How was the world created. I have heard 2 basic arguments. Out of nothing came this dust or these particles? Or this dust or particles always existed. Was wondering what you would say was the creation story?

You will have to explain that one for me.

That was my point nothing can come from nothing. I was only trying to see how the athiest says the world that we know came into existance. I was just curious.

If I understand correctly, which I may not, You say that this matter has always existed and that it changed. If it existed forever then it has changed as much as it could have change in the eternity past. I'm no scientist so I might be way off, but what caused these changes. If you say that it is evolving then it had to evolve from a beginning and it would evolve as much as it could in eternity past. At some point thier must be a start. You say that if there is a God he would have to evolve, but if their is a God then why does he have to live by the rules of nature which He created.

Non-material is not the same as non-existent. I am not postulating some nebulous ether or magic. I am suggesting to you a different way of seeing reality. For example. Rather than assume an empiricists attitude (only what can be obtained via the senses is important), why not assume a rationalists outlook (let us begin with the mind).

Non-materialists do not conceive of what is generally known as 'spirit' like its some rarefied gas or whatever, that cannot be sensed. Spirit is by definition non-material. Only a materialist would concieve of the idea of spirit as something qualitatively the same as something material. By making this error they are right to reject it. But spirit is of the same substance as for example 'justice' or 'love' or whatever. An actual thing from mental point of view, but not a thing from a physical point of view.

A supernaturalist accepts that the world accessible by the mind is actually real. This world, if you want to call it a world, (not a place in the physical sense you understand, to use an analogy, we use the term 'cyberspace' although this just means a 'space' of ideas) is what Plato meant when he spoke of 'Forms' or what Yung called the 'Archetypes'.

By way of illustration. Think about your dreams. You apparently find yourself in a physical world. This world is a product of mind. In the same way, the material world is a product of Spirit (spirit is not mind though).

questions wrote:

How was the world created. I have heard 2 basic arguments. Out of nothing came this dust or these particles? Or this dust or particles always existed. Was wondering what you would say was the creation story?

My take on it:

There was never literally "nothing". That would violate the first law of thermodynamics and overturn all of physics as we understand it. Somthing NEVER comes from literally nothing.

It is theists who insist upon a creation ex nihlo, from literally nothing. Are you now positing that God didn't create the universe from nothing, that He didn't simply say "Let there be Light" and make it so, or that God Himself must have had a creator? No, I think not. The theist position IS one of creation ex nihlo, an atheist wouldn't be caught dead believing something that foolish.

Atheists are very well aware of the first law of thermodynamics, and it is this very concept that makes what theists propose, a creation ex nihlo, ridiculous.

Creation ex nihlo is a classic failure of human perception.

No painting comes to exist without a painter, no building is built without an architect, etc. Seems logical enough, but do these people create from literally nothing or is it more accurate to say they assemble existing materials? For no painter starts with nothing - they start with blank canvass and paint. No builder starts with nothing, they start with brick, mortar and blueprints. Something never comes from literally nothing.

Looking at things from the perspective of a First Cause argument, which theists are quite fond of, for something to exercise influence on the universe this causal agent must have already existed. Something nonexistent can't serve as a causal agent; thus causality must assume existence. Theists arguing for a creation of the universe ex nihlo, however have their logic backward - that existence assumes causation.

What the atheist can offer is a scientific explanation that meshes with conventional logic.

If we take matter-energy to be eternal, uncaused - as our best science seems to suggest (see the first law again), then existence is simply axiomatic. The universe just is, and the Big Bang becomes more or less a transitional event. The universe as we know it began with the Big Bang, but the matter-energy was always there, it must have been - to say otherwise turns all of physics as we understand it on its head.

We know that matter-energy is conserved - always, in every instance we have ever observed or theorized about. It is but a simple and very reasonable extrapolation to then say that matter-energy has always been, and it is empirically evident. There is no need to postulate a creator or a creation ex nihlo.

