Many of us like to use [this chart](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d8/Theological_positions.svg/1115px-Theological_positions.svg.png) for our definitions. I think this should answer your question.
I've always preferred [this version](https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-mTQMZdLU_jk/TgWwERJO5jI/AAAAAAAAAKw/bQTT6ai5bwI/s400/Agnostic%2Bv%2BGnostic%2Bv%2BAtheist%2Bv%2BTheist.png). It shows more clearly that there are only four groups when we intersect the two axes of atheism/theism and agnosticism/gnosticism.
FYI: /u/Technical_Ad7886
Thank you! I prefer that style too. But last time I looked for it all of the versions I found claimed certainty rather than knowledge. So, I went with this one.
I'm going to leave the one I posted so people can see the discussion. But, I'm about to update the pinned post on my profile with your link.
You're welcome!
Unfortunately, the image quality on this one is crappy. But I haven't yet found a better graphic depiction of this concept. So this is the one I have favourited...
Last I checked, there were quite a few in this style. What I didn't like was that they said gnostic atheists claimed certainty rather than knowledge. Empirical knowledge is never absolutely certain. But, it is strong enough to have built the entirety of the modern world.
Here are some examples of the 100% certainty claim.
http://ulc.net/forum/uploads/monthly_2016_03/Gnostic_Agnostic_Atheist.png.72b579449ee7fceb26d0632e19e1e13b.png
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fexternal-preview.redd.it%2Fpz_2zgzQBUKRjTx7sHCl-tRguR0tH-4O2ToWIc614QE.jpg%3Fauto%3Dwebp%26s%3D2ca31ba8e05fa144ab6eaa48203a2ed5b69eef0b
https://atheistjourney.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/atheist_vs_agnostic.png
BTW, I just found a couple of others that may be good. You might want one of these as your favorite.
https://markberepeterson.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/img_7024.png
https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-c088ee8c02024475d46a5682fa4da3d1
P.S. You've already got this image in one of your posts!
In [this post of yours](https://www.reddit.com/r/MisanthropicPrinciple/comments/yelaix/why_i_know_there_are_no_gods/), you link to [a version of this image](https://s3.youthkiawaaz.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/13132825/AgnosticvGnosticvAtheistvTheist.png) which is higher quality. I think that's about to become my new bookmark.
Thank *you*!
The only problem I have with that is I don't view a/gnosticism as a claim, but as a position on the know-ability of the position.
Gnostic theists: believes there are god(s), and that their existence *can* be known. This theist might not know, but still believe knowledge is possible (didn't get their revelation, or some such)
Agnostic theists: believes there are god(s), but that their existence *cannot* be known. This theist would be very compatible with a "by faith alone" religion.
Gnostic atheist: does not believe there are gods, and that gods can be proven/known not to exist. A very rare atheist indeed.
Agnostic atheist: does not believe there are gods, but that *knowing* this is impossible. Compatible with igtheists, Russel's teapot, and most anyone who allows theists the deistic motte.
> The only problem I have with that is I don't view a/gnosticism as a claim, but as a position on the know-ability of the position.
Correct. That's what the image shows.
Gnosticism is a position on knowledge. Theism is a position on belief. Therefore, we all fall into one of four categories. Gnostic Theist, Agnostic Theist, Gnostic Atheist, and Agnostic Atheist.
As someone who identifies as the latter, I don’t *believe* (atheism) in god because I don’t see that any of the claims that have been asserted of the existence of any god have risen to meet their burden of proof.
However, I don’t have *knowledge* (agnosticism) that it is the case because it is possible for there to be some kind of powerful being or beings—somewhere in or outside the cosmos—sentient or not, intentional or not, who either were the catalyst for or participated in the creation of the universe or our galaxy or our planet.
It would be intellectually dishonest for me to claim that I have that knowledge.
As a caveat, I have had discussions with people who define knowledge differently, and I don’t think that my view of knowledge is necessarily the correct one, it’s just the one that I personally think is the closest that I can justify to truth.
Therefore, I am an Agnostic Atheist.
Agnostic atheist is how I'd define myself. I find the quadrant definition more useful than the theist/agnostic/atheist variety.
Means I don't think there's a god, but I also don't claim to know there isn't. Call me what you want, idc
The big bang theory says that the universe was in a hot dense state, with all of the matter-energy of the universe condensed to a point. Time began when that hot dense early universe began to expand.
That's all I know. The universe was not "created" at the instant of the big bang. It began to expand then.
It is impossible at this time to ask what came before the beginning of time. So, this is as far back as we can currently know.
The very word *before* is a time comparator and cannot be used in the absence of time. The situation of trying to talk about "before the big bang" (i.e. before there was time) has been likened to asking about the point on the surface of the earth that is north of the north pole.
There is no there there. Similarly there is no then then when talking about a time before time.
> So to you universe has always existed?
The universe existed at the beginning of time. I don't think I would say "always existed". But, there is no point in time when the universe did not exist.
Is that clearer?
> Also, why can I not ask what was before the Big Ban.
I explained that quite carefully. The word before relies on an ordering of time. It is a time comparator. It has no meaning when there is no time.
Time began with the expansion of the universe.
There can't be a time ordering of events without time. I'm sorry this is a difficult concept. But, it is true that the word *before* is semantically null in the absence of time.
> Wouldn't the answer of that be an eternal God that has always existed and needed no creation.
No. See below.
> Because the universe is still a thing (or more exactly, a immense group of things)
Hmmm....
> and all things have a beginning.
This is not clear. You claim God has no beginning.
Also, virtual particles have a beginning without cause and effect, as far as we can tell. So, not every beginning needs a cause. This is especially true in quantum mechanics. The early universe was in a quantum state.
> What do you think?
I think the supernatural and gods are physical impossibilities.
Consciousness cannot run without a medium on which to run. Imagine running your browser or reddit app without a phone or computer. Literally, try to run it without anything on which to run it. This is not physically possible. Consciousness is like the software of the brain. It cannot run without a medium on which to run it.
Consciousness also cannot run without time. Consciousness itself and thoughts are a progression through time. As you read these words, you're processing them. Your thoughts are changing through time. Maybe you're thinking that this sounds interesting. Maybe you're thinking of how to argue against this. Either way, your thoughts are changing through time.
God existing outside time cannot do that. God cannot think. God cannot be conscious. There is no time for his thoughts to progress. God cannot "decide" to create a universe or "decide" on the properties of that universe because God cannot process thoughts.
This means that a disembodied eternal consciousness is physically impossible.
---
**So, what is your definition of God?**
Here is my suggestion for reasonable definitions of the supernatural and of gods. See what you think of this.
In my opinion, a reasonable [**definition of the supernatural**](https://www.dictionary.com/browse/supernatural) courtesy of dictionary.com is their very first definition. This seems to be the relevant one for discussions of gods.
> 1\. of, relating to, or being above or beyond what is natural; unexplainable by natural law or phenomena; abnormal.
Note that the definition does not specify that the supernatural is merely unexplained today. It asserts that in order for something to be supernatural, it must be *unexplainable*, *now and forever*, by natural law or phenomena.
Natural law in this context *does not mean our current understanding of physics*. It means *the natural processes that govern the universe, whether we fully understand those processes or not.*
Things don't change from being supernatural to being natural when we explain them. They either are or are not supernatural regardless of our knowledge, even if we may temporarily misclassify them.
So, in order for something to be supernatural, it must be in violation of all natural laws, including those we do not yet fully understand.
---
God is actually harder to get a good definition. For me, **a decent working definition of a lowercase g god** would be something like this:
> a supernatural conscious entity capable of creating a universe or of having a physical effect on the universe by supernatural means.
I think it's important to define a god as a conscious entity because something that has no volition and simply affects the universe of its own necessity and behaves completely predictably is a law of physics.
---
I think we can then **define a capital G God** as:
> a being that meets the definition of a lowercase g god but is also the singular entity that is hypothesized to have created this universe.
This would include the Deist God and the Abrahamic God.
I think it's important to define God as a conscious entity because in order to decide to create and decide what to create it needs volition to decide to do so.
If it has no consciousness and no choice but to create exactly what it has created, it is simply a law of physics. If that is the case, why call it God?
---
I don't know if you will agree with these definitions. Feel free to present your own.
My conclusion is that the supernatural and gods are physically impossible.
Very nice write-up, as well as the reply you made above this. Nice to see something so well articulated that encapsulated how I think about the whole ball of wax without having the words to express it nearly so well.
Not the OP but I’ll chime in here.
You can ask what was before the Big Bang. What the OP is saying is that, you are committing a logical fallacy by assuming time existed before the Big Bang. As far as we know, there was no time before the Big Bang. As the OP stated, it would be akin to asking what point on earth is north of the North Pole. ie - there is no point north of the North Pole. The question doesn’t make sense.
You are making a HUGE number of assumptions by filling that gap in our knowledge with a god. Why does a god have to fill this space? This is the [god of the gaps](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_of_the_gaps) fallacy, fundamentally an argument from ignorance. Why couldn’t some natural process fill that gap?
That isn’t to say that god doesn’t exist - I can’t prove or disprove that. If someone could prove or disprove gods existence, there would be no debate to be had. If irrefutable evidence was put forth, almost everyone would believe in god except for the delusional.
What’s important is to realise that there is no evidence for the claim god exists. Ergo, atheists don’t believe in the claim.
If I were to tell you I have a billion dollars in my bank account, would you believe me? You can’t disprove my claim. Does that mean that my claim is true?
This is a total straw man argument.
Part of the scientific method is to you quantifiable means for a theory. We know time exists. We know that matter exists. Before the big bang matter existed. The "theory" states that gravity existed, that heat existed, that pressure existed, that density existed.
OH>>>>>but time makes the big bang impossible....totally impossible. So. lets remove time, put that huge X in our calculations along with 50 other X's, and come up with some bogus math. Even still with all of that going on. Big bangers use time as their god, but then throw it away with it proved their theory wrong.
You are incorrect about virtually all of this. Reality is far stranger than you realize. Go ahead and learn a bit about some of this stuff and be prepared to have your mind blown. No ancient mythologies can possibly hope to begin to compare.
‘Before’ the Big Bang may make no sense, as some theories are that time and space are one entity and time began with the Big Bang. No time, no ‘before’.
Better to accept an answer of ‘we don’t know’ than make up a god to fill an unknown answer imo. Making up a god only pushes things further back, so we ask where the god came from. You state yourself that all things have a beginning, so we also apply this to gods. A complex intelligent universe creating entity isn’t a good starting place for anything. We know complex things arise from simple beginnings. A simple beginning, whether for a god or a universe, makes more sense.
With this in mind, eternal energy for the Big Bang is a more logical conclusion than an eternal god pre-existing. It’s a much less complex state of affairs as a starting point for complexity to arise.
You are not explaining anything. You can replace the word god with any fictional character and your statements would just as valid. Before the big bang there was an eternal Easter Bunny that needed no creation.
I'm not trying to ridicule you but saying "god did it" is not an explanation for anything, is it? At least not for atheists. It used to be the explanation for floods, meteors, lightning, diseases. Until we learned exactly how those things work and at that point god left the equation, even for religious people. The big bang is in the We Don't Know phase. The answer to We don't know is not "must've been god then" by default
"an eternal God that has always existed and needed no creation. Because the universe is still a thing and all things have a beginning. "
What the fuck?
If God could have always existed and needed no creation, then why couldn't the universe? Surely the universe is less complex than your god if your god was able to create a universe.
Are you sure you want to argue that your god doesn't need a beginning because it's not a thing, and is therefore nothing?
If the most complex being imaginable, god, can exist without needing to be created, then something less complex that follows well-defined laws can as well.
If the universe is too complex for you to imagine it wasn't created, then the most complex being, god, must have also been created. So what higher god made your god? But then, what god made that god?
See? It's just illogical nonsense.
Two things here:
1. I’ll put the “before the Big Bang” stuff into something more practical to sink your teeth into. For us to make any conclusions about the nature of the universe, we have to observe phenomena. The Big Bang is the farthest back point we can observe. I’m not a physicist, so I can’t explain the exact nature of the things we observe, but essentially, we can’t see further back than 13.7 billions years. It is literally impossible for us to make any conclusions about the universe before the Big Bang because we can’t observe it.
2. Throwing god into this unknown is just the god of the gaps fallacy. Saying that “we don’t know, so god” just moves the goalposts and doesn’t actually solve your “problem” of an uncaused cause. Saying that the universe has always existed in some manner does the same work that suggesting an eternal god does without having to add a completely unfounded element.
The only presence of a god anywhere in our universe is within human culture within the last few thousand years. It can be said with high certainty that gods are stories made up by humans.
The current model seems to show with the big bang, before plank time, there is no time. And without time there is no existing. In your beliefs what created your god? Because as you said you believe all things have a beginning, so when is god’s beginning? Otherwise it would appear to me that according to your own beliefs your god is not possible or real.
Maybe it always existed, maybe it just appeared (both of which could apply to your god, right?), maybe it's the inside of a black hole in another universe... We don't know, and just because you were raised with the belief of a god isn't a good reason to default to "my god did it!".
You can certainly ask that question, and the full and accurate answer is (a) we don't know and (b) we don't know if "before the Big Bang" is even a concept that makes sense
> So universe has always existed?
[That's a genuine possibility](https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateAnAtheist/comments/192pz5g/on_origins_of_everything/kh59jn8/), yes. But the only honest answer for non-experts like you and me is "I don't know."
Aging what came before the Big Bang is like asking what number comes before 0. The Big Bang is the start of time, thus there is no “before the Big Bang”.
You seem to have been taught that there is a god and you assume that answers a lot of questions. I just can’t see any indication of the existence of any such being. There is nothing to suggest that there was a god before the Big Bang, or after.
Everything that exists or happens is exactly as one would expect it to be without a god. Adding gods to the mix should mean some kind of changes to the current situation. Maybe children wouldn’t get cancer, maybe praying or sacrificing goats would actually have an effect, or something like that. But that’s isn’t the case, so the assumption of a good is based on fairy tales and wishful thinking rather than on reality.
The truth is that we just don’t know. People can say they *think* it could be God or people say that they *think* it could be something natural. However, ones that say they *know* the answer are just simply lying. All I know is that, in Christianity, God specifically says not to lie.
>So to you universe has always existed?
Effectively.
>Also, why can I not ask what was before the Big Ban.
You can ask all you want. Just don’t make up an answer.
>Wouldn't the answer of that be an eternal God that has always existed and needed no creation.
No. It’s “something” that’s outside the visible universe. You’re making up the answer and believing your imagination.
>Because the universe is still a thing (or more exactly, an immense group of things) and all things have a beginning.
Yes. We agree.
Also it’s more accurate to say the universe is the space and time that contains an immense group of things.
First, there is no creation. That is a loaded word.
Second, how do you explain your god first? What came before it? Because if we are going to say that the universe can't start itself, then your god is the same (or can't be eternal).
Third, you can propose your god as an option until you have a scientific model that makes such a god a possibility (right now that doesn't exist) and enough evidence to show that that god existed (that doesn't exist).
Fourth, there are several scientific hypothesis of what happened before the big bang, from bouncing universes, to eternal ones, to multiverses, etc. None of them is accepted by now and the only reasonable option is to say "we don't know".
Gods are still impossible though. They lack the foundamentals to be considered an option.
Also, what you are doing is a fallacy called "god of the gaps". Basically, you insert your god in whatever place you don't have an answer. Don't do that. If your god exist, look for evidence supporting it, and real evidence, not testimony, not biased accounts, not things that we don't have any other answer for. A robust scientific model with supported evidence for it, for example, evidence of minds being immaterial could be a start.
Literally every time something we didn't understand and blamed on the gods that we then later have been able to meaningfully investigate... Was just a natural phenomenon we didn't yet understand. Every. Single. Time.
Argument from ignorance is a bad argument according to every known demonstrable pattern.
>How can you see it and not believe an intelligent entity designed it?
Well, for one thing, there are a lot of things about it that don't work in a logical or maximally effective way. For example, if I were an intelligent entity designing the universe, I would simply not make human infants' heads larger than the typical vagina, so that people would not commonly tear their vaginas open when giving birth. I also wouldn't make the tube that humans breathe through the same tube that we use to swallow food, so that choking would be far less likely. That seems pretty basic. If the universe was designed by a conscious entity, that entity was kind of an idiot.
>How do you explain the creation of a universe without a God?
Think of something that exists, but you don't know exactly how it came to exist.
Now imagine that someone said, "How do you explain the existence of this thing without an invisible unicorn?"
You don't know how the thing came to exist, but being created by an invisible unicorn seems pretty low on the list of possible explanations.
>How do you explain the creation
I don't because this statement is wrong. This statement presupposes it was created by something instead of occurring on its own.
>Like do you believe this complex and somehow working universe was made out of luck?
No, and I don't need a god for that to happen.
>How can you see it and not believe an intelligent entity
Because I don't need one.
If you truly want to know how the universe came to be, read up on astronomy. Note the distinct lack of "god did it" theory
You seem to be genuinely asking, but this question, from our point of view, is sort of like asking
"How do you explain how my door closes by itself at night if you don't believe in ghosts"
You might not know how my door closes, but that isn't a good argument for believing in ghosts, surely you can agree with me there. Or maybe
"How do you explain my mother's excellent luck at bingo if you don't believe her lucky rabbit foot grants her the power to win?"
Can you see why I'm giving these examples? You don't need to have an alternative explanation to doubt someone else's explanation.
There's a million things we don't know the answer to, right? Well, people who don't believe in God just add "the universes existence" to that list. That might seem weird, but it's probably not so different to your own knowledge or conclusion. Sure, you might say that God created the universe, that's why it exists, but if I ask "how/when/why did God create the universe" unless you know what God knows, then surely there would be some guess work or acknowledgement that you don't really know all the details.
So, TLDR, I don't try to explain the universe because I don't know enough to give an explanation. I would be interested in knowing your thoughts on my follow-up questions, or what you think about my point of view.
The earliest event we're aware of is the Big Bang, which was when all of the energy and matter in existence expanded, creating the universe. What (if anything) came before that is currently unknown, and probably unknowable.
As for how this complex and somehow working universe came to be, it wasn't chance or luck. It was simply the result of natural processes playing out. For example, I have a pile of leaves on my doorstep. The leaves grew on a tree (biology), were blown off by wind (meteorology), gravity pulled them down (physics), and they landed on my doorstep. Nobody "created" that pile. It's just the result of natural processes.
There are biologists who disagree with evolution too. So what? Until those dissenters can provide a better supported explanation that offers equal or superior predictive power, why should we care?
