Hawking says there are no gods

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RecoveringYuppy said:
Cite the paper that shows there is no time prior to the Big Bang.
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I believe the assertion is that we have no access to before the Big Bang and outside the Universe. For all intents and purposes those places/times don't exist. But the actual use of that assertion is to describe spacetime, the Universe has no edges and no center because the Universe is all there is.

Someone better versed in cosmology can probably give a more precise version and that indeed has occurred upthread.
 
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Skeptic Ginger said:
I believe the assertion is that we have no access to before the Big Bang and outside the Universe. For all intents and purposes those places/times don't exist. But the actual use of that assertion is to describe spacetime, the Universe has no edges and no center because the Universe is all there is.
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Except for the part that the creation of the universe was governed by all that stuff you just said doesn't exist for all intents and purposes.

Skeptic Ginger said:
Someone better versed in cosmology can probably give a more precise version and that indeed has occurred upthread.
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And what would that be?
 
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RecoveringYuppy said:
That's not what I asked for. Read the paper to figure out what that actually means and what the reasoning behind it is.
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You want me to paraphrase his entire lecture, laying out his reasoning?

Or you want it condensed into a twitter-sized snippet?

Why? What's the point?
 
RecoveringYuppy said:
If you don't see the point then don't worry about it.
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I can guess what your point is and I believe it was noted upthread.

Some people are trying to leave one last gap to fit a god into.

That god would be irrelevant and no religion on the planet except Deism describe such a god and the Diest god is criticized as being irrelevant.

Not to mention the turtles all the way down problem and the complete lack of evidence problem.
 
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Skeptic Ginger said:
I can guess what your point is and I believe it was noted upthread.

Some people are trying to leave one last gap to fit a god into.

That god would be irrelevant and no religion on the planet except Deism describe such a god and the Diest god is criticized as being irrelevant.

Not to mention the turtles all the way down problem and the complete lack of evidence problem.
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This has nothing to do with me. Don't have a clue why you think this is relevant to what I said.

I was telling kellyb she doesn't have to be interested in what I'm talking about.
 
kellyb said:
So he lied when he wrote the words "...the universe has not existed forever. Rather, the universe, and time itself, had a beginning in the Big Bang, about 15 billion years ago."

:confused:
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No. READ THE NEXT THREE SENTENCES.
 
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RecoveringYuppy said:
No. READ THE NEXT THREE SENTENCES.
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k...

The beginning of real time, would have been a singularity, at which the laws of physics would have broken down.
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That completely reinforced the point that there was no time before the big bang...


Nevertheless, the way the universe began would have been determined by the laws of physics, if the universe satisfied the no boundary condition. This says that in the imaginary time direction, space-time is finite in extent, but doesn't have any boundary or edge.
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And the above in no way contradicts the notion that "the universe, and time itself, had a beginning in the Big Bang, about 15 billion years ago."
 
psionl0 said:
Exactly! Not ruling something OUT is different to ruling something IN.
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ok, lets drop the word games for a moment as this is a derail of the discussion. I will ask you a straight question then.

Having just witnessed a phenomena that on the face of it has no obvious and apparent scientific explanation or evidence for one, would you "not rule out" a supernatural (essentially magic) explanation, even though there is no evidence for that either?

The point being (and I think you are aware), is that by rephrasing that as "not rule in a supernatural explanation until there is evidence to do so" is more more poignent and correct. Saying "not rule out" is pointless in the sense that every single made up nonsense explanation is not rued out" either.

I never claimed one was the opposite of the other, infact that is my whole point.
 
kellyb said:
Real time.
Like he said in the preceding sentence, "The beginning of real time, would have been a singularity, at which the laws of physics would have broken down."
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OK. So is it then appropriate to say that "time began at the big bang" or does that leave out some very important context?
 
RecoveringYuppy said:
OK. So is it then appropriate to say that "time began at the big bang" or does that leave out some very important context?
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It's just flat-out appropriate.

At least, Hawking thought so, hence his unqualified, summary statement about "the universe, and time itself, had a beginning in the Big Bang".
 
kellyb said:
It's just flat-out appropriate.

At least, Hawking thought so, hence his unqualified, summary statement about "the universe, and time itself, had a beginning in the Big Bang".
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Thanks kellyb.:)

Just returned to this thread to tackle RecoveringYuppy and found you, and some others, have done so comprehensively already. RecoveringYuppy seemed to want iron clad evidence that Hawking's hypothesis was proven, and I was suggesting it was not so, but Hawking certainly would have used scientific method to come up with his hypothesis.
 
kellyb said:
It's just flat-out appropriate.

At least, Hawking thought so, hence his unqualified, summary statement about "the universe, and time itself, had a beginning in the Big Bang".
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I'm pretty sure that lecture is quite old. For instance Hawking says:

The predictions of the no boundary proposal seem to agree with observation. The no boundary hypothesis also predicts that the universe will eventually collapse again.
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And yet modern observational cosmology strongly suggests* that the universe won't collapse again, contracting one of the predictions of his model (at least according to Hawking).

I didn't read the whole thing, but I'd like to point out one more time, that this is a model that is not (yet?) standard cosmology, to draw philosophical conclusions from it is entirely premature.

*The evidence for the accelerating expansion is very strong.
 
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