A while ago I witnessed a conversation between two maths dudes about the existence of God.
The conversation went something like this:
A: The question of what exists beyond what we know is a pointless or redundant question.
B: How do you mean?
A: Well we know more or less when the big bang happened and before that we know there was nothing.
B: I am interested to know what existed before the big bang.
A: Nothing.
B: That can't be right.
A: Of course it is. For the sake of argument lets just look at your reason. Are you dealing with it as a closed or open set?
B: It's an open set, if the period between the big bang and now is considered as between 0 and 1.
A: It's a closed set, it has to be a closed set, since if the big bang is zero, you never reach it.
B: Now it has to be an open set in order to investigate what came before.
A: That's the point the set is closed. We know when the big bang happened but we will never get there. However close we get there are always an infinate number of calculations between the amount you have and zero, since you can always divide the amount by two.
B: I can see what your saying but I would still like to know what comes after we die.
A: Arrrggghhh!
I wrote to the best of recollection to A&B and B responded with the following:
"A's main point was that it is non-sensical to even begin to try to comprehend what happened before the big bang/the beginning of time, because by definition it is the beginning of anything or a boundary of a bounded closed set. So any information/breakthroughs we have will only limit us towards the beginning of time.
A spoke about time being a closed set [0,1], which is all we know exists. It is therefore foolish to think about the number -2 because in our continuum we can never access it.
Another analogy might be an ameoba in a 2d world having any comprehension of "up". You just can't do it.
Or for example it's like us having any understanding of the second half of our air tanks when we are diving with A. We just don't get chance to get close to it before he starts suckin on his last bar, hahaha!!
We agreed on my arguement that to say that you can't try and think about a creator but that's not to say it doesn't exist. And it may even be intersecting with our own dimension but appearing as something different. Much like a sphere intersecting with a 2D world would appear as a circle. Also, any set Or universe can be extended given an operation so that's not to say that we aren't contained within something much bigger.
For example a set can be extended to a hyperfinite set, given an ultrafilter (I refer you to my dissertation :-p).
Now that I think about it, a nice explanation for the big bang could be the intersection of a hyperspherical universe with an infinite 3D space. In the same way a sphere intersecting with a plane would initially appear as a dot upon intersection (big bang) it would then grow into a circle increasing in size as the sphere passes through, and eventually reach it's maximum size before it begins to shrink again. The way our universe formed could simply be a form of hyperdiffusion along the intersection.
Hope this helps."
I leave it to you to decide how this argument and reasoning might influence your faith.
I also suggest (at Mr B's request) that Messers A and B are not complete losers, but again leave that to your better judgement.
I do know that they were great fun to dive with and decent people to be with.
