Can Something Come From Nothing?

Science seems to say the so-called physical realm does not have a beginning. Let's hear how you know that it did (if that is your position). The Law of Conservation of Energy, the best knowledge that we have, insists that it is eternal. Some believe god is eternal with no evidence that god exists, and some think energy is eternal with massive evidence for that claim.

Alter2Ego -

You do realize that Gravity is a theory correct?

Do you use a cell phone? Do you like using your cell phone?

Satellites were launched from the Earth into orbit so that your cell phone may operate using the "theory" of gravity calculations.

There are many theories in Science that have plenty of evidence.

I am no theologian, and I do not pretend to be.

Please do not pretend to be a Scientist.

No way something comes from nothing more easily. The simpler option is not this.

Eldrick:

You do realize that Gravity is not only a theory; correct? That's what I told another atheist a while back when he came with the same argument that you are using, namely: the "gravity is a theory" argument. Every informed person reading this thread can figure out what you are trying to accomplish with that argument. We are expected to draw the following conclusion:

Since we know gravity exists and gravity is a theory, then evolution must likewise be a reality because evolution, too, is a theory. You seem ignorant of the fact that gravity is not merely a theory. It is also a scientific LAW.

A scientific theory is nothing more than a group of hypotheses aka educated guesses. A scientific law, on the other hand, is defined as "a statement of fact, deduced from observation."

https://www.britannica.com/science/Newto...

At no time has any theory been given the definition "fact." Not once.

BTW: I never claimed to be a scientist. Your "Please do not pretend to be a Scientist" comment applies to you as well.

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

Pletho:

You are right on point. Ask any atheist where the various materials came from so that the Big Bang would cause the universe to expand, and they have no credible answer. They will dream up something that makes no senses and for which they have no evidence. In fact, ask them what caused the Big Bang, and you will hear every type of science fiction aka fairytale known to man.

Alter2Ego

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

Yeah because the answer is "We don't know" ... instead of "Therefore Jesus did it." LOL.

Alter2Ego -

*sigh* The law of Gravity that you listed is the formula by which you calculate the gravitational force that 2 objects exert on each other.

The Theory - which we do not exactly know why - is why this happens. The general consensus is that it is a warping of space time.

Why bring up evolution? I've always wondered why religious people get so butt hurt about evolution?

Why can't your imaginary being have actually created evolution as well?

Do you understand what a singularity is? There is plenty of literature out there if you would like to understand it.

I also wonder if you would be the same person 400 years ago arguing that the Earth is the center of the Universe and wanting to put to death anyone who thought different.

Have a good day!

Just to educate you (and yes I AM a scientist, so IÂ’m not pretending to be one) - theories donÂ’t become laws. Theories and laws are two completely different things in science. A law is simply a description of some regular pattern in nature. The law of gravity, for example states that there is an attraction between any two bodies in the universe that is directly proportional to the masses of the bodies and inversely proportional to the square of the distance separating them. A law is ONLY a description.

A theory on the other hand is an explanation of some set of phenomena. General relativity is a theory of gravity. It says that the apparent attraction between bodies is caused by the curvature of spacetime created by the presence of energy. Theories provide an overarching framework for understanding some aspect of the universe. They suggest further observations and research and are supported by multiple lines of evidence. Theories are really the goal of science.

It is not true that laws are somehow on firmer footing than theories. For the case of gravity the opposite is actually true. The law of gravity is superseded by the theory, and the law gives wrong answers in certain cases. The first of these to be discovered historically was the orbit of the planet Mercury. The law of gravity predicts a slightly diffeeent orbit than what actually is observed. The theory of gravity gives the correct orbit.

Neither laws nor theories can ever be proven - science doesnÂ’t do proof, not in the logical sense anyway. The law of gravity (besides being demonstrably wrong in some situations) cannot be proven because is says that ALL bodies attract and gives the quantitative attraction. Unless you measure the attraction between all pairs of bodies and confirm that it matches the law, you cannot prove the law. You can provide evidence for the law though by working out observations that youÂ’d see if itÂ’s true - like calculating planetary orbits for example. If observations and calculations agree, you have evidence. The best way to try to establish a law is to find situations where it is disproven. If we cannot find such situations, despite our best efforts, we gain confidence in the law.

The process for theories is identical. We work out what we should observe if itÂ’s true and try to find observations that disprove the theory. If we do, we reject the theory; if we canÂ’t we gain confidence in it. Nothing ever is proven, though, whether law or theory.