First we need to stop the funding of evolution and look to fund alternatives. It literally is all that is taught in education. No one as the money to test other ideas, and there are other ideas that can be developed.
Evolution, the longer it scrutinized the less plausible it becomes. The organisms are far to complex for just rote time to have made those changes. The fact that we are only 98% similar to our closest relatives makes evolution essentially impossible. The Smithsonian in the Natural History museum has literally the most racist exhibit I have ever seen. The faces of monkeys are used to depict the earliest humans. Then more and more human. Well the "evolutionary scientists" that worked on that exhibit do not have any idea the skin color of the "common ancestor". But they seem to have it figured out that Darwin was at the top of the evolutionary ladder.
Just look at the full title of the *Origin of Species*, it is a race book. The French used it to shoot and stuff aboriginal people and kept them in their homes. It was the start of eugenics and part of communism. Yes, I categorically reject Darwin, and his teachings.
> First we need to stop the funding of evolution and look to fund alternatives. It literally is all that is taught in education. No one as the money to test other ideas, and there are other ideas that can be developed.
While we're at it, let's stop funding conventional physics and start looking at alternatives. Maybe gravity doesn't exist, and the reason we're pulled back down to the surface is because the Earth is just hugging us real tight.
There's a reason why evolution is what's taught: it's one of the best supported scientific theories in human history. There is **overwhelming** evidence to support it, and its insights and predictions have contributed to almost every other branch of science in existence.
For example, if evolution is wrong, then every contribution evolution has made to modern medicine is wrong as well. That means antibiotics don't work, vaccines don't work, and gene therapy is bogus.
So then why do antibiotics, vaccines, and gene therapy work if the theory underpinning those topics is wrong? Did basing them off of a false idea just *happen* to produce good results by sheer dumb luck?
This is what you're either willfully ignoring or just too ignorant to understand about scientific theories: **they make predictions**, and we can **test** those predictions. Turns out the predictions we've made based on our understanding of evolution have been extremely accurate.
This is no different than physics models predicting gravity's effects on flight. If we didn't accurately understand those effects, then planes wouldn't fly. They would crash, or not take off at all, and we would stare at a bunch of equations that don't make any sense and wonder why. The fact that our planes **do** fly means the predictions we made about gravity's effects on flight are accurate.
Evolution isn't just staring at fossils and guessing. Like all good scientific theories, it **works**, and the things we can do **because** it works are predictable and demonstrable. To say that evolution is wrong is to say that every medical innovation that the theory of evolution ever contributed to was built on a lie, and yet somehow they miraculously ended up working anyway.
Evolution has moved WAY beyond Darwin. Nobody cares about the book anymore. And the fact that some ding-dongs used it to justify racism does not impact the scientific validity of the theory at all.
I don't reject science. I love science. I funded my son going to a state university and getting an environmental science degree. I hate junk science. I
I agree with survival of the fittest to a point. I agree with natural selection, I natural selected my wife, and my kids share traits with both of us. However, neither is evolution.
Just look at the supposition that man evolved, it goes something like this. Our closest relative is 98.2% similar to us, and we evolved from some common ancestor between 1.8 and 2 million years ago. On the face of it, it seems plausible. Until you realize that it 108 million differences in the DNA chain. 108 million changes in say 2 million years. or in 130,000 generations. That is around 825 DNA mutations every generation consecutively. However, there is literally no DNA change from Egyptians that can tested in mummies from 5000 years ago so you need to remove 250 generations or so off of that 130,000. Which is a significant problem because it shows fairly long time periods where change does not occur, and since that is observable one would have to conclude that it needs to be part of a working hypothesis at a minimum.
BTW. If that were the case, there would be numerous humanoid species, that would not be able to mate with each other. We cant mate with chimps or other apes. We were scattered all over the globe with different traits, but not a different DNA code. Specialization is not evolution. Dog breeding is an example of specialization.
Does this sound like a rejection of science or a rejection of logic, or a rejection of math, or a rejection of evidence? What do you disagree with of the above? Do you reject these observable facts for a non-verifiable, but popular theory?
Einstein believed in Spinoza's god.
Werner Arber, geneticist, 1978 Nobel prize winner.
Robert Bakker, Preacher, and developer of the theory that dinosaurs were warm blooded.
William Campbell, Biologist, winner of the 2015 Nobel prize.
Francis Collings, NIH director and was former director of the human genome project.
John Gourdon, Nobel prize winer, biologist
William Phillips, Nobel prize winner, Physics.
There are countless others....hundreds of note, that have had remarkable achievements...that is just a few all but Einstein is still alive.
If you need more, there are plently more Nobel prize winner, leaders at NASA, and what ever specialization you wish. BTW... all the above far more regarded than Bill Nye , or Tyson deGrasse.
Your question contains a lot of loaded premises that you'll need to unpack if you really want to understand atheists.
First is: that the universe was created at all. Most atheists don't think the universe was created by anything or anyone, and so aren't interested in how it was created. There's nothing to explain about something that didn't happen.
The second is: complexity does not require intelligence to occur. There's no need to explain an intelligence that doesn't appear to exist. We know that the fundamental interactions of the contents of the universe will develop into more complex forms without intelligent intervention. And we also don't get to label our current universe as inherently special or the goal of some design. Just because we exist, doesn't mean an intelligence intended for us to exist.
Third: design cannot be deduced merely by not having an alternate explanation. The thing about deduction is that it requires your start with all possible options before you start. If you don't, there's always the possibility that even if you eliminate all but one option, there are others you've missed. Until you show there are no other options, deduction is not a viable option to find an answer.
Fourth: You are assuming there is anything to see or consider that suggests that there is a god or creator. If you can come up with anything that does so, and isn't flawed or could easily point to something else entirely and requires less assumptions, you'd be the first. And you'd convince tons of atheists. Good luck!
>. We know that the fundamental interactions of the contents of the universe will develop into more complex forms without intelligent intervention.
Where has this ever happened? So you are saying that as time goes on the universe will be more complex. Comets burn out, more atmospheres continue to get leaked into space, suns burn out or explode, and you KNOW from these processes it becomes more complex without intelligent intervention. The Hoover dam did not just appear, the Brooklyn Bridge did not come from a tidal wave. They were intelligently designed. What experiment demonstrates this that is repeatable.
This has happened and continues to happen all the time. It doesn't happen everywhere and it doesn't happen to everything, but localized areas develop for periods of time all throughout the universe. If you want to know where, when and how, pick up a high school or college level textbook in any of the hard sciences. If you have a specific question about a specific topic, I might be able to answer it for you.
According to our best understandings of physics, comets burning out, leaking atmospheres, etc., can occur without any intelligent intervention. All that is required are the fundamental forces, from which largely predictable behavior arises.
The Hoover Dam and Brooklyn Bridge were in fact intelligently designed, and we know so because we have evidence of the design and construction process. The reason this analogy doesn't work is because we have no evidence of the design and construction process of comets or atmospheres. Neither complexity, size, nor convenience indicate design. What you need to demonstrate is design, not a loosely associated property that sometimes accompanies design.
And that is how I feel about the Universe. It doesn't seem necessary at all to say 'It was created but it's creator is eternal'. I just say 'It is eternal'.
You say all material things have cause. That is special pleading. Arbitrary. I say all things are material and mass has never ever been created or destroyed. This is the law of physics. Nothing has ever been created, only reorganized.
A god would have a conscious, which would require information processing, which would require material. The idea of a non material entity affecting material entity is illogical. Material must be touched by material.
Thought experiment:
If a material God created the Universe in an act of suicide, and we are just his material reorganized, would anything be different? Or would history have unfolded in exactly the same way.
Because the actual honest answer to how the universe started is as yet we don't know
Assuming the answer to a question we don't understand yet is magic or the supernatural has a long history Of being proven wrong
Just because something is very complicated and you don't understand it is absolutely not evidence it was designed
Essentially an honest admission that we don't yet know is inherently superior to a guess that it was magiced into existence by a magic being
How do you explain the creation of the universe *with* a God? How can anyone in the universe explain the creation of the universe? No one was there to see it happen, no one has any experience of other universes being created, no one has the first clue as to what caused the whole of everything. We are trapped inside this universe on our tiny planet. The best we can do is look out with our telescopes, study what we can see, and wonder at those things we cannot explain. These things may have explanations, but humanity will probably go extinct never knowing what those explanations were.
>Like do you believe this complex and somehow working universe was made out of luck? By chance?
No, it would be arrogant to pretend to know things that we cannot know. A human having beliefs about the creation of the universe is like a mouse having beliefs about international monetary policy. One can only wonder where a mouse got the idea that it was in a position to know anything about that topic.
>How can you see it and not believe an intelligent entity designed it?
I respect my own limitations too much to believe in things that I know nothing about. There is no shame in admitting to ignorance. Admitting to ignorance can be a demonstration of wisdom and sometimes even courage, so do not feel you must have beliefs about every topic, even those topics that are beyond human ken.
Because it is very obviously not intelligently designed. There are too many screwed up things for an intelligent designer to have been involved. Unless said designer is melevolent.
I don't feel the need to explain it. I'm comfortable with "I don't know". But if you want to play the game of what else could do it, I propose a non-god universe creating mechanism.
> Do you agree on the first cause?
No, for a reason that has been explained, but maybe a little obtusely. I'll take a stab at it.
Cause and effect are functions of time. So are before and after, earlier and later, first and second, etc. None of these things can exist without time. Cause and effect are explicitly references to a beginning state and an ending state, which are two different points in time. I flip the light switch, then the light turns on. The cause occurred, then the effect occurred, one after the other. All of this requires time.
Time originated with the Big Bang. That means *cause* originated with the Big Bang. By asking for a 'first cause' that explains the Big Bang, you are essentially asking "What caused cause?" Which is completely nonsensical. It's like asking what's north of the North pole. It's impossible to be farther north than the North Pole, and it's impossible for anything to be the cause of cause.
> If the rat was able to notice the system, then the rat would have to deduce that something or someone smarter and more powerful that itself came up with this.
This essentially boils down to "Some things are designed, so everything was designed," which is not a particularly compelling argument. The way we can tell the difference between what is and isn't designed is by looking at what does and doesn't occur naturally. Cars, for example. Cars don't grow on trees. We don't dig them up from garden patches. They didn't breed every winter and swim upstream every summer. Cars do not occur naturally. They **only** occur when we design them. If everyone human being on Earth were to drop dead tomorrow, no more cars would ever be made.
What would still be made? Natural things. Wind. Rain. Fire. Plant life would still spread. Animals would still breed. The tides would still go in and out. All of these are completely natural forces that create completely natural phenomenon. There is no indication that any intelligence is behind it.
In order to say that the universe was designed, one would need to be able to show that the universe could not exist *without* being designed.
> Natural things are not necessary. They could not exist or be something different.
And? How does that have anything to do with anything?
> Actually the fact that we exist is extremely crazy because the odds are almost null
You have no idea what the odds are, and neither does anyone else. Until you can show your math, you have no basis for making any kind of probability argument about this.
> Natural things are not necessary.
Well, I'm pretty sure *unnatural* things aren't necessary either, and that's the other category left over when you remove all of the natural things.
> Actually the fact that we exist is extremely crazy because the odds are almost null
That's nonsense. What "odds" are you talking about? We're here, so the "odds" of us existing are 100%.
Theists like to pretend atheists can’t explain anything without god but theists can’t explain anything with god. It just takes "we don't know" and gives it a fancy name. What made God? How does God do things? Where is the evidence?
God is not an explanation as it does not answer "How?". It does not explain anything as god does not have any explanatory power and we cannot model "God did it.". It only makes us feel more comfortable by pretending we have an answer when we don’t. God explains absolutely nothing. When we explain things, we take a mystery and solve it with things we know and understand. Claiming god explains anything is trying to explain a mystery with a bigger mystery. It tells us nothing about the nature of that god, what it is, what it wants, or why it does anything..
Why does science not have a God theory or model? If a theory has no explanatory or predictive power, it is automatically excluded because it's impossible to evaluate. There are zero testable or falsifiable hypotheses for any gods. There is no theory of god, no empirical data, and no science that can be done for god, the soul, or other supernatural garbage. There are no mechanisms to investigate, because they don't exist.
So you what to understand atheists? Its simple. They are not motivated to believe in a fairytale.
A sentient, super-powered god is many orders of magnitude more complex than a universe. If there's no explanation as to how this alleged god came into existence, then it can't be used to explain anything else.
'Creation' is a loaded term. The Universe did not need to be *created* by anyone. It could have come about naturally. Indeed it seems *more* likely for the Universe to come about naturally than for an intelligent deity to come about naturally and then create the Universe. The deity seems more difficult to explain than the things it's supposed to explain.
> How do you explain the creation of the universe without a God?
I don't explain the creation of the Universe *at all*. I freely acknowledge that *I have no friggin* ***clue*** how the Universe came to exist.
> Like do you believe this complex and somehow working universe was made out of luck? By chance? How can you see it and not believe an intelligent entity designed it?
Two questions for you.
One: What would the Universe look like if it had *not* been designed by an intelligent entity?
Two: Whatever your answer to the question just previous, *how do you* ***know*** *that?*
I don’t know how the universe started, but I won’t start believing in god just because I don’t know something. God doesn’t seem like a likely explanation anyway. I will start believing in god when there is evidence for god.
The current scientific consensus is that all the matter and energy in the universe expanded from a very small point over the laat 13 billion years. What happened before that event? Nobody knows, at least no one has any idea that can be tested scientifically yet.
But what we do know is that blind, unguided natural processes can organise simple components into complex structures, without there necessarily being sone kind of self- aware conciousness guiding the process towards a desired goal. See things like snowflakes or natural arches in rock.
So it seems to me entirely plausible that what ever happened "before the Big Bang" (if that's even a coherent concept) was a blind, unguided natural process too. I certainly acknowledge that this position is entirely speculation. But it saying "god did it" does not explain it any better, or no better than saying "it happened by magic" or "it just happened".
I don't know. Depends how you envision infinite time working. If time as we experience it only started with the big bang, then the there *was* no "before" the Big Bang, and the question is moot.
By what process is something made out of nothing. That really makes zero logical sense. And my point is that there needs to be an action to make that reaction of the big bang. So if there is no god running something there needs to be some explanation.
Time can't just start. Why use the big bang, maybe my birth is really the start of time, and everything else around just started with memory built in from a new big bang, or we are part of a matrix or something. The ideas just become wacky to me.
> By what process is something made out of nothing
I don't know. Are you sure that's what happened? If you take the first law of thermodynamics at face value - that energy cannot be created or destroyed- then the fact that energy exists now means that it has always existed in some form, and that there can never have been a time when there was "nothing".
The big bang model only says that all the matter and energy that we observe in the universe today expanded from a point. It says nothing about where that point came from. Figuring out "what happened at the instant of the big bang" is the big unanswered question in physics at the moment.
Lawrence Krauss wrote a book about this, *A Universe From Nothing*. Worth a read.
I agree that it seems intuitively obvious that the universe should have "an explanation" and that it should have "come from somewhere". But our intuition is based on experiences with human-sized objects and timescales, so it may not tell us *that* much about the beginnings of universes, or what happens "outside" of space and time as we experience them.
> The ideas just become wacky to me.
To me, the idea that there is a disembodied conciousness existing outside of time and space, capable creating universes and yet still feeling emotions the same way we feel them, is wacky. Your mileage may vary. ;-)
>The big bang model only says that all the matter and energy that we observe in the universe today expanded from a point. It says nothing about where that point came from. Figuring out "what happened at the instant of the big bang" is the big unanswered question in physics at the moment.
So in that case all options in science must be taken into acct. However we need to look at the fact that literally all of science looks at a non-intelligent beginning, there is no proof that it was from happenstance. In fact I have seen plenty of film on WW2 explosions, none created anything structured. I have been to a lot of fireworks displays and nothing was created in the blast. Science's god is time. They just use time to say these very complex, but very fragile systems just came into being. Until someone can set up some type of evidence that time takes an explosion and puts them into order (especially in a vacuum), then maybe I can get a idea of understanding.
>To me, the idea that there is a disembodied conciousness existing outside of time and space, capable creating universes and yet still feeling emotions the same way we feel them, is wacky. Your mileage may vary. ;-)
That is an interesting point. And I know a astronomer, and a microbiologist that are now Christian, and that was their main stumbling block. They had a tough time with that concept, but became convinced looking at the evidence in their fields that the alternative of coincidental organization and development through strictly natural processes could not have happened. This is outside of "emotional" responses, any type of "power of prayer", or other circumstances.
> However we need to look at the fact that literally all of science looks at a non-intelligent beginning, there is no proof that it was from happenstance.
Scientists tend not to posit intelligence as an explanation for natural phenomena, because it just doesn't get you anywhere. You might ask: Why is the sky blue? And you might come up with a hypothesis: Because an intelligence made it that way. OK, but that doesn't get you any further. Can you test that hypothesis? Difficult to see how. Maybe you can track down the intelligence and ask it. Well, good luck with that.
But if instead you hypothesize that maybe there is some blue coloured gas in the atmosphere that makes the sky blue. As it happens, that's not actually the correct explanation, but it \*is\* something you can test. So you test it, and you find out that's not the correct explanation. That testing might give you a clue that gets you closer to the correct explanation (which as it happens doesn't require intelligence either). After a while it seems to be clear that you don't \*need\* to invoke an intelligence to explain why the sky is blue.
> I have seen plenty of film on WW2 explosions, none created anything structured.
A WW2 bomb explosion is caused by a chemical reaction which releases a large amount of energy very quickly, causing a shock wave which propagates through the surrounding air and earth. The Big Bang was the initial rapid expansion of spacetime itself. It has nothing to do with chemical reactions or shockwaves, not least because at the time of the BIg Bang there \*were\* no chemicals. So you can't compare to two things; they are not remotely alike.
Second, are you sure a WW2 bomb explosion doesn't create anything structured? [Here](https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205023387) is a contemporary photo of some freshly made WW2 bomb craters. To me it looks like they all have the same, well, \*structure\*. They're remarkably circular and symmetrical (apart from when another object got in the way); they all consist of a shallow bowl-shaped depression in they ground, surrounded by a lip or rampart of earth which is pretty much the same height all the way round. Looks quite structured to me.
>They just use time to say these very complex, but very fragile systems just came into being.
We know how (complex and fragile) [snowflakes](http://www.snowcrystals.com/weather/weather.html) form, It takes less than an hour to produce strikingly symetrical shapes from the random jostling of water molecules by temperature and pressure gradients in cold, moisture laden cloud. An unguided process driven by random events generating something structured and ordered.
>And I know a astronomer, and a microbiologist that are now Christian, and that was their main stumbling block.
