Can Something Come From Nothing?

You already blinked and you've got nothing. A fool says "Well, since there is a great mystery here let's go with the superstitions of magic believing cultures of thousands of years ago. Who are we to know? The illiterate ancients knew though, you know the ones that believed kissing a donkey cured colds and demons caused viral and bacterial disease. THEY solved the mystery of the universe." LOL.

I certainly lead strongly toward teleological forces in nature ... just probably not the magic one that kills every child and fetus on earth then his believers tout his sanctity of life, not the one who brandishes genocide, misogyny, bigotry, ignorance in his omniscient book, not the one who cherishes the little birdies but designed a carnage system of predation in nature. That is the obvious anthropomorphism of magic beliefs.

I'm not averse to the "perennial philosophy" of Huxley, and the idea that though there is zero reason to believe that any of the feuding god claims are true, all are attempts to account for things and contain elements of truth. Seen from this perspective, even the "mutually exclusive" religious claims are not really exclusive, they just claim to be. But, as Einstein said, there are punishment based religions, right and wrong based religions, magic religions, and cosmos based religions. I'm in the cosmos based camp.

Why would a tree just exist? Well, it's there and we have tremendous evidence for it. Why would a field exist? Well, it's clearly established and proven that it is there, so we believe it is there. Why would god just exist? Well, we have no evidence for that, so it gets the same weight as "Why would pink-polka-dot pixies exist?" I mean they might. IF ALL YOU HAVE TO DO IS BELIEVE ACCORDING TO YOUR EPISTEMOLOGY ... then you really don't see the difference and they are all just the same.

The separate question of why there is anything is not answered by god claims, it's just pushed back and into magical supernatural realms.

We have clear evidence and proof that what we call fields exist. We have no evidence of what we call gods exist, and massive evidence that they are systematically made up. Choose your epistemology. But at least have the sense to be embarrassed or a bit coy about it if you are putting the pixies (or the god) on an equal footing with the field, because, well, after all, we don't know the ultimate nature of things.

Teleology in nature is another question, and a beyond fascinating one. But the personification of this idea into a sky daddy is a pre-scientific, superstitious, magical thinking wish projection. Nowhere on this earth is there as much fuzzy thinking as in the realm of god and religion.

Nobody ever says "I believe in my heart that 2+2=5." But when they are trying to co-opt something over into the "I believe it" realm, because they have nothing but belief, and thus make something true by personal fiat, that's when the "I believe in my heart ..." comes out. A wise man portions his belief to the evidence. It isn't even about hyper rationality, it's about simple respect for reality. We don't get to believe things into legitimacy or reality. When we don't know, we don't know ... and that doesn't make room for wishing things into reality just because the answer is unknown. The principle of evidential warrant doesn't get abandoned because the subject is a mystery. But that is where some try to smuggle unfounded beliefs into the equation. And so "maybe god created everything, I believe it ... what's wrong with that?" ... is simply a non-scientific, religious mindset not respecting reality on that particular subject.

This is not what the Big Bang Theory teaches. Not even essentially.

The Big Bang Theory theorizes that the universe expanded exponentially from a singularity, which is "not" nothing.

Your point is valid, but to nitpick just a little: I believe that modern cosmological models start with a small energetic state for the early universe, but not a singularity. To see how this is possible consider a key mathematical property of an exponential expansion: there is a characteristic time, a, such that the size of the universe doubles for each time increment of duration a. That is if the universe has a size of 1 (in some arbitrary units) at a time t=0, it will have size 2 at time t=a, size 4 at t=2a, size 8 at t=3a, etc.

The same math applies to times before our t=0 where the size of the universe is 1. At time t=-a the size would be 1/2, at t=-2a it is 1/4, at t=-3a itÂ’s 1/8, etc. The main point is that we can go back to arbitrarily early times (ie -ka, where k is an arbitrarily large value) and we will NEVER reach a time where the size of the universe is zero. It will get arbitrarily small, but never zero.

ThatÂ’s the math. Our current knowledge of physics cannot make sense of length scales smaller than the Planck length, so we do eventually hit a point where our scientific models break down. That still does not imply a singularity, though, just the known fact that our models of physics are incomplete since the Planck length scale comes from attempting to reconcile General Relativity with Quantum Mechanics, a task not yet accomplished.

