Cosmological Argument Debunked?
All three of these arguments rely upon the idea of a regress and
invoke God to terminate it. They make the entirely unwarranted
assumption that God himself is immune to the regress. Even if we
allow the dubious luxury of arbitrarily conjuring up a terminator to
an infinite regress and giving it a name, simply because we need
one, there is absolutely no reason to endow that terminator with
any of the properties normally ascribed to God: omnipotence,
omniscience, goodness, creativity of design, to say nothing of such
human attributes as listening to prayers, forgiving sins and reading
innermost thoughts. Incidentally, it has not escaped the notice of logicians
that omniscience and omnipotence are mutually incompatible. If
God is omniscient, he must already know how he is going to intervene
to change the course of history using his omnipotence. But that means
he can't change his mind about his intervention, which means he is not
omnipotent. Karen Owens has captured this witty little paradox in
equally engaging verse:
Can omniscient God, who
Knows the future, find
The omnipotence to
Change His future mind?
To return to the infinite regress and the futility of invoking God
to terminate it, it is more parsimonious to conjure up, say, a 'big
bang singularity', or some other physical concept as yet unknown.
Calling it God is at best unhelpful and at worst perniciously misleading.
Edward Lear's Nonsense Recipe for Crumboblious Cutlets
invites us to 'Procure some strips of beef, and having cut them into
the smallest possible pieces, proceed to cut them still smaller, eight
or perhaps nine times.' Some regresses do reach a natural
terminator. Scientists used to wonder what would happen if you
could dissect, say, gold into the smallest possible pieces. Why
shouldn't you cut one of those pieces in half and produce an even
smaller smidgen of gold? The regress in this case is decisively
terminated by the atom. The smallest possible piece of gold is a
nucleus consisting of exactly seventy-nine protons and a slightly
larger number of neutrons, attended by a swarm of seventy-nine
electrons. If you 'cut' gold any further than the level of the single
atom, whatever else you get it is not gold. The atom provides a
natural terminator to the Crumboblious Cutlets type of regress. It
is by no means clear that God provides a natural terminator to the
regresses of Aquinas.
-Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion
Reply!
The Universe can't cause itself
Or can it? I just found a very interesting article on the origin of matter at this website: http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/que...php?number=631
It reads thusly:
In the beginning, there was not yet any matter. However, there was a lot of energy in the form of light, which comes in discrete packets called photons. When photons have enough energy, they can spontaneously decay into a particle and an antiparticle. (An antiparticle is the exact opposite of the corresponding particle--for example, a proton has charge +e, so an antiproton has charge -e.) This is easily observed today, as gamma rays have enough energy to create measurable electron-antielectron pairs (the antielectron is usually called a positron). It turns out that the photon is just one of a class of particles, called the bosons, that decay in this manner. Many of the bosons around just after the big bang were so energetic that they could decay into much more massive particles such as protons (remember, E=mc^2, so to make a particle with a large mass m, you need a boson with a high energy E). The mass in the universe came from such decays.
The next question to ask is: where did all the antimatter go? For each particle created in this fashion, there is exactly one antiparticle. In this case, there should have been exactly as much antimatter as there is matter. If that were true, when the universe had cooled somewhat each particle would have found an antiparticle and combined to form a boson (this process is called annihilation of the particles). Actually, this was the fate of most of these pairs--something like 10 billion particles annihilated for every one that survived. The survival of even such a small fraction was enough to form all of the matter in our universe. At some point during this process, something else must have happened to cause the survival of more particles than antiparticles (we call this the particle-antiparticle asymmetry).
There are many theories that try to explain this asymmetry. I will give a very brief description of one of them, called electroweak baryogenesis. (Understanding it requires a lot more background information than I have space for.) Protons and neutrons are particles called baryons, and baryogenesis means the creation of baryons. The current understanding of particle physics, called the standard model, dictates that nowadays the number of baryons is nearly constant, with only a small variation due to quantum mechanical tunneling. In the early universe, however, the temperature was much higher, so that this tunneling was commonplace and a large number of baryons could have been created. Electroweak refers to the time period in question, when the electromagnetic and weak forces were decoupling from a single force into 2 separate forces (between 10^-12 and 10^-6 seconds after the big bang--the asymmetry probably would have formed towards the end). An additional source of baryons is due to the fact that leptons (another type of particle, including electrons) can be converted into baryons at this epoch.
Think again, Biblocality.