Hawking says physics proves there is no time for "Gawd".

[Liability]

They have already been answered. Matter is a form of energy. Energy has no origin, it has been proven that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. Just because you do not like the answer does not mean it is not the answer.

Wrong.

If matter is a form of energy and energy is a form of matter (splitting an atom of matter "releases" a shit load of energy which does destroy the matter but leaves the equation intact), then you haven't answered diddly dick.

For if matter and energy (can change form but) cannot otherwise be created or destroyed, then where the fuck did "it" come from in the first damn place?

Another way of stating it is "nothing can exist prior to itself." But your initial condition, your basic premise, requires that something exist prior to itself.

You don't comply with your own conditions but label your facile assertions "law."

You really are not very bright.

It's tough to argue with someone who at least pretends not to know what they are talking about. Splitting an atom does not destroy matter, it simply breaks the atom into smaller parts releasing the energy that held the parts together.

Again, since it has been proven that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, it always existed "in the first damn place." And my basic premise is not your Straw Man "something exists prior to itself" but that there is no such THING as nothing. There never was nothing and there never will be nothing. Everything is energy in some form.

You are such a dork. Splitting the atom does destroy the atom which IS what releases the energy. It transforms matter INTO energy.

What Einstein proved (and which you have not yet learned to grasp) is that matter and energy are interchangeable. So you CAN destroy matter by converting it into energy (but there is no net loss of the balance of matter/energy since the conversion is part of a balanced equation).

Your answer remains a simplistic and very much addled and erroneous bunch of crap.

If matter and energy are two different forms of the same thing, then where did the original matter/energy come from. It cannot be created or destroyed, but it makes absolutely no sense to claim that it always was and always will be since that entails existence absent creation.

You can't answer the question "where did it come from" by saying "it" was 'always' there and yet claim THAT is a "law" without proof that something can exist without having come from somewhere.

But if you wish to insist that something can exist without having been created, why randomly choose matter/energy? (Actually, it would be matter/energy/time/space, but that's another argument.)

Even great physicists and philosophers concede that there is no more proof of the proposition that matter/energy "always existed" then there is for the proposition that they were created by the Big Bang or that the "stuff" of the Big Bang got created itself from some higher cause.

 

[hortysir]

The rotation of the Earth has never been constant. It is presently slowing down by 1 thousandth of a second per day.

You don't know.

Thank you.

No one can comment on how long a day was 5 billion years ago.
Therefore they cannot comment on how long it took God to create *anything*.

1/1000 second per day shorter for 5 billion years? That means 5 billion years ago, a day was nearly 2 billions seconds shorter than it is today (how many seconds in a day, now?). Actually, it would be a lot more than 2 billion seconds shorter because the mechanism that slows the earth would have slowed the earth exponentially more going into the past. So, about a million years ago, to launch a rocket into space wouldn't take any fuel at all.

To an Athiest who believes that there was nothing and then nothing happened to nothing, resulting in the universe, the above math shouldn't be a problem. Stupid Atheists.

You can't use that math, because

The rotation of the Earth has never been constant

 

[Liability]

One of the hardest things to comprehend and reconcile in cosmology is the 'free lunch' factor - how it comes to pass that the universe can get something for nothing; how it can go from not existing, to existing; how matter or energy can come into being from its former non-existing state. To be fair though, cosmology is not the only worldview suffering from this dilemma. Any account of supernatural creation, also leaves the existence of its creator unexplained. Even then, it has resorted to the assumption that supernatural powers exist and natural laws are subject to inexplicable violations.


For any sensible secular attempt to explain the origins of the cosmos, we must proceed from what is known and seek to explain what is unknown without ceding to assumptions or contradictions. A good starting point is to observe that the universe does indeed exist. If it didn't we wouldn't be here contemplating it. It then follows that something had to begin existing or else we must assume that something existed for an eternity into the past. [The assumption that there can be no physical reality extending into the indefinite past may be a human bias based in our innately illogical wiring.]

The eternity idea, when applied to cosmological science, seems to be irreconcilable with direct evidence. The universe does appear to have a finite beginning in the past. This so called 'Big Bang' is much more subtle than our intuitive imaginations tend to picture it. It is not simply matter exploding into a preexisting void.