All true, also true that our models require faster than the speed of light expansion.

Bottom line is, no true theory of a respectable physicist says that the Universe came from nothing, which kind of defeats the title of this thread "something from nothing".

If you change it to "can something come from incredibly little?" your argument breaks down. All sciences break down when anything truly asymptotic is added to an equation.

As soon as we say, "we don't know, so God (or Jesus)" then why have a thirst for knowledge? Why improve as a species?

I'm only halfway being rhetorical, would love to hear your opinion. (no sarcasm)

I pretty much agree with you entirely. FTL spatial expansion is not really an issue with relativity. Relativity does not say that NOTHING can travel faster than light, only that energy transfers cannot occur FTL. Think about it; it’s very easy to generate FTL velocities. Just rotate your whole body 360 degrees in one second. In your rotating reference frame, the velocity of any star would be greater than light. There is no energy transfer at that speed though; it’s essentially a geometric point moving FTL, which is allowed.

Other than that, you are perfectly correct; there is no model of cosmology that would require something from nothing. As I posted above, the standard cosmological model is tht all the observable matter and radiation in the universe came from a field that drives an exponential expansion of the universe, usually referred to as the inflation field (note lack of an “i” is not a typo; it isn’t inflation). This most certainly is not nothing.

There are facets of the universe that remain unknown, and the state of our universe prior to inflation is one of them. If it was an eternal inflation, then what happened when the universe was smaller than the Planck length also is unknown. Even if inflation wasn’t eternal, we know from various observations that there are upper limits on the energy of the universe as it inflated. Hence it did not start from a singularity, which by definition would have no such upper limit ti energy.

Certainly though going from “This is unknown” to “God, Jesus, Vishnu, Thor, or Zeus did it” is completely unproductive. At the very least, even if some deity did create everything, we still should be wondering HOW he, she or it did it. How were the atoms moved about? What processes occurred during creation? The theists’ god of the gaps argument is really just a cop out to avoid the hard work of studying the universe and actually learning something.

It doesn't

Nice thread. But saying that belief in God keeps people from scientific investigations seems far-fetched. I guess this idea is a reaction to some questionable Bible-based ideas about creation and evolution that are all over social media. Ironically, many of the greatest scientists in history have been believers. This includes the person that first came up with the Big Bang theory as far as I know. If someone believes that God is supernatural and transcendent, then God is partly outside the material universe anyway.

What makes these arguments even more complex is that the idea of parallel universes has gained traction in serious physics. If you can believe in other universes, it seems even easier to believe in a supernatural world too.

You are absolutely right. Belief in a religion certainly doesn’t necessarily preclude scientific advance. (Your example BTW was a Belgian Catholic priest named Georges LeMaitre, who conceived the BBT). However for certain people, it seems that religion and science are indeed opposed. Evolution seemed to mark a turning point in this regard, followed by cosmological models. It’s very rare that you find a religious believer who questions gravity, electromagnetism, nuclear physics, and the like based on their religious beliefs. It seems that the two areas I mentioned - how people got here and how the universe got here, are the ones causing consternation. If a religious believer is willing to look past a literal reading of their holy book, this need not be the case. The creation story could be a poetic and figurative way of saying that God is responsible for creating both the universe and humans. Further, presumably God could have simply spoken and created the universe all at once. The Bible does not say that, however, but speaks to creation over a time period - a process of creation, with conditions changing as the process goes on. That sounds almost like something that could agree with a modern scientific understanding. Further humans were created from dust, I.e. matter that was non human, again not wildly out of step with the current understanding.

I’m an atheist so I’m sure believers will flame me shortly for this. If you can get your head out of your book long enough to realize that it is not a science text and by your own belief system never was meant to be, and start thinking critically for yourself, you might just be able to see that science is by no means a threat to religion. Science is not out to disprove the existence of God, since as you correctly stated God is not a part of the natural world, by definition. Science can say nothing about the supernatural.

Won't disagree much. Only to say that the way God is conceived is that he's active in both worlds.

Something can come from nothing, and that is indeed how it all begun, in a perfecttly logically consistent way, no God needed, it all leads to string theory as the TOE. The question is, do you want to keep believing in God or do or are you strong enough to want to know the truth?

