Atheists,- - why is there anything instead of nothing?

Question

If you don't believe in a supernatural Creator (not subject to the laws of nature) as the first cause of the material world, then why does anythnig exist at all? Where did matter/energy come from? If you don't believe in a first cause which itself (by its nature of not being subject to the law of cause and effect) was uncaused, then surely the logical conclusion is that nothing should exist.

BlueOctagons - - - The so called 'Big Bang' is just an intellectual cop-out. If you propose an hypothesis which is supposed to explain the origin of the material universe, you can't just start at a point which is convenient to your story and expect that to satisfactorily explain it. I don't want to know what happened at some stage after the beginning, I want to know what happened at the real beginning.

trouble_906 - - - No! the reason you won't prove me wrong is because you can't. You have obviously been brainwashed, I'm afraid you subscribe to the herd mentality, if some idea is trendy and the in-thing, it doesn't matter if it is right or the truth. The truth with you is obviously down to a consensus opinion, which of course, if you had any common sense you would know, is no indicator of truth, in fact the history of science shows it is about as reliable as the British weather. And it is littered with examples of the perceived wisdom of the day, now on the scrapheap - - - - Piltdown Man, Nebraska Man, Orce Man, Colorado Man, embryonic recapitulation, spontaneous generation of life, steady state universe, flat earth - - - need I go on?

Father Guido - - - sorry! but matter is also subject ot the law of cause and effect so it must have had an original cause, which rules out it being eternal. i.e. it must have had a beginning. So we are back to the question of what was the first cause, which itself did not need a cause? I challenge any atheist on here to give me a naturalisitc answer to this question. Don't worry, I won't hold my breath.

SuperAtheist - - - So when faced with natural laws that oppose your naturalistic ideology you resort to inventions and fiction. There is no way round the law of cause and effect and I am afraid it is universal, you cannot just use words to explain it away. Any quantum physics that tries to explain it away is just hypothesis built on hypothesis, it is certainly not demonstrable fact. The trouble with science today is that so many believe that if you say something often enough and loud enough it becomes fact. where has the scientific method gone to?

Daniel R - - you completely miss the point, God is not subject to the laws that govern matter, so we don't have to ask where God comes from?
If you subscribe to a naturalistic explanation of origins you are bound by the laws which govern matter so you have to answer within this framework. Unfortunately for the atheistic, naturalistic ideology, the very laws which govern matter completely rule out a naturalistic origin for matter. so I can confidently predict there will never be a naturalistic answer to this question, because quite simply, there isn't one.

SuperAtheist - - - I think you need to go back to science class. You can invent all sorts of airy-fairy devices to try to get round natural laws which happen to be inconvenient to your ideology. But I am afraid those who try to manipulate science for ideological reasons, do a great disservice to science, and to those honourable scientists to whom the search for truth is paramount.
With your pie- in-the-sky type pseudo-science no natural laws have any meaning, any hair-brained hypothesis can be devised to get round any problem. And if natural law cannot be relied on it becomes virtually meaningless and we cannot be sure of anything. In fact,using your logic I don't believe you even exist.
I hypothesise that you are just a figment of my imagination.
OK THEN, PROVE ME WRONG!

Beastie - - - - you really have been hoodwinked by evolutionists if you believe that fossils prove anything. Here is a lesson for you; What are fossils? Fossils are the petrified remains of billions of dead things, mostly laid down by water in a catastrophic manner all over the world.
Does this prove the earth is millions of years old, I think not.
Go and look at what happened at the Mount St Helens volcanic eruption, you will see how stratified rocks several hundreds of feet high were formed in a few hours and how a canyon one fortieth the depth of the Grand Canyon was forme in a few days from mud flows. Anything organic material buried in the strata of those rocks will have been fossilised. How old are they? They are now around 27 years old. If we didn't know about the Mount St Helens eruption, we could interpret the strata of the rocks as representing some sort of multi-million year timescale. Because this is exactly what the uniformitarian evolutionists do elsewhere.

SuperAtheist - - - So you call me silly because I challenge YOUR ATHEIST-STYLED ‘SCIENCE’ which dispenses with natural law and the necessity for a first cause by advocating the preposterous notion that matter/energy/information, the universe, and every potentiality therein, all originated of their own accord without any cause?
You know what? I can recommend another good story for you, it’s called ‘Alice in Wonderland’.

Answer 1

Hahaha! All these pseudo-intellectuals using all the big words they know, phrasing them in such a way so as to give the appearance of wisdom. Yet, not one has answered the question!

Please explain, what caused the Big Bang? Where did the compressed matter come from? Why is the Big Bang the only explosion in the history of the universe from which something was constructed?

Answer 2

What a strangely posed question and argument.

I don't know why anything exists or where matter came from (if it came from anywhere). We haven't found the answer to that yet, but some pretty clever people are working on it.

Theories are developed to fit the evidence as we discover it. As the evidence changes so does the theory. That is progress and science is responding to your challenge.

