Ridiculous. For that to work we have to have no evidence that mass, energy, forces, particles and the laws that govern them do not exist, but lots of evidence of ghosts and unicorns and angels and gods flying around doing stuff.
Please, at least try to be serious.
No, that is not how it works. If you insist on there being something other than the “natural”, you need to provide some sort of evidence for that claim. You don’t get to just cram the “supernatural” into whatever gaps in our scientific knowledge happen to exist at a given moment.
For that matter, you need to show that there actually is an “ultimate beginning” to the universe.
To be fair, any classical Christian theist who believes in the incarnation believes that it’s possible for the same person to exist both timelessly and temporally. When it comes to the question of whether God / the divine nature (since in WLC’s view “God” properly refers to the divine nature and not any person) can exist both timelessly and temporally, I think that runs into more problems. It would mean that the divine nature is not essentially timeless or temporal, and I don’t see how timelessness or temporality could be an accidental feature, even if you grant (as WLC does) that God has accidental features.
Possibly because the OP has now been edited seven times (in six day) – and is thus more than a little of a moving target. Forum-members are directed, by links on the forum’s main page, to new posts at the end of a thread, and rarely (if ever) go back and reread posts at its beginning on the off-chance that somebody may unaccountably have altered them.
Allow yourself a moment to consider what a blueshifting is by just looking at the wavelength of light. By looking backwards in time in an expanding universe, points move closer to each other, blueshifting the light traveling between them.
If the points in space aren’t moving apart or together (either by traveling in space relative to each other, or because the space itself between two points is not expanding or contracting), the light doesn’t shift wavelength. And therefore the question being considered in the BVG theorem is about expanding or contracting space. Not whether the dimension of time itself can be eternal into the past.
When the geodesic is blueshifted as we look back in time, it’s because space contracts as we have reversed the arrow of time in an expanding universe. If the universe is not expanding, the geodesic doesn’t blueshift when we look back in time, and then it’s velocity doesn’t reach the speed of light and thus it’s trajectory isn’t geodesically incomplete somewhere in the past.
So no, the BVG theorem doesn’t apply to non-expanding spacetimes, and thus if space at some point in the past stops contracting as we look back, the BVG theorem stops applying to that non-expanding spacetime.
Statements like this are why apologetics is next to worthless. At best, all that can be shown is that we do not know if or how the universe began. Add that to the long list of things we, and in particular you, do not know about the universe. Do you not know what you do not know means?
If you do not see the irony here, we are at an impasse. Your hypothesis is divine creation, and as you cannot build a lab observing initial conditions measuring the effect of a personal, immaterial, eternal, and atemporal God, your hypothesis is not testable, even in principle.
So your response is yes Alan Guth and Alexander Vilenkin are lying about the applicability if their own theorem? And people like Dan Linford, Sean Carroll, and Niayesh Afshordi are too, or just don’t understand it? Forgive me but that’s utterly ridiculous.
But I hear you’ve got Grok to agree with you. I once got an AI to suggest that a circle had a diameter longer than the circle’s diameter plus the hight of an adjacent triangle (that h+d<d). And I wasn’t even trying to do that with clever prompts.
Rubbish, I am not saying that Vilenkin’s proposal is true. I am saying that as far as we know it might be true. There is no fallacy there. You have no valid reason for rejecting it - and if “being unscientific” were a valid reason it would apply equally to your own preferred answer.
Except that you can’t show that and “the alternative” would be broader than “an eternal creator”.
To be charitable you are just using a God of the Gaps argument, thinly disguised. Since science has no testable explanation for the existence of the universe you jump to the God conclusion.
We could stipulate that there was a first moment of time without that requiring that there was a state of affairs where spacetime did not exist. There having been a first moment of time does not entail that the non-existence of spacetime ever obtained.
No wonder you got Grok to agree when you’re just feeding it nonsense with confidence. These AI bots really just tend to bend the knee and accept things you declare to them if you just bury a lot of assertions in the same paragraph.
That straightforwardly doesn’t follow. An obvious non-sequitur. It’s like saying if the Mt. Everest was the result of a natural process it should exist in many places on every continent.
