I'm curious to know atheists' opinions on creation of the universe and its properties.

Was something created from nothing in the advent of the universe?
Has it always existed?

Secondly, how do you resolve space as finite or infinite?

A poll is included for those who wish not to reveal their religious orientation.

I just dont see how the universe could create it self and exist by its own it just had to start from something

I did not vote as your poll answers are very limited.

Was something created from nothing in the advent of the universe? I wouldn't know, however it is creationism that states everything was created from nothing.

Has it always existed? I doubt it. But how could I know.

Secondly, how do you resolve space as finite or infinite? How could I know whether the universe is limited or limitness.

Just because I cannot fathom/know how the universe began or what it's limit is, does not drive me to theism. I can't say how the universe came into being, and no one ever will or can. We can hypothosize - that includes sciences and religion - but nothing more, when I look out into the sky I see beauty, chaos, stability, instability, destruction, rebirth, birds, bats and insects. I don't see the begining of the 'verse or it's walls. But that's not to say it doesn't/didn't have them/it.

Since the universe came from whatever singularity immediately preceding the Big Bang (if it could be called a singularity, seeing as space-time would be contained within it as well), then I don't believe the universe came from nothing. It doesn't really change anything fundamental about my beliefs.

Hi, Vilius,

You and others may have run across a member by the name of Dattaswami at some point in the Spirituality forums. He attempted to explain creation by the Creator from nothing. That begs the question, "Who created the Creator?" That's an infinite loop in and of itself.

If I can locate the link here on UM or the other site where he contributed frequently, I'll post it here. I debated him once, but here on UM his threads tend to be locked instantaneously for the lack of discussion they inspire.

EDIT: Link below:

Dattaswami's Explanation

Thanks for the feedback, Chokmah. I've appended new selections for those who wish to respond, "Other", or "I don't know".

No one really knows how the universe was created...all we have to go on are theories and beliefs....there is no REAL answer

I am thankful for the great scientists which have strived to answer such questions. We dont know now, but one day we might.

Its possible...but I doubt it will be in this day and age

because theres no true answer as iam an athiest i chose other on both and this does not change my belief and never will

What grinds my gears is the bloody creationists....Why is it that their backward logic always suggests that, if its something that we cant explain yet, automaticly it evidence of intelligent creation..i tell you what.... there is no intelligence present there.

its such backward way of living. "oh i dont know how thats created, there for its evidence of god and i dont have to know how it works or how it was created"

ANGRY FACE

I assume that in looking for an atheistic view of the universe's creation, you're looking for a vaguely scientific viewpoint (i.e. one relying only on physical processes with supernatural elements conspicuously absent). At the moment, of course, knowing where it all came from is a bit beyond science's immediate grasp, but cosmologists are a clever enough bunch to come up with some good ideas as to possibilities. I'll throw some of them out there (adapting this from a previous post or two):

If you take inflationary cosmology, for example, the possibility arises that the universe (as we use the term) is in fact merely a pocket of a far larger Universe that was spurred to start inflating by a false vacuum about 13.7 billion years ago. Then the big bang was merely the birth of our pocket, not the Universe in which it spawned. Of course that may just be passing your problem off to another eon, as one might wonder where the bigger universe came from.

In 1973 a physicist, Ed Tryon, submitted a paper to Nature suggesting the universe might be a vacuum fluctuation meaning it essentially would've come from nothing. The key is that in Tryon's estimation the universe wouldn't be "something from nothing" but rather nothing from nothing. Tryon suggested that since all mass/energy in the universe has some associated gravitation, the positive mass/energy of the universe is balanced by the negative gravitational potential energy--in essence, the universe would have net zero energy.

There's a model, taking inspiration some higher-dimensional membrane-type ideas, that paints a slightly different picture. Called the ekpyrotic model it postulates that "our hot big bang universe was created from the collision of two three-dimensional worlds moving along a hidden, extra dimension." Our universe (as we know) was then the product of some collision (although, again, this doesn't address whether the things that collided had their own beginning).

Another theory, partly by the same guy as the previous idea, suggests the universe is cyclic, going through trillion-year cycles between big bangs and big crunches. In that case the universe was created from something--another universe. TCyclic universe.

Another very interesting idea was put forth by a Princeton astrophysicist, J.R. Gott, a few years ago. To understand the idea you need to know that general relativity (Einstein's theory of gravity and the theory used to model the large-scale universe) allows the formation of what're called closed timelike curves. Since general relativity deals with how spacetime is shaped by mass and energy, it turns out that it's possible to form configurations in which spacetime loops back in on itself such that time moves in a loop as you travel through space (i.e. the path through spacetime you take ends at the same time as it began).

Gott's idea can be described like a tree. The trunk is the Universe (capital U) mentioned above when I talked about inflationary cosmology. Each branch is a little pocket or baby universe (like our own) formed in the larger Universe. The idea is simply that one of these branches loops around, via a closed timelike curve, to become the trunk. That is, one of the baby universes spawned by the original Universe turns out to be the original Universe. This one actually has the virtue of explaining where the original universe comes from instead of just stopping at saying our little universe was just created as part of something far larger.

I posted a thread a while back presenting a Nature news article a while back that, while not quite answering your initial question, might have repercussions for it:



As you can probably tell, all of these ideas (and any like them) have a long, long way to go. But the possibility exists for explaining the beginning of the universe in a natural way without having to invoke a deity. Or at least I think so.

Was the universe here forever or did it come "from nothing"? The latter possibility seems so counterintuitive that I'd like to lean toward the former as being the case. But that's based on nothing other than the limits of my imagination and comfort zone.

Hi, Zombie Jesus,

Rest assured, that was not my intention with this thread. Since these are prime examples of unanswerable questions (Though I think Startraveler did one heck of a job with the research he cited) that most everyone places in the back of his/her mind, I was just curious to know what affect, if any, they might have on open-mindedness.

To whomever it was who decided to gravitate toward agnosticism, that's not a minor event. I took pride in the posing of these questions having an impact, not pride in the modification of one's belief system. That can be a traumatic experience, and I'm just glad that my metamorphosis from agnosticism to theism transpired over a course of several years.

Great thread Frank.

I believe that (using my limited knowledge of physics, along with much pondering on my own behalf), that the universe is infinite. It is constantly expanding, which suggests that there is an area outside it, which means taht there is an infinitly largte space outside of our infinitly large universe.

Quite the idea to wrap your head around.

We also know (or is generally accepted by modern physics) that the universe originated at a single point, expanding in the Big Bang. How this point came to be, I don't know. But it's ths paradox within a paradox that keeps me in awe of the universe, and ever questioning the nature of it. Did God create it? I would like to think not. But, who knows......it's what keeps me searching for my beliefs.

I too have chose other for my answers, as I cant say one way or the other, because the answer to your questions are not known.

My belief therefore stays the same.

you do this by asking stupid questions?? no offense, but those questions were kinda with no answers realy.. and im agnostic.

Lost Souls,

Thank you for your participation. Your input is greatly appreciated.

I beg to differ that these are stupid questions. They are queries upon which astrophysicists have spent a great deal of time and effort. But you are entitled to draw your own conclusions.

The fact that there are no rational answers to these mysteries at the present time obviously have the potential to impact people's belief systems. I see that the count of atheists leaning toward agnosticism is now 2. And that applies to members alone, not visitors who might also have opened their minds on the basis of the poll questions. Had the total remained at 1, I'd have considered this quasi-experimental poll worthwhile.

When it comes to the universe, no-one knows. Could be a God of some sort, but it's equally likely that it isn't.

I would like for there to be other universes, but I can't be sure.

IF TIME IS CURVED:
If you were to run time backward, you would approach the point of singularity (the beginning of all things) along an asymptotic curve. Each second/hour/day would be consecutively shorter than the previous one, but the experience of it would be no different from any other second/hour/day. You would continue backwards along this time curve for an infinite number of seconds/hours/days; you would experience this as infinite time; you would never reach the point of beginning at the Big Bang.

IF TIME IS LINEAR:
If you ran time backward, you would eventually reach the beginning of all things. This is how most people see and experience time. BUT: what happens when you reach the beginning of time? What came before? Answer: there was no before. If anything - even time - existed, then it was not the beginning of all things and one would have to go back in time to reach the beginning.

Time, God and the universe had to come into being at the same instant. God could not exist before time, because there was no before. Time seems to be a property of the universe and does not appear to exist apart from it.

There is a related question from the Evolution "debate:" Assuming life is so complex that it could not come into being spontaneously, by random chance, then it must have had a Creator, an intelligence that directed it. But what created the Creator? Without a Creator to create a Creator, there is only random chance. So the conclusion is: Life is too complex to be created by chance, but God isn't. Something doesn't fit here.


Actually, your questions do not really make sense in the context of curved space-time.
--DJS

Great post, Doug! My type of humor, and educational to boot.

For those who subscribe to the concept of curved space-time, please respond "Other", or "I don't know."