if you are going to pick one for the rest to be footnotes to then thales & the philosopher make good candidates for different reasons.

4/5/2006 8:40:31 PM

"hard on for socrates" made me laugh.

you said

Quote :

"... if we were to ASSUME that the existence of God is an answerable question (it is not)..."

and

Quote :

"Anything that is beyond possibly demonstration and verifiability bears no relevance to our existence,"

if we use science to get to the big bang we are still left with the question of how it occured. go prove what happened. oh you cant? guess we shouldnt look into it. our very existence might be beyond "demonstration and verifiability" so i would be perfectly ok with saying that how we came to exist is relevant to any discussion of our existence.

4/5/2006 8:53:49 PM

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"if we use science to get to the big bang we are still left with the question of how it occured."

Very few scientists subscribe to a "big bang" theory with a singularity starting it all.

Even with a theory like that, observations of boundary conditions and our conditions today would either corroborate or debunk the theory. A particularly apt point was made by Hawking against a singularity starting everything, saying that there had to be some inconsistencies in the early compressed universe because the universe we see today is not uniform.

4/5/2006 9:20:14 PM

Quote :

"“hard on for Socrates” a famously ugly man "

The ancient Greek religion believed time was cyclical... maybe they predicted the big bang/big crunch theories OOOooooOOOoo

[/Peter: Oh my god. Brian, there's a message in my alphabets. It says "oooo." Brian: Peter, those are Cheerios]

4/5/2006 9:40:21 PM

4/5/2006 10:07:29 PM

a well placed family guy quote.

to mcdanger :
where did it all begin?

dont sidestep my reasoning of why we should ask this question in both philosophy and science by talking about specifics of the big bang.

4/5/2006 10:58:08 PM

Quote :

"where did it all begin?"

Why did it have to begin?

4/5/2006 11:28:20 PM

from opposites splitting off from the indefinite apeiron, as the arche of all things. /anaximander

4/6/2006 12:55:41 AM

Quote :

"Why did it have to begin?"

4/6/2006 8:36:52 AM

Theist1: Why'd God come about? Nothing caused God
Atheist1: Why'd the universe come about? Nothing caused it
Atheist2: Why'd the universe come about? Oh that old thing, its always been here. (using some cyclical big bang/big crunch theory to explain why the universe seems to be expanding)

4/6/2006 11:24:30 AM

Quote :

""

Why are you rolling your eyes? Answer my question.

Humans always feel compelled to classify things by beginnings and ends. Why? Your day has a beginning (you wake up) and an end (you fall asleep). Your life had a beginning (birth), and will have an end (death). More importantly, the human need to identify causes compells us to find a cause for literally everything (including the entire universe).

So really, why should the universe obey your concepts of beginnings and ends? What about it requires a beginning? Does it really make sense that there is a beginning, an original cause? I'm not being a smart ass, this is a legitimate question. Answering it with rolly eyes simply displays your defeat.

4/6/2006 11:58:09 AM

"what purpose does my life serve?" is pretty important in my opinion. i do not believe that it is only "you are born...you die"

4/6/2006 3:34:36 PM

You didn't answer my question.

4/6/2006 3:58:22 PM

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"Does it really make sense that there is a beginning, an original cause?"

yes. now go read your aristotle and get back to me. im not in the mood to go look it up myself.

4/6/2006 5:05:40 PM

What if the original cause was a reciprocal cause?

4/6/2006 5:17:37 PM

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"yes. now go read your aristotle and get back to me. im not in the mood to go look it up myself."

This isn't good enough. You need to justify the necessity for an original cause.

4/6/2006 6:51:36 PM

for philosophy to be one of the easy majors at NCSU, a lot of you struggle with it. cause i swear, passing some of the trash i've seen in this thread off as "logical thought" to a professor here would get you a D+, tops. personally as an atheist, some day i may believe God exists. it's just that right now, looking around, i don't have any reason to.

1st cause is irrefutable proof of the existence of God btw.

4/6/2006 7:34:54 PM

So are you just going to offer a pointless jab at us, or are you going to participate in the discourse?

If we're all D+ students you should have no problem holding your own in the discussion.

4/6/2006 8:55:29 PM

I only took one phylosophy course and it we were instructed that if we discussed anything having to do with God for our final exam, it had better be near perfect because our proffessor was tired of reading the same paper for X years.

4/6/2006 10:23:15 PM

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"cause i swear, passing some of the trash i've seen in this thread off as "logical thought" to a professor here would get you a D+, tops."

This kind of thing really rips me.

If you can reach into my argument and show me where I'm wrong, and why I should think differently, then I welcome it. I'm always looking for ways to refine my thought process and learn something.

To come in here and insult us is fine, but the worst insult was not adding any substance to the topic.

4/6/2006 10:55:48 PM

that's the funniest thing I've read in a while.

gg.