So many errors here. Airplanes weren't remotely modeled from birds, at least the successful ones weren't. Birds flap their wings to produce lift, no planes have ever done that successfully. Designing an airplane using a propeller driven engine is massively different than the design needed for a flapping wing bird.

And I have birds crash into my house on a regular basis, while modern commercial airlines go over a million flights between crashes.

My hip and my shoulder have worn out and required replacement. That "intelligent designer" certainly scrimped on the amount and strength of the cartilage in my joints, and made replacing it incredibly difficult (and impossible for most of human civilization), unlike the trivial parts replacement on my car.

Yea, you stop there because you don't want to talk about the laryngeal nerve, where apparently your idiot designer ran it all the way down from our skull to our heart, only to make a u-turn and come straight up to its destination to its destination in our neck. As bad as it is for us, its terrible for Giraffes. This is clear evidence for evolution BTW.

Or lets talk about how terrible your designer was when they designed human eyes. They laid down the wiring backwards! Light has to travel through layers of blood cell to reach the photo receptors, greatly diminishing our capacity to capture photons. And also a big blind spot where our optic nerve exits the eye!

Why did your designer give octopuses much better designed eyes? Are they gods real chosen people?

This logical argument could have been written with a crayon. Its called argument from ignorance, where you disbelieve something just because you personally can't conceptualize it. No one a thousand years ago could conceive the sun was a giant nuclear fission reactor, so it must actually be a coal burning furnace.

Singularity expands, hydrogen forms, gravity pulls concentrations together to form stars, as those stars die they collapse and explode in supernova we see and measure daily, spreading heavier elements across the universe, which form concentrations making new stars and their accretion disks forming planets, eventually forming our Sun and the earth.

Its not that hard. Whats hard is deciding you only want to belief true things. Do you? If you truly do, start examining the evidence for your claims, and think hard about why its so weak or non-existent.

Why do you believe anything in a gospel written 50 years after Jesus was crucified, by an anonymous greek author who probably never even met any of the original apostles.

All gospels were written anonymously by church members 30-50 years after the fact. The first was titled "Mark", with the rest almost directly plagiarizing Mark to add their own embellishments. The changes each following author made to Mark is a good record of how they were attempting to reach more converts by honing and improving the message. By the time you get to John, the author does a nearly entire rewrite to make the claim Jesus was actually God and actually claimed to be the Messiah. Clearly it was an incredibly powerful invention by the author, you yourself are evidence of it.

Sigh, you are so confused.

When someone thinks they have a description (model) of how something in the universe works, its called a hypothesis. If their model is tested and becomes the most accurate description of that phenomena, it's called a "theory".

Its a fact that some attractive force between masses that we call gravity exists, we can all see and test this independently and easily.

"How" it works is what we describe in our current best model, or theory. When our model that describes an observed relationship is extremely well tested for a very long time it might even be anecdotally called a "law". Newton's "Law of Gravity" was just his model for how the attractive force of gravity can be calculated between bodies.

And guess what? Newton's "Law of Gravity" is wrong! Not in any substantial way, its still in common use today because of its ease of calculation, but we've known for hundreds of years that it consistently fails at accurately calculating certain edge cases, such as predicting the orbit of Mercury. Instead, Einstein's Theory of General Relativity replaced it, because its a more accurate model, specifically when huge amounts of mass are packed relatively close to each other, like the Sun w/Mercury.

And now, there are indications that General Relativity isn't wholly complete in how it describes gravity, and that we need a new theory of gravity to cover more edge cases we've found!

This is the great thing about science. There are no "eternal" tablets in space listing out the "eternal laws" of the universe. Every "law" is merely a model, that can be fine-tuned further or even thrown out entirely when new evidence warrants it.

I think you struggle with these concepts because you believe that biblical laws were written down eternally on stone tablets, and you somehow think that scientific "laws" must be the same. Your religion may be unable to ever change but our understanding of the universe is constantly improving, and our accepted scientific theories (and "laws") are improved with them.

I know for a fact we were not created by the god of the Bible. Universe is stuck in an infinite loop of existence or there are other explanations out there that definitely will explain all of this much better than the guy who demanded foreskins.

I COMPLETELY reject the premise of your initial query... there has never been 'Nothing', it was all 'reordered'.

its the same as the 'water waste' issue... the sky is falling crowd always argue that you are wasting water by using it in ways that they deem 'unnecessary' when in fact, what you are doing is using water that has always been here. when water disappears, it doesn't become nothing, it converts to gas, where it congeals and becomes liquid again... solid, liquid and gas... it's still water.

