Stephen Hawking tells us the universe spontaneously popped into existence from nothing. I don’t believe this. I believe the universe is. Full stop. It’s us, beings, who are limited by time.
Clearly, things do happen in that universe. Maybe a big bang did happen? I even believe that if it isn’t limited by time, the same things will have happened and will keep happening over and over again. Maybe is time an event like any other within that model?
The thing that really bugs me is the why; but I stopped questioning myself “what started it”. I think it never started, I think it is. To have a moment of starting, you need to be limited by time. Like how human beings, animals, planets and stars are limited by time.
Religious people will probably now think: it’s God who started all this. To which I would answer something about turtles all the way down (it doesn’t answer the question, it just moves it).
Aren’t you pretty much saying the same thing as Hawking?
When Hawking says the universe he is talking about “human beings, animals, planets and stars” etc and that time is as much a feature of that universe as the physical dimensions.
As such there is no “before” the universe because without the universe there was no time to have a before in. So the universe has always existed, as “always” means all of time.
I suspect that this is something really difficult to talk about sensibly because we don’t have the vocabulary to talk about things without a sense of time. “Before”, “always”, “when”, “then” are all the tools we have when talking about change but are all intrinsically linked to time. If the change involves the creation of time itself then how do we go about talking about it?
Actually, yes. If what Hawking said is that “what we can experience from within this model of everything (where everything includes time too), has popped up spontaneously”, if that is what he describes as “the universe”, then our opinions only differ in vocabulary and in that case we might in fact be saying the same thing. yes.
But only describing that is not much better than what religious people do with their stacked turtles that go all the way down, in my opinion :-)
Anyway, since we (our species) are limited by time … it’s rather unlikely that we can ever prove this. Which is, I think, something he said at that conference too, right?
Maybe it would be more easy, especially for philosophists and people like Hawking (as I don’t see Hawking as a philosophists, but that is debatable I guess) to develop a new vocabulary rather than trying to explain it using the typical words (who are, as you correctly point out, intrinsically linked to time).
As someone who does believe in God (I’ll tell you why if you’re interested, but it would be kind of off-topic here), I’m kind of pleased that you recognize the essential similarity between the concepts “the universe always was, nobody created it” and “God always was, nobody created Him”. Both have a turtles-all-the-way-down nature to them — and you can’t escape that. Either you believe that *something* (the protomatter that formed the Big Bang) came into being spontaneously without a cause, as Hawking seems to be saying (I wasn’t at the conference you mention), or else you believe that *something* (either the universe, or else God) always existed and never had a beginning.
Incidentally, I *love* Terry Pratchett’s line in one of the Discworld books: “First there was nothing, which exploded.” I just wish I could remember which book it was.
Of the three possibilities I outlined earlier (first there was nothing, then there was something; there was always something, and that something was non-God; there was always something, and that something was God), I find the “God always existed” one actually to be the strongest philosophically.
The “first there was something, then there was nothing” idea requires matter to spontaneously come into existence without a cause — a one-time behavior that is inconsistent with matter’s later behavior throughout all of time. Yes, we’re talking about the beginning of things when the rules were different, so that’s not an impossible model. But still, it’s rather ugly philosophically to speculate two different sets of rules for matter.
The “matter always existed” idea fits rather nicely with the cyclic Big Bang/Big Crunch model of astrophysics, and I find it much more philosophically pleasing than the “nothing into something” idea. But I still find it flawed. The second law of thermodynamics suggests increasing entropy as the nigh-unbreakable rule. Even in systems that generate a local decrease of entropy (e.g., living beings such as plants), there is an *overall* increase of entropy in the universe as a whole (the amount of entropy increase as the sun’s fusion reactions continue is greater than the local entropy decrease of a plant’s photosynthetic activities). However, in the Big Bang/Big Crunch model, you have to have matter’s “behavior” regarding entropy change over time: after the Big Bang, you get clouds of dust coalescing into starts and planets (increasing order and decreasing entropy). Then you get the current state of the universe, where we observe entropy increasing. Finally, you have the Big Crunch — and I’m quite perplexed by whether to consider that the ultimate in entropy (everything’s back to the primordial chaos) or the ultimate in order (the universe is clearly divided into Something, which is all gathered into a single point, and Nothing, which is everywhere else).
