Some of it is sarcasm, and can’t really blame Rum for that at this point. The criticism remains. Where is your hypothesis?
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Not so. Dark matter exhibits effects the same as visible matter, except that it has not been directly observed. God is not material, of course there is not the slightest empirical evidence of divine creation of the universe, so your analogy fails but somehow you have not figured this out for yourself.
Anyone with a grasp of science is going to write off your sophistry as crackpot technobabble. I will grant you this, though. The average pew sitter in the bubble is going to think you are sheer genius, brilliantly exposing the willful blindness of Noble Prize winning scientists. In the end though, what do you think you will have accomplished?
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Argument by capitalisation is ineffective.
The absence of anything natural can still be natural, if there is also an absence of anything non-natural or supernatural.
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I’m still wondering of the laws of conservation are supposed to be “unnatural.”
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So you claim. But you have failed to make a persuasive case.
No, we don’t know that. We do not know that there was ever an ultimate beginning.
You may believe that. But you have failed to make the case.
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I suspect the average pew sitter will not know what Grok is.
If they do know what Grok is, they’ll also know that citing it is worthless.
I would say that you omitted two letters from “refine.” 
Ronald is trying to reDEfine science itself.
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You say I have failed to make a persuasive case. I think you should ask questions about the parts you don’t understand. What seems uncertain to you? Where do you think the evidence and/or argument is weak?
Why do you say we don’t know that there was an ultimate beginning? There is no viable past eternal cosmological model. If you think there is, name your favorite and I will cite the science paper that refutes it.
How can a process be considered natural when Nature itself does not yet exist? I think you don’t understand the science yet. You should ask questions.
I don’t want to be mean, but someone else will point this out if I don’t.
You have been asked questions, most of which you pointedly ignore, and it is increasing hard to take you seriously. If you want to discuss the the science, then do so, starting by stating your hypothesis.
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Conservation laws only apply to nature.
- Premise 1 (Empirical law): The law of conservation of energy states that within nature, energy can neither be created nor destroyed.
- Premise 2 (Observation): Energy exists in the universe today.
- Premise 3 (Cosmology): The universe (and all of nature) had a beginning—i.e., a time when it did not exist.
- Conclusion: Therefore, the energy in the universe could not have originated by any natural process, because natural processes did not exist before the beginning of nature.
This is not philosophy. It’s science with a logical deduction. The creation of energy at the ultimate beginning of the universe was non-natural - that is, not the result of a natural process. Nature does not create energy.
If spacetime is not present, Nature is not present. Whatever cause is present is non-natural. Did you have a question about that?
Hi Ron!
The empirical evidence for a Creator is all around us. Think about the conservation laws. Let’s zero in on the law of conservation of energy. The law tells us that nature cannot create or destroy energy. But yet energy got created at the ultimate beginning of the universe. This proves the creation event was not the result of a natural process because it did something nature cannot do. The scientific evidence for God is stronger than the scientific evidence for dark matter.
The God hypothesis is quite large because the evidence for the Creator is so large. I have been focusing on just one line of scientific evidence. There are many more. You might be interested in this book.
So you would have us believe.
Rather than ‘teaching’ Cosmology, as @Rumraket suggested, a prominent scientist is involved in a nefarious plot to obscure it?
In spite of his high profile, none of his scientific colleagues have noticed and seen fit to correct or chastise him? Are they also involved in this nefarious plot?
And so it falls to a Theology-graduate/real estate funding coach/apologist to correct this horrendous calumny?
Do you have any idea of how preposterous this sounds?
You have also been spamming this thread with your blog-post claiming Carroll’s “dishonesty”, based it would appear, on little more than his disagreement with you and Craig on the claim that the BGV theorem “proves” that our universe had a beginning.
(As I have already pointed out) the BGV theorem paper explicitly disavows this claim:
What can lie beyond this boundary? Several possibilities have been discussed, one being that the boundary of the inflating region corresponds to the beginning of the Universe in a quantum nucleation event [12].
Even the Guth paper that you yourself cited as “saying that BGV theorem implies a beginning of the universe” states:
There is of course no conclusion that an eternally inflating model must have a unique beginning, and no conclusion that there is an upper bound on the length of all backwards-going geodesics from a given point. There may be models with regions of contraction embedded within the expanding region that could evade our theorem. Aguirre and [49, 50] have proposed a model that evades our theorem, in which the arrow of time reverses at the t = −∞ hypersurface, so the universe “expands” in both halves of the full de Sitter space.
Yes, it also states that “under plausible assumptions, that the answer to this question is no [that it cannot also be eternal in the past].” But “plausible” is a low bar, and far from certainty (there may be multiple competing sets of “plausible” assumptions coexisting).
Given all this, I would strongly suggest that there is NO DISHONESTY in Carroll, who is an expert in this field, disagreeing with yourself and Craig, who most emphatically are not.
I would further suggest that @moderators take a hard look at these scurrilous and defamatory claims.
