In a comment to this post dmullenix writes: “What happened before the Big Bang? The multiverse already existed, it just hadn’t created this particular universe yet. What about space and time? No problem, they’re a part of the universe and came into existence when it did. . . we know that this universe came into existence from something . . .”
When I read dmullenix’s comment I was reminded of a statement widely attributed to G.K. Chesterton: “When men stop believing in God, it is not that they believe in nothing; they will believe in anything.” Dmullenix insists the multiverse existed prior to this universe and it “created” this universe. How does he know this? If we define a “scientific statement” as a statement that may, in principle, be falsified by empirical investigation this statement is not a scientific statement for the simple reason that all of our empirical investigations are limited to this universe. If it is not a scientific statement then what is it? It is a metaphysical/philosophical statement of a priori faith/belief no different in principle than the a priori statements of six-day creationists.
Dmullenix goes on to say that we “know” this universe came into existence from something. As a matter of simple logic his statement is undoubtedly true, because we can be certain that only nonbeing proceeds from nonbeing. But I get the impression that dmullenix is arguing for a material cause of this universe and he thinks he has found it in the multiverse. He does not seem to understand that this gambit just pushes the inquiry back one step: Where did the multiverse come from? Did it itself come from yet another multiverse and if so where did that multiverse come from? The obvious infinite regress seems to escape most materialists like dmullenix, blinkered as they are by their faith commitments.
Let’s also remember that the atheistic-materialistic insistence that ‘randomness’ is a perfectly rational ‘designer-substitute’ is, in itself, in reality, ultimately the ‘anti-science’ position that destroys science;. i.e. Insisting on randomness as the ‘first mover’, the ‘first cause’, for reality within science, as atheists insist that we do, ends up, at the end of the day, destroying the very presuppositions in science that enabled humans to practice science rationally in the first place!!!:
notes:
This following site is a easy to use, and understand, interactive website that takes the user through what is termed ‘Presuppositional apologetics’. The website clearly shows that our use of the laws of logic, mathematics, science and morality cannot be accounted for unless we believe in a God who guarantees our perceptions and reasoning are trustworthy in the first place.
Materialism simply dissolves into absurdity when pushed to extremes and certainly offers no guarantee to us for believing our perceptions and reasoning within science are trustworthy in the first place:
This ‘lack of a guarantee’, for trusting our perceptions and reasoning in science to be trustworthy in the first place, even extends into evolutionary naturalism, the atheists citadel of defiance, itself;
The following interview is sadly comical as a evolutionary psychologist realizes that neo-Darwinism can offer no guarantee that our faculties of reasoning will correspond to the truth, not even for the truth that he is purporting to give in the interview, (which begs the question of how was he able to come to that particular truthful realization, in the first place, if neo-Darwinian evolution were actually true?);
Of related note:
How could that possibly be true; it is a very basic inescapable logic a young child can comprehend / recognise.
I think the more likely answer is, it’s a question that they just don’t want to ask or answer.. you know, like putting your head in the sand.
I’ve always been puzzled that anyone would bring up infinite regress to argue for or against anything. It affects every possible explanation of everything equally. It’s not like we can discard one explanation because of infinite regress and pick a different one that doesn’t face it.
Now I know you won’t believe this,
But I’m telling you…It’s true!
Lightning struck a muddy puddle,
And then life appeared and grew!
I’m not kidding! It was magik!
You can trust me. It’s no lie!
Look around! The life you’re seeing
Came from mud by lightning fried!
Yep, the scientists will tell you…
“That was really how it was!”
And we know we should believe ’em
Since…well, friend…well,..Just because!
After all, they’re educated!
They’ve got tenure and degrees.
They just know stuff…They’re not kidding!
They’ve got clout and expertise!
So, don’t argue. Just accept it.
They are wise and in the know!
They are right…and so, it’s finished
Just because they told us so.
SA:
Actually not. Traversing the infinite in successive steps is infeasible, but there is no reason why there is not an ultimate. Indeed the issue of infinite succession points to the limits of tie as an explanation. If there is a temporal and contingent world that credibly began and then has succeeded step by step since, there is another world that is not contingent, and had no beginning; the root of the contingent world we see.
KF
KF,
If there is a non-contingent world with no beginning that is the cause of this one, I still don’t see why that possibility wouldn’t apply equally to pretty much anything. One could say that a completely unintended Big Bang resulted from something non-contingent with no beginning.
I am of course, playing devil’s advocate in a sense, and I’m more likely to use the same argument in just the opposite direction. Some people might say that to believe in an eternal God with no beginning and no creator is irrational. And to be honest, it seems completely impossible. But that exact same seeming impossibility applies to everything. It doesn’t matter which explanation we believe. We must choose between an infinite regression of causes or a first cause with no cause. I find both equally incomprehensible for the same reason, and I’ve never heard an explanation that gets around it. And yet our existence depends on one of them being true.
For the record, I choose the causeless first cause. But that’s on the basis of trust, not because I claim to make sense of either. Believing that there is non-contingent first cause, which I do, isn’t an explanation of it.
Tom Graffagnino:
Lol.. This is awesome.. Thanks for posting it..
What caused the multiverse:
http://books.google.com/ngrams.....moothing=3
The URL in the previous post was automatically truncated.
It’s meant to be:
http://books.google.com/
ngrams/
graph?content=fine+tuned%2C+multiverse