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Arjan Dirkse wrote:This is a noob question:
In debates with Christian apologists they often claim it is impossible for a universe to come from "nothing" without a creator. However can it be said that there was ever "nothing" ?
Arjan Dirkse wrote:When the universe started to exist time came into being with it,
Arjan Dirkse wrote:so there was never a point in time when there was nothing.
Arjan Dirkse wrote:Thanks for those answers, though I am not sure it really answers my questions!
I guess the term "a universe from nothing" is something I remembered from Krauss.
Arjan Dirkse wrote:When the universe started to exist time came into being with it, so there was never a point in time when there was nothing. For every instant where time = X the universe has existed. There is no "before" state when there was nothing, so in a way the universe has always existed, if you assume always means every instant in time.
Rumraket wrote:Arjan Dirkse wrote:When the universe started to exist time came into being with it, so there was never a point in time when there was nothing. For every instant where time = X the universe has existed. There is no "before" state when there was nothing, so in a way the universe has always existed, if you assume always means every instant in time.
Yep, this mirrors my own view quite well. If the universe has a finite age then that implies there was a first moment of time. But there can't be said to be a "before" the first moment of time. As such, the "state of the world" was never such that there was nothing (defined as an absense of all properties).
That means the universe must have always existed, but that doesn't entail the universe is infinitely old, or that the dimension of time stretches infinitely and endlessly far into the past. Since there was never a transition from "nothingness" (the absense of all properties) to "somethingness", there is no need for a cause to actualize such a transition. The universe simply is and it always was.
You can ask why it is so, why does the universe exist? And my answer is "why do you think there is a why and what answer could be given even in principle that does not immediately raise a similar one?".
Arjan Dirkse wrote:Thanks for all the answers...they're as good an an answer as can be given.
The crux of my question is probably why the religious peddlers in these debates get away with claiming there must have been a point when nothing existed which transitioned into something existing. It seems a silly argument.
BlackBart wrote:Actually, it's more of a strawman than a claim - they claim atheists (Or cosmologists) must think there was 'nothing' before the big bang. What they claim is there must have been a something before the creation of the universe; a creator.
The_Piper wrote:BlackBart wrote:Actually, it's more of a strawman than a claim - they claim atheists (Or cosmologists) must think there was 'nothing' before the big bang. What they claim is there must have been a something before the creation of the universe; a creator.
Which of course brings the question of when and where did the creator come to be, so postulating a creator of the cosmos and time is no help answering a before question either. Then they'll say the creator exists outside of space and time and has always existed, and I'll say ok. No different of a claim than the cosmos always having existed, in my opinion.
BlackBart wrote:Actually, it's more of a strawman than a claim - they claim atheists (Or cosmologists) must think there was 'nothing' before the big bang. What they claim is there must have been a something before the creation of the universe; a creator.
Arjan Dirkse wrote:
In debates with Christian apologists they often claim it is impossible for a universe to come from "nothing" without a creator.
Shagz wrote:Arjan Dirkse wrote:
In debates with Christian apologists they often claim it is impossible for a universe to come from "nothing" without a creator.
I would stop them right there and ask: "How do you know that it is impossible for a universe to come from nothing without a creator?"
If they start with the "all things that move must have a mover" nonsense, I would ask: "How do you know that the universe must follow laws that govern things within the universe?"
Calilasseia wrote:Shagz wrote:Arjan Dirkse wrote:
In debates with Christian apologists they often claim it is impossible for a universe to come from "nothing" without a creator.
I would stop them right there and ask: "How do you know that it is impossible for a universe to come from nothing without a creator?"
If they start with the "all things that move must have a mover" nonsense, I would ask: "How do you know that the universe must follow laws that govern things within the universe?"
One problem being of course, that the whole business of regarding testable natural processes as responsible for the instantiation of the universe, which physicists all subscribe to, is based partly upon the precedent that testable natural processes have been robustly and repeatedly demonstrated to be sufficient to account for vast classes of observable entities and phenomena. As a corollary, physicists see no reason for that precedent to be broken. What those physicists anticipate, when you actually bother to ask them, is that new physics will be alighted upon governing the universe instantiation process, though of course that physics has to be consilient with what has been discovered before.
Calilasseia wrote:... at bottom, a universe is a region of spacetime populated with lots of particles. If all it takes is a mechanism for the dumping of lots of energy into that spacetime to fill that spacetime with the requisite lots of particles, then it's game over, and indeed, finding such a mechanism is a pretty central focus of much modern cosmological research.
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