The beginning of time and the origin of the matter that comprises the universe as we know it. A topic for theists and atheists.
Offline At work today I had some time in between calls so I started to think... What was there before everything came to be. No matter which perspective I look at it from it gives me a headache.
Mind F**k #1
From the theist perspective, you have the question of a God with no beginning and no end... but in the realm of human understanding how can something defy time and have NO beginning. No end is easy to comprehend, "ok it just never stops, kinda like the energizer bunny". There is simply no way to fathom something truly with no beginning.
Mind F**k #2
The big bang and evolutionist perspective aka "sans diety"... ok there was a big bang and matter blah blah blah... then stuff evolved, the strong survive, mutations etc. Ok, the basics of that are not hard to wrap your brain around. But I am still left with the same question as before. Where did the matter itself come from? If there was a big bang, where did the matter that caused it to happen come from? What is the definite beginning of time?
Perhaps now all theists and atheists alike can join together in grappling with this collasal mind f**k. I don't honestly think there is a solid answer to this question no matter which side you approach it from.
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Matter is made via accelerating energy to the speed of light, E=mc2
Time well are time in this universe, started when matter was made by accelerating energy, matter equals mass / mass equals gravity/ gravity equal time
Gravity and time are linked no gravity no time
? anything else
....as amazing as it is, it's not a miracle. Don't forget to ask the fun Buddhists for ideas.
There is no end to the unknown, so it seems. Creation is forever re-creating as a ziilion zillion yrs is only as an instant.
We have looked outward to what seems to then become a void, but who would not think zillion upon zillions of more mutiple big bang creations are there ?
How and why ? That is the beauty of myth, religion, philosophy and science ..... untill the fundy's and the greedy and unimaginative ruin the day.
How and why ? umm , could just call it god if it wasn't for them fundy's ....... bummer......
todangst is fun with these questions .....
Atheism Books.
Is this the answer you are looking for?
The Absurdity of the Cosmological Argument
"Physical reality” isn’t some arbitrary demarcation. It is defined in terms of what we can systematically investigate, directly or not, by means of our senses. It is preposterous to assert that the process of systematic scientific reasoning arbitrarily excludes “non-physical explanations” because the very notion of “non-physical explanation” is contradictory.
-Me
Books about atheism
deludedgod ,,,, I would say YES with a very quick re-scan of your essay .... which I have read and admired before.
My only problem as always is with the use of the word god, just because of it's many meanings to people.
You wrote supernatural and magic and those would be adjectives I would use when using the god word to make clear to the simple reader, ie supernatural or magic or creator god. ..... as we agree there is no creator .....
It really is important I think to stress and define that god word ..... as the buddhists use of the word is so different than here in the west.
I would like to see the message you and other atheists make more universially understood.
..... that god word is mabey never going away so to re-define it is seems the only way.
kill the fundy god, that ain't god ..... you know what I mean ......
I'm really glad I found you man ..... way inspiring .... and do write too for the simplest ones, think of kids and how you would explain that damn old word , ..... G-O-D
Atheism Books.
If you don't like the good article from deludedgod here is my simple explanation.
Whatever the position, atheist or theist, there is always "something" eternal that you have to start from (god, multiverse or the laws of the nature).
Looking for the answer are cosmologists and physicists, asserting that they know the answer, as always, theists ("God did it" seems to apply to anything not easily explained by science).
A mystic is someone who wants to understand the universe, but is too lazy to study physics.
How is it defying time?
To say that something has no beginning it to say that no matter how far you go back in time, it was still there. You will never find a time before that.
I don't see a problem with that.
I don't see why matter has to 'come from' somewhere. According to the laws of conservation, matter cannot be created or destroyed so must be eternal.
It might be that time is finite, that there is a beginning to time. If so, it doesn't make sense to talk about 'where time came from' because that implies that there was something before time.
('before' is a relation between two moments in time, i.e. this happened before this - if time has a beginning then there is no 'before'
Rev Devlin: But my headache stems from the prospect of where did all that energy come from and what got everything started, what made the ball start rolling. I wasn't using the word time in that scientific space/time kind of way. I was using it in the say one-one-thousand = 60 seconds kind of way
Strafio: Everything has to have some sort of source, this is a rational presumption, yes? Something with no source defies the span of understanding.
My only mental mire with saying that matter/time energy were created by xyz is that it just sort of says "*poof*... everything was there, just because, it was just there". Maybe its that simple, just with a complex reason. Hopefully I clarified some of my crappier or weaker points, usually things come out better at 1pm then 330am Thanks for making this an interesting topic!
Not really... no.
Otherwise we would have an infinite regress of 'sources'.
Whether something can be said to have a 'source' depends on the context.
For example, we say that every event has a cause.
This is because every event in time had an event before it.
And because these events are connected by the laws of physics, and that the first event determines what the second event will be, we can put a causal relation between the two events.
Then you put the rule "everything must have a cause" in abstract and take it outside of this context, it stops making sense and you get the 'mind fucks' that you came up with.
The concept of Infinate Universe/Time.. I think this is something that can not be comprehended by our minds. In a nutshell, we see the world/universe in 3 dimensions. I believe that there is so much more than what we can see or possibly understand. But one thing you could easily deduce when struggling with this mind f**k is that 'God' does not answer the question, because you would still need to ask the question how God was created and what was before 'God'. To say 'God just always was' is a cop out. This mind set requires that you don't think.
space/time & 60 seconds are the same thing
Arrrrrr where did all that energy come from and what got everything started
Space Monkeys with light sabres. having a fight, go on try not to picture it
Unknown at this present time would be the most rational answer, science may yet answer this question in the future, but for now it is unknown
Deludedgod has an interesting theory involving nothing, that I hope he will share with us, as I cannot remember the details
But until science can give use the answer, I'm sticking with Space Monkeys ? and your-self what do you think
IIRC, that would be vacuum flucuation and quantum tunneling.
However, there are non ex-nihlo theories that are perfectly valid.
Rev Dev: Id say at the present my thinking is somewhere between yours and davidnay2007's post just above yours. The human mind is so limited, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't do our damndest to understand the world around us.
Strafio: Lemme get this straight, you are saying that everything just 'became'? you said that according to the laws of conservation that matter must be eternal... This "matter" is starting to sound an awful lot like a deity *ducks rock thrown at head*
? Did you mean According to the laws of conservation, energy cannot be created or destroyed so must be eternal
Even so it's not eternal as in " existing for an infinite amount of time, as time in thiis universe has a beginning, it also has a probable end
ops Edit that which exists without mass exists outside time, I see, and stand corrected, by myself ? were are those space monkeys when you need them