The God Particle? There is still no free lunch in the Cosmology Cafe! Solving the Darwinist problem part four!
The two postulations , ie that a god existed before the universe, and that the universe exploded from nothing, are both mutualy possible and mutualy exclusive, the god (if we ignore the question of its own origin)obviously exploded, and in its anhialation , created everything. simples , and gets round the atheist / theist thing. by making both sides right, one before and one after the big bang.As an atheist myself, and understanding that i can never know what happened before the big bang, im willing to let this one ride, god may of created everything, but he wiped himself out in doing so, probably was suicidaly bored with the lack of deity type totty.
I have included an entire string of comments at the end of this post, but this one really got me started! A couple of other comments are interspersed in the post but are also found in their entirety at the end. I do appreciate the inspiration!
The secular concept of the Big Bang is amusing, as so many naturalists struggle to describe how it could have produced the Universe while missing the main point - Someone or something had to come up with a material Universe, time, energy, physical laws, yadda yadda yadda! It has been often said that there is no free lunch. and this applies to cosmology as well as biology. The Laws of Thermodynamics are in place. The Law of Biogenesis remains intact. No amount of wishing and hoping by Darwinists can replace evidence.
Suffice it to say that, even as Darwinism is made up of whole cloth and does NOT represent what we observe today, the same is true of the concept of everything coming from nothing, for many reasons. The Universe is not nothing that separated into matter and anti-matter because it is not a zero sum. Such a concept as that does not account for time and also does not explain logical natural laws OR what would POWER such an event? Field theorists swing and miss at this problem as well. If you want to begin your argument with fields, well, where did the fields come from? If particles, what birthed them? If strings, Who or what strung them? The same philosophy that cannot account for the formation of life on Earth certainly can't seem to get beyond causeless beginnings in the cosmos, either.
Anyway, with all the talk about the Higgs boson (the "God Particle") somehow "proving" the Standard Model of the Big Bang or in some way replacing God, this was a good time to discuss cosmology and worldviews. Belief in a Big Bang would be cast aside if not for the ignorance of the public, and the cause of that ignorance is an education in which only one view of Origins can be taught. Evidence is kept from the public and propaganda is a continual rainstorm of nonsense coming from the media, academia and secular science. Therefore we have at least two or three generations of Americans who do not even comprehend what the arguments for and against Creation consist of, as they have only been presented with Darwinism and a glimpse of Creation as a strawman in the corner wearing a dunce cap.
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Anonymous said...
"Throwing your arms up in the air and saying "god did it" leads to satisfaction with your own ignorance which in turn prevents the advancement of mankind scientifically. I'm not ok with that."
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Apparently there are masses of people who think Creation scientists sit around all day saying, "God did it! and commence to have paper airplane fights? This is as ridiculous as thinking a mechanic looks at your car and says, "Toyota made it" and then fails to inspect the vehicle to see what is working correctly and what needs to be fixed! "God did it" is the starting point rather than the conclusion when discussing science.
This is a classic strawman argument. Darwinists present a ridiculous parody of Creation by the God of the Bible rather than actually address the counter-arguments to their claims. People like Stephen Hawking and Richard Dawkins will find an obviously mythologized Chinese-telephoned creation myth from an obscure tribe or parody Norse or Greek mythology to represent Creationism and, having elicited a guffaw from the audience, proceed to present their propaganda. That a people who wandered far from God both philosophically and geographically would have a Flood or Creation story that strains the imagination does not in any way diminish the very logical and historical account found in the Bible. But the fact that both creation and flood stories abound in all cultures world-wide actually supports the idea that someone would have recorded these things for posterity accurately and, thus, back to the Bible we go again.
Creation scientists used to be called "scientists" and people like Newton and Lord Kelvin and the Pasteurs would base their research on the idea that a Logical God created, and therefore it was worth their time to investigate the workings of the Universe with the expectation that it's creation was based on logic. Thus Bacon came up with the scientific method (which did not preclude supernatural causes) and thus science grew in leaps and bounds on the premise that God created, therefore all operations and phenomena could be studied and understood.
