Sunday, June 21, 2015

God Stuff




stuff I think about                                                          













JMJ





















"... and please don't say that God existed before the Big Bang ..."


I'm not trying to start any flame wars, but more and more this is stuff I think about .... Here someone asks Jesuit Father Mitch Pacwa ....

If space and time started at the  time of the Big Bang, say 14 billion years ago, and time did not exist before that, we must assume that the creation of the universe  and of God were contemporaneous events, rather than the reverse ....



6 comments:

Tom Smith said...

The "Big Bang" is a creation of man. before that it just was.

Rodger the Real King of France said...

heavy :)

Ralph Gizzip said...

I would ask that person, "How many 'Big Bangs' have there been?"

I'm guessing at some point the universe quits expanding (gravity) and begins to contract. Then it contracts to a singularity and BANG! it starts all over again.

But that's just my opinion. I could be wrong.

DougM said...

Some folks need an answer to anchor their lives. That's understandable.
Some don't care.
Other folks thrive on the pursuit of the answer.
The problem is that the answer may not come in one's lifetime, if ever. That can be frightening.
The key is to not panic by filling in knowledge gaps with large assumptions or unwarranted certainties.

Y'gotta remember that mankind has always been wrong about how nature works, and it still is, but we're getting less and less wrong as knowledge advances.

The answer is still, "I just don't know for sure. Stay tuned."
Good stuff — a tad frustrating and frightening, perhaps, but fascinating.

When you invoke a sufficiently flexible definition of God, you win. Question answered, ta-daa! There's no way to disprove it.

Also, the question asked of the Padre is not exactly valid. "Before" the Big Bang is still "meaningless" in the sense that the BB, itself, is a logical outcome (a retro-diction) of our understanding of natural laws. Those natural laws still don't explain what happened prior to a gazillionth of a second after T=0 (don't know if there is a preceding time or not). It's still a mystery, although there are some pretty weird speculations (e.g. multiverse). Trouble is, they still don't answer what happened before those pre-T=0 things began. However, invoking an Aristotelian "prime mover" is a philosophical cop-out. It's really an assumption based on unwarranted pseudo-logic. It just ends the question by invoking the word "prime."

Sure, if you throw a sufficiently flexible definition of God into the mix, we can quit now and all go home, QED. Trouble is, the God factor is a really, really big assumption, not an answer. Not sayin' God can't be the answer; but adding an unfathomable deity really adds huuuge questions, wayyy more than it answers about nature.
Again, good stuff.

The Padre makes three errors (I did only one viewing):
Aristotle was wrong about many if not most things. I cringe when Catholic thinkers invoke him (it's traditional).
Logical thinking is only valid when it is based on valid initial conditions and is consistent with knowledge.
Old philosophers did not have modern knowledge, and they disagreed with each other. Modern science evolved as the most successful metaphysics, so philosophy is now pretty much answerable to science.

(Now, if you'll excuse me, my head hurts.)

Anonymous said...

Seems the guy forgot the "ex nihilo" bit of Gen 1:1.

Everything after 10^-43 sec is physics, everything before that is theology.

Anonymous said...

The universe, and particularly it's origin, is nothing short of impossible by our understanding of physics, even if you don't believe in a Creator. Assuming God lives inside of time (after all, if He created the universe He would have had to live prior to the creation, and time was part of the creation) is preposterous at best.

The most amazing thing about the universe is the question of why are there laws of physics that "stuff" obeys? Why is not everything in chaos, why is there some sort of order? Does this prove there is a God? No, but it's another question, like what came before T=0, that doesn't seem to have an answer.

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