This assumes that the environment outside our universe is temporary. I don't know why that environment wouldn't be infinite or otherwise be part of an infinite. You want YOUR god to be the only infinity. I don't see a justification for that. It doesn't matter at all, but I have wondered what Christians think god would have done for INFINITY in total nothingness before having decided to create this particular universe. That must have been startlingly bleak. Or, maybe He was creating other universes, thus building an environment of many universes! And, doing so for INFINITY. In that case, what is outside our universe is NOT God + absolute nothingness. It would be God + all he created over infinity.
Good! I was just pointing out that from a communications angle giving the word "god" more meanings can be problematic.
Infinity is merely a measure which humans use for a reference point. Iow, I would say this Being is timeless. Especially if time as we measure it by our universe has a beginning. It (time) also would be contingent. Imagine the end of our Universe. Nothing to observe and no one to observe it so what would time be?
Yes, this is true for our space-time. That is, our universe as per Einstein, et. al. But, it does not imply that there is no environment outside our universe. Our understanding of what is outside our universe is almost 100% in the form of what various theoretical physicists postulate, as our ability to test by observation is limited. About the best theoretical physicists can do today is test whether a specific model would naturally lead to the kind of universe in which we find ourselves. One such idea is that there are universes that intersect with our own. If true, one would imagine that the intersections of these universes could be detected by looking for gigantic star arrangements in circles describing those intersections, as the intersections would add gravity in that circular formation. Cosmologists looked for those circles for a long time using the best telescopes we have, and they found no such circles. So, there are times when we CAN test these ideas using the experimental physics we call science.
All of that is true, science will be able to discover remarkable things about our universe. But what is being suggested doesn't answer the question of creation or the existence of life. We can push out our understanding to include an environment outside our own, other universes, other dimensions, etc. but the question of how and why all this was created is still unanswered.
I'm not claiming that the environment from which our universe sprang has time as we know it. And, we certainly don't know anything about that environment having an end or not having an end. We DO have evidence that the universe we are in can end in a few different ways.
I'm curious. What other way would time present itself? There's the past, present, and future. What do you have in mind?
Well, one can ALWAYS say that anything we find was something that God did. That's the beauty of the "god of the gaps" argument. Whenever scientists say "I don't know", theists can say "god did it". Personally, I accept the "I don't know", because we do NOT know that "god did it". For example, god could have created an environment from which our universe (and others like it) is inevitable. But, we don't know that. We can also say that god created this universe as a "one off" - with individual attention by him. But, we don't know that. Claiming to know stuff that we DO NOT know, and don't even have any evidence of, is not something I can accept, though there are those who joyously do accept that.
The problem I have with this is more general. As a natural reaction, religion denies not just what science has learned, but the very fundamentals of the process science uses to FIND answers. Cosmology is just one case of this. The result is a general attitude that what we have learned is total crap - an attitude that results in an assault on learning in all areas. It results in a denial of the importance of education, a refutation of medicine, climatology, infrastructure, etc., purely on the belief that experts in a field are nefarious and must be rejected, regardless of what they say. Today, a large segment of our society accepts the total crap spewed on politicized "news" sites INSTEAD of anything science has found. And, the reason is really no more than that since it is science, it MUST be rejected.
In our universe, physicists have shown that we live in 4 dimensions - the three dimensions of space and the dimension of time that are fused as one inseparable space-time. This is a giant departure of time as Newton understood it, and Newton's model was an improvement over how time was viewed by earlier scientists. Human understanding of time, which is not perfect, shows a progression of learning. I'm certainly not going to propose how things like space and time work outside of our own universe - or even propose what the possibilities might be.
That is absolutely not true of most Christians, certainly not of me. My experience is that atheist scientists are far more hostile to Christianity than Christians are to science. And there are many, many scientists who have embraced Christianity, not in spite of science, but because of science.
True. This is one of the questions that so far is answered by "I don't know". So, anyone who wants to can say the answer is, "My god did that." That's how "god of the gaps" works! In fact, you could say that regardless of whether science has a well supported case for how things do work. More than that, science answers questions of "how" things work, not "why" they work that way. "Why" is philosophical. You can decide "why" your god would want humans.
I did not mean that as an accusation of you. There are large numbers of scientists who ARE Christians, for example. That doesn't mean that they believe our universe was created as an individual act of god, and it doesn't mean they reject evolution, of course. The tension between science and religion from the science side is that science has NO way of accepting supernatural causes. So, when they are proposed, they get rejected out of hand. Science is based on the assumption that we may learn through observation. Religion is based on the assumption that there is an all powerful, untestable, being that does stuff that no amount of observation can address in any way. It's not surprising that there is tension. But, let's remember that science does NOT accept that there is ANY POSSIBILITY of demonstrating that there is not God. Science will always accept new observation. In fact, scientists LOVE IT when current understanding is proven false. For example, the failure of the CERN particle collider to smash current models of particle physics was seriously distressing to science. They WANTED their models to be broken, as it would point to superior directions in searching for truth. In general, (not you specifically) the attitude of religion is nothing remotely like that. If the "god did it" answer confronts a scientific answer, the religious view is that the science is an assault on religion by nefarious scientists.
No. What you do is address codas to the idea of a god that "answers" questions science has not yet found. You redefine this concept as necessary to keep it relevant. Just keep adding "god did that" and "prove it" without feeling the need for YOU to prove your godhead. It just explains what we don't yet know. How simplistic is that!
Just been watching an explanation of the issue of space-time and how our passage through space defines our time so that if our planet continues to travel as it does, we have our arrow of time. But it also discussed entropy, the universal move towards disorder and erosion which ultimately will reduce everything to protons and eventually when they erode, nothing. Where then is your god?
Right where He's always been, outside time and space, creator of the universe. Do you imagine you understand God's will, knowing what He SHOULD do as opposed to what He IS doing?
Science is about how things work. We know what IS happening, how things work, by observation. I would suggest that if there is a god, nobody knows what he is doing, or why.
Not anymore. You have nothing to say. You don't discuss actual scientific advancements, or speculate as to what they may indicate. For example in a conversation about what "was" before the BB I said that all the matter and forces and all else we see and know today were created milliseconds after the BB by the force of the explosion. I have mentioned vibrating strings of forces. I have mentioned entropy. And this is the best you can do? Seriously not worth discussing this with you.
Once again the same convenient answer to everything we don't know yet. If you don't know the answers and especially if you don't even know the questions to ask, just attribute it all to an imaginary idea. It is positively primitive.
I had hoped you would come to understand the questions. Your problem is that very few of them are satisfactorily answered by your one size fits all answer. The declaration that Peter Pan exists and answers anything you don't know would be as useful.