Not only does science point to existence being axiomatic, but simple logic does as well, because "nothing" is an incoherent concept. "Nothing" is not lack, not empty, not the void, not darkness, not the absence of anything, because the absence of anything would still be something. So again, the concept of creation from literally nothing makes no sense, because "nothing" quite literally cannot exist.

In the end, the theist is reduced to demanding to know why there is something rather than nothing, but this too begs the question, because it presumes that nothing or non-existence ought to be the natural state of things. This is like presuming the sky is supposed to be green and then citing the fact that it is blue as evidence for a Creator.

A scientist does not ask "why is there something rather than nothing", but rather "why SHOULDN'T there be something rather than nothing". There isn't anything about the universe that suggests it shouldn't be here and be exactly as we observe it be.

All of that aside, current quantum theories may in fact have room for our universe coming from what would be perceptually (not literally) nothing. Such theories included the universe arising from a quantum vacuum fluctuation that propagated itself, proposed by Ed Tyron in the early 1970s and a variation upon this proposed by Alex Vilenkin in the 80s that was dubbed quantum tunneling.

The most lucid theory going at the moment was proposed by Stephen Hawking and James Hartle, and is often dubbed the ?no boundary proposal?. Their view provides a description of the universe in its entirety, viewed as a self-contained entity, with no reference to anything that might have come before it ? pretty much what I?ve laid out above. For Hawking, this description is timeless, for as one looks at earlier and earlier times, they find that the universe is not eternal, but has no creation event either. Instead, at times of the order of Planck time (10-43 seconds), our classical understanding of space-time is reduced to quantum soup. In Hawking's exact words:

"The boundary condition of the universe is that it has no boundary.' The universe would be completely self-contained and not affected by anything outside itself. It would neither be created nor destroyed. It would just BE." - A Brief History of Time (New York: Bantam, 1988), p. 136.

Smolin's theory of fecund universes illustrate what I'm trying to describe quite well, I think. He essentially theorizes that each black hole is the begininning of a new universe, and there is evidence to support this. What we believe happened at the big bang and what we observe to happen at black holes are quite similar.

In the end, naturalistic explanations of why we are here are infinitiley less ad hoc than supernaturalistic ones, and that's what should concern us as critical thinkers.

Yellow_Number_Five wrote:

questions wrote:

How was the world created. I have heard 2 basic arguments. Out of nothing came this dust or these particles? Or this dust or particles always existed. Was wondering what you would say was the creation story?

My take on it:

There was never literally "nothing". That would violate the first law of thermodynamics and overturn all of physics as we understand it. Somthing NEVER comes from literally nothing.

It is theists who insist upon a creation ex nihlo, from literally nothing. Are you now positing that God didn't create the universe from nothing, that He didn't simply say "Let there be Light" and make it so, or that God Himself must have had a creator? No, I think not. The theist position IS one of creation ex nihlo, an atheist wouldn't be caught dead believing something that foolish.

Atheists are very well aware of the first law of thermodynamics, and it is this very concept that makes what theists propose, a creation ex nihlo, ridiculous.

Creation ex nihlo is a classic failure of human perception.

No painting comes to exist without a painter, no building is built without an architect, etc. Seems logical enough, but do these people create from literally nothing or is it more accurate to say they assemble existing materials? For no painter starts with nothing - they start with blank canvass and paint. No builder starts with nothing, they start with brick, mortar and blueprints. Something never comes from literally nothing.

Looking at things from the perspective of a First Cause argument, which theists are quite fond of, for something to exercise influence on the universe this causal agent must have already existed. Something nonexistent can't serve as a causal agent; thus causality must assume existence. Theists arguing for a creation of the universe ex nihlo, however have their logic backward - that existence assumes causation.

What the atheist can offer is a scientific explanation that meshes with conventional logic.

If we take matter-energy to be eternal, uncaused - as our best science seems to suggest (see the first law again), then existence is simply axiomatic. The universe just is, and the Big Bang becomes more or less a transitional event. The universe as we know it began with the Big Bang, but the matter-energy was always there, it must have been - to say otherwise turns all of physics as we understand it on its head.

