There is no God!

[Aemeth]

Not at all true. As I've said before, the fact that we don't understand something yet is no evidence at all that "God must have done it". We had no idea of what made the sun shine until the 1920s. Now we understand nuclear fusion, and have remarkably detailed and complete models not just of our sun, but of all stars.

The cosmological argument is one of logic, not an appeal to God to come save the day because we don't understand. The Kalaam argument alone proves that an infinite regress is logically impossible, implying that at one point there was nothing, and now there is something. That is NOT EVEN CLOSE to being in the same category of "sun shining physics." It is logically (and, for what it is worth, scientifically) invalid. That alone is enough, so the ideas that order doesn't come from disorder and life from non-life are really not even necessary.

I'm not saying this proves God. I am saying that in this day and age (until I can be intellectually honest while claiming something can come out of nothing) I am saying something Supernatural (in the purest sense of the word--above or outside of nature) must exist.

Science has given us excellent explanations for many things which once were great mysteries. Consider the life sciences-- we now understand life, and human thought, down to the molecular level. Molecular biology is a science which didn't even exist until about 1960. Cosmology is not quite so advanced as molecular biology, but one should expect that over the next 100 years, we'll gather far more data and have a much more complete explanation of our universe.

I agree we will gather much more information but about the universe in the future, but 1) our discoveries will probably only change our scientific perspectives rather than our logical ones (since logic is outside of everything) and 2) until I can see how energy can be created/destroyed in space (or anywhere) somehow, I will hold onto my Supernatural view (this is why I said anything else is not necessarily wrong, just hasty)

[deepsepia]

The cosmological argument is one of logic, not an appeal to God to come save the day because we don't understand.

Where's the logic? Because there's some aspect of the cosmos that we don't yet understand, therefore its proof for the existence of leprechauns? How is that logical? There are things we have yet to understand, but the record is extremely strong that as discovery moves on, new discoveries will be consistent with natural law, not evidence of the supernatural.

Natural science has predicted all sorts of extraordinary and intuitively improbably things, before they happened. Natural science predicted that gravity could bend light, that nuclear fission and fusion were possible, that black holes should exist-- and lo and behold, we find these things to be true.

There can be no logic to the belief in the supernatural. Every supernatural "explanation" causes more logical problems than it solves.

Here's the simplest logical problem: Where did God come from?

[Aemeth]

The whole "something came from nothing" part is where the logic comes from....That is not an aspect of the cosmos. That is not gravity bending light. The atheist puts his faith in the idea that maybe someday Science will show us how something can come from nothing, life from non-life (although Stanley Miller sure got close :p), and order from disorder. The deist puts his faith in the idea that there is something Super Natural out there that can explain what nature alone can't at this stage in history.

Where did God come from? THIS QUESTION AND ITS CONSEQUENCES ARE THE ESSENCE OF MY ARGUMENT. God is super natural. I do not understand logically where he/it/whatever came from. I do not avoid the "something came from nothing" dilemma. I merely answer it with an appeal to something greater than unassisted nature. God is above nature and my comprehension so it is acceptable for me to say "I don't know" and maintain intellectual integrity. But, if all you have is science, then you must explain many things that science hasn't solved. To me that takes more faith at this stage in existence.

[deepsepia]

The whole "something came from nothing" part is where the logic comes from....That is not an aspect of the cosmos.The atheist puts his faith in the idea that maybe someday Science will show us how something can come from nothing,

Hardly. One: atheists don't reason from "faith", they reason from evidence. There are many aspects of the universe which may never be known to us. We know, for example, that we live in a bubble -- we cannot "see faster" than the speed of light, so there are things happening in the universe which we will never see.

Your suggestion that the nature of the universe is that "something came from nothing" is too simplistic. The nature of the universe is extraordinarily complex, and not at all intuitive. The best evidence is that there has always been "something" -- but that this something can change from matter to energy, and back again.

[raum]

The whole "something came from nothing" part is where the logic comes from....That is not an aspect of the cosmos.The atheist puts his faith in the idea that maybe someday Science will show us how something can come from nothing,

Absolutely it is an aspect of the cosmos. Also forget the notions of "something" and "nothing." "Thing" is an illusion native to Tebel.

There is Ain, Ain Soph, and Ain Soph Aur. The Void, The Absence of the Void, and the Light that infinitely entends into the Absence of the Void. These are the primary tenets of manifestation, and supported EASILY by everything we know of Quantum Physics.

And when El "engraves" upon the Ain, those fearsome words "Ihi Aur" (There is Light).... Aur, or Light, is made manifest in a World. The greatest problem people have is the inability to read the bible or its source documents and the desire to understand it. There are no less than SEVEN "Olam" or "worlds" in the Old Testament. Some are destroyed. We don't even come to reside on this one until after the deluge.

First is created Eretz, where there is Heden, a land of fruition.
and then Humanity is banished to Adamah, until the birth of Seth.
Cain is dispursed into Eretz for redemption (given by his mark) and then to Arka,
Ge, is the world where there was an attempt to build a tower of Be Ba'al. or Babel.
Neshiah, is the world of the sojurn of Abraham
Ziah, is the world that thrived until the destruction of the temple.
to the Tebel called Assiah - The World of Men that now experiences.

These worlds are Briat Olam Ha-Qadosh Achad, "or the Creation of the Holy World of Union." they are levels of exist that OVERLAP, and donot trail together as a linear timeline. Think of them as the "group conscious real estate" of the Jewish people; Their own wing of the Akashic Library.

