devans99 wrote: ↑Thu Dec 20, 2018 3:46 pm
Right, so surely it has to be circular then? Time I mean; thats the only way out of the chicken and egg problem. The start of the universe was caused by the end of the universe. The big crunch causing the big bang in an eternal loop.
Allow me to copy and paste this prior exchange:
devans99 wrote: ↑Tue Dec 18, 2018 3:54 am
So God exists beyond the universe maybe.
seeds wrote: ↑Wed Dec 19, 2018 8:51 pm
Not meaning to be confusing here, but actually,
no, God does not exist beyond the universe, at least not in the way that your statement implies.
What I said earlier is that the “
alternate context of reality” in which God’s ultimate form is “perceivable,” exists beyond (outside of) the universe, not God.
With the above in mind, how would the eternal banging and crunching of the universe have any affect on that which exists
“outside” of itself?
To approach this from a slightly different angle, I suggest that you are taking the contemporary meaning of the word
“universe” (which, according to the Big Bang theory, appears to be a singular and closed, “bubble-like” phenomenon, beyond which nothing else exists)...
...and you are conflating it with the notion that it represents what some of us call the
“ALL-THAT-IS,” which, in theory, could conceivably consist of an infinity of alternate universes, as is depicted below...
Indeed, that is precisely what I was suggesting in my prior post.
And the point is that you need to understand that just because
our universe (which could be represented by the smaller bubble in the lower middle portion of the image) might be caught-up in your theory of an endless cycle of bangs and crunches, it doesn’t mean that the other universes would be affected.
So how, exactly, would “circular time” as it applies to our tiny little parochial circumstances, fit in with
that scenario?
Now setting aside (via O’s Razor) the speculation of other universes existing outside of ours and just focusing on what we
think we are observing, we are still confronted with the mystery regarding the
source of the substance that composes this...
In other words, where did the
“stuff” (in deference to poster
uwot) that underpins the construction of the above phenomenon, initially come from?
If you say that it came from absolute nothingness, then that is a thoroughly untenable suggestion, for logic insists that you simply cannot derive somethingness from
absolute nothingness.
On the other hand, if you take the modern physics route and say that the existence of the eternally “banging and crunching” phenomenon is the result of mysterious quantum processes hidden in a vacuum,...
...then you have to explain the origin of a vacuum that is capable of generating mysterious quantum processes, which then leads into the problem of infinite regress. And if you think that “circular time” is the answer to that particular problem of regress, then you just don’t understand the issue I am raising.
And lastly but definitely not leastly,...
...what you are proposing is a purely materialistic explanation of reality, and it does absolutely nothing to shed light on
how the utterly chaotic circumstances of each Bang is transformed into the unthinkable level of order that is required to awaken us into existence.
The bottom line is that your insistence that “circular time” somehow resolves the “chicken and egg problem” does not hold up under deeper examination.
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