Wonderful argument. About on par with most atheists. It's funny that anti Christian/pro Luciferian freemasons wrote in their books that atheists were by far the dumbest people in society. They looked down on their worldviews as the lowest tier of thinking a man can have.

You earlier said the distinguishing feature of science, as opposed to religion etc, is we can perform experiments to establish the veracity of claims. Other methods of establishing truth are possible, so I do not agree with this in any case. But at least this is a correct definition of science, i.e. experiment. Now we get this gish gallop (besides your first paragraph which is correct) without any reference to experiment. Observational study is clearly demarcated from experiment, the standard of proof (yes proof is what we are talking) is rather different. An experiment proves or disproves a hypothesis. For instance I have recently performed a modernised version of Compton's 1923 experiment which PROVES light is best modelled as a quantised momentum carrier as opposed to an electromagnetic wave. EM wave models still have explanatory power, as PROVEN by other experiments. I have also determined approximations for the distances to various star clusters, which is total conjecture. Not all 'lines of evidence' are born equal.

There isn't a single 'giant' in science, those that Newton stood on the shoulders of, nor any since who stood on Newton's shoulders, who did/does not believe in God. Atheism is not new of course but rather seems to dominate the modern discourse.

An often overlooked equivocation. The observed uniform field "we can all see and test independently and easily" is known as terrestrial gravity. The inverse square law, a totally different field, is universal gravitation. Ne'er the twin shall meet. Where do they meet? They cannot meet. The only relevant matter here is that Newton was deeply motivated by religion. He did not have a hypothesis for gravity and nor did Einstein - also apparently religious.

Not sure where to begin here. Your notions of science are quite off. I have NEVER said that science can ONLY deal with experiment. That simply isnÂ’t true. Scienc can only deal with observations of the physical universe. Experiments are a subset of such observations, and certainly, when such experiments are possible, they are preferable. But experiments are not always possible. Astronomy, geology, evolutionary biology, and cosmology (and likely others) would be entirely impossible if we were limited solely to controlled laboratory experiments.

Experiments also do not PROVE anything. The result of an experiment is always that either the observed result is inconsistent with the hypothesis or it is consistent with it. In the first case, the hypothesis is disproven and must be modified or scrapped. In the second case, it is not disproven, but neither is it proven. It is still subject to new experiments or observations that might disprove it. No idea is EVER proven. The best we can say is that our consensus ideas have been subject to testing and have resisted all efforts to disprove them. Such is the status of all accepted theories and laws.

Note that there is no underlying ontological difference between experiment and observation here. An observation can disprove a theory or law as much as an experiment can. A prime example of this is the disproof of Newtonian gravity. The observations were that Mercury doesnÂ’t follow the orbit it should based on Newtons law and that the apparent position of stars during a total solar eclipse is different from what Newton would predict. A new idea, General Relativity, was able to explain those observations, so NewtonÂ’s law was disproven.

Your examples don’t prove anything. The experiments you talk about shoe that the nature of light is consistent with the idea that light is composed of momentum carriers and also consistent with the idea that light is an electromagnetic wave. It’s still possible that either or both of those formulations will one day be disproven. The set of experiments and observations that have been performed on light is a mere subset of all possible such experiments or observations. It seems unlikely to us that a new experiment or observation could overthrow the understanding of light we have based on quantum mechanics, but it seemed just as unlikely that the understanding of physics at the end of the 19th century would be completely disproven either. After all, everything but a couple of “minor anomalies” - the details of the spectrum of black body radiation and the aforementioned discrepancies in Mercury’s orbit - was perfectly explained by the physics of that time.

None of this, though in any way has anything to do with belief or non belief in a deity. Science simply has nothing to say about the matter. A deity that created the universe with its observed properties is perfectly consistent with science. A universe with the observed properties and lacking a deity also is perfectly consistent with science. Science cannot distinguish the two situations, so the existence of a deity or lack thereof is not subject to scientific study. Scientists certainly can be believers, but that belief is irrelevant to scientific study.

You said we can experiment, which distinguishes science from religion. You also said we can infer using observation. You then later dropped the experimental requirement of science since you were exemplifying ideas that are not supported by experiment, i.e. gravity. Experiments are not always possible, correct. Which lowers the standard of evidence considerably, in fact to a point of no evidence at all, but guesswork. So you do not have a catch-all 'science' that you can parade as a homogeneous bloc of knowledge, unless you limit your point to controlled experiment, which leaves 95% of your posts untenable.

