The other day I read that Stephen Hawkings had said that asking about the origin of the universe is pointless since we can't get information beyond that point. I forget what else he says aside from that but according to his logic he says that the uncaused cause is unnecessary to speculate about.
(he also says that philosophy is dead)
Oh yeah, the point of this thread.
I want to ask: if we can't know what happened before everything then is it really unnecessary to speculate?
It doesn't make any more money for anyone or provide us with more physical comforts, so yes, it not only is unnecessary, it is even counter productive, because it is a threat to our comfort and causes pointless dissension.
>>499441
then such being the case, what's the deal with Dawkins and Co. that still try to prove a universe from nothing? wouldn't it be better to preach pure agnosticism?
>>499431
No, because it's possible that one they we will understand what happened.
>>499450
*day
>>499446
They are trying to shut up the Christfags who are causing discord and are cancerous to all our happiness.
>There are a great many ways in which, at the present moment, the church, by its insistence upon what it chooses to call morality, inflicts upon all sorts of people undeserved and unnecessary suffering. And of course, as we know, it is in its major part an opponent still of progress and improvement in all the ways that diminish suffering in the world, because it has chosen to label as morality a certain narrow set of rules of conduct which have nothing to do with human happiness; and when you say that this or that ought to be done because it would make for human happiness, they think that has nothing to do with the matter at all. "What has human happiness to do with morals? The object of morals is not to make people happy."
-Betrand Russell
>>499456
but according to Hawkings then they would not succeed because they know about the origins of the universe as much as Christians: bum-fuck all.
It would be better to preach from the surest point (from hawking's perspective) to avoid any conflict. Part of what I think makes any religious person mock the idea of the big-bang is the (mistaken) assertion that suddenly from nothing, came everything. It's better to say that we don't know what was there before the origin.
>>499431
If you can not know the unknowable, why try? Especially when it isn't relevant to anything, and it has no causal implications beyond causing the universe.
>>499446
They don't teach it came from nothing. There was a precursor to the universe and singularity was completely different from the universe we know. That's a retarded Christian fallacy. And there's no reason to think there was any sort of intelligence or will behind it. There was something, it was not divine, just a phenomenon.
>>499468
It's relevant though.
>>499468
Richard Dawkins does teach that the universe came from nothing. It's up there in his talks with Lawrence Krauss.
>>499465
It's called fighting fire with fire. If Christfags didn't start their nonsense, it wouldn't be necessary.
>>499478
But it only causes a shit-storm and it would only take some Christian studying physics to start calling Dawkins out for his bullshit.
>>499431
Such speculation does no good, now does it? Pursuit of knowledge is a worthy goal same as the pursuit of happiness or justice or just survival, but this speculation does not advance any of those goals so it is, by definition, unnecessary, and one might even call it frivolous. Does that mean that we should not speculate? Of course not: much of what people do is frivolous anyway. Just don't think you're being a useful member of the society if you devote your days to such speculation.
>>499483
CHRISTIANS are the ones who cause the shitstorm, they start a fire and then whine about atheists trying to put it out.
>>499491
You just said fire with fire. How does fire put fire out? anyways it's a retarded analogy. What I'm saying is, if nobody can have accurate data on what caused the universe, then Dawkins and the other militant atheists might as well call themselves people of faith and believes (the belief that the universe comes from nothing).
I
>>499499
>>499502
Fighting fire with fire is an actual tactic, you used controlled fire to burn the woods around massive forest fire, in order to stop it from spreading.
Russell's teapot makes atheists the triumphant victors, here. Christians lost a long time ago, they're just in massive denial.
>>499518
But Dawkings and Co. are literally touting another teapot if what Hawkings says is true. If their objective is to undo the foundations of Christianity or whatever then they would do good to not have weak foundations themselves.
>>499418
In the realm of cosmology, the debate between theism and atheism is really only a quibble over details. Both sides agree there must be some ultimate entity, which is the eternal first cause and ground of all being, the end point of all explanations. They only disagree over what properties this “ultimate being” has. Theists think it has a whole plethora of amazing powers and attributes, including the most complex mind imaginable. But as atheists point out, there is no evidence for any of those tacked-on assumptions. There are only two properties we can be sure the ultimate being has: its nature is to exist, and it had a reasonable chance of producing our universe exactly as we see it. We can’t say anything more than that without sufficient evidence. And there is no actual evidence for any of the traditional divine attributes.
Chaotic Inflation theory is a reasonable inference from contemporary scientific observations and understanding, and predicts everything we observe. It holds that those properties of the universe that can be different than they are, like the mass of quarks, “froze” into place when the universe cooled, and due to chaotic or quantum indeterminism, different parts of the universe randomly ended up with different features—some with no quarks, some with quarks of a different mass, and so on. Yet the universe inflated so quickly, that once these properties froze in place in each tiny spot, that area grew to a size thousands of times larger than we could ever see. Thus, the universe we observe appears everywhere the same—but if we could see far enough, we would see different parts of the universe with completely different properties. There is nothing we know that could stop this process, so it must go on forever—and may already have. So if inflation did occur, and it was chaotic, then nearly every possible universe would exist, including ours.
>>499560
your point?
>>499418
>(he also says that philosophy is dead)
Philosophy literally died with Marxism, no one treats the works of philosophers seriously or even with value outside of a curiosity outside of other philosophers and students. It cant die like religion did
>>500130
>Philosophy literally died with Marxism
Not all philosophy after Marx was Marxist. There were other giants such as Nietzsche (in fact many the big advancements have been derivative of his work). Furthermore most would say we now in a post-marxist world. The post-modernists destroyed Marxism, fuck even the communists now are not Marxist. Zivek will you that Marxism is just another ideology, which in his language is a bad thing.