Currently there are myriad organizations working on the premise that the Universe was created. Some are Young Earth Creationists, some are Intelligent Design and some Old Earth Creationists. All of them are busily working on projects such as modernizing the classification system of organisms, some on basic geology, some on dating methods, some busily falsifying Darwinists claims, some pursuing research on the workings of the cell and many of them are seeking to find clues within organisms to fight disease, maladies and mutations, etc. They run the gamut from Cosmologist to Microbiologists. Many of them are focused on philosophy and apologetics but more are working in the field and in laboratories, doing real science, advancing our knowledge of how things are designed and how best to understand those designs and take advantage of them.
Secular scientists are also doing such things, without wearing a Theistic hat. Biomimetics, Biomimicry and Nano-engineering are among the disciplines which are based on the concept that the designs of nature are superior and more efficient than those of men. With that understanding, they are seeking to copy or learn from design in the natural world to make more efficient or new machines and mechanisms. Yes, the careful inspection of a gecko's feet or an e.coli flagellum or the intricate wingstrokes of the bumblebee have produced advances of modern science. Butterfly wings are a source of study for multiple reasons. We have copied the dragonfly to help us make better drones.
Probably the biggest hindrance to the advancement of man's knowledge is the mule-headedness and exclusionary policies of Darwinists. Scientists or teachers who do not toe the Evolutionary Line are shunned, denied entrance into some organizations, denied tenure, fired from teaching positions, cast out of agencies, given failing grades in colleges, absolutely banned from most peer reviews and roundly castigated by members of the Ruling Paradigm. There are agencies such as the NCSE that are devoted primarily to censorship of non-Darwinist information and fighting to keep students from being presented with any evidence that casts doubts upon the Darwinist Mythology.
As award-winning editor and author Atheist-turned Christian Lee Strobel said, "It was the evidence from science and history that prompted me to abandon my atheism and become a Christian."
The bottom line? Darwinists (aka naturalistic materialists or Humanists or advocates of evolution, the various members of the anti-Theistic and Atheopathic crowd) are devoted to stifling knowledge and evidence. Darwinists fear evidence being a commodity in the free marketplace of idea exchange. They want a monopoly on what students and the common man can hear and think and believe. The very existence of this fear reveals their weakness! Darwinists fear debate, fear a level playing field, fear the free flow of evidence and the idea of robust and free conversation among men of science or philosophy. And, really, who among us does NOT have a philosophy of daily living? Philosophy is the foundation of science. Your philosophy determines YOUR worldview. But YOUR worldview should not be forced upon everyone else!
The United States of America was built on the premise that free men should be free to think, act, accomplish, succeed, fail, love, learn and all the other components of living contained in the words written in our Declaration of Independence:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
Darwinist censorship is not in line with the language or intent of our Founding Fathers to promote and provide a free society. This includes the free exchange of ideas and the freedom to worship or not worship God as one chooses. These worldview bullies have spent decades trying to eliminate expressions of religious belief and freedom of speech in the venues of science and academia, even though that is the first and foremost assertion of the First Amendment to the Constitution!
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
As I have said before, when an army discovers the place the enemy has fortified the most, they have found that place the enemy considers most difficult to defend AND/OR they have found a place that contains something valuable to the enemy and therefore most important to capture or destroy. Darwinists have built a high-walled and heavily fortified castle in which they seek to keep scrutiny away from their assertions. This is because their assertions will not withstand scrutiny. The very act of censorship and bullying by the Darwinist community actually reveals their weaknesses and fears. Feel free to ignore them and research for yourself.
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Contrary to Radar's constant caricatures, scientists do not claim that "nothing" caused the big bang.
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Yes, they do, Anonymous! Yes, they do!
Yes, they do, Anonymous! Yes, they do!
I invite Anonymous to go ahead and inform us all? I know of no secular scientist who has a logical explanation for the existence of a "singularity" that explodes into all time and space and existence nor can identify the power by which it was accomplished. No answer seems to fall into the "nothing" category. Furthermore, the Universe is by definition the sum of all material existence, time included, and therefore in the materialist sense there cannot be a "before the Universe" without stepping into the supernatural realm.
