The Church of the Big Bang

an “eternal round.” Fascinating phrase. That implies a cyclical nature rather than linear.

I do not see any conflict between what we suppose with science and what we suppose with religion. I think in both cases, we know very very little of actual reality. And yes, I believe we suppose and assume much in regards to religion too. We say phrases like “one eternal round” but I think we have absolutely no clue what that really means. We simply do not have enough facts at hand to make any realistic judgment of things like the Big Bang. I’ll let scientists who ponder and research that subject their whole lives figure out what exactly that means, and at the same time I will let prophets ponder and research what exactly “one eternal round” means.

all of the matter and radiation of our present universe were packed together in the primeval fireball

Doesn’t exactly sound like nihilo to me.

Interesting. I stand corrected.

#4. I was afraid a “real” astronomer would come in here and point out a bunch of scientific inaccuracies in my post! Heh. I’m glad you didn’t. I would become an astronomer except that mathematics and physics don’t naturally come to my brain. But I love astronomy man.

IMO, the people who wrote that their GOD (YHWH) created “the heavens [read sky above, incl. sun, moon, stars] and the earth” had no concept of the universe, much less the galaxy, or even the solar system. They probably believed that the Earth was fixed, and that the sun revolved around it. The creation stoy was meant to contextualize observed environmental phenomena and other living organisms as part of God’s creation, all designed for humankind’s benefit. Given this perspective, I think it a bit silly to try to fit theological cosmology into a modern scientific construct of the origins of the universe (about which the worshipers of YHWH knew nothing). The early worshipers of YHWH used the creation story now recorded in Genesis as a way of explaining humankind’s existence, and their place in the world. I seriously doubt this origin myth was meant to be ideologically interpreted into the “one true way” God created the heavens and the earth, a lens through which all other considerations, scientific and theological must be seen.

I see no problem with God creating a universe using a “big bang” method. But also I don’t see it necessary to reconcile science with mythic stories of creation in the Bible or any other holy book: Bible stories can reveal and teach “truth” even if the stories they tell aren’t literally factual. Jesus spoke in parables.

#9 SteveS:

I agree with your point regarding the Bible. Just like a game of telephone tag, thoughts were given in the cultural context of an ancient society and have been passed down through multiple translations, etc. since then. It is a bit more difficult to use the same arguments with modern LDS revelations, which were given to Joseph Smith in modern times and expressed in English.

As my father the astronomer likes to tell students, scientists have narrowed the origins of the universe down from two possibilities:

It came from nothing. Or it came from something.

Science can extrapolate the condition of the universe back to the first moments of the Big Bank (the Planck time) but not past it. Some think the universe spontaneously evolved from a singularity, which is sort of compatible with ex nihilo creation. Others speculate that new universes are created by evaporating black holes (a long story involving quantum mechanics that I don’t quite understand) in existing universes. That has interesting similarities to the “one eternal round” idea.

By the way, how is William Lane Craig’s cosmological argument different from Aquinas’s?

re. #13: “By the way, how is William Lane Craig’s cosmological argument different from Aquinas’s?”

Or Aristotle’s about the unmoved mover?

##15, 16: I see. Aquinas and, I suspect, the “Kalam school of Islamic thought,” with which I’m not familiar, at least not by that name (is that Averroes, Avicenna & Co.?) were both influenced by Aristotelian metaphysics.

I see no problem with God creating a universe using a “big bang” method

The problem is that it is impossible for an immanent being to create the universe, so adopting this idea means rejecting much of what Joseph Smith said on the subject, closing the door to the idea that our Heavenly Father is an exalted man, and pretty much any substantive sense of exaltation.

Not that that is not a legitimate position to take, even within the realm of Mormon thought, of course. It is classical orthodoxy in every sense of the term.

When the child was a child,
It was the time for these questions:
Why am I me, and why not you?
Why am I here, and why not there?
When did time begin, and where does space end?
Is life under the sun not just a dream?
Is what I see and hear and smell
not just an illusion of a world before the world?
Given the facts of evil and people.
does evil really exist?
How can it be that I, who I am,
didn’t exist before I came to be,
and that, someday, I, who I am,
will no longer be who I am?

