Manc Skipper

If there is no time, then there can be no before.

Aunt Spiker

"it *had* to be supernatural*

Why couldn't it just be a natural force or means that us humans don't understand, yet?

__________________

Tashah

No... it's not. Unknown, unquantified, et. al.

You see Matt, you have an agenda. That is why you filched that particular quote of Robert Jastrow. Do you imagine that I am naive and unaware of your motivation here?



Thou hast been busted.

__________________

Matt633

Don't deny it. Never purported otherwise. Did you not notice that I had as my username a Scripture reference???????

Do you not think Richard Dawkins had an agenda when he wrote The God Delusion?
Does that make his resaerch and arguments any less valid?

Having an agenda does not make an argument any less valid.


Tashah, the very website you cited has the same quote on it. I acknowledged with full disclosure that Jastrow was an agnostic. That only serves to make such a quote from a book written by his own hand that much weightier.

Jastrow was well aware of the interpretation that statement wouldf conjure and made no attempt to veil it. The title of his book was "God and the Astronomers".

Let me give you another quote by Jastrow on that same website you cited:

Matt633

Because of the definition of the term "supernatural". Whatever existed BEFORE nature is not bound by nature. Thus it is supernatural by very definition.

There were no natural forces because there was no nature. There was not even time so it could not have been a "natural force". It therefore had to be supernatural.

Some of you are stuck on this antiquated idea of a static universe which Einstein's theory of general relativity along with the Big Bang have proven to be false.

If time, space and matter had a begining as the entire scientific community now affirms then there was no nature nor natural forces. Therefore whatever brought the universe into being had to be supernatural.

Matt633

Anarcho-facsist, the word natural means flowing from nature.

Webster defines natural as "the universe; the forces and powers that animate and regulate it."

I surmise that your definition of natural is quite "unnatural".

Matt633

Since we speak in time we must use terms we understand- like we say the "time before time" or the "period before time".

Panache

One of your premises is false. Not sure which one.

The concept of causality is time-dependent. The cause must happen before the effect. If time did not exist prior to the big bang, then either there could not have been a cause prior to the effect, because the very concept of "prior to the effect" assumes the existence of time, which we are supposing did not exist.

Accordingly premise one, as we understand it, is false.

Alternatively, science could be wrong about the whole "Beginning" aspect of the universe.

For example, it could be that time is circular, and that in the far future, after the universe is done expanding, it will start contracting, and all the matter and energy in the universe will be pulled together into a singularity no bigger than a softball, essentially putting an "end" to time and space and all that jazz, and giving it a pheonix-esque rebirth in the form of the big bang, starting the whole bloody cycle over again.

Now, nothing supernatural could have existed before time in the traditional sense, because the word "before" assumes the existence of time, but we could imagine another dimension of time that lies outside the linear time we are used to experiencing.

If that were the case though, it wouldn't mean that the cause of the universe was supernatural. It would just mean that nature was bigger than we thought.

Matt633

Good thoughts in my opinion for what it's worth.

Stephen Hawking speaks a great deal on a similar view point of time.

But even so, whatever existed before our laws of nature cannot be bound by the laws of our nature and is of necessity- supernatural.

Only things that exist within the parameters of our nature can be defined as natural. Anything outside of nature is supernatural. If you prefer the term "preternatural" that works as well. Same concept.

Aunt Spiker

I just don't buy into the notion that we, as humans, have come to a point where we can figure out how things were started. (The Theory of Punity).

I don't think any of our theories are right - I think we have absolutely no idea how we got here. If it exists by some means - to me - it's natural. It's *all* natural. I don't believe in "supernatural" anything "Supernatural" is a term coined to define things that seem to defy logic or nature - it's a human-defined category of existence, not an actual state of something's being.

__________________