Just for fun…. There are age-old questions that circulate from generation to generation, supposedly unanswerable. Surprisingly enough, most of these questions are far from being an intellectual enigma. They can be answered, and answered quite easily at that. Here are a few:
If a tree falls in the forest, and there is no one present to hear it, does it make a sound? Of course! Sound waves are produced whether there is anyone present to receive them or not.
Did Adam and Eve have belly buttons? No. Belly buttons are scars from the umbilical cord attached to us during our prenatal stage of life. Adam and Eve were created as adults. Since they never experienced the prenatal stage of life, they never had an umbilical cord attached to their bodies, and thus they never would have developed a belly button.
Where did Cain get his wife? It was his sister! Yes, I know, that’s gross. But it’s true nonetheless.
Which came first—the chicken or the egg? The chicken! For the egg to produce a chicken it would have to be a chicken egg, meaning it would have to contain the genetic blueprint for building a chicken. But where would such a blueprint come from if not a chicken? Without a prior chicken, there could be no egg capable of producing a chicken. The chicken would have to exist as a species before it could reproduce itself.
Why did the chicken cross the road? To lay the first egg. See above.
If you are inside a falling elevator, if you jump in the air before the elevator hits the ground, will you escape injury? No. While inside the elevator your body is traveling at the same speed as the elevator. If the elevator is falling toward the ground at a rate of 15 mph, your body is also falling toward the ground at a rate of 15 mph (even though it still relative to the elevator). Jumping in the air will only slightly delay your impact into the ground at 15 mph, and only slightly delay your injuries! If you are not convinced, think what would happen if you were sitting on the hood of a car going 15 mph, and the car suddenly slammed on its brakes. Your body would continue to travel at 15 mph, catapulting you from the hood of the car to the gravel on the road. The same principle applies with the elevator.
So there you have it. Can you think of any other examples?
Thinking to Believe 
March 17, 2008 at 3:28 pm
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March 19, 2008 at 4:51 pm
1. Did Adam and Eve have belly buttons? If they were created as full humans, they could have been created with belly buttons. Also, if the Adam and Eve story is not literally true, they (as the first humans) would have had belly buttons when born from humanity’s nearest ancestor.
2. Where did Cain get his wife? From a nearby city. The people in that city either evolved or were separately created. But either Adam’s family mixed with all of the non-Garden humans such that we’re all descendants of Adam, or not all races are descendants of Adam.
3. Which came first—the chicken or the egg? The chicken egg, which was laid by the closest ancestor of chickens. At that point you have a chicken egg, and going forward you have chickens.
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March 21, 2008 at 4:32 pm
Arthur,
Your answers depend on the truth of evolution. I don’t find good evidence for it, and thus I would disagree.
Jason
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March 27, 2008 at 10:04 am
Oh yes! The classic stupid stumpers.
Here’s one:
If God is all-powerful and can do anything can He create a rock so big that He can’t lift it?
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March 27, 2008 at 11:37 am
Definitely! So what is your answer?
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March 28, 2008 at 3:43 pm
Jason,
Fellow CLC alumnus here. I wanted to inquire into the possibility of having you participate in a blogosphere debate with a young Trinitarian scholar named Nick Norelli (URL: http://rdtwot.wordpress.com).
I would host in on my blog (brianleport.com) and would use it as a means of promoting flow to your blog as well as Nick’s. Let me know if you are interested (brianleport.com)
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March 29, 2008 at 12:56 am
good post I enjoyed it
Epikos Church
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April 1, 2008 at 6:03 pm
If God cannot lie, how can He be omnipotent?
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April 3, 2008 at 1:20 am
I think you are working from a deficient definition of omnipotence. You seem to be defining it as all-ability, rather than all-power. God does not have all abilities, but He does have all power. God lacks many abilities. For example, God cannot change the past. He cannot not exist. And He cannot create another eternally divine monotheistic being.
Omnipotence does not mean that God can do anything, but that God can actualize any state of affairs that is not logically contradictory, or contrary to His nature. Lying is inconsistent with His holy and good nature, and thus He is unable to do so. But this “lack” is not a deficiency; it is a perfection.
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April 4, 2008 at 12:38 pm
Here’s one that always ends up knotting my brain up.
Is there any end to the universe? If so, what’s directly on the other side of it? If not, what in the universe is the universe?
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April 7, 2008 at 8:21 pm
Brian,
Sorry for my delayed response. I consider debate a worthy enterprise, but there are some debate topics that are more difficult to debate, and often less fruitful than others. I think the Oneness v. Trinity debate is one of those. The topic is so wide and vast, covering so many areas, that a debate only allows one to scratch the surface of the issue. In such circumstances ideas often don’t win the day; tactics do.
