The Universe can't cause itself

[Think]

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!

[Think]

By the way, I am Christian, but I just want to see the reply to a well thought-out argument.

[Finestwheat]

By the way, I am Christian, but I just want to see the reply to a well thought-out argument.
In your profile, you said you were not sure about the atonement of Jesus Christ, so therefore, you are not a Christian. And you said, according to the Bible you are going to Hell. Christians are not going to Hell, but non-Christians are. You're contradicting yourself. You're not thinking.

[Churchwork]

All three of these arguments rely upon the idea of a regress and invoke God to terminate it.

God is not invoked. Think. If nature can't have an infinite regress due to heat death and the exponential progression of conscience, then we know the uncreated exists since no other option exists than the uncreated. The uncreated is what we call God. Now find out who is God. Where has He personally revealed Himself to us?


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.

Since as we have seen there is no assumption, but the evidence points to the uncreated Creator, then find out where He reveals Himself. Should His qualities be less than ours? As soon as they are, you know any claim to being God would be false. Therefore, all the above mentioned attributes would all be required, for as soon as they are less than our standards, then that claim of being God is false. An infinitely existing God, even outside time, would be all-knowing, all-present and all-powerful. There is no reasoning power you could employ to shake Him off the judgment you will occur by spending eternity in Hell and being eternally separated from Him if you refuse His saving grace and mercy bestowed through the atoning sacrifice on the cross, for forgiveness of sins and to give everlasting life.


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.

Why would He change His mind? His mind is perfect. All He does is perfect. A change of mind would indicate some uncertainty, imperfection, non-omnipotence. That He could change mind, doesn't mean He will or needs to. God is always righteous. Changing His mind is perhaps changing His objective morals, but His objective morals never change.


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?
That option, if available, would never be employed since His mind, past, present and future is perfect. It is decided in the intuitive revelation of God and conclusion that is God without sweat, tears and doubt or need for alterations. This is the God you can trust, who responds righteously in all situations. Even though God could not erect obedience on the fallen angels, He had to create man whom He knew He could receive obedience through Christ.


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.
Appreciate the inherent contradiction and pompousness in this theory of yours. You're saying you have to be God to know if God exists, because even if there was one last thing man didn't know, man would need to know it in order to know if God exists. That seems parsimonious to me, because of your unwillingness to enter into a relationship with Christ, and thus take the dullardly road to perdition. Consecrating yourself in Christ would be the far more challenging, fruitful and deeper union you are unwilling to spend your resources on.

There is also a false humility in saying there is something you don't know yet, so maybe God doesn't exist. Such an attitude is highly pernicious and misleading, because despite knowing God exists because nature can't cause itself and He reveals Himself by proof of His resurrection, you enter into the world assuming things despite the evidence. So what else will accept as true which is clearly proven false? Scientists agree the singularity exists and that singularity can't cause itself. We go with the evidence. You are looking for a pipe dream and wasting your life for the holy grail of atheism. It's really a search for a justifiable rationalization of self-worship and self-indulgence. It's delusional. The definition of insanity is continuing to do that which produces no results. You still can't escape Hell with your heart of deceit. Nor can Satan.


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 Crumblies 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.
Oh yes, it is quite clear there is a terminator to infinite regress of the past because nature can't cause itself. Everything in nature has a cause as is true for the element of gold which never always existed. The reason why gold exists is due to the explosions of the stars. The reason why the full elemental table exists is because the universe is as big as it is. If it was any smaller some elements would not be have been created.

There is a doublestandard here is as well. And as soon as you have a doublestandard, you realize your teaching is false. Atheists claim the first single-celled organism could have come into being from processes other than which the models allow for. The models tell us 200 amino acids for 1 protein and 1000 proteins are required for life, but the models show us that not even 1 protein can come into being from 200 amino acids based on mixing all the interatomic interactions in the history of the universe. But the atheist claims it all stops with the atom without considering the possibility within atoms are quarks and smaller still are strings. The formation of an atom has a cause from these smaller parts. Dawkins mindlessly shuts his mind down by assuming how many times he cuts his meat. But that goes against the evidence. He invokes his rule and stops short of reality. To do so is selfish.

Not so well thought out eh?

[ThinkAgain]

Or can it? I just found a very interesting article on the origin of matter at this website: http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/question.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.

[Churchwork]

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.
Such decays exist due to their associated causes. That "lots of energy" in the form of light just doesn't happen all by itself, but it had a cause as well. Bosons, Photons, etc. all have their antecedent causes. But since nothing in nature can happen all by itself, there must be a cause which is uncaused.


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).
That's nice. But annihilation is an improper term due to the 1st law of thermodynamics.



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.

How do these words show something happened all by itself in nature? You don't say.

I agree, the universe can't cause itself. All you are doing is showing causes to prove the point all things in nature and light require a cause whether high or low energies, particles or antiparticles.

You should think again!