Stephen Hawking (RIP)

Purple said:
It explains the unexplained with the unexplainable. It is no more observable or logical than the celestial teapot.
What is observable or logical about the Cosmological argument?
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The Cosmological argument is a logical inductive argument from the observable existence of the universe to the existence of a first cause. You seem to think an argument is illogical just because you don't like it. That's not how it works. Induction is a specific form of reasoning in which the premises of an argument support a conclusion, but do not ensure it (definition).

A first cause is also a reasonable inference. Compare it to the scientific alternative:

 
Purple said:
It explains the unexplained with the unexplainable. It is no more observable or logical than the celestial teapot.
What is observable or logical about the Cosmological argument?
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In fairness, the same thing could be said about the Big Bang theory. Im not disputing that there was not a massive explosion, as that is scientifically observable, but its 'logical' assumption that it created the universe is pure theoretical.
What existed before the Big Bang is not observable and, when you think about it, not logical either.
 
In fairness to the Big Bang theory, it is very well supported by observational evidence, though not in every detail. Also, there is no "before" the Big Bang. Space and time (probably) came into existence at the same instant. The Big Bang is the subsequent expansion of space which is still continuing, not an explosion into a pre-existing void. Classical physics cannot deal with the very early moments of the expansion. For that we need something like Alan Guth's cosmic inflation theory. It is not at all well supported by observation, though there are efforts underway to find evidence for it.

Just because time (might) begin with the Big Bang, it does not mean there is no antecedent. In fact cosmologists are anxious to find one, because otherwise the Big Bang smacks of creation ex nihilo which, from a scientific point of view, is also about as useful as a celestial teapot.

As of right now, there is no evidence whatsoever of any of the antecedents which have been postulated over the years -- an oscillating universe of alternate expansions and collapses considered by Einstein, the conformal cyclic cosmology of Roger Penrose, or the Steinhardt-Turok model of colliding branes and its ekpyrotic variant. Inflation theory is still the primary candidate for explaining the extraordinary homogeneity of the universe without which neither we, nor much of anything else, could exist. The BICEP experiments at the South Pole which are looking for the B-mode polarisation of the cosmic microwave background are the best hope for finding evidence of inflation, though so far they have turned up nothing.

But let's be clear -- even the eternal inflation/multiverse variants of Guth's inflation theory are not eternal in the past. There is still a beginning. Nor are they very economical, generating a thousand trillion trillion new Big Bang universes every second. You have to smile when you consider that some materialists argued against god on the basis the one universe designed for our needs is overly extravagant.

Nope, the Cosmological argument is actually a lot more robust than any of the collection of metaphysical celestial teapots lined up against it. In fact, even if any of those unlikely scenarios turned out to be true, they would still require an ontological first cause.
 
Well Holy God! The arguments and presentations here are spiffingly excellent. I must confess that I have missed out on such conversations over the past 65 years. How I'd like to share a tea break with all the contributors on this thread.

Any chance any of you can tell me what the weather in Co Kerry will be like in 8 days time?
 
A first cause/ cosmological argument just puts another layer of the unknown on the already unknown. It then tells us that the new unknown is unknowable. It has no place in a scientific argument.
 
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Purple said:
I first cause/ cosmological argument just puts another layer of the unknown on the already unknown. It then tells us that the new unknown is unknowable. It has no place in a scientific argument.
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Does that not make the case for the existance of (a) God stronger then?
 
Purple said:
A first cause/ cosmological argument ... has no place in a scientific argument.
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It doesn't pretend to be scientific. It can't be. No theory of an ultimate origin can ever be, by definition, because it will be just a fact without further explanation. By the same token it can never be replaced by a scientific argument since such an argument cannot, by definition, exist. This is a pretty basic logical argument.

Purple said:
[It] just puts another layer of the unknown on the already unknown.
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It merely says that some layer must be the first, the most basic. It is almost tautological, unless you believe in the possibility of an infinite regress of ever more fundamental explanations.
 
Leper said:
Any chance any of you can tell me what the weather in Co Kerry will be like in 8 days time?
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Cosmic ray showers, lethal doses of ionising solar radiation, and hard vacuums
... giving way to a providentially provided benign atmosphere in most places.
 
okay, so we are back to the celestial teapot.
 
Purple said:
okay, so we are back to the celestial teapot.
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You can call it any disparaging name you like if it makes you feel better. As I said originally, it's still a thoroughly logical argument based on observables, with no possibility -- even in principle -- of a scientific alternative.

And once you get over that initial hump, of course, it has further merits. It allows you to reason about the extraordinary apparent fine-tuning of our universe which science can't explain either.
 
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dub_nerd said:
You can call it any disparaging name you like if it makes you feel better. As I said originally, it's still a thoroughly logical argument based on observables, with no possibility -- even in principle -- of a scientific alternative.
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No, it is thoroughly illogical. It simply fills the void of knowledge which we don't currently have with something that cannot ever be explained.

dub_nerd said:
And once you get over that initial hump, of course, it has further merits. It allows you to reason about the extraordinary apparent fine-tuning of our universe which science can't explain either.
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"apparent fine-tuning" or things we don't understand yet. I don't accept the premise that ignorance validates the existence of the supernatural.
 
