Silvers931 said:
Is an eternal and dynamic universe the only sensible universe? I mean clearly creation ex nihilo is absurd, so either reality is inherently absurd or its eternal, mechanical, and logical with no clear "beginning".
Hi Silvers, to a large extent I share your attitude, but I would express it differently so as not to risk offending or antagonizing people who have different ideas about what is sensible and what is absurd.
Here's what I'd say. I don't know of any observational evidence that reality had a beginning, or that existence had a beginning.
For example in cosmology there are various bounce models that fit the data just as well as the older model that breaks down right at the start of expansion.
the bounce models time extends back thru the bounce to a contracting phase of the universe, a reality similar to ours except contracting rather than expanding.
Not to say that is RIGHT. It is just one line of investigation that one can point to, to dispose of arguments people make about something mysterious (or ex nihilo) happening around the start of expansion. there is potential confusion about what is meant by "singularity" and "big bang theory". There are active areas of research about the start of expansion and different approaches to modeling it, resolving the "singularity" and going back farther in time.
So I'd point to ongoing research, with non-singular models that fit the data just as well as the older model that breaks down, and say there's no evidence that existence ever had a beginning, maybe it
always was. And I'd let people draw their own conclusions. I'd avoid saying this or that philosophical belief is "absurd", because it seldom does any good to antagonize people who basically think differently.
BTW I hope things are going well with the AMU courses. I think you said in another thread that you were studying Applied Math and planned to do a Masters at WKU Bowling Green in computational math. Sounds like a challenging program! but potentially very interesting, and involving valuable skills. For that matter, one of the hundreds of application areas for computer numerical simulation of large-scale systems is cosmology itself! The condensation of gas clouds in the early universe, the formation of structures such as filaments, clusters, galaxies, ... the "falling together of stuff" in other words.
