Has an ultimate beginning.

Rules? As in... deterministic? I don't think we know that.

Neither of the two mentioned laws are violated by your edit.

I agree that they are part of what makes up reality. But claiming that they 'cannot exist without a reality' is equivocating them to a 'thing' that must exist within a reality, like a rock. Now, of course they cannot exist in a reality if there is no reality, and I agree that a reality may not be able to exist without them. But the laws are not a specific 'thing' like a rock is, they are simply a description of the way that the reality works, and it may be impossible to have a reality without them. However, the term 'exists' generally means 'manifests within reality' and so in that sense, no they cannot exist external of a reality. The point I am trying to make is that they may be necessary for any reality, and have always existed in the sense that they may have always been a necessity in order for any reality to exist, even before the 'first' reality (though now we are getting into whether or not 'before' reality or 'the first reality' even makes sense conceptually).

the problem with this subject is human intuition is entirely unreliable because it is based in simple notions of the temporal cause and effect we experience, and that very well may not apply at all.

nobody knows what the big bang represents. as far as i know nobody has even proven that the big bang couldn't just be a local event that is part of a spacially infinite universe.

this subject is entirely empirical and at this point nobody has the necessary information to draw any conclusions. trying to tackle it with philosophy is just mentally jacking off. this is effectively the point atheists are making when they counter the cosmological argument with the possibility of an eternal universe.

Then what you are describing is conjecture about what 'outside the universe' is like, which really is not terribly concrete but simply that - conjecture. Now I fully admit that my belief in naturalism is the same regarding 'outside the universe' but that is because I would expect that if there were supernatural forces at work outside of our universe that they would also be at work within it.

Much of our technology is based on the belief that the speed of light is a constant 186000 miles per second....but that belief may be unreliable because its possible that the speed of light is random and by pure happenstance every observable instance has been 186000 miles per second.

Now my unreliable human intuition tells me the speed of light is a constant and as unreliable as my human intuition is, I'm going still going to put my trust in it. Why? Cause I simply have no reason to doubt it here.

Same goes with the universe. Every observable action so far has had a cause and If I leave God out, the simpleist explaination is that causes and effects have been happening for eternity. If causes and effects have been happening for eternity then reality is ultimately eternal.

I'm quite surprised at the poll results so far. Because it seems to me that if you deny reality is eternal then your forced into accepting a "First Cause" or "Prime Mover"....a concept I didn't think atheist would accept. Why....because there is 0 evidence of such.

There is no compelling evidence for a "First Cause" so does that mean you believe that every event has had a cause?

Does it make any sense to ask whether or not things had causes before cause and effect (linear time, as we see/experience it) existed?

if you are really interested in this subject you should study general relativity before trying to think about it (in simple terms the "speed of light" is the speed limit anything can travel, not just what we happen to measure the speed of light as). in short basic human intuition on the subject is going to be pretty worthless without training.

that does not appear to be the case on the quantum scale, at least in terms of the classical temporal cause/effect you are referring to.

the time we experience began at the big bang, so "eternity" in the sense you are intuitively using the term doesn't have to apply.

again nobody can say if simplistic human notions of causality even apply. for that matter nobody can say that the universe didn't cause itself.

And exactly how was that "speed limit anything can travel" derived?

GR is based on first principals which are not derived but accepted to be true on observation alone. Observation alone opens the door to errors of happenstance.

Sometimes Yahweh is an observable action in the material world, what is his cause?

I don t understand how you can know if something is eternel if you re not eternal. yourself.
For some reason I believe that if something is born or created or apear, it will ultimately die .
Some kind of ying yang.
Sorry I am ununderstandable


not sure about the definition of utimately thu

Can you cite an experiment that shows an effect preceding a cause?

i guess i'm not following your point. the speed of light in a vaccum has been confirmed by numerous methods to great accuracy. there is no chance for "errors of happenstance".

GR itself was certainly not derived from observation. it was derived conceptually and then confirmed by observation.

there are numerous experiments in QM where an effect appears to correlate to something that happens in the future. easy to research this for yourself.

ORLY? Cite?

You can observe that light fades with distance such that the energy twice as far as the source is spread over 4 times the area. However you can also show mathematically that this must be so. You can mathematically derive what we call the inverse square law and predict that light will obey it.

You cannot mathematically derive something like the speed of light or a mass of proton and predict that you will observe it. Your stuck relying on observation alone which is inherently unreliable.

For instance 50 billion years from now a planet much like ours could form in this galaxy and on it intelligent life could arise. That intelligent will look out into their night sky and all they will be able to observe will be their Milkyway. They will know nothing of other galaxies or the expansion of the universe because everything outside their galaxy(including backround radiation) will have expanded away and exist outside their observable universe(due to the slow speed of light). The will not be able to come up with the big bang theory because observation of the facts that lead to the theory will fail them.

Just because zero evidence remains observable of history prior to the big bang doesn't history prior to the big bang did not happen.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed...quantum_eraser

The correlation between the two detectors in quantum erasure is only observable after the fact. So there really is no backwards causality happening.

However, your post was worded vaguely enough that arguing about it would only take the thread off topic. Whatever.

science does the best it can with what it has. that does not mean certain things such as the expansion of the universe or the speed of light can't be said to be reliable based on a large amount of collective observational evidence.

anyway from a technical perspective your scenario probably could never happen. the expansion of the universe is not sufficient to overcome local gravity between galaxies. only distant galaxies are uniformly expanding away from us. many nearby are moving towards us or past us in the wrong direction. in fact andromeda will collide with us in several billion years. there will probably never be a time when part of the milky way is still intact and the light from other galaxies isn't visible. also the (progressively colder) CBR from the big bang will always be there to observe no matter how dilute the universe becomes. not really relevant, but kind of interesting.

nobody knows that for sure, but something that violates our intuitive notion of temporal cause and effect appears to be happening - either backwards causality, or "non-local" (faster than light) causality which violates GR, messes with the relevance of temporal direction, and creates a frame of reference where effects precede causes.

Not this.

I voted No, but not because I particularly believe that there is no ultimate reality but I simply don't know. Given that the greatest scientific minds haven't come up with a consensus, it would be pretty arrogant of me to come to a conclusion. So I have no belief one way or the other here.

I don't know.