Sophrosyne said:
Only if you think of "God" as "super"natural.

Perhaps mankind has to make some further evolutionary leaps.
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If God isn't supernatural then he/she/it works within the boundaries of science and so is not God.
 
There are alot of questions that cannot be answered by science, although alot more of them can be answered today than 500 years ago. I think we have become too arrogant because of the advances in technology to think that science has the answers to everything. Its funny that the most scientific illiterate people can be the most strident in their beliefs that science holds the answer to everything. Another issue which evolution does not really have a satisfactory answer for is why are humans so much more intelligent than any other animal. Why did other animals not develop to the same level as humans and why did humans not have to compete with animals of similar intelligence. I know that humans had to fight for survival against huge pre historic animals but never had to compete with any animal that came any way close in intellignce.
 
Purple said:
If God isn't supernatural then he/she/it works within the boundaries of science and so is not God.
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As I mentioned, it depends on your idea of "God".

Perhaps homo erectus, had he the thought processes, would have regarded us as "Gods".
 

Science is actively looking for answers to its 'known unknowns'. 150 years ago we didn't have a theory of evolution. We do now. Some 'why' questions may be very challenging to answer, but if science does not have the answer, then neither does any other methodology.

Dolphins are very intelligent, just in a different way to humans. Other animals are as developed as humans, just they developed in a different way.

Humans (homo sapiens) did compete with Neanderthals, who were almost as intelligent as us. We never had to compete with huge prehistoric animals, unless you mean extinct large predators such as short faced running bears and cave bears. When dinosaurs were around, our ancestors were were about the size of shrews.
Even today, humans with all our intelligence and knowledge can fall victim to leopards, bears, crocodiles, wolves, lions, tigers and snakes.
 
Purple said:
No, it is thoroughly illogical. It simply fills the void of knowledge which we don't currently have with something that cannot ever be explained.
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I think we've beat this one to death. You continually use the word "illogical" for any idea you don't like. To me, logical means founded on logic. The Cosmological argument is founded on inductive logic. That's all there is to it. Your objection is nothing to do with logic, so I think you need to choose a different terminology.

Purple said:
..."apparent fine-tuning" or things we don't understand yet. I don't accept the premise that ignorance validates the existence of the supernatural.
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This is in danger of turning into a "science of the gaps" argument. You cannot counter the Cosmological argument by saying "we just haven't discovered enough yet". It is an argument in principal. There is no possibility, even in principal, that you can come up with a scientific explanation of the universe that explains itself. That is an example -- to use your favourite term -- of a thoroughly illogical argument.

Nevertheless, I take your point about apparent fine tuning as one that is worth pursuing further. I think the average person has little appreciation of the extent of such tuning involved in our existence. Therefore the assumption that science will readily provide a solution seems disturbingly dogmatic and "faith-based" to me. This is not the sort of happy accident whereby we live on a planet at the right distance from a star in the right region of a galaxy, with a plethora of other accidents that favour our existence (although those chemical and environmental conditions are all interesting too and have been extensively written about).

No, it is a question of more fundamental universal parameters. The expansion rate of the universe, for instance, has to be tuned to one part in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 ... otherwise we would get rapid recollapse or runaway expansion. Either way there could be no interesting structure in the universe. The existence of atoms (and pretty much everything else) depends on something that scientists call the fine structure constant -- a number that crops up in many fundamental relationships in physics. A different value for the fine structure constant would mean no possibility of nuclear fusion, no possibility of most of the chemical elements, and a host of other negative implications for the world as we know it.

Many similar arguments can be made. Do actual real scientists take your blasé attitude of sweeping all this under the rug of "things we don't understand yet"? No, they most certainly do not. The fine tuning of the cosmic expansion has been referred to as "a remarkably precise and totally unexpected relation". The namesake of this thread, Steven Hawking, said of the fundamental constants that "the remarkable fact is that the values of these numbers seem to have been very finely adjusted to make possible the development of life". Physicists Robert H Dicke and Fred Hoyle have written about it. Freeman Dyson said: "The more I examine the universe, and the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the Universe in some sense must have known we were coming". Richard Feynman wrote of the fine structure constant:

Immediately you would like to know where this number for a coupling comes from: is it related to pi or perhaps to the base of natural logarithms? Nobody knows. It's one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics: a magic number that comes to us with no understanding by man. You might say the "hand of God" wrote that number, and "we don't know how He pushed his pencil." We know what kind of a dance to do experimentally to measure this number very accurately, but we don't know what kind of dance to do on the computer to make this number come out, without putting it in secretly!​

I could go on, but I've already quoted some of the great thinkers in theoretical physics. Now, I could finish with a rhetorical flourish and say that scientists are stumped by the fine-tuning problem and have nowhere left to run. But I don't really think that Feynman, an atheist, was seriously talking about the "hand of God", or that Hawking who cited God in order to sell books actually believed in him/it. And seeing as I am a big fan of science myself, and fully accept that methodological naturalism (the philosophical assumption that a scientific explanation exists) is the right way to approach it, let's see where scientists think we should be headed. But since we are talking about arguments in principle we won't get too hung up on particular theories.

