--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "curtisdeltablues" <curtisdeltablues@...> wrote: > > Barry > > Me and Curtis, not so much. We don't hold much of anyone's > > declarations to be Truth, just because they said them. > > Judy > Curtis isn't questioning the premise that the universe > had a beginning, actually. > > I hadn't been but in my most recent post I may be changing > my mind. Although the universe in its present form is > thought to have a beginning and may have a starting point, > the matter contained in it may not. It may have all been > contained in the inconceivable density of the singularity > that existed before the big bang. So the biggest problem > with John's premise might be the assumption that we know of > anything that can be said to have begun in an ultimate > sense.
I think all this amounts to a big fat red herring, actually, since "the universe" is defined as what came into existence--what began to exist--only with the big bang. But this is what Barry is questioning. He's a proponent of the old "steady-state" theory, which had some currency awhile back but has since been pretty much discredited in favor of the big bang theory, which was developed on the basis of observational data that wasn't available to the steady-state folks. (Barry isn't aware that there ever *was* a steady-state theory, though. He believes that "human beings seem to find it impossible to conceive of the universe *not* having a beginning," much less to have an actual theory that it had no beginning.) In any case, the phrase "before the big bang" is distinctly iffy, given that time itself is said to have been created in the big bang. (Time *and* space, in fact, along with matter and energy.) > And causes are not needed once you know how matter > and energy operate under those conditions. This would depend on how you define "cause." Matter and energy are also created in the big bang. The issue would be whether the potential of the singularity to manifest as the universe can be considered a "material cause," in Aristotle's Four Causes formulation. I'm curious to know if you're sticking to this from one of your earlier posts in the thread: > In the case of existence itself, it may have primacy > without needing a cause. Also wondering if you're willing to retract your original "fallacious inductive reasoning" claim, now that you've had at least a bit of a look at the Craig argument. I should think it would be interesting to accept the first premise of the syllogism just for the sake of the discussion, and see where John takes it, how he gets from there to the conclusion. I've seen some incredibly complex, sophisticated ways to do that. Don't know if John is going to use any of them, but I'd love to find out. > Nice job on presenting syllogisms. Thanks. Pretty basic stuff.