The big bang was actually predicted by Einstein's theory of relativity, in which time and space are aspects of the same thing 'spacetime'. The implications of this are less intuitive than most people realize. To have an appreciation of cause and effect, so that we can say "this was caused by that" we also rely on a concept of linear time, because each effect must be preceded by a previous cause. The perfectly sensible question of "but what caused that?", ultimately leading to the current question regarding the cause of all the matter in the universe, relies on the assumption that time existed before that matter. OK, it did, but the matter is only a manifestation of energy (again according with relativity), but that just pushes the question back to "where did the energy come from?" What is needed is a primal cause of all causes. Unless time itself breaks down and the concepts of 'before' and 'after' become meaningless.

When cosmologists say that the universe is expanding, they do not mean that the galaxies are rushing into a preexisting void. What they mean is that spacetime itself is expanding and increasing the relative distance between galaxies like raisins in an expanding raisin loaf. The implications of relativity for the big bang, is that time and space are properties of the universe that themselves began with the big bang. In conceptual thought and natural language this is hard to intuitively describe and comprehend, but in the language of mathematics, it seems the natural and inevitable consequence of the known evidence.



If the universe is expanding this way, then by running the clock backwards and inquiring into past epochs, we must conclude that the universe becomes smaller and smaller as we look further and further into the past. This is not hard to do in cosmology incidentally, because light travels at a finite speed and what we see from distant objects is delayed by the traveling time for light (approx. 300,000 km/sec).

The further away the object, the more ancient the light is that we are presently receiving from it. We are actually looking back through time as we look out through space.

Traversing the eons back through 13.7 billion years we come to a point where time and space cease to exist. Running the clock forward again we pass through a moment at the beginning of time where the universe is no bigger than an atom. At this point in history or prior, time and space become indistinct and it gets worse. Below the Plank constants, the entire universe is subject to quantum fluctuation. Quantum mechanics is another area that is full of counter intuitive but mathematically beautiful ideas.

So where did matter come from? It came from a free exchange with energy for particles. But as for the ultimate cause of all causes, we must assume that something was permitted to begin existing without cause, otherwise nothing could begin existing in the first place and at the first time. In this view, causality itself, was also born in the big bang. Without spacetime it is meaningless to speak about prior causes, because without spacetime, no linear progression of time from the past into the future is possible. It may be desirable to explain where this matter manifesting energy came from, but the question assumes that it is sensible and meaningful to ask a question about causality, in a situation where no prior causes are possible.

A relatavistic metaphor for this, honoring spacetime, is that below a certain size, the universe has no space for a past. Its entire volume was consumed at first by that primordial present moment. The only reason it found room for a future, is by expanding rapidly and dragging the present moment away from the past. The energy required to fund this expansion and the subsequent formation of matter is not justified by causality. because it existed at the birth of the universe, before which there was no time or causal relationships. On the other hand, the "free energy" can not be prohibited by causality either, as, by the same token, there were no causal relationships to prevent the "free energy" either.

Intuitively, we expect to find a cause for everything, but if we think about it carefully we must realize that this can not apply to absolutely everything. Something must initially exist without cause. There is no logical contradiction, or violation of natural law, if there is no natural law which prevents the spontaneous appearance of something. In our day to day lives at the human scale of existence, it would seem ludicrous for a chair to spontaneously pop into existence before our eyes. A chair is certainly the kind of object that must be made of other materials, by way of cause and effect relationships orchestrated by human minds. But what about a rock? again rocks are formed by geological processes, that have natural cause and effect relationships which in turn obey the laws of nature. We must then ask, how the rock manifested itself, bypassing the known laws of physics which create rocks.

Energy is much more nebulous and plastic. It is easily transformed from one state into another. We may use light to create electricity for instance, or heat to produce kinetic energy etc etc.. But ultimately we know that no energy is destroyed or created. it is just transformed from one form to another. This is called the principle of energy conservation. We know there are natural laws which make this principal inviolate. It is no coincidence of nature that energy can neither be destroyed or created. But those laws depend for their meaning an inviolability on cause and effect relationships within spacetime. No law was broken in the big bang, because no extra energy suddenly appeared in the universe, the energy appeared with the universe.

