aneeshm
Deity
The more I ponder over the idea of creation, the more patently ridiculous it seems. Here are a few of my musings.
Note that thought I have used terms from physics, readers are requested to take them to mean their philosophical equivalent. I'm just most comfortable using physics as a language.
Consider a perfectly isolated system in perfect static equilibrium. Will it ever be able to break out of that equilibrium? By the definition of equilibrium, it cannot.
Thus, it is impossible for the universe to have "started" from a state of equilibrium.
Consider a perfectly isolated system in perfect static equilibrium. That system undergoes no change whatsoever. Time is, therefore, meaningless in such a system. It makes no difference whether a nanosecond, a minute, or an aeon passes - the thing remains just the damn same. There is no way in hell to detect how much time has passed simply by observing the system (if we ignore for a moment the inconvenient fact that it is impossible to observe such a system without destroying the equilibrium - just assume we're omniscient, or something like that which allows us to observe without disturbing). It also means that system will never "start" and break out of its equilibrium.
This means that time cannot ever have a beginning, because that would mean an equilibrium state before its beginning, and as we have just seen, there is no way to break out of such equilibrium, thus it could not have started.
The last problem is trickier, and I haven't come to a satisfactory answer yet.
Consider a perfectly isolated system which is disturbed (not in equilibrium). Can this system ever attain perfect static equilibrium? If it can be proven that it cannot, then the idea of the "beginning of the universe" is provably false, along with an idea of the "end of the universe" or "end of time".
All of these results tell us that the idea of creation is absurd, it is puerile.
The problem is, most religious people, instead of confronting the problem head-on, choose to instead break the model by positing that the system is not, in fact, isolated, and that there exists a second entity, let us call it "God", who comes in and disturbs the system (the act of creation is a disturbance of the state of an equipoised nothingness).
The problem is just shifted one step back - start treating God as our system, and all the old problems still apply.
They then try to wiggle out of it by saying that the attribute of time is not applicable to God. Now that's one of the dumber things to declare, because if time does not apply to God, then neither does causality (in which time is implicit), and if you can discard causality, then what is the need of a theory of creation at all, given that it was thought up to satisfy the curiosity concerning causality in the first place?
Note that thought I have used terms from physics, readers are requested to take them to mean their philosophical equivalent. I'm just most comfortable using physics as a language.
Consider a perfectly isolated system in perfect static equilibrium. Will it ever be able to break out of that equilibrium? By the definition of equilibrium, it cannot.
Thus, it is impossible for the universe to have "started" from a state of equilibrium.
Consider a perfectly isolated system in perfect static equilibrium. That system undergoes no change whatsoever. Time is, therefore, meaningless in such a system. It makes no difference whether a nanosecond, a minute, or an aeon passes - the thing remains just the damn same. There is no way in hell to detect how much time has passed simply by observing the system (if we ignore for a moment the inconvenient fact that it is impossible to observe such a system without destroying the equilibrium - just assume we're omniscient, or something like that which allows us to observe without disturbing). It also means that system will never "start" and break out of its equilibrium.
This means that time cannot ever have a beginning, because that would mean an equilibrium state before its beginning, and as we have just seen, there is no way to break out of such equilibrium, thus it could not have started.
The last problem is trickier, and I haven't come to a satisfactory answer yet.
Consider a perfectly isolated system which is disturbed (not in equilibrium). Can this system ever attain perfect static equilibrium? If it can be proven that it cannot, then the idea of the "beginning of the universe" is provably false, along with an idea of the "end of the universe" or "end of time".
All of these results tell us that the idea of creation is absurd, it is puerile.
The problem is, most religious people, instead of confronting the problem head-on, choose to instead break the model by positing that the system is not, in fact, isolated, and that there exists a second entity, let us call it "God", who comes in and disturbs the system (the act of creation is a disturbance of the state of an equipoised nothingness).
The problem is just shifted one step back - start treating God as our system, and all the old problems still apply.
They then try to wiggle out of it by saying that the attribute of time is not applicable to God. Now that's one of the dumber things to declare, because if time does not apply to God, then neither does causality (in which time is implicit), and if you can discard causality, then what is the need of a theory of creation at all, given that it was thought up to satisfy the curiosity concerning causality in the first place?
