The Ultimate Question of Origins: God and the Beginning of the Universe
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Raiders of the Lost Spacetime
Raiders of the lost spacetime Christian W¨uthrich∗ For Dennis Lehmkuhl (ed.), Towards a Theory of Spacetime Theories. Birkh¨auser. Abstract Spacetime as we know and love it is lost in most approaches to quantum gravity. For many of these approaches, as inchoate and incomplete as they may be, one of the main challenges is to relate what they take to be the fundamental non-spatiotemporal structure of the world back to the classical spacetime of GR. The present essay investigates how spacetime is lost and how it may be regained in one major approach to quantum gravity, loop quantum gravity. Keywords: quantum gravity, problem of time, quantum GR, loop quantum gravity, emergence of spacetime. Many approaches to quantum gravity (QG) suggest or imply that space and time do not exist at the most fundamental ontological level, at least not in anything like their usual form. Thus deprived of their former status as part of the fundamental furniture of the world, together, perhaps, with quarks and leptons, they merely `emerge' from the deeper physics that does not rely on, or even permit, their (fundamental) existence, rather like tables and chairs. The extent to which the fundamental structures described by competing approaches to QG diverge from relativistic spacetimes varies, along different dimensions (Huggett and W¨uthrich 2012). That modern physics puts time under pressure is widely accepted. One can read the history of modern physics from the advent of relativity theory to the present day as a continuing peeling away of the structure that time was initially believed to exemplify (Huggett et al. -
Russell, Infinity, and the Tristram Shandy Paradox
RUSSELL, INFINITY, AND THE TRISTRAM SHANDY PARADOX by Shandon Guthrie INTRODUCTION Mathematicians have puzzled for centuries what precisely we mean when we refer to the concept of infinity . Some have suggested that infinity is merely something that exists in the mind. Yet others maintain that infinity possesses some ontological status in the real world. In an attempt to demonstrate the difference between the reality of an infinite and the idea of an infinite, Aristotle had suggested the terms actual infinite (the completed whole value of infinity) and potential infinite (susceptible to infinite addition). (1) Analytic philosopher Bertrand Russell believed that an actual infinite could be achieved as long as the counter possessed an actually infinite number of years to do it. In the example given in Sterne's novel, we have the example of Tristram Shandy. (2) Sterne writes about Tristram Shandy as an individual committed to writing an autobiography. However, he is so slow that it takes him one year in order to complete only one day. This means that the most recent event that could be recorded is the day that occurred one year ago. As Shandy writes an additional day, it takes him an additional year to complete the events of that day. Russell uses this example and believes that an actual infinite can be achieved through successive addition only if Shandy has an infinite number of days to complete it. RUSSELL'S ASSESSMENT OF THE TRISTRAM SHANDY PARADOX Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) suspects that the Tristram Shandy paradox can be solved. For Russell, it is the individual who possesses an infinite number of days. -
On God's Existence
Scholars Crossing SOR Faculty Publications and Presentations Summer 2001 On God's Existence W. David Beck Liberty University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/sor_fac_pubs Part of the Biblical Studies Commons, Comparative Methodologies and Theories Commons, Epistemology Commons, Esthetics Commons, Ethics in Religion Commons, History of Philosophy Commons, History of Religions of Eastern Origins Commons, History of Religions of Western Origin Commons, Other Philosophy Commons, Other Religion Commons, and the Religious Thought, Theology and Philosophy of Religion Commons Recommended Citation Beck, W. David, "On God's Existence" (2001). SOR Faculty Publications and Presentations. 167. https://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/sor_fac_pubs/167 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Scholars Crossing. It has been accepted for inclusion in SOR Faculty Publications and Presentations by an authorized administrator of Scholars Crossing. For more information, please contact [email protected]. W. DAVID BECK 49 compared to the energy involved in the entire act of, say, raising one's hand to vote. When an engineer throws a switch to release the water behind Hoover Dam, the vast amount of potential energy unleashed by the moving water is overwhelmingly greater than that involved in the engineer throwing the switch. It may be the same with libeliarian acts. Perhaps the energy released in the exercise of active power is miniscule compared to the poten tial energy released in the body as part of the relevant causal pathway. I just don't lmow. Second, even if one opts for this second option (the release of energy is virtually undetectable), it doesn't follow that the resulting gap would not be detectable, since the effects of a libertarian act could still be quite different in a "gappy" way from what would have followed in the absence of that act. -