We might like to know why the universe began at all. According to the modern understandings, it was neither compulsory or impossible, but how probable was it? This is also a moot point, because there may be multitudes of such universes. Given that spacetime is born into the universe, these universes would exist outside of our space and time coordinate system, so there would also be no meaning to whether they exist before, after, or simultaneously with ours. Remember this when you are tempted to think that our own existence is unfathomably improbable. However improbable anything in our universe may seem, given a potentially infinite number of possible universes some of them (perhaps scores of them), may quite easily have the quirky improbable characteristics we find in our own Universe.
____________________
As alluded to above, there was no matter as we know it in the time leading up to the big bang, but there was a concentration of energy that began to expand at some point. After thinning and cooling, particles began to condense. The rest is history.
It is interesting that people usually have no problem accepting the possibility of time unfolding into an endless future, but have a huge difficulty going in the other direction. The problem may be that the idea of things existing into an endless past is beyond our intelligence, wit and imagination. This difficulty might arise because 'anthropomorphizing' cosmology is simply irresistable to us. We have a beginning, and many of us are sure that we will enjoy existence for endless future ages [alternately, we have difficulty accepting that our existence could somehow completely end], and so logic notwithstanding we conclude that the cosmos must be the same. In reality, our concept of an endless future is every bit as dim and unsupportable by observation as is our conviction that an endless past is utterly impossibe.
Some theorists are considering the possibility that our universe began at the collision of two nearby universes, mathematically constructed as 'membranes' [an offshoot of superstring theory]. There may be countless other universes, many or all of which overlapping with our own. They may simply exist within the folded dimensions locked in the quantum world of the tiny. Of course, this might not be the case, but there are mathematical models that support the possibility. It goes without saying that such models offer hope that we might speculate about conditions prior to the big bang, and that we might one day shed the taboo of the forever indefinite past.

Where did the material for the Big Bang come from

Cool stuff, but the best part is to see REAL scientists and philosophers acknowledging the lack of certainty in what gets randomly tossed off here as "the" answer by goobers like edthsickdick.

It's actually perfectly ok to acknowledge that we don't know and to qualify, with a hint of humility, the answers we believe we have deduced, so far.

 

[JimBowie1958]

[The assumption that there can be no physical reality extending into the indefinite past may be a human bias based in our innately illogical wiring.]

Liked the rest of the post, but this statement is simply wrong.

It is impossible for time to flow in finite nonzero increments to the present from an infinitely long past, just as it is impossible to go from the present to a time in the infinitely distant future.

We cant do the latter because we never come to an end-point, and we cant do the former because there is no beginning point.

The flow of time had to begin at some point in time in the past.

 

[daveman]

Actually, that is Creationism not Atheism. Creationism says no thing (God) created everything from nothing.

Science, in the proven First Law of thermodynamics, says there never was nothing and there never will be nothing because energy can neither be created nor destroyed. That means that energy has always existed and will always exist in the EXACT SAME TOTAL QUANTITY. It is quite common for dishonest Creationists to substitute Atheism for Creationism, as your post did, in a feeble attempt to get Atheists to defend creating something from nothing and thus validating Creationism.

Not my fault you really don't understand your belief system.

 

[daveman]

The company was Union Carbide. The endeavor was the ORGDP....Oak Ridge Gaseous Diffusion Plant where the material for the bomb which was dropped on Hiroshima was withdrawn in cylinders 8 inches in diameter and 30 inches long...called always safe because of their geometry.

The first ten years I was a process operator, the next six a computer operator, the last twenty five I was operations manager in one of the largest mainframe computer installations in the SE U S. I never had a band of my own because I was working 40-60 hours a week on my day job. Sorry, I've forgotten most of the women's names.

So, you point to your resume as proof of your assertion that there is no God.

Really?

What's this thread about.....Hawking doubting the existence of an ancient gawd. We know Einstein didn't because it was published in his obituary. Would you like to see it again.....'course those who we brainwashed and believe in virgin birth and resurrection which came from stories told by the less than civili ed know they have to be right:

""I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own--a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human fraility. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotism." ~Dr. Albert Einstein~

Here's a hint for you:

I don't care what Hawking and Einstein say about religion.

I know you're easily swayed. I'm not.

 

[daveman]

I'll bet you money that this simplistic viewpoint was created by someone that believes Moses lived for over 160 years.

Book it.

You believe evolution explains the origin of life, don't you?