4/6/2006 11:13:52 PM

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"1st cause is irrefutable proof of the existence of God btw."

Sign #1 That You Know Absolutely Dick About Philosophy: You call anything irrefutable.

4/6/2006 11:15:56 PM

This isn't good enough. You need to justify the necessity for an original cause.

^peace. im out.

4/6/2006 11:18:35 PM

If an original clause is so obviously necessary, why can't you name the reason?

4/7/2006 2:08:45 AM

Why does matter have to matter so much?

4/7/2006 2:47:27 AM

Why that's a completely separate matter.

4/7/2006 3:06:42 AM

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"If we're all D+ students you should have no problem holding your own in the discussion."

you'll have to go back and quote me where i said you're all D+ students and not "a lot" of you.

Quote :

"Sign #1 That You Know Absolutely Dick About Philosophy: You call anything irrefutable."

the sarcasm went undetected. it should have been in all caps. how you could miss that considering i said i was an atheist in the same post is a mystery to me. as McDanger points out, if revolt can say God doesn't need a cause, he can say the universe doesn't need a cause.

like i said, everybody doesn't suck at it, and i'm by no means an expert, but there has been plenty of stinking it up in this thread.

4/7/2006 9:12:27 AM

Quote :

"you'll have to go back and quote me where i said you're all D+ students and not "a lot" of you."

Quote :

"as McDanger points out, if revolt can say God doesn't need a cause, he can say the universe doesn't need a cause."

While this is true, I don't really think of it like that. I'm not relying on the weakness of his argument to prop mine up. The Universe really doesn't need an original cause. In fact, we can't even properly define causality in the first place, and it seems mostly a human-invented illusion (though helpful in understanding our environment in an abbreviated sense).

If I explain everything we know about fire today, and then add an extra bit, that fire transports the spiritual energy of what it burns to another Universe in a way which is undetectable and untestable, then you couldn't technically prove me wrong.

However, it would be meaningless for me to make this distinction, and certainly not the simplest set of facts available to describe how fire works. Occam's razor is a great guideline. My argument is that in order to claim that the Universe needs a beginning, that he will have to illustrate why it needs an original cause. Nothing about our current understanding of the Universe requires a beginning, so the burden is on him to show us why a beginning is necessary.

I can't blame him though. He's simply not seeing past one of the human brain's built-in cognitive operators (causality).

4/7/2006 12:00:24 PM

Quote :

"While this is true, I don't really think of it like that. I'm not relying on the weakness of his argument to prop mine up. The Universe really doesn't need an original cause. In fact, we can't even properly define causality in the first place, and it seems mostly a human-invented illusion (though helpful in understanding our environment in an abbreviated sense)."

exactly what you're supposed to do.

Quote :

"If I explain everything we know about fire today, and then add an extra bit, that fire transports the spiritual energy of what it burns to another Universe in a way which is undetectable and untestable, then you couldn't technically prove me wrong."

it depends on what the "extra bit" is. unless you could show it had spiritual energy in the first place, it would seem pointless to me to even ponder it, because while i SUCK at physics i'm sure that in a closed environment you could combust everything in your fire and account for missing mass converted to energy and gas and all that stuff. the difference between what remains and what we started with should be the "spiritual energy" transported to the other universe. i could have understand it wrong so that may not make sense.

if i did understand it though, the fire example is exactly why i don't believe in a personal God. if there is a God, then God is at least capable of interacting with us in some way. looking around, it just doesn't seem God is interested.

i saw earlier you said something about not all scientists agreeing on the singularity. like i said, i suck in physics, but i read NewScientist to dumb it down for me. what are the alternatives to the singularity.

(i used to buy the first cause argument btw, was never sold on design)

4/7/2006 1:10:05 PM

^ Yeah I think you understood my argument pretty well. Piling extra "unanswerables" onto a natural process is not the way to go, is my point. We should only believe in what's necessary to explain phenomena.

Quote :

"what are the alternatives to the singularity."

As far as recyclable/expanding-contracting universe theories go, the idea is that a singularity is actually not possible. Instead, the Universe crunches down to a critical density, upon which a big-bang like explosion would occur. However, this wouldn't happen from a single point with infinite density (since that would result in a uniform explosion, and thus a uniform Universe in any direction). Rather, it would compress as much as it could, and still be riddled with imperfections (such that upon explosion, natural law would deterministically create the non-uniform world we can observe).

4/7/2006 1:25:55 PM

I shave my face daily with Occam's razor.

4/7/2006 3:09:21 PM

Quote :

"for philosophy to be one of the easy majors at NCSU,"

Name of department : Philosophy (also See Religion)
Average GPA of courses in department : 2.72
Std. dev. of courses in department : 0.18
Percentile within all departments : 4%

4/7/2006 5:30:57 PM