My brother believes in God and he doesnt want to know about this.

An accessible introduction : https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nameiw...

This is really deep and amazing stuff, much deeper and profound than God

This thread was nothing, and now it's kind of something

Every religion is just man's attempt to explain The Mystery. Nothing could be more obvious or practically undeniable.

So atheist believe the universe cames from nothing while religious people believe universe was created from god that came from nothing .

If god came from nothing why couldn’t the universe came from nothing too ?
why should we need a god in the first place then ?

So we are just arguing about the middle man ?!?
Just cut the middleman , it’s more profitable .

I’m not a fan of downloading stuff , don’t u have a normal link on what it is ?
A book ?
Thx

Cosmology does not claim that the universe comes from nothing. To the direct contrary, science claims that energy is not created or destroyed, and therefore there was never nothing, that is, since there is energy now, and it is eternal, there was never nothing, the universe did not come from nothing, and there is no such thing as nothing, which "no thing" seems a contradiction in terms anyway. "Nothing" is not part of the model of the evolution of the cosmos.

So the magic "poof the universe into existence" believing theists who use this argument just, as usual, are not concerned with little details about reality in their arguments. Their appeal is from ignorance and they couldn't care less if, in their mind, it helps their magic claims.

Yes but that was not my point .
Even by giving what they think it’s true about not believing in god and the universe comes from nothing , it’s exactly what they believe too except they need a middle man named “god” in between to make the universe comes from nothing more plausible .

Which I don’t know why it makes it more plausible .
Because universe coming from nothing and being wrong while god coming from nothing and creating universe shouldn’t be more plausible .

Eldrick:

A theory is an educated guess aka speculation without evidence to prove it.

Alter2Ego

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"That people may know that you, whose name is JEHOVAH, you alone are the Most High over all the earth." ~ Psalms 83:18

stremba70:

The actual evidence that shows there is one True God is seen by the creations around us. Logic says our fine-tuned universe could not have happened by itself.

Alter2Ego

________________
"That people may know that you, whose name is JEHOVAH, you alone are the Most High over all the earth." ~ Psalms 83:18

No one has yet to make a logical response to my OP … The reason why is because they cannot. They have to beat around the bush. They cannot directly and specifically respond based only on what I asked. The clear, simple obvious response is NO.. Something cannot come from nothing… If there is a something it came from something. Something doesn't has to be known or seen or even believed but logically and mathematically something cannot come from nothing…

The problem is the supposition that "nothing" even passes muster as any kind of meaningful notion, because science proves that it doesn't. The equation goes more like this: energy is here, energy is not created or destroyed i.e.is eternal, voila, the universe has always been here in some form. It didn't come from nothing. Beyond that, quantum field theory seems to indicate that something physical can come from nothing physical, which is an avenue for existent things to emerge from nonexistent/non-physical realms.

So "can something come from nothing?" is not a reasonable metaphysics question. It is a nonsense question. It is a whole lot like, "Can life come from non-life?" Answer: it doesn't really need to. Same thing as with something from nothing ... it doesn't need to. It kind of has a built in misunderstanding to it.

We don't need something to come from nothing in a non-theist model. It's just bullshyt. Theism it seems needs god to come from nothing, then just start poofing things into existence.

Hmm, well, your response proves to me that nothing can for sure come from something... LOL Just a little humor...

Just in case you do not understand.

We are talking about "all" of the physical realm that exist. And that it did not come from nothing. That it came from something. It just did not appear or make itself. It had a beginning, an origin, a birth, an entrance so to speak.

The visible actually came from that which cannot be seen, the invisible. The things which are seen were not made of things which do appear.

You do believe in the word invisible right? That the truth of "invisible" the "unseen” or “not able to be seen" exist? In other words, that which your eyes cannot see or detect, that which your five senses cannot detect or see.

If not let me give you and very easy to understand example.

Your thoughts are invisible, they exist in your head but you cannot see them, they can however be "manifested into the physical world". You can "speak" your thoughts which then would be detectable by someone's ears. You can "write" your thoughts and they then would be readable by someone's eyes.

So at least you see the concept and the mechanics of how it works. How something invisible can be manifested to be visible, detectable, seen in the senses realm?

This is an easy concept to agree upon I would think?