The Wrath of the Intelligent Designer

[Cyrus]

Joel Katz wrote:

> our own universal laws indicate as much:  something cannot originate 
> from nothing, energy can only be transformed.  so there has to have 
> been something prior to our universe.  our universe is also only one 
> version of a theoretically infinite type.  so rationally i think one 
> has to posit an inconceivable force as the source of being.

If the total amount of energy in the universe is zero, then there was no 
energy needed for it to come into existence.
(And, by the way, who says the universe is not chaotic?)

 From http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/cosmo.html :

Simplicity and Physical Law

So the argument from probability fails. Many sets of physical constants 
could have produced a universe with life, albeit life very unlike our 
own. But what about the laws of physics themselves? Can we take their 
mere existence as evidence for intelligent design?

Let me begin by addressing two commonsense notions: (1) you cannot get 
something from nothing, and (2) the order of the universe requires the 
pre-existence of an active intelligence to do the ordering. I will leave 
it to the theologians to explain how the postulate of a creator God 
solves the problem of creation ex nihilo, since God is something that, 
itself, must have come, uncreated, from nothing. Instead I will address 
the physics issues implied by the creation of the universe from nothing. 
In physics terms, creation ex nihilo appears to violate both the first 
and second laws of thermodynamics.

The first law of thermodynamics is equivalent to the principle of 
conservation of energy: the total energy of a closed system is constant; 
any energy change must be compensated by a corresponding inflow or 
outflow from the system.

Einstein showed that mass and energy are equivalent, by E=mc2. So, if 
the universe started from "nothing," energy conservation would seem to 
have been violated by the creation of matter. Some energy from outside 
is apparently required.

However, our best estimate today is that the total energy of the 
universe is zero (within a small zero point energy that results from 
quantum fluctuations), with the positive energy of matter balanced by 
the negative potential energy of gravity. Since the total energy is 
zero, no energy was needed to produce the universe and the first law was 
not violated.

The second law of thermodynamics requires that the entropy, or disorder, 
of the universe must increase or at least stay constant with time. This 
would seem to imply that the universe started out in a greater state of 
order than it has today, and so must have been designed.

However, this argument holds only for a universe of constant volume. The 
maximum entropy of any object is that of a black hole of the same 
volume. In an expanding universe, the maximum allowable entropy of the 
universe is continually increasing, allowing more and more room for 
order to form as time goes by. If we extrapolate the big bang back to 
the earliest definable time, the so-called Planck time (10-43 second), 
we find that universe started out in a condition of maximum entropy -- 
total chaos. The universe had no order at the earliest definable 
instant. If there was a creator, it had nothing to create.

Note also that one cannot ask, much less answer, "What happened before 
the big bang?" Since no time earlier than the Planck time can be 
logically defined, the whole notion of time before the big bang is 
meaningless.

Furthermore, within the framework of Einstein's relativity, time is the 
fourth dimension of spacetime. Defining this fourth dimension as ict, 
where t is what you read on a clock, i = sqrt(-1), and c is the speed of 
light, the coordinates of time and space are interchangeable. In short, 
time is inextricably intertwined with space and came into being "when" 
or "where" (language is inadequate to mathematics here) spacetime came 
into being.

Cyrus