|
Harvey, It so happens that I believe in the 'Cuaseless infinite chain". It is one of the ways in which my god is infinite. God and the universes have always existed. Your statement: "In the first case you have everything in the world that has no explanation" just does not make any sense to me.
Infinite timeline chains, as a concept, are not necessarily 'causeless'. We imagine infinite sets all the time (e.g., the set of all reals), and if we had the power of creation, we can imagine creating finite and infinite sets (wouldn't that be fun...).
The problem is what happens when there is no 'us' Kimosabe. That is, if there is nothing to cause infinite timeline chains to exist, then they exist due to a random function (i.e., it just began that way and this infinite timeline just happened to exist). If this were to be the case, then there is no reason why the random occurrence of an infinite timeline universe should be ordered.
Conceptually, there are probably an infinite number of possible timeline universes. An infinite number of those universes are ordered, but a much, much larger infinite number are unordered. For example, if you take an infinite set of even numbers, for every ordered set that begins with 2 (2,4,6,8), there are many more unordered sets with (2,6,8,4); (2,8,4,6); (2,4,6,8);, etc, etc. So, if you remove an outside logico-causal order to the world, there is no reason why each 'moment' in our universe is unordered. That is, there's no reason why our birth had to precede our first day of college, or the evolution of humans had to follow the evolution of life. If a random occurring infinite timeline universe is in fact the case, it seems very odd that we live in a universe that has a consecutive history that gives the appearance of a causal chain (even fooling our best scientific minds into believing this is so). It just makes absolutely no sense.
It seems to me that the Bojowald/Smolin (BS) cosmology explains everything. I see no reason why a first cause is necessary. What exists is a continuing series of similar causes that puts the Mega universe into a steady state equilibrium. Whereas our micro universe undergoes profound change.
As a scientist, Smolin and et al. cannot and should not be responsible for generating theories that make sense metaphysically (at least to certain degrees). The World that they might be referring to might be a World might be one which exists due to a logical order, but it is an infinite timeline world (ala Thomas Aquinas who believed that there was no beginning to the world). There is nothing necessarily wrong with this kind of view. It's only when you propose that this is true along with full blooded materialism that you land into trouble.
On another aspect of your post, I believe that a tree may fall in the forest without an intelligence to observe it. But truth cannot happen without intelligent observation. Truth is therefore subjective.
Well, it can be subjective, or God can watch the DVD version which has different endings.
|
