Did anyone notice Stephen Hawking contradicted himself?

Hello again Leadfoot

I agree with you that people can appear to self direct. However, I think this is appearance. Consider the statistics of certain areas. When certain conditions are present, depending on those conditions, something is more or less likely to happen than a place without those conditions.

Also, I think we all intuit this on some levels. What are our expectations of how an abused child will turn out? If you witnessed a child whose parents didn't feed it on time, didn't change its diapers when needed, hit it randomly etc. what would your expectations be of how the child would turn out?

Note, I an asking your internal analysis, not what could be. It could be that the child would turn out to be Charles Manson, or a Nobel prize winner. But I think most of us would agree that the odds are stacked against that child. Why?

It is a statistical thing. You believe in raising your kids well so that..? You Increase the odds they will be psychologically and physically healthy.

Your point is well taken that for any given individual, what comes out after what goes in is impossible to tell. However, statistics don't tell individual stories. And individual stories do not invalidate statistics. The way I see it, those individuals just prove that we don't know what exactly goes into our decision making processes.

However, and this isn't formal science, we all know and agree what gives our children the best chances for success. And it works out..statistically.

Note, I define, success and healthy very broadly. As I see it, in our culture, there is a very broad range for being successful which includes a lot of behaviours that Christians and more conservative people might not view as being successful. I can tell that already by Angelgz2's reply, his or her definition of wrongful (evil!) behaviour appears broad and not nuanced.

I just knew there was a reason I didn't become a statistician!

You rely a lot on 'things we all know' and I don't fault you for that. One of the things we all know is that the statisticle average is boring, not interesting, lacking appeal, etc.

Life is the exception to the rule. It defies the 'average', it fights to the death and wins against entropy, it does the impossible - it defies the odds. And interesting.

Hi Leadfoot, again, I'm going to have to appeal that we're talking on different levels. Viewed from the individual, we certainly are "free". But when we view ourselves from above, in a sense, we lose that individuality. And this is necessary when it comes to certain of our actions. The government pines for individual responsibility, but stacks the deck as much as it can to remove any possibility of free action. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. We paint the roads so as to reduce the amount of freedom we have to keep us safe.

And in fact, even on a personal level, you use statistics all the time to make your decisions. You're neuronal function works on averages - a binary principle, it averages the total input of neurotransmitter to tell it whether or not to fire..just an interesting aside..

More to the point, in our world, on our conscious level, we are always using statistics. If someone continues to be a boor, we count and average and if the scales tip to much, we eject. We determine odds of work, academic, friendship relationships using statistics. They are just not formalized like in scientific projects and so we don't realize we are using them..

So, 'life' uses statistics to fight to the death and to overcome entropy and in doing so, tries to defy the odds..Try not to make an assumption that because I say statistics are valuable that I mean that the statistics themselves always and by necessity prescribe a particular behavior, moral or course of action..They are an integral, necessary part of how we understand the world, but they are one analysis..a part of a greater whole..

I like your comments though. I think we agree more than you might think..

Hmm, you sure use lots of difficult English words that I do not know, but, yeah, I agree with the Law of Large Numbers. However, I don't exactly see your point here. What are you trying to say? Are you trying to extend the philosophical skepticism by saying that "there's no way to really know anything", or ...? You remind of me my first year college professor, who taught us intro to philosophy. She believes that it's "all a show between our ears" and that there's no way to know if anything is real. That would drive you crazy now wouldn't it?

Great, glad you have such faith in children. Feel free to leave your teenage son / daughter doing whatever they want with no guidance whatsoever.

Hi Angelz2, whenever I get into a philosophical discussion, I find it important to distinguish what is meant by knowledge. Since this is a philosophy forum, then dot dot dot..

So, when you ask what I'm trying to say, well, what I'm trying to DO is establish the boundaries and the terms of the discussion. I find that lots of disagreement is caused by a lack of understanding of the terms and of what is meant when someone says "I know".

So, on one level, our knowledge is absolute because it is self defined. This kind of knowledge doesn't need to be questioned. On down the line we have knowledge where we need to clarify the referent of what we claim. This is a bit more difficult and science helps us immensely here. At the other end are things we cannot know because there is no referent. No universally agreed upon definition mostly because we cannot probably agree on terms because there is no clear referent to what we are discussing ('God' for example).

