Ginkgo wrote: ↑Thu Aug 20, 2020 12:42 pm
Immanuel Can wrote:
Well, I don't think we "see" any such thing. We have no reason to grant Krauss's "basis," since it's just untrue.
What basis might that be?
That we agree to call a "something" a "nothing," and that we imagine his theory is a sort of truth. It's just a speculation, after all, and one not even amenable to scientific testing. We could call it, at most, a very preliminary intuition, so we don't owe it much credence...at least yet.
Immanuel Can wrote:
I also understand that there are at least 10 different speculative quantum models that are currently being floated. It looks like somebody is trying very hard to find a way to get away from the necessity of the universe having an origin -- so desperately, in fact, that they are willing to choose raw, unscientific speculation over the mathematical and empirical evidence of their eyes.
What mathematical and empirical evidence might that be?
Empirically, things like everyday exhibitions of causality, on which you and I count for our daily lives, and upon which science itself rests, or the linear nature of time, or the expansion of the universe, or entropic decline. Mathematically, that if these things are so, then infinite regress of causes is utterly impossible.
Immanuel Can wrote:
Is it just possible that their earnestness to see nothing where something exists is motivated by ideology, rather than by science?
Why would they want to see nothing?
Because the alternative is recognizing that a First Cause is inescapable, and potentially, that opens the door to the idea of God again. This is exactly what dismayed so many cosmologists when the "red shift effect" was finally accepted as necessary science, back in the '60s. You can find no end of them inveighing that this would open the door to Creationism again.
The same happened to Thomas Nagel the Atheist, when he dared to question evolutionism in "Mind and Cosmos." The establishment came down on him like a ton of bricks...not because he was a Creationist (he declared in his final chapter that he was hoping for a new Materialist paradigm to emerge, and only felt that the current Progressivist paradigm was inhibiting its emergence) but because they felt he opened the door to Creationism again, and lent comfort to that view.
If you recall, they went after Thomas Kuhn in a similar way, after he published "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions."
Here's their ideological concern: a universe emerging from nothing would resolve the dilemma, and once and for all eliminate Creation. So anybody who actually proves that it happened that way would be first in line for the Nobel Prize, since the ideological motive is so strong for absolutizing the scientific pursuit itself, and also, as we might admit, against facing God.
Immanuel Can wrote:
No, I mean we cannot grant Krauss's premise. That's all. It's not evident or scientific.
I haven't read his book, so what is not evident or scientific?
You see in the NYT review. No proof, and no possibility of proof. Just a speculation.
Immanuel Can wrote:
And quantum theories that are unproven, which will include at the very least 9 of the current 10, will be eliminated.
This may well turn out to be the case, but that is nothing new to science.
Absolutely. But it speaks against holding to any explanation involving quantum conjecture until there is some science to support it. That is, at least, what a scientist should do.
Immanuel Can wrote:
Well, on the one hand, we have all the empirical evidence currently available, pointing to things like linear time and cause and effect. And on the other, we have pure speculation unsupported at present by any empirical evidence. Are we to take the unsupported speculation as a promissory note for future findings? If so, that would be assuming a conclusion, and not at all scientific. At worst, it would be gratuitous secular prophecy.
If you are talking about quantum mechanics then this is untrue. As I said before, quantum theory provides us with some of the most accurate predictions in all of science. You are setting up a false dichotomy between classical science and quantum mechanics.
I'm not "setting it up". I'm just pointing it out.
I think you have an aversion towards quantum mechanics.
I have a skepticism about unproven and inherently unprovable theories. Don't you?
I should think so.