Yes, I think we are getting somewhere. I also think that you have a problem in each of your two points.
In the first, you’re assuming that there must be a purpose, a satisfactory answer to the why question. I reject this because I see no reason to think that the universe has any intrinsic purpose or meaning. Random events happen all the time with no reason or purpose.
In the second, I think you’re simply confused over what is and isn’t possible.
In the first, you’re assuming that there must be a purpose, a satisfactory answer to the why question. I reject this because I see no reason to think that the universe has any intrinsic purpose or meaning. Random events happen all the time with no reason or purpose.
In the second, I think you’re simply confused over what is and isn’t possible.
This might be a pedantic detail but time, like space, is a property of the universe that started with the big bang. There was no before the big bang.ivdavid said:Assuming the big bang really happened, the starting point should be even before that - namely,the primordial hot and dense initial condition.
Yes it can. It gives the answer: for no reason. Do you really question why random events happen? Do you ask why this week's lottery numbers were what they were? Or why a particle of radioactive material decays when it does? There isn't necessarily a reason why, yet you're assuming that there must be.Random chance can never answer the question 'why'.
No. That's precisely the point.He might observe that random chance triggered off many things but there isn't any purpose to be found in random chance, is there?
You've now moved beyond science and into metaphysics. Tread carefully.How can I meaningfully conclude that there is no meaning in our world?
No it isn't. Some objects, like genes, create copies of themselves as a property of their physical structure. It's nothing mystical. It's something that those elements arranged in that pattern do. In the primordial soup of the ancient oceans, billions upon trillions of molecules would have been formed by random combinations of those elements. There's nothing conceptually impossible about the idea that one out of this multitude would have had the necessary structure (though it would have been far simpler than the genes of a living organism).But a 'self-replicating' molecule out of 'chance' is conceptually impossible.
I don’t understand what you mean by an intrinsic property here.How can something created by random chance attain and exhibit an intrinsic property - namely that of self-replication?