 

[daveman]

Time exists ONLY in terms of motion, not the other way around as you have it, which I'm sure you know since I have explained it to you on other threads. Therefore you are deliberately trying to be deceptive.

Well, that explains why my speedometer is calibrated in hours per mile.

Oh, wait...

 

[daveman]

It's tough to argue with someone who at least pretends not to know what they are talking about. Splitting an atom does not destroy matter, it simply breaks the atom into smaller parts releasing the energy that held the parts together.

Wrong. Matter is converted to energy. In fission, 0.1% of mass is converted. In fusion, 1%.

 

[Desperado]

I believe Stephen Hawking has a vendetta against God.
Wonder how he would feel if he was not handicapped?

 

[hortysir]

I believe Stephen Hawking has a vendetta against God.
Wonder how he would feel if he was not handicapped?

 

[koshergrl]

Hawking married the woman who changes his catheter and wipes his butt.

I don't really care what he has to say about the creation of the universe.

 

[hortysir]

Hawking married the woman who changes his catheter and wipes his butt.

I don't really care what he has to say about the creation of the universe.

That's love

 

[Ariux]

Hawking married the woman who changes his catheter and wipes his butt.

I don't really care what he has to say about the creation of the universe.

That's love

That's money.

 

[koshergrl]

And it also shows he's an idiot who can't see past the nose on his face.

 

[Ariux]

You don't know.

Thank you.

No one can comment on how long a day was 5 billion years ago.
Therefore they cannot comment on how long it took God to create *anything*.

1/1000 second per day shorter for 5 billion years? That means 5 billion years ago, a day was nearly 2 billions seconds shorter than it is today (how many seconds in a day, now?). Actually, it would be a lot more than 2 billion seconds shorter because the mechanism that slows the earth would have slowed the earth exponentially more going into the past. So, about a million years ago, to launch a rocket into space wouldn't take any fuel at all.

To an Athiest who believes that there was nothing and then nothing happened to nothing, resulting in the universe, the above math shouldn't be a problem. Stupid Atheists.

You can't use that math, because

The rotation of the Earth has never been constant

You're full of shit. I said the Earth's rotation isn't constant, and that works against you, not for you. Besides, when you said the rotation isn't constant, all you meant was that it's slowing. You have no answer to what I've pointed out, other than bullshit.

Atheists are people who decided to trade intelligence for arrogance.

 

[edthecynic]

Wrong.

If matter is a form of energy and energy is a form of matter (splitting an atom of matter "releases" a shit load of energy which does destroy the matter but leaves the equation intact), then you haven't answered diddly dick.

For if matter and energy (can change form but) cannot otherwise be created or destroyed, then where the fuck did "it" come from in the first damn place?

Another way of stating it is "nothing can exist prior to itself." But your initial condition, your basic premise, requires that something exist prior to itself.

You don't comply with your own conditions but label your facile assertions "law."

You really are not very bright.

It's tough to argue with someone who at least pretends not to know what they are talking about. Splitting an atom does not destroy matter, it simply breaks the atom into smaller parts releasing the energy that held the parts together.

Again, since it has been proven that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, it always existed "in the first damn place." And my basic premise is not your Straw Man "something exists prior to itself" but that there is no such THING as nothing. There never was nothing and there never will be nothing. Everything is energy in some form.

You are such a dork. Splitting the atom does destroy the atom which IS what releases the energy. It transforms matter INTO energy.

I always love it when you parrot what I said as if it was your own. Thanks for changing from the MATTER is destroyed to the atom is split to pieces releasing the energy holding the pieces together.

 

[bobcollum]

I'll bet you money that this simplistic viewpoint was created by someone that believes Moses lived for over 160 years.

Book it.

You believe evolution explains the origin of life, don't you?

Theoretically I feel it's as close to anything else we could call an explanation.

 

[bobcollum]

And it also shows he's an idiot who can't see past the nose on his face.

How's that KG?

 

[edthecynic]

Time exists ONLY in terms of motion, not the other way around as you have it, which I'm sure you know since I have explained it to you on other threads. Therefore you are deliberately trying to be deceptive.

Well, that explains why my speedometer is calibrated in hours per mile.

Oh, wait...

Speed = distance X time.
Time = speed/distance. Time exists in terms of motion (speed and distance).