This sounds like a classic god-of-the-gaps position.
I understand where you’re coming from- I would say that I ultimately believe God is responsible for such laws/mechanisms but would be very careful to posit him as the scientific explanation which you seem eager to propose is overwhelming evidence for him.
I’m not sure how our universe having some sort of beginning points to a supernatural being. Why should we immediate take the jump from ‘our universe had some sort of beginning’ to ‘this is evidence of God?’ This doesn’t seem to be a wise position based upon historical patterns. One could easily have come at the forefronts of knowledge and point to things we didn’t yet understand and use that as evidence for God and one will always be able to do this within the scientific process. There are several theories that have logical extensions into multiple universes (i.e. eternal inflation, the string theory landscape, the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics). But then, one could ask where did those come from in a seemingly endless regression. Historically speaking though your extrapolation immediately to this obviously is evidence of God supernaturally creating the universe doesn’t make much sense, nor does it make sense within the cosmological community that did the hard work of figuring out our universe had some sort of beginning.
Genesis 1:1 is a close enough correspondence for me.
(That quantum mechanics may be hinting that the fundamental reality of the universe is information works for me, too. John 1:1)
Close enough correspondence for you to what? For you to say that the universe was supernaturally created and thus eternal inflation, the many world’s interpretation of QM, the string theory landscape and any other possible theory about physics beyond our universe will always be wrong?
I’m sorry, but I don’t buy that. I’m making my arguments based on what we “do know” from scientific investigation. God of the gaps is an argument from ignorance which argues from the position of what we “don’t know.” If anything, it’s the naturalist who is making an argument from ignorance saying we don’t know, therefore let’s wait for some undefined amount of time and we’ll eventually figure it out.
Not at all. What I’m saying is that there is indirect scientific evidence that supports an abductive inference for a metaphysical cause. It’s a metaphysical explanation that is supported by scientific evidence.
So you keep claiming but when asked to support the claim and show the evidence you flailed and flounced out as fast as you could.
Which is exactly what you are arguing. Since we don’t know all possible natural explanations you credit everything we don’t know to GODDIDIT. That’s not science and it’s not an abductive inference. It’s ad hoc story telling to support your preconceived God ideas.
Yes, close enough. Do you have mathematics or instrumentation in the works that can peer into that which is before time and space? Why isn’t it sheer speculation.
You’ve got me scratching my head here now. But nobody who uses god-of-the-gaps ever admits to such. Could you at least give me a refresher on your best evidences “from what we do know?”
That’s pretty bold lol. The only honest scientific answer for many things is ‘we don’t know.’ And you are seizing upon this opportunity suggesting you do know (but not calling it god of the gaps).
Can you go over this one more time?
My take: as a Christian I believe particular metaphysical claims and at best I can rationzalize or argue scientific evidence can be coniststent with my position. But I couldn’t claim my ideas are supported by scientific evidence. That’s way beyond what one can do with science.
Well I guess that’s it then. The scientists have given you something close enough to how you read Genesis 1:1 but they better stop because that’s the end of the road for science!
Before time and space? What exactly do you mean or where are you getting this from? In a classical sense the Friedman equation and GR equations break down ‘at the beginning’ and that’s okay because we know that the universe was not classical but quantum. But we don’t have an adequate theory of quantum gravity just yet so nobody can really say.
As for your actual question…
Maybe we can detect other universes in the CMB- Sabine Hossenfelder: Backreaction: The science of the multiverse.
There has to be something wrong with the Schrödinger equation (hidden variables or maybe stochastic collapse models) or otherwise we are left with the many world interpretation of quantum mechanics. In a funny way, it’s a type of multiverse that is easily described with equations we know very well.
I also think that your approach ultimately would take a review paper like this one on bouncing cosmologies and say ‘you guys are all wrong and will always be wrong because my Bible tells me you’re wrong’- https://arxiv.org/pdf/1603.05834.pdf
I’ll bide my time and you can do what you do.
Not that it is ‘pure faith’, since there are additional reasons to believe in God…
Forgive my incredulity, but I would be surprised if Hawking actually said anything close to that paragraph. Do you have any source for it? The only thing I can find are unsourced claims in a Huffpo article and from a site called news24.
That’s the source, hyperlinked above in ‘Stephen Hawking’. Yeah, it does sound like it could easily be apocryphal.
The reason I asked is because while I am a big fan of Hawking’s work as a physicist, his knowledge of philosophy is severely lacking. He does not seem to understand what philosophers mean by First Cause, and I am surprised if he would ever use philosophically charged words like “Creative Purpose”.
Uh, what? I don’t recall anything in the gospels about global warming. I definitely don’t recall anything about the church having discussed it for the last 2000 years…
When is a supernatural cause ever the best explanation? What makes it the best explanation, and why?
The problem is the definition of natural and supernatural. It has been proposed that anything that creates the universe is supernatural by definition. I was simply proposing a scenario and seeing how it fits with our views on the supernatural.
As to your larger point, all processes that people consider natural run into the same problem. How do clouds form? That leads to asking how planets form, how elements form, and eventually to how universes form. So is cloud formation supernatural? I guess we could call it 6 degrees of separation from the supernatural.
What makes it valid?