Now consider the philosophical idea of God — specifically, the concept of God as being outside of time, supernatural (in other words, not bound by the natural laws), and so on. This could be the Christian concept of God, or it could be the Greeks’ “Prime Mover” — it just needs to be a Thing (being, cause, whatever term you want) that stands “outside” the universe and its natural laws. This model is the one I find to be most philosophically pleasing, because it doesn’t require postulating changes in the fundamental nature of the universe. Entropy is currently decreasing — well, it’s been doing that ever since God (or the Prime Mover, or whatever — I’ll just say “God” from this point on to keep this short) created the universe. Matter doesn’t just spontaneously appear without a cause — no, it doesn’t. The first cause was God. And so on. All the things that I find flawed with the first two models are easily resolved in the “God did it” model.
Does the “God did it” model have weaknesses of its own? Yes — it requires postulating something existing completely outside the universe, not bound by its natural laws. (And, of course, not testable by science due to that fact). But the other two models, Hawking’s suggestion and your “the universe has always existed” model, also require the (current) laws of the universe to not apply to something — specifically, the universe at some point in the past and/or future. Since there’s no getting around the fact that *something* has to break the current laws of the universe for the current universe to exist, I’d much rather have that something not be the universe, but be something that by its very nature isn’t part of the universe. That seems much more philosophically pleasing to me, because it doesn’t require specifying changing natures on the part of anything. God’s nature has always been the same, and the universe’s nature has always been the same.
P.S. Argh, language. I decided not to even *try* to come up with new words. “Before”, “always”, and so on… they’re concepts we understand. And even when you’re talking about the beginning of time, it’s still pretty clear to what these concepts apply and to what they don’t. I think a brand-new vocabulary would actually be harder to understand and follow than the time-based vocabulary we have. At least with it, we don’t have to look up definitions all the time.
Wow, that was a long post. Sorry about that. When I get going on a nifty philosophical idea, I really get going. :-)
No problem for the long post. I rather see that universe as something that simply expands to infinite (you therefore can’t be outside of it, nor not taking part of it) and as something that never needed to be created, because it simply always was and always will be.
Whether this everything takes places within the boundaries that we can experience, is another question. Maybe that thing where time does matter, that seems to keep growing and that we call “the or our universe”, is just a balloon inside something truly infinite in all its dimensions (including time). Where this “God” of yours stands (under the assumption that the entity exists), might be outside of that balloon. Its position doesn’t change the fact that he’s inside of a real (what I believe to be infinite) universe that surrounds the balloon :) of course.
But then again, my question is much more: why & what caused it to happen (the balloon, because the infinite that surrounds it, never happened: that has always been — it’s different than if it had to come into existence –).
For that question, you either need the guarantee of true randomness combined with infiniteness, in for example time, which inevitably would result in every possible combination. It would take a lot combinations, and therefore time too, but time is irrelevant here (it doesn’t matter how long it would take, there’s infinite amounts of everything, including time). Including the one that we are experiencing and being part of. This concept also requires believing that it will happen again.
Or you believe in a God. But then we are back to turtles all the way down on ‘that’ subject: what caused God to exist (this can be answered with my infiniteness-theory too) and what makes God do its moves? (this can’t be answered, I think — except with yet another turtle like: it’s love! –)
However. I also don’t think you can answer what causes true randomness. What’s the motor that drives it and why is it driving it?
We can of course combine both theories by saying that God is true randomness . hehe. Yet that combination still doesn’t answer it (that’s like adding the offspring of two very different turtles that had sex with each other: it’s still a turtle).
Again under the strict assumption that there’s a conscious being that we’ll call “God” (or true randomness, if you prefer that): I’m sure that if indeed the entity exists, he’s laughing his ass off right now (well, I would if it were me).
I wonder what the entity was thinking when we got a first man-made nuclear reaction going, and other inventions like that. Hehe.
Also, I think “consciousness” is were the true difference of both our opinions lie: I’m pessimistic about its (the entity’s) consciousness. I think (but you can correct me) that you are rather optimistic about that.
And crap, because we can’t ever prove this :-).
Hey God, what about an opensource development model for the universe? :-). Oh wait, it is opensource.