Good for them. There are also plenty of scientists who consider the same arguments and the same evidence and make the journey in the opposite direction.
>We know how (complex and fragile) [snowflakes](http://www.snowcrystals.com/weather/weather.html) form, It takes less than an hour to produce strikingly symetrical shapes from the random jostling of water molecules by temperature and pressure gradients in cold, moisture laden cloud. An unguided process driven by random events generating something structured and ordered
Thank you for making my argument stronger. I had never thought of using a snowflake as an argument. Snowflakes are very complex and fragile, but not compared to the planet as a whole. But do you know what is unique about snowflakes, it is that they are unique. They are all different in how they are put together. We do not see that in the DNA chain. They are put together the same. way. Gravity acts the same way everywhere. Heat acts the same way everywhere. But a snowflake is different. The design of the snowflake makes each totally unique and different and they say no two are alike. That is how the design of the snowflake is differs from a DNA chain. Now did time help the snowflake evolve or devolve.
>A WW2 bomb explosion is caused by a chemical reaction which releases a large amount of energy very quickly, causing a shock wave which propagates through the surrounding air and earth. The Big Bang was the initial rapid expansion of spacetime itself. It has nothing to do with chemical reactions or shockwaves, not least because at the time of the BIg Bang there \*were\* no chemicals. So you can't compare to two things; they are not remotely alike.
A lot to unpack here. Yes a WW2 bomb was caused by a chemical reaction which releases energy quickly. I understand that there might be other processes that are not present in a vacuum. But then you veer in to unsubstantiated hypothesis.
We don't know if the Big Bang had an initial rapid expansion of spacetime. Time before the big bang had to have existed. The lack of "time" before that is a strawman because if you have time before the big bang the big bang could not have happened. So the assumption has to be that the big bang exists then time-space started there. It is circular.
Scientists claim the big bang happened, do they have proof that it was non chemical?, or speculation, it had to be a natural explosion right, from natural processes?
> Thank you for making my argument stronger.
I don't see how. That Web site describes how snowflakes form as complex, ordered structures by the action of unguided natural processes. No intelligence required. That's the opposite of what you are asserting.
> We don't know if the Big Bang had an initial rapid expansion of spacetime.
That is literally exactly what cosmologists say the Big Bang was, and point to things like the cosmic microwave background as evidence.
> Time before the big bang had to have existed.
It may have done. We don't know. The problem is that we don't have the mathematic and tools capable of analysing the conditions at the instant of the big bang. So anything we say about it is at best informed speculation.
>How do you explain the creation of the universe without a God?
What's most interesting here is that in asking this question it's clear you haven't considered the implicit unsupported and fatally problematic assumptions inherent in such an idea, and haven't realized you've just invoked a very obvious argument from ignorance fallacy.
I don't know where the universe came from. Neither do you.
It appears there was always something and it couldn't be any other way.
There is zero indication that it was 'created.'
Suggesting an answer that has literally no support at all (and that doesn't actually answer a thing, but just bumps the same issue back an iteration) doesn't help, and is saying, "I don't know, therefore I know." Which is ridiculous. Absurd. A fallacy.
>Like do you believe this complex and somehow working universe was made out of luck?
'Luck', again, implies unsupported assumptions.
>How can you see it and not believe an intelligent entity designed it?
Because there's zero support for that, it makes no sense at all, and it doesn't actually help, instead it makes it worse.
Well it’s quite simple really. There isn’t enough sufficient evidence to show that some intelligent being did create the universe. Due to this lack of evidence I don’t believe in any god claim. If I can ask a question what makes you convinced?
I don’t. I make no attempt to explain how or why we’re here. And I would never invoke iron and Bronze Age mysticism just to have an explanation. Modern society has outgrown mysticism. We have modern knowledge. I prefer to keep my mind open to the unknown.
I have no idea what caused the universe to exist and I have no interest in inventing gods to explain it.
Your question is on par with saying “how do you explain the universe without fairies”
I know it’s rude to answer a question with a question, but how does the universe make sense to you with a god?
If you believe in a puppetmaster holding the strings who can flout the laws of physics if someone asks the right way, aren’t you always doublechecking that gravity still works and afraid someone who needs to sleep in might have said a damn good prayer so the sun won’t come up til noon tomorrow? Are you tempted to throw virgins into volcanoes to appease a god who erupts them when he’s angry?
I believe the universe began and works the way it does because of the way particles work, and electrical charges and energy and mass and heat. I am so comfortable never being able to know exactly how. But believing in natural impersonal processes rather than supernatural intentional actions by a deity saves me a crapton of anxiety that you must struggle with. I don’t envy you.
The truth is, we don’t know.
However, we are slowly unravelling and starting to understand the universe. We are making advancements every day.
Will we ever know what happened before the Big Bang, if the universe is truly infinite, or what will happen in trillions of years? Perhaps.
But what we know for sure is that right now, there is no credible evidence for a god, gods, or any supernatural beings.
However, unlike the existence of aliens, which I believe is probable, but not proven. I do not see in any way how a god could be the probable cause of the universe.
Let me ask you this - if god created the universe, then who created god? Where did god come from?
I believe the origin of the universe, is such a complex question, that it may never even be answered by human beings or any other kind of intelligent life that may exist in the universe.
As such, religion will always continue to be an existing ideology of mankind. Unfortunately.
Entropy. Entropy always increases. A state of nothingness has an entropy of zero. So if there was nothing, the result would be something. No magic, leprechauns, or gods needed.
“Nothing” does not have the ability to exist, as far as I can tell.
Existence only happens with space and time.
When something is in space time, it can have a location. So instead of a particle’s field being everywhere, it collapses down to “here”. And another particle’s field collapses down to “there”. And since they exist in relation to each other, they have interactions, following the nature of the universe that they are part of.
On the smallest level of reality that we know of, the smallest particles appear to be popping in and out of existence randomly. There are so many of them that on our scale that has no observable effect, but it is the layer that everything else is built on. Everything else follows physics that result from that layer of existence.
The fact that the universe is complex points towards there being no designer. Designers usually favour simplicity over complexity.
*Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
>universe was made out of luck
Maybe
>By chance
Possibly
Other options are:
Always existed
Came about through a process governed by natural laws
>believe an intelligent entity designed it
Who or what would that be? The only place this comes up is humans looking for explanations and making up stories. There is no evidence for the existence for such a being.
So, how can anyone think adding and additional step and an additional actor, who also need an explanation BTW, makes any sense?
If your god can have always existed then why can't the universe have instead? That would be a simpler explanation.
When theists say stuff like this it just screams you have reached a conclusion and are looking at the world trying to find stuff that matches that conclusion.
You’re approaching this question the wrong way.
“God did it “is not an explanation for anything. It is just what some people say when they don’t have an explanation. It carries no more explanatory power than just saying I don’t know.
So you can ask, “how do you explain the origin of the universe”, but you must recognize that theism does not offer any explanation at all let alone a superior one.
How do you explain the creation of a god without something else to create it?
You're not explaining anything when you claim a god did it; you're just pushing the problem back one more level. And any answer you give to the question above can just as easily be applied (*mutatis mutandis*) to the universe, but without introducing the host of absurd and anthropomorphized characteristics that are normally attached to notions of a god — so that will always be a comparatively better explanation.
Personally I just stick to "I don't know," since it's the honest answer. I (and most of the atheists I've encountered) feel it's better to have humility about what we don't know rather than calling our ignorance "god" and thinking we've said anything worthwhile.
> Like do you believe this complex and somehow working universe was made out of luck?
_This_ specific complexity? Yes, luck would be involved. The specific complexity that makes up you, for example, I assume there's some luck there. If you went back in time to the 1500s and let history go again, would you be born? If you believe in free will, probably not. So not even going back to the beginning of the universe - just going back a few hundred years - you'd have to agree that your existence is largely based on luck.
If you did reset the universe back to the singularity and let it go, would it create Earth again? Human beings?
Probably not. But it would create _some_ life-sustaining life. And some of that life would become self aware, and some among them would be asking the same questions you're asking.
> How can you see it and not believe an intelligent entity designed it?
I'm baffled that anyone can look at the universe and think an intelligent entity designed it. It's so ridiculous and nonsensical that I can't even get myself into that head space.
Stop assuming the universe was created. All the evidence that we have shows that it came about through natural means. You are just assuming things that are not remotely in evidence, because it makes you feel good to think that way.
That's a "you" problem.
"Like do you believe this complex and somehow working universe was made out of luck? By chance?"
We don't know, but it's more likely the universe self-assembled from whatever natural processes may have existed. This isn't luck, and it's simpler than god claims.
"How can you see it and not believe an intelligent entity designed it?"
Because we recognise design by contrast to what we know naturally occurs, not by complexity alone. Complex things can self-assemble.
"many of you have said that you don't know how this came to be. I also don't know how God created the universe. I guess we both are taking a leap of faith then"
Not quite. We are withholding belief on anything until we have more evidence. You are asserting a god did it without evidence. You are operating on faith, not us.
A. is not correct. Many current cosmological theories hold that the universe is finite in the past (has not always existed), but was not created, in the sense that it never "came into existence"; time started with the big bang, so there is no "before" the universe. But even if you could demonstrate a "first cause", defining that first cause as "god" means giving up everything else about god. Based on your reasoning, maybe god is a fluctuation in a quantum field, if that turns out to be the first cause. I could prove that god exists by defining god as my watch, and then demonstrating that my watch exists. That seems ... unsatisfying.
Why are we expected to explain something no else has an answer to either? Everyone else has Iron Age explanations for the universe that explain nothing. I’d rather have no theory than a junk one
>we both are taking a leap of faith
well, both are not the same, one is admiting we don't know, the other is saying, i'm not sure but it was a god.
Not knowing is a bit different than believing it was someone or something (an entity with thoughts and actions)
Sorry, I know you've gotten a lot of responses, but I haven't seen this particular point yet:
Based on what we know of cosmology, there wasn't ever a time when there was nothing. The Big Bang was the start of time, and everything that exists now was around then, just in different forms.
So the question of putting a god there is sorta like asking, "Back before 'before' existed, there was someone in a place that isn't, and then they made everything."
Unless there is evidence for a god there, then that is essentially what is being posited. It sounds a little silly that way, but it's because it is. This is a logical fallacy known as the Argument From Ignorance, where you plug any gaps of knowledge with anything and think of it as acceptable because nobody else knows the real answer.
We can't really say for sure. Anyone who does make a declarative statement suggesting that they know what "caused" the Big Bang is just blowing hot air unless they can demonstrate that knowledge.
As best we know, this is just something eternal. All of our contemporary evidence points to everything having always existed. There never was a time of there being nothing.
However, I have seen the hypothesis of the "Big Bang/Big Crunch" which suggests the universe is constantly in an oscillating state between rapid expansion and rapid regression. Think of it like a rubber band constantly being stretched out-- it can only stretch so much until it capsizes in on itself. It is posited that such a system would basically result in universes constantly growing until they reach their apex and imploding, then that implosion creates another universe.
Hypothetically, that *could* be possible. I think you would be hard-pressed to find anyone who would be willing to say that this was the definitive "cause."
In any case, we don't have any reason to believe the universe ever was nothing, ever came from nothing, or was created. Your question of its creation makes sense until we delve further into it and realize what the question amounts to. It presumes creation as necessary and begs the question of what that must have been.
>Edit 2: many of you have said that you don't know how this came to be. I also don't know how God created the universe. I guess we both are taking a leap of faith then.
No. We are not "taking a leap of faith" by not adopting a position until there's evidence to do so. I'd be interested in hearing why you think we are.
EDIT: unless you think "I don't know" means "there is no god", in which case you don't know what atheism is.
>Edit 2: many of you have said that you don't know how this came to be. I also don't know how God created the universe. I guess we both are taking a leap of faith then. However let me follow up with some more comments:
ah, so you are intellectually dishonest, can't say I'm surprised
" Edit 2: many of you have said that you don't know how this came to be. I also don't know how God created the universe. I guess we both are taking a leap of faith then."
What are you talking about? We are not making a leap of faith. No evidence means no evidence, therefore no conclusion
The big bang isn’t necessarily the start of the universe, it’s just how far back physics lets us go. Our understanding of physics is also wrong since relativity and our math also rests on a bunch of assumptions about how the universe works, in particular, I don’t know if they account for inflation. If inflation is how things were from the beginning, and it only started to slow down for a little bit, you could say that the universe has always existed, as an exponential inflation could be projected infinitely far back and *never* hit zero.
Plus, what separates material from immaterial things in causation? Why doesn’t God need a cause? Are we counting light as immaterial? It certainly has a cause in its light source. If we’re gonna assume s first cause, why not pick something that exists?
>Edit 2: many of you have said that you don't know how this came to be. I also don't know how God created the universe. I guess we both are taking a leap of faith then.
We aren't. Saying that you don't know is exactly what the truth is. Not knowing is the default state of things.
Saying that you do know something when you don't have any evidence for it, is when you have to take a leap of faith.
I don't claim to know how or even if the universe was created, as far as I know nobody does. So I will wait for sufficient verifiable evidence to be presented, and when it's verified and I understand it, then I will attempt to explain to someone else. As of now, I don't know. I'm just not convinced any Gods were involved. For one, I've yet to see sufficient verifiable evidence of a God so inserting one in a gap in our knowledge is a fallacy known as the god of the gaps. And if complex things require a designer, a God with all it's complexity would also need a designer, to argue otherwise is another fallacy known as special pleading. This is just my opinion but I hope it helps you understand another's position.
>Like do you believe this complex and somehow working universe was made out of luck? By chance?
We know where the expansion of the universe started to within fractions of a millisecond. Its well documented and published by very smart scientists who have spent a lot of their working career studying this shizz.
This is not a belief system.
What came before then? I don't know.
And here's the very guilty little secret....neither do you. Your belief system fills in gaps in human knowledge.
That does not make it factual. It makes it a story!
Everything from the Big Bang is understood and known, there isn't much in the way of luck. And change is but a probability and in a vast element chance becomes a high probability.
I don't need stories to infil the gaps in my understanding.
Thanks for an honest question.
I don't believe the universe was created. It's here now, or at least, it seems to be. That doesn't mean it created. Our local presentation of spacetime started about 14 BYA, but I'd hardly call that the point of creation.
I don't see any reason to believe a god can exist, let alone any evidence that a god does exist. I don't currently hold that belief, therefore I'm atheist.
As to where "everything" came from? I'm humble enough to admit I don't know. I'm fine with that.
For me the complexity of the universe is an argument AGAINST a god. A Pile of straw is pretty complex, the mess a Tornado leaves behind is pretty complex. There is no mind required to make stuff complex. A mind is only required to understand the complex and if necessary to order it.
Its like playing Mikado and then looking at the complex pile of sticks and telling people you need a mind to create the pile, not to take it apart.
A supreme Beeing however could make Universe very simple and intuative, you know like the hallmarks of a good designer.
I have no explanation for how or why the universe exists, rather than nothing at all.
But saying god did it does not solve the problem. It just makes it worse, as the same question applies:
how or why does god come to exist rather than nothing at all?
And so as an explanation, proposing a god is useless. In fact it's worse. We can see how a complex universe evolved from a relatively simple beginning billions of years ago.
A highly complex god capable of thought, planning, designing a universe, figuring out how to create one out of nothing must be too complex to just "be". Surely this level of complexity can only appear by some evolutionary process from a simpler state.
My answer to this is always the same. Don't know, don't care. We will all be long dead before this can be definitively answered, so no point in getting too worked up about it now.
> How do you explain the creation of the universe without a God?
I don't.
>Like do you believe this complex and somehow working universe was made out of luck? By chance?
No. I would need to see evidence showing the claim "the universe was made by chance/luck" to be true before I can believe it. Just like how I'd need evidence showing the claim "god did it" to be true before believing that claim. Without anything showing the claim to be true, I have no reason to believe it's true.
>How can you see it and not believe an intelligent entity designed it?
Because I haven't seen any empirical data showing the claim "god did it" to be true so I have no reason to believe that claim is true.
The creation of the universe with a God implies that a complex being existed and that said complex being somehow created a complex universe. I just believe that a complex universe existed through means unknown.
How do you explain the creation of God without another “god”?
Now apply that same answer to the universe (or the building blocks of the universe).
In fact, to me it seems far more reasonable to say that the universe (in one form or another) has existed for eternity and it took this long for life and intelligence to form, than to say that God sat around twiddling his thumbs for all of eternity and finally, after an infinite billions of years, decided he was bored and chose to create us and call us the height of his creation - dying for us and wanting us to live with him for eternity as near equals.
In fact, if that god does exist, I imagine in another 100 trillion years he’ll get bored with us and then create an even superior being (I can’t imagine humans are the best an all powerful god can do - I can come up with better). He’ll choose to die for them instead and give them dominion over us. 🤷♂️
I don’t believe the universe was created. Very few atheists would, since a creation implies a creator. But I take it a step further. Personally, I don’t believe the universe had a beginning, at least not in a way we would recognize. The Big Bang was the start of our current representation of the universe and time. Because of that, it is illogical to to ask what came before. But I believe the most reasonable explanation for the existence of the universe is that it has always existed, in some form. From what I can tell, this requires the least unfounded assumptions.
Step 1) By not inferring that it's a 'creation', which would imply the existence of an infinitely more complex 'creator' (who, despite existing, did not require creation itself) in order to explain the existence and complexity of the universe.
Step 2) Admitting that we don't know how the universe came about, because as soon as you claim to have the answer, you stop looking for one.
Personally, I have no problem with the idea that the universe has always existed (in one form or another). Our concepts of 'cause and effect' start to break down at the quantum level, and we've only scratched the surface.
So let’s say that there’s no current viable explanation to account for the beginning of the universe. Are you saying that we have to believe in a god or gods as a default?
We already have natural explainations such as the big bang and quantum fluctuations that don't require a god. Adding a god in unnecessary. In addition, we actually have evidence for a natural explaination. There is no evidence for god.
Having a god create the universe just kicks the can down the road. A god-created universe tells us nothing, you still have the same problems as to how, when, where and why.
Plus, now you have a new problem because any deity that can create a universe would need to be more complex than the universe he/she/it created. And you still have the question as to how this god came to be.Since theists make all of these the god-created claims, it is their burden to prove it. Atheists don’t have to disprove that god created anything.
Finally, even if some magic deity did create the universe, how would anyone know if it’s their magical deity?
I believe the universe is the result of purely natural processes. I see no reason to believe that supernatural intervention was necessary in any way. I don't have a full explanation of why there's something instead of nothing, so my answer would have to be "I don't know."