Theology proper needs to be addressed from both the macro and micro perspectives. A debate barely allows for one of them to be covered, in even its most condensed form.
I am much more open to the “open dialogue” format. I have engaged in this many times, where correspondence adds up to 150-200 pages by the end (over the course of several weeks or months). I think this avenue is much more fruitful. But unfortunately, I cannot engage in that sort of dialogue right now. Life has me so tangled up right now that I have only been able to post one blog entry the entire month of March! I simply lack the time for a dialogue of this sort right now. But I would be open to doing so in the future.
Jason
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April 8, 2008 at 10:10 am
Anonymous,
Very good question! I have contemplated this question for some time, and though I have come to no definitive answers, I have some tentative thoughts to consider.
Essentially your question is whether space is finite or infinite, and the implications of either. The scientific evidence suggests that space is finite. According to the Big Bang theory there was an absolute beginning to the universe. Space is both finite and expanding. Given the abundance of empirical confirmation of the Big Bang theory, I would argue that we have good scientific grounds for thinking space is finite. I wish I had a good philosophical argument to accompany the scientific argument, but as of the present I do not. While it is clear to me that an actual infinite number of things cannot exist (it results in logical absurdities), I am not so sure the same principle applies to space. It seems to me that given the nature of space, God could have created it infinitely a finite time ago. Be that as it may, we have at least one good reason to think space is finite rather than infinite.
If space is finite, then there must be a boundary, or edge to space. That invites your question: What is on the other side of space? While this is a reasonable question to ask, it is guilty of a categorical error (thinking in the wrong categories, like using a yardstick to weigh a chicken). Asking what is on the other side of space is like asking what was before the beginning of time. There can be no such thing, because “before” is a temporal word/concept, and there is no temporality the other side of the beginning. Likewise, there is nothing the other side of the border of space. It’s not empty space, but the absence of space. What does the absence of space look like? My spatio-temporal brain can’t even begin to comprehend it, but that doesn’t make it any less true.
While the notion of a boundary to space is difficult to conceive, it is not incoherent. In fact, most scientists and theologians agree that such a boundary existed in the past. Our universe came into being from nothing. There was no matter, space, or time until the first moment of creation. At the boundary of creation, however, matter, space, and time emerged from nothingness. If nothing else, then, a boundary to space existed as a historical reality at that precise historical moment. Space was on one side of that boundary, while non-space was on the other. If a boundary to space did exist in the past, why think it can’t exist in the present? It may be mysterious and even incomprehensible to our finite minds, but it is not incoherent.
To me, the real difficulty does not lie in the fact that there is a boundary to space, but that space is expanding. How is it expanding, and what is it expanding into? It cannot be expanding into empty space, because there is no such thing. It seems to simply be emerging from nothing. Maybe this isn’t so strange. After all, the existence of space emerged from nowhere at creation. If space continues to expand, it simply continues to emerge from nowhere even now as the boundary of the universe continues to expand.
Jason
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April 10, 2008 at 12:48 am
Hi Jason,
I (Phillip) actually asked the question about the universe and “what’s on the other side of it?” I forgot my login, so I posted the question anonymously.
Anyways, your response is thought provoking indeed. My understanding of this topic always seems to allude me right when I think I can make sense of it.
Disregarding the philosophy behind it and looking at it from a scientific perspective, I’m generally left no better than where I started and end up reverting back to philosophy to try to make heads or tails of it.
What troubles me is if the universe is expanding, its expansion should be contained within something more immense then we could possibly fathom.
Another possibility by way of example could be that if the universe prior to the big bang was at its singularity, it could be likened to a stick of dynamite. The dynamite explodes and the insuing shockwave pushes the air around it, causing a momentary vacuum, only to have the atmosphere collapse back, re-filling the void.
Could the universe be like that stick of dynamite, only immensly larger in scale? Could the universe have been a singular mass of material that exploded(big bang)pushing the unknown outward in all directions causing a vacuum (which space is)only to collapse on itself like many astrophysicists predict?
***I do realize that many scientists believe that space is continuing to expand and its expansion is actually speeding up rather than slowing down and contracting.***
Obviously, the question would be what is that unknown that’s being pushed outward in the expansion.
Talk to you soon,
Phillip (East Valley Church)
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April 17, 2008 at 4:29 pm
Phil,
Science is incapable of answering this question by the very nature of science: it can only explore the physical world. What we are discussing is beyond the physical world, so we must look to philosophy.