Thomas Aquinas' Argument from Motion & the Kalām Cosmological
University of Central Florida STARS Honors Undergraduate Theses UCF Theses and Dissertations 2020 Rethinking Causality: Thomas Aquinas' Argument From Motion & the Kalām Cosmological Argument Derwin Sánchez Jr. University of Central Florida Part of the Philosophy Commons Find similar works at: https://stars.library.ucf.edu/honorstheses University of Central Florida Libraries http://library.ucf.edu This Open Access is brought to you for free and open access by the UCF Theses and Dissertations at STARS. It has been accepted for inclusion in Honors Undergraduate Theses by an authorized administrator of STARS. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Recommended Citation Sánchez, Derwin Jr., "Rethinking Causality: Thomas Aquinas' Argument From Motion & the Kalām Cosmological Argument" (2020). Honors Undergraduate Theses. 858. https://stars.library.ucf.edu/honorstheses/858 RETHINKING CAUSALITY: THOMAS AQUINAS’ ARGUMENT FROM MOTION & THE KALĀM COSMOLOGICAL ARGUMENT by DERWIN SANCHEZ, JR. A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Honors in the Major Program in Philosophy in the College of Arts and Humanities and in the Burnett Honors College at the University of Central Florida Orlando, Florida Fall Term 2020 Thesis Chair: Dr. Cyrus Zargar i ABSTRACT Ever since they were formulated in the Middle Ages, St. Thomas Aquinas’ famous Five Ways to demonstrate the existence of God have been frequently debated. During this process there have been several misconceptions of what Aquinas actually meant, especially when discussing his cosmological arguments. While previous researchers have managed to tease out why Aquinas accepts some infinite regresses and rejects others, I attempt to add on to this by demonstrating the centrality of his metaphysics in his argument from motion. -
The Absurdity of Life Without God (Craig)
The Absurdity of Life Without God (Craig) 1. Life Without God is Meaningless: William Lane Craig argues that, if there is no God, then life itself lacks meaning, value, and purpose. The primary motive of this conclusion is the idea that, without God, there is no immortality. And, without immortality, then each and every one of us is doomed to die. Life is, as Craig notes, merely a brief transition out of oblivion and back into oblivion. Not only that, but the human race—indeed, the entire universe—is doomed to die. In 5 billion years, the Sun will engulf the Earth in a fiery death. Billions of years after that, the entire universe, as it expands and cools, will one day be nothing but a litter of dead, cold stars, forever getting further and further from one another, travelling forever into the dark recesses of dead, cold, lifeless space. (1) Life is Meaningless: If we are all doomed to die, then nothing really matters. No one’s life has any ULTIMATE significance. Our advancements to expand human knowledge, to alleviate human suffering, to learn to live in peace will all eventually be meaningless. Craig claims that, because human beings are doomed to be here for only a short time, astronomically speaking, we are no more significant than a “swarm of mosquitos”; and man, “because he ends in nothing, he IS nothing”. But, he says, even if we could live forever, life would still be meaningless. It is not MERE eternity that gives life meaning. There must be something that GIVES it meaning. -
August 9, 2001 Word Count: 7015 Words Abstract There Is A
PRESENTISM AND QUANTUM GRAVITY1 August 9, 2001 word count: 7015 words Abstract There is a philosophical tradition of arguing against presentism, the thesis that only presently existing things exist, on the basis of its incompatibility with fundamental physics. I grant that presentism is incompatible with special and general relativity, but argue that presentism is not incompatible with quantum gravity, because there are some theories of quantum gravity that utilize a fixed foliation of spacetime. I reply to various objections to this defense of presentism, and point out a flaw in Gödel’s modal argument for the ideality of time. This paper provides an interesting case study of the interplay between physics and philosophy. 1I have given talks based on previous versions of this paper at Princeton University, the American University of Beirut, California Polytechnic State University, and the University of Kentucky. I thank the audiences at these presentations for helpful discussion. I also thank Gordon Belot, Mauro Dorato, Brian Kierland, Steven Savitt, Bas van Fraassen, Steve Weinstein, and an anonymous referee for helpful comments. 1 1. Introduction. I am a presentist: I believe that only presently existing things exist.2 Contrast presentism with eternalism: the eternalist believes that past, present, and future things all exist. Assuming that there are three spatial dimensions, the eternalist believes that the universe is four- dimensional, and while there are different events in different regions of this so-called “block universe”, the universe as a whole does not change. The presentist, in contrast, believes that the universe is three-dimensional. I am also a Heraclitean: I believe that change is a fundamental aspect of reality. -
