Why not? If you can't observe it, test it, and reproduce it, then it lies outside the realm of science and in the realm of belief. Until someone figures out a way to experimentally verify the big bang hypothesis (or any other explanation for the origin of the universe or what came "before"), it's entirely fair to attribute it to whatever you feel like, be it a god or anything else. There is no law of the universe that guarantees that science is capable of answering all questions.
Well, I think surely the entirely fair thing to do is to just admit we don't know rather than make any attribution or imply any possession of an answer to those questions?
Humans have created models for things they don't understand throughout human history. Certainly throughout any recorded history. We don't know, but we have a model that fits pretty well and we can guess at the underlying causes. We'll be wrong more often than right, but over time as we get more data and we can test more things, we get a more accurate model. Not necessarily the right model. We may never get that. But based on those models, "guesses" are far more reliable than "The Sun is a god who circles the world".
While we don't "know" how gravity works we can explain it and model it much more accurately now than when logos was the explanation. Providing those details is far more useful than a simple "we don't know."
Certainly, that's also perfectly fair. The thing to keep in mind is that some people derive utility from belief in some sort of creator, so ultimately it's an argument of values (specifically, you're looking to argue that people should prefer uncertainty to unprovable (but also undisprovable!) certainty).
If you can't observe it, test it, and reproduce it, then it lies outside of the realm of (natural) science and may lie within the realm of mathematics, philosophy, or (gasp) theology.
> There is no law of the universe that guarantees that science is capable of answering all questions.
There's a name for a more nuanced version of this "law" and there's a good amount of work being done arguing for and against weaker and stronger versions of it: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sufficient-reason/
I think it's important to clarify that the question of whether or not everything has a cause is itself outside of science. Science is about determining what a cause is likely to be, using the universe itself as a source of truth, and constrained by fundamental limits on our ability to observe and experiment. Which is to say, even if the philosophers conclude that everything must have a cause, there is still no law that says that we (as scientific agents of a universe that is attempting to understand itself) are capable of determining every possible cause.
There's quite a big philosophical difference between "there exists a point beyond which it is possible to make observations" and "the universe was created by an omnipotent being"
An illusion is something that disappears when you see behind it, no? How goes it for the illusion of the both of us being connected but separate beings? I think at the very least it would require consent of both parties to merge, so as long as I don’t believe it, you have to live as a being separate from me, and as such it stays „an illusion“ for you that we are one; merely an idea, a potential option maybe, no?
You can declare Life to mean the complex interplay of every living organism, but I don’t see how you can go as far as to claim our physical and mental separateness is not there at all? After all, we need boundaries between „us“ to not be utterly alone. I like to think even of „my“ body more as a federated system, like Life maybe but on a smaller scale. I have some influence on it but not full control. In fact, one could say the polarities in the physical realm are Nature (towards separation, entropy; Kaos) and Life (actively working towards one, requires energy to keep matter ordered; Order).
If we merge, by definition the „I“ and „you“ have to die; both of us stop existing. The merger creates something new, a „we“. A single entity. We can then use the definition of identity to call this new we „I“. Rinse and repeat until back to being alone/all-one?
Do you really want to be all-one? Omnipotent, full of all potentials/possibilities? I don’t know. I am already overwhelmed with my limited human potential/possibilities/options. And I prefer to not be alone. I prefer to stay separate, and keep my identity.
I don't get it. Put all life together and its all pretty obviously NOT omnipotent as far as I can tell. Every living thing on earth could spontaneously have an desire about the state affairs on Pluto and I don't see any reason to believe anything on Pluto would change.
Anything outside of what we can observe will always be based on faith anyway. We'll probably never understand what's "before" the big bang, wether it make sense to ask that question or why something exists rather than nothing.
I don't think so - god is substantially less parsimonious. But in the end, I think you're sort of using two different notions of belief as if they were the same.
I believe (lowercase b) in all sorts of stuff, scientific and otherwise, but believing in God typically indicates some kind of act of faith, which is to say, ultimately, to believe in something despite the absence of evidence for it and for some deeper reason than can be furnished by a warrant of some kind. I can believe in the spontaneous generation of the universe in the lowercase b sense of the word without really having anything to do at all with the latter kind of belief, which I think is kind of dumb.
Historically, in the West at least, the ability or inability to reason one's way to the existence of God determined whether you needed to rely on faith or not.
You didn't read closely enough. He is condemning the notion that evolution explains the origin of all things (as ridiculous as that sounds...it was a kind of ontological darwinism; no reasonable person holds this opinion today).
On the other hand, there are a lot of stars and different cultures might give them different names and yet there really are many of them.
Furthermore, assume God doesn't exist. Lots of cultures might invent god for various reasons and they'd naturally have different names and attributes for them, which in fact seems to be the current state of affairs.
