by oz » Wed Nov 23, 2011 3:24 pm
For thousands of years, people have said that their god was behind what they didn't understand -- life, lightning, stars, earthquakes, the origin of life, the world or the universe, etc. Positing a god to supposedly answer a question solves nothing. It just stops you from asking more questions.
There's no reliable evidence for God/Yahweh, Jesus, Allah, Zeus, Thor, or any of the thousands of other gods that people have worshiped. If any of the major gods existed, there would be reliable evidence. Since no such evidence exists, these gods do not exist. There's also extensive evidence that they are all just myths, created to help soothe our fear of death, and perpetuated through religion to subjugate the underclass into obedience.
There are many well-respected physicists, such as Stephen Hawking, Lawrence Krauss, Sean M. Carroll, Victor Stenger, Michio Kaku, Alan Guth, Alex Vilenkin, Robert A.J. Matthews, and Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek, who have created scientific models where the Big Bang and thus the entire universe could arise from nothing but a quantum vacuum fluctuation -- via natural processes.
In relativity, gravity is negative energy and matter is positive energy. Because the two seem to be equal in absolute total value, our observable universe appears balanced to the sum of zero. Our universe could thus have come into existence without violating conservation of mass and energy — with the matter of the universe condensing out of the positive energy as the universe cooled, and gravity created from the negative energy. When energy condenses into matter, equal parts of matter and antimatter are created — which annihilate each other to form energy. However there appears to be a slight imbalance to the process, which results in matter dominating over antimatter.
I know that this doesn't make sense in our Newtonian experience, but it does in the realm of quantum mechanics and relativity. As Nobel laureate physicist Richard Feynman wrote, "The theory of quantum electrodynamics describes nature as absurd from the point of view of common sense. And it agrees fully with experiment. So I hope you can accept nature as she is — absurd."
"To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today."
— Isaac Asimov
"As far as I can see, such a theory [of the primeval atom] remains entirely outside any metaphysical or religious question. It leaves the materialist free to deny any transcendental Being… For the believer, it removes any attempt at familiarity with God."
— Georges Lemaître, Catholic priest who first proposed what became the Big Bang Theory
For more, watch the video at the 1st link - "A Universe From Nothing" by Lawrence Krauss.
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