We know that matter-energy is conserved - always, in every instance we have ever observed or theorized about. It is but a simple and very reasonable extrapolation to then say that matter-energy has always been, and it is empirically evident. There is no need to postulate a creator or a creation ex nihlo.

Not only does science point to existence being axiomatic, but simple logic does as well, because "nothing" is an incoherent concept. "Nothing" is not lack, not empty, not the void, not darkness, not the absence of anything, because the absence of anything would still be something. So again, the concept of creation from literally nothing makes no sense, because "nothing" quite literally cannot exist.

In the end, the theist is reduced to demanding to know why there is something rather than nothing, but this too begs the question, because it presumes that nothing or non-existence ought to be the natural state of things. This is like presuming the sky is supposed to be green and then citing the fact that it is blue as evidence for a Creator.

A scientist does not ask "why is there something rather than nothing", but rather "why SHOULDN'T there be something rather than nothing". There isn't anything about the universe that suggests it shouldn't be here and be exactly as we observe it be.

All of that aside, current quantum theories may in fact have room for our universe coming from what would be perceptually (not literally) nothing. Such theories included the universe arising from a quantum vacuum fluctuation that propagated itself, proposed by Ed Tyron in the early 1970s and a variation upon this proposed by Alex Vilenkin in the 80s that was dubbed quantum tunneling.

The most lucid theory going at the moment was proposed by Stephen Hawking and James Hartle, and is often dubbed the ?no boundary proposal?. Their view provides a description of the universe in its entirety, viewed as a self-contained entity, with no reference to anything that might have come before it ? pretty much what I?ve laid out above. For Hawking, this description is timeless, for as one looks at earlier and earlier times, they find that the universe is not eternal, but has no creation event either. Instead, at times of the order of Planck time (10-43 seconds), our classical understanding of space-time is reduced to quantum soup. In Hawking's exact words:

"The boundary condition of the universe is that it has no boundary.' The universe would be completely self-contained and not affected by anything outside itself. It would neither be created nor destroyed. It would just BE." - A Brief History of Time (New York: Bantam, 1988), p. 136.

Smolin's theory of fecund universes illustrate what I'm trying to describe quite well, I think. He essentially theorizes that each black hole is the begininning of a new universe, and there is evidence to support this. What we believe happened at the big bang and what we observe to happen at black holes are quite similar.

In the end, naturalistic explanations of why we are here are infinitiley less ad hoc than supernaturalistic ones, and that's what should concern us as critical thinkers.

I think you miss understood me.

I was saying what is the atheist view of the world. I believe the world was created out of nothing, but not from nothing.

God spoke and the world became. Ex Nihlo. It is almost like God thought it and it became. Science if I'm right, might not be, says that matter can not be created nor destroyed. But here we are. So at some time it must have been created. I'm not argueing just wanting to know what the other side says.

 

Sorry for not being clear. What i mean is that there was nothing no earth, no air, no particles. But I believe there was God. He created this world out of nothing. It was created out of nothing from God.

The next thing is Science says matter cannot be created nor destroyed but at the same time i see CREATION, and you asked "see the error". Yes i see it I was wondering how the athiest explains it.

To disprove something that doesn't exist is impossible.

You need proof. A lack of proof, proves nothing.

Although I argue there is plenty of proof of a God.

My point is we should all be open minded that if there is a Supernatural and you're only looking for the natural (science), thats all you will probably find.

The crook doesn't find the cop for the same reason that the athiest doesn't find God. He isn't looking for Him.

At the same time I am well aware of my own bias.

Stick proof in front of my face that goes against the Bible, I'll deny it.

You must be wrong. At the same time do not deny that science and evolution is proven to have flaws over and over...

...and God (supernatural being) would clearify some these flaws, but many people here in this forum deny it.

Although I argue there is plenty of proof of a God. My point is we should all be open minded that if there is a Supernatural and you're only looking for the natural (science), thats all you will probably find.

questions wrote:

For my proof of God (hold your breath). Look in the sky see the sun (not to long you'll burn your eyes) See the moon at night look at the clouds. Man didn't make this, nature can't make nature. Only a God could do this.