So, I am a skeptic, just like Hume. But that kind of skeptic is muddled with many modern or spiritual or what-have-you kinds of thinking that conflates just what is meant by the kind of skepticism branded by Hume and the Empiricists. Hume never disbelieved in 'things'. He just set about defining the kinds of knowledge we can have about 'things' and what the knowledge inside of us is (that part is necessarily incomplete) and that includes that at a certain level we can know nothing about a thing. But at other levels we can fully know it.

It helps to understand what words actually are..and also you might want to look up reification, something religious people continually sin with..

So, yes, I believe there are things and we can know them..either fully or to a degree or not at all. How to distinguish where along that continuum something you are interested in knowing lies, come with practice, reading, experimentation, experience etc..oh yeah and an open mind..

On another tip, I don't think I'm going out on a limb when I say you've completely misinterpreted what Maddie is saying..This is where what I was saying above is important. You've got to sift through and understand at what level you are talking about. Understand where you agree and at what level you don't. You may have some good points, but its muddled, pointed in many different directions at once..

Anyway, the knowledge here isn't so much about 'a thing' as it is experience in life. Something we can know a helluva lot about if we turn our attention both inward and outward and we allow ourselves to question whether our beliefs are correct or whether they could use some 'nuancing'.

That is why, I always say, "there's no fun arguing with a skeptic". It is simply because they'll always be correct that somethings we perhaps will never understand. Something as simple as arithmetic can never be proven because "finding a complete and consistent set of axioms for all mathematics is impossible", known as Godel's incompleteness theorem. That's why, on a philosophical basis, I argue that science takes as much faith as religion, though some people would probably adamantly disagree with me.

So go back to the REAL topic of this post, if at T0, the universe and time "popped" into existence, and at T<0, there was nothing, that still is something coming out of nothing. Maddie kept saying that the key here is time, but that makes no sense at all. Time is "something" and the absence of something is nothing. Saying that before the big bang, it's "undefined" still makes no sense. So something is able to come out of "undefined"? WTF is that? Therefore, if the universe were to have a "beginning" as the current Standard Model suggest, then we inevitably run into the problem of something coming out of nothing -- the biggest logical paradox of philosophy. That's why I say it takes just as much faith to believe something like this because despite we can do all the math, all the physics, we can never "prove it". You just have to take this universe came into existence out of nothing (or that which is undefined) for granted. What's your take on that?

You are correct that "some things" we will never understand because they are not capable of being understood. I don't see the issue with this? Are you saying something different? I am not saying all things cannot be understood. Just important to know at what level it can be understood and at what level it fades into the averages of the quanta..



Yah, well, there's the rub. Science is a methodology and therefore not apprehended by faith. You have committed the sin of reification there. Scientific methodology is true by definition.

I think you mean that what people believe based on scientific results are based on faith. This is sticky. In a sense you are correct. But only with qualification. You see, here's where religious people get themselves into trouble. The same analysis they use for deciding one thing that suits them is not the same analysis used for something that doesn't.

So, for something that doesn't concern you (religiously/morally), the evidence will add up to a belief, even though that evidence doesn't equate to some 'hard' proof. Whereas the same level of evidence propounded for say, something like evolution, is not enough. You seem to require absolute proof. Even then it is doubtful you would believe. A famous Christian philosopher whose initials are William Lane Craig, in a debate once said that even were he to be taken back in time to the tomb where Jesus was buried and showed his body in his tomb many days after the 3 days he supposedly rose, he would still believe in Christianity (this even assuming he were to believe it was actually Jesus' body he was looking at).

Now, I get that he doesn't really know that he would keep his faith, but that's not the point. The point is that there is just no way to convince religious people, no evidence 'hard' enough for admittance of religious error. And to be fair, that's because most things don't have that degree of hard evidence. We are just not THAT smart.

