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Edited on Wed Mar-11-09 12:04 AM by struggle4progress
when considering such questions
On current knowledge, time and space have no absolute meaning, and the order of events in time depends on how one watches. One might therefore want to be cautious about inquiring into whatever came "before" the Big Bang, since near the Big Bang neither space nor time nor physics may resemble our own. Should the Big Bang turn out to be a coordinate rather than physical singularity, that one could somehow "look beyond," it might still happen that the space and time accessible to us were somehow "finite" without having any definite boundaries
The problem, of determining how the world "actually is" from how it "actually looks" to us, should be well-known: for a simple example, consider merely the visual world; it is very well-described at ordinary human scale by projective geometry, which unifies the theories of points and lines by introducing "points at infinity" and "lines at infinity" (which, despite their strange names, are no different than the other points and lines); but under this theory one can go always in the same direction, eventually returning to one's starting point as one's mirror image. The result seems ridiculous, but of course it will never be possible to test it experimentally, given the size of the known universe. There are other practical reasons to reject this visual geometry, but the replacements are not necessarily less problematic. Godel, for example, once took an interest in general relativity and was able to prove that the following situation was consistent with Einstein's theory: the universe might allow spacelike paths along which an observer could travel to his/her own past; note that here we are not talking about moving backwards in time by traveling faster than the speed of light, but (rather) something like ambling through space until we encountered yesterday. This suggests than in some universes compatible with the theory of relativity, the well-known paradoxes of time-travel could already appear with space-travel -- although (again) it is unlikely that we could have a practical experimental test of the possibility. Just as in the world of projective-geometry there can be no real distinction between an object and its mirror-image, in a Godel-world one's own present and past and future might somehow be confused
We are unlikely to eliminate intractable problems from our theories: the paradoxes of self-reference, discovered by the Greek logicians two millenia ago, were honed into useful and exact proof methods by Cantor, Russell, Godel, Turing, and a host of other mathematicians -- but the paradoxes in some sense remain. Theories risk inconsistency unless their scope is limited: one can have theories, and one can have theories about theories (meta-theories) and also theories about theories about theories (meta-meta-theories) and so on in a never-ending hierarchy, but the paradoxes of self-reference become a danger if one tries to collapse the hierarchy. It is likely possible to provide ever better fragments of a material theory of consciousness, but a unified theory that would allow us to explain ourselves materially, well enough to explain our ability to understand the material world well enough to explain ourselves materially, is likely to engender the ancient paradoxes of self-reference. Science necessarily remains reductionist: this would not eliminate the possibility of endless scientific progress, but it would prevent "a final scientific theory of everything"
My other comment, of course, is that your observation, that "G-d did it!" is singularly unhelpful as an explanation, is not particularly interesting -- since I know plenty of religious people who generally find it as unhelpful as you do, and their religious views arise differently than you think. Your vision of religion as a mode of explanation is not a universal view: one might, for example, instead view the religious perspective as an existential choice, one of many choices we could make. One can simultaneously regard science as the preferred approach for answering questions which are properly addressed by rational methods, without believing that every question should be addressed by reason or by reason alone.
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