The "something can't come from nothing" argument

[Thief]

Your denial is comical.

So is your avatar....you're soooooooo spooky!

 

[McBell]

God did not begin to exist.

Bold empty claim.

 

[Sha'irullah]

God can easily be defined as nothing because god is not something that is a thing or has an existence. Something that lives outside of the perceivable world is not perceivable nor capable of ever being perceived and henceforth does not exist.

Christians for example like saying that atheists claim the world came from nothing when people of almost every religion make the same claim. God made the cosmos out of nothing but because it was god it makes sense to them. It is purely wordplay and deception because anyone with moderate intelligence would be able to see the error in this.

It is not fair or honest to make double standards like this but many people of religious faith are not exactly interested in honesty. It is purely an appeal to emotions the vast majority of the time. If one believes that god created the world out of nothing then it only begs the question who or what created god.

 

[1robin]

God can easily be defined as nothing because god is not something that is a thing or has an existence. Something that lives outside of the perceivable world is not perceivable nor capable of ever being perceived and henceforth does not exist.

1. God is perceptible.
2. Perception has nothing to do with being a thing.
3. God is a non-material being.
4. He is personal.
5. He is moral.
6. He is the ultimate explanation of everything.

Quite busy for nothing.

Christians for example like saying that atheists claim the world came from nothing when people of almost every religion make the same claim. God made the cosmos out of nothing but because it was god it makes sense to them. It is purely wordplay and deception because anyone with moderate intelligence would be able to see the error in this.

No most people in the world say the universe came from a being. I also don't think most atheists will say the universe came from nothing. They don't know where it came from but are smart enough to know from nothing is a stupid answer.

It is not fair or honest to make double standards like this but many people of religious faith are not exactly interested in honesty. It is purely an appeal to emotions the vast majority of the time. If one believes that god created the world out of nothing then it only begs the question who or what created god.

This post of yours does not help your case.

 

[1robin]

One can't very easily know what they are not conscious of so why assume? I gave the evidence and there is no way to tell the difference if it were spirits or an suppressed memory making a decision for you? I would bet on the natural cause before resorting to imaginative influences.

Yes we can but if we can't then your whole argument falls to pieces. How can I have a memory of an event that has yet to occur? Or are you saying I can't remember the past? Unlike you I don't bet on things before hand. I look at the evidence and go with the best explanation. Sherlock said if you theorize before you have all the data then your data will always be viewed through the lens of that theory. I have been without any success trying to get anyone who denies that posters claim to ask him for more data. Obviously data is not important, only the narrative you showed up with.

 

[1robin]

You’re pulling my leg now, right?

I (and others) offered all kinds of natural explanations that we know actually exist and actually happen.

Not one of them is the best explanation. I said no one has given an actual explanation. A story is not an explanation unless it is consistent with the evidence. I saw not a single one that was.

Why does any god have to be behind any of it?

He doesn't have to be. He is the best choice once the natural does not appear to be the best explanation. I never argue God to a certainty and quite often point it out, yet it never gets through. It is proof or nothing for the person of faith and only the absence of impossibility for the atheist, and even that is periodically violated.

Even if we could verify that these things are bona fide premonitions, how do we draw the line from that to the specific version of the Christian god you believe in? The Kalam Cosmological argument doesn’t get you there. Textual reliability of the Bible (if it existed) doesn’t get you there. Moral consistency doesn’t get you there. Unknowable knowledge recorded long ago (if it existed) doesn’t get you there.

I was not trying to do so exactly. For the seat belt story it is only evidence of the non natural. Arguments for which version of the non-natural is true if any are of a whole different type. Arguments are usually made in steps.

There have been plenty of reasonable natural explanations provided for you.

I do not remember but one even being given and it was poor and almost incoherent.

No offense, but it seems you’ll appoint a supernatural explanation to just about anything for which you don’t have an immediate and/or desirable explanation available to you.

I as a person along with millions who have experienced God directly are probably more open to him as an explanation and should be. However I only consider the supernatural as the best explanation if it is and I am very critical in doing so. I deny probably 80% of healing claims without even investigating. I am not a God of the gaps guy, but you tend to be a naturalism of the gaps person.

And if it’s so obvious that the specific, personal god you believe in is behind premonitions that even a non-believer should view your god as the best candidate, then it should be easy for you to draw a line from point A (premonition) to point B (your god). Where’s the connection? Because I don’t see that any god has to be behind any of it, or that the supernatural needs to be invoked at all.

