somebody wrote:
> 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,

What I usually hear is "how can something come from nothing?"

However, regardless of the precision of phrasing, it's still not true. And 
it's actually pretty easy to measure: small volumes of vacuum have less 
stuff in them than large volumes of vacuum.

> 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 ).

No, more like
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Something_from_nothing

First cause is something different, that comes after you admit something 
can't come from nothing.  I'm also not talking about the question of "*Why* 
is there something instead of nothing?"

> 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.

That's one way of arguing about it.  Another way (which I put up here 
recently that nobody even commented on) was that perhaps time slowed due to 
the changes in physics (as in, infinite mass making infinite gravity making 
infinite redshift making ...) and the universe has always been around, even 
tho it only started four billion of *our* years ago.

> However, it became more complex sometime recently.

Sounds interesting! Have you a cite?

> In any case, defining as god whatever remains when our understanding stops
> back in time, although useless, is not in itself false or inconsistent.

I would say it's "false" because that's not what God means. I could define 
"apple" as what remains when our understanding stops back in time, but that 
wouldn't make me right. :-) Nobody calls it God if it stopped existing when 
the universe came into being, except maybe the Mayans.

> 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.

Right. That comes after, tho.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "We'd like you to back-port all the changes in 2.0
    back to version 1.0."
   "We've done that already. We call it 2.0."

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