I am not in agreement with William Lane Craig concerning the building of the Universe. He is in that Hugh Ross wing of Creationists who believe God used the "Big Bang" to create the Universe. However, that aside, he does give us a logical and reasoned argument that reasonable people should acknowledge as true. When scientists realized that the Universe could NOT be either eternal or regenerating, they then had to accept that it had a beginning. This, by the way, was not a surprise to Christians as they would have read this in Genesis 1:1. Christians knew there was a beginning long ago. So cue William Lane Craig, from his online treatise:
Ultimate Question of Origins: God and the Beginning of the Universe
"We can summarize our argument as follows:
1. Whatever exists has a reason for its existence, either in the necessity of its own nature or in an external ground.
2. Whatever begins to exist is not necessary in its existence.
3. If the universe has an external ground of its existence, then there exists a Personal Creator of the universe, who, sans the universe, is timeless, spaceless, beginningless, changeless, necessary, uncaused, and enormously powerful.
4. The universe began to exist.From (2) and (4) it follows that
5. Therefore, the universe is not necessary in its existence.From (1) and (5) it follows further that
6. Therefore, the universe has an external ground of its existence.From (3) and (6) it we can conclude that
7. Therefore, there exists a Personal Creator of the universe, who, sans the universe, is timeless, spaceless, beginningless, changeless, necessary, uncaused, and enormously powerful.And this, as Thomas Aquinas laconically remarked, "is what everybody means by God." (Thomas Aquinas Summa theologiae 1a.2.3)"
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So I hereby challenge ANY of you to logically deny the obvious answer to the beginning of the Universe. A Higher Power outside of the material realm would be required to create a material realm. So the natural Universe was designed and created by a Supernatural Entity. Virtually every culture references a God or gods but the Bible is quite specific about the Creator God and gives us a good approximate date for the creation of said Universe AND the time taken by God to do it. How is not explained. However, all scientific statements in the Bible are true. The Bible is also an accurate history of mankind, told primarily through one specific family line that became known as Jews. So the Bible is e-v-i-d-e-n-c-e! It is a witness statement made by the Creator given to His created beings.
What do Darwinists have in terms of actual evidence? Oh, if the world only took the time to study the subject, the utter lack of evidence for Darwinism would astound them! P.T Barnum and Mark Twain would give the Con of the Millennium Award to Darwinists for pulling it off! Fairy tales, lies and myths presented as fact. Wow! Anyway, that article as promised for dessert:
On the Origin of Everything
‘A Universe From Nothing,’ by Lawrence M. Krauss
Illustration by Andy Martin
By DAVID ALBERT
Published: March 23, 2012
Lawrence M. Krauss, a well-known cosmologist and prolific popular-science writer, apparently means to announce to the world, in this new book, that the laws of quantum mechanics have in them the makings of a thoroughly scientific and adamantly secular explanation of why there is something rather than nothing. Period. Case closed. End of story. I kid you not. Look at the subtitle. Look at how Richard Dawkins sums it up in his afterword: “Even the last remaining trump card of the theologian, ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?,’ shrivels up before your eyes as you read these pages. If ‘On the Origin of Species’ was biology’s deadliest blow to supernaturalism, we may come to see ‘A Universe From Nothing’ as the equivalent from cosmology. The title means exactly what it says. And what it says is devastating.”
Well, let’s see. There are lots of different sorts of conversations one might want to have about a claim like that: conversations, say, about what it is to explain something, and about what it is to be a law of nature, and about what it is to be a physical thing. But since the space I have is limited, let me put those niceties aside and try to be quick, and crude, and concrete.
Where, for starters, are the laws of quantum mechanics themselves supposed to have come from? Krauss is more or less upfront, as it turns out, about not having a clue about that. He acknowledges (albeit in a parenthesis, and just a few pages before the end of the book) that everything he has been talking about simply takes the basic principles of quantum mechanics for granted. “I have no idea if this notion can be usefully dispensed with,” he writes, “or at least I don’t know of any productive work in this regard.” And what if he did know of some productive work in that regard? What if he were in a position to announce, for instance, that the truth of the quantum-mechanical laws can be traced back to the fact that the world has some other, deeper property X? Wouldn’t we still be in a position to ask why X rather than Y? And is there a last such question? Is there some point at which the possibility of asking any further such questions somehow definitively comes to an end? How would that work? What would that be like?