I do not recall making any emphatic connections between those events and my specific God. Sometimes I do as representing God in a generalized sense representing personal supernatural agency, but don't even think I did so here. Regardless, my official claim is that a supernatural explanation is a far better fit to the evidence we have been given than any natural one so far and by far.

Ah, but there are natural explanations available. Ignoring them doesn’t mean that they don’t exist.

I have not recognized any natural explanation that did not deserve rejection. You cannot claim I ignored something because it was so terrible an argument I rejected it. That is more of that awful liberal condemnation by classification crap I hate so bad.

It looks to me like this response is just a cop out.

So we can’t demonstrate the existence of the supernatural. I don’t recall your ever doing so.

How do we know it exists? And if we don’t (or can’t) know it exists, how on earth can we attribute any occurrence of anything to the supernatural?

Rare things do occur.

1. I have given several reasons that make epilepsy a terrible explanation (however unlike the one about the seat belt it was not reject-able in totality, it is just not a good one). There were too many thing epilepsy did not explain about it and I provided many of them. I am not going to do so over and over forever.
2. How do you know dark matter exists despite no experiment and no detectability of any kind exists? It wrote no Bible's, healed no tumor's, sent no prophets, and no one has ever experienced it knowingly. We can because it explains other things that are detectable better than any other theory. Once again: It is proof or nothing for the person of faith and only the absence of impossibility for the atheist, and even that is periodically violated.

With the huge difference being that in order to accept that say, Socrates lived once upon a time, I don’t have to invoke some unknown supernatural realm to justify my belief in the events that he recorded or that others recorded about him. And if I did, I’d be just as skeptical about those supernatural claims as I am about the ones we’re discussing here. They would be just as unverifiable as the ones in question. And I think you would be just as skeptical.

This is perfect bias. You are denying a word that describes a realm that has no conflicting evidence. It is not improbable or impossible. You simply reject a man because of the idea he comes with. Socrates is not any more true because gravity, mass, or radiation exists. I am or was probably more skeptical of Christianity than you ever were. I literally hated it if it did exist. I spent hours arguing against it as I do now for it. The moment that changed is when I said I am going to throw out all pre-conceptions, my tackle box of rejections, and simply start from scratch. Despite any ones sincere beliefs there is no neutrality concerning God. Even if your not aware of it we all have drawn a position. Let me quickly give two relevant stories.

1. My Dad whom I love very much, was an Apollo engineer, and is one of the most practical, moral, non-sensational, intelligent, and rational people I have ever known. He goes to church regularly and builds houses for the homeless and gives far more than ten percent. He is my superior in every form of discussion we have, even military. Yet when we discuss salvation or the supernatural he becomes a different person all together. Gone is the rigorous rational engineer and some kind of child with a driven preference shows up. This along with a hundred other things that I observed or recalled after I had been born again led me to believe he only had head faith and had never been spiritually born again as my mother had. I finally asked him directly and he said no he had not. So despite all outward appearances he is not on God's side. He is on the world's side and is actually hostile to spirituality. He is trying to get into heaven by another gate (the I'm good enough gate). Here is what Christ says about them:

New International Version
"Very truly I tell you Pharisees, anyone who does not enter the sheep pen by the gate, but climbs in by some other way, is a thief and a robber.

Of course I love him to the point I have spent hours talking to him and even writing 50 page papers about salvation and buying him concordances and Bible's. He says he is very impressed by my arguments and then never mentions them again. There is no theological neutrality. That is why double standards and liberal categorical argumentation are expected but still exasperating.

2. The most skeptical group of people I have ever heard of regarding the supernatural are the Catholics who investigate them. Secular doctors and others are stunned by how reluctant they are to credit either a miracle or demonic activity and yet they have approved of thousands of miracles after exhaustive study. They are skeptical because they have to be for liability reasons and are the hardest to convince I have ever heard of. Yet even they consider the supernatural and obvious reality.

Sorry for the length. I was too lazy to stop.

 

[1robin]

Perhaps the argument revolves about the word...nothing.

In terms of....void....

Spirit first....or substance.

If Spirit is something....the discussion is dead.
If Spirit is nothing....then we might recalibrate our sense of .....void.

Nothing literally means non-being.

 

[outhouse]

1. God is perceptible.
2. Perception has nothing to do with being a thing.
3. God is a non-material being.
4. He is personal.
5. He is moral.
6. He is the ultimate explanation of everything.

How can you define something so well that is not present?


Where did you learn this?

And if he is present, provide some credible sources to back that up.

