On 29/05/2025 14:25, Stefan Ram wrote:
Robert Carnegie <rja.carnegie@gmail.com> wrote or quoted:
As for atheism and laws of nature, I see those
as two separate things.
Even in the most exact science, physics, there are still "miracles"
today, just a different word gets used for it: "singularities."
Let's roll back the clock! We bump into a singularity! In physics,
this means "something where the known laws of nature just don't
cut it anymore."
You can't actually "roll back the clock", though.
If you imagine the state of the universe very soon
after its apparent creation by reasoning back from
how things are nowadays, it's very likely that
you aren't considering something that was relevant
then and is not relevant now. However, material
theorists are reasonably satisfied with their ideas
of how things were within a split-second of the
start, if there was a start. I see that you've
taken up that point, below.
Stephen Hawking proposed considering an apparent
beginning of time in the sense that at the Earth's
South Pole, there is a beginning of land. A place
which is so south, that everywhere else is north
of it. But if you go there, you don't see a
singularity. You just see land all around the
South Pole. You can walk back and forth across it.
It's only our standard of measurement that implies
that a singularity exists there.
And that's directly tied to the question: "Why is there anything at
all instead of nothing?" One of the biggest mysteries out there!
I have trouble conceiving a situation in which
that question has any answer - if we rule out
saying "God made everything" and not allowing
the question to include "why does God exist?"
As reasonably, "nothing" also means "no God".
"What is consciousness?" - physical laws don't have an explanation
for that one. It's a singularity!
Consciousness is the special thing that important
entities possess (humans, the government) and others
do not (animals, plants, artificial intelligence,
immigrants). This special thing has not been shown
to exist, in my opinion.
"How do we resolve the measurement problem in quantum physics?" -
another head-scratcher for today's physicists.
This may be only a mental problem, as physics seems
to work, whether you think that you understand it,
or not.
"What happens inside a black hole?" - Why, it's a singularity!
What happens inside a black hole, stays inside a
black hole! So don't worry about it!
When Christians say, "God created the world", a physicist today can't
exactly dismiss that; they can only say, "Maybe. We don't know enough
about what went down in the first 10^-44 seconds after the big bang
to make any solid claims." - but the physicist could add: "Interesting
theory! What kind of experiments could we run to put that theory to the
test, one way or the other?"
The physicists seem to have settled how the earth,
sun, moon, and stars came to be, anyway. That is
all long after the big bang. Thus is the book of
Genesis disposed of.
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