Speaking of something from nothing, what about something to nothing?
My daughter is 36 years old and this is till her favorite movie.
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Perhaps there never was something from nothing or nothing from something.
Perhaps it has always been the same something, simply undergoing constant transformation.
But my mind will never get past where did the something that’s always been come from?
I really do need a joint.
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I like to tell my Christian friends that a God who could create a living cell that is capable of reproducing itself, transforming itself into a million different forms that can adapt to a million different environments over a billion years, is a much greater creator than a God who is continually having to go back to the workbench, whipping up an eye here, a bacterial flagellum there.
And again, I really don’t have a problem with anyone who believes God is the ultimate cause, as long as we agree on what the geology/astronomy/paleontology evidence shows us about earth’s history.
The issue that Christian evolutionists need to confront, though, is all those false starts and dead ends in the process. If the earth was essentially created for humans in God’s image, why all that mucking about with Hallucigenia and Velociraptor and Homo habilis?
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Hence, the tongue-in-cheek idea of “unintelligent design:” the idea that life was designed by a total idiot who had no idea what he/she/they were doing.
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Or did they?
Questioning God’s will or creation decisions is a big no no among some of my friends. And while I question their belief system on many things they are still very good friends.
If you mean this literally, it may help to know that this is a known phenomenon of the brain shutting down. It creates the “white tunnel of light” in your visual cortex from which all descriptions of “heaven” and such in Near Death Experiences are derived. Just a biological quirk your brain is going through on the way out.
Why not? There’s no reason to believe otherwise. Maybe the question you should be asking is why you feel such a strong need for a life other than this one. Make the best of life now because all the evidence says it’s the only one you have. Make the world a better place with your actions and help other people.
Almost dying is a very very emotional experience, but you do yourself a disservice by mapping that energy onto fruitless evidence-free spiritual navel gazing rather than trying to get the most out of the time you have left.
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I did not actually see the white light. I was told later about full cardiac arrest. I also understand about the white light possibly being part of our brains shutting down.
Who says I’m not making the best of this life and why can’t I do both? Have a meaningful life while contemplating what if?
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Another element that makes the Big Bang even less intuitive is that it is a singularity in time as well as space. That means that there’s no point in asking what happened “before” the big bang, because there was no before. Time itself doesn’t exist beyond that point, so our usual ideas of cause and effect break down here.
The best analogy I’ve heard of it is that time is like distance north-south, and the Big Bang is the north pole. You can’t say what’s one metre north of the north pole, because the direction “north” doesn’t exist once you reach the pole.
If you’re used to living in an area that seems very flat, where North and South are well-defined and useful directions, the idea that they just stop existing at some point is very odd and seems nonsensical. However, once you know about the curvature of the earth and the shape of the globe, then this makes sense. In the same way, people who live in a part of the universe where time seems to be a constant find the idea of a singularity very odd.
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Ah, but no. After the heat death of the universe, after the last black hole has evaporated, all that is left is the quantum foam. That is as close to “nothing” as is possible. Just a sea of virtual particles annihilating each other immediately after coming into existence. It’s a thought experiment, and nothing that we will probably ever fully understand, but it’s fun to consider.
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I contemplate it every time I see an especially heady draft of beer.
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I’ll admit I have no idea about quantum anything but what you describe as “as close to nothing as possible” would still mean something and you’re also describing a process that occurred because of something that was once here.
In other words, lets say your scenario happens and eventually a new something evolves into something where people or some other life form is able to ask questions and discover the quantum foam that started their beginning, they would then get stuck on where did the foam come from. It came from a previous something which may have come from an infinite amount of other somethings that became nothings but I would still be stuck at something from actual nothing at the absolute beginning.
Our brains are both the greatest thing and the most frustrating thing, my brain anyhow.
I’m also not trying to prove or disprove a creator, clearly we will never know unless that creator reveals itself is a non cryptic way and not through Jim Baker.
It is fun thinking about the whole thing.