I asked for proof. Not for some impromptu slam poetry.

Well, let's go with this: While you're looking at the sun or moon, try looking for an asteroid also - one such as wiped out the dinosaurs millions of years ago, and which would wipe us out if it were to strike. Look in your local cancer ward. Look at New Orleans, post-Katrina. Look at birth defects. Look how a praying mantis gets its head ripped off during the mating process. god did this? god needs therapy.

Can I start breathing again?

questions wrote:

To say that we are here by luck and all of the pieces of our universe happened by luck would be like saying that I had a bag that had clogs, gears, and pieces of metal in it. Then I fell and out came a watch.

Very ingenious, and very original.

By sheer coincidence, there is a video addressing this:

http://www.rationalresponders.com/the_blind_watchmaker

Humor me and watch it.

questions wrote:

Whats the chances. Evolution says we all came from the same gene pool. The trees the plants and all people. Yet DNA research that is coming out now is proving that to be wrong.

According to whom? god?

questions wrote:

You ask how would a God answer these questions?

I don't believe I did. If god would just show up for once, that would be enough of an answer.

questions wrote:

If God made then world, then the world's creation happened when he created it.

No kidding? If a unicorn bit me on the ass, my ass would be bitten when it bit me. And I'd probably enjoy it.

questions wrote:

Evolution has based many of its proofs off of lies and deception.

Even if that is the case, religion is way ahead in the lies and deception category. If science has even one proof not based on lies and deception, that is one more than religion has.

questions wrote:

Many deny that a man named Jesus ever existed.

No...there were plenty of men named jesus, it was a common name (sort of like "Bob&quot. But do I deny that a man named jesus existed who was born of a virgin, blah blah blah, died, un-died, and so on? Well, sure I deny he existed. Because he didn't.

questions wrote:

That is a really stupid statement, made out of hatred of Christianity.

No, it's made out of a love of historical accuracy.

questions wrote:

History has record of Him not just Christian sources, but Jewish and Roman.

Oh really? Like what?

questions wrote:

Proof is right in front your face and you deny it, because of your bias.

Sorry, all I can see right now in front of me is blank space.

questions wrote:

Believe me I say all this becuase of one reason. I do not want to win an arguement, if I'm right there is a God and those that reject Him will go to Hell.

Very ingenious, and very original.

Search around the forums here (or you can pretty much search anywhere) for Pascal' Wager. Humor me.

questions wrote:

Humor me. Before you go to sleep tonight, ask this God I speak of to reveal Himself to you. Ask Him to show you the truth.

I asked for about the first 20 years of my life. Got nothing. How's that for humor?

questions wrote:

What do you have to lose.

Five seconds of my life...which I'll never get back.

questions wrote:

Maybe I'll be famous, I'm the one that got the athiest to say a prayer.

Definitely a resume builder. I heard it makes you popular with the ladies, too.

Makes me want to cuss, but i'm not allowed too.

Does God cause tragedy? Two fold answer, Yes he controls everything and can fix anything. Sin has brought tragedy into the world.

All who repent and believe in Christ will be healed in heaven.

Historians use the Bible more than anyother text.

They may not believe the miracles and God but they do agree with the battles and the historical stories. But I asume you are saying that the Bible lies about a God.

If you deny that a man named Jesus claimed to be God, and claimed to be born of a virgin who was actually crucified on a cross, once again you are rejecting the most basic proofs that history can provide.

Out of pure hatred for Christianity.

And as you asking for God to reveal himself for 20 years of your life I don't what to say. I pray that all who seek him will find him. I will pray for you every day this week. Look for Him.

Out of those dust particles that evolved into our universe today, you beleive love came into existance.

What animal shows love the way people do. When does the lion see the gazelle in pain and go and try to comfort it. When does the tiger give all of his possesions to the animals that need them. Man is different. Man has morals. Morals can not come from nature. Man cares and has compasion, nature has instincts.