After looking around and reading a few reasons people give for being atheist, I've been quite surprised to find that nobody seems to share the reason that first made me an atheist. I've always thought it funny that people turn to religion to answer questions like where we came from, where the world came from, and what are purpose of life is. Most religions attribute such things to the presence of a creator of some sort, a supreme being that made everything. However, this idea has a serious flaw... what created the creator? What created existence in the first place? Why does anything exist? These are questions I've never been able to answer, and I doubt anyone ever will be able to.. not even religion. I was just wondering if anyone else had ever wondered about these things, and what they thought.
Technically speaking we can't really assume that the laws of physics as we know them hold true outside of our own existence, if one were to take the position that a god created our existence then that god existed outside of our existence previously and thus we must assume that such a being is not subject to the natural laws we know. Anyway you look at it though, as Amuck stated the rule of exception simply doesn't work... for theist or atheist views. Assuming the universe is not eternal and was caused by something should imply that whatever caused the universe also had a cause.
I've had this same discussion before with a very smart girl once, and she told me it's what she likes to call the rule of exception. They say that proof of God is in the fact that everything must have been created, because everything must have been created... except God.
Oh no, lol.
What I meant is that's the term she uses to describe the argument that others make when they say the proof of God is "his creation". When I said she was very smart, I wasn't being sarcastic.
To me, the only logical options are that something created existence (not a pre-existing being mind you) or that the universe simply is and always will be. To add a pre-existing being is too complicated, and is by far the less parsimonious option. While the is/always answer is the simpler answer, and should therefor be the generally accepted one in terms of parsimony, that answer doesn't seem to sit well with me. I've always been trained to look for actions and reactions, and existence itself should be a reaction to something. But following that logic only seems to lead to more and more abstract possibilities that don't really answer the question. In the end, I don't really think the question can be answered following any creed because any reaction creating existence would be outside of existence and therefor most likely outside of our ability to comprehend. I suppose its even possible that our idea of action/reaction might not even hold true outside of our own existence.
Well, Christians sufficiently explained God's existence in my mind, as far as where he came from. They said he "transcended" matter/ physical stuff. He was eternal and lived outside of space and time (ever hear Ray Comfort talk about this? makes me nauseous now). There definitely arises problems from that line of thinking, like... why did God choose only 6,000 years ago to FINALLY create something in all his infinite boredom?
But honestly, I don't believe in God at all... but wondering what created the creator posed as much of a problem for me as where matter comes from, or consciousness. There is no "origin" explanation and I guess it's that which us humans have difficulty with in our little pea brains. I know scientists talk about the Big Bang, but... at least as far as quantum physics is concerned, size is relative. You can go infinitely large AND infinitely small. So, if there was one point of super charged atom that exploded, could you not look inside it and see a universe exactly the same as ours? Sure, it would be super dense... until you got closer and you saw the holes there, too.
I don't know. To me, we haven't figured out how we all got here... only how we came to be what we are now.
The big bang isn't really the issue here though, I'm definetely not an astronomy expert but my understanding of the big bang is that space already existed as it is now and that all matter and energy was condense to a single point. Here we're trying to take the next step and ask where all of that came from in the first place.
While it makes sense that a God could exist that is an enternal being with no creator, it makes more sense that existence itself is eternal with no creator... it is the more parsimonious option.
Not quite. Space/time didn't exist either before the big bang (or at least Plank time). During the first few fractions of a second after Planck time, spacetime underwent what is called the inflationary period, where it expanded at an extreme exponential rate. The rate of spacetime expansion was many times lightspeed, to give you an idea. (And yes, spacetime can expand at a rate greater than that of the speed of light. Relativity does not apply to spacetime itself, just things moving within spacetime. This is why there is the possibility of an FTL drive that takes advantage of this by warping spacetime)
I recommend the book Hyperspace by Michio Kaku, or The Universe In A Nutshell by Stephen Hawking if you are interested in reading about this.
And yes, Occam's Razor cuts a deity right out of the equation. :)
Not quite. The Bohr model of the atom (with little electrons whizzing about the nucleus like planets) is outdated and inaccurate. Electrons are actually waveform particles that surround the atom in a kind of haze. Basically, following Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, we cannot know both the location and the speed of an electron at the same time, so the 'orbit' of an electron is actually a waveform function that describes the possibility of the electron being in that place at that time.
For some good information on the structure of atoms, I highly recommend Issac Asimov's Atom: Journey Across The Subatomic Cosmos. It is a little dated, as it was last updated a few years before Asimov died, but it's a good solid history of our understanding of the atom, from ancient Greece to the last 80s/early 90s.