nothing god is best explanation

Couldn't there have been something which differentiated into those aspects of the natural world that we see in it? It would be natural, just different.

If and only if that "something" were the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Okay seriously. Let's call it (to sound smart) the UNUE - Ultimate Natural Uniting Entity.

I want to think on that pseudo Buddhist concept a bit.

Originally posted by sonship

i dont 'believe' in either. we do not know, so it would be stupid to believe. i think the theory that there was something seems more interesting and currently makes more sense to me. but i wouldnt say i believed it. it is beyond what we know, so ill sit nice and patiently on the fence until we have more information.

What is the harm in b ...[text shortened]... y that there was something seems more interesting and currently makes more sense to me. [/quote]

to me, there is no point in choosing to believe in one theory more than another is neither are conclusive. it wouldnt benefit me to do so.

i disagree, saying i think one theory seems more probable than another is not saying a believe it. belief is something concrete, to me if a say i believe in something then im pretty damn sure that the something is true. to use an extreme example to make the point i think the yeti is more likely to exist than the loch ness monster. that doesnt mean i believe in the yeti.

"So I take this to mean that you lean on the side of something of either space / time / matter / energy existing apart from and "prior" to the Big Bang."

if i lean in any direction on this, its a fraction of a degree. i like the theory of fluctuating higgs fields collapsing and expanding creating multiple universes........but this just opens even more questions. my strongest view is that we just do not know and until they day arrives where we know more ill take all theories with a pinch of salt.

Originally posted by sonship
What I wrote was that there was a consensus generally that space, time, matter came to be in the big bang. I did not say that there was a consensus on the "precise origin" of the Big Bang.

To the current consensus of cosmology it does mean that.

The word "that" meaning space, time, matter did come about in this big bang.

The char ...[text shortened]... claimed about the general consensus concerning the big bang other than a few vocal exceptions.

No, there absolutely is no consensus among cosmologists that the Big Bang that created our universe is the origin of "something as opposed to nothing." Aside from a healthy commerce of multiverse theories, as well as theories that our own universe has been expanding and collapsing cyclically in uncounted successions of big bangs, there are plenty of ideas touching on quantum vacuum fluctuations and universes spontaneously exploding into being in the space-time of existing universes.

In fact, I suspect that only a minority of cosmologists think that before the Big Bang there really was "just nothing."

Dimensionality is a complex matter. The surface of a sphere shows how a two-dimensional space can be unbounded yet finite. This naturally generalizes to higher dimensions, and can incorporate the dimension known as time as well. That is, space and time could loop, so that it really makes no sense to try to identify a "time zero" any more than it makes sense to talk about a starting point on a circle or a sphere. In fact, in different universes in a hypothetical multiverse, the various timelines (or time loops) within each universe would necessarily be incommensurate. That is to say, you couldn't really set up a bunch of clocks in one of the universes which tell the time in the other universes, as if they all really were arranged like apartments in a single building with abutting walls.

Anyone who insists that the very small or the very large must behave like things behave on the scale of humans on Earth is bound to be frustrated, and may begin to look favorably on magical solutions involving gods, demons and angels.

Anyway, as has already been said myriad times here, gods are just a cop-out. Gods kick the can further down the road and beg to have their own origins explained. Gods are an unnecessary hypothesis because they have all sorts of extra moving parts that the origins of physics do not require (intelligence, emotions, language, moral codes, etc.)