Monday, October 26, 2009

Here Comes Today

Atheists will say: “I won’t believe / think / accept anything unless it has been “proven” by repeatable, verifiable, testable observations.”

Atheists will say: “It is incoherent to speculate on what was “before” the Big Bang because “before” did not exist. In fact, nothing existed before the Big Bang; not space, not time, not matter nor even the laws of physics.”

Atheists will say: Before the Big Bang there were other Big Bangs and other universes; in fact there were an infinite number of Big Bangs and an infinite number of universes of which ours is just the latest.
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I don’t know what you make of that kind of thinking but it makes me feel as though I’m talking to a person whose intelligence and ability for logical thought have been over-ridden by an absurd and illogical world-view; a world-view that is impossible to defend.

For example:

All things being equal, tomorrow is coming. And, according to atheists a new universe is coming. First let’s rid ourselves of the cyclic model.

. “It is said that an Argument is what convinces reasonable men, and a Proof is what it takes to convince an unreasonable man. With the proof now in place, cosmologists can no longer hide behind the possibility of a past-eternal universe. There is no escape, they have to face the problem of the cosmic beginning.” Alex Vilenkin, “Many Worlds In One - The Search for Other Universes.”

. We know that our universe is not the latest of an infinite number of cycles because in cyclic models entropy is carried forward into the next cycle. There is simply not enough entropy in our universe to have had a previous cycle.

. There is not enough matter in our universe to reverse the current expansion.

Conclusion: The cyclic model is not and cannot be past eternal.

But what about matter itself being eternal or infinite?

As stated, tomorrow is coming. However, for tomorrow to happen we must first proceed through today. For today to become reality, we first had to proceed through yesterday and on and on and on back to day one, or the Big Bang which occurred roughly 14 billion years ago.

Not so say the atheists, out of the other side of their mouths. Atheists say that matter does not have a beginning. The existence of matter just goes back and back and back literally forever. There was no beginning.

So how, if you do not have day one, as Big Bang cosmology suggests, do you get to day two which is necessary for day three and on and on into the future until we arrive at today? Atheists seem to accept that the universe is 14 billion years old. How do they make that statement if they don't accept current measures of time?

Because of what we know, atheists accept that the material infinite does not exist.
Because of what they want to believe, atheists also say that the material infinite does exist.
To atheists, these statements are interchangeable depending on where they are at in the argument and which side of the issue they are arguing.

Because of what we know, atheists accept that the infinite is just a concept.
Because of what they want to believe, atheists also say that the infinite is more than a concept, that it’s real.
To atheists, these statements are interchangeable depending on where they are at in the argument and which side of the issue they are arguing.

Because of what we know, atheists accept that everything that begins to exist has a cause.
Because of what they want to believe, atheists says that some things can begin to exist without a cause. In this cause atheists say that everything came from nothing without a cause, or by nothing.
To atheists, these statements are interchangeable depending on where they are at in the argument and which side of the issue they are arguing.

Because of what we know, atheists accept that there cannot be an infinite regress of cause.
Because of what they want to believe, atheists also say that there can be an infinite regress of cause.
To atheists, these statements are interchangeable depending on where they are at in the argument and which side of the issue they are arguing.

Because of the Big Bang which required a cause, an external to matter, space and time cause at that, atheists admit that we’ve reached today but they have no explanation for how that happened.

Atheism - logically indefensible.

4 comments:

SmartLX said...

I asked for this, so I'll take part in this thread and then I'm done. There seems to be little I can achieve here.

- Atheists believe plenty of things they have not observed, because there are other kinds of evidence besides direct observation. That's how people are convicted of murder without having committed it in front of the police.

- The two given concepts of "before the Big Bang" are mutually exclusive, of course, but neither is a certainty and few would claim as much. Each is merely a possibility. That's an important thing to be, however, when someone claims that a god is the only possibility.

- Vilenkin is squarely in the "no time before time" camp. He and his colleagues, I say again, ruled out eternal inflation without a singularity, not the possibility of naturally caused singularities or the entire sample space of eternal universes or even cyclical universes. Vilenkin's own model does not require a cause at all, and rather than leave it at that he explains exactly how in his book.

- Entropy ceased to be such a dealbreaker in cyclical cosmology (if it ever was one - the field has existed since the 1930s regardless) with string theory, and the dark energy hypothesis. In those multiverse models with infinite universes and therefore matter, it may not be an issue at all.

- Whether there's enough matter in the universe to eventually pull it back together is still up in the air, and closely related to the search for dark matter. The Big Bang/Crunch cycle isn't the only cyclical model though. The universe might not have to collapse to start a new one.

- I totally called it (comment #44): Mak's used VenomFangX's argument that infinite past time makes reaching the present impossible. (The original video is gone, so I've linked to a response.)

The simplest response is that if time stretches backwards into infinity, then infinite time has passed to bring us to the present. A road is the same distance in both directions. Infinity isn't likely to both exist and not exist.

Atheists do indeed consider the mutually exclusive possibilities of no pre-Bang time and infinite pre-Bang time. Certainly I discuss them both. I do this because neither one has yet been ruled out, despite the incredulity and ridicule of people like Makarios.

Thesauros said...

There is no such thing as "either end" in infinity.

SmartLX said...

That's nice, but I didn't say "either end" so now you're misquoting as well as quote-mining. I said "both directions", which do exist on any timeline or numerical line of any sort. If we can project back into infinity in the first place, then we can return.

SmartLX said...

Makarios has continued this argument in Eternity and Matter, but I'm sticking to what I said and finishing with this thread. He's all yours, folks.