I have started some work and it seems odd wrestling with Excel after all these years. Good fun though as it gives me a break from what I call the world's loneliest cottage. I should be able to increase my hours gently over a reasonable period of time. I have a caring mother there in Sid's wife, Jayne who keeps an eye on me should I start running too fast too soon.
The temparature on the car dash was 5 degrees, there is hope!
Looking forward to my trip to Nottingham tomorrow. Should be fun.
Anyway, let's go back to thinking about what/who is God again.
The existence of the world and everything in it can only be explained if we can determine the first cause. Accepted. It is impossible for anything to be the cause of its own existence because then it would have to create itself, and to do so , it would have to exist before it existed. If something exists, it is because something else prior to it was its cause. Therefore, if no first cause exists, neither will anything else exist. So, WHAT/WHO is this first cause? So how did we all happen? An act of God or as Monsignor Dawkins & Co claim, an act of matter which is self existing and not created?
Matter has been long considered as a parallel argument to us as a being( from the scientific circles) but does it fully answer the first cause argument? Matter is not nearly as abstract of an idea and in fact, we are all matter, so the notion that matter "is" is not nearly as far fetched as the idea that God "is". Okay most of us will accept this notion if we can be convinced that matter can self create. However, when we examine this notion, science has ALWAYS fallen miles short of making a convincing argument. I want to be fair to the God argument here and stop being blindly trendy in following this God-bashing and examine what science has to argue instead.
It doesn't require a quantum physicist to know that we live in an expanding universe that gets bigger and bigger with every passing day. Now let us suppose that we made time run backwards!If we are located at a certain distance today, then yesterday we were closer together. The day before that, we were still closer. Ultimately, where must all the galaxies have been?At a point!At the beginning! At what scientists themselves call a singularity!Not so long back (1998?) it was discovered that the galaxies are accelerating in their expansion. Any notion that we live in an oscillating or pulsating universe has been dispelled by this discovery. The universe is not slowing down, but speeding up in its motion. So WHAT was at this starting point?
A second proof that we had a clear beginning but not an eternal cycle of matter -going- on can be seen in the energy sources that fuel the cosmos. Like all stars, the sun generates its energy by using an incomprehensible amount of hydrogen in the process. In spite of that tremendous consumption of fuel, the sun has only used up a very small amount of the hydrogen it had the day it came into existence. This incredible process of combustion is not just confined to the sun. Every star in the sky generates its energy in the same way. Throughout the cosmos there are 25 quintillion stars(don't even try to imagine the zeros), thereby reducing the total amount of hydrogen in the cosmos. If everywhere in the cosmos hydrogen is being consumed and if the process has been going on forever, how much hydrogen should be left? The fact is that hydrogen is the most abundant material in the universe! Everywhere we look in space we can see the line in the spectrum--a piece of light only given off by hydrogen. This could not be unless we had a beginning!
Finally,In space, things too get old. Astronomers refer to the ageing process as heat death. If the cosmos is "everything that ever was or is or ever will be," nothing could be added to it to improve its order or repair it. Even a universe that expands and collapses and expands again forever would die because it would lose light and heat each time it expanded and rebounded. So what does this do to the scientific premise that matter is eternal ?
So science making claims as matter being eternal and self creating is extraordinarily dodgy at its best and fail to convince me as being the cause of all creation. Besides, even if it has been self creating itself since an eternity in time, to be honest, is hiding behind what seems simply concepts beyond science itself. It just doesn't sit right, does it? Well, to me anyway. An odd paradox. Hmmm!!
More on this soon.....
You've certainly been busy, that's for sure and you have certainly touched on some, from a scientific point of view, confusing points, none more so than the accelerating universal expansion.
ReplyDeleteThere is a minor but key flaw to your process though. Matter is eternal? Not sure where this comes from (can't be bothered to google it just to seem clever) but every scientist knows that everything is made of energy and energy truly is eternal because you cannot destroy it, you can only convert it into something else. Energy, at least on universal scale, can seem to suffer from entropy but the truth is that if the universe is continuing to expand then there is less energy about, therefore a supposed entropic problem.
Whilst the accelerating expansion is confusing, I personally am a fan of the theory that the universe was created by the big bang and will, one day so far in the future you might as well say googleplex years, contract and go back to the beginning. Does this prove the non existance of God? Not in the slightest, what started the whole big bang process in the first place? With reference to the 'First Cause' thing, something had to have created the conditions for the big bang to happen in the first place, creating something out of nothing is highly improbable (I'm agnostic so accept that nothing is impossible untill proven so and so most things are a matter of probability).
Regardless of what scientist say, you can use science either to disprove the existance of a 'God' by showing things working in their own way or prove that there is a 'God' by pointing to the exact same thing and saying 'It'd take God to create such a beautifully elegant system'