 

[1robin]

"Identical" is an exaggeration. More accurately, it assumes that the feelings we call premonitions are all of the same kind (but we call them premonitions only if they turn out to be true). This seems to me more reasonable than assuming that the ones that happen to come true are of a different nature from the rest.

In my own life I have had many premonitions I considered to be from God, my own reflexes, my unconscious, bias, experience, all kinds of things. Few of them have ever come true. I do not consider the true ones Godly and the rest natural. Let me state this another way. There are literally hundreds of millions of claims to supernatural experience. Even if all but one were false that would still make the supernatural true. BTW many of God's predictions are conditional and do not actually occur. I am sure many people felt like their drinking was going to kill them but slackened up or quit and it didn't. It is not the issue whether every God said it would happen is legit, it is whether a single one is. That is my response to your argument above but I regard the sheer volume as convincing and my own personal experience as conclusive.

Yes, entirely.

That would make every accurate weather forecast a miracle. It actually might be but not a supernatural one. That is a silly way to think about these issues.

Hang on. Which book of the bible did George Lucas write?

Good one. I saw a family guy episode where Stewey said for Luke to come to the backside of the force.

You do Nostradamus too much kindness in calling his prophecies half correct. Like all such prophecies, his are given a simulacrum of accuracy only by tortuous retrofit.

I did not mean to give him any credit. I am saying the bible allows for half predictions to exist but they are not from God. God's are either conditionally true or objectively true. There are over 2000 accurate prophecies for example. 351 about one man. I am critical and rational enough to acknowledge grey areas but there are so many clear and accurate predictions in extreme detail trying to write them all off is an act of lunacy.

And when I'm playing darts, every time I hit the bullseye that is evidence that god is guiding my hand, or at least should be considered for such. The times I miss the board, or the dart strikes the wire and bounces off, have no bearing on this conclusion.

I have a saying that consideration of God begins where probability ends. That is a general way of saying if natural probabilistic trends are highly against X then examine whether X could be supernatural. If you hit a bulls eye or a guy wins the lottery I think nothing of it. If you hit 1000 in a row or the same guy wins the lottery 20 times in a row no one on earth would think that natural prabalistic reasons exist to account for it. That intent and maybe supernatural intent is involved. Even in physics it is a generally principle that probabilities higher than 10^50th are treated as zero. Only in faith issue is 1 in 10^50th a natural certainty. Probabilities come in degrees and your lumping them all together again.

Where do you get your "Maybe a couple"? If you're going to get anecdotal again, I'll respond by recalling plenty of occasions when I've braced myself for a crash that didn't occur (though I didn't brace myself for the one that did).

It can't be many. I do not mean putting on a seat belt when you normally do not wear one and having a fender bender. I mean having a panic attack struggling to get a seat belt from it being tangled up behind the seat seconds before a major crash occurred. If this is random and we go by probability how many could there be compared to times that it occurred and no crash happened? Serious crashes are rare (I know, I drove a wrecker while in college) and scrambling around desperately untangling a seat belt is rare. Both occurring is a multiplicative probability and would be extremely low. I should not know 3 personally. Once again I think the rates are far too high for probability to explain but that is an informed hunch. I have no idea where these statistics would be.

 

[1robin]

How can you define something so well that is not present?

I didn't. I defined the most present thing there is.


Where did you learn this?

And if he is present, provide some credible sources to back that up.

I learned this through at least three areas. My personal experience, the Bible, and philosophy. I claim to have been born again, been in his presence at least twice and have three things among many, that I personally consider miraculous. Do I need more? How about the hundreds of millions of claims to supernatural experiences? I tell you what, I will match evidence for God with evidence for dark matter you provide by twice as much. Deal?

 

[SkepticThinker]

It can't be many. I do not mean putting on a seat belt when you normally do not wear one and having a fender bender. I mean having a panic attack struggling to get a seat belt from it being tangled up behind the seat seconds before a major crash occurred. If this is random and we go by probability how many could there be compared to times that it occurred and no crash happened? Serious crashes are rare (I know, I drove a wrecker while in college) and scrambling around desperately untangling a seat belt is rare. Both occurring is a multiplicative probability and would be extremely low. I should not know 3 personally. Once again I think the rates are far too high for probability to explain but that is an informed hunch. I have no idea where these statistics would be.

I've had that experience countless times. I'm always bracing myself for accidents that never come and not bracing myself for accidents that actually happen. I've also had panic attacks for no apparent reason. I don't see where the need is to jump to supernatural conclusions about such things.

