An Atheist's Noncreation Myth

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
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GENESIS

In the Beginning there was the Material, and the Process by which the Material would be formed and changed. The Beginning was the Beginning of the Process’s action upon the Material.

THE COMMANDMENTS

  1. Thou shalt not speak of Time outside the Process, for all Time is a measurement of the Process, and a representation of the Process’s action upon the Material.

  2. Thou shalt not speak of what was before the Beginning, for to be before the Beginning is to be outside the Process, and thus outside of Time. To speak of what comes before is to speak of Time; but there is no Time outside the Process.

  3. Nor shalt thou say that either the Material or the Process came into Being. For the Material and the Process are Being itself. Being does not come into Being.

  4. Thou shalt not speak of a Cause of the Process or of the Material, for though they began in the Beginning they were not caused. To speak of cause is to speak of process, and all process exists inside the One Process. A Cause of the Process would be outside the Process, yet there it could not truly be a Cause. Hence neither the Process nor the Material is caused (at least not by anything outside of themselves).

The above is basically my response to the Cosmological Argument as I’ve heard it advanced in various conversations books and articles.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_argument

Perhaps presenting this without its full context in my thinking is not the best, but I’m curious if it can stand on its own. It is my most bare-bones philosophical cosmogony. Does it make sense?

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Some of the concepts addressed in this argument were discussed:

here

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This is basically what I want to say. The commandments are just common errors I see people make when talking about the universe.

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I’ll play devil’s advocate.

Let’s say the space in front of you represents an emptiness that existed before the universe was created. And let’s say that you rub flint and steel together to create a spark, and this spark represents our universe after it was created.

True, the spark existed in the flint and steel before it was manifested, but also true is it that the spark did not exist in its eventual location until after the flint and steel were rubbed together.

Am I somehow breaking rule #3 by talking about the creation of the universe?

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Membrain:

Mostly you’re breaking rules 1 and 2, which are really one rule, the First Rule, the most important one, as is the First Commandment of Exodus. Following the tradition in which priests revise their infallible religious texts and deny the resulting contradictions, I will maintain that the First Rule is and always has been rule 1.

It is not correct to say “there was nothing before the beginning.” The only true way is never to speak “before the beginning” at all. It leads the mind astray by placing it into a metaphysical world, a primordial “emptiness before the beginning,” which never existed even as an emptiness. Any emptiness implies a container of the emptiness through which the emptiness receives its definition; yet there was never a container, for there nothing outside the Material and the Process.

I have also recently been informed that the Material and the Process together form the Organism.

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agreed. =D>
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The flint-and-steel-creating-a-spark example doesn’t seem metaphysical. And by the “Material and the Process” do you mean our universe? If so, I still don’t see anything hard about speculating on things existing outside of the universe, or existing prior to the creation of the universe, or things existing after our universe ceases to exist.

All of these concepts seem reasonable. To deny oneself these concepts seems unnecessarily self-limiting.

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Everything is possible. Even God is possible. Speculate as far as you wish, but my commandments have the power to undermine the assumptions inherent in such speculations. And equally your speculations can undermine my assumptions. Neither stands on firm ground until evidence decides, evidence which I don’t think is forthcoming anytime soon.

In the Material and the Process with their associated Genesis and Commandments, I only meant to present a self-contained framework in which questions of universal origins need not arise. That is why it is a “noncreation myth” rather than a fact. It is a ‘minimal model’ of the universe’s origins, a framework which accommodates what we observe while dismissing the philosophical need for anything else.

All commandments are made for a purpose, and outside that purpose they are only meant to be broken.

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I disagree. The existence of cause-and-effect is known based upon firm evidence. When asking the question “is it more reasonable to assume that the universe was caused or uncaused” the answer (for me) is “caused”.

That’s the two-step rationale: one, the existence of cause-and-effect; and two, the likelihood of cause-and-effect at the beginning of the universe (which really isn’t considered the beginning when one assumes a prior cause).

The idea of a beginning I suppose is due to the apparently drastic change between a relatively empty space, and then some kind of huge manifestation of our universe. It seems like a beginning, conceptually, to us; but can be viewed as no different than any other transition: gradual. One just needs to slow the progress of time enough to turn the transition from “explosive” to “gradual” which isn’t hard to do.

Anyway, assuming a non-casual beginning to the universe seems to be the weaker argument.

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Here is the issue. You think that the universe’s beginning is just some event in a larger timeline and a larger “empty space” for which you have no evidence. You claim that there is such a thing as “before the universe’s beginning”, again with no evidence that “before” or processual “cause and effect” can even apply to something outside the universe. You imagine that you can mentally stand outside the universe in some empty aether and observe it Big-Banging into existence, when in reality you have never done anything but stand inside this universe, and there is no reason to suppose that standing outside the universe even refers to a possible state of affairs.

The scientific theory of the Big Bang and space expansion has nothing to do with some sort of cosmic beach ball expanding in a “relatively empty space”. The expansion is completely intrinsic to the universe itself and requires no external empty space. The expansion of space is expressed scientifically using a mathematical structure called a metric tensor. The metric tensor is an intrinsic property of space and explains space’s expansion without reference to any space outside the universe. Thus there is no reason to suppose that anything resembling space, time, material, process, etc exist outside the universe we live in.

From what we can see the universe is an all-enfolding, self-organizing, self-sustaining, self-sufficient process. To suppose anything beyond it is completely ungrounded speculation; my commandments prohibit such speculation only because I feel it is unnecessary and unfruitful given what we know.

