On 8/21/2019 1:18 PM, Jon Alan Schmidt wrote:
I suggest that [Peirce] could have offered an argument against
[the Big Bang] -- in fact, against any theory that posits a finite
age and definite beginning of the universe...
No. Peirce insisted on following the evidence. An amazing event
occurred around 13.8 billion years ago. There are many hypotheses
about what it might have been, but no physicist or astronomer
seriously claims that it didn't happen.
Peirce's synechism, tychism, and (objective) idealism together
conceive the entire universe as fundamentally a semeiosic continuum
-- a continuum of mind, including matter as "effete mind"
The word 'fundamentally' is inappropriate. Peirce's hypotheses were
vague. The term 'effete mind' is vague, and his translation of
Schelling's term 'erloschene Geist' as "extinct mind" is just as vague.
The noun 'Geist' could be translated as spirit, mind, psyche, intellect.
The adjective 'erloschene' could be applied to an extinct volcano,
a flame that went out, or a family that had no heirs. That isn't
much different from the word 'effete', which by etymology means
not fruitful. At best, both terms are colorful metaphors. Any
inferences from them are unsubstantiated speculations.
CSP: Philosophy tries to understand. In so doing, it is committed
to the assumption that things are intelligible, that the process
of nature and the process of reason are one. (CP 6.581; c. 1905)
Most scientists today would agree with that quotation. The other
quotations by Peirce are reasonable, but none of them contradict
any science of the 20th or 21st c.
In any case, many hypotheses about the Big Bang do not assume that
it originated from nothing. For example:
1. Time itself is an emergent property. The Big Bang is the name
of one boundary of space-time. Outside that boundary, there is
no time, and the word 'before' is meaningless.
2. There was a universe before the Big Bang. But it collapsed in
a Big Crunch -- a gigantic black hole. But that black hole was
so huge that it was unstable, and it exploded in what we call
the Big Bang.
3. Our current universe is one component of a multiverse with
an open-ended variety of universes with different values for
the fundamental physical constants. Most of those universes
are so weird that galaxies and stars as we know them could not
exist, and life as we know it would be impossible.
There is a huge amount of speculation about cosmology by scientists,
theologians, and people who have backgrounds in both. They have a
century more information than Peirce had. Yet they can't make any
definite claims. I strongly endorse a comment that was published
in _Physics Today_:
When it comes to fundamental questions of existence — in this case,
the existence of our universe and its properties — we humans are
like a fish in a bowl trying to figure out the nature of the ocean.
It’s wiser to accept our ignorance with humility and embrace
uncertainty than to claim certainty with blind arrogance and risk
future embarrassment.
This is an excerpt from a book review by Marcelo Gleiser, a professor
of physics and astronomy at Dartmouth College. See the URL below.
John
_____________________________________________________________________
Book: _A Fortunate Universe: Life in a Finely Tuned Cosmos_ by
Geraint Lewis and Luke Barnes.
A review of that book by Marcelo Gleiser:
https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1063/PT.3.3765
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