Origin of the Universe and life

The two biggest questions we have are the origin of the universe and the origin of life.
We do not have satisfactory answers to either of these questions.
Singularities bother me.

The question of the origin of the universe is in a different ball park to that of the origin of life. With life, we know the gist of it (primordial soup, chemical reactions, replication, proto-organelles, proto-cells, etc.), but with the universe, the best we’ve got for “before the bang” is a load of made-up string/brane theory.

Both of those questions have been answered. The problem is who believes which answer. For anyone to believe an answer, they have to be able to think in whatever manner the answer requires.

A) The universe had no beginning. It has always existed. But despite fears, this does not preclude God’s role in it.
B) Life is the necessary eventuality of an increasing entropy. This also does not preclude God’s role in it.

People just have to understand God a little better. The logic is easy enough.

The question is, does God understand humans well enough to know that we might be hugely disappointed if we found the grail at the end of all mystery quests? If I were God, I would make it a point to make myself complex and mysterious enough that only a little of me would be revealed between large spaces of time over millennia and eons. Getting to know me then would be like having a human peel the leaves off a lotus very slowly, one by one, and being so awed and mesmerized each time that she or he would forget to turn back the next leaf for an age or two until the glamor wore off and someone thinks to look under the next one. That’s how quantum physics and cosmology work these days, very gradually turning the leaves. Each discovery seems like the one or the answer, but then something else comes along and opens things up anew. It’s like searching for the holy grail, and the wonder and joy of it is not in finding THE answer but rather in the journey and the great discoveries along the way.

  1. The big bang theory with the singularity thing is silly. Not much evidence.

  2. The prebiotic molecular evolution ideas are very shaky. No evidence.

I don’t want to grow up… I’m an Oscar Meyer kid…

What do you all think about the singularity thing? It sounds stupid to me. That is not science.

That’s weird, because you question demands a singular response, as it presumes it.

Show me one beginning and one end and then we’ll have to consider your question seriously, if you cannot then you should not presume that the universe requires a singular point of origin, an absolute source.

Burp------I have no idea about the origin of the universe. That singularity thing(big bang) sounds silly.
I do think that it may be possible to figure out the prebiotic pathways that led to a protocell(ISSOL)
What bothers me the most is the arrogance of some scientists and theists.

I’m not happy with the singularity, turtle, but I am happy with the big bang. But there again, I’m not happy with it being some kind of causeless effect or something from nothing. IMHO the idea that the universe was born of a quantum fluctuation isn’t much better than “God did it”. It’s still a turtles-all-the-way down non-answer. Hence I end up thinking in terms of an eternal universe too. Or in a nutshell: I don’t know.

Excuse me?
:confused:

Only if you take it literally, like dumb-asses take the Biblical narrative, and not figuratively…metaphorically.

Big Bang merely represents the extent of human cognition.
Furthest point back (an ambiguous point) the mind can rationalize the Flux, or rather the flow towards entropy.

The Big Bang is not a singular event in space-time, but an ongoing one.

That makes two of us.
Funny how two animals can find common ground…one crawling on the soil and the other flying in the air.

Boggles the mind, doesn’t it - that this universe may have always existed! But it sounds like what you are saying is that God may be the universe. If the universe has always existed :confusion-shrug: …so which came first, the chicken or the egg? Does the chicken always carry the egg within her or did the egg eventually become the chicken? :laughing:

So evolution is entrophy?

I like the idea of an intelligent but sort of blind universe always finding its way intuitively, with or without a god, especially one in which this god, which can’t really be included or excluded, simply remains as a spectator like a fan at a baseball game rooting us on but staying completely ‘out of how the game is played’.

The origins of the universe may always be a mystery…

I agree completely. And we don’t know now, no matter how much theorizing.

Indeed Turtle… all theory and no facts, and government money goes into this kind of research #-o

To be honest, I’m not a qualified physicist. And I doubt anybody here is to be honest - I’m not sure this is a real area of investigation for philosophers. We can refute ideas of God and such, but whenever anybody asks me how the universe or life was created, the best I can reply is with things it can’t be.

Having said that, I remain absolutely faithful that there IS an answer; just because the world is incredibly complex it doesn’t mean we should give up. It just makes it more awe inspiring.

CHEE------I believe that there will be some answers out there. But you don’t have to be a physics professor to recognize bullshit. The singularity thing is like all the virtual things physics comes up with. It seems like something has to start things off but they don’t want to deal with before the big bang. So they cut off discussion of the before. The god people do
the same thing. God did it. You don’t hear who made god very often.