So, on one level I agree with you that people's ideas based on scientific findings are ultimately, at root, faith based. However, and this is the important part:

YOUR INFERENCE THAT THIS PUTS SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT/IDEAS ON AN EQUAL FOOTING WITH IDEAS BASED OFF OF SCIENTIFIC FINDINGS IS A FALSE EQUIVALANCY.

Sorry, my caps lock got stuck.

In "real life" we just don't assign the same weight to ideas based off of religious thought than we do for ideas based off of science. And again, typically, for those more conservative religious people, to reiterate, you guys cop to this fact when the idea is something you perceive doesn't challenge your faith..

Yes, I am talking about the results obtained by scientific methods. However, please understand that we are constantly discovering new results that are in conflict with previous results. For instance, for hundreds of years we thought Newtonian physics is all there is, until Einstein showed that there's more to it, then there's results from quantum mechanics that even shocked Einstein.

So, I'll have to disagree with you on this aspect that Scientific methodology is true by definition because the building blocks of science is math and statistics and both are based on assumptions and axioms. Based on those axioms, we do experiments and formulate hypothesis and test for their validity. Null hypothesis is rejected when there's sufficient evidence to the contrary.

Before Maddie jumps out and criticize me again on my lack of knowledge in physics, let me declare that everything I heard are based on documentaries I've see or books I've read -- for dummies, NOT Ph.D level physics. Please understand the way I understand it is that some key aspects of the Standard Model relies on the existence of theoretical partials: Superpartners and Graviton are mathematically deduced, but aren't observed at all. So how can you call that a methodology true by definition? It takes as much faith to define it as "true" as it takes to believe in God (For argument's sake, I didn't say that's God = Jesus by the way).

Oh yeah by the way, something I perceive definitely changes my faith. It could strengthen it, or it could occasionally weaken it. I had an interesting conversation with my cousin, who is an atheist. I saw a documentary in which some scientist (forgot who) said you don't need God because if there are an infinite number of universe exists and all possibilities are played out, then, there's no such thing as coincidence. My cousin said, then "what do you call that which holds all the multi-verse?" I said, well it's just there -- it's eternal. Then he said, "then if you say it's just there, what's the difference between believing that vs believing God?"

I think we are making progress..Lets continue..

So, when I say that science is a methodology, I don't mean anything about the results obtained. The term 'methodology' should clue you in there. It means a way of going about something. Like flying an airplane or building it. There is a methodology involved. There wasn't at one time. But now, we have the methodology to make a vehicle fly. The methodology isn't questioned, its been proven to work.

This is what I mean when I say its self defining. The methodology either works for a given thing or it doesn't. Scientific methodology for the most part prescribes what will work for it and what won't. If you want to add to things to it that previously proved recalcitrant, then it is incumbent on you to prove that it can fit..

With that in mind, I think what you are talking about are the results obtained when using that methodology. These are two different things and the difference, in my opinion, is worth noting.

Also, it appears that when you say that math/stats are based on assumptions (your use of the term 'axiom' is incorrect here as that would grant validity, not invalidate it) is..shall we say..conflated?

To the extent that something is an assumption, that is noted and accounted for in the 'methodology' of science (if you understand stats, you will understand this - look up confidence intervals etc.). The numbers themselves are not what's at issue.

When people talk about numbers and infinity and uncertainty surrounding numbers and theories etc, it is easy to think numbers are real things and not what they really are: logical constructions. When you are doing numerical calculations, what you are doing is exercising that part of your brain that deals in logic. Numbers don't exist 'out there'.

In addition to the physics class, you may want to take a statistics class as well as a logic class. I think you might have some great points, good arguments to make for your defense of deity, but you need to refine how you talk about it so you are more clear and don't conflate things..it is a bit hard to untangle what you are talking about so our terms are clear for discussion..

I got lost with Laurence Krauss before I paid attention to Steve. Those two are better then soccer.

When anyone speaks about deity, it's based on faith and nothing else. That's because deity cannot be objectively proven. When anyone talks about their god, it's impossible for them to show us objective proof of his/her/its existence.

I think you are not cleared about this yourself, no offense intended, as I am not sure what you mean by self-defining. Nothing can self-define. We humans define something as such which may or may not be correct.

