[PasorBob]

You birds are a faithful lot. I envy you. I accept anything as possible except the self-contradictory.

You accept the existence of the infinite and for causation outside of time and space in terms of your religion but deny them to science.

Either they are possible or they or not.

If you like Tegmark, then you must admit to transformations. Many worlds transforms into wave function collapse (in terms of perception). Superposition transforms into classical results (again in terms of perception). And yet you believe that the universe is “expanding” even though the way you seem to use the term is meaningless. You say that in the absence of space things cannot exist and yet you base your intellectual life on their existence. You say that in the absence of time, events cannot occur. And yet your world-view depends on the opposite.

Dear grasshopper, snatch the pebble from my hand :)

[Alamo-Girl]

To the contrary, God is not "in" time or space. Time and space are not properties of God.

Neither therefore can the term "physical causation" or any other physical terms, e.g. physical laws, operate as restrictions on God.

God is the only possible candidate for the uncaused cause (first cause) of causation.

All physical cosmologies rely on space/time for physical causation (e.g. multi-verse, multi-world, cyclic, ekpyrotic, imaginary time.) They cannot have an infinite past (plentitude argument, everything that can happen did) because there was a beginning of real space and real time. All they do is move the goal post to prior space/time which also had a beginning, i.e. a finite chain of prior physical causation.

Truly, the only closed cosmology known to me is Max Tegmark's Level IV Parallel universe which is closed precisely because it is radical Platonism. In his view, the perceptible physical world (the frog view) is a manifestation of the real mathematical structures which actually exist outside of space and time.

“A mathematical structure is an abstract, immutable entity existing outside of space and time. If history were a movie, the structure would correspond not to a single frame of it but to the entire videotape. Consider, for example, a world made up of pointlike particles moving around in three-dimensional space. In four-dimensional spacetime — the bird perspective — these particle trajectories resemble a tangle of spaghetti. If the frog sees a particle moving with constant velocity, the bird sees a straight strand of uncooked spaghetti. If the frog sees a pair of orbiting particles, the bird sees two spaghetti strands intertwined like a double helix. To the frog, the world is described by Newton’s laws of motion and gravitation. To the bird, it is described by the geometry of the pasta — a mathematical structure. The frog itself is merely a thick bundle of pasta, whose highly complex intertwining corresponds to a cluster of particles that store and process information. Our universe is far more complicated than this example, and scientists do not yet know to what, if any, mathematical structure it corresponds.

“The Platonic paradigm raises the question of why the universe is the way it is. To an Aristotelian, this is a meaningless question: The universe just is. But a Platonist cannot help but wonder why it could not have been different. If the universe is inherently mathematical, then why was only one of the many mathematical structures singled out to describe a universe? A fundamental asymmetry appears to be built into the very heart of reality.”

Tegmark, Max, “Parallel Universes,” Scientific American, May, 2003

His cosmology is closed precisely because mathematical structures - Platonic forms - are not "in" space or time.

We began with a scientific image of the world that was held by many in opposition to a religious view built upon unverifiable beliefs and intuitions about the ultimate nature of things. But we have found that at the roots of the scientific image of the world lies a mathematical foundation that is itself ultimately religious. All our surest statements about the nature of the world are mathematical statements, yet we do not know what mathematics "is" ... and so we find that we have adapted a religion strikingly similar to many traditional faiths. Change "mathematics" to "God" and little else might seem to change. The problem of human contact with some spiritual realm, of timelessness, of our inability to capture all with language and symbol -- all have their counterparts in the quest for the nature of Platonic mathematics.

Barrow, Pi in the Sky, pg. 296-297

And even under Tegmark's model, there must be an uncaused cause of the mathematical structures themselves.

But the frog cannot discern this because he relies first on his sensory perception for knowledge. He is a natural man. To him, the particle is in an orbit, the wave is continuous. He cannot perceive by sensory perception alone the beginning and end of it.

The bird whose perspective is Platonist - the "beyond" - discerns this. Sensory perception is not his most certain source of knowledge. Reasoning to the Platonist would trump sensory perception.

More importantly, the Christian discerns the "beyond" directly, Spiritually - even if he does not have the terms of mathematics, physics and philosophy to describe it to others.

For what man knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of man which is in him? even so the things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God. Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the spirit which is of God; that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God.

Which things also we speak, not in the words which man's wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth; comparing spiritual things with spiritual.

But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know [them], because they are spiritually discerned. – I Corinthians 2:11-14

For this reason, the Freeper survey on how we know what we know and how certain we are that we know it was quite helpful. Oftentimes, the correspondents are not speaking the same language.

To God be the glory!