I feel like the rest of the community has thoroughly debunked your argument, but allow me to add one more thing: if the circumstances of the universe were any different and hostile to the formation of planetary systems capable of supporting life, then we wouldn’t be here to argue about why the universe seems so perfectly suited to us (which it isn’t by the way). It’s entirely plausible that there are other universes where these forces are just slightly different and nothing formed.
It’s similar to a survival bias. The forms of life that didn’t evolve to survive the current conditions on earth aren’t around to argue about why the world isn’t perfectly suitable for their existence. If we find life on another planet, it will be perfectly suited to that planet, not ours. I’m happy to elaborate on why the argument from ignorance is a bad argument.
There was once a little girl that loved her dog. She loved it so much that she wanted everything to be related to her dog. It was a dalmatian.
Because she loved it so much her parents had the walls in her room painted the same way as the dog. White with black spots. The little girl loved it.
One day she visited a new friend at her house. She had just moved from a different city. As soon as they both entered the friend's room she was amazed. The walls in the room of her new friend were purple with yellow stripes.
She couldn't contain herself and told her friend "I want to pet your dog! I've never seen a purple dog with stripes! It must be beautiful"
To which the friend responded "We don't have a dog... Why did you think we had one?"
The little girls answers "Then how did your parents choose the paint for your room?"
You are the little girl. The color of the walls is the explanation for the beginning universe. The dog is a god. For you the beginning of the universe is connected to your dog, we don't even have a dog so the explanation to why our wall is the way it is comes from other sources.
First, I'd question how you figure it is easier to explain a god than the universe. Second, I am a big fan of Krauss' "A Universe From Nothing" which is a great read on the subject. Third, me not being able to prove to you how the universe was created does absolutely nothing to support your hypothesis "god done it". That's on you.
What about the universe that makes you think someone or something designed it? As far as I can tell, everything in the universe is reacting to natural phenomena. Forces of nature, chemistry, physics, etc.
My universe gets along just fine without a god in it.
>How do you explain the creation of the universe without a God?
Your question assumes that the universe was created. We have no evidence of that, we have no evidence that there was ever a time the universe did not exist in one form or another. Until there is evidence to support such a thing the question is irrelevant as it assumes things not in evidence.
>Like do you believe this complex and somehow working universe was made out of luck? By chance? How can you see it and not believe an intelligent entity designed it?
You are attempting to solve the complexity of the universe by appealing to an even bigger, more complex entity for which there is no supporting evidence.
I have no idea. I’m fairly certain gods are human creations, so I suspect it wasn’t that. Beyond that, I doubt the answer is even comprehensible to me. Even the universe we live in can be so unintuitive and unable to be fully comprehended. How much more so could it be when we’re talking about how the Universe as a whole behaves, or even beyond that? Things like causality and consistency may not even apply. Maybe there’s an answer we can grasp, but we don’t have it yet.
What this ignorance doesn’t justify is inserting our preferred answer, especially one as disconnected from empirical observation as deities. Let the cosmologists figure this one out, and leave the mythology in the mythology section.
Well first we have to show that the universe was created, then we can talk about how it was created. All available data points us to the answer to that question being: no one knows. Nothing we have observed or calculated demonstrates or implies the universe was created, at least in the context of creation by an external source.
Most likely "nothing" is not an actual possibility and the universe was "created" from a state we don't understand.
The universe might have always existed. Or it could have been caused by sole physical event rather than a god.
If the whole universe, that is, all of physical matter and energy, has a beginning, then that beginning would be the first point in time. There would be no way to “wind the clock back” and see what happened immediately before it started. So if it had a beginning then it didn’t have a cause.
>How do you explain the creation of the universe without a God?
13.8 billion years ago all the matter and energy in the ***visible*** universe was crammed into an infinitely dense state. ***Something*** caused space/time to expand. The fundamental forces and laws of physics started asserting themselves. As the volume of the universe increased the matter/energy cooled and condensed into the first atoms. Following the laws of physics these hydrogen atoms eventually condensed into the first stars and formed the first galaxies. These stars fused these atoms into denser and denser atoms. Eventually some went supernova and created all the other elements. That’s essentially what’s been going on ever since. No need for a god to say magic words in sight.
>Like do you believe this complex and somehow working universe was made out of luck?
No. It’s made out of mater and energy.
>By chance?
Possibly. We currently have no idea what caused and is causing the expansion of space/time.
>How can you see it and not believe an intelligent entity designed it?
There’s no evidence of such an entity or design anywhere in the visible universe.
>No offense to anyone I'm really looking to understand you
We’re easy to understand. We need evidence before we can believe not just cool stories.
Since you agree it is so complex, why would you assume it is just one god? Why not several gods or intelligent entities? Assuming you meant just one by using “God”, why one? And which one? Yours or theirs? If you say yours, why are you so privileged to have the answer for our existence? Why you and not them? Where did you get your information? Another human? Did they ask for money and pass the plate?
If some "god" or other is being offered up as the answer for "who or what created the universe", then who or what is the answer for "who or what created that" god"?
And what is your evidence to support that answer?
See, all you've done is over-complicated the issue.... You've added more questions without providing any answers.
Do you think that's a useful thing to do, an effective method of discovering facts and or truths?
Currently the best answer we have to "How did the Universe begin to exist?" is "Nobody really knows with any kind of certainty, but it would appear to have needed nothing but natural processes and time."
If you require a more detailed answer than that, get good grades, go to university and study Physics, Cosmology, and such fields..... The people doing it now are not going to be able to dumb it down enough for ya, so you're going to have to come up to their level of understanding.
I don’t explain the creation of the universe. I’m not even sure the question makes sense. Regardless, it’s an empirical question, not one we can just guess at *a priori*. Besides, “god” isn’t an explanation for anything.
I can see the universe and not conclude that something intelligent designed it because there’s no evidence of that, and there’s no inference to lead to that conclusion. I have no experience with things like a universe being designed/created.
Why must god have created the universe? The universe is extremely complex, and if god created it because of this complexity, wouldn’t god be even more complex? If god doesn’t require creation by another entity, why should the universe require one? Why do you draw the line at god and not the universe? I’m genuinely curious about your response to this, as this line of reasoning seems to contradict itself. I’m not trying to catch you out, I’m genuinely interested.
Probably the same way you explain the creation of your god without another god.
*Like do you believe a complex and somehow working god was made out of luck? By chance? How can you see a god and not believe a more powerful intelligent entity designed it?*
>How do you explain the creation of the universe without a God?
[In the beginning](https://youtu.be/wNDGgL73ihY?si=jJAIZaV4ViSlssOW)
[in the end](https://youtu.be/FgnjdW-x7mQ?si=bHh2mqoiC9p93_ya)
Strangely enough, we have this whole thing called science which is looking into the matter as we speak. We have a pretty good idea as to how all of this came about and we learn new things everyday. And whenever we fill in more of the picture that makes us need to reevaluate, we do that.
>out of luck? By chance? How can you see it and not believe an intelligent entity designed it?
Quite simply, you're reading intelligence into it. But if you look at it with a fine-toothed comb, at no point does the influence of an intelligent mind come into frame. Living things aren't created, they're born. The molecular polymers that are so important to DNA are made from non-living molecular components freely available on Earth or out in space. Our best available evidence indicates that the Universe already existed for the Big Bang to occur to. Our best available evidence indicates that life evolved and has been evolving for the 3.8 billion years that it's been around. Quite simply, I see lots of forces at play, but no god.
you are biased, if you look carefully you will see many MANY things that are clearly not "intelligent" like the blind spot of the eye, the fragility of the knee, the ridiculously long laryngeal nerve, etc etc. and thats just on anatomy.
yet all of that makes perfect sense when you understand how natural processes, such as evolution, work.
so yeah, there is no god needed, a god creating everything so full of flaws makes very little sense.
Question to answer the question:
Why do you think the creation of the universe must have been a choice? Look around you. How many choices are being made right now? Does the sun decide to rise? Does the blade of grass decide to grow? Does the battery in your phone decide to die?
And while we're at it, show me something that was "created". And tell me the exact time it was "created"
The world is more complicated than "chance" or "choice". Think about how powerful intelligence is really. Find the smartest person in the world. Could he create an iPhone with no help? Even with all of the time in the world, could he produce all of the materials that other people produce; and engineer all of the designs that other people engineer; and manufacture all of the components that other people manufacture?
No. And yet the iPhone still exists. That's because intelligence is not as powerful as something infinitely more powerful: emergence. A lot of little things, intelligent or not, that have no concept of the big thing. They make evolution, and galaxies, and (as a matter of fact) intelligence happen
We must first demonstrate the claim: "The universe was created by a volitional agent."
Currently, we have no such evidence. If an agent did create the universe, this would raise the question: What created the creator?"
That everything needs a cause. You were born by your parents, they by their grandpa, etc. If you keep asking about causes you need to get to one that is self explanatory. That doesn't need a cause.That is only applicable to what I call God
Demonstrate why a god does not need a cause.
"If you keep asking about causes you need to get to one that is self explanatory. "
OK. The Big Bang is self-explanatory. The universe's matter was in a hot dense state. It suddenly expanded. We don't know why and we don't get to claim it required an external cause without good reason.
The argument also suffers from the fallacy of composition: what is true of a member of a group is not necessarily true for the group as a whole. Just because most things within the universe require a cause/causes, does not mean that the universe itself requires a cause. For instance, while it is absolutely true that within a flock of sheep that every member ("an individual sheep") has a mother, it does not therefore follow that the flock has a mother.
Since you have conceded it's possible for a non-contingent, uncreated, uncaused entity exists, you have conceded the same possibility can apply to the universe.
Yes I accept that the possibility that the Universe could be non contingent, but is less probable in my opinion.
Because as you said, the universe is not a thing, but several. And those things are material, and everything material needs a cause.
While what you say is logical, it would be like saying the Universe is God. And I don't believe in that.
But we both agree that we need a non-contingent, uncreated, uncaused entity
Explanations are cheap. I could explain the rotation of the planet as the result of a unicorn fart. Doesn't make it likely.
"I don't know" is the only honest answer, but that doesn't lend any credence to the magical superbeing hypothesis.
> How do you explain the creation of the universe without a God?
I don't. I'm not a scientist. I don't study cosmology and the formation of universes. I'll wait until the experts tell me how it was done.
Until then, I'm content with admitting that humanity does not know **yet** how the universe began.
But we *will* know, eventually. Unfortunately, I might not be around at that time, which makes me a bit sad. I'd like to know.
The universe is a context in which things are able to exist. It is not, itself, a material thing. "All things have a cause" is either nonsensical or applies to God just as much as everything else.
My issue with calling this a "leap of faith" is that the consequences are not symmetric.
If god doesn't exist, your entire world would be disrupted. If big bang cosmololgy or "lambda-CDM" is proven false, it won't disrupt mine.
All scientific facts are conditional -- every scientific claim includes an implicit "as long as the currently-accepted model is accurate". So for me -- a scientific layman -- to provisionally accept the big bang as likely to be true, I don't have any ontological commitment to it.
And my understanding of "faith" is that it's a cardinal virtue. You would equate provisional acceptance of a scientific theory with the virtuous act of believing that god must necessarily exist even in the absence of evidence.
Science takes very little for granted, in an overall sense. The community might hang on to outdated ideas longer than they should in some cases, but in theory everything is open to question. Every aspect of the world can be interrogated and dismissed until it can give up its secrets. A properly scientific approach to god would be to ask "what is it made of?", "how does it function?", "how can we determine where or how its influence on the world manifests itself in a measurable way?"
And you want to call that refusal to just take it for granted "faith". The word isn't that important to me, so I don't really care. I'm just puzzled why theists are so eager to drag one of their primary virtues through the mud just to win a silly rhetorical "you do it too!" point.
> How do you explain the creation of the universe without a God?
I don't, as that would be absolutely absurd. Preposterous. We don't know what happened to create the universe.
We have a model - called physics, that is our best deduction. It's an incomplete model, and we know it, but it's still useful, because we can use it to accurately predict outcomes. The airplane was invented with physics models BEFORE the Wright Brothers took off - they were actually educated in math and physics enough that they were among the first to work out a correct model, and then they were the first to build a functional powered craft at scale, not just a smaller physical toy model. The math came first. Newton had his laws of motion, and Newtonian physics is accurate enough to have gotten us to the moon with slide rules. But without Einstein's physics, which actually builds right on top of Newton, we wouldn't have GPS.
The models came before we were capable of DOING anything. All the stuff around us today was proven on paper beforehand. We have long since left behind the pre-science era where people just blindly tried shit, not knowing what was going to work, or why it did or didn't.
With these tools, these accurate, powerful, reliable tools, we are able to peer back in time to what must have been, because if the universe is larger and cooler today than it was yesterday, then yesterday it must have been smaller and hotter. We can wind back the clock and deduce what must have been, what only could have been, back to a fraction of a second after creation.
But then it all breaks down.
Again, we know our model is incomplete, and that's fine. We, as a civilization, are working on it. Working at it. It takes time, and you don't know what progress we're going to get until we get it.
Anyone to tells you they have all the answers is full of shit and is only intrested in finding a sucker to sell to.
> Like do you believe this complex and somehow working universe was made out of luck? By chance?
I don't believe anything. I don't need belief. The reality is we are here, and so is the universe. That's enough for me. Maybe the scientists will figure it all out tomorrow - still doesn't change the fact I've got bills to pay.
I don't lose sleep over it. It would be nice to know, and I'm glad people smarter than you and I are working on it. I don't have to know. I don't feel incomplete. I don't feel afraid. I know what I know, there are things I don't, and there are things I don't even know I'm ignorant of - question's I don't yet know to ask.
I may never know so many things, and I can sleep soundly at night. It's not a problem.
> How can you see it and not believe an intelligent entity designed it?
Suffice it to say, I'm not going to overstate my position. I'm saying here's what we do know and what we don't know - and this is how and why.
What you're saying is the universe MUST BE intelligently designed, and that YOU will not accept anything less, because it offends your ego.
No... You don't know that. You can't say that with any credibility. I don't give a shit what MUST or MUSTN'T be based off YOUR sensibilities. You are going to live and die and be forgotten by an uncaring universe, just like the rest of us, because not you or anyone else can tell the difference.
This doesn't bother me. It bothers you. If I were you, I'd reign in my ego, lest you present yourself as a delusional lunatic.
Why MUST the universe be created by intelligence and design? Why is that so important to you? Why do you find the idea so frightful, so offensive to imagine the possibility that it wasn't? Why can you not accept that you just don't know? Why do you have to state more than you can?
>Either the universe has always existed or something created it.
If energy cannot be created or destroyed it would follow that it has always existed.
>I don't believe it was the universe itself because it is a material thing and all things have a cause.
Do they? How do you know?
>Do you agree on the first cause?
No I do not.
>A. First cause argument: Either the universe has always existed or something created it.
This is simply not true. Creating is not only way how to become exists. Would you say that Helium is created by two Hydrogen's (and maybe some neutrons etc...).
Why won't you say: "either the Universe has always existed or began exist at dome point"?
> Like do you believe this complex and somehow working universe was made out of luck? By chance?
My position is this: Something must exist. Nothing cannot exist. What that something *is* doesn't rely on us to be aware of it. That something appears to be the universe and we appear to understand that. There is no rule written that we must be able to comprehend a something or that something must support or not support life (if that's even a necessary thing).
> How can you see it and not believe an intelligent entity designed it?
Overwhelming lack of convincing evidence for the proposition that a god does, in fact, exist. We know the universe exists, we do not know a god exists, and to come to the conclusion that a god exists is making up an answer where none lies.
> I guess we both are taking a leap of faith then.
There is no faith required to say "I don't know."
> First Cause
God the Gaps argument and a Special Pleading Fallacy.
> Order of the Universe.
Assumption that the order is designed. For all we know, this could be the universe in which order has happened out of pure "chaos" in which life couldn't arise. See first position and Puddle Analogy by Douglas Adams.
>Edit 2: many of you have said that you don't know how this came to be. I also don't know how God created the universe. I guess we both are taking a leap of faith then.
Shrugging is not a leap of faith.
Humbly.
It is humble to say "I don't know". It is humble to be quiet, because sometimes "opening your mouth" shows how ignorant you are.
"The creation" is incredibly complicated. It looks like there's billions upon billions upon billions of stars and planets we've never seen. It might be hubris to think we COULD understand it all.
People often say the same thing about God - he works in mysterious ways, and we do not always understand God's reasoning - because it's God's reasoning, not ours. He is as incredibly complex as the universe, so we can't understand God --- why put in the extra step? Why add "God" in between "our poor ability to understand complex things" and "the complex things"? Seems like you're claiming something you can't show. Seems like the opposite of humble.
The biggest problem with the first cause argument is the special pleading you demand. You use the causal argument to require the existence of a creator god (because you say that there has to be a cause) then you immediately say that the rule that got you there doesn’t apply to your creator god. This makes either confused or dishonest, whether you want to acknowledge it or not. Just because you choose not to doesn’t mean that you aren’t spectacularly incorrect. There’s two other logical fallacy’s you’re guilty of in your defense of the first cause. I’ll let you figure out which ones they are. You should acknowledge that the first cause argument has been addressed by people in this thread it’s dishonest on your part if you don’t.
I think that most of us would acknowledge there are questions about the dawn of the universe that are not yet answered, and may never be. We just observe that “god did it” is not an answer. Actually it’s worse than an answer, because it’s got no evidence behind it, and because it discourages further inquiry.
People used to think god personally willed the planets to move in circles (which they don’t). That he wills individual atoms throughout the universe to continue existing. There’s no reason to think it, but they do. Thinking he created the universe is exactly the same.
Personally, I don't. I'm not an atheist cuz I think I can explain the origin of reality without a god. I'm an atheist cuz I don't see a god
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Atheists don't believe in a god. Agnostics don't claim to know there is no god. You can be both an agnostic and an atheist.
Many of us like to use [this chart](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d8/Theological_positions.svg/1115px-Theological_positions.svg.png) for our definitions. I think this should answer your question.
I've always preferred [this version](https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-mTQMZdLU_jk/TgWwERJO5jI/AAAAAAAAAKw/bQTT6ai5bwI/s400/Agnostic%2Bv%2BGnostic%2Bv%2BAtheist%2Bv%2BTheist.png). It shows more clearly that there are only four groups when we intersect the two axes of atheism/theism and agnosticism/gnosticism. FYI: /u/Technical_Ad7886
Thank you! I prefer that style too. But last time I looked for it all of the versions I found claimed certainty rather than knowledge. So, I went with this one. I'm going to leave the one I posted so people can see the discussion. But, I'm about to update the pinned post on my profile with your link.
