Posted: Apr 03, 2018 9:14 pm
Wortfish wrote:aban57 wrote:
Indeed, the first verse of the Bible claim that god created the heaven and the earth, from nothing, as this is the beginning of the creation story.
That's actually what some atheists believe: http://njbiblescience.org/presentations ... othing.pdf
Oh dear, not this crap again ...
First of all, this has nothing to do with atheism. Atheism, in its rigorous formulation, consists of suspicion of unsupported supernaturalist assertions. That is IT. Everything else is left as the remit of those with the requisite expertise.
Second, the output of phyicists has nothing to do with belief whatsoever, certainly not as practised by supernaturalists, which involves uncritical acceptance of unsupported assertions. Physicists, on the other hand, are in the business of testing assertions to destruction. Whilst it is true that theoretical physicists may themselves generate new assertions, they do so on the basis that [1] said assertions have already been determined in advance to be consistent with known physics, and [2] that at some point, an empirical test of those assertions will be devised and conducted. The moment this happens, whether those assertions stand or fall is solely determined by concordance with the empirical data.
Third, what Krauss is proposing isn't creation ex nihilo, what he's proposing is that there exists a testable natural process for converting vacuum energy into matter. On this basis, he has a nice, safe precedent to build upon, in the form of E=mc2. An equation which underpins the operation of such diverse technologies as particle accelerators (which convert collision and kinetic energy into matter) and the various uses of nuclear fission (converting mass into energy via the release of nuclear binding energy, which is itself a contributor to the mass of the atomic nucleus). All those atmospheric nuclear tests conducted by the superpowers, provide ample empirical evidence that this equation is not only sound, but real world applicable. Indeed, the view of modern cosmologists is that the vacuum is itself a physical entity, a point that is totally lost on the various pedlars of apologetics who continue misrepresenting cosmological physics.
But the crap you linked to above, is precisely what I'd expect from the sort of people who think science is a branch of apologetics. Hint: it's not.
Wortfish wrote:Genesis doesn't say that God made the heavens and earth from absolutely nothing at all.
Well, even if we discount for a moment, that Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 contain separate, and contradictory, "creation accounts", there's the little problem that there's been a nicely anti-consilient range of "interpretations" of Genesis ever since it was written. For example, Augustine of Hippo rejected the calendar days cited in Genesis 1 as temporal divisions, rather as logical divisions of subject matter, and even more interestingly, wrote this interesting piece, in which he asserted that the 6,000 years so beloved of creationists was too long a period of time to have elapsed since the "creation" event, an assertion he presented close to 1,200 years before the Ussher chronology. Even more interestingly, Augustine also wrote this, which is the passage in which Augustine asserted that time itself did not exist before his magic man started performing the requisite conjuring tricks, an assertion that has been mistakenly credited to physicists, who instead postulated that time as observable in this universe began with the Big Bang.
But that's the whole problem with mythology - it's the epistemological equivalent of quicksand, and trying to extract genuinely substantive knowledge from it is like trying to plough the Mediterranean Sea.