What existed before the big bang? Something must have!

[HeadingNorth]

Does evolution follow logic though, can environmental forces force some seemingly illogical evolutionary changes?

 

Evolutionary forces are always random, but the ones that give a better chance of survival are always logical if you have all available data - which we generally don't. Moreover, some mutations don't appear to be either better or worse, but just happen; and moreover yet again, having a better chance of survival doesn't necessarily mean surviving.

 

 

Applying logic to the "creature-or-egg" question, though, is very different from asking if evolution always follows a logical path. If the egg appeared before any living thing, then nothing could have laid it and so it didn't appear at all. Self-contradiction; assumption is false; the egg did not come before any living thing. Creature came before egg.

 

Exactly which creature cannot be deduced by logic alone; you need observation for that.

[onewheeldave]

 

So what about dark energy?.. are we to assume it didn't exist before the BB?

 

As I understand, dark energy is one of the things our universe contains, just as it contains mass, planets, photons, stars etc, etc.

 

As such, it seems a pretty safe bet that, like all the other contents of our universe, it didn't exist before the Big Bang.

[danot]

Logic tells us that some sort of creature must have come before the egg, in order to lay it. Observation tells us that it was probably a proto-reptile.

 

(More recent observations since the last time I read up on archaeology might, by now, have a better idea of exactly what.)

Then maybe some sort of creature created the universe?

[HeadingNorth]

Then maybe some sort of creature created the universe?

 

That assumption does not solve the problem of creation, since we would ask what created the creature that created the Universe. And then ask what created the creator of the creature that created the Universe. And then ask what created ....

 

 

....this is either an infinite loop going on forever - in which case the infinite loop exists without anything having created it; or, it ends with something that exists without anything having created it. Therefore, things can exist without needing something to create them. Therefore, the Universe itself may exist without needing something to create it, and postulating creators of it is nothing more than a waste of time.

[danot]

What makes you think that we haven't or can't? We can see how single cell creatures reproduce today, we can also look at fossils of single cell creatures.

But that wouldn't give us the answer we're looking for would it.

[danot]

But apparently you don't. There is no contradiction in that sentence. The Big Bang may have occurred spontaneously without necessity for something to have created it.

Not if there was "nothing to create it".

[HeadingNorth]

Not if there was "nothing to create it".

 

Yes, exactly if there was nothing to craete it. It was explained to you on page one, and has been explained repeatedly throughout this thread, and I posted the explanation again not five minutes ago, that if you begin by saying "everything that exists must have been created by something" you prove that something exists which was not created by anything.

[Cyclone]

My bold

 

"Nothing to create the big bang"... now that's a contradiction.. you know what that means don't you?

 

It isn't a contradiction at all. You keep trying to assert that something must have caused it, which as HN keeps pointing out just leaves you having to ask where the something came from.

Nothing caused it, as far as we can understand or theorise, there was NOTHING before it, it (existence) just started.

[onewheeldave]

I'm wondering if its going to turn out that Danot is a creationist of some sort?

 

He does seem, at several points in the thread, to have been on the verge of proposing some kind of God scenario for the beginning of the world.

 

Now he's brought in the, seemingly unnconnected, chicken/egg biology thing.

 

It would also explain his difficulties with logic and mistrust of science.

[HeadingNorth]

I'm wondering if its going to turn out that Danot is a creationist of some sort?

 

He does seem, at several points in the thread, to have been on the verge of proposing some kind of God scenario for the beginning of the world.

 

 

Others have actually done so, but - just as with the Great Green Arkleseizure, the Multiverse, the two small bangs arguing - it would not answer the question, merely double the size of it. If you accept that things can exist without needing a creator, you don't need a God; the Universe exists without need of a creator. If you don't accept that things can exist without a creator - what created God? (Or, if you prefer - what created the Arkleseizure?)

 

By the same token, the "Big Bangs occur multiple times as quantum fluctuations in a vacuum within a far older universe" hypothesis, still does not explain creation. The far older universe, itself, must have sprung into being spontaneously, or else been created by something; once again, all you've done is to double the size of the problem.