Or that we should be able to see new big-bangs occurring all the time. But why should we if they do not occur inside our own universe? It’s conceivable that new big bangs are occurring in large numbers every moment, but that they lie beyond our observational horizon, either entirely separate from our own universe, or at least so far beyond our best telescopes we can’t presently detect them.
At some point the Sun will swell up and swallow the Earth, eventually absorbing it’s material. This will only happen once. The Sun and Earth will not be repeaing this same history over and over again.
There’s a cloud outside right now that resulted from a natural process, and there has probably never been a cloud exactly like it before, and unless the universe is going to have an infinite future (with incredibly many new planets forming with their own earth-like atmospheres) there isn’t likely to ever occur another cloud exactly like it again.
Natural events or processes really can be, for all intents and purposes, unique, and only happen once.
Some were, others simply followed logically from the math (the other bubble universes in inflation follow from the math, they’re not some sort of concoction proposed to deal with some problem).
This historical falsehood that keeps circling around among apologists really needs to die. It’s just false.
This is just false. The number of distinct universes increasing over time is not equivalent to an expansion of spacetime in inflationary cosmology (now you’re REALLY stretching the applicability of the BVG theorem, obviously the number of universes decreasing into the past does not result in geodesic blueshifting).
Also you could just have the number of universes fluctuate around some mean to pick just one logically possible alternative. Just as universes come into existence, others disappear again. This could just extend infinitely into the past.
There could be some physical process that ensures the total number stays relatively constant (the strength of the mechanism generating new universes is inversely proportional to the number of them, so when the numbers get very low lots of new ones are generated), and simultaneously when the number of universes grows too large, the ensemble becomes unstable and some of them decay spontaneously. Not all too dissimilar to how larger more unstable atomic nuclei will decay into smaller more stable ones.
This is just false. No such demonstration has occurred. As you like to quote Newton uttering in the much more impressive Latin, “Hypotheses non fingo”. The idea that spacetime was at some point not even in existence is an untestable idea that no observation or data supports.
This is just an assertion. In fact it seems to me you can’t have empirical evidence that nature did not exist. At best you can have empirical evidence that there was a first moment of time, but you can have no data that indicates there was a state of non-being preceding it.
This is also just an assertion.
So what reason do we have for thinking quantum fluctuations require space again?
But you don’t mention any.
How does that question constitute a “philosophical and scientific problem” with Vilenkin’s idea?
How is the universe resulting from a quantum fluctuation meaningfully equivalent to the universe creating itself? It seems to me it would be the universe resulting from the laws of physics, which are not identical to the universe itself.
Your apologetics here becomes confused and muddled, I think. Vilenkin suggests the laws of physics have some platonic existence by themselves. Obviously if that is the case, then it isn’t the universe creating itself, but the laws of physics creating the universe.
Since time did not exist, it follow that it did not happen in time. So the question is just misplaced. Ironically you have to posit something similar for the divine act of creation of time itself. That it did not happen IN time. So if God is logically allowed to create time itself without being in time, why can’t Vilenkin’s proposed quantum fluctuation occur outside of time too? As a logical possibility that seems to me equally coherent, at least, as the idea that some sort of mind can exist outside of time and cause universes to come into existence.
But you ultimately don’t care about scientific testability. If we are not allowed to accept scientifically untestable proposals, guess where that leaves your God hypothesis?
And neither is the God-hypothesis, so I guess I just can’t accept neither yours nor Vilenkin’s proposal.
I could in principle just agree that there was a first moment of time and then there was never a time at which the universe did not exist. Hence, since the universe always existed and was not ever out of existence, there was no act or moment of creation, or coming into existence, and hence no cause is required to explain or facilitate such an event since it never occurred.
Another straightforward non-sequitur. That something can’t be tested doesn’t mean the true answer isn’t natural. We just have no way to determine it from what our observations can tell us. That would leave us unknowing, it wouldn’t leave us knowing it wasn’t natural.
LOL. Insert the “I think you skipped a step” cartoon here.