Lines from Rainer Marie Rilke’s When the Child was a Child

Forest:

“Criminal”? Really? One of the really nice features of English is its ability to accept modification to accept new concepts.

If you wish to restrict the use of “multiverse”, you’re a bit late, my friend. It’s in the professional jargon.

Forest:

When people first started talking about parallelism among “universes”, there was a word in a science fiction story that I loved, but never caught on. It is even adaptable to integrating the spiritual and physical realms (and maybe anything else): alternity.

I like “alternity.” If there are parallel worlds where Esperanto has been adopted adopted, at least one of them must use “alternity” for this concept.

Like Nephi I glory in plain clarity of expression. I have no qualm against evolution of English in the direction of simplicity and clarity, but I do lament changes that make clarity more difficult.

My urging is not to turn the clock back and try to undo what has been done, but to use appropriate qualifications to compensate for the ambiguity that has crept in.

How do various versions of Pidgin English manage to express so many concepts with so few words? By massive use of circumlocutions!

I suppose if we can get used to “sub-atomic,” we can get used to “super-universal.”

Atom comes for “a” meaning not, and “tom” meaning cut or divide. Originally an atom was something that could not be broken down into parts. But then came the atom smashers.

Some science fiction writers have imagined that each of our “atoms” could be like an entire world in itself, infinitely large by the standards of its inhabitants, kind of like the speck of dust that Horton the elephant so faithfully protected against all odds to save the inhabitants of Whoville. This idea contradicts all current versions of quantum mechanics, our best approximations to date of the microcosmic world, but, as Brother Joseph said, “It is better to believe too much, than to believe to little.” I take this to mean (in part anyway) that our imaginations will always fall short of the complexity of reality.

Like Arthur, I have had the same experience from childhood of the wonderment of the uniqueness of this “I.”

A similar meditation is on the wonderment that anything at all exists. The empty set is so much simpler than anything else. Think about it. More on this later.

I’m afraid that I have way more to say than time to say it, so please be patient.

First of all, more on pondering “I.”

When I first realized that no other mortal could know exactly what it was like to be me, and that there were things about me and my thoughts that made me unique in some ways, I wondered if Heavenly Father was aware of how special I felt, and if my uniqueness was in any way important to him. I was very young, but I had a strong feeling that the answer was in the affirmative. And, like Enos, with that assurance I immediately realized that everybody else must have similar tender feelings of special uniqueness, and like Ammon and his brethren, I couldn’t bear the thought that any of them might have to suffer in any way beyond the passing pains that we all experience when we fall down or get stung by a bee. I began to know that each soul is precious to God.

I don’t see how anybody who has experienced this “I” epiphany could ever condone the intentional torture of another living creature. Because of this, I consider section 19 of the D&C as one of the bed rock documents essential for understanding the plan of salvation.

I once talked to a friend of evangelical persuasion who took the view that all creatures are like bugs or worms in the sight of God, and that on His whim He elects some for salvation, and some for never ending torture. I thought that showing him section 19 would provide him a way out from this (to me) painful thought. I was flabbergasted that he fought against it, saying that it contradicted the Bible, that therefore Joseph Smith was an impostor, etc.

Section 19 takes great pains to reconcile the scriptural idiomatic phrases with this new interpretation. Basically, since Eternal is one of the names of God, Eternal Punishment means “God’s punishment,” and God’s punishment is neither cruel nor without termination. If you take this interpretation, then there is no contradiction between section 19 and the Bible.

But suppose there was, then I would have to say that Joseph Smith got it better than whichever Bible writers that contradicted him. But my friend would have nothing of it. I wonder if he has ever had the “I” experience. How could he retain his Calvinistic view of God if he did?

If somebody starts a new religion based on my previous message, please remember that I do not subscribe to it, so name it after somebody else

On the existence of God:

For me the most marvelous thing is that anything at all exists.

In my mind the conceptual step from the existence of inert matter to, say, the existence of microbes, is much smaller than the conceptual step from nothingness to existence of inert matter.

Another conceptual step, still smaller in my mind, is from from the existence of life to the existence of sentient life.

Of course, as sentient beings we, like Descartes, can emphatically confirm the existence of ourselves.