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There will always be a frontier at the edge of human understanding. To scientists, this is a shining opportunity to explore the unknown. The biggest challenge, I think, is that the further we get from what we understand, the more difficult it is to form and test disprovable hypotheses.
Another challenge is our brains themselves. We all carry cognitive biases - both innate and learned. We jump to conclusions. We see patterns everywhere, but not all of them are real or meaningful. We constantly confuse correlation and causation. We need to understand our limitations and strive to transcend them if we want to continue to grow.
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There are questions, and then there are meta-questions. For example, “can god create a boulder so heavy that he can’t lift it?” is a question. The meta-question might be “is this question well-formed?” or “is this question answerable?” I suggest that your question about what preceded the big bang is fundamentally unanswerable. If you can’t argue from logic (and you can’t, for proto-origins), then you have to argue from evidence. But the only evidence we have is from a universe which didn’t exist before the big bang. For me, the answer to “where did all this come from” is “we can’t know.” Not “we don’t know”, or “we don’t know yet”, or even “we’ll never know”. We can’t know. It might not be a satisfying answer, but it is a useful answer, if for no other reason than it removes one question from the list I’d like answered before I die.
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Nah, vaccines are a harder problem. As we’ve already seen, the more accepted they get, the harder it gets to point to extant reasons/data that show how effective they are.
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And yet the probability may be much higher of getting not a whole big bang, but just a boltzmann brain that exists for an instant and remembers a past that never happened. Then it becomes a weird anthropics calculation I don’t know how to resolve.
@sisyphus321 Be careful putting any specific questions outside the realm of inquiry. Lord Kelvin once wrote that “The influence of animal or vegetable life on matter is infinitely beyond the range of any scientific inquiry hitherto entered on.” He wrote this after Mendel and Darwin published their works, btw.
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The problem with the 747 analogy is the implied assumption that there is a “goal” that evolution is heading towards. Because there is no “goal”. It’s just various natural pressures increasing, or decreasing, the probabilities that an organism with a given trait (some tiny tiny difference from other members of the species) will manage to raise babies. There is no end-game, no “result”, there’s just a lot of “here are the critters who are around at the moment”. All slightly different from one another in various ways. Religious folks always seem to think there must be a “goal” or “plan” in nature for some reason.
So a tornado at a junk yard will not blow things around and create a 747, but with enough tornados hitting that junk yard they might blow things around until it’s mostly things which are heavy and have a round, aerodynamic shape that are left sitting around the junk-yard. Evolving that junk yard to be one filled with heavy round things that can’t blow easily. The tornado is an environmental pressure which makes being “non-blowable” a favorable trait.
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They probably figured it out much earlier than that. The reason we remember Eratosthenes work a little over 2000 years ago is that he accurately calculated the circumference. Sadly, since he calculated it in stadia, and that unit had not been standardised, we aren’t completely sure how accurate the result was.
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If you stand at the North pole and dig a 1 metre deep hole, moving you nearer to the spinning vortex of molten iron at the earth’s core that causes the earth’s magnetic field, have you travelled a metre North? If you held a compass vertically at around waist height as you stand in the hole, would the North end point at your feet? Asking because I really don’t know.
Which is why that over the long-term evolution selects for maximum degeneracy. An engineered machine is designed and built for one specific set of conditions and goals, and if either the conditions or goals change we start over with a new design. That’s not an option in evolution. There are always environmental changes, and it isn’t predictable what those changes will be. If the current solutions don’t also work for the new conditions, there isn’t a redesign but an extinction
Which is why what succeeds is degeneracy; systems that accomplish many different, good-enough solutions to the current conditions (both within and across individuals). That way when conditions inevitably change, some of the current good-enough solutions will also work in the new environment. Whenever people talk about evolution in terms of goals or trait-optimization they miss the point. The only universal good of evolution is survival through as many different ways as possible, because that promises that some of those ways will also lead to survival in whatever is to come
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