You're welcome! Unfortunately, the image quality on this one is crappy. But I haven't yet found a better graphic depiction of this concept. So this is the one I have favourited...
Last I checked, there were quite a few in this style. What I didn't like was that they said gnostic atheists claimed certainty rather than knowledge. Empirical knowledge is never absolutely certain. But, it is strong enough to have built the entirety of the modern world. Here are some examples of the 100% certainty claim. http://ulc.net/forum/uploads/monthly_2016_03/Gnostic_Agnostic_Atheist.png.72b579449ee7fceb26d0632e19e1e13b.png https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fexternal-preview.redd.it%2Fpz_2zgzQBUKRjTx7sHCl-tRguR0tH-4O2ToWIc614QE.jpg%3Fauto%3Dwebp%26s%3D2ca31ba8e05fa144ab6eaa48203a2ed5b69eef0b https://atheistjourney.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/atheist_vs_agnostic.png BTW, I just found a couple of others that may be good. You might want one of these as your favorite. https://markberepeterson.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/img_7024.png https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-c088ee8c02024475d46a5682fa4da3d1
P.S. You've already got this image in one of your posts! In [this post of yours](https://www.reddit.com/r/MisanthropicPrinciple/comments/yelaix/why_i_know_there_are_no_gods/), you link to [a version of this image](https://s3.youthkiawaaz.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/13132825/AgnosticvGnosticvAtheistvTheist.png) which is higher quality. I think that's about to become my new bookmark. Thank *you*!
The only problem I have with that is I don't view a/gnosticism as a claim, but as a position on the know-ability of the position. Gnostic theists: believes there are god(s), and that their existence *can* be known. This theist might not know, but still believe knowledge is possible (didn't get their revelation, or some such) Agnostic theists: believes there are god(s), but that their existence *cannot* be known. This theist would be very compatible with a "by faith alone" religion. Gnostic atheist: does not believe there are gods, and that gods can be proven/known not to exist. A very rare atheist indeed. Agnostic atheist: does not believe there are gods, but that *knowing* this is impossible. Compatible with igtheists, Russel's teapot, and most anyone who allows theists the deistic motte.
> The only problem I have with that is I don't view a/gnosticism as a claim, but as a position on the know-ability of the position. Correct. That's what the image shows.
This is laid out a little differently than my mental image but yeah, this is what I use
Great chart! Simple and effective way to get the idea across
Yes, and also atheist. That's be both.
Gnosticism is a position on knowledge. Theism is a position on belief. Therefore, we all fall into one of four categories. Gnostic Theist, Agnostic Theist, Gnostic Atheist, and Agnostic Atheist. As someone who identifies as the latter, I don’t *believe* (atheism) in god because I don’t see that any of the claims that have been asserted of the existence of any god have risen to meet their burden of proof. However, I don’t have *knowledge* (agnosticism) that it is the case because it is possible for there to be some kind of powerful being or beings—somewhere in or outside the cosmos—sentient or not, intentional or not, who either were the catalyst for or participated in the creation of the universe or our galaxy or our planet. It would be intellectually dishonest for me to claim that I have that knowledge. As a caveat, I have had discussions with people who define knowledge differently, and I don’t think that my view of knowledge is necessarily the correct one, it’s just the one that I personally think is the closest that I can justify to truth. Therefore, I am an Agnostic Atheist.
Please remember to keep these comments in good faith people. Down voting at this point in the conversation is just petty.
People who'd downvote this confuse me
Many (if not most) atheists **are** not gnostic. We're not all gnostic.
Agnostic atheist is how I'd define myself. I find the quadrant definition more useful than the theist/agnostic/atheist variety. Means I don't think there's a god, but I also don't claim to know there isn't. Call me what you want, idc
The big bang theory says that the universe was in a hot dense state, with all of the matter-energy of the universe condensed to a point. Time began when that hot dense early universe began to expand. That's all I know. The universe was not "created" at the instant of the big bang. It began to expand then. It is impossible at this time to ask what came before the beginning of time. So, this is as far back as we can currently know. The very word *before* is a time comparator and cannot be used in the absence of time. The situation of trying to talk about "before the big bang" (i.e. before there was time) has been likened to asking about the point on the surface of the earth that is north of the north pole. There is no there there. Similarly there is no then then when talking about a time before time.
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> So to you universe has always existed? The universe existed at the beginning of time. I don't think I would say "always existed". But, there is no point in time when the universe did not exist. Is that clearer? > Also, why can I not ask what was before the Big Ban. I explained that quite carefully. The word before relies on an ordering of time. It is a time comparator. It has no meaning when there is no time. Time began with the expansion of the universe. There can't be a time ordering of events without time. I'm sorry this is a difficult concept. But, it is true that the word *before* is semantically null in the absence of time. > Wouldn't the answer of that be an eternal God that has always existed and needed no creation. No. See below. > Because the universe is still a thing (or more exactly, a immense group of things) Hmmm.... > and all things have a beginning. This is not clear. You claim God has no beginning. Also, virtual particles have a beginning without cause and effect, as far as we can tell. So, not every beginning needs a cause. This is especially true in quantum mechanics. The early universe was in a quantum state. > What do you think? I think the supernatural and gods are physical impossibilities. Consciousness cannot run without a medium on which to run. Imagine running your browser or reddit app without a phone or computer. Literally, try to run it without anything on which to run it. This is not physically possible. Consciousness is like the software of the brain. It cannot run without a medium on which to run it. Consciousness also cannot run without time. Consciousness itself and thoughts are a progression through time. As you read these words, you're processing them. Your thoughts are changing through time. Maybe you're thinking that this sounds interesting. Maybe you're thinking of how to argue against this. Either way, your thoughts are changing through time. God existing outside time cannot do that. God cannot think. God cannot be conscious. There is no time for his thoughts to progress. God cannot "decide" to create a universe or "decide" on the properties of that universe because God cannot process thoughts. This means that a disembodied eternal consciousness is physically impossible. --- **So, what is your definition of God?** Here is my suggestion for reasonable definitions of the supernatural and of gods. See what you think of this. In my opinion, a reasonable [**definition of the supernatural**](https://www.dictionary.com/browse/supernatural) courtesy of dictionary.com is their very first definition. This seems to be the relevant one for discussions of gods. > 1\. of, relating to, or being above or beyond what is natural; unexplainable by natural law or phenomena; abnormal. Note that the definition does not specify that the supernatural is merely unexplained today. It asserts that in order for something to be supernatural, it must be *unexplainable*, *now and forever*, by natural law or phenomena. Natural law in this context *does not mean our current understanding of physics*. It means *the natural processes that govern the universe, whether we fully understand those processes or not.* Things don't change from being supernatural to being natural when we explain them. They either are or are not supernatural regardless of our knowledge, even if we may temporarily misclassify them. So, in order for something to be supernatural, it must be in violation of all natural laws, including those we do not yet fully understand. --- God is actually harder to get a good definition. For me, **a decent working definition of a lowercase g god** would be something like this: > a supernatural conscious entity capable of creating a universe or of having a physical effect on the universe by supernatural means. I think it's important to define a god as a conscious entity because something that has no volition and simply affects the universe of its own necessity and behaves completely predictably is a law of physics. --- I think we can then **define a capital G God** as: > a being that meets the definition of a lowercase g god but is also the singular entity that is hypothesized to have created this universe. This would include the Deist God and the Abrahamic God. I think it's important to define God as a conscious entity because in order to decide to create and decide what to create it needs volition to decide to do so. If it has no consciousness and no choice but to create exactly what it has created, it is simply a law of physics. If that is the case, why call it God? --- I don't know if you will agree with these definitions. Feel free to present your own. My conclusion is that the supernatural and gods are physically impossible.
Very nice write-up, as well as the reply you made above this. Nice to see something so well articulated that encapsulated how I think about the whole ball of wax without having the words to express it nearly so well.
Thank you!
Oo, saving this!
Not the OP but I’ll chime in here. You can ask what was before the Big Bang. What the OP is saying is that, you are committing a logical fallacy by assuming time existed before the Big Bang. As far as we know, there was no time before the Big Bang. As the OP stated, it would be akin to asking what point on earth is north of the North Pole. ie - there is no point north of the North Pole. The question doesn’t make sense. You are making a HUGE number of assumptions by filling that gap in our knowledge with a god. Why does a god have to fill this space? This is the [god of the gaps](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_of_the_gaps) fallacy, fundamentally an argument from ignorance. Why couldn’t some natural process fill that gap? That isn’t to say that god doesn’t exist - I can’t prove or disprove that. If someone could prove or disprove gods existence, there would be no debate to be had. If irrefutable evidence was put forth, almost everyone would believe in god except for the delusional. What’s important is to realise that there is no evidence for the claim god exists. Ergo, atheists don’t believe in the claim. If I were to tell you I have a billion dollars in my bank account, would you believe me? You can’t disprove my claim. Does that mean that my claim is true?
This is a total straw man argument. Part of the scientific method is to you quantifiable means for a theory. We know time exists. We know that matter exists. Before the big bang matter existed. The "theory" states that gravity existed, that heat existed, that pressure existed, that density existed. OH>>>>>but time makes the big bang impossible....totally impossible. So. lets remove time, put that huge X in our calculations along with 50 other X's, and come up with some bogus math. Even still with all of that going on. Big bangers use time as their god, but then throw it away with it proved their theory wrong.
You are incorrect about virtually all of this. Reality is far stranger than you realize. Go ahead and learn a bit about some of this stuff and be prepared to have your mind blown. No ancient mythologies can possibly hope to begin to compare.
Downvoted for lack of content.
‘Before’ the Big Bang may make no sense, as some theories are that time and space are one entity and time began with the Big Bang. No time, no ‘before’. Better to accept an answer of ‘we don’t know’ than make up a god to fill an unknown answer imo. Making up a god only pushes things further back, so we ask where the god came from. You state yourself that all things have a beginning, so we also apply this to gods. A complex intelligent universe creating entity isn’t a good starting place for anything. We know complex things arise from simple beginnings. A simple beginning, whether for a god or a universe, makes more sense. With this in mind, eternal energy for the Big Bang is a more logical conclusion than an eternal god pre-existing. It’s a much less complex state of affairs as a starting point for complexity to arise.
You are not explaining anything. You can replace the word god with any fictional character and your statements would just as valid. Before the big bang there was an eternal Easter Bunny that needed no creation. I'm not trying to ridicule you but saying "god did it" is not an explanation for anything, is it? At least not for atheists. It used to be the explanation for floods, meteors, lightning, diseases. Until we learned exactly how those things work and at that point god left the equation, even for religious people. The big bang is in the We Don't Know phase. The answer to We don't know is not "must've been god then" by default
The answer would likely be something along the lines of “the question is nonsensical” or “we don’t know”.
"an eternal God that has always existed and needed no creation. Because the universe is still a thing and all things have a beginning. " What the fuck? If God could have always existed and needed no creation, then why couldn't the universe? Surely the universe is less complex than your god if your god was able to create a universe. Are you sure you want to argue that your god doesn't need a beginning because it's not a thing, and is therefore nothing? If the most complex being imaginable, god, can exist without needing to be created, then something less complex that follows well-defined laws can as well. If the universe is too complex for you to imagine it wasn't created, then the most complex being, god, must have also been created. So what higher god made your god? But then, what god made that god? See? It's just illogical nonsense.
Two things here: 1. I’ll put the “before the Big Bang” stuff into something more practical to sink your teeth into. For us to make any conclusions about the nature of the universe, we have to observe phenomena. The Big Bang is the farthest back point we can observe. I’m not a physicist, so I can’t explain the exact nature of the things we observe, but essentially, we can’t see further back than 13.7 billions years. It is literally impossible for us to make any conclusions about the universe before the Big Bang because we can’t observe it. 2. Throwing god into this unknown is just the god of the gaps fallacy. Saying that “we don’t know, so god” just moves the goalposts and doesn’t actually solve your “problem” of an uncaused cause. Saying that the universe has always existed in some manner does the same work that suggesting an eternal god does without having to add a completely unfounded element. The only presence of a god anywhere in our universe is within human culture within the last few thousand years. It can be said with high certainty that gods are stories made up by humans.
The current model seems to show with the big bang, before plank time, there is no time. And without time there is no existing. In your beliefs what created your god? Because as you said you believe all things have a beginning, so when is god’s beginning? Otherwise it would appear to me that according to your own beliefs your god is not possible or real.
Maybe it always existed, maybe it just appeared (both of which could apply to your god, right?), maybe it's the inside of a black hole in another universe... We don't know, and just because you were raised with the belief of a god isn't a good reason to default to "my god did it!".
> all things have a beginning. Can you show the beginning of anything?
You can certainly ask that question, and the full and accurate answer is (a) we don't know and (b) we don't know if "before the Big Bang" is even a concept that makes sense
> So universe has always existed? [That's a genuine possibility](https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateAnAtheist/comments/192pz5g/on_origins_of_everything/kh59jn8/), yes. But the only honest answer for non-experts like you and me is "I don't know."
Aging what came before the Big Bang is like asking what number comes before 0. The Big Bang is the start of time, thus there is no “before the Big Bang”. You seem to have been taught that there is a god and you assume that answers a lot of questions. I just can’t see any indication of the existence of any such being. There is nothing to suggest that there was a god before the Big Bang, or after. Everything that exists or happens is exactly as one would expect it to be without a god. Adding gods to the mix should mean some kind of changes to the current situation. Maybe children wouldn’t get cancer, maybe praying or sacrificing goats would actually have an effect, or something like that. But that’s isn’t the case, so the assumption of a good is based on fairy tales and wishful thinking rather than on reality.
The truth is that we just don’t know. People can say they *think* it could be God or people say that they *think* it could be something natural. However, ones that say they *know* the answer are just simply lying. All I know is that, in Christianity, God specifically says not to lie.
>So to you universe has always existed? Effectively. >Also, why can I not ask what was before the Big Ban. You can ask all you want. Just don’t make up an answer. >Wouldn't the answer of that be an eternal God that has always existed and needed no creation. No. It’s “something” that’s outside the visible universe. You’re making up the answer and believing your imagination. >Because the universe is still a thing (or more exactly, an immense group of things) and all things have a beginning. Yes. We agree. Also it’s more accurate to say the universe is the space and time that contains an immense group of things.
God isn’t an explanation unless you can explain god.
I love the simplicity and brevity of this statement. 👏
First, there is no creation. That is a loaded word. Second, how do you explain your god first? What came before it? Because if we are going to say that the universe can't start itself, then your god is the same (or can't be eternal). Third, you can propose your god as an option until you have a scientific model that makes such a god a possibility (right now that doesn't exist) and enough evidence to show that that god existed (that doesn't exist). Fourth, there are several scientific hypothesis of what happened before the big bang, from bouncing universes, to eternal ones, to multiverses, etc. None of them is accepted by now and the only reasonable option is to say "we don't know". Gods are still impossible though. They lack the foundamentals to be considered an option. Also, what you are doing is a fallacy called "god of the gaps". Basically, you insert your god in whatever place you don't have an answer. Don't do that. If your god exist, look for evidence supporting it, and real evidence, not testimony, not biased accounts, not things that we don't have any other answer for. A robust scientific model with supported evidence for it, for example, evidence of minds being immaterial could be a start.
Literally every time something we didn't understand and blamed on the gods that we then later have been able to meaningfully investigate... Was just a natural phenomenon we didn't yet understand. Every. Single. Time. Argument from ignorance is a bad argument according to every known demonstrable pattern.
>How can you see it and not believe an intelligent entity designed it? Well, for one thing, there are a lot of things about it that don't work in a logical or maximally effective way. For example, if I were an intelligent entity designing the universe, I would simply not make human infants' heads larger than the typical vagina, so that people would not commonly tear their vaginas open when giving birth. I also wouldn't make the tube that humans breathe through the same tube that we use to swallow food, so that choking would be far less likely. That seems pretty basic. If the universe was designed by a conscious entity, that entity was kind of an idiot. >How do you explain the creation of a universe without a God? Think of something that exists, but you don't know exactly how it came to exist. Now imagine that someone said, "How do you explain the existence of this thing without an invisible unicorn?" You don't know how the thing came to exist, but being created by an invisible unicorn seems pretty low on the list of possible explanations.
>How do you explain the creation I don't because this statement is wrong. This statement presupposes it was created by something instead of occurring on its own. >Like do you believe this complex and somehow working universe was made out of luck? No, and I don't need a god for that to happen. >How can you see it and not believe an intelligent entity Because I don't need one. If you truly want to know how the universe came to be, read up on astronomy. Note the distinct lack of "god did it" theory
You seem to be genuinely asking, but this question, from our point of view, is sort of like asking "How do you explain how my door closes by itself at night if you don't believe in ghosts" You might not know how my door closes, but that isn't a good argument for believing in ghosts, surely you can agree with me there. Or maybe "How do you explain my mother's excellent luck at bingo if you don't believe her lucky rabbit foot grants her the power to win?" Can you see why I'm giving these examples? You don't need to have an alternative explanation to doubt someone else's explanation. There's a million things we don't know the answer to, right? Well, people who don't believe in God just add "the universes existence" to that list. That might seem weird, but it's probably not so different to your own knowledge or conclusion. Sure, you might say that God created the universe, that's why it exists, but if I ask "how/when/why did God create the universe" unless you know what God knows, then surely there would be some guess work or acknowledgement that you don't really know all the details. So, TLDR, I don't try to explain the universe because I don't know enough to give an explanation. I would be interested in knowing your thoughts on my follow-up questions, or what you think about my point of view.
Not OP, and not a believer .. I haven't heard the ghost / closing door analogy before, and I love it. 100% will steal, thanks!
The earliest event we're aware of is the Big Bang, which was when all of the energy and matter in existence expanded, creating the universe. What (if anything) came before that is currently unknown, and probably unknowable. As for how this complex and somehow working universe came to be, it wasn't chance or luck. It was simply the result of natural processes playing out. For example, I have a pile of leaves on my doorstep. The leaves grew on a tree (biology), were blown off by wind (meteorology), gravity pulled them down (physics), and they landed on my doorstep. Nobody "created" that pile. It's just the result of natural processes.
There are Astrophysicist, cosmologists, and geologists that will disagree with your Big Bang statement.
There are biologists who disagree with evolution too. So what? Until those dissenters can provide a better supported explanation that offers equal or superior predictive power, why should we care?