The next conceptual step is from the existence of sentient beings to the existence of diety. To me it doesn’t seem like such a large conceptual step compared to the conceptual jump from nothingness to sentient beings, and especially to those who have had direct contact with diety, the existence of God is no more preposterous than the existence of inert matter.

I’m afraid some readeres will not understand why I have to keep saying “conceptual step.”

For example the “conceptual step” from nothingness to inert matter, does not imply that at one time there was nothing, and then at a later time there was matter. It just means that we mentally step from one concept to the other, while noticing how far apart the two concepts are in our mental space. Nothingness is a mental concept, whether or not there ever was such a thing in reality. Each of us has our own mental space, so we have to judge for ourselves how far apart these concepts are in our own mental spaces. That’s why I said, “In my mind the conceptual step …”

John von Neumann’s development of the whole numbers on the foundation of set theory starts by defining zero as the empty set. Then one is the set whose only element is zero. After that each new number is the set of all previously defined numbers. So von Neumann was used to counting from zero instead of one. One day when loading his luggage into a taxi en route to the airport, he asked his wife, “Where’s my other suitcase?” “What do you mean? All five of them are here.” “But I can only see four; zero, one, two, three four!”

>> The Steady State model says that the universe does not evolve or change in time. There was no beginning in the past and there will be no end in the future. Past, present, future – the universe is the same forever.

Hmmm. I think I disagree. On large scale, yes, the Steady State Model did appear as though it suggests a non-evolving universe. However, that is not what the SSM is really about. Proving an evolving universe is not the heart of the matter in SSM or of the Big Bang Theory. First, one must understand beforehand that both the Big Bang Theory and the Steady State Model agree that on large scale (>200Mpc), there is no privileged location in space (the universe is BOTH homogeneous and isotropic). If this is true, the Big Bang Theory also suggests a non-evolving universe. The evolution of the universe is not the central focus to the Steady State Model nor is it a central focus to the Big Bang theory. The argument between these two theories has a lot to do with the creation of matter. Steady State Model was critiqued that its suggestive of continuous creation of matter violates the mass-energy conservation. The Big Bang Theory was critiqued of its instantaneous (instead of continuous and progressive) creation of matter in the universe. SSM only fell out of favor within the decade when observational evidence of cosmic microwave background supports the Big Bang Theory. On smaller scale, over time the universe would be significantly different for both SSM universe and Big Bang universe. On large scale, as time changes, we would still have homogeneous and isotropic universe be it for SSM universe or Big Bang universe.

“Great explosions (novas and super novas of various sizes) are all over the place, and so far we cannot place an upper limit on the range of their energy levels. There must be some that are vastly greater than the size of our currently observable universe, that would make our observable universe seem like a tiny microscopic dot in comparison with a galaxy.”

While I do agree with much of your post (particularly about the problem that we can only observe our own region of the Universe and thus have no clue what’s going beyond our horizon), I’m going to have to call you on this statement. We can (and do) easily put an upper limit on all explosions that we observe in astronomy. That is: convert the entire rest mass of the progenitor object(s) into energy, and add in any chemical energy or gravitational potential energy as well.

My point in this, though, is that the Big Bang model argues that space itself is expanding, not that there was an ‘explosion’ of anything. Thus, talking about the explosions we see (e.g. supernovae) is not related to the origin of the universe or to any sort of expansion of space, which is what we use to deduce the early phase of the universe when it was really really hot, and really really small (the Big Bang).

The description I think you’re getting at is related to various models of inflation. This posits that an extremely small quantum fluctuation expanded quite rapidly (i.e. inflated) and allowed the material in it to cool, and eventually form us. This model can not predict what is happening outside of our region of expansion (the flat pancake part of your description), or even predict if that region obeys the same laws of physics that our region does, or even if there is any part of space that didn’t take part in our inflationary epoch.

>> Can you avoid an Ultimate Beginning, whether the Universe started with a Big Bang or not?

Yes. M-theory cosmology has a lot to say about that. To add to some fun to LDS theology speculation that sparked out of my Institute class sometime last year, it fits quite into picture with the scriptures D&C 3:2, D&C 35: 1, and 1 Nephi 10: 19 (18-19). I reckon that is how God thinks and how he ought to model universe. But don’t take my word 100% because I don’t know, and it could be that I may be full of it.