I think you’ve succeeded in convincing me even more strongly than ever that Grok has no actual comprehension of what it is doing if prompts like this flurry of non-sequiturs is how you convinced it God exists. Well done, I guess I am able to change my mind at least a little bit, some times.
Science necessarily includes evidence. As there’s not a single datum of evidence mentioned
in that paragraph, why you explicitly claimed in the title that you discussed “scientific evidence” with Grok is not clear.
I did as you requested. It was simple to do. In fact, you can do it yourself. Just click on the Grok conversation URL in the OP and ask your questions. I did it and will share the URL here.
I have no idea what you are talking about. I’m talking about the science. The science has conclusively shown that our universe is not entirely Natural. It cannot be because the beginning of the universe was not Natural. The initial conditions were “no spacetime”. Nature did not exist and the universe cannot create itself. Your comment about ghosts and unicorns indicates you are unwilling to discuss the science. I have already demonstrated an “ultimate beginning” to the universe. If you don’t understand the science, you should be asking questions.
We have no empirical evidence our universe was ever in a nonexpanding state. I have no idea what prompt you gave to Grok or what Grok said. If you want to discuss Grok, then post the Grok conversation URL as I did in the OP.
And I have said that Guth, in particular, has tried to walk back his peer-reviewed papers declaring that BGV theorem implies a beginning. At one point in 2014, Guth and Sean Carroll were talking about a paper they were working on together which was going to describe a past eternal model. They never published that paper. I don’t think the math worked out. I don’t think a viable past eternal model is possible. While Guth has not published that paper or any other paper proposing a past eternal model, he has continued to make statements that undermine his own work on BGV theorem. Scientists sometimes do that. Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose co-published the Penrose-Hawking singularity theorems in the 1960s which point to a beginning of the universe. Years later, Hawking published his “No Boundary proposal” which he said could be eternal to the past (but actually described a thermodynamic beginning). Hawking said that for 20 years he was trying to convince people his singularity theorems pointed in the wrong direction. The Penrose-Hawking singularity theorems are still far more influential than Hawking’s No Boundary proposal.
Vilenkin is a little harder to describe. In his book Many Worlds in One, on page 176, Vilenkin writes:
“It is said that an argument is what convinces reasonable men and a proof is what it takes to convince even an unreasonable man. With the proof now in place, cosmologists can no longer hide behind the possibility of a past-eternal universe. There is no escape: they have to face the problem of a cosmic beginning.”
Several years ago, after Vilenkin had made some public comments that sounded like he was walking back his conclusion of a cosmic beginning I emailed Vilenkin and asked if he had changed his position or if I could still quote the above passage from his book as representing his viewpoint. He told me that I could continue to use this quote.
Vilenkin offers a very specific proposal for a beginning of the universe without the need for a Creator. I discussed this proposal with Grok. I provided a link to the discussion with Grok in the OP. if you got a chance to read it, you would know I reject Vilenkin’s proposal because it is not testable and therefore is not scientific.
None of that is really responsive to the point that the BVG theorem only applies to expanding spacetimes, which can’t stretch back infinitely far because the blueshift would go to infinity. It wouldn’t apply to non-expanding spacetime, obviously, since then looking back in time would not produce blueshifts and thus the velocity wouldn’t go to infinity.
Your response is there’s no evidence that the universe we see was ever not expanding, which is true but irrelevant to the larger point of whether the BVG theorem has actually proved there must be an ultimate beginning and that we have ruled out an infinite past using it. For already explained reasons we have not.
That doesn’t mean I am saying we should just accept that there was an infinite past on the mere possibility that there could be. I am myself undecided on the past age of the universe.
But even if there really was a first moment of time, as I have also stated, that doesn’t mean there was ever a state of affairs at which the universe did not exist. If the universe has always existed (here “always” means for all of time) then there was never a transition from nothing to something, and as such no such coming-into-being ever occurred.
And then along come apologists, armed only with “verbal/written language”, but exhibiting far more confidence that they know exactly what is going on than the cautious and ambiguous conclusions of those working with the “advanced mathematics” would suggest.