[TheOtherHobbes]

It's fine to be confused, because the idea that "photons don't experience time" is physically meaningless.

If you plug c into the Lorentz transformation you get an infinity, which doesn't tell you anything particularly useful.

There's no physical way to accelerate to light speed, so it's meaningless to make assertions about how the "experience" of travelling at light speed would be different to the (presumably simpler) experience of travelling at < c.

The problem is that relativity is a classical theory, and it says nothing about the underlying physical processes of photon creation/destruction and propagation.

Maybe one day a Theory of Quantum Gravity will fix that problem and provide a detailed low-level picture of what actually happens when things move through spacetime. But we're not going to get there for a while.

In the meantime, we'll carry on using concepts like "position" and "time" without really understanding the mechanisms that generate them.

And if that sounds obvious, it really isn't. It's astounding that the universe knows where everything is and where it's going. Not only does it somehow keep track of all those changing spacetime relationships within a self-consistent system, but it also generates the counterintuitive geometry described by relativity.

How does it do that? No one knows.

[cygx]

It's fine to be confused, because the idea that "photons don't experience time" is physically meaningless.

It's just a colloquial description of the fact that the time interval between two events along a null geodesic is zero.

[meric]

But some believe it's God who does this.

[TimTheTinker]

This sounds a lot like the common "God of the gaps" argument that Hitchens and others describe, in which a deity or deities are supposedly invoked to explain what we do not yet understand.

Yet it is fascinating that (1) any system of thought (including science itself) must rely on axioms; (2) by Godël's incompleteness theorem, no system of thought can prove its own axioms; and (3) thus it would seem that faith is inescapably required to believe in anything at all.

When evaluating world views, perhaps the best metric is to evaluate which of them requires the least faith.

For my part, when considering the known universe's mere existence, atheism seems to require a lot more faith than theism.

[e12e]

Another way to look at it, is a requirement to accept uncertainty - the existence of unknowns - or indeed "unknowables".

To each their own - but I don't see "There are some things we cannot describe in our system of knowledge" as a particularly strong proof for the existence of God.

Perhaps some of us have been imbued with an unhealthy and naive lust for certainty, in part by an education system that put an emphasis on right and wrong answers rather than on the quest for better questions?

[TimTheTinker]

There's a lot of difference between "there are some things we cannot know" and "all systems of belief rest on axioms that must be taken on faith".

To me, the latter is an encouragement to rationally evaluate existing belief systems against each other, since it reduces all of them to a level playing field. From there, one can apply a simple twofold truth test to each system: correspondence to reality and internal consistency.

[tasty_freeze]

> atheism seems to require a lot more faith than theism.

There is a world of difference between thinking something caused our universe to exist and perhaps giving it the name "god", and believing in a specific god or specific claims about any god.

[TimTheTinker]

Acknowledged. Advocating for a more specific form of theism would require more specific arguments.

[meric]

1. We give capital letters to the Big Bang, certainly we can have capital letters to the word to describe the cause of the universe, God?

2. God is not part of this universe.

3. God, having been the cause of this universe, can be described as all powerful - at least in the same way Big Bang was powerful.

4. God is outside of time.

The above requires no faith at all - to me it's obvious God described in points 1-4 is true.

Now the following requires a degree of faith:

5. God is one, indivisible, at least in the same way a quantum (by definition) is indivisible.

6. God, rather than having zero consciousness, is completely conscious, having equal or more consciousness than all the consciousness in this universe.

If God is all powerful by definition of having caused the universe then I find it harder to believe the specific claim that God in fact, is not conscious, even less than a starfish. And when we are talking about God, it's more likely to be all or nothing, so my specific claim is that God is completely conscious, and being outside of time, all-knowing.