Yes, the universe is expanding. The question is WHAT in the universe is expanding? According to Big Bang Cosmology it is space itself, not matter, which rules out some immense, static, empty space like you have envisioned. Of course, BBC treats space as if it were a substance that can be spread out. That is questionable. If space is not a substance, but a relation that emerges in the presence of materiality, then what is expanding is not space, but matter. So the question of whether matter or space is expanding hinges on the nature of space: is it a substance or a relation. If you are interested in this, I started a thread on it over at William Lane Craig’s site: http://www.websitetoolbox.com/tool/post/rfforum/vpost?id=2630538 There I bring up, and try to answer the question of what is causing the expansion, whatever it is that is expanding. I also argue that there is a difference between space and distance. I think my conclusions, if sound, demonstrate that it is false to think of space as a vacuum. If space is just a vacuum (the absence of matter), then we would have to conclude that matter is not spatial. But clearly it is spatial. It can be located in space, and takes up space.
You wrote, “Another possibility by way of example could be that if the universe prior to the big bang was at its singularity, it could be likened to a stick of dynamite. The dynamite explodes and the insuing [sic] shockwave pushes the air around it, causing a momentary vacuum, only to have the atmosphere collapse back, re-filling the void.” Actually, the singularity is the beginning of the universe. There was no universe prior to the singularity. The singularity is the beginning of the universe, in its infinitely dense form. In the words of P. C. W. Davies, the “initial cosmological singularity…forms a past temporal extremity to the universe. We cannot continue physical reasoning, or even the concept of spacetime, through such an extremity. For this reason most cosmologists think of the initial singularity as the beginning of the universe. On this view the big bang represents the creation event; the creation not only of all the matter and energy in the universe, but also of spacetime itself.” Likewise Barrow and Tipler write, “At this singularity, space and time came into existence; literally nothing existed before the singularity….”
As for the dynamite and vacuum analogy, the difference is that there is no space devoid of space, so you cannot fill in space. A vacuum is not the absence of space, but the absence of matter.
As for the future of the universe, it is my understanding that given the discovery of the cosmological constant (universe is accelerating in its expansion), most astrophysicists are certain that the universe will not collapse back on itself, but will continue to expand forever until it reaches universal heat death.
Jason
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April 18, 2008 at 3:46 pm
I disagree with your conclusion about the falling elevator. If you are falling in an elevator at the rate of 15 mph, and you jump up and propel yourself in the opposite direction at the rate of 15 mph, you have effectively slowed your descent momentarily to 0 mph. If this happens at the same instant the elevator hits bottom, you have a soft landing.
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April 18, 2008 at 4:53 pm
Jimmy,
That’s true. But I’m assuming the any falling elevator is falling at a speed that exceeds what we could jump.
Jason
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May 6, 2008 at 6:08 pm
If you jumped in a falling elevator going 15MPH, you’d slow your rate of descent to 14.9MPH. Not even worth it.
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May 7, 2008 at 11:42 am
Exactly.
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May 7, 2008 at 11:43 am
I should also add that most elevators during normal operation move faster than I can jump in the opposite direction!
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May 25, 2008 at 12:13 am
Jason,
A couple of responses to your post:
I think my conclusions, if sound, demonstrate that it is false to think of space as a vacuum. If space is just a vacuum (the absence of matter), then we would have to conclude that matter is not spatial. But clearly it is spatial. It can be located in space, and takes up space.
I haven’t had a chance to review the link you pasted in your response yet, but something you mentioned stood out to me. You said, “[…] it is false to think of space as a vacuum.” If you generalize space by a textbook definition of it simply being the absence of matter, you may have a point. However, space is functionally a vacuum (no atmosphere, friction, low pressure & density, et cetera). A perfect vacuum has a gaseous pressure of zero. We have nothing man made that can achieve that, in fact, space is the closest thing that we know to be a perfect vacuum.
What we do know is that space does contain matter such as cosmic dust, as well as hydrogen and helium atoms. There is also the esoteric notion of dark matter, which I’m sure you’ve heard of.
If your premise presumes that space is not a vacuum, and by vacuum you mean simply the absence of matter. I have to think your conclusion may inevitably be off base. If I misinterpreted your thoughts on space not being a vacuum then I apologize.
You said, “Actually, the singularity is the beginning of the universe. There was no universe prior to the singularity. The singularity is the beginning of the universe, in its infinitely dense form.” You then went on to quote P. C. W. Davies, John Barrow and Frank Tipler. You may say that there was no universe prior to the singularity, but as you know, just saying it doesn’t make it so.
