Starting today August 7th, 2024, in order to post in the Married Couples, Courting Couples, or Singles forums, you will not be allowed to post if you have your Marital status designated as private. Announcements will be made in the respective forums as well but please note that if yours is currently listed as Private, you will need to submit a ticket in the Support Area to have yours changed.
Matter could exist before time zero, but there were no events to measure time before the time zero, so it "always" existed. This is my poor uneducated understanding of things, feel free to set me straight.I'm not sure what "always" means in the event that time is bounded. Can you clarify?
Given the unlikelihood of our species to have come into existence, one can properly define it as a miracle, albeit one of a natural kind. The Latin word miraculum means an object of wonder, and can't someone say, whether a theist or an atheist, that our very existence is wondrous? The conception, development, and birth of a child is a natural occurrence, yet very miraculous indeed. Why can't we view all living things that same way?
This might potentially be helpful:I'm interested in reading stuff written for the layman on this. Have any good links?
Well, no, if time has a boundary, then it's nonsense to even talk about anything before time. It's exactly like asking if there's anything north of the north pole: the question isn't even coherent. But we by no means know whether or not time had a beginning.Matter could exist before time zero, but there were no events to measure time before the time zero, so it "always" existed. This is my poor uneducated understanding of things, feel free to set me straight.
Given the unlikelihood of our species to have come into existence, one can properly define it as a miracle, albeit one of a natural kind.
The Latin word miraculum means an object of wonder, and can't someone say, whether a theist or an atheist, that our very existence is wondrous? The conception, development, and birth of a child is a natural occurrence, yet very miraculous indeed. Why can't we view all living things that same way?
We understand this process quite well. No deity is needed. The matter that we know and love condensed out of the high temperature bath that existed in our early universe, a bath that came about from the decay of the field that drove inflation. Where inflation came from we don't yet know (we don't even know much about what inflation was), but that doesn't mean that it came from nothing.
Though we don't yet know that much about the formation of life, it certainly didn't come out of nothing. It came out of the soup of organic molecules that existed on the early Earth (and we can be certain that they did exist on the early Earth, because we see the same molecules that would have been necessary for the formation of life on comets).
So is winning the lottery miraculous? What probability does an event have to have before it is considered a miracle?
If a miracle is just something that produces wonder in the human mind, then that's fine, but there's no need for God.
http://www.leaderu.com/offices/billcraig/docs/creation.html
I don't have enough faith to believe that something just so happened to arise from nothing, nor that the universe itself is eternal.
Is it easier to believe in an eternal, all-powerful deity than that? I'd have thought he'd be bigger and even more difficult to believe in.
The existence of an uncaused first cause avoids the absurdity of infinite regress.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/cosmological-argument/
I'm sure it does. What's to say that such an uncaused first cause must be a deity, however?
The existence of an uncaused first cause avoids the absurdity of infinite regress.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/cosmological-argument/
The problem, though is that you really have no way of determining anything about the "first cause" as it's called, which makes me a marginal deist at best.
Therefore, it seems to me that, like it or not, currently accepted cosmological theory does lend tangible support to the theistic doctrine of creatio ex nihilo.
Ockham's razor. You need to prove God ever became incarnate on it's own merits, which hasn't been done. Furthermore, it hasn't been proven that God is omnipotent or even conscious, all you really show with the cosmological argument is that some things are unanswerable with science. It seems that you need to take the rest on faith.If you allow that God, or the supernatural exists, then what would prevent God from becoming incarnate?
I recommend reading Dr. Craig's article.
A changeless, mechanically operating cause would produce either an immemorial effect or none at all; but an agent endowed with free will can have an eternal determination to operate causally at a (first) moment of time and thereby to produce a temporally first effect.
Do you have an alternative proposition?
As Dr. Craig explains, the uncaused first cause was personal:
http://www.leaderu.com/offices/billcraig/docs/creation.html
Very simply, the causal inference is based in the metaphysical intuition that something cannot come out of absolutely nothing.
Well, since there was no "prior" to the initial singularity, that statement doesn't make sense (and yes I've read his numerous regurgitations circling the "prior" means something other than time - in this case however by using "physically prior" he has dropped back in 4D space-time).In the case of the universe (including any boundary points), there was not anything physically prior to the initial singularity.
Nonsense. Transcending space and time does not imply "uncaused", only "uncaused by anything in our universe." It definitely doesn't imply changeless nor enormously powerful (except perhaps relative to us).From the nature of the case involved, that cause must have transcended space and time (at least sans the universe) and therefore be uncaused, changeless, eternal, immaterial, and enormously powerful.
I disagree. Since we don't know what the "cause" was, it could have been two hyper-dimensional ball bearings colliding at high hyper-dimensional velocity which spawned our universe, and the 4 dimensions we got were just the luck of the draw.For the only way in which a temporal effect could originate from an eternal, changeless cause would seem to be if the cause is a personal agent who eternally chooses to create an effect in time.
We use cookies and similar technologies for the following purposes:
Do you accept cookies and these technologies?
We use cookies and similar technologies for the following purposes:
Do you accept cookies and these technologies?