Haha. Wittgenstein said, “Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.”
As far as what “uncaused” means in Quantum physics, maybe it simply means the cause of an event is unknown, similar to the way scientists use “random” to mean the result of a particular cause is “unknowable” in advance.
Just for the record, Genesis 1 is reacting to ANE cosmology, not modern cosmologies. I don’t think it teaches the Big Bang or “creation ex nihilo.” (The former is a modern and the latter is a centuries-old invention.) When I read it the Spirit is hovering over the waters – an ancient symbol of chaos – and YHWH God proceeds to establish order in the heavens and Earth from that pre-existing chaos.
Signing off for now. Looking forward to @pevaquark’s second installment of the history of modern cosmologies. Good stuff!
Something I read recently said that QM actually applies across the spectrum from the very small to the immense and everything relevant to human projects in between. It isn’t as if you need Newtonian physics for our purposes. It is just that they are an efficient short cut that is reliable and much simpler to apply wherever they apply. Of course in this day and age who needs any physics at all when we have chat bots who can answer all the questions without the bother of needing to understand anything at all.
Someone brought up this article in another thread, and what a great tie in for what I was just talking about with Aquinas:
He did believe, as a matter of faith (confirmed by the decree of the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215), that the universe had a temporal beginning, but for him there is no contradiction in the notion of an eternal, created universe: for were the universe to be without a beginning it still would have an origin, it still would be created, it still would depend upon God for its very existence.
To explore it theoretically, which we are capable of doing, I would love to see what happens when it is seriously considered how something is unobservable when it can affect change without changing. Such that the immediate effect of this ‘thing’ would appear to come from nothing.
Self-creation; gets a lot of credibility, but careful examination of the concept will reveal that the idea is an absurd logical impossibility.
Why? Because for something to create itself, it would have to be before it was—it would have to be and not be at the same time and in the same relationship, which violates a fundamental principle of truth and science: the law of noncontradiction.
EG: When the Hubble Space Telescope was sent into space to gather more information on the expanding universe, one of the most famous astrophysicists in America was interviewed on the radio. He said, “Fifteen to seventeen billion years ago, the universe exploded into being.”
What was it before it exploded into being?
The only option was nonbeing—which would mean that a fundamental scientific precept was violated: ex nihilo nihil fit—“out of nothing, nothing comes.”
The contradiction of an eternal and created universe is resolved by seeing the origin of the universe or universes as being in the present and not the past. As a matter of faith, the world has a beginning in the past, but neither possibility is contrary to reason (or science).
Do you think that’s what many scientists believe about the universe’s beginning? If so, you’ve thwarted all of them with a simple logic principle. If not, then this is a strawman.
People tend to talk past each other on this particular topic, because while there is a common understanding of what the universe is, there are different definitions of what nothing is, or perhaps is not. Some physicists seem intent on representing the prior state of a physical phase change as equivalent to any legitimate conception of nothing, thus offering a scientific solution to a philosophical riddle, but that is a sort of slight of hand.
Sabine Hossenfelder has a nice YouTube presentation on the challenge of giving a gift of nothing. She breaks it down to nine levels, but the slicing and dicing does not really matter.
Nice video! The comments on the video were loaded, otherwise I would have posted one about how there is not nothing, and neither are there an infinite number of things
Neat trick! So the infinite Set of all Real Numbers doesn’t exist?
I’m reminded of 1st Class Petty Officer Donald Head’s “question-out-of-nowhere” to me one day, back in 1968, to wit:
“A man jumped off a bridge. Where was he when he jumped?”
When I answered: “In the air”, Head said: "No, that’s after he jumped.
So I said: “Well then, he was on the bridge.” And Head said: “No, that’s before he jumped,” Then Head turned and walked away, leaving me to wonder about it in the 55 years since.
It applies to an observable quantity, which do appear quite real.
I’m not that good with numbers, and whether they should exist in a category of their own. But I have no problem understanding how the number of natural numbers is undefinable.
In the same way, I can see how a quantity of things like universes or fleas can logically proceed to infinity, but I see a problem with there being an infinite number of either.
When I walk to my front door to get my mail, I cross an infinite number of points in an infinite number of instants, but I do not tire. However, a turtle could beat me.
Thanks, @rsewell . The video was a lot of fun. I particularly liked level 8.
“There’s still mathematics that could be said to exist in some sense. That is, we have abstract ideas and objects, numbers, sets, logic, truths and falsehoods, and the entire platonic world of ideals. For the 8th level of nothing, we remove those, too.”
