Aron-Ra said:
I asked you to explain your criteria for how you would determine whether you believe something to be impossible. You gave no criteria, and instead cited only "common sense".
Common sense and personal experience is the criteria.
Then there is no way to determine that and demonstrate it for anyone else. You need something objective or your claims will be indefensible.
It would be a pointless exercise for me to spend any amount of time in any effort to demonstrate that something can come from nothing via naturalistic means which I already believe is impossible and I have much more important things to be spending my time and energy on.
Yet you wrote this post anyway, and addressed it to someone who also does not believe in "something from nothing" by
any means. Worse, you admit you believe everything
did come from nothing, and you believe it happened by magic!
Yet your example of something impossible is something you believe actually happened!
Where do you believe all matter in the universe came from then?
Worse, you believe even incantations can cause something to come from nothing!
No I don’t.
Obviously that's impossible too, right?
Obviously wrong as I don’t believe that.
If you don't believe God "spoke" the universe into existence, then how do you think it happened?
But if its impossible, then how could you believe it happened? And how could such an illogical contradiction count as common sense? Are you suggesting that we decide that something is impossible based on your belief that it happened,
You’re not making any sense… as usual.
Hey, you're the one who claims to believe in things which you also believe to be impossible.
You said that I believe in impossible things I didn’t which makes this a strawman argument. Just because you cannot conceive of something or explain something does not make it impossible so you’re back to arguing from personal incredulity.
Actually you yourself said that it is impossible for something to come from nothing, and that is what you've always said you believe actually happened. If you've changed your mind about that, please explain what it is you believe now.
Of course common sense allowed me to predict the example you would give.
Whoa! What example? Abiogenesis? I didn’t give that example… you did, your prediction was false.
I didn't say 'abiogenesis'. And why would I, since that's not "something from nothing" in anyone's perspective? The example I was talking about was big bang cosmology. My prediction was accurate.
You think science believes this too, but without the excuse that magic allows them to break the laws of physics. Since nothing supernatural can be demonstrated or tested for, then its just a made up excuse which can't be used in science.
Science? You speak of it as though life cannot be lived without it. Science is not a necessity except perhaps to those unable to come to terms with life without it. Extremely limiting and very sad.
I do think it is impossible to live without science. It is possible to live without faith however.
But quantum physics can be tested and demonstrated to allow science a way around the laws of standard physics. You may also be surprised to learn that big bang cosmologists do not believe in "something from nothing". They don't yet know exactly what to believe, but their best idea to date is that all matter in the universe, and the universe itself, all space and time erupted into this plane possibly from a pan-dimensional rift. All atoms are made of a few subatomic particles and a whole lot of empty space. Take away the empty space, and you've got a helluva compression in matter. Hubble's discovery of the red shift indicates that everything in the universe -on the galactic scale- is flying away from everything else at very high speeds, which of course means that if we hit STOP and REWIND, we would see all the galaxies flying toward each other at very high speeds. Seen in reverse, everything seems to be zooming into one central point, a "singularity". The discovery of cosmic background radiation by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson was the first substantial evidence of the big bang, and it won them the Nobel prize in 1976. Just last year, another Nobel was awarded to members of their team for further discoveries refining our understanding of evidence of the big bang. (BBC News).
String theorists cite a "mathematic eloquence" to suggest a series of dimensions, which they propose could imply an extra-planerial source for all matter in the universe. That remains to be seen, but the fact remains that science does not believe in "something from nothing". Creationists do, even though they know it is impossible.
The more you respond to me with stuff like this the more convinced I am that you are wrong with regards to mans evolutionary origin. That a chance chemical reaction triggered a mindless process of mistake after mistake, plus natural selection (whatever that is supposed to mean),
It means it wasn't "chance".
...that produced an organism which, via a series of random chemical reactions that, somehow, produces consistency of thought sufficient to enable it to contemplate and theorise, proceeds to contemplate and theorise on the origins of the universe and itself, its beginning, development and ultimate end, is beyond your ability even to begin to explain and, I would say, impossible, to demonstrate notwithstanding your apparent faith in the abilities and musings of so called ‘’scientists’’ who propose as much.
I don't have faith, and don't need it. Science is an abundantly productive process with a long history of profound success -while religion tends to be absolutely wrong about absolutely everything all the time, and even admit they will lie to promote what they "just gotta believe" no matter what. So what choice do I have?
I'll allow you to rethink your criteria and give a better explanation for how to determine whether something is impossible or merely improbable. I gave you my criteria for that, and you rejected it without any explanation. Perhaps you should think about that too.
I’m happy with the criteria I gave. Common sense (which, judging your response is, perhaps, not as common as I had believed) tells me that something from nothing is impossible.
Perhaps what you have is more "common" than it is "sense" because you do still believe that everything magically came from nothing, do you not?
As I see it there are three options:
God created the universe.
Meaning that everything came from nothing as a result of a magic invisible man chanting an incantation spell.
The universe has always existed.
Nice, but not likely given what we know about physics and thermodynamics.
The universe created itself from nothing.
Show me a citation from someone who proposes that one.
Which one do you put your faith in?
I don't have faith in anything. But I did strongly prefer the 'steady state' universe until I tried to defend it before a couple of astrophysicists. They effectively proved their point, forcing me concede that a big bang eruption was in fact the only option supported by any evidence at all, and there is a lot behind it. But that isn't what you pretend it is. Its more related to the string theorists' idea that I mentioned before. So I will go with a fourth option; all mass, energy, space itself, and even time -erupted into this dimension from a quantum singularity, which may have been caused by rift in the space/time continuum. Although I would happily entertain any other explanation which has both evidenciary support and explanatary power at least equivilent to current cosmology.
I didn't like being proven wrong. So I try to minimize the number of times that happens. You don't apparently don't mind it so much, because you still parrot the same nonsense even after you know its been disproved.
