"Darren New" <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote in message
news:4a6b8e2e$1@news.povray.org...

> What is it with the creationists who as "do you believe nothing came from
> something?"
>
> Why do they think there's evidence the universe ever didn't exist?
>
> Often creationists will say "matter can neither be created nor destroyed,
> hence God must have created it."

I think even creationists (most anyway) accept that matter and energy are
transmutable, or sides of the same coin, so I'm not sure if that's the
precise form of the statement, or if you are thinking more along the lines
of the first cause argument (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_cause_argument , also maybe
http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/theodore_schick/bigbang.html ).

[...]

> nonsensical. After all, if you're going to argue religion based on the Big
> Bang, you ought to be accepting the rest of General Relativity too. As far
> as I know, there's no scientific reason to believe there was ever a time
> when there was "nothing" either.

It used to be that time was considered strictly a product of Big Bang, so it
would be meaningless to even ask about such a time or cause. However, it
became more complex sometime recently.

Cause is also a nebulous concept: When you shoot two billiard balls towards
each other, what "causes" the collision? You? Inertia? Motion? At a
fundamental level, collapse of wavefunction is what comes closest to talking
about discrete causes, but even then, such can be seen as incomplete
understanding/modeling on our part. If we consider the combined wavefunction
of you and the billiard balls, there remains no deeper cause of any events
except the existence of the wavefunction itself - attributing discrete
causes to discrete events becomes an artifact of the model/interpretation,
and the non-unitariness of the operation one that of the observer/observed
dichotomy.

In any case, defining as god whatever remains when our understanding stops
back in time, although useless, is not in itself false or inconsistent. It's
when someone claims that that "god" is the same as Allah, God... etc which
assumes personality, wishes, demand, pettiness, vengefulness, caring... etc
that absurdness arises.

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