What was the first cause of a god? I trust that you will respond with an explanation that is as logical and demonstrable as you expect an atheist's to be.

You say "If you don't believe in a first cause which itself (by its nature of not being subject to the law of cause and effect) was uncaused, then surely the logical conclusion is that nothing should exist.".

Evidently (existence!), that is not the logical conclusion. Science and atheists would not accept such a demonstrably wrong conclusion, but again science is considering what first cause might be, or even if there need be one.

You cannot oppose different views and expect an explanation of the one that you appear to reject, unless you are prepared to judge them both by the same standard.

Atheists do that, and that is why they reject a supernatural creator. There is no testable evidence of a creator.

It would be interesting if you had some.

Answer 3

Ah, another man who can't prove the existence of his deity but insists everyone else has to have proof of what they believe.
God made everything is SUCH a tidy answer, isn't it?
And the Bible's right as well.
Oh, those inconvenient fossils? God put them there too. Just to fool the science community into believing the world is actually billions of years old.
Science, at least, can evolve, find the truth and admit they were wrong before.
Religion is, allegedly, perfect in its original form and therefore unquestionable.

Science will eventually discover where it all came from.
You will never discover God, because of two reasons.
First, Christians do not seek to prove the existence of God, they just believe so they aren't looking.
Second, you can't find what's not there.

Answer 4

We don't know. Maybe we won't ever know.

But why do you think imagining a god answers the question? It really doesn't. Why, according to you, does a god exist rather than not exist? You have no answer. So in the end the theist is reduced to the same problem as the atheist.

Just saying "but God is uncaused" also doesn't answer the question. If something can exist that is uncaused, why can't we simply say "the universe is uncaused" and leave out the unnecessary god?

Answer 5

I have no idea. I'm glad that there is something, because I am glad that I exist. But I don't know that there is a "why" and if there is I don't think we piddly humans have any way of knowing it.

The universe started with the Big Bang. I don't really know what was before that; it is possible that matter and energy is infinite. I haven't delved that deep into physics and quantum mechanics and string theory and M theory (or whatever it's called) and all the other stuff I'd need to know to understand it. I'm a writer and not a scientist.

Answer 6

Recent news about the museum opening, in where else but the good old US of A, depicting a six thousand year old Creationist World, prompted me to research further.

I took a good long hard look at why it makes sense to them.This is how I saw it;

A Jewish astronaut, a Zombie by all accounts, who was his own Father tells us that we can live forever if we symbolically eat his flesh and drink his blood.

Telepathically tell him we accept him as our master so he can remove an evil force from our souls present in humans because a rib created woman was convinced by a snake, to eat an apple from a magical tree- well it all makes good sound common sense doesn't it?
So Darwin, Copernicus, Crick and Wilson eat your hearts out-you were wrong!

Time for me to get back to The Church and reality.I've been deluding myself with science for far too long.
I should have realised how perfectly true the good book is.
But how about if life on other planets is made up pf something else than DNA?

Answer 7

You seek the meaning of life? Good luck! It is far more beyond our understanding than everything in this universe. And the simplest thing is to claim that there is a CREATOR, who 'created' this universe. For short: the meaning and the origin of existence does not root in religion, because religion is the creation of mankind, and NOT vice versa.

Believers only believe because it is what they want or what they are capable of. As I have said, it is very easy to accuse GOD of existence at all... thinking on a higher level and trying to understand it is much more complicated.

In any case, everyone believes what he/she wants to believe. Free will is part of human nature, and the crusades proved that not all religions respect that part of us.

Oh and one more thing: If there would be nothing instead of everything, we couldn't discuss this matter here and know. Such totalitarian expressions like NOTHING and EVERYTHING are the creations of weak minds unable to see the bigger picture.

Answer 8

~~~AMDG ,,,, Some of us believe that this Source is not a Supreme Being with "Supernatural Powers of Omnipotence" that is Seperate from Us. We feel that we all come from this Source which can be beyond the current abilities of Human Conciousness to Comprehend. For the moment we can only give it descriptions like Ultimate Higher Conciousness, etc, etc,,,, which is the "Energy" you were asking about. Matter exists because Conciousness wills it. Note: Conciousness is "The Something" which counters your contention of a "logical conclusion,,,that nothing should exist". This of course is an Oversimplification. ~ Namaste`

Answer 9

Nothing is unstable. Eventually it decays into Something.

The 'law of cause and effect' is not universal. At the quantum level, uncaused events are common.

CD

Silly man. As I said, uncaused events are COMMON - they happen all the time. A simple decaying atom is a perfect example: nothing CAUSES it to happen - it simply becomes increasingly probable. Ditto virtual particles, which simply appear out of nothing on a probabilistic basis.

If you try to insist that all matter has to obey these classical matter laws, and ignore the quantum world entirely, your thinking is stuck at Einstein.

Answer 10

Thank you A.M.D.G All you get in response to any explanatory questions, is the usual Big Bang, they do not go behind the Big Bang, They are not thinking for themselves, only repeating some scientist theory, Scientist are not all knowing Divinity, only man?