Well... so... that seems like a pretty valid argument for the existence of a creator. I have been operating under the assumption that the universe has simply always existed and that time is an illusion, but it sounds like I may have to rethink that whole idea.

Hi paisleyartmachine,

The concept of time as regards the beginning of the universe is a muddle at best. When you mention time as "an illusion," you're not too far off the mark: mathematically speaking, time is an equivalency used to give meaning to other physical concepts. As such, time need not be thought of as "beginning and ending;." rather, no mathematical description is necessary for an "arrow of time." Granted, we seem to perceive things as "past, present, or future," but this is an unnecessary constraint- hence this question of time's "arrow" remains one of the true mysteries of physics.

Likewise, to describe the "beginning of the universe" as a physical point along such a time line is equally suspect. While decent models exist for the early stages of the universe, quantum mechanics begins to break down at around the 10^-44 second looking "backwards. In short, current models indicate that time and the universe began at some "point," but describing anything that might have happened "before the beginning" is meaningless.

As to the continual expansion of the universe, this is a matter of some conjecture as well. To be honest, I would be more than a bit skeptical of anyone who claims to speak definitively on the subject. This sort of argument must be based in no small part on the exact origin of the universe. Absent a quantum theory of gravity or the possible validation of brane cosmological interpretations, I suspect that to blindly choose entropy as an over-riding consideration is a bit short-sighted. 

If we speak of a beginning as a convenient method of defining a point in illusory time from which we can proceed with some assurance, I would ask the question of your campus group: what is the point of inserting god into the process? This sort of thinking is merely adding on an unnecessary layer to an incredibly complex idea. Slapping a proverbial band-aid on the limits of our scientific knowledge by reaching a point where we feel it useful to default into "god did it" is intellectually dishonest at best and smacks of outright chicanery at worst. 

Welcome to the forum, by the way!  

Hello Unrepentant_Elitist, thank you for your reply. As far as the concept of time is concerned I think I follow you. I will try to paraphrase just to make sure I am understanding: time is not tangible in that it is a measurement of change and not necessarily a flow of past into present into future.

Now when you talk about a quantum theory of gravity or the possible validation of brane cosmological interpretations in regards to the expansion of the universe, are you saying that there are current models which imply an alternative to the heat death of the universe? I would love to learn more... although I have found the majority of articles about models of the universe almost completely incomprehensible. 

Thanks for the welcome! Happy to be here.

Ruh roh.

That quote aside, the base of your argument off of a notion that life can't exist in conditions we have on earth.  That's fairly presumptuous.  Now if we pretend that's a fact, there's still the (actual) fact that for those conditions to exist there has to be the precursor we have now...  Asking "Why hasn't it happened already" is silly.

Edit:  Also I don't even think that the equilibrium argument is a fact either, but I'd love to hear otherwise.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paisley_%28design%29

it could be a word used in more than one username.  Who knows, it could very well be. That said he hasn't posted a video yet.

There is no clear 'arrow of time' at the particle level, where quantum effects rule.

But as we consider more complex assemblages of particles, statistical probabilities do point in a very definite direction, and the Second Law is intimately involved.

There are vastly more ways for a collection of atoms/molecules to be 'arranged' in a relatively structureless, disordered way than in any neat structure with significant new properties.

So, overall, and in the ultimate, closed systems progress in the direction of increasing disorder, which effectively defines an arrow of time. Time could be thought of as an emergent property of large assemblages of particles.

The current opinion in cosmology is that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating, and will have no finite end, just progressively more spread out and isolated fragments.

There are some theories which suggest that when individual fragments become sufficiently isolated, and under the influence of Dark Energy which by then will have become dominant over gravity, new Big Bang singularities can form. An interesting aspect of this is that altho the overall entropy of the Universe will have become much larger since the original BB, the share of this entropy in each fragment will be tiny, so the new BB starts of with minimal entropy, avoiding any violation of the second law.

A 'God' really doesn't fit into or clarify or 'explain' any of this, just introduces something far harder to explain than the sort of spontaneous quantum twitch needed to start of the BB scenario.

Ah, the sweet sound of science.

And the students smiled and played
With the neon light they made
And the sign flashed out its spectrum
In the words of its speculation
And the sign said "The words of the professor are written in our lecture notes
And RRS posts
And whispered in the sound of science

Yes, I agree. I think the underlying principal here is just because we have come to a limit in our understanding of the universe it does not mean that we have to 'Default to God'did'it' as stated earlier. I think I was just a little bit shaken from finding out the universe is more likely to be dispersing towards heat death than it is to be cyclical.

Thank you so much for your response. I really appreciate the quality of science people are willing to drop here. Can you by chance point me in the direction of this theory so that I can get a better understanding of it? I know a bit about Stephen Hawkings and the membrane/dark matter theories, but I don't really understand how dark matter relates to our universe other than it's gravity helping hold it together. 

I am not sure exactly where I heard that particular argument first, I think it was part of a series of podcasts from Slacker Astronomy, from interviews with people at the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago.