And before you say "not in my bible." These teachings are Essenianic adoption of Nazarene cosmology as they were debated by transcensionists in the EXACT school where Jeshua was educated. "Jesus" argues heavily against a literal interpretation of the Scripture.

but that doesn't mean that there is "no" truth to it.

Hardly. One: atheists don't reason from "faith", they reason from evidence. There are many aspects of the universe which may never be known to us. We know, for example, that we live in a bubble -- we cannot "see faster" than the speed of light, so there are things happening in the universe which we will never see.

Your suggestion that the nature of the universe is that "something came from nothing" is too simplistic. The nature of the universe is extraordinarily complex, and not at all intuitive. The best evidence is that there has always been "something" -- but that this something can change from matter to energy, and back again.

Most athiests are not as "soph"isticiated as your understanding. What you describe is abit more Agnostic than true Classic Athiesm. Though, I expect athiesm has had to change a bit as Quantum Science has evolved.

[Aemeth]

You basically just said that atheists have faith that the aspects of the universe we cannot understand work to explain how something can come from nothing, order/disorder and life/non-life. There is no evidence of ANY of the aforementioned in any other aspect of our understanding of the universe, so it takes some form of a faith statement to attribute everything to natural laws that right now appear to violate all of the other natural laws we have come to discover.

There cannot always have been something (see: Kalaam argument). If there has always been something, that is the most significant characteristic of an infinite regress. Time cannot go both ways because it is linear and progressive...

[raum]

There cannot always have been something (see: Kalaam argument). If there has always been something, that is the most significant characteristic of an infinite regress. Time cannot go both ways because it is linear and progressive...

Time is not linear. man's progression through time MIGHT be, if he determines it so.

Most aboriginals are impossible to understand with an idea that time exists as a one-way single file line.

[deepsepia]

You basically just said that atheists have faith that the aspects of the universe we cannot understand work to explain how something can come from nothing, order/disorder and life/non-life.

Absolutely not.

Atheists observe no evidence of the supernatural at work, and say so. They do not rely on "faith" for any judgment about reality, just evidence and natural science. If tomorrow God spoke to me and performed a verifiable miracle before my eyes, I'd "believe". Since that never has happened, I take the natural world to behave predictably as natural science tells us it will-- that's not faith, that's observation and reason. "Faith" is claiming as true something for which you have no evidence.

Theists claim that some supernatural force is active, but can produce no evidence for it.

As I've pointed out, the things which natural science has explained are always increasing. There was no good explanation for how stars worked until the 1920s. Similarly, there was no good explanation fro gravitation. There was no scientific explanation for genetics or heredity until the 1950s-- now we have good explanations for all these things.

The origin of the universe is a harder problem, only because we have less data about it. But as we accumulate more data, we understand better. The suggestion that some supernatural force "caused" the universe and that such a force is a conscious being has no evidence for it at all. There surely were forces that we don't understand well operating in the first moments of our universe-- but what connection to God is there in that?

People used to refer to "the miracle of life" -- but consider today's news from experimental biology

A team of biologists and chemists is closing in on bringing non-living matter to life.

It's not as Frankensteinian as it sounds. Instead, a lab led by Jack Szostak, a molecular biologist at Harvard Medical School, is building simple cell models that can almost be called life.

Szostak's protocells are built from fatty molecules that can trap bits of nucleic acids that contain the source code for replication. Combined with a process that harnesses external energy from the sun or chemical reactions, they could form a self-replicating, evolving system that satisfies the conditions of life, but isn't anything like life on earth now, but might represent life as it began or could exist elsewhere in the universe.

While his latest work remains unpublished, Szostak described preliminary new success in getting protocells with genetic information inside them to replicate at the XV International Conference on the Origin of Life in Florence, Italy, last week. The replication isn't wholly autonomous, so it's not quite artificial life yet, but it is as close as anyone has ever come to turning chemicals into biological organisms.

"We've made more progress on how the membrane of a protocell could grow and divide," Szostak said in a phone interview. "What we can do now is copy a limited set of simple [genetic] sequences, but we need to be able to copy arbitrary sequences so that sequences could evolve that do something useful."

By doing "something useful" for the cell, these genes would launch the new form of life down the Darwinian evolutionary path similar to the one that our oldest living ancestors must have traveled. Though where selective pressure will lead the new form of life is impossible to know.

"Once we can get a replicating environment, we're hoping to experimentally determine what can evolve under those conditions," said Sheref Mansy, a former member of Szostak's lab and now a chemist at Denver University.

full article at: http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008 ... 1&mbid=yhp

[Aemeth]

First, good article...I would be intrigued to see this actually be completed successfully...

There surely were forces that we don't understand well operating in the first moments of our universe-- but what connection to God is there in that?

There is no connection to God. There is a connection to something that neither science nor logic can understand. That is all I am arguing. And I am convinced enough that something-from-nothing will not change (much more than I am of order/disorder and life/non-life) that I will say that there must be something else out there such as "God" than to say that science will figure out a way to explain this. It is just too radical of a concept for me to believe that natural laws as we know them could produce something like this, something that would violate all the other natural laws we have discovered in this realm...

[Aemeth]

Time is not linear. man's progression through time MIGHT be, if he determines it so.

Most aboriginals are impossible to understand with an idea that time exists as a one-way single file line.

I was writing from the pretense that time is essentially useless without progression. So technically/obviously you are right, but that was a cheap shot :curse: