The origin of the universe

[fontduroy]

Hey Zach, just wanted to refute a couple of your statements based on recent news.

Originally Posted by Zach

Animals do not change their outward appearance to conform to their environment.

This article talks about a cricket in Hawaii that over the past twenty years has mutated itself genetically in order to avoid being killed by a particular parasite that is attracted to its mating call. Very interesting stuff. I think you will see an example of an animal/insect that changed its appearance to conform to its environment and aid its survivability.

Also, to use a more obvious example, humans change their outward appearance all the time to conform to their environments. Just this morning I put on a hat to escape the rain on my glasses.

Originally Posted by Zach

If evolution is true, why aren't there any "middle" species in existence? No more evolving species? Were they just eliminated? Why aren't there any remains, at all? Or just haven't scientists found them yet?

Actually, scientists are finding them all the time: read here. It all depends on how "middle" you want to go before you can see the pattern. Understand that over the millenia there has been a lot of earth, ash, water and such deposited all over the world. Also, just because many of these fossils are possibly out there doesn't mean that we will ever find all of them; there just aren't enough people digging! So you see, the needle in the proverbial haystack does come to light at times.

Sometimes the answer you are seeking is much less important than the journey that brought you there.

[takkaria]

Originally Posted by The Universal Call

Precisely, we can not prove God, we can not prove alien races, we can not prove that a replica of Elton John is living on a yellow little island far far away wailing. We can not prove their non-existence either... Tricky case actually... Your God theory is just as valid as any other theory, if it cannot be proven to be wrong so to say, and this is one of the reasons why I find the Big Bang theory to be so amusing: They speak about the size of the universe, they speak of how it is expanding, they speak of how a tiny little dot got to existence out from, quite frankly, nothing. Now, I have not been tutored in this subject, but I think this is a fair idea of how the BB'ers are thinking about it. What's ironic is: they can not prove that nothing existed before the Big Bang (slowly destroying their theory about time).

No, and indeed no scientist would try: you cannot prove things before event one, as any event before the beginning of the universe would have no effect on what happened in the universe thereafter. Stephen Hawking says as much in "A Briefer History of Time".

They can not prove that the universe is finite, since they have never been to the far corners of the universe to prove that it has a limit, is it really valid to say that the universe is expanding because of an explosion? How about the galaxies and the stars just being moved away from each other due to the explosion; since we do not know if the universe is finite or infinite (the latter which I think it should be) what are we to say that it must be this or that way?

Because saying that there is expansion is more consistent with all the other things we know than saying there is no expansion. There is even evidence to support the case of expansion: that is, we can look at the light from remote regions of the universe and see that it is shifted towards one end of the spectrum, as it has lost energy over the course of its travel towards us.

As far as we are concerned nothing might be moving, and will never move, a quanuntrabillion (if only the word existed...) miles away from here. We will never be able to find out that, so what we are doing is that we are assuming that since the universe seem to be expanding: "all the universe MUST be expanding, and it just MUST be finite".

And again, we do not actually say that the universe is finite: there are theories that the universe is actually like a sphere in that you can go all the way round and end up at the same point, which I would regard as a form of infinity. I am unsure if there are theories which suggest an infinite universe, but I would suggest that it would be irrelevant to science whether the universe had an outer boundary or not. (How could you ever tell the difference?)

Originally Posted by jdiddy

I think you and others here would benefit from reading Descartes' Meditations. He takes everything back to the nubs and says "what do I KNOW FOR SURE is real and correct" (answer: just my conciousness) and extrapolates out from there. It's very logical and was a real "aha" moment for me when I read them. I'm not going to color your view of these by telling you what I believed when I finished reading them, but I'll just say that my beliefs were drastically different when I ended than when I started. Within the span of a couple hours.

Indeed! I would agree wholeheartedly. It seems this thread has spent a lot of time reiterating scepticism and questions first posed in the 1600s.

About the Meditations: though many of his conclusions are flawed, and many others are arguable, Descartes is one of the big names in modern philosophy. If you are seriously interested in the topic of what we can know (and related issues), it is very much worth spending time reading on philosophy. Epistemology is the study of knowledge, and Wikipedia has a useful summary, though it is not quite how I would present the subject: Epistemology . There seems to be a general trend in this thread towards scepticism, and I think that many of you would benefit a read of Philosophical skepticism. Googling will, I'm sure, bring up plenty of useful information, but I really recommend "Sophie's World" (a book) as a quick (300 pages?) fiction book outlining philosophy from the ancient greeks onwards, and available in Norweigan or English.

[Zach]

Originally Posted by fontduroy

This article talks about a cricket in Hawaii that over the past twenty years has mutated itself genetically in order to avoid being killed by a particular parasite that is attracted to its mating call. Very interesting stuff. I think you will see an example of an animal/insect that changed its appearance to conform to its environment and aid its

So there's no chance that it could be a new species of cricket? From what I read in that article it looks like two species of cricket mated to create this new one.

And, why would a cricket change its appearance to avoid being killed by a particular parasite that is attracted to its mating call? Wouldn't you think it would change its mating call instead?

Also, to use a more obvious example, humans change their outward appearance all the time to conform to their environments. Just this morning I put on a hat to escape the rain on my glasses.

That's different, it's the result of an ability to put on clothing. You're not changing your actual appearance, you're just covering it up.

[fontduroy]

Zach,

Oops, I posted the wrong link to the story! Here's the story about the cricket that changed its appearance: Crickets on Hawaiian Island develop silent wings in response to parasitic attack

As you'll read, changing the cricket's appearance and changing the mating call are one and the same. In order to change or eliminate the mating call, the cricket mutated by smoothing out its wings, thus stopping its ability to use the mating call that attracts the parasitic flies.

I'm not saying that the crickets did this consciously, but mutations happen all the time in every species. The smooth wing mutation was obviously better for the crickets and allowed the male crickets to survive without being infected, therefore allowing them to produce more offspring. The mutation was passed on to the new offspring, and it went from being a "mutation" to a "trait". Humans even mutate all the time (sometimes for better or worse). It is the "marketability" of these mutations that decides whether they will proliferate or not within the species.

Of course, you could explain all of this by saying that it's god's will.

Anyway, I'm not trying to change your mind. If there is one thing I've realized it's that everyone has be true to themselves. The theory of evolution is one that I believe has merit; it works for me. I just wanted to answer some of your questions that you posted early on.

[Keith]

Originally Posted by Zach

I hope this is the correct forum to post this in, as it says "religion" in the description, but if it's not, please move it.
I was just wondering what everyone around here believes concerning the origins of the universe. Being a creationist myself, I obviously believe that the universe is just too complex and beautiful to have just been spontaneously made or evolved over billions of years, and was created by a higher being.
I'm interested in this kind of thing, and I like to know other people's views and opinions on the matter.

A couple of thoughts:
1. "Beautiful" is an entirely subjective thing. What we find beautiful is programmed into us ; the only reason we find a naked human female (or male, if you're that way inclined) more attractive than, say, a squid, is because it's to our species benefit.

2. Complexity is actually a minus for your position rather than a plus; you would expect a created world to be considerably simpler and more rational. If a human couldn't possibly come into existence save by design, how much more must that be true for God?

3. If the universe is too complex and beautiful to exist without a creator then, by extension God is too complex and beautiful to exist without a creator.

I suspect we may never truly know precisely how the universe was created. Science is largely limited to studying the laws of the universe - what came before is out of scope. And faith cannot (by definition) produce conclusive results (and even if it could, there are many contradictory faiths).

Originally Posted by Zach

There's one problem with this theory. Creatures don't adapt to their environment, they live where their physical characteristics allow them. You can't take a herd of elephants and drop them in Antarctica and wait a few million years and come back to find wooly mammoths. Animals do not change their outward appearance to conform to their environment. Polar bears live in the arctic because they have been built to.

A very important distinction: animals don't evolve, species evolve. Individual animals do not change their appearance and abilities.

You are probably right regarding the elephants ; just transplanting a herd to Antarctica would be too drastic a change of environment - they would all die before evolution had a chance to work.

But let's posit a less drastic example where the temperature slowly dropped - say 1 degree every 10-20 years. Over that time the elephants with the thicker hides and greater conservation of body heat (eg. more blubber) would tend to survive the cold winters better. The survivors would get to breed and the non-survivors (obviously) wouldn't.

Note that none of the individual elephants 'adapted', but by 'selecting' for the best survival traits, within 1,000 years you have a species of fatter elephants with thicker skin better suited to the cold. Now extend that process over a few million years. You probably wouldn't end up with mammoths (nature tends to select new solutions each time - that's why evolution is a branching tree rather than a line) but you'd end up with a species significantly different from the elephants you started with.

