Atheism, Theism and Big Bang Cosmology, by Quentin Smith

[ActobogG]

Quentin Smith nears "it" with his "Atheism, Theism, and the Big Bang Cosmology." But what is overlooked time and again is a definition of God; God mathematically defined.

When talking about the Big Bang, you really have to visualize what was there before it. If something comes into existence from nothing, and takes form in an area that was not there before, then where did that thing come from and what type of existence does it have? That unanswerable question is where the concept of God comes from. Man cannot conceive an explanation for so alien a concept as something from nothing, so he creates an entity that can. Only here he creates a greater mystery than the one he was earlier faced with.

Three dimensions or four, one mathematical concept is ever-present, and that is the controlling presence of pi. Controlled rates of expansion and contraction can be charted with pi, more so than we think. Say you square the speed of light, roughly 186,000 mps. You get a pi, with a large value inconsistency. You need to move that decimal point a vast distance to lessen the enormous number of the speed of light squared, or to greatly increase pi. That is what the Big Bang is, that is the universe that we live in today, the result of that great mathematical impossibility.

But was this a one-time thing, never to be repeated? Once the universe was created, once it came into being from nothing into nothing, is that it?

Let's define what "it" is. Pi has been proven to be an ever-present controlling force. Man has been proven to need an explanation for his existence. Man cannot bear the thought of assigning a mathematical answer for life, rather he grasps at intangibles like religion. The answer is staring him right in the face; pi is God.

Pi was there at the beginning, and it is everywhere around us today. The laws of pi govern our everyday life. As pi is everywhere in the universe, our lives our created by it, pi is here seen as the creator. Our free thought, which we see as so uniquely human, is nothing more than another manifestation of pi's existence. Pi is God's mathematical name.

When we really grasp that fact we can see the endless universes that are opened to us. Smith gets close!

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[Richard Carrier]

I can't say any of this makes much sense to me.

First, pi is the physically inevitable property of any geometric extension of at least two dimensions. It is literally impossible to have any universe with at least two dimensions in which pi does not in part describe the property of certain shapes in that universe. So I don't see what is so mysterious about it, or how it can be called a "god" when it has no mind and no will and is neither omnipotent nor omniscient.

Second, I can't fathom the point of trying to derive pi by squaring c. You give the speed of light in arbitrary units (m/s). Pi is not unit-defined. So there can be no plausible connection between them, and any link you might find would have to be pure coincidence. Because the fact that the length of a meter and of a second are just so is a matter of pure coincidence, which has nothing to do with the fundamental nature of the universe. Now, if you calculated c using the fundamental constants of the Planck Length and Planck Time (each the absolute smallest possible unit, and thus a fundamental property of the universe and therefore not arbitrary), and then found a correlation with pi, then you might be on to something interesting. But otherwise, the number you give is meaningless. Why meters per second and not feet per minute? Or standard donkey-lengths per average bowl movement duration? Your choice of one over all infinite possibilities is completely arbitrary and therefore can have no bearing on the nature of the universe.

Third, no scientist proposes that the Big Bang came from nothing. Quite the opposite: even on the most standard theory it came from a quantum fluctuation, and the quantum fluctuation did not come "from" anywhere, but always existed--in the obvious sense that there was never a time or a place when that quantum substratum did not exist, for it exists at every time and place that exists (for the present universe is just the same thing, greatly expanded and cooled). I am attracted to the Smolin multiverse theory, in which our Big Bang actually came from another universe, but even on that theory there has never been "nothing."