only a purist atheist would believe in an infinite past, i.e. a steady state multi-verse.
Thats your idea what an purist atheist should do. I'd say you're lacking imagination, these purist atheists are a creative bunch and can make up a god-less model for a non-steady-state universe...
ST: What do you mean when you speak about a "direction"? AG: Teleology, purpose for which "all that there is" exists - final cause in Aristotelean parlance, the last of four.
Ah, the "What is it good for" question... You are right, a purist atheist may just admire the beauty of it all.
In their worldview all that exists is matter in all its motions, which is to say the dog and the salami are made of the same quantum components and phenomena and nothing else, i.e. there is no "ghost in the machine."
But even in this world-view, there are less complex and more complex machines, the most complex being the living ones. And even without a "ghost in the machine", this complexity is something with a value..
The two most common instances of randomness in nature cited (radioactive decay and virtual particles) are neither one random. The first is clearly the effect of a physical cause - and both fail under the causation form: "if not for A, C would not be" IOW, if not for time events would not occur, if not for space things would not exist.
There you lost me: Yes, radioactive decay is random, yes, it's a physical process. Do you think the decay of an atom is triggered by a kind of inner clock?
PS: if not for A, C would not be - where the hell is B? Isn't it A2 + B2 = C2 :-)
Indeed atheists can justify almost anything to themselves (we call it "living in a second reality") - but that doesn't make them rational in the larger sense much less in their cosmology.
On the radioactive decay, I didn't mention clocks, I mentioned causation.
In the absence of space, things do not exist.
But of course atheists who have created their own hermetically sealed "second reality" to justify themselves cannot see that or anything else outside their self-imposed conceptual boundaries.
To which si tacuissem replied: Almost lyric, but a kind of personal opinion...
If this is a personal opinion, si tacuissem, then please note it's Aristotle's.
I have a friend who's an astrophysicist and loves cosmological speculation. He believes that the universe took its beginning from a random fluctuation in a false vacuum: On his view, that is the prima causa of all that there is. But there is no explanation of where the false vacuum came from; i.e., its cause is not accounted for. So in effect he really is ignoring the problem the first cause. But without a first cause, space and time would not exist, as A-G has pointed out; and so there could not even be a false vacuum in which a random fluctuation could occur: space and time are prerequisite.
You wrote: "...purist atheists are a creative bunch and can make up a god-less model for a non-steady-state universe..."
Well, sure they can. Hawking -- evidently shrinking from the obvious implications of a big bang/inflationary universe that he and Penrose and Ellis had mathematically modeled -- developed a cosmology of an eternal(uncaused) universe by stipulating imaginary time. One can have great fun with such pursuits; but at the end of the day the question arises: But is it true? The scientific consensus increasingly credits the big bang/inflationary universe model on grounds of observation and evidence; i.e., the COBE satellite data on the cosmic microwave background radiation for which John C. Mather and George C. Smoot were awarded the 2006 Nobel prize in physics. The Nobel committee cited their work especially for lending further confirmation of the big bang model, and for refining the age of the universe. The universe has an age because it had a beginning: Thus the universe is not eternal. For the reasons A-G cites, it must have had a first cause that is not itself "caused."
Aristotle also pointed out that an infinitely regressive causal series cannot account for logic or the lawful behavior that we observe in the natural world. You can't get from an string of "accidental" causes in an infinite past to logic and reason. No matter how many "accidents" you have, there is no principle whereby logic and lawful behavior can be the result.
AG wrote: Teleology, purpose for which "all that there is" exists - final cause in Aristotelean parlance, the last of four.
To which you replied: Ah, the "What is it good for" question... You are right, a purist atheist may just admire the beauty of it all.
Well, FWIW, it seems to me that if the purist atheist can admire the beauty of the world without wondering why something that ought to be random, accidental, chaotic, etc., etc., according to his own presuppositions, then he's not particularly inquisitive, not looking deeply enough into the issue of why there is beauty in the world, or how it got there. But if he's determined to resist the idea of God, he really can't "go there."
Lastly, the machine analogy for living beings works superficially, but quickly falls apart on closer inspection. Two points here: (1) machines are fully subject to the 2nd law of thermodynamics, but living systems (to be living) are able to work against it (at least during their lifetimes); and (2) living systems are able to alter their paths away from the paths predicted on the basis of initial conditions and the laws of physics. That is, they are not completely causally determined; but the same cannot be said of a machine. All it can do is execute its program.
My two cents' worth FWIW. Thanks for this interesting exchange with Alamo-Girl!