(BTW, Fontduroy is being a little sloppy with his terminology ; the crickets themselves do not evolve, but that species of crickets does).

Originally Posted by Zach

How did the early, early humanoids reproduce, if they did not have the "sophisticated" reproductive systems we have today? Certainly not by binary fission.. Or, did the early humanoid body somehow "decide" that it would need an efficient reproductive system in order to keep the population growing?

The reproductive system is basically the same in all humanoids; and, for that matter, all mammals (except monotremes).

Originally Posted by Fontduroy

Also, just because many of these fossils are possibly out there doesn't mean that we will ever find all of them; there just aren't enough people digging!

More importantly, fossils are a very rare occurance ; they are only created under very particular conditions. The vast majority of creatures die and decompose without leaving a fossil.

Originally Posted by Zach

If evolution is true, why aren't there any "middle" species in existence?

There are. If you look at the scientific classifications of species on earth, you will see that they demonstrate a series of steps from one form to another.

eg. Australopithecus Robustus -> Homo Habilis -> Homo Erectus -> Homo Sapiens

Each of those steps (except the last one) is a "middle" species.

P.S. "The Universal Call", I haven't had a chance to read your link yet, but I will...

[Rocket Surgery]

Great site! So many deep thinkers here. I love it!

Well, I DID read the article, and, although I found it unnecessarily verbose, I was able to grasp its basic theory and for me, at least, has proven to be quite a profound revelation, to wit:

Non-existence is impossible for the simple reason that you cannot get something from absolutely nothing.

I agree that the Universe cannot have just "winked" into existence where prior to its creation there was absolutely nothing, physical or non-physical, in existence at all, at any time or anywhere.

Since I think we can all agree that this Universe we all perceive is definitely something that exists -- even if only as illusion to our conciousness -- then it goes without saying that something -- even if only conciousness -- must have existed ahead of it.... and then something before that and something before that, and so on and so forth. Perhaps an infinite loop of some sort is the only true explanation after all.

My only fear is that if we look too deeply into the Cosmos, we'll eventually find giant monkeys looking down upon us, chanting, "Boil that dust speck! Boil that dust speck!"

Oww! My brain's bruised....

~ RS

[starlequin]

Originally Posted by Zach

I was just wondering what everyone around here believes concerning the origins of the universe.

I've always been intellectually lazy regarding these types of questions. I don't know because it's not possible for me to know until I've departed the earth. So why bother wondering at all?

[spacedout]

The universe started way back when - a long time ago.

[BillyTheAdult]

I am sort of the same although I wouldn't call it laziness myself, as much as a recognition that my opinion is of that much significance. Which ironically enough is the reason that I maybe would call it laziness as that's easier than explaining.

I am of the view that the universe and everything in it is without cause, it just is.

[ChannelingMyself]

I would be lying if I said I haven't thought about that question before. However, within the last few months I've been reading many blogs and books dealing with spirituality/New Age concepts. Now I realize our finite minds can't comprehend that there was no beginning. We see time as linear so I just have given up thinking about how it all came about.

[MysteryX]

I posted something in a thread about psychic self-defense that is very relevant to your question

For the adventurous souls:

In some of the highest planes of the Absolute, I found a black hole at the origin of the Universe. We did NOT learn this in the very advanced Alchemy class about higher planes of the Absolute! I found it over the highest place we went. When I went to the black hole, I was literally sucked in and I was scared as hell! Am I really willing to let myself die? I had just listened to someone talking about his mystical death experiences and 'being willing to die' from the ego. I decided to surrender and let myself dive into the black hole.

Turns out the spirit can pass but not the ego. The ego dies there. It got me outside the Universe, in a strange place where I could feel several universes. I didn't explore that... somehow I felt it wasn't a place for me.

Several months ago I got seriously attacked by some demons because of unconscious weaknesses of another strong healer. This was a major issues for 2 months. What I often did when there was lots of entities attacking me: I'd go back to the black and stand in the middle, watching all of them getting sucked into the black hole!

That's one way to do it

Some said: Next time stop to visit the being that put it there.

Wow. That entity taught me quite a few things. You have to understand that creating a new Universe is quite a controversial idea.

Black Hole = Vortex = Creation. The Universe was created out of a black hole. The galaxy was created around a black hole. Each of our atoms were created around a black hole. Black holes exist at all scales from the infinitely small to the infinitely large.

The process of bringing out a new controversial idea is very similar to creating a Universe. 'It' did the same process for my business.