Inflation theory might conceivably explain the cosmic expansion rate. But it introduces additional fine tuning of its own. The problem is simply replaced by whatever it is that causes the false vacuum decay to roll over at a particular energy level into the regular residual expansion that we observe. And this is a general problem with any conceivable scientific theory. It is simply illogical and implausible to posit that there could be an ultimate explanation that requires no arbitrary parameters to be put in "by hand". Science cannot produce such a thing, even in principle.

Realising this, some scientists have turned to another general approach. Building on the success of biological evolutionary theories in explaining how apparent design can arise by random chance, they posit that the universe we inhabit is just one among an ensemble of many possible ones, each of which has a possibility of existing. There are a number of different theories in this class, but they equally suffer from a number of general problems. The first is that there is simply no evidence that any such theory is real. In fact, a number of impertinent scientists have cried foul -- they point out that all such speculation is in the realm of the metaphysical, and that scientists have abandoned the scientific principle by engaging in it.

A second problem is that the supposed multiverse is not akin to the fitness landscape within which biological evolution occurs. In fact, biological evolution is the furthest thing imaginable from a random process. Darwin's theory of evolution contains within it three essential principles. It is a theory of common descent by random mutation and natural selection. The random mutation part is ... random. The rest is not. Common descent requires continuity of existence, and natural selection similarly requires that advantageous traits can be preferentially conserved and propagated. Multiverse theories, by and large, involve universes that are completely causally isolated. You can't "evolve" a universe with just the right properties, it has to genuinely be a completely random throw of the dice. (There is one exception that I know of, which is Lee Smolin's theory of fecund universes which evolve inside black holes and are subject to a sort of natural selection, but this is beset by its own theoretical problems). The fine tuning in our own universe is such that even entirely profligate schemes like "eternal inflation" don't produce it in any sensible time frame (as Alan Guth acknowledges).

And thirdly, after all that, multiverse theories still don't solve the problem. Because they still need their own rules and fine tuning about how the ensemble is produced in the first place.


I agree. Without wanting to cast aspersions, my experience is that many people who bang on about "sky fairies" and "celestial teapots" are irrational dogmatists who have difficulty following a logical argument and are not very well schooled in science.
 
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odyssey06 said:
Dolphins are very intelligent, just in a different way to humans. Other animals are as developed as humans, just they developed in a different way.
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I know they are intelligent , but at the end of the day they are still swimming around in the oceans like they did for many thousands of years. They did not develop a society or a culture or a history or change their environment in any real sense . I know in the modern era we like to promote ideas that put animals on the same level as humans and I have seen the documentaries that show how they can communicate etc. However nothing I have seen has convinced me that any animal has any semblance of the intelligence and organisation of a human. I know that this is now an old idea and very unfashionable to suggest that humans are masters of their environment. I think everything in nature is harmonious and makes sense and has a place except for man. From a logical viewpoint mankind should not exist.
 

True, re: dolphins, but then what you have said has also been true of humans for the vast majority of our time on earth as a species.
It would have been true of our most direct ancestors, and Neanderthals.
It is only with the coming of agriculture that we moved to the stage of changing the environment and seem to stand out as an outlier to the rest of nature. Our species was just as intelligent in 30,000 BC but as hunter gatherers we would have seemed in harmony with nature - at least in those places where we co-evolved with nature such as Africa and Eurasia.

Ants are probably more organised than humans. Dolphins are as clever in their domain. Killer whales have culture in the sense that different whale groups in different regions pass on hunting techniques to their offspring. Chimpanzees are almost as intelligent.
But it took our combination of general intelligence, organisation and language to produce a creature capable of the next level of environmental control.

I wouldn't agree with the idea that logically we shouldn't exist though! The idea that nature is harmonious has a certain appeal, but I don't see it as underscored by logic. If nature is supposed to be harmonious why do we have catastrophes such as asteroid & comet impacts, ice ages, supernova ... and worse, the burning off of atmospheres, gamma ray bursts...
 

but these events ice ages, supernova etc are part of nature, even though they are incredibly destructive (only from our human perspective) they are still harmonious ( i mean harmonious as it is part of nature and makes sense). For example the stuff that man does for example creating nuclear waste and elements that nature could not create in that environment, also the creation of toxic dumps with all sorts of different wastes like plastics metals and chemicals all mixed together no natural process can create. I think this is what differentiates man from everything else, nature can clean up after itself but it cannot clean up after mankind. For example nature may create a toxic substance like oil that may leak out in that location but no natural or animal process will dig that oil out of sea and transport it thousands of miles and an oil spill causes it to pollute the sea where there was no oil in the first place.

Another idea suppose man existed to current levels of technology and was wiped out by some catastrophic event. Then millions of years later some new intelligent animal like man came along and started looking for his origins or what existed before like we do today with the dinosaurs , how would he explain all the debris left behind by man that is different to everything else in nature. For example how would a man from 1000 years ago cope with digging up something like a car created by us. He would hardly think it was made by some prehistoric animal (prehistoric from his perspective). It would not make sense to him and it would not be "natural"
 
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