Also, I think you a nit picking here a bit. A consequence of Godel's Incompleteness Theorem is that there is no true axiom so I use axiom and assumption interchangeably, which even my professor does in an advanced math class. A set of assumptions or most people call "axioms" are formed before you can carry out a deductive process (since you say I "need" to take logic class, let me show you what a logic class would look like):

For all elements X in set A, X is red
B is an element in set A
Therefore, B is red.

I'd love to use logical operators, but, I'm too lazy to turn on symbols. The conclusion, that is, the last statement is true based on the deductive statements based on first statement, which is an assumption or "axiom". In other words, it's taken to be true and it does NOT prove its own truthfulness.

But right now, the cutting Edge physics are mostly based on Math, and then subsequent experiment to find these "theoretical particles" Here's some fruit for your thought:

Nature tends to be symmetrical as much as it could be
Particles are part of nature
Therefore, particles must have their super-partners called "Sparticles"

Unfortunately, we are yet to discover them. If they don't exist, then to what extent are the exceptions? Therefore, based current understanding, we make assumptions then we draw conclusions, let it be statistical or any other methods. One day we realize that the initial assumption is wrong, then we correct it and then realize it has vast implications and we have to go back to the drawing board.

I don't doubt scientists understand these themselves. The public, however, takes our current understanding of science as absolute. That is very, very unfortunate, and is in my view, sheer arrogance. In fact, again, it's Maddie that brought up this topic of science vs religion. I personally don't even care much -- you believe what you want to believe. The purpose of this thread was to see whether there's any chance that Hawking could have been wrong. Not wrong about the Big Bang, but wrong about time travel. His entire logic is based on this:

Something cannot come out of nothing -- Axiom
To travel back in time, something must come out of nothing -- premise
Therefore, time travel is impossible -- conclusion

However, obviously in the big bang, something came out of nothing so WTF? So far none of the replies has proven anything otherwise.

Your points are well noted..I could use a logic class! Touche!

Yes, sorry, I was not clear, when I say 'self-defining' I mean that it is so because we humans define them as so. We are in agreement here.

What I am responding to is:

"So, I'll have to disagree with you on this aspect that Scientific methodology is true by definition because the building blocks of science is math and statistics and both are based on assumptions and axioms"

That methodology is true by definition because we make it so. A methodology is a series of steps taken to get to some result. It speaks nothing about the results themselves and nothing about the factors plugged into the methodology.

Its like a manual to build something. We don't say the plane manual is bad if you can follow the directions and your plane flies as the manual says it should or if it doesn't fly (assuming others have used the manual and have built planes that fly). Same with scientific methodology. You follow the rules and as long as you plug in the right factors, you get science. However, those results may or may not be valid, they may not even make sense. The whole 'scientific' study may be bogus. But the methodology itself isn't affected. In fact much of the methodology defines what is acceptable and what isn't.

It seems to me you are speaking about the actual experimental factors themselves and maybe the results, interpretation and hypothesis. This is not what I am speaking about. Am I being nit-picky? Maybe. I don't know, but I can tell you that these things, to me, are worth being picky about because when you lump them all together, it is hard to tell what about science you are criticizing.

Like I said, you probably have some great points about what aspects of science are left wanting when it comes to knowledge, but its very hard to sift out your wheat from your chaff because, as I read you, you combine what I think are separate things and so things that don't deserve it, get burned along with, maybe, what should..

You are probably right about the "Method itself is true". Okay, I'll accept this. So, like you said, we are getting somewhere. It appears what I really meant is that the "inputs" of some methods can be wrong, although we "assume" them to be true based on past experience or observation. As a result, the results are probably false as well. That's basically the whole disagreement I had with Maddie when I said that science relies on just as much faith as religion.

To me, if you have to make certain, unproven assumptions about things, why not just believe God? Someone believing something simply because it's assume to be true without a shed of proof, what do you call that, if not faith?

But, since you said I am saying a lot of different things, I'll point out your initial posts are also saying a lot of different things. That's because when someone brings something to the table, I tend to respond to what they are saying. In either case, it seems you want to say that scientific method is true. Okay, so it's true, then what? What is that you are ultimately trying to say or prove me wrong here?

False. That's because you don't understand the definition of science.