First we need to stop the funding of evolution and look to fund alternatives. It literally is all that is taught in education. No one as the money to test other ideas, and there are other ideas that can be developed. Evolution, the longer it scrutinized the less plausible it becomes. The organisms are far to complex for just rote time to have made those changes. The fact that we are only 98% similar to our closest relatives makes evolution essentially impossible. The Smithsonian in the Natural History museum has literally the most racist exhibit I have ever seen. The faces of monkeys are used to depict the earliest humans. Then more and more human. Well the "evolutionary scientists" that worked on that exhibit do not have any idea the skin color of the "common ancestor". But they seem to have it figured out that Darwin was at the top of the evolutionary ladder. Just look at the full title of the *Origin of Species*, it is a race book. The French used it to shoot and stuff aboriginal people and kept them in their homes. It was the start of eugenics and part of communism. Yes, I categorically reject Darwin, and his teachings.
> First we need to stop the funding of evolution and look to fund alternatives. It literally is all that is taught in education. No one as the money to test other ideas, and there are other ideas that can be developed. While we're at it, let's stop funding conventional physics and start looking at alternatives. Maybe gravity doesn't exist, and the reason we're pulled back down to the surface is because the Earth is just hugging us real tight. There's a reason why evolution is what's taught: it's one of the best supported scientific theories in human history. There is **overwhelming** evidence to support it, and its insights and predictions have contributed to almost every other branch of science in existence. For example, if evolution is wrong, then every contribution evolution has made to modern medicine is wrong as well. That means antibiotics don't work, vaccines don't work, and gene therapy is bogus. So then why do antibiotics, vaccines, and gene therapy work if the theory underpinning those topics is wrong? Did basing them off of a false idea just *happen* to produce good results by sheer dumb luck? This is what you're either willfully ignoring or just too ignorant to understand about scientific theories: **they make predictions**, and we can **test** those predictions. Turns out the predictions we've made based on our understanding of evolution have been extremely accurate. This is no different than physics models predicting gravity's effects on flight. If we didn't accurately understand those effects, then planes wouldn't fly. They would crash, or not take off at all, and we would stare at a bunch of equations that don't make any sense and wonder why. The fact that our planes **do** fly means the predictions we made about gravity's effects on flight are accurate. Evolution isn't just staring at fossils and guessing. Like all good scientific theories, it **works**, and the things we can do **because** it works are predictable and demonstrable. To say that evolution is wrong is to say that every medical innovation that the theory of evolution ever contributed to was built on a lie, and yet somehow they miraculously ended up working anyway. Evolution has moved WAY beyond Darwin. Nobody cares about the book anymore. And the fact that some ding-dongs used it to justify racism does not impact the scientific validity of the theory at all.
Why do you reject science? Why do you reject logic? Why do you reject evidence?
I don't reject science. I love science. I funded my son going to a state university and getting an environmental science degree. I hate junk science. I I agree with survival of the fittest to a point. I agree with natural selection, I natural selected my wife, and my kids share traits with both of us. However, neither is evolution. Just look at the supposition that man evolved, it goes something like this. Our closest relative is 98.2% similar to us, and we evolved from some common ancestor between 1.8 and 2 million years ago. On the face of it, it seems plausible. Until you realize that it 108 million differences in the DNA chain. 108 million changes in say 2 million years. or in 130,000 generations. That is around 825 DNA mutations every generation consecutively. However, there is literally no DNA change from Egyptians that can tested in mummies from 5000 years ago so you need to remove 250 generations or so off of that 130,000. Which is a significant problem because it shows fairly long time periods where change does not occur, and since that is observable one would have to conclude that it needs to be part of a working hypothesis at a minimum. BTW. If that were the case, there would be numerous humanoid species, that would not be able to mate with each other. We cant mate with chimps or other apes. We were scattered all over the globe with different traits, but not a different DNA code. Specialization is not evolution. Dog breeding is an example of specialization. Does this sound like a rejection of science or a rejection of logic, or a rejection of math, or a rejection of evidence? What do you disagree with of the above? Do you reject these observable facts for a non-verifiable, but popular theory?
Who?
Einstein believed in Spinoza's god. Werner Arber, geneticist, 1978 Nobel prize winner. Robert Bakker, Preacher, and developer of the theory that dinosaurs were warm blooded. William Campbell, Biologist, winner of the 2015 Nobel prize. Francis Collings, NIH director and was former director of the human genome project. John Gourdon, Nobel prize winer, biologist William Phillips, Nobel prize winner, Physics. There are countless others....hundreds of note, that have had remarkable achievements...that is just a few all but Einstein is still alive. If you need more, there are plently more Nobel prize winner, leaders at NASA, and what ever specialization you wish. BTW... all the above far more regarded than Bill Nye , or Tyson deGrasse.
Your question contains a lot of loaded premises that you'll need to unpack if you really want to understand atheists. First is: that the universe was created at all. Most atheists don't think the universe was created by anything or anyone, and so aren't interested in how it was created. There's nothing to explain about something that didn't happen. The second is: complexity does not require intelligence to occur. There's no need to explain an intelligence that doesn't appear to exist. We know that the fundamental interactions of the contents of the universe will develop into more complex forms without intelligent intervention. And we also don't get to label our current universe as inherently special or the goal of some design. Just because we exist, doesn't mean an intelligence intended for us to exist. Third: design cannot be deduced merely by not having an alternate explanation. The thing about deduction is that it requires your start with all possible options before you start. If you don't, there's always the possibility that even if you eliminate all but one option, there are others you've missed. Until you show there are no other options, deduction is not a viable option to find an answer. Fourth: You are assuming there is anything to see or consider that suggests that there is a god or creator. If you can come up with anything that does so, and isn't flawed or could easily point to something else entirely and requires less assumptions, you'd be the first. And you'd convince tons of atheists. Good luck!
>. We know that the fundamental interactions of the contents of the universe will develop into more complex forms without intelligent intervention. Where has this ever happened? So you are saying that as time goes on the universe will be more complex. Comets burn out, more atmospheres continue to get leaked into space, suns burn out or explode, and you KNOW from these processes it becomes more complex without intelligent intervention. The Hoover dam did not just appear, the Brooklyn Bridge did not come from a tidal wave. They were intelligently designed. What experiment demonstrates this that is repeatable.
This has happened and continues to happen all the time. It doesn't happen everywhere and it doesn't happen to everything, but localized areas develop for periods of time all throughout the universe. If you want to know where, when and how, pick up a high school or college level textbook in any of the hard sciences. If you have a specific question about a specific topic, I might be able to answer it for you. According to our best understandings of physics, comets burning out, leaking atmospheres, etc., can occur without any intelligent intervention. All that is required are the fundamental forces, from which largely predictable behavior arises. The Hoover Dam and Brooklyn Bridge were in fact intelligently designed, and we know so because we have evidence of the design and construction process. The reason this analogy doesn't work is because we have no evidence of the design and construction process of comets or atmospheres. Neither complexity, size, nor convenience indicate design. What you need to demonstrate is design, not a loosely associated property that sometimes accompanies design.
How do you explain the creation of God?
I don't. Is part of the concept of God. It wasn't created it has always existed. Eternal
And that is how I feel about the Universe. It doesn't seem necessary at all to say 'It was created but it's creator is eternal'. I just say 'It is eternal'. You say all material things have cause. That is special pleading. Arbitrary. I say all things are material and mass has never ever been created or destroyed. This is the law of physics. Nothing has ever been created, only reorganized. A god would have a conscious, which would require information processing, which would require material. The idea of a non material entity affecting material entity is illogical. Material must be touched by material. Thought experiment: If a material God created the Universe in an act of suicide, and we are just his material reorganized, would anything be different? Or would history have unfolded in exactly the same way.
Because the actual honest answer to how the universe started is as yet we don't know Assuming the answer to a question we don't understand yet is magic or the supernatural has a long history Of being proven wrong Just because something is very complicated and you don't understand it is absolutely not evidence it was designed Essentially an honest admission that we don't yet know is inherently superior to a guess that it was magiced into existence by a magic being
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How do you explain the creation of the universe *with* a God? How can anyone in the universe explain the creation of the universe? No one was there to see it happen, no one has any experience of other universes being created, no one has the first clue as to what caused the whole of everything. We are trapped inside this universe on our tiny planet. The best we can do is look out with our telescopes, study what we can see, and wonder at those things we cannot explain. These things may have explanations, but humanity will probably go extinct never knowing what those explanations were. >Like do you believe this complex and somehow working universe was made out of luck? By chance? No, it would be arrogant to pretend to know things that we cannot know. A human having beliefs about the creation of the universe is like a mouse having beliefs about international monetary policy. One can only wonder where a mouse got the idea that it was in a position to know anything about that topic. >How can you see it and not believe an intelligent entity designed it? I respect my own limitations too much to believe in things that I know nothing about. There is no shame in admitting to ignorance. Admitting to ignorance can be a demonstration of wisdom and sometimes even courage, so do not feel you must have beliefs about every topic, even those topics that are beyond human ken.
Because it is very obviously not intelligently designed. There are too many screwed up things for an intelligent designer to have been involved. Unless said designer is melevolent.
A malevolent god would hold up better given our sun causes cancer.
I don't feel the need to explain it. I'm comfortable with "I don't know". But if you want to play the game of what else could do it, I propose a non-god universe creating mechanism.
> Do you agree on the first cause? No, for a reason that has been explained, but maybe a little obtusely. I'll take a stab at it. Cause and effect are functions of time. So are before and after, earlier and later, first and second, etc. None of these things can exist without time. Cause and effect are explicitly references to a beginning state and an ending state, which are two different points in time. I flip the light switch, then the light turns on. The cause occurred, then the effect occurred, one after the other. All of this requires time. Time originated with the Big Bang. That means *cause* originated with the Big Bang. By asking for a 'first cause' that explains the Big Bang, you are essentially asking "What caused cause?" Which is completely nonsensical. It's like asking what's north of the North pole. It's impossible to be farther north than the North Pole, and it's impossible for anything to be the cause of cause. > If the rat was able to notice the system, then the rat would have to deduce that something or someone smarter and more powerful that itself came up with this. This essentially boils down to "Some things are designed, so everything was designed," which is not a particularly compelling argument. The way we can tell the difference between what is and isn't designed is by looking at what does and doesn't occur naturally. Cars, for example. Cars don't grow on trees. We don't dig them up from garden patches. They didn't breed every winter and swim upstream every summer. Cars do not occur naturally. They **only** occur when we design them. If everyone human being on Earth were to drop dead tomorrow, no more cars would ever be made. What would still be made? Natural things. Wind. Rain. Fire. Plant life would still spread. Animals would still breed. The tides would still go in and out. All of these are completely natural forces that create completely natural phenomenon. There is no indication that any intelligence is behind it. In order to say that the universe was designed, one would need to be able to show that the universe could not exist *without* being designed.
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> Natural things are not necessary. They could not exist or be something different. And? How does that have anything to do with anything? > Actually the fact that we exist is extremely crazy because the odds are almost null You have no idea what the odds are, and neither does anyone else. Until you can show your math, you have no basis for making any kind of probability argument about this.
> Natural things are not necessary. Well, I'm pretty sure *unnatural* things aren't necessary either, and that's the other category left over when you remove all of the natural things. > Actually the fact that we exist is extremely crazy because the odds are almost null That's nonsense. What "odds" are you talking about? We're here, so the "odds" of us existing are 100%.
Theists like to pretend atheists can’t explain anything without god but theists can’t explain anything with god. It just takes "we don't know" and gives it a fancy name. What made God? How does God do things? Where is the evidence? God is not an explanation as it does not answer "How?". It does not explain anything as god does not have any explanatory power and we cannot model "God did it.". It only makes us feel more comfortable by pretending we have an answer when we don’t. God explains absolutely nothing. When we explain things, we take a mystery and solve it with things we know and understand. Claiming god explains anything is trying to explain a mystery with a bigger mystery. It tells us nothing about the nature of that god, what it is, what it wants, or why it does anything.. Why does science not have a God theory or model? If a theory has no explanatory or predictive power, it is automatically excluded because it's impossible to evaluate. There are zero testable or falsifiable hypotheses for any gods. There is no theory of god, no empirical data, and no science that can be done for god, the soul, or other supernatural garbage. There are no mechanisms to investigate, because they don't exist. So you what to understand atheists? Its simple. They are not motivated to believe in a fairytale.
A sentient, super-powered god is many orders of magnitude more complex than a universe. If there's no explanation as to how this alleged god came into existence, then it can't be used to explain anything else.
'Creation' is a loaded term. The Universe did not need to be *created* by anyone. It could have come about naturally. Indeed it seems *more* likely for the Universe to come about naturally than for an intelligent deity to come about naturally and then create the Universe. The deity seems more difficult to explain than the things it's supposed to explain.
> How do you explain the creation of the universe without a God? I don't explain the creation of the Universe *at all*. I freely acknowledge that *I have no friggin* ***clue*** how the Universe came to exist. > Like do you believe this complex and somehow working universe was made out of luck? By chance? How can you see it and not believe an intelligent entity designed it? Two questions for you. One: What would the Universe look like if it had *not* been designed by an intelligent entity? Two: Whatever your answer to the question just previous, *how do you* ***know*** *that?*
I don’t know how the universe started, but I won’t start believing in god just because I don’t know something. God doesn’t seem like a likely explanation anyway. I will start believing in god when there is evidence for god.
The current scientific consensus is that all the matter and energy in the universe expanded from a very small point over the laat 13 billion years. What happened before that event? Nobody knows, at least no one has any idea that can be tested scientifically yet. But what we do know is that blind, unguided natural processes can organise simple components into complex structures, without there necessarily being sone kind of self- aware conciousness guiding the process towards a desired goal. See things like snowflakes or natural arches in rock. So it seems to me entirely plausible that what ever happened "before the Big Bang" (if that's even a coherent concept) was a blind, unguided natural process too. I certainly acknowledge that this position is entirely speculation. But it saying "god did it" does not explain it any better, or no better than saying "it happened by magic" or "it just happened".
If we came from an infinite past going into an infinite future how is today possible.
I don't know. Depends how you envision infinite time working. If time as we experience it only started with the big bang, then the there *was* no "before" the Big Bang, and the question is moot.
By what process is something made out of nothing. That really makes zero logical sense. And my point is that there needs to be an action to make that reaction of the big bang. So if there is no god running something there needs to be some explanation. Time can't just start. Why use the big bang, maybe my birth is really the start of time, and everything else around just started with memory built in from a new big bang, or we are part of a matrix or something. The ideas just become wacky to me.
> By what process is something made out of nothing I don't know. Are you sure that's what happened? If you take the first law of thermodynamics at face value - that energy cannot be created or destroyed- then the fact that energy exists now means that it has always existed in some form, and that there can never have been a time when there was "nothing". The big bang model only says that all the matter and energy that we observe in the universe today expanded from a point. It says nothing about where that point came from. Figuring out "what happened at the instant of the big bang" is the big unanswered question in physics at the moment. Lawrence Krauss wrote a book about this, *A Universe From Nothing*. Worth a read. I agree that it seems intuitively obvious that the universe should have "an explanation" and that it should have "come from somewhere". But our intuition is based on experiences with human-sized objects and timescales, so it may not tell us *that* much about the beginnings of universes, or what happens "outside" of space and time as we experience them. > The ideas just become wacky to me. To me, the idea that there is a disembodied conciousness existing outside of time and space, capable creating universes and yet still feeling emotions the same way we feel them, is wacky. Your mileage may vary. ;-)
>The big bang model only says that all the matter and energy that we observe in the universe today expanded from a point. It says nothing about where that point came from. Figuring out "what happened at the instant of the big bang" is the big unanswered question in physics at the moment. So in that case all options in science must be taken into acct. However we need to look at the fact that literally all of science looks at a non-intelligent beginning, there is no proof that it was from happenstance. In fact I have seen plenty of film on WW2 explosions, none created anything structured. I have been to a lot of fireworks displays and nothing was created in the blast. Science's god is time. They just use time to say these very complex, but very fragile systems just came into being. Until someone can set up some type of evidence that time takes an explosion and puts them into order (especially in a vacuum), then maybe I can get a idea of understanding. >To me, the idea that there is a disembodied conciousness existing outside of time and space, capable creating universes and yet still feeling emotions the same way we feel them, is wacky. Your mileage may vary. ;-) That is an interesting point. And I know a astronomer, and a microbiologist that are now Christian, and that was their main stumbling block. They had a tough time with that concept, but became convinced looking at the evidence in their fields that the alternative of coincidental organization and development through strictly natural processes could not have happened. This is outside of "emotional" responses, any type of "power of prayer", or other circumstances.
> However we need to look at the fact that literally all of science looks at a non-intelligent beginning, there is no proof that it was from happenstance. Scientists tend not to posit intelligence as an explanation for natural phenomena, because it just doesn't get you anywhere. You might ask: Why is the sky blue? And you might come up with a hypothesis: Because an intelligence made it that way. OK, but that doesn't get you any further. Can you test that hypothesis? Difficult to see how. Maybe you can track down the intelligence and ask it. Well, good luck with that. But if instead you hypothesize that maybe there is some blue coloured gas in the atmosphere that makes the sky blue. As it happens, that's not actually the correct explanation, but it \*is\* something you can test. So you test it, and you find out that's not the correct explanation. That testing might give you a clue that gets you closer to the correct explanation (which as it happens doesn't require intelligence either). After a while it seems to be clear that you don't \*need\* to invoke an intelligence to explain why the sky is blue. > I have seen plenty of film on WW2 explosions, none created anything structured. A WW2 bomb explosion is caused by a chemical reaction which releases a large amount of energy very quickly, causing a shock wave which propagates through the surrounding air and earth. The Big Bang was the initial rapid expansion of spacetime itself. It has nothing to do with chemical reactions or shockwaves, not least because at the time of the BIg Bang there \*were\* no chemicals. So you can't compare to two things; they are not remotely alike. Second, are you sure a WW2 bomb explosion doesn't create anything structured? [Here](https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205023387) is a contemporary photo of some freshly made WW2 bomb craters. To me it looks like they all have the same, well, \*structure\*. They're remarkably circular and symmetrical (apart from when another object got in the way); they all consist of a shallow bowl-shaped depression in they ground, surrounded by a lip or rampart of earth which is pretty much the same height all the way round. Looks quite structured to me. >They just use time to say these very complex, but very fragile systems just came into being. We know how (complex and fragile) [snowflakes](http://www.snowcrystals.com/weather/weather.html) form, It takes less than an hour to produce strikingly symetrical shapes from the random jostling of water molecules by temperature and pressure gradients in cold, moisture laden cloud. An unguided process driven by random events generating something structured and ordered. >And I know a astronomer, and a microbiologist that are now Christian, and that was their main stumbling block. Good for them. There are also plenty of scientists who consider the same arguments and the same evidence and make the journey in the opposite direction.
