I would say that these hypotheses are examples of some form of mental blindness.
The problem with these hypotheses is that they do not tell how everything started from ‘nothing’. They base their calculations on the natural laws of this universe and often utilize calculations about what happens in vacuum. Before this universe (or a comparable existence), there was no vacuum (vacuum is something*), there were not even the natural laws that operate in this universe.
If this universe started from a comparable existence where similar laws worked, that would only push the starting point a bit further away in time. It would not explain how something emerged from nothing.
Nothing may be difficult to imagine, even for cosmologists. Nothing means that there is no place, no time, no rules or laws, no events, no cause and effect. Definitely not quantum fluctuations.
Christianity assumes an exception when it suggests that in the nothingness, there was something - God. That is a matter of faith, not something that could be shown to be true.
Edit:
Clarification: vacuum is a space entirely devoid of matter. That means that it has a location in space-time. A vacuum within space-time is subject to the laws of this universe and affected by the force fields around it. Photons and possibly other particles (gravitons, tachyons, etc) travel through that location.
If we are talking of a vacuum outside of space-time, then the laws of this universe do not hold and there are no quantums of energy traveling through that space or force fields affecting the vacuum.
My words should speak for themselves. If I wrote something that is not true, please correct me and tell what is not true. Otherwise, there is no need for credentials.
Because God is not controlling the minutia! There is evolution! But not all of it complies to what you think! Give both God and evolution some latitude (and mystery) You do not know it all! Stop trying to!
Don’t be idiotic!
If you would just accept some humility and not claim to know everything we might get somewhere.
here can be bias or deliberate funneling that can’t be easily identified or seen. There is the whole Genetic code thing that you are nowhere near solving or explaining.
This whole dispute is based solely on the fact that scientists think they know everything and object if someone comes up with something they can’t explain or compute or dares to suggest that they are wrong or missed something. You can’t take outside criticism! You hide behind your wall of indignity.
Grow up man!
Richard
T_aquaticus
(The Friendly Neighborhood Atheist)
68
Let me see if I have this straight.
You are saying God would not use natural selection because God would not allow fitter organisms to have more offspring than less fit organisms. However, God will have organisms dying and surviving at rates that are indistinguishable from what we would expect from natural selection based on fitness.
So what’s the difference between natural selection and God determining who lives and dies?
You said the opposite before.
“The weak can survive, because God wills it, rather than purely Natural causes and effects.”
“God is not sitting on the sidelines dispassionately watching the world get dominated by the strong and the selfish.”
Physician, heal thyself.
You said this:
“God is still creator instead of things creating themselves.”
What is biological reproduction other than things creating themselves? Horses create horses. Birds create birds.
That is the whole question. I have been trying to explain for the last million years!
No I did not. You just assumed!
You do not seem tbe able to see in shades of grey. It really is all or nothing. All science / all God. All evolution, all hands on creation, All scie
Boy was I waiting for that!
Every time! You get criticised? Back at you!
It is not Richard v T_aquaticus. It is not I am right and you are wrong (or vice versa0. Get it into your (Censored) head. It is not about Richard! Take it on the chin for once in your life!
I am out of here.
Richard
nce/ all theology.
The world is full of balance. You might try it sometime.
T_aquaticus
(The Friendly Neighborhood Atheist)
70
The less fit survive at a lower rate than the more fit. That’s natural selection.
So will we get that explanation?
You didn’t write these sentences?
“The weak can survive, because God wills it, rather than purely Natural causes and effects.”
“God is not sitting on the sidelines dispassionately watching the world get dominated by the strong and the selfish.”
The more fit are dominating the less fit. We see it happening.
You think you know everything and can’t stand to be criticized.
3 Likes
T_aquaticus
(The Friendly Neighborhood Atheist)
72
Nothing started from nothing. There’s always been something. There was no beginning. They are meaningless concepts. Existence is infinite and eternal. Nothing changes. There is nothing qualitatively, complexly new, unique. No loss, no gain. No net entropy. Without or within, God. The story, the music, the fractal, cannot possibly change. As it ceaselessly changes, cycles, emerges at every scale. Existence is smooth, isotropic. It’s either always been grounded in God, or it hasn’t. That is the only difference. That and transcendence in Him. Which is perfectly orthodox.
That is a rational alternative to the hypothesis that something emerged from nothing. Both hypotheses (something emerged from nothing vs. there’s always been something) are currently speculation, with no proof, and therefore, remain at the level of beliefs (in that sense, matters of faith).
The word ‘always’ (infinite and eternal existence) is also a difficult concept to imagine and understand more deeply than ‘always is always’. There is also the attached question of what is eternal? (again, a matter of faith). Does not make thinking easier…
Does a proper understanding of the principles of philosophy and logic point one to monotheism and the Christian God?
No.
Logic is a tool of rationalization not inquiry. It has no ability to point anywhere in isolation. It is incapable of conclusions without premises and premises are chosen to create the conclusions you have already decided must be the case. Its purpose is not determining correct conclusions about reality, but simply to make all of your claims about reality consistent with each other.
But even if something, the minimal point of existence, can emerge ‘from’, ‘in’ nothing; if null, then not null, it has always done so. Even so, that is imparsimonious compared with there’s always been the infinite eternal seething foam of nature: there has always been nothing and something, is infinitely more complex than there’s always been something, one thing. That’s what introducing a single unnecessary entity does. Like God. Nothing, is just as bad.
Faith doesn’t come in to it. Apart from in reason vs. unreason. Our infinitesimal window on reality shows infinite, meaningless, deterministic, logical eternal order in chance and necessity, with necessity coming first, necessitating chance; not unreason. Reason cannot emerge from unreason. Probability cannot emerge from madness. It is reasonable to extrapolate from the empirical; of unreasoned reason instantiated as a universe, to smooth, eternal, changeless, infinity.
Hoyle was right. For the wrong reason. The ultimate state is steady. At either end of scale and all in between.
The Christian Creation Story does NOT say that God the creator created our universe from nothing.
When God began to create[a]the heavens and the earth, **2**the earth was complete chaos, and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God[b]swept over the face of the waters.
The Hebrew Creation Story says nothing about God creating ex nihilo. Water, at a minimum, was present. Maybe all ancient peoples believed that the creator god created the earth out of pre-existing materials.
The Mayan creation story is not considered ex nihilobecause it describes the world being shaped from existing elements, not from absolute nothingness. While it begins with a void, the creator gods, Tepeu and Gucumatz, molded the earth from a primordial sea and darkness, a process more aligned with creation from chaos than from nothing.
The Hebrew Creation Story follows a similar pattern.
When God began to create[a]the heavens and the earth, **2the earth was complete chaos, and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God[b]swept over the face of the waters. **3**Then God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. **4**And God saw that the light was good, and God separated the light from the darkness. **5**God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.
**6 **And God said, “Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.” **7**So God made the dome and separated the waters that were under the dome from the waters that were above the dome. And it was so. **8**God called the dome Sky. And there was evening and there was morning, the second day.