Eternity has no beginning or end.
Sent from my iPhone
On Oct 1, 2008, at 12:37 PM, Christine Smith <christine_mb_smith@yahoo.com
> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> A quick question to all the physicists out there...I was reading one
> of the articles on the ASA faith-science new blog, and came across
> the following:
>
> "Materialistic explanations of the universe have to rely on one of
> two explanations for where the universe came from. The first is that
> the universe is eternal. This idea runs into problems almost
> immediately because of the second law of thermodynamics. This law
> states that the useable energy in a closed system is constantly
> decreasing, which means that an eternally old universe would have
> run out of useful energy by now. To solve this problem, some
> physicists argue that the universe can reset itself periodically by
> collapsing and re-forming in what is known as an oscillating
> universe. While there are logical problems with this idea (see
> William Lane Craig’s The Kalam Cosmological Argument), it still leav
> es us with our current universe having a starting point."
>
> My question is...if the universe is argued to be eternal, does the
> 2nd law of thermodynamics even make sense to begin with? I'm having
> a hard time conceptualizing the argument without a reference to
> time, as in "why should we assume the energy would have run out by
> now?...what if we're close to the beginning of eternity?"
>
> Thanks ahead of time for your responses :)
> In Christ,
> Christine (ASA member, who's definitely not a physicist)
>
>
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Received on Wed Oct 1 14:05:31 2008
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