Never mind. Forget where the laws came from. Have a look instead at what they say. It happens that ever since the scientific revolution of the 17th century, what physics has given us in the way of candidates for the fundamental laws of nature have as a general rule simply taken it for granted that there is, at the bottom of everything, some basic, elementary, eternally persisting, concrete, physical stuff. Newton, for example, took that elementary stuff to consist of material particles. And physicists at the end of the 19th century took that elementary stuff to consist of both material particles and electromagnetic fields. And so on. And what the fundamental laws of nature are about, and all the fundamental laws of nature are about, and all there is for the fundamental laws of nature to be about, insofar as physics has ever been able to imagine, is how that elementary stuff is arranged. The fundamental laws of nature generally take the form of rules concerning which arrangements of that stuff are physically possible and which aren’t, or rules connecting the arrangements of that elementary stuff at later times to its arrangement at earlier times, or something like that. But the laws have no bearing whatsoever on questions of where the elementary stuff came from, or of why the world should have consisted of the particular elementary stuff it does, as opposed to something else, or to nothing at all.
The fundamental physical laws that Krauss is talking about in “A Universe From Nothing” — the laws of relativistic quantum field theories — are no exception to this. The particular, eternally persisting, elementary physical stuff of the world, according to the standard presentations of relativistic quantum field theories, consists (unsurprisingly) of relativistic quantum fields. And the fundamental laws of this theory take the form of rules concerning which arrangements of those fields are physically possible and which aren’t, and rules connecting the arrangements of those fields at later times to their arrangements at earlier times, and so on — and they have nothing whatsoever to say on the subject of where those fields came from, or of why the world should have consisted of the particular kinds of fields it does, or of why it should have consisted of fields at all, or of why there should have been a world in the first place. Period. Case closed. End of story.
What on earth, then, can Krauss have been thinking? Well, there is, as it happens, an interesting difference between relativistic quantum field theories and every previous serious candidate for a fundamental physical theory of the world. Every previous such theory counted material particles among the concrete, fundamental, eternally persisting elementary physical stuff of the world — and relativistic quantum field theories, interestingly and emphatically and unprecedentedly, do not. According to relativistic quantum field theories, particles are to be understood, rather, as specific arrangements of the fields. Certain arrangements of the fields, for instance, correspond to there being 14 particles in the universe, and certain other arrangements correspond to there being 276 particles, and certain other arrangements correspond to there being an infinite number of particles, and certain other arrangements correspond to there being no particles at all. And those last arrangements are referred to, in the jargon of quantum field theories, for obvious reasons, as “vacuum” states. Krauss seems to be thinking that these vacuum states amount to the relativistic-quantum-field-theoretical version of there not being any physical stuff at all. And he has an argument — or thinks he does — that the laws of relativistic quantum field theories entail that vacuum states are unstable. And that, in a nutshell, is the account he proposes of why there should be something rather than nothing.
But that’s just not right. Relativistic-quantum-field-theoretical vacuum states — no less than giraffes or refrigerators or solar systems — are particular arrangements of elementary physical stuff. The true relativistic-quantum-field-theoretical equivalent to there not being any physical stuff at all isn’t this or that particular arrangement of the fields — what it is (obviously, and ineluctably, and on the contrary) is the simple absence of the fields! The fact that some arrangements of fields happen to correspond to the existence of particles and some don’t is not a whit more mysterious than the fact that some of the possible arrangements of my fingers happen to correspond to the existence of a fist and some don’t. And the fact that particles can pop in and out of existence, over time, as those fields rearrange themselves, is not a whit more mysterious than the fact that fists can pop in and out of existence, over time, as my fingers rearrange themselves. And none of these poppings — if you look at them aright — amount to anything even remotely in the neighborhood of a creation from nothing.
