Atheist humor

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Well, if you say the universe is uncaused you are essentially done (assuming you can prove it).
If you say it has been created by a Creator, you still have quite a bit or work left to explain what caused the Creator.

I think "common sense" is not enough to explain things. There are many counter-intuitive things. Because probability/statistics are counter-intuitive to people it is possible to make a profit with casinos. Most people devise gambling strategies that can only be mathematically disproven by experts, but at first glance they make sense. Often these strategies are based on wrong assumptions that seem at first glance to be "common sense".

http://www.colorado.edu/philosophy/vste ... neTune.pdf

"A general mistake made in search of fine-tuning, he points out, is to vary just one physical parameter while keeping all the others constant. Yet a "theory of everything" - which alas we do not yet have - is bound to reveal intimate links between physical parameters. A change in one may be compensated by a change in another, says Stenger."

http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/cultu ... -life.html

I imagine another "creator". I don't believe in religion(s). Possibly, the true religion died off, or perhaps the true religion is bits and pieces of what exists now. Possibly, all religions are human made.

However, I do believe in a creator, as Albert Einstein labeled , "the old one".



I agree.

However, in this particular case, I am disinclined to believe in "something came from nothing", because I have never seen it happen. I would quickly change my opinion if I had at least some evidence to understand how such magnificent order to matter can come from nothing.

Even the renown atheist Richard Dawkins appears to accept that the universe is finely tuned for life, which is why he asserts the no-evidence hypothesis of the multiverse, that there exists an infinite number of parallel universes and we got lucky to be in one that supports life (as presented in earlier video) - to explain away "fine tuning" of this universe.

How does the order in a snowflake emerge from the chaos of liquid water? Answer: cooling, triggering a phase change.

I have no evidence at all for what I'm going to say next, it's just something I've been wondering about.
What if universes are "created" from events happening in an already existing universe? If that is the case, universes that are better at creating new universes will create more universes who resemble them. Sort of an evolutionary chain of universes. Of course, this does not explain the original source of the universes.

Taking it even further, it is likely that this universe will at some point not be able to sustain life, or even molecules. Possible ends to our universe could be a Big Freeze where everything is far apart and temperatures are too low for anything, or a Big Crunch where everything collapses. It would make sense for intelligent beings like h00mans to try to create new universes that are able to sustain life (not even saying it's even possible). This could be the SciFi version of Creationism.

I heard an interesting thought experiment from Sam Harris, who is an atheist. In the thought experiment we assume a very advanced, futuristic version of our own earth with us humans. It would make sense for Christians (for example) to create a simulation to see if their vision of the world could be true. We could be people living inside that simulation, in which case God exists in the Matrix-like world we live in. Since an advanced society could create a huge amount of simulated worlds it could be somewhat "likely" that we live in a model world created by one of the religious movements.
One reason The Matrix was popular is that it is somewhat hard to disprove that the world is really fake. A bit like the philosophical zombie argument.

After saying all this, I still think it is more likely that the universe is "uncaused" in the way we see causality, beause we have only observed causality in our little corner of spacetime. How things outside/before the universe work, we don't know anything. People have postulated universes with fewer physical dimensions but more time dimensions. I found this picture from wikipedia interesting (though I don't claim to understand any of it):

Although it looks complicated, I think it is mostly quite easy to understand. At least, the pink and red is.

Life cannot exist without time.
Life cannot exist without at least two, and probably three, spatial dimensions.

The green and the blue is mystifying to me though, I guess we can't contemplate extra dimensions properly.

I don't think a chemist would view water as "chaos". The chemist would be able to identify the chemical bonding pattern of hydrogen to oxygen, the number of electrons, their positions, and orbit. As well as make strong predictions based on this "order" as to how water would combine with other substances, or change based on changing its temperature.

A physicist could fill in any blanks of the nuclear force and electromagnetic forces of the particles and then make predictions based on particle attraction/repulsion.

You are talking about molecules in the abstract, not liquid water, which moves in a chaotic way. Fluid dynamics is not at all intuitive. Einstein was still making discoveries about it. There is still much we don't know about it, but that's not my major point. Order can come from chaos spontaneously, without a designer.

If you are good at visualizing multivariable calculus, it becomes a whole lot easier. That's the case with most of physics; if you can "see" what the math is saying, it makes a whole lot more sense.

It is almost like learning a different language. If you only learn it as math, then it's like just memorizing a bunch of vocabulary lists.

So why are 4 spatial dimensions with 1 time dimension "unstable", but with an added time dimension it's "unpredictable"?
I forgot most of my math since I never use it anymore. It's like a language you never speak, you just lose it. I only remember English because of the interwebs and media.

Tricky to put into actual words, but I'll give it a go.

To visualize adding spatial dimensions is a little easier, so I'll start there. Think about a single point in the zero dimension. To "see" it as a line, you could "pull" the point in a new physical direction. Then if you pull the line in a completely new physical direction, you get a square. Then pull the square in a new physical direction and you get a cube. Trying to add another dimension would be like pulling a 3D object in a new physical direction, which can be done (and "seen" for some people) mathematically, even if not in the traditional visual sense in our universe. And so on. If that makes sense.

Temporal dimensions aren't quite like spatial dimensions, they are more along the lines of measuring the "distance" between events. Light years are actually a temporal measurement that is expressed in a space-time manner, which allows us to "convert" light years into a "distance." With only one temporal dimension (like we have), there a specific context for the measurement, since time would only have two "directions" to measure between events (albeit not in a "straight line"). This is how we exist in our present universe. We have our perceived spatial dimensions (on 3 axis) acting along an extra axis (time). If you added another temporal dimension, you would no longer have a curved past and future along which to measure events, you would have an extra "line" for your co-ordinates. So instead of a curved "line" that you would get with one temporal dimension, you would end up with hyperbolic and parabolic intersections, creating an infinite surface on which nothing could be put at any specific "time," as we measure it.

You couldn't really have a universe that works for us with no temporal dimension, as there would be no "place" for events to happen in or the spatial dimensions to exist. In a similar way, without any spatial dimensions, there would be no events to take place in any amount of temporal dimensions.

Just be aware that some of this isn't exactly how it mathematically works, but hopefully it gives you something of an idea of how it works.

I did have one physics professor who used the concept of a universe with a second temporal dimension as a sort of possible eternal afterlife, but he was very adamant that any existence there would be so completely unlike this one that having any type of "life" concept in that universe wouldn't really be possible; you would just exist and nothing more. He did have 2 PhD's and one was in something called "Theoretical Religion," which he apparently designed himself with the university's approval. He was also very clear in his belief that the universe was not made for us, but that we formed in response to the specific characteristics of this universe. We evolved to make use of the 3 spatial dimensions and the one temporal dimension that exist here, whereas in other universes with different sets of dimensions, any type of "life" that would arise would be so compoletely different that even if we knew how to sned and receive signals across different we would not be able to recognize anything from other forms of "life." Even in this universe, we can only sense such a narrow spectrum that communication with any life that arose here would be unlikely to be identified by either party. We only see and hear such a tiny bit of the spectrum. We only knew that radio waves have existed for a tiny little bit of time. We still have a distance to go in working out some of the bits of physics like some of the why behind how gravitational forces work. That is the great thing about physics; you make one discovery to answer some questions, and it shows you a whole bunch of new avenues that you can follow to find more questions that you didn't even know were out there.

Side note:

Nine chapters, two hours of maths, that take you gradually up to the fourth dimension.

http://www.dimensions-math.org/Dim_E.htm
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3C690048E1531DC7