God is both the beginning and the end. As a counterargument to you Atheists, what made the Big Bang happen, and if you can answer that what made the things that made the Big Bang?
The singularity reached critical mass. Boom. And nothing needed to make it. There was no law of causation before there was a law of time.
Why add science into the mix? Religion existed first.
Science is simply an explanation of how things work using logic, reasoning, and things of that nature. Religion explains how currently unexplained things work with conjecture and faith. If you don't add science to the mix, you're wrong. If you don't add religion to the mix, you'll really suck at speculating/building societies/facilitating the possibility for the science. And yes, science came first. The very first toolmaking people used science to make tools. "Ugh. I take stick. I poke ant hole. Ants on stick. Me eat ants. Yummy. Ug ug ug ugg. *science* (LoZ treasure get music)"
Ironically, the beginning of religion required more higher thinking than the beginning of science, and now science is more complicated and religion is simpler.
Okay, if I'm right, acording to the Big Bang theory, the universe started out as a highly concertrated ball of matter. Well, where did that matter come from? I mean, where did the stuff to create everything in the universe come from? Did it just appear or something? (PLEASE answer! This has been bothering me for YEARS!)
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.
Also keep in mind that true nothing is an unstable state in our reality, as such it can't exist.
I love this argument because depending on how you order the facts you can decide: 1 there is a god and he made/did everything 2 there is no god and all this was a total fluke 3 aliens/a wizard did it? 4 god did some of it them created a woman with three breasts chocolate flavoured nipples for himself and forgot about us entirely lol
If God made everything, then who (or what) made god?
Paradox
This isn't a paradox, at least in a philosophical sense. There are three types of beings that we can talk about: 1) Dependent beings: these are entities that depend on something else for their existence. That's what us, chair, and watermelons have in common. 2) Self-Caused beings: now, this is a logical contradiction. It's a ridiculous position to try and defend. No being can causally affect its own existence. 3) Independent beings: these are entities which don't need a cause for their existence. God, by definition, is an independent being.
You can try to force a contradiction with the following argument: 1) Everything that exists must have a cause for its existence. 2) God exists. 2a) Nothing caused God's existence. 3) God has a cause for His existence.
This isn't a paradox, but rather a contradiction between (2a) and (3). But all the theist has to deny is deny (1). You might object, but the theist will just say that (1) begs the question against the existence of God. My point is that Independent Beings are not (in a philosophical sense) a paradox. But is there any argument to motivate the existence of independent beings? Are there any physical objects (maybe subatomic particles?) that exist by their very definition? Or at least have no cause for their existence?
This isn't a paradox, but rather a contradiction between (2a) and (3). But all the theist has to deny is deny (1). You might object, but the theist will just say that (1) begs the question against the existence of God. My point is that Independent Beings are not (in a philosophical sense) a paradox. But is there any argument to motivate the existence of independent beings? Are there any physical objects (maybe subatomic particles?) that exist by their very definition? Or at least have no cause for their existence?
I'm going out on a limb here and gonna say you believe in the series of Big Crunches and Big Bangs. So consider this:
Where did the very first matter come from? From the very first universe? And you can't really say "IT ALWAYS EXISTED!" because that sounds a lot like God, does it not? :/
As for science coming first... "Big ball of light. Ug Ug. Must be magic. Ug Ug Uggg. *mysticism*"
Ug ug ug. Me look at sky. Me see ball of light. How I see ball of light? *science*
Or . . . .
Ug ug ug. I in world. World pretty. I in world. Mommy big. Me small. What is world? Ug ug ug. *science*
Where did the very first matter come from? From the very first universe? And you can't really say "IT ALWAYS EXISTED!" because that sounds a lot like God, does it not? :/
What if there never was a first? It creates a cyclical structure for time, with one point where there is no time in between universes that ccould be counted as the beginning of a new cycle. Also, you can't say God was around forever, because that sounds like the very first matter, doesn't it?
ALSO, it did technically always exist, because until the Big Bang happened all time was in the singularity. If there's no time, something can't exist for a period of time. If it was 'always' there, it makes sense because there would be NO TIME AND THEREFORE NO SUCH THING AS BEGINNING OR END.
Where did the very first matter come from? From the very first universe? And you can't really say "IT ALWAYS EXISTED!" because that sounds a lot like God, does it not? :/
God has always existed, and always will . . . God was never created, He just was . . .
If you can believe god has always existed. Then you can't say it is wrong to believe the universe has always existed.
Although he can't claim to be any better than you for his faith, you can't either.
As such I claim that no one knows the answer to any of these questions they just think they do, and I will suspend debate until such time as the presence of an omniscient being has been proved/disproved. =P
