Atheists: You want "some proof"?? well, come on then..?

Question

First, read article below, then answer..I'm not trying to convert you, but just to ponder some things.. that's all. If you want an excellent argument from a scientists standpoint on the argument that there has to be a cause (a creator) for the effect (The universe), that proves the atheists theories that 1) the universe came out of nothing 2) the universe is eternal (Stephan Hawking dismisses this theory) go against basic laws. Although, this article does not stand to present a God/Religion.. It proves that the atheist views about the 'beginning' or 'what has always been' are not sound (based on scientifically proven laws).. It wouldn't work any better than to imagine a dough nut in your hand right now and having it appear. If atheists dare, open your minds and read this article written by Ph.D., Bert Thompson with excepts from scientific studies regarding this subject.. here it is, and I wish you the best on your journey. http://www.apologeticspress.org/articles...

http://www.apologeticspress.org/articles/269

heres the right link.

Come on you guys can come up with something better, surely? Oh well.. *sigh*

"This is clearly stupid - WHY couldn't the universe create itself, if God could? God gets a pass on requiring an origin, but the universe doesn't? There is no basis for the assertion, so we're back to faith."
read the article, it explains this very clearly, but then you probably didnt read it.

People.. this is NOT about religion! It is not about friggin JESUS. It is simply a look into the probability into a creator. This God they teach you about, that you have stayed away from is an opinion.

THIS IS AWESOME!! I have never pi**ed so many people off in my life! most did not read the article, and did not have any counter arguments (that werent already addressed in the article.) which means you read half. No one here "seems" smart enough to even scratch the surface with an intelligent response. *oh, well*

Thanks to green_meklar and DC among maybe one other who actually read it. Green_meklar.. I appreciate you reading it and taking the time to think about what it proposed and countering it with an intelligent response...despite what I agree with or not.. You dignified my question with a thought provoking answer.

Answer 1

The article seems to be fairly good, but unfortunately it does make some mistakes, some very common mistakes made by many religious people when they try to argue in favor of God's existence. I'll point them out:

>As Henry Morris has commented, “The Second Law requires the universe to have had a beginning” (1974, p. 26). Indeed, it does. The Universe is now known not to be eternal.

While to many people this looks like solid logic, it actually runs into the problem of failing to think outside the box. There isn't actually anything to say that the Big Bang was the beginning of everything, or that the laws of thermodynamics always holds true. There may well be other universes besides our own that can interact with each other in violation of one or the other or both of these ideas. It may well be that time itself doesn't work the same way everywhere, that the time we observe in our universe appears as nothing more than another static dimension to a different, higher kind of time by which the Big Bang might not seem as unusual as it does to us. We must not limit ourselves to the workings of physics as we know them; the questions of the Universe's formation require thinking in terms of pure logic, as applied in any kind of metaphysical system, not just our own. To say that the Universe is not eternal because it doesn't seem that way to us is really quite naive.

Now, there do exist OTHER arguments against any plane of existence being eternal, but they are not very relevant to the article's point as they do as much to disprove God as they do to disprove the eternal existence of the Universe.

>Estling is correct, of course. There is no evidence that would allow matter or energy simply to “pop into existence” of its own accord. This suggestion is in clear violation of the first law of thermodynamics.

This of course runs into precisely the same problems I outlined above.

>Furthermore, to suggest that the Universe created itself is to posit a self-contradictory position.

It would appear that this is the case. However, note that I said 'would appear'. We can't know for sure that logic precludes the development of something from nothing, there may be ways to apply logic such that these cases do work and we just don't know about them yet.