The WHO says that 1.24 million people die worldwide every year as a result of traffic accidents. The CDC says that 2.2 million Americans are injured every year in car accidents. (And take note in regards to your own safety, that they also say that more than half of people that died in car crashes weren't wearing a seatbelt.) Doesn't sound like such a rare thing to me.

WHO | Road traffic injuries
CDC - Seat Belt Policy Impact Brief - Motor Vehicle Safety - Injury Center

 

[outhouse]

I didn't. I defined the most present thing there is.

Evidence to support your claim? If it is present, there is evidence.

 

[idav]

Yes we can but if we can't then your whole argument falls to pieces. How can I have a memory of an event that has yet to occur? Or are you saying I can't remember the past? Unlike you I don't bet on things before hand. I look at the evidence and go with the best explanation. Sherlock said if you theorize before you have all the data then your data will always be viewed through the lens of that theory. I have been without any success trying to get anyone who denies that posters claim to ask him for more data. Obviously data is not important, only the narrative you showed up with.

Sherlock figures the stuff out with evidence and data but that isnt without a path. The signs lead to more signs. Prediction is something a bit more than just speculation.

 

[Thief]

Nothing literally means non-being.

ok...I can go with that.....

God is ......no thing.....
He would then be Some'one'.

 

[Sha'irullah]

In Panendeism there is no such issue as god is the very first thing and everything is a product of god. Issue solved

 

[newgodthinker]

I think God could have put evolution in order! Actually I don't think God is anywhere in the causal chain the way molecules and atoms are. He is outside it all. That's how I think. And I also despise the lazy thought that all this came from BAM God. Science people! Study it!

 

[shawn001]

Everyone should take a look at this, its current and explains a lot.

What Is the Big Bang Theory? | Space.com

There may also be multiverses,

 

[johnhanks]

BTW many of God's predictions are conditional and do not actually occur.

This sounds like a con-man's dream come true.

There are over 2000 accurate prophecies for example. 351 about one man. I am critical and rational enough to acknowledge grey areas but there are so many clear and accurate predictions in extreme detail trying to write them all off is an act of lunacy.

I'd like to read a couple that require absolutely no special pleading or retrofit - that are just straightforward statements along the lines of "this event [with full correct detail] will happen at precisely this time and in this place".

Once again I think the rates are far too high for probability to explain but that is an informed hunch.

No, it's just a hunch.

This has been an interesting exchange, but it's got precious little to do with Evolution vs. Creationism. If you want to continue, maybe it should be in the Historicity of Claimed Miracles thread in General Religious Debates.

 

[1robin]

I've had that experience countless times. I'm always bracing myself for accidents that never come and not bracing myself for accidents that actually happen. I've also had panic attacks for no apparent reason. I don't see where the need is to jump to supernatural conclusions about such things.

Well you shot up everything except my point. The one thing you did not mention is having a premonition, having to struggle to compensate for it, and then having it occur. If you look at my previous posts I delineated all these things and showed what the only relevant factor was. It is far more ridiculous to deny that every single one of these events I mention was luck that to believe they were all God. Both are pretty silly but one is far sillier that the other. I need only one to be supernatural to justify my world view. You need them all to be natural. Which position seems more biased?

The WHO says that 1.24 million people die worldwide every year as a result of traffic accidents. The CDC says that 2.2 million Americans are injured every year in car accidents. (And take note in regards to your own safety, that they also say that more than half of people that died in car crashes weren't wearing a seatbelt.) Doesn't sound like such a rare thing to me.

If you are contending the rareness of my claim of how many fatalities there are per accident lets use more relevant numbers. There are approx. 50 million people injured in car accidents per year. Since 45% of accidents occur in parking lots and do not cause injuries it is safe to say that 70 million people are involved in accidents total. However I found that only 6 million accidents occur a year and that makes more than ten people involved per accident which makes no sense.

Tell you what to begin with do you agree that the number of fatal accidents is less that 20% of the total? If you can we can just skip straightening out this math crap. Once we agree or settle on the numbers I will get into your claims about them.

 

[idav]

I need only one to be supernatural to justify my world view. You need them all to be natural. Which position seems more biased?

It would only be silly if that isn't what the evidence suggests. And with millions upon millions of cases it still is next to impossible to show anything supernatural. That shouldn't be if it has any influence on existence at all. No so far everything is explainable once we try. Non-explainable is just god of gaps and doesn't hold up against all the naturalistic explanations proven so far.