in saying there are an infinite number of bits when you get a bit size of ZERO. Since you will never get there, I will always be correct, and always have a number in hand, to multiply by your number, to get the number of bits in the string.
The confusion is that you think that since you can keep halving the bits FOREVER, that infinity ensues. I have just shown that it doesn't. We can indeed keep halving the string for ETERNITY, but since you will never get to ZERO, you will never be correct. Hence the confusion, hence the paradox.
Please think on this for a day, I think you will see that my model is irrefutable.
But, by all means, this only settles a small facet of the proof. I really look forward to discussing this further, as it is aiding my ability to phrase concepts within my head in a way that others can (hopefully) understand.
Cheers.
Not in an infinitely long string.
That's the whole problem.
Assuming the Planck Length is a reality and not a false limit for sake of the discussion, in an infinitely long string, there would be an infinite number of discrete bits.
Please go back and read my last post to you now.
it picks up on this theme.
I will think more on this tonight, as requested, but until you can convince me that a infinitely long string can not be made up of an infinite number of discrete bits, I can assure you that you have not won me over yet.
Keep trying though. I am enjoying this as well.
I found myself discussing this with my girlfriend last night.
She got bored rather quickly, but rest assured, you have at least gotten inside my head - and that's a start.
If God is eternal, who or what created eternity?
Eternity had to be there to start off with, for God be in it.
Eternity is not a "thing" to be created.
Eternity is simply an attribute of something (be it God or the universe, or anything else).
I know you are bright, however, and you are aware of this, so I smell a Platonic trap.
Where are you going with this?
As it happens the point seems to be precisely that there is nowhere to go with it.
Who or what attributed eternity?
The impossibility continues to be that of supposing an attribute, or whatever you want to call it, without the existence of the potential prior to, or apart from the object affected.
If they want to posit a God as a catch all for whatever is beyond our knowing I'll buy that, but only for the sake of logical benefit, on the condition that the failure to know entails the obligation to cease to pretend to know. Such a silence is one to be craved with relish.
It is easy to understand though the fear of an eternal God. Eternity implies an endless supply of second chances; with no such pressure to get it right first time it is no wonder that it all goes wrong.
Why?
Why would any attribute or property need be bestowed on anything by an external potential?
What is illogical about saying that "God" had always existed?
Is it any less logical than saying that the universe had always existed?
What imparted the properties of an eternal universe upon it?
I'm not sure what the infinitely long string is doing in our discussion. I saw it creep in a few posts ago, but I was still caught up in the proof that a finite string does not have an infinite number of "bits" in it.
I will concede to you that a hypothetical string of infinite length would contain infinite "bits", but such a string is only a construct, it could never exist.
Now... if you are using the sting as a time analogy, as we have been for a few pages now, I can see that you are suggesting that infinite time would have infinite discrete bits, which I concede to you as well. But only as a hypothetical. If you will look at my proof, this is precisely what I take to be an axiom, which leads to the problems that seal god's fate (the god which I defined according to most monotheistic religions).
Here is a re-stating of the gist of my proof using your infinite string. Imagine your hand somewhere on the body of this string. Now, I want to tell you that there is a piece of string that I painted red, off to your left. I want you to go and find it. The problem is, you can't ever find it. I painted it so far to the left, that you would have to go an infinite length to get to it. No matter how far you go, the part I painted is just a little further to the left. You could travel an infinite distance, and still not approach it.
If this were time, we could use any definition of what a discrete step is. Since you are presuming that there is an infinite number of them, they can even be huge states involving many smaller states. This is the same as how an infinite ruler can be divided into an infinite number of inches, feet, or millimeters (sorry to mix standards). So don't get into the trap of thinking about seconds, minutes, years or eons. Think about god making coffee.