Krauss, mind you, has heard this kind of talk before, and it makes him crazy. A century ago, it seems to him, nobody would have made so much as a peep about referring to a stretch of space without any material particles in it as “nothing.” And now that he and his colleagues think they have a way of showing how everything there is could imaginably have emerged from a stretch of space like that, the nut cases are moving the goal posts. He complains that “some philosophers and many theologians define and redefine ‘nothing’ as not being any of the versions of nothing that scientists currently describe,” and that “now, I am told by religious critics that I cannot refer to empty space as ‘nothing,’ but rather as a ‘quantum vacuum,’ to distinguish it from the philosopher’s or theologian’s idealized ‘nothing,’ ” and he does a good deal of railing about “the intellectual bankruptcy of much of theology and some of modern philosophy.” But all there is to say about this, as far as I can see, is that Krauss is dead wrong and his religious and philosophical critics are absolutely right. Who cares what we would or would not have made a peep about a hundred years ago? We were wrong a hundred years ago. We know more now. And if what we formerly took for nothing turns out, on closer examination, to have the makings of protons and neutrons and tables and chairs and planets and solar systems and galaxies and universes in it, then it wasn’t nothing, and it couldn’t have been nothing, in the first place. And the history of science — if we understand it correctly — gives us no hint of how it might be possible to imagine otherwise.
And I guess it ought to be mentioned, quite apart from the question of whether anything Krauss says turns out to be true or false, that the whole business of approaching the struggle with religion as if it were a card game, or a horse race, or some kind of battle of wits, just feels all wrong — or it does, at any rate, to me. When I was growing up, where I was growing up, there was a critique of religion according to which religion was cruel, and a lie, and a mechanism of enslavement, and something full of loathing and contempt for everything essentially human. Maybe that was true and maybe it wasn’t, but it had to do with important things — it had to do, that is, with history, and with suffering, and with the hope of a better world — and it seems like a pity, and more than a pity, and worse than a pity, with all that in the back of one’s head, to think that all that gets offered to us now, by guys like these, in books like this, is the pale, small, silly, nerdy accusation that religion is, I don’t know, dumb.
Notice the comments, below, that inspired me to write this particular post:
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"Cute. Yes, atheists say "there is no God" in the absence of any evidence for God's existence."
What you call "cute", the rest of the world just simply calls "the English language". But as far as the existence of the supernatural, to say it doesn't or never existed by definition has to be patently false. Even if you don't identify it as a god. By definition, the natural order before the big bang did not exist. Whatever or whoever caused that big bang existed outside the natural order, making it/he/she "supernatural". The only counter argument to this would be to say nothing caused the big bang, the first and only example in scientific history of an effect with no cause.
What you call "cute", the rest of the world just simply calls "the English language". But as far as the existence of the supernatural, to say it doesn't or never existed by definition has to be patently false. Even if you don't identify it as a god. By definition, the natural order before the big bang did not exist. Whatever or whoever caused that big bang existed outside the natural order, making it/he/she "supernatural". The only counter argument to this would be to say nothing caused the big bang, the first and only example in scientific history of an effect with no cause.
"What you call "cute", the rest of the world just simply calls "the English language"."
No, it's obfuscation. Different answers apply to different questions.
"But as far as the existence of the supernatural, to say it doesn't or never existed by definition has to be patently false."
Who says it doesn't exist "by definition"?
"Even if you don't identify it as a god. By definition, the natural order before the big bang did not exist."
We don't know what was before the big bang, if it was a natural order of some kind, we don't know if there was anything before the big bang, we don't even know if there is such a thing as "before" contained in what to our minds is "on the other side", time-wise, of the big bang.
"Whatever or whoever caused that big bang existed outside the natural order, making it/he/she "supernatural"."
We don't know if anything that is in any way comprehensible to us preceded the big bang. It may be part of some kind of natural order that is not understood by us, that is simply beyond our comprehension.
"The only counter argument to this would be to say nothing caused the big bang, the first and only example in scientific history of an effect with no cause."
That is hardly the only counter-argument. If we accept that the scientific evidence indicates that a kind of big bang occurred, then the only thing we can say with certainty is that we don't understand what caused it.
Contrary to Radar's constant caricatures, scientists do not claim that "nothing" caused the big bang.
No, it's obfuscation. Different answers apply to different questions.
"But as far as the existence of the supernatural, to say it doesn't or never existed by definition has to be patently false."
Who says it doesn't exist "by definition"?
"Even if you don't identify it as a god. By definition, the natural order before the big bang did not exist."