The creature on the pancake bubble, noticing that the bubble is expanding, thinks that it started from an “explosion,” and if we define “explosion” as extremely rapid expansion, she would be right. She might also have the (miss)understanding that her bubble was the entire universe, so no point in talking about the bubble as an explosion that took place in some larger substrate.

Arthur,

with regard to your question about the second law of thermodynamics:

Two conditions have to be satisfied before you can invoke the second law:

(1) The entropy in question has to be the entropy of a closed system.

(2) The system has to be near thermal equilibrium.

(3) The closed system has to have only a finite amount of entropy. (If total entropy is already infinite, then it cannot increase.)

The universe as a whole is a closed system, since there can be nothing outside of the class of all things. But it is extremely doubtful that it is a finite system.

Conditions (1)and (3) may apply to our local component of the universe, but (3) cannot apply to the entire universe. Condition (2) applies only rarely in placid locales.

For a relaxation of condition (2), see the Scientific American article

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-nature-breaks-the-second-law

Here’s a part of the heading:

Waste is unavoidable—a sad fact of life quantified by the famous second law of thermodynamics. But if the world is steadily becoming more disordered, how do you explain the self-organization that often occurs in nature? At root, the trouble is that classical thermodynamics assumes systems are in equilibrium, a placid condition seldom truly achieved in the real world.
A new approach closes this loophole and finds that the second law holds far from equilibrium. But the evolution from order to disorder can be unsteady, allowing for pockets of self-organization.

In our currently observable universe (COU) the largest explosions are precipitated by implosions. The degree to which an implosion can compact matter (before the explosive reaction) is limited by the momentum of the imploding matter, the synchronicity, and the relative lack of angular momentum.

If the imploding matter lacks in total inward momentum, or it arrives out of phase to the crunch region, or it has any angular momentum to speak of, then a black hole will not form.

Various combinations of phase, angular momentum, and inward momentum can result in various kinds of explosions. The various possible outcomes are examined in the “Big Bounce” SciAm article referred to above.

The interesting question is about the implosion leading up to the explosion out of which came our own COU. Was there sufficient angular momentum to keep us from getting pinched off from the rest of the universe?

I would assume an affirmative answer, since observed massive bodies tend to rotate, and it would be hard to implode many such bodies together in such a way that all of their angular momenta would cancel.

This brings up Mach, who brought up the question, “Why is angular momentum absolute, when linear momentum is relative?” A person in a black box in space can easily do experiments to see if she is rotating relative to the “fixed stars,” but there is no experiment she can do to see if she is translating at a constant velocity relative to the fixed stars. In other words, Inertial reference systems are equivalent, but they are all non-rotating.

It doesn’t make sense to ask if the universe as a whole is rotating (rotating with respect to what?), but it does make sense to ask if our COU is rotating relative to the larger substrate out of which it came. That’s the angular momentum that we are talking about in the context of being pinched off or not.

It seems more likely that God would notice that “there is space there” to be organized if it were not pinched off from the rest of the universe. On the other hand, it might be safer to quarantine us by putting us in a separate component of space-time.

Once you get a wider view of the universe, i.e. any of the “multiverse” versions, then in comparison the “big-bang-equals-everything” view seems pretty narrow and provincial.

One of the great features of multiverse theories is that they strongly imply that anything that is not outright impossible has surely already happened in infinitely many worlds.

So if it is not absolutely impossible for intelligent beings to attain to a status of power, intelligence, and goodness so far beyond our own that we would call it “godhood,’ then it has already happened infinitely many times.

We’re not talking some being, like the god of orthodox Christian creeds, that exists independent of the multiverse.

Joseph Smith taught (in the King Follet sermon, for example) that our Heavenly Father was once a man like us, and that we can progress as He did to a similar status relative to our future creations.

Does multiverse theory make the existence of gods and devils inevitable?

That depends on how you define these terms. If you mean some philosophical impossibility, then no. But if you only mean infinitely more advanced in evil or good (respectively) than anything we can detect in our society, then yes.

How about evolution? We know that natrual selection happens. It seems to me that five billion years is infinitesimal in comparison with the expected time that it would take for evolution of matter from scratch (i.e. inert elements). But that is no problem in the multiverse, there are infinitely many worlds that that have been around infinitely longer than five billion years. No matter how long the time needed, that much time has already passed on infinitely many worlds.