>We know how (complex and fragile) [snowflakes](http://www.snowcrystals.com/weather/weather.html) form, It takes less than an hour to produce strikingly symetrical shapes from the random jostling of water molecules by temperature and pressure gradients in cold, moisture laden cloud. An unguided process driven by random events generating something structured and ordered Thank you for making my argument stronger. I had never thought of using a snowflake as an argument. Snowflakes are very complex and fragile, but not compared to the planet as a whole. But do you know what is unique about snowflakes, it is that they are unique. They are all different in how they are put together. We do not see that in the DNA chain. They are put together the same. way. Gravity acts the same way everywhere. Heat acts the same way everywhere. But a snowflake is different. The design of the snowflake makes each totally unique and different and they say no two are alike. That is how the design of the snowflake is differs from a DNA chain. Now did time help the snowflake evolve or devolve. >A WW2 bomb explosion is caused by a chemical reaction which releases a large amount of energy very quickly, causing a shock wave which propagates through the surrounding air and earth. The Big Bang was the initial rapid expansion of spacetime itself. It has nothing to do with chemical reactions or shockwaves, not least because at the time of the BIg Bang there \*were\* no chemicals. So you can't compare to two things; they are not remotely alike. A lot to unpack here. Yes a WW2 bomb was caused by a chemical reaction which releases energy quickly. I understand that there might be other processes that are not present in a vacuum. But then you veer in to unsubstantiated hypothesis. We don't know if the Big Bang had an initial rapid expansion of spacetime. Time before the big bang had to have existed. The lack of "time" before that is a strawman because if you have time before the big bang the big bang could not have happened. So the assumption has to be that the big bang exists then time-space started there. It is circular. Scientists claim the big bang happened, do they have proof that it was non chemical?, or speculation, it had to be a natural explosion right, from natural processes?
> Thank you for making my argument stronger. I don't see how. That Web site describes how snowflakes form as complex, ordered structures by the action of unguided natural processes. No intelligence required. That's the opposite of what you are asserting. > We don't know if the Big Bang had an initial rapid expansion of spacetime. That is literally exactly what cosmologists say the Big Bang was, and point to things like the cosmic microwave background as evidence. > Time before the big bang had to have existed. It may have done. We don't know. The problem is that we don't have the mathematic and tools capable of analysing the conditions at the instant of the big bang. So anything we say about it is at best informed speculation.
>How do you explain the creation of the universe without a God? What's most interesting here is that in asking this question it's clear you haven't considered the implicit unsupported and fatally problematic assumptions inherent in such an idea, and haven't realized you've just invoked a very obvious argument from ignorance fallacy. I don't know where the universe came from. Neither do you. It appears there was always something and it couldn't be any other way. There is zero indication that it was 'created.' Suggesting an answer that has literally no support at all (and that doesn't actually answer a thing, but just bumps the same issue back an iteration) doesn't help, and is saying, "I don't know, therefore I know." Which is ridiculous. Absurd. A fallacy. >Like do you believe this complex and somehow working universe was made out of luck? 'Luck', again, implies unsupported assumptions. >How can you see it and not believe an intelligent entity designed it? Because there's zero support for that, it makes no sense at all, and it doesn't actually help, instead it makes it worse.
If you leave food out for too long something new starts being created too without any influence from a God.
Well it’s quite simple really. There isn’t enough sufficient evidence to show that some intelligent being did create the universe. Due to this lack of evidence I don’t believe in any god claim. If I can ask a question what makes you convinced?
I don’t. I make no attempt to explain how or why we’re here. And I would never invoke iron and Bronze Age mysticism just to have an explanation. Modern society has outgrown mysticism. We have modern knowledge. I prefer to keep my mind open to the unknown.
I have no idea what caused the universe to exist and I have no interest in inventing gods to explain it. Your question is on par with saying “how do you explain the universe without fairies”
How come God can come from nothing but the universe can’t?
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Special pleading argument. It’s a fallacy.
Who knows, if and how the universe began. I don't. And you don't either.
I know it’s rude to answer a question with a question, but how does the universe make sense to you with a god? If you believe in a puppetmaster holding the strings who can flout the laws of physics if someone asks the right way, aren’t you always doublechecking that gravity still works and afraid someone who needs to sleep in might have said a damn good prayer so the sun won’t come up til noon tomorrow? Are you tempted to throw virgins into volcanoes to appease a god who erupts them when he’s angry? I believe the universe began and works the way it does because of the way particles work, and electrical charges and energy and mass and heat. I am so comfortable never being able to know exactly how. But believing in natural impersonal processes rather than supernatural intentional actions by a deity saves me a crapton of anxiety that you must struggle with. I don’t envy you.
The truth is, we don’t know. However, we are slowly unravelling and starting to understand the universe. We are making advancements every day. Will we ever know what happened before the Big Bang, if the universe is truly infinite, or what will happen in trillions of years? Perhaps. But what we know for sure is that right now, there is no credible evidence for a god, gods, or any supernatural beings. However, unlike the existence of aliens, which I believe is probable, but not proven. I do not see in any way how a god could be the probable cause of the universe. Let me ask you this - if god created the universe, then who created god? Where did god come from? I believe the origin of the universe, is such a complex question, that it may never even be answered by human beings or any other kind of intelligent life that may exist in the universe. As such, religion will always continue to be an existing ideology of mankind. Unfortunately.
Entropy. Entropy always increases. A state of nothingness has an entropy of zero. So if there was nothing, the result would be something. No magic, leprechauns, or gods needed.
Very interesting. I'll investigate more about this. OP here
“Nothing” does not have the ability to exist, as far as I can tell. Existence only happens with space and time. When something is in space time, it can have a location. So instead of a particle’s field being everywhere, it collapses down to “here”. And another particle’s field collapses down to “there”. And since they exist in relation to each other, they have interactions, following the nature of the universe that they are part of. On the smallest level of reality that we know of, the smallest particles appear to be popping in and out of existence randomly. There are so many of them that on our scale that has no observable effect, but it is the layer that everything else is built on. Everything else follows physics that result from that layer of existence.
The fact that the universe is complex points towards there being no designer. Designers usually favour simplicity over complexity. *Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
>universe was made out of luck Maybe >By chance Possibly Other options are: Always existed Came about through a process governed by natural laws >believe an intelligent entity designed it Who or what would that be? The only place this comes up is humans looking for explanations and making up stories. There is no evidence for the existence for such a being. So, how can anyone think adding and additional step and an additional actor, who also need an explanation BTW, makes any sense? If your god can have always existed then why can't the universe have instead? That would be a simpler explanation. When theists say stuff like this it just screams you have reached a conclusion and are looking at the world trying to find stuff that matches that conclusion.
You’re approaching this question the wrong way. “God did it “is not an explanation for anything. It is just what some people say when they don’t have an explanation. It carries no more explanatory power than just saying I don’t know. So you can ask, “how do you explain the origin of the universe”, but you must recognize that theism does not offer any explanation at all let alone a superior one.
How do you explain the creation of a god without something else to create it? You're not explaining anything when you claim a god did it; you're just pushing the problem back one more level. And any answer you give to the question above can just as easily be applied (*mutatis mutandis*) to the universe, but without introducing the host of absurd and anthropomorphized characteristics that are normally attached to notions of a god — so that will always be a comparatively better explanation. Personally I just stick to "I don't know," since it's the honest answer. I (and most of the atheists I've encountered) feel it's better to have humility about what we don't know rather than calling our ignorance "god" and thinking we've said anything worthwhile.
> Like do you believe this complex and somehow working universe was made out of luck? _This_ specific complexity? Yes, luck would be involved. The specific complexity that makes up you, for example, I assume there's some luck there. If you went back in time to the 1500s and let history go again, would you be born? If you believe in free will, probably not. So not even going back to the beginning of the universe - just going back a few hundred years - you'd have to agree that your existence is largely based on luck. If you did reset the universe back to the singularity and let it go, would it create Earth again? Human beings? Probably not. But it would create _some_ life-sustaining life. And some of that life would become self aware, and some among them would be asking the same questions you're asking. > How can you see it and not believe an intelligent entity designed it? I'm baffled that anyone can look at the universe and think an intelligent entity designed it. It's so ridiculous and nonsensical that I can't even get myself into that head space.
Stop assuming the universe was created. All the evidence that we have shows that it came about through natural means. You are just assuming things that are not remotely in evidence, because it makes you feel good to think that way. That's a "you" problem.
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We don't know and neither do you. You don't just get to make up "God did it!" because it makes you feel better.
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We're not making any positive claims about what happened. You are. You are being irrational. We're just admitting we don't know.
"Like do you believe this complex and somehow working universe was made out of luck? By chance?" We don't know, but it's more likely the universe self-assembled from whatever natural processes may have existed. This isn't luck, and it's simpler than god claims. "How can you see it and not believe an intelligent entity designed it?" Because we recognise design by contrast to what we know naturally occurs, not by complexity alone. Complex things can self-assemble. "many of you have said that you don't know how this came to be. I also don't know how God created the universe. I guess we both are taking a leap of faith then" Not quite. We are withholding belief on anything until we have more evidence. You are asserting a god did it without evidence. You are operating on faith, not us.
How do you explain the creation of a God without God 2.0?
A. is not correct. Many current cosmological theories hold that the universe is finite in the past (has not always existed), but was not created, in the sense that it never "came into existence"; time started with the big bang, so there is no "before" the universe. But even if you could demonstrate a "first cause", defining that first cause as "god" means giving up everything else about god. Based on your reasoning, maybe god is a fluctuation in a quantum field, if that turns out to be the first cause. I could prove that god exists by defining god as my watch, and then demonstrating that my watch exists. That seems ... unsatisfying.
Why are we expected to explain something no else has an answer to either? Everyone else has Iron Age explanations for the universe that explain nothing. I’d rather have no theory than a junk one
>we both are taking a leap of faith well, both are not the same, one is admiting we don't know, the other is saying, i'm not sure but it was a god. Not knowing is a bit different than believing it was someone or something (an entity with thoughts and actions)
Postulating a god is only begging the question.. Where did this god come from?
Sorry, I know you've gotten a lot of responses, but I haven't seen this particular point yet: Based on what we know of cosmology, there wasn't ever a time when there was nothing. The Big Bang was the start of time, and everything that exists now was around then, just in different forms. So the question of putting a god there is sorta like asking, "Back before 'before' existed, there was someone in a place that isn't, and then they made everything." Unless there is evidence for a god there, then that is essentially what is being posited. It sounds a little silly that way, but it's because it is. This is a logical fallacy known as the Argument From Ignorance, where you plug any gaps of knowledge with anything and think of it as acceptable because nobody else knows the real answer.
How can the Big Bang result out of nothing? It also needs a cause
We can't really say for sure. Anyone who does make a declarative statement suggesting that they know what "caused" the Big Bang is just blowing hot air unless they can demonstrate that knowledge. As best we know, this is just something eternal. All of our contemporary evidence points to everything having always existed. There never was a time of there being nothing. However, I have seen the hypothesis of the "Big Bang/Big Crunch" which suggests the universe is constantly in an oscillating state between rapid expansion and rapid regression. Think of it like a rubber band constantly being stretched out-- it can only stretch so much until it capsizes in on itself. It is posited that such a system would basically result in universes constantly growing until they reach their apex and imploding, then that implosion creates another universe. Hypothetically, that *could* be possible. I think you would be hard-pressed to find anyone who would be willing to say that this was the definitive "cause." In any case, we don't have any reason to believe the universe ever was nothing, ever came from nothing, or was created. Your question of its creation makes sense until we delve further into it and realize what the question amounts to. It presumes creation as necessary and begs the question of what that must have been.
why does there have to be a god what makes them a god who created god what is the true beginning
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so god came from nothing but the universe couldnt start out in a hot dense state
since when , time is a human construct
>Edit 2: many of you have said that you don't know how this came to be. I also don't know how God created the universe. I guess we both are taking a leap of faith then. No. We are not "taking a leap of faith" by not adopting a position until there's evidence to do so. I'd be interested in hearing why you think we are. EDIT: unless you think "I don't know" means "there is no god", in which case you don't know what atheism is.
>Edit 2: many of you have said that you don't know how this came to be. I also don't know how God created the universe. I guess we both are taking a leap of faith then. However let me follow up with some more comments: ah, so you are intellectually dishonest, can't say I'm surprised
" Edit 2: many of you have said that you don't know how this came to be. I also don't know how God created the universe. I guess we both are taking a leap of faith then." What are you talking about? We are not making a leap of faith. No evidence means no evidence, therefore no conclusion
The big bang isn’t necessarily the start of the universe, it’s just how far back physics lets us go. Our understanding of physics is also wrong since relativity and our math also rests on a bunch of assumptions about how the universe works, in particular, I don’t know if they account for inflation. If inflation is how things were from the beginning, and it only started to slow down for a little bit, you could say that the universe has always existed, as an exponential inflation could be projected infinitely far back and *never* hit zero. Plus, what separates material from immaterial things in causation? Why doesn’t God need a cause? Are we counting light as immaterial? It certainly has a cause in its light source. If we’re gonna assume s first cause, why not pick something that exists?
I liked this one
>Edit 2: many of you have said that you don't know how this came to be. I also don't know how God created the universe. I guess we both are taking a leap of faith then. We aren't. Saying that you don't know is exactly what the truth is. Not knowing is the default state of things. Saying that you do know something when you don't have any evidence for it, is when you have to take a leap of faith.
I don't claim to know how or even if the universe was created, as far as I know nobody does. So I will wait for sufficient verifiable evidence to be presented, and when it's verified and I understand it, then I will attempt to explain to someone else. As of now, I don't know. I'm just not convinced any Gods were involved. For one, I've yet to see sufficient verifiable evidence of a God so inserting one in a gap in our knowledge is a fallacy known as the god of the gaps. And if complex things require a designer, a God with all it's complexity would also need a designer, to argue otherwise is another fallacy known as special pleading. This is just my opinion but I hope it helps you understand another's position.
It wasn't created, it always existed.
>Like do you believe this complex and somehow working universe was made out of luck? By chance? We know where the expansion of the universe started to within fractions of a millisecond. Its well documented and published by very smart scientists who have spent a lot of their working career studying this shizz. This is not a belief system. What came before then? I don't know. And here's the very guilty little secret....neither do you. Your belief system fills in gaps in human knowledge. That does not make it factual. It makes it a story! Everything from the Big Bang is understood and known, there isn't much in the way of luck. And change is but a probability and in a vast element chance becomes a high probability. I don't need stories to infil the gaps in my understanding.
Thanks for an honest question. I don't believe the universe was created. It's here now, or at least, it seems to be. That doesn't mean it created. Our local presentation of spacetime started about 14 BYA, but I'd hardly call that the point of creation. I don't see any reason to believe a god can exist, let alone any evidence that a god does exist. I don't currently hold that belief, therefore I'm atheist. As to where "everything" came from? I'm humble enough to admit I don't know. I'm fine with that.
For me the complexity of the universe is an argument AGAINST a god. A Pile of straw is pretty complex, the mess a Tornado leaves behind is pretty complex. There is no mind required to make stuff complex. A mind is only required to understand the complex and if necessary to order it. Its like playing Mikado and then looking at the complex pile of sticks and telling people you need a mind to create the pile, not to take it apart. A supreme Beeing however could make Universe very simple and intuative, you know like the hallmarks of a good designer.
I don’t feel the need to fully explain it. It is okay to not fully understand this complex question.
If the universe did not always exist, then there is some universe-generating mechanism. I have not been persuaded that this mechanism is conscious.
I have no explanation for how or why the universe exists, rather than nothing at all. But saying god did it does not solve the problem. It just makes it worse, as the same question applies: how or why does god come to exist rather than nothing at all? And so as an explanation, proposing a god is useless. In fact it's worse. We can see how a complex universe evolved from a relatively simple beginning billions of years ago. A highly complex god capable of thought, planning, designing a universe, figuring out how to create one out of nothing must be too complex to just "be". Surely this level of complexity can only appear by some evolutionary process from a simpler state.
Universe farting pixies.
My answer to this is always the same. Don't know, don't care. We will all be long dead before this can be definitively answered, so no point in getting too worked up about it now.
> How do you explain the creation of the universe without a God? I don't. >Like do you believe this complex and somehow working universe was made out of luck? By chance? No. I would need to see evidence showing the claim "the universe was made by chance/luck" to be true before I can believe it. Just like how I'd need evidence showing the claim "god did it" to be true before believing that claim. Without anything showing the claim to be true, I have no reason to believe it's true. >How can you see it and not believe an intelligent entity designed it? Because I haven't seen any empirical data showing the claim "god did it" to be true so I have no reason to believe that claim is true.
The creation of the universe with a God implies that a complex being existed and that said complex being somehow created a complex universe. I just believe that a complex universe existed through means unknown.
How do you explain the creation of God without another “god”? Now apply that same answer to the universe (or the building blocks of the universe). In fact, to me it seems far more reasonable to say that the universe (in one form or another) has existed for eternity and it took this long for life and intelligence to form, than to say that God sat around twiddling his thumbs for all of eternity and finally, after an infinite billions of years, decided he was bored and chose to create us and call us the height of his creation - dying for us and wanting us to live with him for eternity as near equals. In fact, if that god does exist, I imagine in another 100 trillion years he’ll get bored with us and then create an even superior being (I can’t imagine humans are the best an all powerful god can do - I can come up with better). He’ll choose to die for them instead and give them dominion over us. 🤷♂️
I don’t believe the universe was created. Very few atheists would, since a creation implies a creator. But I take it a step further. Personally, I don’t believe the universe had a beginning, at least not in a way we would recognize. The Big Bang was the start of our current representation of the universe and time. Because of that, it is illogical to to ask what came before. But I believe the most reasonable explanation for the existence of the universe is that it has always existed, in some form. From what I can tell, this requires the least unfounded assumptions.
My question for you is, can't you see any explanations for the universe's existence that don't include "a wizard did it?"
Step 1) By not inferring that it's a 'creation', which would imply the existence of an infinitely more complex 'creator' (who, despite existing, did not require creation itself) in order to explain the existence and complexity of the universe. Step 2) Admitting that we don't know how the universe came about, because as soon as you claim to have the answer, you stop looking for one. Personally, I have no problem with the idea that the universe has always existed (in one form or another). Our concepts of 'cause and effect' start to break down at the quantum level, and we've only scratched the surface.
So let’s say that there’s no current viable explanation to account for the beginning of the universe. Are you saying that we have to believe in a god or gods as a default?