We don't know what was before the big bang, if it was a natural order of some kind, we don't know if there was anything before the big bang, we don't even know if there is such a thing as "before" contained in what to our minds is "on the other side", time-wise, of the big bang.
"Whatever or whoever caused that big bang existed outside the natural order, making it/he/she "supernatural"."
We don't know if anything that is in any way comprehensible to us preceded the big bang. It may be part of some kind of natural order that is not understood by us, that is simply beyond our comprehension.
"The only counter argument to this would be to say nothing caused the big bang, the first and only example in scientific history of an effect with no cause."
That is hardly the only counter-argument. If we accept that the scientific evidence indicates that a kind of big bang occurred, then the only thing we can say with certainty is that we don't understand what caused it.
Contrary to Radar's constant caricatures, scientists do not claim that "nothing" caused the big bang.
"The Darwinists and Atheists are the Problem!"
What's the problem exactly?
What's the problem exactly?
The destruction of a moral society and the lack of critical thinking.
Because God has been tossed aside by the media and much of government, human life is not valued. We butcher babies in the womb and are considering euthanasia as an option. Sexual perversion is being called "good" and homosexuality, which brings more violence and STDs into the scene, is given a veneer of respectability and people pretend that it is a right rather than a deviation from the norm.
Because kids are taught that everything came from nothing, they do not worry about having a logical point of view and they simply accept what is taught to them. This is a generality but, to the extent it happens it harms us all. We have engineers and scientists who respect scientific laws in operational science but have a baseless mythology for origins ingrained into them, making illogical claims seem acceptable.
We have an increase in violent crimes and fatherless families, in part because the welfare system rewards women for having babies without a husband. This leads to more crime, less motivation for personal accomplishment via normal pathways and more motivation to use the underground economy or crime to supplement government handouts.
Society in the USA is in trouble and Godlessness is a large part of it. Even in churches, many congregations, pastors and organizations have abandoned Biblical principles to compromise with the crowd.
Because God has been tossed aside by the media and much of government, human life is not valued. We butcher babies in the womb and are considering euthanasia as an option. Sexual perversion is being called "good" and homosexuality, which brings more violence and STDs into the scene, is given a veneer of respectability and people pretend that it is a right rather than a deviation from the norm.
Because kids are taught that everything came from nothing, they do not worry about having a logical point of view and they simply accept what is taught to them. This is a generality but, to the extent it happens it harms us all. We have engineers and scientists who respect scientific laws in operational science but have a baseless mythology for origins ingrained into them, making illogical claims seem acceptable.
We have an increase in violent crimes and fatherless families, in part because the welfare system rewards women for having babies without a husband. This leads to more crime, less motivation for personal accomplishment via normal pathways and more motivation to use the underground economy or crime to supplement government handouts.
Society in the USA is in trouble and Godlessness is a large part of it. Even in churches, many congregations, pastors and organizations have abandoned Biblical principles to compromise with the crowd.
The two postulations , ie that a god existed before the universe, and that the universe exploded from nothing, are both mutualy possible and mutualy exclusive, the god (if we ignore the question of its own origin)obviously exploded, and in its anhialation , created everything. simples , and gets round the atheist / theist thing. by making both sides right, one before and one after the big bang.As an atheist myself, and understanding that i can never know what happened before the big bang, im willing to let this one ride, god may of created everything, but he wiped himself out in doing so, probably was suicidaly bored with the lack of deity type totty.
Answer me this question: If a person was not indoctrinated from birth with Christian stories, what would their world view be? The answer is that they would know nothing of any of those stories, and they would come to their own conclusions about the world based on the facts that they could see. Through this method they would learn more about the world around them, slowly gaining more knowledge over time in a never ending procession called learning. This, my friend, is how something comes from nothing.
Christians believe that the natural was created by the Supernatural.
Naturalists believe that something came from nothing.
The concept of learning in a human being has no bearing on the question of the origin of all things, unless of course you believe that you ARE the Universe and everything is simply a mirage you have created for your own amusement?
Thus begins a post on the subject.
So I was thereby inspired. God EXPLODED??!! Perhaps you got a laugh from that one? You are welcome!