God? a Debate Between a Christian and an Atheist
God? A Debate Between A Christian and An Atheist William Lane Craig Walter Sinnott-Armstrong OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS GOD? POINT/COUNTERPOINT SERIES Series Editor James P. Sterba, University of Notre Dame AFFIRMATIVE ACTION AND RACIAL PREFERENCE Carl Cohen and James P. Sterba GOD? A DEBATE BETWEEN A CHRISTIAN AND AN ATHEIST William Lane Craig and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong GOD? A DEBATE BETWEEN A CHRISTIAN AND AN ATHEIST William Lane Craig Walter Sinnott-Armstrong Point/Counterpoint Series James P. Sterba, Series Editor 1 2004 1 Oxford New York Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi São Paulo Shanghai Taipei Tokyo Toronto Copyright © 2004 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York, 10016 http://www.oup-usa.org Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Craig, William Lane. God? : a debate between a Christian and an atheist / William Lane Craig, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong. p. cm.—(Point/counterpoint series) ISBN 0-19-516599-3 (alk. paper)—ISBN 0-19-516600-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. God—Proof. 2. Atheism. I. Sinnott-Armstrong, Walter, -
Theistic Arguments: the Craig Program
Theistic Arguments: The Craig Program Edwin K. P. Chong Version: March 12, 2005 1 Introduction Reference: • William Lane Craig, God, Are You There? Five Reasons God Exists and Three Reasons It Makes a Difference, Ravi Zacharias International Ministries, 1999. Motivation: • World’s greatest thinkers have wrestled with the question of God. • Is there a personal, transcendent being who created the universe and is the source of moral goodness? • Today’s university student is not trained to deal with this issue. • Instead of reflecting rationally on the issue, many students absorb uncritically the easy an- swers and secular prejudices of their teachers. • People who think that it doesn’t make a difference what you believe about God simply reveal that they haven’t thought very deeply about the question. • Even atheist philosophers, e.g., Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, recognized that the ques- tion makes a tremendous difference. Three reasons it makes a difference: 1. If God does not exist, then life is ultimately meaningless. 2. If God does not exist, then we must ultimately live without hope. 3. If God does exist, then not only does life have meaning and hope, but there is also the possibility of coming to know God and his love personally. None of this shows that God exists. But it does show that it makes a tremendous difference whether God exists. • Blaise Pascal: even if the evidence for and against the existence of God were absolutely equal, the rational thing to do would be to believe that God exists. • Presumption of theism: presume that God exists unless we have some good reason to think that atheism is true. -
Craig, William Lane. "Religious Epistemology"
verified, positivistic philosophers held them to be literally meaningless, as if one had asserted, “’t was brillig, and the slythey toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe.” Under criticism, the Verification Principle underwent a number of changes, including its permutation into the Falsification Principle, which held that a meaningful sentence must be capable in principle Religious epistemology of being empirically falsified. The fate of religious William Lane Craig language was thought to be no brighter under falsificationism than under verificationism, as became evident at a famous Oxford University symposium on “Theology and Falsification” held in 1948. "Enlightenment critiques of the reasonableness of religious belief point to defects not so much in At the symposium Antony Flew borrowed a story religious belief as in the conceptions of told several years earlier by John Wisdom knowledge uncritically adopted as the basis of concerning two explorers who came upon a patch these critiques. Maybe religious knowledge looks of flowers in a jungle clearing. One explorer was dubious because we have the wrong idea about convinced that the flowers were tended by a what it is to know something and how we know gardener. In the ensuing days, however, despite what we know." --C. Stephen Evans and Merold the explorers’ every effort to find him, no gardener Westphal, Christian Perspectives on Religious was ever detected. To save his hypothesis, the Knowledge. one explorer was progressively forced to qualify his original hypothesis to the point that the Introduction hypothesized gardener must be invisible, intangible, and undetectable. To which the other In Religious Epistemology we encounter the finally replied, “Just how does what you call an intersection of traditional epistemology with the invisible, intangible, eternally elusive gardener newly burgeoning field of Philosophy of Religion. -
Quantum General Relativity