There are variations on it of course, and I have been Googling for more references. I will try and post some more specific links later. It takes longer to skim thru podcasts for such references, unless they include enough info in the associated text description.

Just to correct a point there, it is Dark Energy which is the main player here, not Dark Matter. Yes, Dark Matter could well be helping to shape and hold together individual galaxies, but Dark Energy is what is seen as probably driving the accelerating expansion. They are not particular connected, other than both being hard to detect directly ( ie 'Dark' ).

Or you could just point out that 'God' is just one enormous violation of the Second Law, so it is stupid to attempt to explain a problem by something which has essentially the same problem (of origin, etc), just to an infinitely bigger degree.

That's a lot more fun. I love theists who try using the 'Law'(s) of science. By using them at all they subject their beliefs to science, which then annuls them.

The basic problem with observing quantum scale particles is summed up in Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, which states 

They specifically are excluding errors in the measuring devices.

I think it is determined by the need to actually interact in some way with the particle, either by bouncing a photon off it, or measure its electromagnetic field, which requires letting its field change some magnet or electric charge, which inevitably changes the forces on the particle via that field.

For the most part, you are correct. Time is an arbitrary place-marker that is useful in describing isentropic systems. Unfortunately, I see little evidence to suggest a uniform distribution of entropy or entropic variation; thus I am led to conclude that time itself (while useful to describe individual points) is largely irrelevant. As concerns theories of the "end of the universe," (for lack of a better term) the number that exist may be somewhat daunting. However, if I may suggest  a few, you might consider: Heat Death (as you have previously mentioned), Gradual Cooling (which is not exactly an "end of time scenario" but rather an abrogation of time), or Multiverse interpretations of cosmology. On a personal note, though I am far from being qualified in astrophysics, I find that the Mulitiverse scenario is most consistent with my chosen field of atomic physics (perhaps I might be biased). However, I leave you to your own thoughts. Happy hunting, and if I may be of any help (how egotistical is that phrase?) please let me know...chances are, I'm lurking around these pages somewhere...

Interestingly enough this actually has nothing to do with the measuring technique. Even if you could build a perfect detector that in no way interacted with the particle of interest, there would still be limits on how accurately you could measure the particle's velocity and position simultaneously. The Schrodinger's Equation presents terms in such a way that being able to measure one term more accurately necessarily decreases the maximum possible accuracy of another term. Velocity and position is the example usually used to illustrate this point, but some other pairs of properties of particles also have this problem. On the other hand other pairs of properties could be simultaneously measured to any arbitrarily high degree of accuracy. There is a mathematical method used to check if any two properties commute or not.

I am aware of the more purely mathematical interpretation, but I see no way to actually measure the position and momentum (not velocity) without some actual interaction. Please enlighten me if there is a way to do this.

The more interesting attempts to measure without interaction involve measuring the particle (photon or electron) after the quantum interaction point, such as well after the double slit, in such a way as to be able to infer their position or momentum at the point of encountering the slits. AFAICR, this still doesn't kill the interference, but then it also doesn't necessarily determine the state of the wave function at the time of encountering the slits. I am not able to locate references to this right at the moment, so please don't hold me to it. There are a series of experiments involving inserting grids corresponding to the positions of the black lines in the interference pattern normally observed at that position and then observing the results further down the track. I should try and retrieve these sources.

How so?  G-d isn't any "thing" that would be subject to the 2nd Law.  Trying to apply the 2nd Law to G-d is about as dumb as trying to apply the 2nd Law to 2+2.  Or the color red.  If violating 2nd Law is a disproof of something existing, I'm guessing that (Proof by Analogy), "2+2" and "red" also don't exist?  More significantly, the 2nd Law also doesn't apply to the 2nd Law, so by your reasoning, the 2nd Law also doesn't exist.  Quite the contradiction you've argued yourself into ...

And yeah, it does look like Heat Death, or The Big Rip is the most likely end for the Universe.  Not much we can do about it.

Did you seriously quote mine to say that?  How would you like it if someone took you out of context (for one sentence!) and built a bunch of assumptions of your beliefs and put idiotic words in your mouth?  

Not calling you an idiot, but you did your best to make him look like one with very silly examples.

I don't see anything of yours IN there.

Bob IS an idiot and no, they aren't silly examples.  Study how Reason and Argument work and then you'll understand that there is no such thing as a "very silly example".

The 2nd Law doesn't apply to everything that exists with in the universe.  And while I'm willing to concede, for the sake of moving forward with my argument that virtually all of the arguments used here against G-d are some form of the "Begging the Conclusion" logical fallacy, I did refrain from going off on a wild tangent and pointing out that the 2nd Law doesn't apply, for example, to the electrostatic repulsion between an electron cloud and the nucleus of an atom.  And hopefully Bob realizes that electrons AND atomic nuclei are both "things".  QED, the 2nd Law also doesn't apply to every "thing" in the Universe because there exist "things" in the Universe which violate the 2nd Law.  QED, G-d cannot be proven or disproven using 2nd Law arguments whether G-d is a "thing" or "no thing" or "nothing" or just a superstitious belief of a bunch of nomadic goat herders.