God makes coffee for breakfast every "day". I don't care what a day is, lets just define it as the length of time it takes for god to start making coffee again. (since we know he makes it once a day)
Over one of these cups of coffee, god decides to create the universe. Who knows how long before he gets around to doing it, that isn't important. What is important for our discussion is that there is a cup of coffee that god had... off to the "left" if we are thinking about a time-line. This cup of coffee is just like the red bit of string. No matter how far "left" you go, it is just beyond that one. Since there is an infinite number of "coffee days", this is not a mere playing with words, it isn't an abstraction, it is a feature of our hypothetical universe (and your infinite string). From this cup of coffee, which we know to have existed, all the way to the cup over which god contemplates the cosmos, there are in infinite number of cups in-between. God could not make that number of cups. And you can't use his god-like magic to weasel your way out of it. No matter how many cups he makes, there is at least one more to brew.
And I most theists I know like to say, at this point, that god just brewed an "infinite number of cups all at once". Which is the sort of ignorance and confusion you need in order to believe in a god that is made up of the three axioms I give.
Like I said in the proof, this does not mean that the future is finite, only that the past must be. Remember, the ray, not the line. The reason that this isn't impossible is because even though an infinite number of states await the cosmos, there are an infinite number of them that the universe will never reach. (most people's heads explode when they bump into this piece of logic) We could calculate that the particles and energy are approaching some asymptote of existence, but also tell that they will never quite reach them. No paradox.
The problem with an infinite past is that we are here, you and I. And an infinite cups of coffee have not been brewed. I can think of an infinite number of them that can not be reached between here and there.
Again, Sherlock Holmes is begging me to reconsider our assumptions in the face of such airtight illogic. And one of those is the assumption of the infinite past. An assumption that gives all cosmological and religious models severe problems. And it shouldn't... it is easy to consider a past with no time. And it would be less weird than other things to consider that a timeless, massless void contains the natural and overwhelming power to create all mass and time. It could be downhill in the nature of my 2nd law post. And since no time existed beforehand, it would be instantaneous. It may not have been "our" big-bang. It could have been a billion big-bangs ago. I'm not pretending to have an answer to fill the void. (pardon the pun) I'm just demonstrating that an infinite past not only doesn't make sense, it isn't even necessary.
And all gods seem to rely on this feature, which is why most gods are easily disproved.
Tell your girlfriend I said hello. And do be fair when relating my side of the issue... I'm trying to get my wife to argue your side as best she can!
The God of the Bible created time and space.
You see? One Raven, do you see what I mean? The God of the Bible was brewing coffee for a very long time and THEN he created TIME. Because TIME is just a measure of how many seconds have passed. It is a human construct. When god is existing, and thinking, and drinking coffee, he is exhibiting changes in his state. Changes that could be labeled by himself, and surely remembered by himself. But somehow that isn't TIME to a theist. TIME is the thing that god created from "outside" of TIME.
I hope this demonstration from IceAgeCivilizations helps you see my point by giving you the black bas relief on which my points stand out.
It is not so much a question of bestowing, more a question of recognition.
It depends what you mean by logic.
Logic is a method.
God may exist forever therefore the Universe may exist for ever, that is logical.
Either statement on its own is a belief, or an axiom, or perhaps an observation if you happen to be God.
If I notice that acording to Genesis Chapter 1, 26 "God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness:"
it is then logical to deduce that if we in the image of God were created, not previously eternal, then God must be the same.
OK, I'll own up.
It was me.
It was all my fault.
I was not here then so I must have been there.
It stands to reason.
If the universe is an open system, then there was no "Big Bang," as its beginning point necessitates that there be an outer edge.
And if Big Bangers would admit that it is a bounded universe, according to the geometry of the Big Bang, then they would have to admit that gravitational time dilation was in play during the expansion of the universe, so the stars need be only thousands of years old, and of course, they can't have that, so they say that the universe is boundless and bounded, all at the same time, like swivel disingenuously asserts.
And if Big Bangers would admit that it is a bounded universe, according to the geometry of the Big Bang, then they would have to admit that gravitational time dilation was in play during the expansion of the universe, so the stars need be only thousands of years old, and of course, they can't have that, so they say that the universe is boundless and bounded, all at the same time, like swivel disingenuously asserts.
Notice that God said "let us make man in OUR image," now who do you suppose the other(s) were besides the Father?
"Multiverse"?
It is actually derived from past tense of the latin "vertere", to turn, i.e. turned once.