Was There A First Cause?

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Imagine the Big Bang was "this side" of a black hole. The "other side" would be forever out of our reach.

Couldn't you go round? Black holes are only little.

Go around what, why and where?

Go round the black hole, obviously because your sat-nav directed you, and obviously, to your destination.

I don't think you read what I meant to say in that post.

[mistermack]

I don't think you read what I meant to say in that post.

No, I didn't get it.
Did you mean the other side of the event horizon?

[Gawdzilla Sama]

I don't think you read what I meant to say in that post.

No, I didn't get it.
Did you mean the other side of the event horizon?

The Big Bang. It could have been the "output" from a black hole in another universe.

[mistermack]

I don't think you read what I meant to say in that post.

No, I didn't get it.
Did you mean the other side of the event horizon?

The Big Bang. It could have been the "output" from a black hole in another universe.

If that's what black holes do. Anything's possible when you reach the limit of what cosmologists know.

But that just takes the something from nothing question back in time a bit.
You still have the something from nothing conundrum, if you follow the sequence right back to a first cause. It's just a much longer sequence.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

True, and I'm not worried about it. I imagine a endless sequence:

A universe has countless black holes.

Each black hole gives birth to a new universe.

The new universes each have countless black holes.

Each of those black holes gives birth to a new universe.

Endlessly. Our universe was on the "outer edge" or "lowest level" of this grand architecture, but as soon as it started producing black holes, a new "layer" of universes. And time would be "tighter" for each new level of universes. The original may still be there, slowly feeding matter into lower level universes.

[hiyymer]

Some say it all began in a bang and nothing much happened before but did it? Maybe the universe is cyclic and the big bang was just the latest orgasm and you know how each one makes you forget all the others? Put another way if you push everything chaotic on earths surface into a well ordered point the size of the Isle of White. Like noahs ark in minature and placing all the cars in one big warehouse and all the fish in another. You'd have the impression when you let the fish go etc that it all began with the Isle of White, but it wouldn't have, would it?

Then consider that, like the multiverse, each orgasm could have different physical laws (not fish and cars at all) and that some of them fizzle in a split second and others take a few billion billion years to play out.

[Tero]

Black holes are just flatulence from God.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Black holes are just flatulence from God.

There's a grandeur to this vision of life...

[MiM]

The conundrum is, can something come from nothing?
The religious argument is that this is impossible. Only nothing comes from nothing.
Therefore, there must have been a first cause, outside of space and time, and that was god.

But I've never had an answer to the big question. What did god make the Universe OUT OF?
There are two basic possibilities. He made it out of SOMETHING, or NOTHING.

If he made it out of something, then you don't need a god. Something became something else.
If he made it out of nothing, then something CAN come from nothing after all, so you don't need a god.

So it boils down to "something cannot come from nothing, but if it did, god did it".
It's actually the old problem of infinity all over again. If you start with nothing, and something appears, then you have an increase of INFINITE proportion. Something is INFINITELY bigger than nothing.

So it's the old religious trick. Throw in an apparent infinity, point out that an infinity is impossible, and conclude that only a god can fill that gap in our knowledge.

No, no not like that - you see, God made the universe out of himself.

[Coito ergo sum]

The conundrum is, can something come from nothing?
The religious argument is that this is impossible. Only nothing comes from nothing.
Therefore, there must have been a first cause, outside of space and time, and that was god.

But I've never had an answer to the big question. What did god make the Universe OUT OF?
There are two basic possibilities. He made it out of SOMETHING, or NOTHING.

If he made it out of something, then you don't need a god. Something became something else.
If he made it out of nothing, then something CAN come from nothing after all, so you don't need a god.

So it boils down to "something cannot come from nothing, but if it did, god did it".
It's actually the old problem of infinity all over again. If you start with nothing, and something appears, then you have an increase of INFINITE proportion. Something is INFINITELY bigger than nothing.

So it's the old religious trick. Throw in an apparent infinity, point out that an infinity is impossible, and conclude that only a god can fill that gap in our knowledge.


The only other possibility is a cyclic universe. But that doesn't answer anything. How did THAT come about?

Possible solution: there is no nothing.

[Coito ergo sum]

I don't think you read what I meant to say in that post.

No, I didn't get it.
Did you mean the other side of the event horizon?

The Big Bang. It could have been the "output" from a black hole in another universe.

It doesn't much matter since the Big Bang theory is almost certainly wrong.

[Coito ergo sum]

True, and I'm not worried about it. I imagine a endless sequence:

A universe has countless black holes.

Each black hole gives birth to a new universe.

The new universes each have countless black holes.

Each of those black holes gives birth to a new universe.

Endlessly. Our universe was on the "outer edge" or "lowest level" of this grand architecture, but as soon as it started producing black holes, a new "layer" of universes. And time would be "tighter" for each new level of universes. The original may still be there, slowly feeding matter into lower level universes.

The Hindus knew it first. Only they called the black holes "turtles."

[Coito ergo sum]

Black holes are just flatulence from God.

There's a grandeur to this vision of life...

There is a Larry Niven/Jerry Pournelle novel title in there....

The Flatulence of God -- An astounding new novel by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle.

[Atheist-Lite]

As telescopes become ever more powerful it becomes easier and easier to see less and less of the distant cosmos in all its spacetime glory.

[Brian Peacock]

The conundrum is, can something come from nothing?
The religious argument is that this is impossible. Only nothing comes from nothing.
Therefore, there must have been a first cause, outside of space and time, and that was god.

But I've never had an answer to the big question. What did god make the Universe OUT OF?
There are two basic possibilities. He made it out of SOMETHING, or NOTHING.

If he made it out of something, then you don't need a god. Something became something else.
If he made it out of nothing, then something CAN come from nothing after all, so you don't need a god.

So it boils down to "something cannot come from nothing, but if it did, god did it".
It's actually the old problem of infinity all over again. If you start with nothing, and something appears, then you have an increase of INFINITE proportion. Something is INFINITELY bigger than nothing.

So it's the old religious trick. Throw in an apparent infinity, point out that an infinity is impossible, and conclude that only a god can fill that gap in our knowledge.

The First Cause/Prime Mover idea, commonly offered by religionists of every stripe, finds its antecedence in a distinctly Aristotelian view of causality, where every cause is itself the effect of a previous cause and every cause-and-effect is merely a link in a causal-chain from past to present. Aristotle reasoned that if every cause requires a preceding cause then there must have been a first cause that put all that subsequently followed into action. The essentially teleological view (telos: final cause, or end) recognises that nothing arises or occurs spontaneously or without influence, therefore what we see around us in the present is necessarily rooted in the circumstances of the past. Aristotle used the Prime Mover as a regression terminator to avoid the quandary of an infinite past which, without some starting point or first cause, seems to undermine the notion of causality and leave us wondering as to how anything could cause anything at all.

Aristotle was a very clever chap and his arguments are still compelling, not least because it aligns so well with our intuitions and observation about time and causality.

However, thinking backwards in this way does bring us to contemplating what that primary cause could or might have been; in what context and by what manner did the first thing cause everything which followed? Our intuitions find it rather unsatisfactory when we are told that everything began with the Big Bang or that God brought the universe into being by an act of will, not least because reason seems to demand an answer to questions like; so, what caused the Big Bang, and, what caused God to exists? The idea that there could have been literally nothing (no-thing) which preceded the universe therefore seems difficult to countenance, not to say somewhat counter-intuitive and contrary to what we see around us.

The only other possibility is a cyclic universe. But that doesn't answer anything. How did THAT come about?

See what I mean?

Well worth an hour of anyone's time - which of course is relative.