So how did life get started in our extremely young “big bang” neighborhood?

It was brought here.

By whom?

By the gods that saw useable space here after the big bang cooled off, just like the islands of Hawaii became inhabited after the volcanoes had sufficient time to cool off.

A few hundred thousand years ago the Hawaiian islands began surfacing as volcanoes from the depths of the pacific ocean. The molten magma was pretty much sterile until it cooled off enough for bacteria to find little niches, etc.

Fast forward to Captain Cook. He finds these islands inhabited by humans and a great variety of other life. Did he assume that all of this life evolved from scratch on the island? Of course not. The islanders had legends of arriving there in out rigger canoes from far away Samoa, etc.

To me it’s just as ridiculous to think that life evolved from scratch in this tiny, young “big bang” remnant as it is to think that life evolved from scratch on the young volcanic islands of the Pacific Ocean.

I don’t understand “everything exists.” Maybe you can clarify? I can understand a possible world in which, for instance, a unicorn might evolve through natural selection. That, I comprehend. But what about a possible world in which a contradiction exists… a “married bachelor,” as philosophers like to use. If you said “everything that possibly could exist, does exist,” that bothers me less.

But it still brings me back to the idea of “I exist.” If there is another situation somewhere else in which the exact initial conditions of my birth also happened, is it “me” over there or not? Would my consciousness exist in both places? If so, and the consciousnesses existed independently of each other, then there’s something else besides the initial conditions of the atoms of a zygote that makes up “me.” I also don’t seem to be experiencing any more than one consciousness now, so I can safely assume that either there is another “Arthur” out there with a different consciousness (thus demonstrating weakly that consciousness is not located in the brain), or there is no other “Arthur” out there at all.

Firetag,

your Occam razor perspective is the same of mine. I’m glad that I’m not the only one to think of it that way.

Arthur, your questions cut to the heart of the matter.

Nobody really knows the answers to you questions. This field is wide open!

First, what do we mean by “all things exist?”

One of the four basic approaches given by Tegmark basically treats the Multiverse as a cellular automaton that extends infinitely in all directions of time and space, and where each “cell” is an infinitesimal volume of space-time, i.;e. a kind of “action atom.”

To say that everything exists in some part of this cellular automaton universe could mean, for example, that every distinguishable local cellular automaton configuration exists somewhere in this grand cellular automaton. Two cellular automata are indistinguishable if they have the same value in each corresponding cell.

So somewhere there is a world in which Shakespeare’s works have been typed without any typos by monkeys typing at random, using a type face indistinguishable from that of a 1960′s Underwood typewriter.

If we want to go beyond Tegmark we could model the “infinite extent in all directions of space and time” with copies of the Surreal Numbers of John Horton Conway, which are infinitely richer than the real numbers in extent and continuity, including all ordinal numbers and all orders of infinitesimals.

The point is, that just because two regions of the cellular automaton are indistinguishable to us with our current instruments, does not mean that they could not be distinguished at some deeper level.

There could be another region of space time say 10^(10^(10^10)) light years from here that is indistinguishable from our currently observable universe over the next 100 billion years, yet detectable differences might begin to emerge after that, because all along there were “hidden variable” differences that we could not detect.

Your twin in that part of the multiverse would eventually take a different path from yours.

Here’s an interesting implication of multiverse theory that came to me:

It gives us another reason to avoid unnecessary risks. Suppose I can take some kind of shortcut with only one chance in a billion that it will result in an accident, where without the shortcut there is only one chance in a quadrillion. Ordinarily one might say, no biggy, I’ll take the shortcut. But if you know that it is going to increase the number of copies (by a factor of a million) of yourself that suffer the accident, then you will think twice about taking the shortcut.

In the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics you branch out into all of those other copies. So all of you think that you were the one that decided to be careful, and all of you would be right, since that decision was made before the branching (at the accident time) takes place.

#55, oh, I guess you’re right… those copies were me. How strange all this truly is.

I want to get back to one of Arthur’s main purposes for starting this thread (if we can call it that); the big bang ofers a way of rapproachment for “creationists” and “evolutionists.”