They do. See above proof of light having the property of momentum.

I.e., the hypothesis is proven or disproven. This fad of 'science doesn't prove' is tiresome and patently wrong. See countless examples of scientific proof. Science does not prove as geometry proves, but it proves nonetheless in its own remit.

The entire point of repeatability is to avoid the bias that comes with one-off measurements thus giving us sound proof that cannot be refuted because... it's repeatable. "Consensus ideas" - Science is the complete opposite of consensus ideas. You could have a universally accepted idea and it still be wrong, should it be refuted by experiment.

Absolutely there is difference. You implicitly stated when complaining that most of the so-called sciences cannot be done without experiment. Your list of cosmology etc is observational based science as opposed to natural science. Different methodologies offering wildly different standards of proof.

It cannot be disproven. It is a repeatable and reproducible experiment, that is the entire point. This or that model can be refined and updated etc, that is perhaps your meaning. The physics of the 19th C is not all disproven. It retains explanatory power. The "physics" is not Newtons' inverse sq law - that is not physics. That is a bit of applied mathematical genius with no bearing on anything that can be experimented here on Earth. (Cue tiresome Cavendish).

Yes because science deals with the phenomenal. A thinking person, scientist or otherwise, is able to think beyond the phenomenal to where Science cannot reach.

What ^ ?
Search for Truth...

Empirical, sensual, sensible etc. Shared by absurdist reasoning 'anything observable can disprove a hypothesis' and the scientific method testing hypotheses by experiment. Limited to the phenomenal, i.e. there are further more significant truths to be found outside of science. 'Science has nothing to say about the matter' is a true statement. Science deals with establishing cause: it cannot establish the un-caused, the infinite, the absolute, the nature of God - all things evidently true but science cannot speak of such things. Using "science" to support atheism is non-sensical. Replacing the ineffable mystery of deity with the mathematical conceptualisation of a "field" does not require words, beyond buffoonery.

Charles Darwin became an agnostic and did not believe in the biblical, personal God. Marie Curie was an atheist. Ernest Rutherford was socially an Anglican but intellectually atheist. Albert Einstein was quite an old-fashioned seventeenth-eighteenth-century-style encyclopedist who believed everything was logical and predictable, even mechanical, and could in principle be known, but he did not believe in the biblical, personal God, claiming he believed in 'Spinoza's God', which meant the divine impersonal harmony of the Universe. (Empirical observation has since disproved General Relativity just as in Einstein's day it disproved Newton.) When Einstein supposedly told Niels Bohr, 'God does not play dice,' because he was disturbed by the unknowable aspect of the quantum universe, he meant 'Spinoza's God' and not the biblical, personal God Yahweh. Bohr, of course, was an atheist. Francis Crick was an atheist. Stephen Hawking was an atheist. Linus Pauling was an atheist. Andrei Sakharov was an atheist. Richard Feynman was an atheist. Enrico Fermi was an agnostic (being culturally an Italian Catholic he wouldn't have liked to say atheist). This list is, to put it mildly, not exhaustive.

Nope, no such thing as “terrestrial” gravity, it’s one universal gravity. You are confusing observations for the model. We observe things fall on earth, that acceleration demonstrates the Newtonian gravitational model. We can also demonstrate that gravity is slightly weaker at higher altitudes, that observation also demonstrates the model.

Nope, he was Christian, if his religion informed his scientific theories he would have believed the earth was flat and covered by a solid dome called the firmament. Instead his models were influenced by his observations of reality.

Einstein followed no religion. He was sympathetic to Spinozas God, the idea that the rules of the universe were set by a deistic creator that otherwise has zero influence or contact with humans. And his models were all based on observations, not magical bearded man in sky.

I prefer to believe in as many true things and as few false things as possible. You only want to justify your existing beliefs irregardless of whether true or false. So I doubt any future discussion can be productive.

I said giants, not pygmies. 'God does not play dice' refers to a deterministic divine plan.

Terrestrial gravity is the correct term for the uniform field observed at the Earth surface. Universal gravitation is the inverse square law, gravity does not vary according to an inverse sq law, it's a uniform field. Yes there are differences in acceleration due to gravity resulting from a myriad of factors, most of which cannot be identified reliably, there is no cause of gravity, no experiment is possible. Newton was also an occultist. The purpose of science in those days was to discover the laws of nature designed and implemented by the creator/s - recall that the most important figure in modern science is Francis Bacon, who translated the KJV bible, go figure.
'Magical bearded man in the sky'? 'Gigantic straw man' more fitting.