Ian,
Just because you don't understand what I am saying, doesn't mean it makes no sense. For your information, the vacuum fluctuation hypothesis did not come out of my ass. It came out of the asses of Cosmologists who understand General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics far better than I do. I think it goes without saying that they understand it considerably better than you, as well.
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They are cosmologists not philosophers!
That's nice. We are discussing cosmology, not philosophy.
As I say such a "vacuum fluctuation" must presuppose that something exists.
Obviously.
There cannot be a vacuum fluctuation, or indeed anything else, in the context of nothingness.
Of course not.
Any physical process whether vacuum fluctuations or whatever, cannot cause the big bang because the concept of causality implies a preceding event. But there can not be any prior events to the "big bang" otherwise it wouldn't be the start of the Universe!
I am quite aware of this. What you seem to fail to realize is that the vacuum fluctuation hypothesis
does not contradict any of this in any way.
The hypothesis is not that the Big Bang was caused by a vacuum fluctuation, but that the Universe itself
is a vacuum fluctuation.
Once again, your arguments indicate that you don't know anything about the hypothesis that you are trying to argue against.
Your complete lack of comprehension of the subject is also apparent, because if you had any idea what the vacuum fluctuation hypothesis actually says,
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I don't need to know what it means for the aforementioned reasons. Just accept the Univese started acausally (acausal in the true meaning of the word) and cut the cr*p.
Read my posts again moron. I originally cited the vacuum fluctuation hypothesis as an example of a scenario in which the Big Bang was acausal!
you would know that (a) it is claiming, as you just did, that the Big Bang was an acausal event (as are all vacuum fluctuations),
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You don't understand what acausal means. If a vacuum fluctuation were truly acausal then you would not be subscribing to naturalism. The fact that some event is inherently random doesn't mean that it is acausal! If it can be described by mathematical rules then it is causal not acausal.
So now you are claiming that Quantum Mechanics violates naturalism? You are completely clueless. Acausal means that the event is not caused by prior states. That does not necessarily mean that it cannot be described by mathematical rules, and it certainly doesn't mean that the probabilities cannot be described by mathematical rules.
And before you start in with more of your "Stimpy is using the wrong definitions" nonsense again, I am using the word acausal as it is used in science. After all, science is what we are discussing here.
That said, I am not offering any claims of how or why the Big Bang happened. I don't know. I was merely pointing out that there are theories in which the Big Bang needed no cause.
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No, if the Universe was acaused then it lies outside the scope of physics.
Bullsh*t. You don't know what you are talking about. I can only guess that what you are trying to say is that the origin of the Universe is supernatural. There is certainly no reason to think that this must be the case.
T'ai Chi,
One certainly does not need a mathematical theory to ask what came before a physical event. So people say there was a Big Bang, ok. So what came before that Big Bang?
You do have to assume that there was a "before the Big Bang". That assumption appears to be false.
Where did the material come from?
Nobody knows. There are several theories for this in the works, but as yet none of them are complete, and we do not have enough information to complete them.
Where did the mysterious hoover vacumn fluctuations come from.
Where is this mysterious ad hoc voodoo dark matter?
Any serious questions, or are you just here to annoy people?
Dr. Stupid