Just as easy it is to speculate that “there was no universe prior to the singularity.” One could argue just as easily that the singularity contained in dense form all the matter in universe. The singularity may have existed in an infinitely empty universe prior to the Big Bang.
This scenario may be problematic to believers (which I am, but don’t have issue with) because it infers there may have been something prior to the Big Bang, which believers now hang their hats on as a proof to God’s creative power.
You’ll have to forgive me if I don’t take Davies, Barrow and Tipler’s opinion as gospel, as they are all believers. In the same sense my nose might twitch if someone pointed to Dawkins, Ruse and Dennett as unbiased resources to prove the validity of Darwinism.
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May 27, 2008 at 5:32 pm
I won’t bother to comment on the space stuff since that topic is too far removed from my brain right now.
As for the singularity, I am not just stating this. This is the reigning cosmogenical theory, and has received multiple lines of empirical confirmation over the past 80 years. Even the alternative models (most of which are speculations in metaphysics than real science) cannot escape an absolute beginning to time, space, and matter, including the multiverse theory.
You said, “One could argue just as easily that the singularity contained in dense form all the matter in universe.” That’s what the Big Bang Theory holds!
As far as saying the “singularity may have existed in an infinitely empty universe prior to the Big Bang,” that is nonsensical. If the singularity forms the past extremity of space, time, and matter, you cannot have an empty universe prior to the Big Bang. Besides, the singularity is a mathematical idealization. It is thought of as being infinitely dense, which is science-speak for nothingness.
Of course there was something prior to the Big Bang: God. Even if you want to go the multiverse route, philosophically (and scientifically) you cannot avoid
an absolute beginning. It is impossible to form an infinite by successive addition, and impossible to traverse an infnite. So there is no way to create an infinite history by adding one moment to the next, and even if an infinite past existed, it would be just as impossible to reach today (the end of the past infinite chain of moments) as it would be to reach the top of an infinite stairs. It is nonsensical. Besides that, it is clear that the infinite cannot exist in reality. It is a mathematical idealization only. And besides all of that, there cannot be an infinite regress. It must stop somewhere.
Correct me if I am wrong, but I am almost certain that Davies, Barrow and Tipler are not theists. Davies is a pantheist, which is little more than religious atheism in which the universe is the object of semi-devotion (similar to Einstein). Many think he is a Christian just because he is so honest with the short-comings of materialistic science.
Tipler is now a Christian (of some sort, though from the reviews it seems many reject his The Physics of Christianity as rubbish), but when he wrote the stuff I quote of him he was a self-described atheist. In fact, his work was largely a way to get God out of the picture. I am particularly thinking of his and Barrow’s book on the Anthropic Principle which was clearly an attempt to get around the God conclusion regarding the intricate fine-tuning of the universe for intelligent life. Barrow, too, is not a Christian.
Jason
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May 28, 2008 at 11:21 pm
Maybe I need to do some review, but I believe the singularity is just as I described it, with the emphasis on “…all the matter in the universe”
But even as I write this, it does sound as if I have some elements of the steady state theory mixed in my earlier response. So I’ll need to do some further research.
I understand the futility of trying to traverse the infinite so I’ll move on.
I disagree with you saying “infinitely dense” is science speack for “nothingness.” Rather, I think it’s best described as incomprehensible. Infinitely dense matter is still matter, and that’s something!
P.C.W. Davies is certainly hard to pin down as far as his beliefs. He certainly believes in the concept of humans unique concious, which he doesn’t believe happened by accident. I don’t know if that jives with a panthiestic view.
As far as the authors/scientists noted; unless things have changed, Barrow is part of the United Reformed Church (trinitarian, Calvinistic roots).
Best-
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May 29, 2008 at 5:14 pm
Infnite density is something (I forgot) over zero. Zero is nothing. Everything I have read about the Big Bang theory says the singularity is a mathematical idealization. In fact, on the Big Bang model the singularity is not the beginning of the universe, or even the first moment of the universe. It is logically, although not chronologically prior to the universe. Indeed, on the Big Bang theory all matter was once condensed into a infinitesimal speck, but not the singularity itself. If you were to record the creation of the universe, and play the Big Bang backwards, matter would cease to exist at the point of the singularity. It would be the “state” after matter reached its smallest conceivable location.
Barrow may be part of that church, but what he believes (especially how he translates those beliefs scientifically) is quite strange. There are many Catholics who do science like atheists, so religiouis affiliation doesn’t tell us much about one’s views or manner of reasoning.
Jason
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