First you have the core idea. Neutral and motionless.

Second you have the inner strength to bring life to the idea.

Third you have inner protection to make sure inner strength doesn't erode.

Fourth you have outer strength to spread the idea around.

Fifth you have outer protection to ensure the spread idea doesn't erode.

There are the 5 layers forming the core of a black hole as a vortex. I was feeling very overwhelmed lately with my ideas clashing onto the rational mind of many people. He worked on setting up inner protection, outer strength and outer protection properly. I'm feeling much better!

Once you have this spiral of creation, what's inside can grow like a flower. What happens if you stand in the middle? You make a shadow preventing the flower from growing properly. Get OUT and stand OUTSIDE the vortex.

A few observations about this vortex:
1. Unlike a sun which is a very bright power, a black hole is a very subtle and unnoticeable power.
2. A black hole core cannot be damaged or broken. Once it is set-up properly, the only thing that can ever be eroded or damaged is what's outside the vortex core.
3. This brings a much clearer separations between me and my business. My business doesn't need to energetically feed from my energy anymore. It is now a distinct entity.
4. A vortex is very violent and chaotic by nature. It is about creation through purification. It brings duality back to unity.
5. You don't attack black holes! If you want to alter them, you work on their structure.

A new black hole seems to go through several phases
1. It is dormant while the core stabilizes
2. It is actively sucking what's around and creating at its center
3. When something goes into the black hole (at least for the Universe's black hole), I count around 15-30 seconds before it reaches the center where it is destroyed.

Maybe some of you can look at what was just created and tell me more about it.

The same patterns happen at all scales.

[Mato Kinze]

Struggling to know the unknowable, while futile in its goal, is never an exercise in futility.

In simply asking the question of ourselves, we begin to seek our own Truth.

[Ne Cede Malis]

I relate more to this:

I have no idea how or why the universe was created.
I have no idea whether it just sort of happened or whether it was by some design.
I am a part of it.

That I do know - all else is conjecture.

Ne Cede Malis

[joelr]

Originally Posted by Zach

You have some good points. Of course we puny humans may appear to other "higher" alien races as nothing but simple and maybe ugly. But, just as someone said that there's no "proof" of God existing, there also is no "proof" of the existence of alien races, life after death (an eternal consciousness), or a dozen other things. What is proof? How can you define "proof"?

If you say that the universe just exists "because it had no choice", then you're saying that humans are the (ongoing) result of billions, trillions, quadrillions (whatever) years of try-and-fail evolution, and those that "adapted" to their environment the best survived and those that didn't adapt died, thus the natural selection theory and survival of the fittest. Am I right?

There's one problem with this theory. Creatures don't adapt to their environment, they live where their physical characteristics allow them. You can't take a herd of elephants and drop them in Antarctica and wait a few million years and come back to find wooly mammoths. Animals do not change their outward appearance to conform to their environment. Polar bears live in the arctic because they have been built to.

If evolution is true, why aren't there any "middle" species in existence? No more evolving species? Were they just eliminated? Why aren't there any remains, at all? Or just haven't scientists found them yet?

What do you mean by "middle" species? If you're talking about humans there are dozens of species starting with a species of apes that lived in trees millions of years ago, eventually began walking upright and migrated to other areas. Each species became a little smarter, eventually losing body hair (a different method of cooling the body was preferred - sweat) and on and on.

The same goes for all animals. If you took enough elephants and put them in a colder climate there is a possibility that one could be born with a better heating system, maybe body fur. That one will be more successful at passing it's genes down and soon mostly the furry elephants live and the others die out.
It can work something like that.

If you're trying to choose creation over evolution it's truly a scientific dead-end. My Uncle is a cellular biologist and was always giving me lectures on how ridiculous and under-educated the creationists are. He would explain their arguments and show how they were not scientific at all.

You can incorporate evolution into a creationist picture of the universe. That the universe is a created structure with laws and rules set up so life will eventually evolve. It's doesn't specify that HUMAN life is the end-all-be-all of life or that any particular mythology is real (like Christianity). It just suggests a God or higher being that has creative powers. Or that our collective consciousness, at some level merges into a higher state and creates the physical world.

But the Christians who waste time trying to debunk evolution because their church leaders interpret the bible to be anti-evolution is a colossal waste of time. They did the same thing with the position of the Earth in the universe (they proclaimed it was the center and the sun revolved around it). And astronomers wasted entire careers on thelogians incorrect translations.