>the only remaining alternative is that the Universe was created by something, or Someone, that: (a) existed before it, i.e., some eternal, uncaused First Cause; (b) is superior to it—since the created cannot be superior to the creator; and (c) is of a different nature, since the finite, contingent Universe of matter is unable to explain itself

A. This is only true if this something exists in the same timeline as our own universe, which is not necessarily true. Time as we know it may extend only back to the Big Bang, with our entire universe occupying no more than a single instant of time in a higher universe.
B. This depends what you mean by 'superior'. It really seems to me that here the article is really trying a little too hard to support the existence of God and not hard enough to follow actual logic. We already know that the Universe, right at the beginning, was simpler than it is now; it is therefore easy to imagine that whatever process initially created it could also be simpler than the Universe in its current state. This can easily be verified as true by an analogy, although I won't bother filling my answer with analogies at the moment.
C. This is not necessarily the case. The creation process would have to have come from a higher universe, but that doesn't mean that that higher universe is necessarily eternal or even different from our universe in any way save for size (it has to be bigger). Again, it seems to me that the article is spending too much time trying to support God's existence and ends up sacrificing its own integrity for it.

>since something exists now, it must follow logically that something has existed forever.

According to logic as we know it, yes, this makes sense.

>1. Everything that exists is either matter or mind.
>2. Something exists now, so something eternal must exist.
>3. Therefore, either matter or mind is eternal.
>A. Either matter or mind is eternal.
>B. Matter is not eternal, per the evidence cited above.
>C. Thus, it is mind that is eternal.

Okay, this is going way too far. 1 is totally invalid, the mind is based on the material world in the same way that a computer program is based on the computer itself and there is no distinction here that is useful for the article's purposes. B I also refuted above by mentioning that the article is confining itself to physics as we know it which probably does not apply outside our universe. C, the idea that an entity could exist forever AND independent of anything else is of course ridiculous, entities cannot experience infinite time nor can they exist without a system on which to run.

>In the past, atheists suggested that the mind is nothing more than a function of the brain, which is matter; thus the mind and the brain are the same, and matter is all that exists. However, that viewpoint is no longer intellectually credible, as a result of the scientific experiments of British neurologist, Sir John Eccles. Dr. Eccles won the Nobel Prize for distinguishing that the mind is more than merely physical. He showed that the supplementary motor area of the brain may be fired by mere intention to do something, without the motor cortex of the brain (which controls muscle movements) operating.

So what? This data proves nothing to the effect that the article is claiming it proves. Why? Simply because the intention itself is ALSO a function of the way the brain works. There is no supernatural force acting on the brain, the mind's processes are entirely contained within the brain even if its perception is not.

>No one ever could be convinced that Stonehenge “just happened” by accident, yet atheists and agnostics expect us to believe that this highly ordered, well-designed Universe, and the complicated life it contains, “just happened.”

The Universe is not particularly highly ordered or well designed. Even some of the simplest computer simulations are FAR more interesting, for their information content, than our relatively bare, empty universe. And of course, you must remember the Anthropic Principle: We as sentient beings have to observe ourselves being in a universe that allows our existence, we cannot observe being in any other kind of universe.

>When the Bible records, “In the beginning, God...,” it makes known to us just such a First Cause.

Oh, wait, so the article does all this philosophical talk about PRECISELY how things work and why they are as they are, and then it suddenly turns around and explicitly says, with absolutely none of the logical reasoning it praised so highly in its previous paragraphs, that christianity just happens to be the true religion? So much for its credibility...

Answer 2

Essentially, I'm the same as you. Agnostic, but my family's so devout and my community is largely white and Christian(growing up, mostly everyone was Catholic or Lutheran). For me to just outright say "I don't believe in God" or even say "I don't know if God exists or not" is tantamount to heresy around here. Only ones who know are my mother and husband and only because they're from different states and grew up away from this area in more accepting places. The rest of my family would be a) devastated b) horrified c) likely disown me. Even when I was still religious, the minute I asked an innocent question when I was a kid, I got scolded or told I shouldn't question God or the Bible for any reason. My thought was how could they expect me to believe if they refused to answer my questions. So yeah, even if I was still religious, it wasn't "good enough" without blind belief, so for me to outright say that I didn't believe would probably wreck my life, too. Small community like this, there's no way I want to be known as the "local atheist".

