Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
21
And also to you Charles.
Our insignificant bubble of space-time began once upon a time yes. Like all the infinite others from eternity. That’s not scepticism. It’s common sense. As you at least intuitively feel. There is no beginning of beginnings, no end of them. And there’s always been nothing and there’s always been something, it’s always been if !p then p, null > !null. God certainly isn’t necessary for any of it. He would be for a fairy tale single universe of therefore infinite complexity and He’d have to be infinitely stranger than He is if He merely grounds infinity from eternity, to do something different after eternity. And we’re not the one lucky winner in inhabiting a universe in which minds emerge on trillions of worlds. There are infinite. If anything can happen - i.e. a quantum perturbation in unstable absolute nothingness, then everything will, according to the prevenient laws of physics of course. To deny reality to create a gap isn’t faith. There is no gap. But there is faith.
I thought there was also a passage that speaks of chaos and that God created by ordering the chaos rather than making everything from nothing. Of course I’m not prepared to support that given the paucity of my Bible study.
I’m not sure what you are referring to, but there was ‘chaos’ after the big bang when material and energy were created, and he created order out of it.
Genesis 1:1-2
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters.
You’re right the word chaos is not used here but I’ve heard others equate “formless”, “void” and “darkness” with chaos. Bringing form to the formless is a way of ordering chaos perhaps.
*Hey, no fair tricking me into looking up Bible verses.
Yes, In the Genesis account God basically establishes order from chaos, and separates the waters above from the waters below with a firmament to separate them, etc. And then the Flood of Noah undoes it all.
Compressed isn’t the right way of thinking about it either. The farthest back we can go is the first millionth of a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second. Before that, what we call the Plank era is when the laws of nature as we know them break down – we may never understand anything about that period. After that is what we call the Grand Unification Era where the laws of nature were different – more simple, one force and no matter, likely only bosons which can occupy the same space in an unlimited quantity. It was certainly a very high temperature (more than a billion billion billion degrees Kelvin).
But then at about the first billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second this changed as the universe expanded and cooled there was a spontaneous symmetry breaking so the one force separated in to four and particles separated into the many kinds of particles we see today including both what we call matter and anti-matter in nearly but not quite equal amounts. It is also thought that this change cause space to expand even faster (so called inflation).
Human languages are insufficient to describe such things. You need some sophisticated mathematics. And even then our understanding is clearly incomplete.
As explained, matter did not exist, the laws of nature were different, and by the time matter did exist and the laws of nature were as they are now, there was no time for it to collapse. The universe was expanding too rapidly.
There was no empty space into which things were expanding. It is space itself which was expanding, and it was hot everywhere.
I don’t think there is any good reason to look for Big Bang’s, quarks or information theory in the Bible. Nothing wrong with fitting what science finds out into the Bible’s narrative but I wouldn’t equate that with an intended message.
Genesis 1:1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2 The earth was without form and void…
NO, it does not say the universe or the heavens were without form and void, it is only the EARTH which it says was without form and void! It does not say God created the universe from some pre-existing stuff which God found lying around in chaos!
So what it does say is not that different from the scientific description of the creation of the EARTH – condensing from the dust and gasses left over from supernovae and neutron star collisions. But all the matter in the universe was not originally lying around forever in chaos before that but came from a previous creative event.
Not sure a multiverse removes God from the equation. It just pushes the question back one layer, because you still have this “system of multiverses that follows certain rules,” the origin of which at some level demands an answer.
It’s interesting, because the Greek word pistis, which we translate as “faith,” also implies faithfulness, trust, and allegiance. It was the Enlightenment that redefined it as diametrically opposed to reason and evidence (not so much “proof,” which really only exists in mathematics). The early gospel preachers consistently appealed to evidence when preaching Jesus as the crucified and resurrected Messiah.
I like what you said about a philosophical understanding and hope. At some level, everybody has “faith” (not so much pistis as a rational logical leap to accept foundational principles). Hope is, I think, intrinsic to pistis.
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Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
38
Only if you keep asking. There is no answer. God explains nothing, science explains nothing, rationality explains nothing, nothing explains nothing. Existence is utterly inexplicable. The rules are deterministic, both prevenient and after the event. The if !p then p rule is the first eternal layer, all the other laws of physics are instantiated, damp down, crystallize out at each others’ vertices.
Here is a different approach to the same question which is easier to understand. The basic question. Is the universe finite or infinite? Most people, esp. us in the West agree that the universe is finite.
That means that the universe has boundaries, specifically it has a Beginning and an Ending. We can observe that the universe is expanding from a point. We can calculate how long it has been expanding. We have definitive evidence of a vast release of energy at that time. This is our evidence of the Big Bang based on observations and our knowledge of God’s laws.
Did the universe have a beginning? Yes, because a finite universe exists. Was there energy and matter before there was energy and matter? No. Was there time before time? No. Was there space before space? No. Can humans conceive of Nothing, no time, no space, no matter, no energy? No.
God is not the God of the Gaps. God is the God of the Facts. God created the universe through the Logos, God’s Rational Word, Jesus Christ. God governs the universe and governs the human world through Jesus Christ, the Logos.
Humans and our world are finite. We have a beginning and an end. God is not finite. God is able to create our universe and did. God could have limited our freedom and made us absolutely dependent on God, but God did not. God gave to humans the freedom to accept or reject God’s Love.
Sadly much of the church is rejecting God’s mercy and wisdom.
I should explain… I mean different only in the sense that things behave differently at very high temperatures. All of this is still a part of the Standard model, so the mathematical equations of physics still cover this. The Standard model only breaks down in the Plank era (and at the center of a black hole). There we believe something we are still missing comes into play. There is some hope recently that muons are doing something not predicted by the Standard Model which will help us figure out what we are missing and thus shed light on the puzzles represented by so called “dark matter” and “dark energy” where our gravitational equations are failing to explain what we see in the sky correctly.