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I am simply discussing the scientific evidence that has caused other astronomers like Allan Sandage and Hugh Ross to reject their atheism and become Theists and Christians. At some point in the future, I believe our standard cosmology will describe a universe with a Creator. Perhaps it will be called the Theta Lambda Cold Dark Matter model since the letter Theta is the first letter in Theos, the Greek word for God.
Yes, if you read the discussion with Grok linked in the OP, you would know that I discussed Vilenkin’s proposal of a quantum nucleation in the absence of spacetime. I commend Vilenkin for attempting a mathematical description from the proper initial conditions of “no spacetime”. However, I cannot accept his proposal because it is not testable. It is not directly testable because we cannot create a lab with the condition of “no spacetime”. It is not possible to develop an indirect test which is specific enough to test this idea either. As Newton wrote, “Hypotheses non fingo.” We cannot accept untested hypotheses.
BGV theorem is a mathematical proof that any model that expands on average over its history must have had a beginning. Vilenkin writes:
“It is said that an argument is what convinces reasonable men and a proof is what it takes to convince 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.” Alexander Vilenkin, Many Worlds in One, p.176.
The problem of a cosmic beginning is the first problem. The second problem is this: Can we explain a cosmic beginning from the initial conditions of “no spacetime”? Vilenkin made his attempt but it turned out not to be testable. I am proposing the God hypothesis. Is my proposal testable? Yes. I believe it is using Bayesian probabillity. And it has already passed the test.
Blockquote
For good measure I again asked Grok whether my views here are correct, and it agreed. The multiverses emergent from various distinct physical theories were NOT invented to try to provide answers to fine-tuning problems, nor to try to “naturalize” the big bang. That claim is a historical falsehood.`
Blockquote
Thank you for providing your Grok conversation URL. I asked it a series of questions.
Grok writes:
Blockquote
However, you’re correct that some scientists resisted the Big Bang’s implications of a finite cosmic beginning, which resonated with theological ideas. Robert Jastrow’s God and the Astronomers (1978) notes resistance from figures like Einstein, who initially favored a static universe, and Eddington, who found a beginning “repugnant.” Einstein later accepted expansion due to Hubble’s redshift observations (1929). Fred Hoyle, a steady-state proponent, coined “Big Bang” derisively and disliked its theological connotations, proposing continuous matter creation to maintain a past-eternal universe. The steady-state model lost favor after the cosmic microwave background (CMB) discovery (1964), which supported Big Bang predictions.
And
Blockquote
Based on current evidence and theoretical work, no widely accepted past-eternal cosmological models are considered viable. The Borde-Guth-Vilenkin (BGV) theorem (2003) shows that universes with an average expansion rate greater than zero, like ours, are geodesically incomplete to the past, implying a beginning. Most inflationary models, including eternal inflation, are future-eternal but not past-eternal, as Guth notes. Alternative models (e.g., cyclic or steady-state) have largely been ruled out by observations like the CMB and accelerating expansion. While some speculative models (e.g., quantum or loop quantum cosmology) attempt past-eternity, they lack empirical support or consensus. Thus, I agree: no viable past-eternal models currently exist in mainstream cosmology.
After showing Grok a blog post I wrote, it writes:
Blockquote
The Creator hypothesis, while not directly testable, is evaluated via Bayesian reasoning by assessing how well observed evidence (e.g., fine-tuning, cosmic beginning) aligns with it compared to naturalistic alternatives. The claim that abiogenesis is in distress is supported by ongoing challenges in origin-of-life research, though falsification remains speculative. The post’s conclusion that the Creator hypothesis is “virtually certain” reflects the Bayesian outcome but depends on the assigned likelihoods, which some might contest.
https://grok.com/share/c2hhcmQtMg%3D%3D_9039fc6c-318f-482b-87cd-00558e523b62
In other words, you require this proposal must be testable, but your proposal about God doesn’t have to be testable.
This is tiresome.
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@RonaldCram To get the quote to work right you need to use them like this:
[quote]
quoted text
[/quote]
Carriage returns required. I’d fix them for you but I don’t have time just now.
Everyone else, maybe give Ron some time to edit before propagating broken syntax, or fix them yourself in the reply.
This thread in now back in side convo.
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The Aguirre model Guth talks about describes a. reversal of the arrow of time. The arrow of time is associated with entropy. If entropy is reversed, that would be a violation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
In the Abstract of “Eternal inflation and its implications”, Guth writes:
Blockquote
Although inflation is generically eternal into the future,
it is not eternal into the past: it can be proven under reasonable assumptions that the
inflating region must be incomplete in past directions, so some physics other than
inflation is needed to describe the past boundary of the inflating region.
So you can see that Guth does not think Aguirre’s assumption of a reversal of the arrow of time is reasonable.
I have already quoted Guth on page 14:
Blockquote
If the universe can be eternal into the future, is it possible that it is also eternal into
the past? Here I will describe a recent theorem [43] which shows, under plausible
assumptions, that the answer to this question is no.
Obviously, Guth does not consider Aguirre’s model to be reasonable or plausible. And no one should. A reversal of the arrow of time is an interesting mathematical perspective but it is completely unphysical.