Philosophy and Physics: Questions as to the Origin of the Universe

[NihilNominis]

I would be most gratified if someone learned in Physics would explain Physicists' point of view on the question of the Universe's origin in the following philosophical context:

It seems to me that to avoid infinite regress it is necessary at some point in the causal chain to posit incontingent being.

The Universe may not, it seems to me, be posited as the pagan snake-which-eats-its-own-tail, for this model fails to avoid the problem of infinite regress. Let's take the simplest such loop, of two members. If A causes B, which causes A, then A's being caused depends on B's having been caused, which depends upon A's having been caused, and so forth. As such, even if what my vulgar conception conceives of the Big Crunch model (if I'm not mistaken, that would be a repeating universe) had been proved, I think it would still be a worthwhile question to ask what caused that loop to a) begin or b) to come into being (qua a loop, if we are viewing time as something internal to it, static to the external observer).

The Universe, then, may be conceived of in two ways: it may be conceived of either as externally caused, in which case its cause is either external contingent result of Incontingent Being or external Incontingent Being itself, or it may be conceived of as itself Incontingent Being, given that matter can neither be created or destroyed.

This first conception of the Universe, although inscrutable to natural science, is philosophically quite handy, for it neatly accounts both for the existence of the Universe and its motion.

The second conception, on the other hand, has this difficulty: if we are to take the Parmenidean conception of the Universe, and to hold that matter makes up the One Incontingent Being, which alone truly exists, and that all change within the One is meaningless, nevertheless we still find that change certainly occurs within the One, even if we cannot conclude from that change the contingency of the Universe. This change betrays motion in the Universe, and motion would seem to demand a cause.

If modern Physics best supports the first conception of the Universe, I would ask only why it does so. I understand as well as any that any further discussion of the topic is meaningless, given that it is the internal laws of the Universe which Physics devotes itself to studying.

If the second, however, I would ask both what its grounds are for doing so and how it would account for motion in the Universe.

Thanks,
NN

 

[Tanelorn]

NN, very eloquently put, I have had similar thoughts myself. Unfortunately, I suspect that Cosmologists for now are unable to answer these higher order questions because it is not possible to make observations beyond our universe space time (perhaps for now or forever!).

We know that the universe exists (by our common definition of existence), we know that the observable universe has changed with time considerably, and we know that an enormous amount of energy (by our standards) changed from one form to another when our observable universe began, perhaps 13.8 billion years ago. I think anything else remains speculation and conjecture. There could be as much complexity as we already know of both above and below the smallest and largest scales that we can presently measure.

Philsophically speaking, my personal feeling is that the universe is kind of equivalent to a game of pinball and there are several analogies that can be drawn from this. I also feel that a single unique instant of creation in time is somehow wrong, perhaps because there shouldn't be a special point in time in a similar way that we expect the universe to be homogeneous throughout all space with no special point in space.

However, Cosmologists have to be disiplined in their approach to deal with what can be measured and deduced and we have to fully respect that. I believe that Cosmology is still in its infancy, but with time we may be able to answer more questions about our existence, but unfortunately by that time we will likely no longer be around to more fully understand it. Myself, I would prefer to not know the truths of existence, than to mistakenly believe in something that was determined in the future to be incorrect.

 

[NihilNominis]

Thanks for the reply!

It seems that no philosophical hypothesis has been excluded by the scientific data. The problem of immesurable complexity you brought up reminds me of Pascal:

"We naturally believe ourselves far more capable of reaching the centre of things than of embracing their circumference. The visible extent of the world visibly exceeds us; but as we exceed little things, we think ourselves more capable of knowing them. And yet we need no less capacity for attaining the Nothing than the All."
--Pensees 72

Archimedes Plutonium may well have been right, for all we know with certainty.

Speaking of Creation, it seems that a point can be special inherently or accidentally. That is to say, because it is somehow different from all other points (as would disrupt the homogenuity of the cosmos) or because it was the location of something singular (pun intended). I don't think we have to compromise the homogenuity of time to acknowledge points of convergence any more than we must compromise that of space.

What we could refer to as the point of Creation, then, the site of the Big Bang, is really a great convergence of all matter at a certain point in space and a certain point in time. And, with what little I know, it does not seem necessary that these points be marked as qualitatively different or unique for anything other than the fact of that convergence.

As to my personal opinion, I think man's quest for knowledge always tends towards the moral. He wants to get a clear picture of his situation so he knows how to react to it. For my own part I am after largely the same thing. What I don't want to do, however, is to waste my time believing in or investigating things that have been already determined as incorrect.

 

[Tanelorn]

NN, there is no center point of creation, it happened everywhere and in every direction and as far as we can observe. An almost infinite universe was still almost infinite even though the observable part was almost infinitesimal at the beginning.

 

[NihilNominis]

That's fascinating. Perhaps I have a provincial understanding of the commonly accepted model, then.

What did the universe look like at the first moment we can speak reasonably about it?

 

[Tanelorn]

NN, you could start with some of the threads already here. I am a novice and I would have to refer you to the senior members here. Also you would have to understand the advanced physics pretty well to follow the model down to I think 10^-33 secs. I have trouble at less than 300,000 years and last scattering.

 

[granpa]

what 'caused' the first event?

at a deep quantum level, events are not 'caused' by previous events.
they are merely 'influenced' by previous events.

the first event wasnt influenced by any previous events but it didnt need to be

there is no paradox.
only a poorly framed question.

 

[wuliheron]

Another alternative is that we simply may not be able to discern the ultimate nature of existence. I like to use the example of fun house mirrors. We are using nature to study nature and the result may ultimately be similar to using one fun house mirror to study another. Before his death John Wheeler said that he believed when we did find a theory of everything it would be a simple equation with no clear metaphysical explanation whatsoever.

If this is the case, then the best we can do is provide contextual accounts of nature and, as Wittgenstein said, "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." Science is simply not in the business of speculation and when the context is so broad as to include life, the universe, and everything it is pure speculation.

 

[nickyrtr]

My personal hunch is that what we now call "the Universe", the set of galaxies undergoing Hubble expansion, is not the sum total of everything that exists. If that is the case, a corollary would be that the Big Bang was not the beginning of time, but rather an event that dominates our neighborhood in space and time. There would then be no philosophical problem of causality, just an ordinary cause and effect explanation like most astrophysical phenomena.

Of course, there is no evidence today to support the hunch. It appeals to me more by historical analogy, that every time we think we have discovered everything that exists, some troublemaker comes along and finds something new.

 

[Ynaught?]

NN, why is creation ex nihilo philosophically problematic?

From a philosophical prospective, I respectfully disagree with Tanelorn's statement that "there is no center point of creation." The exact center of my universe is within me. That make my universe slightly, but measurably different from your universe, and from Tanelorn's as well as from all others. In this way, there is no external vantage point, no incontingent being, no cause of creation outside creation itself.