In fact, if we assume God exists and is actively in communication with humans, its actually a bit weird that different human cultures would have different conceptions and names for that being. Why didn't it just give everyone the same name and information?
Why do you think God will have a name? Name is used by humans to identity a person among a lot of other persons. Why will God have a name if it is the only thing in existence?
To answer the question of why humans give name to God. It's to make god more relatable so that they can workshop it. And use devotion to come closer with it. Look up Bhakti Yoga.
How about just having one God vs many? If there is a single omnipotent being, why do various cultures have multiple gods? And why do different cultures’ gods tell them different things?
Fair question. So my understanding is God is consciousness. It's omnipotent, all knowing and eternal. It's the only thing which is constant in your life and it sees everything you do.
Now, you cannot worship consciousness as humans because it's invisible and you can never imagine it. You need a version of consciousness that you can see as well as you can relate to. So cultures invent localized version of God which people can relate to. And of course it will have attributes similar to that of the culture. But the properties kind of still hold. Like all knowing, powerful etc.
This reminds me of what Jordan Peterson does, which is to define "God" as something that we know exists. He defines it as the fundamental value upon which other values are built; you define it as consciousness.
I've always thought arguments like these are unnecessarily applying a term loaded with human conceptions and biases in a way that doesn't shed any further light on the thing it's applied to. Like, what do we gain by defining "God" as consciousness? Why can't we just say "consciousness"? And is it worth the added confusion that when we say "God", we now don't mean what most people think "God" is?
The only reason I can come up with to do this is discomfort at saying, "I don't believe in God."
I’m sorry but that’s a lot of words to provide no additional clarity. God is consciousness. So if there are no conscious beings in the universe there is no god? Or is this just renaming something that already has a meaning into god?
I didn't say he'd have a name, I said he'd give humans a uniform one since, according to, for instance, the Christian worldview he is purported to be interested in human affairs.
> Various isolated cultures are going to come up with different names for God.
People hate not knowing the answer to the big questions so much that they'll readily accept whatever answers are served up to them.
> This like saying which Sun? Surya, Ra or Helios?
The difference is that the sun is readily observed. A conveniently invisible god isn't.
> All are different names of sun. But there is only one sun.
And there's only one human nature, which is why it's not surprising that common artefacts of human nature (e.g. religion) emerged universally throughout ancient human cultures.
How so? If you attribute it to an earlier universe, you are just pushing the problem further back. It doesn't seem to be a proof or even a mild indication.
The universe casually didn't follow the laws of physics immediately after the Big Bang, an improbable event directly after an improbable event. No explanation has been found, even according to CERN, why everything that was created was not spontaneously annihilated. Attributing that to a divine intervention is the most probable explanation. CERN attributing this to "Some unknown entity" is humorous.
One theory (which CERN is using) is to argue that almost all matter was destroyed, and that the current observable universe is merely the tiny leftover due to slight differences in behavior, making the Big Bang look more like the Ludicrous Bang. This, of course, just contributes to religious snickering at how all problems are solved by adding another billion years to the timeline, over and over.
Edit to reply: They behave differently; but why there is more of one than the other, remains unexplained; as regardless of how they behave, both should have been initially created in equal numbers. As for Sabine Hossenfelder's quote, that's a religious-faith level cop-out. When science requires faith, should it not be treated as a religion?
> No explanation has been found, even according to CERN
Incorrect.
First, let's be clear, "our understanding of the laws of physics" is not "the actual laws of physics". Every physicist knows this. The universe always follows the real laws, physicists are very excited about the difference because it's a chance to win a Nobel Prize.
For example, the one in 1980 for the discovery (in 1964, they're slow to award the prize) of CP violation in decays of neutral kaons, which is fancy physics language for "matter and antimatter do not behave the same way". This year, the LHCb experiment in CERN also discovered CP violation in baryons.
In fact, this is in your own linked article from CERN: """In the past few decades, particle-physics experiments have shown that the laws of nature do not apply equally to matter and antimatter. Physicists are keen to discover the reasons why."""
That said, personally I like the response from Sabine Hossenfelder: There's nothing to be explained, conservation laws only apply to time-evolution of a system, not to the initial conditions.
We don't look for a reason why the mass-energy was non-zero, why do we even need one for why the baryon number isn't zero?
> Attributing that to a divine intervention is the most probable explanation.
You lost me here. It seems humans have a predisposition to believe in divine beings, so this just sounds like taking human biases as a basis for truth. What's wrong with saying, "I don't know?"
Belief in anything is completely trivial unless you act based on those beliefs. No one is going to waste time worshiping, or murder someone over, the "nothing" from before "something".