1 An extended zero-energy hypothesis predicting negative GF potential energy. ZEUT explains that, during the the existence of negative-energy gravitons and inflation phase of our universe, energy flows from the (negative energy) GF to the (positive energy) inflation field possibly explaining the accelerated expansion of (IF) so that the total (negative) GF-energy decreases our universe (becoming more negative) and the total (positive) IF-energy increases (becoming more positive): however, the respective * [1] GF/IF energy densities remain constant and opposite since Andrei-Lucian Drăgoi , Independent researcher the region is inflating; consequently, IF explains the (Bucharest, Romania) cancellation between matter (including radiation) and GF DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.36245.99044 energies on cosmological scales, which is consistent with * astronomical observations (concordant with the observable Abstract universe being flat) [2]. The negative energy GF and the positive energy matter (and radiation) may exactly cancel out only if our universe is completely flat: such a zero-energy flat This paper proposes an extended (e) zero-energy universe can theoretically last forever. Tryon acknowledged hypothesis (eZEH) starting from the “classical” speculative zero-energy universe hypothesis (ZEUH) (first proposed by that his ZEUT was inspired by the general relativist Peter physicist Pascual Jordan), which mainly states that the total Bergmann, who showed (before Tryon) how a universe could amount of energy in our universe is exactly zero: its amount come from nothing without contradicting ECP (with the 1st of positive energy (in the form of matter and radiation) is law of thermodynamics being also an ECP version). The first exactly canceled out by its negative energy (in the form of documented mention of ZEUH (1934) (in the context of gravity). -
Creation Ex Nihilo: Theology and Science William Lane Craig
Creation ex nihilo: Theology and Science William Lane Craig SUMMARY The biblical doctrine of temporal creation ex nihilo has received strong scientific confirmation from post-relativistic physics. Two lines of evidence point to an absolute beginning of the universe: the expansion of the universe and the thermodynamics of the universe. In each case attempts to maintain a past-eternal universe have become increasingly difficult to defend. Given the beginning of the universe, the question arises as to how the universe could have come into being. Attempts by some physicists to maintain that physics can explain the origin of the universe from nothing either trade on an equivocal use of the term “nothing” or else are guilty of philosophical faux pas. Supernatural creation ex nihilo is the better explanation. CREATION EX NIHILO: THEOLOGY AND SCIENCE Introduction “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen. 1.1). With majestic simplicity the author of the opening chapter of Genesis thus differentiated his viewpoint, not only from the ancient creation myths of Israel’s neighbors, but also effectively from pantheism, such as is found in religions like Vedanta Hinduism and Taoism, from panentheism, whether of classical neo- Platonist vintage or twentieth-century process theology, and from polytheism, ranging from ancient paganism to contemporary Mormonism. The biblical writers give us to understand that the universe had a temporal origin and thus imply creatio ex nihilo in the temporal sense that God brought the universe into being without a material cause at some point in the finite past. [1] Moreover, the Church Fathers, though heavily influenced by Greek thought, dug in their heels concerning the doctrine of creation, sturdily insisting on the temporal creation of the universe ex nihilo in opposition to the prevailing Hellenistic doctrine of the eternity of matter. -
Robert Winston's Story of God Science and Religion 'Syked' About Science
Guardian Student Media Awards 2005 Best Magazine Nominee I,Thes Imperialci Collegeence Science Magazine Issue 2 Summer 2005 , As science magazineience for Imperial College Science and ReligionI c Robert Winston’s Story of God ‘Syked’ about Science Issue 3 Winter 2005 Cover-Contents-Editorial-BackCover2.indd 1 25/11/05 3:08:57 am IssueI, s 3c Winterience 2005 Editor-in-chief From the Editor Mun Keat Looi Section Editors Imperial Features Letitia Hughes CIENCE, LIGHT of our lives, fire of our minds. Science seeks Helen Thomson to explain our existence and purpose, but in doing so strays into the territory of religion. So the conflict began. You know External Features the story: two households, both alike in dignity... Amber Bauer S Stella Papadopoulou Here at I, Science we see little difference between the frying pan and the fire. The row over Intelligent Design theory has reignited Interviews the debate on both sides of the Atlantic. Google, the new ultimate Chris Miles source of knowledge, finds an astonishing 118 million hits for the Lilian Anekwe term “science and religion”. Is there a place for science in religion, or religion in science? News and Events There is plenty of opinion at the Imperial College of Science, David Brill Technology and Medicine: the Rector, Sir Richard Sykes (p18), the Laura Middleton Chaplain Andrew Willson (p25), Professor Lord Robert Winston (p10) and the Reverend Sir John Polkinghorne (p12). Of course, we Opinion take the opportunity to wax lyrical ourselves (p25). Duncan McMillan Permit me my two cents worth. Professor Sir Richard Dawkins, Daniela de Angel one of the major voices in the debate, spoke at Imperial recently.