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I’m sorry, but I don’t see the need to unnecessarily restrict oneself in that way. We know that cause-and-effect is true; we know that things are always smaller than other bigger things that encompass them; we can rationalize that arguments to the contrary are weaker. The speculation is not “completely ungrounded”. I don’t understand why you keep saying it is. I’ve given three examples none of which you’ve refuted.

So if one wants to intentionally restrict your beliefs since one can’t stand outside of the universe physically, I don’t understand it. I see no reason to do it. :slight_smile:

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While cause and effect is true, I think that people often take far too mechanistic a view of the universe. Is a watch a better metaphor for the universe or is a flower? Surely both are products of the universe, and so could be used as models for understanding said universe, but which has fewer degrees of seperation to the beginning?

What causes a flower to open and close besides manifestations of the passage of time? What causes plants to renew themselves, producing copies and permutations of themselves besides natural processes? So then, does it make more sense to say that a plant comes from another plant in a long and unbroken chain or that a plant was carefully crafted by a scientist in a lab and was delivered complete to a forest?

Next, I would ask in the case of larger things which encompass smaller things, has there ever been an occasion where the division between larger and smaller hasn’t been an arbitrary division or where the engulfer and the engulfed are, in truth, independent of one another?

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Sure, I think we can look at things mechanistically or organically. Reductionistically or Holistically. Either can be useful.

Dependence or independence is probably also dependent of what approach one uses. I’m not sure what difference it would make to our thread. :-k

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I am very much unsure how this addressed the criticism I levied towards your rejection of seeing the Universe as an all-enfolding, self-organizing, self-sustaining, self-sufficient process.

Clarify.

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I don’t disagree. I thought we were talking about things existing outside of our universe. Or before or after our universe. The “commandments” apparently don’t allow for such thinking which I see as a flaw.

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Whereas I don’t think such thinking makes any sense.

What part of a flower is outside the flower? What comes before the flower? What comes before the plant?

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It’s pretty easy to steer an inquiry to the verdict you want if you make the rules to push it that way…

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I didn’t make any claims about what is outside, before, or after the plant or flower. Why did you make it part of your refutation? I just assume that those things exist in some way (based upon evidence and logic). To create a framework that tries to disallow even the asking of the question I see as suspicious.

Although some scientists do hypothesize what was before and what will be after our universe exists. Some even hypothesize what existence outside of our universe would be like. Again, all based on logic, math, evidence. etc.

Here’s a video with smart people from Princeton, MIT, Fermilab, etc. discussing before/after/other universes (10 minutes long):

youtube.com/watch?v=hGnhsudTaRI

Creating rules that deny these possibilities seems questionable and self-serving in some way.

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I can’t refute any of your examples (three? I see only the flint and steel one…) anymore than I can refute the ancient creation myths postulating that a god ejaculated the universe into existence. The question is what our various cosmogonies assume and whether those assumptions have any grounding in what we know about the world. The internal logic of your creation myth is not under dispute, any more than any other creation myth’s internal logic. The problem is that it postulates things for which we have no evidence. Why flint and steel, or any other cause for the world, when my Genesis accounts for it by itself?

Do not so easily conflate logic and math with evidence. Logic and math can be used to imagine any physical scenario and thus any cosmogony. (As a physicist I can tell you that physicists of a certain breed love to do this sort of untethered-by-evidence imagining, which is part of the reason string theory is under dispute.) If scientists wanted they could describe the physiology of the god who spat our universe into existence. I dispute that this amounts to evidence for such a cosmogony.

Evidence is what we can see in this universe (or other universes, should we find them) and what we can deduce from that. To me it is clear that all we can conclude from such evidence is the intrinsic nature of the universe, and nothing about anything outside of it. How can you know what is outside a cave from looking at its inside all your life?

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The three things that you have not refuted are:

  1. We know that cause-and-effect is true.
  2. We know that things are always smaller than other bigger things that encompass them.
  3. We can rationalize that arguments to the contrary are weaker.

To expand on #3: I mean that arguing that there is nothing outside our universe is weaker than arguing that something must be out there. Likewise that there was no cause.

Regarding “refut(ing) the ancient creation myths postulating that a god ejaculated the universe into existence…”

I can easily. It just involves establishing that there is no evidence for God and the evidence that people believe things that aren’t true. A refutation of the belief in the existence of God outside of the universe is as easy as the refutation of the belief in the existence of God inside of the universe.

Besides, I’m not claiming (again) that I know for sure what is going on outside of the universe. I’m just claiming (again) that “something” is going on. It’s a very modest claim. If your commandments forbid even so modest a claim, then they seem unreasonably strict.

The answer to your question, “Why flint and steel, or any other cause for the world?”, is that it provides a metaphor to be visualized by the reader while at the same time implying that it is probably untrue. I could have used the metaphor of a giant dude snapping his fingers and the universe is the sound created by that action, but that harkens back to what I consider a weaker theistic model.

The evidence I was talking about concerns the evidence for cause-and-effect and “things are always smaller than other bigger things that encompass them”. There are an enormous amount of examples.

The better evidence for the existence of other universes that was mentioned in “The Elegant Universe” video is apparently the disappearance of a graviton. While not conclusive, it would lend weight to string theory.

The answer to your question, “How can you know what is outside a cave from looking at its inside all your life?”, is that I am not claiming to know with certainty what goes on outside the cave (why do those words keep getting put in my mouth?). I’m just claiming that there is nothing wrong with thinking about, first, if there is nothing, or something, and if something, what might it be. Like I showed in the video, a lot of smart people are doing it, and it has lead to the theory that the disappearance of a graviton might lead us to more truths about what exists outside (and possibly inside) of our universe.

Proclaiming that “the pursuit of what’s beyond our universe is baseless” I see as, well, baseless.