I think that is even more true when we embed the big bang in multiverse theory. It gives more wiggle room for both camps, and those who wiggle far enough will find themselves approaching a common ground with the opposite camp.

It’s like the blind men and the elephants. The grand unified theory is the elephant itself.

Creationists see evolution from scratch as highly improbable, and in any case they feel no need for that hypothesis.

Evolutionists see resurrected beings as highly improbable, and in any case feel no need for that hypothesis.

Twenty billion years is too short for intelligent beings to evolve from scratch, say the creationists. It’s too short for intelligent beings to evolve into gods, say the evolutionists.

The most honest of both camps will not deny the logical possibility of the other’s theory, but do deny that the probability is significant enough to consider.

But in the context of multiverse theory, anything that has any probability, no matter how small, will exist in some region of the multiverse, and then why not here?

Has life ever evovled from scratch somewhere in the multiverse. If it is not a logical impossibility, the answer is yes, and not only once, but infinitely many times.

Have societies of intelligent beings evolved to the stage where they can resurrect their dead? If there is not logical contradiction involved, then the answer is yes, and in infinitely many cases, infinitely remote in time and space.

We know from experience that it is easier to propagate life by seed and transplanting than to create it from scratch, so we must suppose that when we encounter life in a region of the multiverse, it is more likely that it was transplanted their than evolved from scratch. Remember the analogy with the volcanic islands of the Pacific?

On the other hand there could be (and therefore must be) regions so remote that evolution from scratch would be more likely than propagation of existing life from some other region.

Personally, I don’t think our big bang region is that remote.

Is Joseph Smith’s explanation of the origin of the Book of Mormon logically impossible, or just extremely unusual?

If it is not logically impossible, then it has happened exactly like he said in some region of the multiverse, and why not here?

Joseph claimed to have a personal interview with two other resurrected beings whom he identified as the Father and the Son. I personally have received many spiritual witnesses that corroborate his words.

I suppose there are regions of the multiverse where their version of Joseph Smith turns out to be an imposter. I don’t worry about that because we know that there are many false prophtes and false Christs even here on this planet in its relatively short span of history.

For that matter it is possible that my spiritual witnesses could be hallucinations. I recognize that. But we all must judge such things according to our best judgement, keeping in mind that we will be judged by the same standard that we used in making our judgments.

The point is that the multiverse doesn’t let us off the hook. We have to face up to the hard decisions rather than reject things out of hand, like the orthodox creationists and orthodox evolutionists have been doing for a century or more. (much more if we go back to Korihor, for example)

I’ve got to look up Tipler. I keep seeing references to his theory that immortality is scientifically inevitable, eventually.

This reminds me of something that I am still puzzling over: in my understanding everything is created spiritually before it recieves a grosser (but equally important) coarser physical component, and for us humans, a fulness of joy cannot come until our spirit and resurrected body are inseparabley connected.

Is our physical component an artificial adjunct invented by the gods to inhance our powers and happiness, or is it something as natural as the butterfly stage in the life cycle of the caterpillar/pupa/butterfly.

As I understand it, a spirit by itself cannot reproduce, but resurrection doesn’t seem to be a natural process, either, i.e. a process that would happen if nature were left to itself, like the butterfly emerging from the cocoon.

I have to agree with Firetag on that last bit. There is still so much I don’t understand about how God can be eternal and yet out of time, etc as it relates to the Big Bang. I am definitely no physicist or expert. I think I got lost somewhere in the last comments once all of the mathematical equations got involved (a.k.a. big words, my head hurts).

I do feel as though there is more to it, as far as spiritual creation goes. For the Big Bang seems in no way to deal with that. Still, it is yet to be revealed to us, it seems, how the Big Bang theory can be fully compatible with LDS cosmology. I’m going to hold on to the latter and the teachings of the prophet Joseph for now, and continue to gather as much as I can.

There are still so many questions I have though, like how is it that the universe can have a beginning and yet not have an end? What is the ultimate destiny of the universe, and if it can come to an end, how is it that we can be immortal? How is it that our bodies are ressurected? I understand that it is the atonement of Christ and power of God that makes it happen, just curious as to the processes, though again one of the mysteries of Godliness, with spiritual implications that seem out of the realm of what’s being discussed here.

Forgive me for my ignorance >.>