Origin of Life or Universe problem

A caused B shown as A → B.

then what caused ( A → B ) ? I am not saying what caused A because you get another kind of infinite regression as in An caused An-1 … A2 caused A1 caused A, etc. No I am asking what caused the general fact that A causes B or what made A cause B to exist…

C did.

then C → ( A → B ).

then what caused ( C → ( A → B ) ) ?

D did.

and so on forever.

So what is the final answer ? There is no answer, it goes on forever. But even if you get one last answer, X caused it all, does that really give you anything ? Isn’t X just another symbol - concept - idea ? Do you really think one concept - idea - answer X is “supernatural” is all “encompassing” ? I doubt it, but good luck…

A second problem regarding these kinds of problems is the very idea of cause: does A → B mean every time A appears then B appears ? Does it appear right immediately after A or after some time interval ? How many intermediate states are there between A and B ? Are there an infinite number of intermediate states ?

And what if it is probabilistic like in Quantum Mechanics ? B sometimes follows A, other times no ? or sometimes a wildcat comes after A ?

And then exactly what delimits A and B ?

maybe A extends up to B ? Maybe B is part of A ? maybe there is no cause and effect, but just B comes after A, as is a sequence of arbitrary items, symbols, delimitations (in space and/or time ? ). Etc. Etc.

Then if B just comes after A, isn’t that like house B is further down the road from house A ? Doesn’t necessarily mean A causes B, or maybe is it B causes A ?

So this gives me the idea that cause and effect and science in general breaks down past a certain point: if every time you get A, B sometimes appear, you got some kind of pattern, maybe not absolute, but some pattern. But you can never rely on it always. And when talking about the origin of Life or the Universe, delimiting, defining or even only imagining and conceiving items A and B doesn’t seem so easy. Good luck with that.

Science is based on “Intentionality of Use”: that is how the “new” result, discovery, cause and effect, relationship, new idea, study, model etc. is going to be used. It may be used to create another complex abstract model, some kind of physical experiment, some technological application, some new kind of observation, etc. But it is always our mind, within its constraints and limitations, within its own language and cause and effect models, mathematical and logical models, that decides how the results are used and channeled.

Now how would any kind of result in the exploration of the “Origin of Life” or “Origin of Universe” be used ? To create a new universe in a laboratory ? To create new life forms from molecules in a giant chemical laboratory that channels the reactions that led from simple carbon molecules to complete cells ? Maybe, or maybe it could be used in a Virtual Reality environment as a new imaginary world where modified - technological singularity brains interact accordingly.

But even more important, if you change the neural circuit of minds, brains, the way information, emotions, feelings, pain/pleasure circuits, memory , sense organs and sense information are associated - connected and combined, you get a new universe, you get new patterns and a new science with new laws of physics.

So you could simulate or create the information relationship (which is what really exists in the end, matter - reality or what is real and fake is irrelevant) that creates a model of the “Origin of the Universe”, or the “Origin of Life”. Or you can change the way our mind with new constraints, internal languages, cause and effect models, mathematical and logical models that use and channel information in new ways, decodes any information so as to create the exact new Origin of Life or Origin of the Universe Information Relationship…

It boils down to this:

  1. That very general combination of atoms - molecules or even more abstractly just Matter - Energy can be repeated under the right conditions to produce a life form: even maybe in the center of stars in hot plasmas or 100s of km under the surface of planets. But these right conditions are unknown and very vague, and may always remain vague, in that the laws of physics may never let you get closer to a certain point in describing and knowing the general conditions.

  2. When the conditions to create a life form are met, the exact form may be impossible to predict because the chance combinations, quantum fluctuations specify such a unique sequence of events and such a unique chain of causes and events as to not be possible to repeat it again even in an infinite universe that cycles through its infinite combinations: the exact number representing the sequence of events is always larger than the number of combinations the universe can cycle through: One infinite number (the sequence of chemical reactions) is larger in some odd way than another infinite number (the combinations of all atoms or all of the possible combinations of Mass - Energy ). A kind of race condition is set forward with the exact sequence of reactions being to large of a set compared to the set of all possible combinations of Mass - Energy.

Well, anyways, the math is not very precise, someone else could do better, but you get the idea…

I think that there may be no predetermined sequence, no real determinism operating even though we have precise laws of physics: the exact events are like completely new, not even the laws of physics could have predicted them so to say, not even god could have known, in this sense there is no “external reality”: when a person says, “it could have gone differently, it could have evolved in another way”, there is no IT. It is like a micro big bang every picosecond, it is like a new set of laws of physics pop into existence just that one time to create just that one event, and a sequence of events create the path from atoms to cells.

In that case, it will never be known, because there is no IT.