FurryCatHerder, I was composing my last post while you responded to MrPal.

The second law, by definition, applies to material/physical objects, and collections of material objects.

In its basic form, it describes the relationships between the flows of heat and other forms of energy between physical objects, and introduces the concept of 'entropy', which is a measure of the quantity of energy flow divided by the absolute temperature of the body gaining or losing that quantity of thermal energy.

So of course it would be nonsense to apply it to ideas.

However, most views of God seem to envisage something more than just an idea. Usually as something which has extent, awareness, will, sentience, or at least some 'higher' analogues of such, as well as the ability to directly influence both physical objects and our thoughts.

So, extrapolating from our current understanding of earthly versions of such abilities and attributes, it would seem to imply that God was constituted of some supernatural analogue of matter, since everything we actually know about sentience strongly suggest that it requires some complex structure and organisation, such as the physical brain and its pattern of neuronal interconnections.

Structure and organisation in turn require some substrate to be expressed in. So it is hard to see how a sentient entity would not have some analogue of physical matter as its basis. This in turn opens the way for a version of the second law to apply, which is actually only dependent on very fundamental aspects of matter and energy, which would still apply to a different implementation or version of matter and energy. At least to something which could support a version of 'mind', which was analogous in some sense to our own, supposedly "created in the image" of that entity, altho I may be presuming too much in assuming you read that phrase that way.

Ok, it applies to anything to which the property of 'temperature' can be applied, and which can be meaningfully be considered to contain an amount of thermal energy. Which rules out the scale at which quantum behaviour dominates. IOW to macroscopic matter, from atoms up. Altho you could apply to a collection of electrons and protons, ie, a plasma. But, like other thermodynamic principles, it applies to the collective behaviour of particles, to which temperature and thermal energy are most applicable, as statistical properties.

Sp it applies to the collective behaviour of any matter, but not to an individual particle.

I thought you might already be aware of that distinction, but obviously I was wrong.

But not all people who at least nominally identify with any of those faiths.

You are straw-manning the beliefs of most contemporary believers, who claim to believe in something neither crudely anthropomorphic nor quite as utterly beyond our physical universe or abstract as what you seem to be hinting at.

I am not referring to the 'official' theology of any religion, rather to what many actual nominal adherents describe.

More straw-manning of an argument I have not made.

I was not assuming God exists in this universe, merely that there are some really fundamental principles that apply to any 'Universe' or realm which is consistent with basic logic.

If you envisage your G-d inhabiting something beyond even that restriction, there is no way you can validly claim to know or reason anything with any certainty about such an entity.

I am NOT dodging your objection to "God doesn't work the way I think god should work, therefore god doesn't", since that is not what I am arguing.

You keep dodging my logical objections to what you have said, by saying I just 'believe' in "logic", implying that logic is just an idea that you don't accept. Which is becoming increasingly obvious. You clearly have no idea of what "logic" is, or what I 'believe'. As I cannot fathom just what is going on inside your head.

Well, this would be why there are distinct fields of study in science. You see, in science, people don't attribute every phenomena to any one single magical agency - they create different theories to address different systems, each derived from different branches of evidence.

The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics doesn't apply to quantum phenomena, which don't behave like material objects constructed of multiple atoms, and it doesn't have anything to say on the matter of neutron decay. 

This is... what, probably grade 1-2 level material? The idea that science is divided into multiple branches?

You you know what, though? Forget all that. You've said that Bob is 'an idiot', and trot yourself around like an expert - so let's see you put together a quantum equation. Piece of cake for a pro like yourself, right? 

Don't have to know how to put together a quantum equation to know (which I got right and Bob got wrong) that the 2nd Law doesn't apply to quantum phenomena.

The premise that Bob advanced is that the 2nd Law can be applied, somehow or other, to "god" as a concept because "god" has to have some kind of "substrate" existing within this universe's space-time in order to be "sentient" such that the 2nd Law would apply.

False premise, invalid argument.  And that is Logic 101.  Also pronounced "Bob is an idiot".

  Let's see, a generally hostile, confrontational demeanor.... talk of chopping off penis's with a machete .... calling people "idiot."  I'm afraid that for the moment FCH may be experiencing a condition that renders her ceremonially unclean.  Go easy on her guys.

LOL!

No, too old for that.  I'm a Nice OLD Jewish Lady.

It's just extremely hypocritical of Bob to use the 2nd Law to disprove the existence of G-d when the 2nd Law can't be used to prove (or disprove) "2 + 2 = 4".

And I wasn't threatening Bob, I was suggesting that perhaps Bob is experiencing cognitive dissonance at being bested by a woman that's not unlike having a woman stand next to him with a machete.  As in "Oh, sh*t -- my precious manhood is going to shrivel up and blow away!"