Atheists, please answer this?

Question

To you there is no creator, no first mover. So reality as we know it just happened by numerous blind events that created very complex forms over a very large period of

time. But how did it all get started?

The problem is that any event needs an event handler. If anybody understand programming, in order to excute and event you must program it to occur.

In other words, for ANYTHING to happen there has to be instructions for that event.

But how can instructions evolve without prior instructions to do so, it is impossible.

So in the beginning there had to be some sort of programming, instructions for a certain first action. Where do atheists think this came from?

Answer 1

OK, think of evolution like a mathematical logic: It's a set of rules that constantly apply to a certain situation as it progresses. In this case, the situation is life. The rules are not created, but are purely logic: The most adapted organisms will survive in the natural world and live to pass on their genes which carry desirable traits to the next generation. Simple as that.

As for the start of life, to be honest I'm not sure whether any of us hold that answer for you, but there are many theories you can probably look up.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_life

Answer 2

> But how did it all get started?

This question has been asked and responded to many times on this forum and everywhere else in the known universe. Are you blind, can you not read, or are you just a troll to ask it again? Which is it?

> The problem is that any event needs an event handler.

The problem is that you have no understanding of science. You are just parroting some tripe that you were fed and you repeat thoughlessly. How could you possibly know that this rubbish is true? You don't. However, since you can't really know that any of your religious beliefs are true, I can understand how you just keep on parroting.

> In other words, for ANYTHING to happen there has to be instructions for that event.

All right, I give. Please tell me about where the instructions for the existence of your god come from. If you can't, then why not keep it to yourself, where you can maintain your delusions in wonderful bliss.

Answer 3

Your justification doesn't work. If there was a god to be your "event handler", providing instructions for the creation of the universe, who or what was the event handler that created the god that created the universe?

This justification vanishes over the event horizon of a logical black hole in a line of infinite regression.

The problem is that you're trying to use logic to support your illogical position, and when you do, it just doubles back on you and unsupports your own theory. It doesn't disprove it, it just doesn't help you.

Linear logic is unlikely to be applicable to the beginning of the universe. We don't know or understand what the "beginning" really was, and since none of the universal laws we use to construct analogies with existed at the time, we are unable to build comparisons that are comprehensible, with familiar reference points. For this reason, plain English explanations for how the universe started always tend to fail. Our language doesn't "work" in describing an event where there are no rules or familiar symbols or concepts.

Your linear programming analogy is illustrative of this point. It's a bad analogy, because before the universe existed, there was nothing. No framework. In your analogy, the computer existed before the program, and so did the programmer, so the program (universe) conceptually already existed within a meta-universe. The two situations are not comparable.

Sorry, somebody asks this question every day, probably eight or ten times. It's never proven anything. You haven't proven anything, or convinced anybody, and you never will with this line. It's broken. It don't work. Can't be fixed. It's dead, Jim. It's been dead for quite awhile, now, and frankly, it's starting to smell funky! Please bury it, and perform whatever ritual people of your faith have deluded yourselves into thinking is necessary.

Answer 4

I never get tired of answering this same question.

The origins of the universe are a mystery and atheists don't claim to know them.

Inability to solve a problem does not grant the right to give credit to a God. Just because we don't have a good answer doesn't mean you can make one up and suppose that it must be so.

By your own logic, even God must have had a creator, and that creator must have had one, and so on. If nothing occurs without a mover, nothing could occur. Obviously, the universe must have been created in an illogical way, God or no God, or else there is a simpler explanation that we have yet to find.

Answer 5

I don't know. It may be that your assumptions - all the "there had to be..." - are wrong. You're awfully certain of a lot of things here without giving any good reason for anyone to agree.

Notice that believers don't have an answer to this either. If you meant this to be reason to believe in gods, you're suffering the "log in your own eye" problem: the believer has all of the same difficulties the atheist has in explaining this, _plus_ a whole set of needlessly made up additional problems. The only reason this "argument from ignorance" seems reasonable to believers is that it never even occurred to them to question their own beliefs (again, if they did, they'd see that it's even HARDER to explain things if you insist on a creator). In short, they're blinded by arrogance.

The analogy to programming is false - almost question-begging, as you refer to "instructions" as though it's a given that there was some kind of coded description of events that had to predate the events in order for them to occur. That's simply false: events occur without any kind of prior description.

Answer 6

No see... that is your problem.

Events do not need an event handler.
Events just need a set of circumstances to lead into them.

Nothing needs instructions to happen. For a conscious and simple-minded human to catalyse something happening instructions may help.... but there are none actually needed for anything.

Reality doesn't deal in beginnings, as before every event there is another set of events to lead to it... and it certainly doesn't deal in creators therefore.


Athiests don't believe that programming came from anywhere as it is a redundant concept.... i.e. Your axioms are flawed.

Answer 7

ah yes, a modified first cause argument...

a few questions for you:

you assert that there has to be an 'event handler' for every event, ie a causer. This is an assertion on your part, for that contains the central issue.

Your question translates to 'how can something come from nothing'? and it also asserts that there must be an intelligent mind to 'code' or 'give instructions' to everything. as if all atheists casually agree on everything regarding this subject, or as if everything evolves to a plan or a set of instructions.

thats circular: asking how can something evolve to plan without a planner, and then demanding that i must assume that everything evolves to a plan or a set of instructions. haven't you heard of nihilism???

vale to you

Answer 8

Any reliance on a chain of causality or intention leads to the problem of infinite regression, as others have pointed out. Therefore the only possible answer is that existence is genuinely random and genuinely uncaused. Quantum physics proposes this, and it is supported by experimental evidence.

Answer 9

I'm not an evolutionist and I don't claim to be. I still ask myself how all this could have started. It seems so unlikely that things would happen in such a perfect way for us to be here, and I confess that I don't understand any of it.

However, random happenstance makes more sense to me than an invisible being deciding to create us. Where evolution is the stuff of science, creationism, to me, is nothing more than a fairy tale.

***I'M NOT GODZILLA down below me summed it up nicely in one sentence.

Answer 10

this universe started with the big bang. During that the initial parameters and constraints for this universe were set. How exactly the big bang started we don't know, nor if there was anything before that (or indeed if that last statement makes sense).

i would recommend against placing your god in this gap, there is a good chance we will close it eventually.