It could suggest a few things. Intentionality is one; another is the anthropic principle, which comes in a few variations.
A common one is that it is clearly too much of a coincidence that the physical attributes of the universe (the strength of charge on an electron, the strength of the fundamental forces, etc.) have just the right values to allow particles, stars, planets, molecules, life, etc. to form. A slight change in the value of many of these attributes would result in a dead or empty/dark universe.
Amazing coincidence. Or maybe not. If there are many universes, each with different values of the attributes then maybe all but one are empty/dead. The one which isn't is obviously the one that we're in, observing it to have just the right values to support... etc. Some see that as near proof that there can't be just one universe.
Having said that, this universe seems to be dead (although not empty/dark) apart from our planet. If we're the only life in this universe (which blows my mind) then maybe this universe's parameters are only just about capable of supporting life. Perhaps other universes have better parameters and are teeming with life on every planet.
Or maybe there is a creator, but it isn't the adult version of Father Christmas, it's a small project team working on universe simulation and we're just one of their attempts, running on a GPU cluster. I've never bought into simulism though - it seems too much like the kind of dumb chain of if-thens that philosophers love to generate definitive outcomes from.
Boy your post is a lot to unpack. I know the alternate universes idea is one explanation for much of quantum theory. But that's hard to grasp. You have some interesting ideas in your post.
I just finished a short book Quantum Body by Deepak Chopra and he thinks reality is created by conscious awareness. (Things don't exist until we are aware of it!?). He also postulates all living things have a quantum body in addition to our known physical body and it's this quantum body that organized all our cells and microbiome to work in unison to make conscious life.
You stated, "There is no evidence of God unless it is a malevolent personality". With all the pain and suffering in the world I can see why you would think that.
I don't know the reason. Religious people will just say have faith that there are good reasons but we can't know them.
I have some other thoughts on this. (Not reasons just thoughts about it) A baby goes through much pain/discomfort at the moment of birth but an amazing life awaits on the other side. Maybe pain or suffering can be thought of as temporary compared to after life.
I went through a time when my wife had a painful life threatening illness. (She is fine now). As I look back on that time, I have to honestly say it was a period when I was the best person I have been.
wow! sorry you two have had to go through that. I realize your story ended well, but so many of these same ones do not. sometimes the pain and suffering doesn't end in anything so amazing - and it certainly seems to me to be capricious. Nonetheless, I definitely identify with your assertion that going through suffering often makes us better. you'd think since the majority of posters here are or were runners, we'd know that what's often the reward is the suffering itself. I get it, Tristan.
You are 100% right about pain and suffering not ending in something positive for many. In fact I came back to your post because I felt I may have minimized the horrors many go through by saying it was a difficult but very positive result for me.
I really have no idea why there are so many people having such terrible things happen to them. You are right, It seems capricious and unfair.
"Before the Big Bang," like "outside the universe," is a phrase literally without meaning.
Or as someone else in the thread put it, like asking "what is north of the North Pole".
This *might* be true. But it's also possible that the Big Bang wasn't the beginning, and other things happened first. We just don't know.
We can see images of the early universe using powerful telescopes, and when we trace things back as far as we can see (~13.7 billion years), we see that the universe was very hot, very dense, and rapidly expanding and cooling. We can extrapolate that back a bit further, towards a moment we call the 'big bang' at which the universe would be arbitrarily hot and dense and our theories break down. Our theories work quite well for the present day and most of the history of the universe, but the closer you get to the big bang the more speculative it becomes.
Sometimes people treat 'what happened before the Big Bang' like some sort of gotcha or unanswerable question, which is weird. But it's a mistake to respond that this question doesn't have an answer - it might or it might not! We just don't know yet.
(Caveat - not really my field; I've been out of grad school for a couple of decades and my work was in biophysics.)
Your caveat should be that this is all cookie-cutter dogma, which nearly everyone who repeats it has failed to examine critically.
The biggest problem is shaky underpinning of the theory that distant objects are so "early:"
- Assumptions about the link between redshift and relative velocity on the cosmological scale remain hypothetical;
- Time, and therefore velocity, aren't really meaningful concepts on that scale, but are rather projections of local time concepts on the terms of the hypothesis used; and
- the "expanding universe" makes no attempt to examine what is the stuff of this "universe," and in what way is it expanding, rather than the things it contains merely getting farther apart.
"13.7 billion years ago" is no more meaningful than "before the big bang." That's just not what time is about.
Cosmology is deep inside of a rabbit hole of its own making, dug by people trained as scientists trying to do the work of philosophers.
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