Carmel wrote:David:
Don't be fooled. Modern cosmologists don't have any evidence at all that the Universe began at the Big Bang. It is simply an assumption they insert into the current theory.
Carmel:
That's not the whole truth, either. Keeping in mind that due to the dynamic of the space-time continuum, when scientists look out into space, they can literally see the conditions of the Universe back in time. Based on this, they know quite accurately what the conditions of the
Universe were within one minute after the Big Bang occured. The Big Bang Theory entails far more than "an assumption they insert into current theory".
That the Big Bang represents the very beginnning of Nature itself is the assumption that is inserted. This is a separate issue to whether the space-time bubble in which we live is expanding or not, or whether it came from a singularity or not. You do see the difference, don't you?
This assumption that there is nothing beyond the space-time bubble - that our space-time bubble represents all there is - is wholly non-scientific in nature. It's an arbitrary decision made purely to stroke the vanity of cosmologists. It allows them to feel that their work is of fundamental philosophical importance, that they are not just common scientists studying a localized phenomenon.
David:
You really need to be clear about this. When it comes to these fundamental issues, science has absolutely nothing to say. It is wholly beyond the power of science to resolve these issues, one way or the other.
Carmel:
I still don't understand why you seem to display what appears to be an anti-science bias, when, in fact, modern scientific theory seems to confirm your philosophies at every turn.
I'm not anti-science. Just anti-sloppy thinking. And boy, when it comes to scientists speculating about the philosophical implications of their work, there is an awful lot of that.
"The Omniverse", a term which is gradually replacing "universe", acknowledges a boundless, infinite universe(omniverse), not unlike your version of "The Totality".
That's good to hear, but I doubt that such a change of perspective has come from solid philosophical reasoning. More probably it has come about because the previous assumption (i.e. that the Big Bang initiated Nature itself) threw up too many intractable problems within the framework of the theory.
Scientists, as a rule, have no interest in philosophic knowledge and philosophic wisdom. So any progress they make on that front is invariably produced by accident than design.
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