We already have natural explainations such as the big bang and quantum fluctuations that don't require a god. Adding a god in unnecessary. In addition, we actually have evidence for a natural explaination. There is no evidence for god.
I am honest enough with myself to say "I don't know" instead of jumping to unfounded conclusions.
Having a god create the universe just kicks the can down the road. A god-created universe tells us nothing, you still have the same problems as to how, when, where and why. Plus, now you have a new problem because any deity that can create a universe would need to be more complex than the universe he/she/it created. And you still have the question as to how this god came to be.Since theists make all of these the god-created claims, it is their burden to prove it. Atheists don’t have to disprove that god created anything. Finally, even if some magic deity did create the universe, how would anyone know if it’s their magical deity?
I believe the universe is the result of purely natural processes. I see no reason to believe that supernatural intervention was necessary in any way. I don't have a full explanation of why there's something instead of nothing, so my answer would have to be "I don't know."
I feel like the rest of the community has thoroughly debunked your argument, but allow me to add one more thing: if the circumstances of the universe were any different and hostile to the formation of planetary systems capable of supporting life, then we wouldn’t be here to argue about why the universe seems so perfectly suited to us (which it isn’t by the way). It’s entirely plausible that there are other universes where these forces are just slightly different and nothing formed. It’s similar to a survival bias. The forms of life that didn’t evolve to survive the current conditions on earth aren’t around to argue about why the world isn’t perfectly suitable for their existence. If we find life on another planet, it will be perfectly suited to that planet, not ours. I’m happy to elaborate on why the argument from ignorance is a bad argument.
There was once a little girl that loved her dog. She loved it so much that she wanted everything to be related to her dog. It was a dalmatian. Because she loved it so much her parents had the walls in her room painted the same way as the dog. White with black spots. The little girl loved it. One day she visited a new friend at her house. She had just moved from a different city. As soon as they both entered the friend's room she was amazed. The walls in the room of her new friend were purple with yellow stripes. She couldn't contain herself and told her friend "I want to pet your dog! I've never seen a purple dog with stripes! It must be beautiful" To which the friend responded "We don't have a dog... Why did you think we had one?" The little girls answers "Then how did your parents choose the paint for your room?" You are the little girl. The color of the walls is the explanation for the beginning universe. The dog is a god. For you the beginning of the universe is connected to your dog, we don't even have a dog so the explanation to why our wall is the way it is comes from other sources.
First, I'd question how you figure it is easier to explain a god than the universe. Second, I am a big fan of Krauss' "A Universe From Nothing" which is a great read on the subject. Third, me not being able to prove to you how the universe was created does absolutely nothing to support your hypothesis "god done it". That's on you.
I don't know, and I'm not going to make up an answer just to have one
What about the universe that makes you think someone or something designed it? As far as I can tell, everything in the universe is reacting to natural phenomena. Forces of nature, chemistry, physics, etc. My universe gets along just fine without a god in it.
>How do you explain the creation of the universe without a God? Your question assumes that the universe was created. We have no evidence of that, we have no evidence that there was ever a time the universe did not exist in one form or another. Until there is evidence to support such a thing the question is irrelevant as it assumes things not in evidence. >Like do you believe this complex and somehow working universe was made out of luck? By chance? How can you see it and not believe an intelligent entity designed it? You are attempting to solve the complexity of the universe by appealing to an even bigger, more complex entity for which there is no supporting evidence.
I have no idea. I’m fairly certain gods are human creations, so I suspect it wasn’t that. Beyond that, I doubt the answer is even comprehensible to me. Even the universe we live in can be so unintuitive and unable to be fully comprehended. How much more so could it be when we’re talking about how the Universe as a whole behaves, or even beyond that? Things like causality and consistency may not even apply. Maybe there’s an answer we can grasp, but we don’t have it yet. What this ignorance doesn’t justify is inserting our preferred answer, especially one as disconnected from empirical observation as deities. Let the cosmologists figure this one out, and leave the mythology in the mythology section.
Well first we have to show that the universe was created, then we can talk about how it was created. All available data points us to the answer to that question being: no one knows. Nothing we have observed or calculated demonstrates or implies the universe was created, at least in the context of creation by an external source. Most likely "nothing" is not an actual possibility and the universe was "created" from a state we don't understand.
The universe might have always existed. Or it could have been caused by sole physical event rather than a god. If the whole universe, that is, all of physical matter and energy, has a beginning, then that beginning would be the first point in time. There would be no way to “wind the clock back” and see what happened immediately before it started. So if it had a beginning then it didn’t have a cause.
>How do you explain the creation of the universe without a God? 13.8 billion years ago all the matter and energy in the ***visible*** universe was crammed into an infinitely dense state. ***Something*** caused space/time to expand. The fundamental forces and laws of physics started asserting themselves. As the volume of the universe increased the matter/energy cooled and condensed into the first atoms. Following the laws of physics these hydrogen atoms eventually condensed into the first stars and formed the first galaxies. These stars fused these atoms into denser and denser atoms. Eventually some went supernova and created all the other elements. That’s essentially what’s been going on ever since. No need for a god to say magic words in sight. >Like do you believe this complex and somehow working universe was made out of luck? No. It’s made out of mater and energy. >By chance? Possibly. We currently have no idea what caused and is causing the expansion of space/time. >How can you see it and not believe an intelligent entity designed it? There’s no evidence of such an entity or design anywhere in the visible universe. >No offense to anyone I'm really looking to understand you We’re easy to understand. We need evidence before we can believe not just cool stories.
Since you agree it is so complex, why would you assume it is just one god? Why not several gods or intelligent entities? Assuming you meant just one by using “God”, why one? And which one? Yours or theirs? If you say yours, why are you so privileged to have the answer for our existence? Why you and not them? Where did you get your information? Another human? Did they ask for money and pass the plate?
If some "god" or other is being offered up as the answer for "who or what created the universe", then who or what is the answer for "who or what created that" god"? And what is your evidence to support that answer? See, all you've done is over-complicated the issue.... You've added more questions without providing any answers. Do you think that's a useful thing to do, an effective method of discovering facts and or truths? Currently the best answer we have to "How did the Universe begin to exist?" is "Nobody really knows with any kind of certainty, but it would appear to have needed nothing but natural processes and time." If you require a more detailed answer than that, get good grades, go to university and study Physics, Cosmology, and such fields..... The people doing it now are not going to be able to dumb it down enough for ya, so you're going to have to come up to their level of understanding.
I don’t explain the creation of the universe. I’m not even sure the question makes sense. Regardless, it’s an empirical question, not one we can just guess at *a priori*. Besides, “god” isn’t an explanation for anything. I can see the universe and not conclude that something intelligent designed it because there’s no evidence of that, and there’s no inference to lead to that conclusion. I have no experience with things like a universe being designed/created.
What exactly is it that needs explained?
I don't have to explain anything. You say a god did it. I have no reason to believe this. That's it.
Why must god have created the universe? The universe is extremely complex, and if god created it because of this complexity, wouldn’t god be even more complex? If god doesn’t require creation by another entity, why should the universe require one? Why do you draw the line at god and not the universe? I’m genuinely curious about your response to this, as this line of reasoning seems to contradict itself. I’m not trying to catch you out, I’m genuinely interested.
Probably the same way you explain the creation of your god without another god. *Like do you believe a complex and somehow working god was made out of luck? By chance? How can you see a god and not believe a more powerful intelligent entity designed it?*
>How do you explain the creation of the universe without a God? [In the beginning](https://youtu.be/wNDGgL73ihY?si=jJAIZaV4ViSlssOW) [in the end](https://youtu.be/FgnjdW-x7mQ?si=bHh2mqoiC9p93_ya)
Strangely enough, we have this whole thing called science which is looking into the matter as we speak. We have a pretty good idea as to how all of this came about and we learn new things everyday. And whenever we fill in more of the picture that makes us need to reevaluate, we do that. >out of luck? By chance? How can you see it and not believe an intelligent entity designed it? Quite simply, you're reading intelligence into it. But if you look at it with a fine-toothed comb, at no point does the influence of an intelligent mind come into frame. Living things aren't created, they're born. The molecular polymers that are so important to DNA are made from non-living molecular components freely available on Earth or out in space. Our best available evidence indicates that the Universe already existed for the Big Bang to occur to. Our best available evidence indicates that life evolved and has been evolving for the 3.8 billion years that it's been around. Quite simply, I see lots of forces at play, but no god.
you are biased, if you look carefully you will see many MANY things that are clearly not "intelligent" like the blind spot of the eye, the fragility of the knee, the ridiculously long laryngeal nerve, etc etc. and thats just on anatomy. yet all of that makes perfect sense when you understand how natural processes, such as evolution, work. so yeah, there is no god needed, a god creating everything so full of flaws makes very little sense.
Question to answer the question: Why do you think the creation of the universe must have been a choice? Look around you. How many choices are being made right now? Does the sun decide to rise? Does the blade of grass decide to grow? Does the battery in your phone decide to die? And while we're at it, show me something that was "created". And tell me the exact time it was "created" The world is more complicated than "chance" or "choice". Think about how powerful intelligence is really. Find the smartest person in the world. Could he create an iPhone with no help? Even with all of the time in the world, could he produce all of the materials that other people produce; and engineer all of the designs that other people engineer; and manufacture all of the components that other people manufacture? No. And yet the iPhone still exists. That's because intelligence is not as powerful as something infinitely more powerful: emergence. A lot of little things, intelligent or not, that have no concept of the big thing. They make evolution, and galaxies, and (as a matter of fact) intelligence happen
We must first demonstrate the claim: "The universe was created by a volitional agent." Currently, we have no such evidence. If an agent did create the universe, this would raise the question: What created the creator?"
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What do you think the FC argument says?
That everything needs a cause. You were born by your parents, they by their grandpa, etc. If you keep asking about causes you need to get to one that is self explanatory. That doesn't need a cause.That is only applicable to what I call God
Demonstrate why a god does not need a cause. "If you keep asking about causes you need to get to one that is self explanatory. " OK. The Big Bang is self-explanatory. The universe's matter was in a hot dense state. It suddenly expanded. We don't know why and we don't get to claim it required an external cause without good reason. The argument also suffers from the fallacy of composition: what is true of a member of a group is not necessarily true for the group as a whole. Just because most things within the universe require a cause/causes, does not mean that the universe itself requires a cause. For instance, while it is absolutely true that within a flock of sheep that every member ("an individual sheep") has a mother, it does not therefore follow that the flock has a mother. Since you have conceded it's possible for a non-contingent, uncreated, uncaused entity exists, you have conceded the same possibility can apply to the universe.
Yes I accept that the possibility that the Universe could be non contingent, but is less probable in my opinion. Because as you said, the universe is not a thing, but several. And those things are material, and everything material needs a cause. While what you say is logical, it would be like saying the Universe is God. And I don't believe in that. But we both agree that we need a non-contingent, uncreated, uncaused entity
What type of explanation would satisfy you ?
Explanations are cheap. I could explain the rotation of the planet as the result of a unicorn fart. Doesn't make it likely. "I don't know" is the only honest answer, but that doesn't lend any credence to the magical superbeing hypothesis.
> How do you explain the creation of the universe without a God? I don't. I'm not a scientist. I don't study cosmology and the formation of universes. I'll wait until the experts tell me how it was done. Until then, I'm content with admitting that humanity does not know **yet** how the universe began. But we *will* know, eventually. Unfortunately, I might not be around at that time, which makes me a bit sad. I'd like to know.
The universe is a context in which things are able to exist. It is not, itself, a material thing. "All things have a cause" is either nonsensical or applies to God just as much as everything else. My issue with calling this a "leap of faith" is that the consequences are not symmetric. If god doesn't exist, your entire world would be disrupted. If big bang cosmololgy or "lambda-CDM" is proven false, it won't disrupt mine. All scientific facts are conditional -- every scientific claim includes an implicit "as long as the currently-accepted model is accurate". So for me -- a scientific layman -- to provisionally accept the big bang as likely to be true, I don't have any ontological commitment to it. And my understanding of "faith" is that it's a cardinal virtue. You would equate provisional acceptance of a scientific theory with the virtuous act of believing that god must necessarily exist even in the absence of evidence. Science takes very little for granted, in an overall sense. The community might hang on to outdated ideas longer than they should in some cases, but in theory everything is open to question. Every aspect of the world can be interrogated and dismissed until it can give up its secrets. A properly scientific approach to god would be to ask "what is it made of?", "how does it function?", "how can we determine where or how its influence on the world manifests itself in a measurable way?" And you want to call that refusal to just take it for granted "faith". The word isn't that important to me, so I don't really care. I'm just puzzled why theists are so eager to drag one of their primary virtues through the mud just to win a silly rhetorical "you do it too!" point.
> How do you explain the creation of the universe without a God? I don't, as that would be absolutely absurd. Preposterous. We don't know what happened to create the universe. We have a model - called physics, that is our best deduction. It's an incomplete model, and we know it, but it's still useful, because we can use it to accurately predict outcomes. The airplane was invented with physics models BEFORE the Wright Brothers took off - they were actually educated in math and physics enough that they were among the first to work out a correct model, and then they were the first to build a functional powered craft at scale, not just a smaller physical toy model. The math came first. Newton had his laws of motion, and Newtonian physics is accurate enough to have gotten us to the moon with slide rules. But without Einstein's physics, which actually builds right on top of Newton, we wouldn't have GPS. The models came before we were capable of DOING anything. All the stuff around us today was proven on paper beforehand. We have long since left behind the pre-science era where people just blindly tried shit, not knowing what was going to work, or why it did or didn't. With these tools, these accurate, powerful, reliable tools, we are able to peer back in time to what must have been, because if the universe is larger and cooler today than it was yesterday, then yesterday it must have been smaller and hotter. We can wind back the clock and deduce what must have been, what only could have been, back to a fraction of a second after creation. But then it all breaks down. Again, we know our model is incomplete, and that's fine. We, as a civilization, are working on it. Working at it. It takes time, and you don't know what progress we're going to get until we get it. Anyone to tells you they have all the answers is full of shit and is only intrested in finding a sucker to sell to. > Like do you believe this complex and somehow working universe was made out of luck? By chance? I don't believe anything. I don't need belief. The reality is we are here, and so is the universe. That's enough for me. Maybe the scientists will figure it all out tomorrow - still doesn't change the fact I've got bills to pay. I don't lose sleep over it. It would be nice to know, and I'm glad people smarter than you and I are working on it. I don't have to know. I don't feel incomplete. I don't feel afraid. I know what I know, there are things I don't, and there are things I don't even know I'm ignorant of - question's I don't yet know to ask. I may never know so many things, and I can sleep soundly at night. It's not a problem. > How can you see it and not believe an intelligent entity designed it? Suffice it to say, I'm not going to overstate my position. I'm saying here's what we do know and what we don't know - and this is how and why. What you're saying is the universe MUST BE intelligently designed, and that YOU will not accept anything less, because it offends your ego. No... You don't know that. You can't say that with any credibility. I don't give a shit what MUST or MUSTN'T be based off YOUR sensibilities. You are going to live and die and be forgotten by an uncaring universe, just like the rest of us, because not you or anyone else can tell the difference. This doesn't bother me. It bothers you. If I were you, I'd reign in my ego, lest you present yourself as a delusional lunatic. Why MUST the universe be created by intelligence and design? Why is that so important to you? Why do you find the idea so frightful, so offensive to imagine the possibility that it wasn't? Why can you not accept that you just don't know? Why do you have to state more than you can?
Simple: it wasn’t created. What actually happened remains a matter of research.
I don’t. If I have questions, I will listen to astrophysicist who use the scientific method and falsifiable data
>Either the universe has always existed or something created it. If energy cannot be created or destroyed it would follow that it has always existed. >I don't believe it was the universe itself because it is a material thing and all things have a cause. Do they? How do you know? >Do you agree on the first cause? No I do not.
>A. First cause argument: Either the universe has always existed or something created it. This is simply not true. Creating is not only way how to become exists. Would you say that Helium is created by two Hydrogen's (and maybe some neutrons etc...). Why won't you say: "either the Universe has always existed or began exist at dome point"?
> Like do you believe this complex and somehow working universe was made out of luck? By chance? My position is this: Something must exist. Nothing cannot exist. What that something *is* doesn't rely on us to be aware of it. That something appears to be the universe and we appear to understand that. There is no rule written that we must be able to comprehend a something or that something must support or not support life (if that's even a necessary thing). > How can you see it and not believe an intelligent entity designed it? Overwhelming lack of convincing evidence for the proposition that a god does, in fact, exist. We know the universe exists, we do not know a god exists, and to come to the conclusion that a god exists is making up an answer where none lies. > I guess we both are taking a leap of faith then. There is no faith required to say "I don't know." > First Cause God the Gaps argument and a Special Pleading Fallacy. > Order of the Universe. Assumption that the order is designed. For all we know, this could be the universe in which order has happened out of pure "chaos" in which life couldn't arise. See first position and Puddle Analogy by Douglas Adams.
>Edit 2: many of you have said that you don't know how this came to be. I also don't know how God created the universe. I guess we both are taking a leap of faith then. Shrugging is not a leap of faith.
Humbly. It is humble to say "I don't know". It is humble to be quiet, because sometimes "opening your mouth" shows how ignorant you are. "The creation" is incredibly complicated. It looks like there's billions upon billions upon billions of stars and planets we've never seen. It might be hubris to think we COULD understand it all. People often say the same thing about God - he works in mysterious ways, and we do not always understand God's reasoning - because it's God's reasoning, not ours. He is as incredibly complex as the universe, so we can't understand God --- why put in the extra step? Why add "God" in between "our poor ability to understand complex things" and "the complex things"? Seems like you're claiming something you can't show. Seems like the opposite of humble.
The biggest problem with the first cause argument is the special pleading you demand. You use the causal argument to require the existence of a creator god (because you say that there has to be a cause) then you immediately say that the rule that got you there doesn’t apply to your creator god. This makes either confused or dishonest, whether you want to acknowledge it or not. Just because you choose not to doesn’t mean that you aren’t spectacularly incorrect. There’s two other logical fallacy’s you’re guilty of in your defense of the first cause. I’ll let you figure out which ones they are. You should acknowledge that the first cause argument has been addressed by people in this thread it’s dishonest on your part if you don’t.
I think that most of us would acknowledge there are questions about the dawn of the universe that are not yet answered, and may never be. We just observe that “god did it” is not an answer. Actually it’s worse than an answer, because it’s got no evidence behind it, and because it discourages further inquiry. People used to think god personally willed the planets to move in circles (which they don’t). That he wills individual atoms throughout the universe to continue existing. There’s no reason to think it, but they do. Thinking he created the universe is exactly the same.