Atheist/Anti-theist/Agnostic Troper Group

Goodbye is actually a contraction of "god be with you"

Yeah, I say "oh my god", "god damn it," "Jesus Christ", etc. all the time. They're just common expressions

I question whether I'm atheist a lot. It doesn't help that Mom says that, since I feel silently judged when I'm around religious imagery, I secretly believe in God and am just unwilling to accept him.

I tend to say "gesundheit" to people when they sneeze, rather than "bless you" — after all, gesundheit is just German for "good health", so it's not as religious. Not sure how you would avoid saying "goodbye" if you wanted to avoid religious terms — "see ya", maybe?

Well, regardless of whether you actually believe in God or not, religious objects and images can still carry symbolic power — I'd feel like I was being watched too, if I was under a big ol' statue of Jesus on the cross.

Edited by ClancyGardener on Sep 21st 2020 at 4:06:02 AM

Getting that shit ingrained in you as a kid can be hard to shake off.

Besides, even if you still subconsciously believe on some level, that doesn't mean god exists.

Edited by Elfive on Sep 21st 2020 at 1:11:37 PM

It’s strange how much of our internal language derived from some all-powerful deity that has been scientifically proven to not exist.

Scientifically disproven? That seems like a bold claim. Which things specifically do you think scientifically disproved God?

Well, I mean, if you ask me the case for the non-existence of god is stronger than the one for the non-existence of unicorns.

There's no mechanism by which gods could exist that's compatible with our current understanding of reality.

Well, that depends doesn't it? "God" with a capital G usually is defined pretty differently from "gods". Per some mythology, gods could be something like Superman (i.e. superhuman alien beings), which seems more plausible.

Well, something caused the Big Bang to happen.

I often think what existed before our universe came to be, or if it's the starting point. I just like to think about such things

The fact that time and space are two aspects of the same thing kind of implies that there was no "before the big bang".

Which also means that despite having a "beginning", there was no point in time in which the universe didn't exist. You can sort of think of it as a static, four-dimensional object. What appears to be a creation event is simply one end of it.

Edited by Elfive on Oct 5th 2020 at 12:26:05 PM

Alternately, the Eternal Inflation hypothesis, if one buys into that, could push back the start of the universe potentially indefinitely. Just because it's not possible to meaningfully mathematically trace a geodesic past a singularity doesn't mean they won't go past it in some form. It really depends whether you subscribe more to the QM based interpretations or the GR based ones. We'll need a unified theory to confirm anything before something like 10^-32 seconds though.

Yes, there's many models now that don't have any absolute beginning. I find the Cyclic Model (or the Oscillating Universe) idea fascinating myself.

And what about the multiverse hypothesis?

You talking Many-Worlds interpretation of QM, the string-theory variant, black-hole generation/optimization, or the ones created by the eternal inflation one? There's so many multiverse hypotheses out there.

A bit unrelated, but I tend not to overthink matters about the universe and its creation. To me, I will just never be able to come to a solid conclusion with the little facts we know today, so I might as well leave it to the scientists to figure it out someday.

Good question. Any of those seems more interesting than the brain-dead cliche - like described on another forum which I'm totally stealing now - that "Mr Magician conjured everything out of thin air".

There may be parallel Earths, but things would happen completely differently in them. None of us would exist.

Mathematically speaking, infinite of the infinite parallel universes would be identical to this one. The same amount would also be different in some way, because infinity works weirdly.

Cantor's proofs are cool like that.

Well, we aren't yet. But there are a lot of interpretations of known laws that allow for them. Alternately we could live in a Copenhagen universe or pilot wave universe, and the wave function really could collapse or always be collapsed. But the simplest explanation given what we know of QM points to many-worlds having the fewest extra bells and whistles. There's also every possibility the universe is flat or saddle shaped and infinite (Very likely, especially the flat one), which would mean that there are infinite duplicates of everything in the universe with no need for multiverses.

Edited by Florien on Oct 31st 2020 at 1:23:17 AM

That seems pretty incomprehensible. How are we certain parallel universes even exist if there’s no way to access them?

The same way we know other galaxies exist despite not being able to access them.

I think.

I dunno, I'm not a space scientist.

Well, we can literally see the other galaxies, because they're big and filled with glowing stuff.

Fair enough.

We cannot prove there is a multiverse with current methods. However, it would be a valid explanation as to why the universe is in a relatively stable and life-friendly state, because it would allow us to invoke the anthropic principle. There is no particular reason to believe in a multiverse, but neither is there any particular reason to not.

I once wrote a paper on time travel in 8th grade (no, that's not a typo) that touched on this a bit. I forget what it said though cause I left it in my school google account, which I no longer have access too.