Answer 3

God exists because the Universe is here. The universe couldn't have created itself, so therefore Goddidit. This of course begs the question "If the universe couldn't have created itself, how could God?"

This is clearly stupid - WHY couldn't the universe create itself, if God could? God gets a pass on requiring an origin, but the universe doesn't? There is no basis for the assertion, so we're back to faith.

Nice try.

Answer 4

Ummm well yes the article was written by a PhD, but also one who is the director of the apologetic press which is a creationist organization. How is this proof? This is a creationist writing about.........creation!?!? NO way

OH and I love this part about the author of the article

"Thompson conducted regular YEC lectures entitled "Science & Nature: Two Votes for God" until 2005. In the spring of 2005, Thompson was removed from his post due to accusations of sexual misconduct with young boys. In recent months he has apparently retired from active work involving creationism."

Edit: To the person who created this question. No one here is "smart" enough to answer intelligently? This article was written by the directior of this website.....hardly a third party source. How can we argue anything since it's written so purely one-sided. On top of that, the person who wrote the article was dismissed for molesting children. Are you saying you are condoning his actions? If he obviously doesn't act like a "christian" in his own personal life, how can you believe anything that he writes?

Answer 5

I read it. Its basically logical fallacies and typically extremely poor reasoning.

Something from nothing and gods form a false dichotomy.

If time is a derived aspect of the universe ( which it is ). The universe itself can be eternal (timeless since time is derived ) yet still have a beginning in time. The entire article has a gross misunderstanding of the what many physicists believe is the nature of time. The article makes the assumption that the universe is embedded in time and that time is distinct from the universe. This is not at all what most physicists believe. Time is derived from the states of the universe. It makes no sense to talk about time except with reference to distinct states.

The article makes another major logical fallacy in that it confuses the two definitions of eternal.

Eternal has two distinct meanings. "Timeless" and Infinite in time. The universe is likely timeless in the first sense in that time is not a fundamental part of the universe but derived from other properties of the universe. The universe may or may not be timeless in the second sense. By arguing that the universe is not timeless in the second sense it ignores the issue that it is timeless in the first sense.

I see you refuse to address my issues with the article but simply resort to ad homenems.

Answer 6

So if there has to be a cause for the Universe which you describe as a creator then what is the cause of the creator.
This argument always goes round in circles because the human mind is not sufficiently developed to understand it.
But that is no reason for inventing gods and demons to fill in the gaps in our knowledge

Answer 7

See, the great thing about science is that if doesn't know an answer, it's not afraid to say I DON'T KNOW. Scientists will continue rigorously looking for answers, with some ideas tossed aside when they're discredited, and others being embraced when they're proven.

In other words, everything that science teaches you is tested, provable fact.

It doesn't need pages and pages of apologetics to give tortured explanations of why I should "believe" in it.

If science doesn't have all the answers, that doesn't mean it's wrong and God is automatically real. It just means we have work left to do. It's not lazy, like God-belief, where if something doesn't make sense, the believer just says "God did it," end of story.

The facts speak for themselves.

Answer 8

That's not proof, and it doesn't relate to the existence of gods, only of a first cause. Even if the cosmological argument were a valid proof, accepting it wouldn't be inconsistent with atheism.
Atheism is just the absence of belief in gods. If you want to disprove atheism, you'll have to prove that at least one god exists. The article in your link doesn't even attempt to do this.

Answer 9

The problem is a misunderstanding of time. Stephen Hawking proposed a universe completely self-contained. He said that asking for a cause of the universe was like asking what happens at the edge of the Earth.

Answer 10

I neither believe that:

1) the universe came out of nothing and
2) the universe is eternal (relating to matter and energy)

Plus I don't believe in gods.

And I don't care if Hawking agrees or disagrees with me as I can think for myself.