First I’m not trying to prove you wrong. I’m not even saying you are wrong about certain of your religious beliefs (though I might say that the reasons you give are spurious).

I’m attempting to get clarity on what we are discussing; which we might appear to have done. So, if I read you right, ‘science’ isn’t the ‘bad guy’. It’s certain claims made by people using scientific methodology that are at issue.

Now that we have got a little clarity, we could now move on to argue: What specific claims are made using scientific methodology about the universe or “things” do you have a problem with? THOSE things and the conclusions certain people derive from them are the things which you have issue with, nay? Not science wholesale?

So when you say that SCIENCE relies as much on faith as religion, that’s being a bit disingenuous. You are wholesaling science to the consignment bin!

What really should be said is that there are CERTAIN conclusions people make when studying the results of a PARTICULAR phenomenon using scientific methodology that you believe rely on faith. There is a difference here. One is the wholesale destruction of something called science. The other only says that you disagree with particular conclusions or perhaps that certain phenomenon are not amenable to study via scientific methodology.

I don’t need faith to believe in the science of flying via a helicopter. Maybe though I might need faith to believe in the creation of the universe? I don’t know. Is the latter amenable to science? There are a lot of arguments back and forth on this issue that don’t need the conflation of “science sucks” or science (wholesale) needs faith etc. In fact maybe it’s impossible for science to be faith-dependent depending on your definition of science. To whit, some believe something is not science unless the thing studied is theoretically capable of being falsified.

Again, maybe you think I'm being nit-picky. But this is philosophy and science and you need to refine and define your terms to have a proper discussion about it. The big-boy articulation pants have to be worn. Virtually nothing that we have gained viz a viz science would be available to us now without being able to properly define terms. Philosophy is no exception and the reason it has made the strides it has is because a bunch of folks got together post 17th century (especially in the 20th century) and began to articulate the semantic errors all the previous philosophers made (see Bertrand Russell and his ilk) and corrected assumptions (using scientific discoveries no less!) that were made by previous philosophers.

If you are good with this, maybe then I can respond to your question about why not to just believe in God? Reify!

I think this is called 'theory.' The scientific method is quite reliable, and many depend on its findings because it can be repeated with the same results. It's when science finds better methods to find the correct answer is when the 'scientific method' can be relied upon.

This is the first and foremost misunderstanding most people have when I say science relies on as much faith as religion -- you automatically assume that any type of "faith" is bad. I never said "science suck", and, in fact, science answered a lot of questions and I was furious when my cable company put the Science Channel to another package that I must pay $20 more for it. In addition, you are perfectly right that you don't need to rely on faith to know that flying a helicopter is mostly safe.

Just like 90% of scientific theories don't need faith, much of the religious text are actually ethical teachings and philosophy much like any other texts by ancient philosophers. You don't need faith to evaluate the validity those teachings. Faith comes in when you say "God created the universe". You can disagree with this statement, as much as you can disagree with any UNPROVEN scientific theories but that DOES NOT mean either is a vice. The ONLY part of faith-based religion that requires faith is the belief of a benevolent, omniscient and omnipotent God. You need to understand that science and religion are both evolving. Historically, people has personified God as an actual being, but that is rather a limitation of human vocabulary to describe an existence far beyond our own. The "faith" part led us to believe that this "being" is the manifestation or everything "good" and that he created the universe and everything else out of good intentions regardless what they are.

So what's the "faith" part of science?

POSSIBILITY 1. The big bang happened and we have absolutely no idea what happened before that, and possibly won't ever know. Using Stephan Hawking's own words "asking what's before the big bang is like asking what's south of south pole. This is kind of implying "something came out of nothing" and we must accept this without proof.

POSSIBILITY 2. The universe or "multiverse" is eternal and there's no beginning or end, and obviously, if this is true, there's no way to prove it.

POSSIBILITY 3. A supreme alien race created the universe and us and they've existed for as long as we can possibly understand. Their intentions can be good, bad or indifferent. Occam's Razor here -- why add an extra layer when you can say they are God(s).

So out of the above three possibilities, which one can you prove to be true? So if you must take one of the above for granted, then why not just believe in God?