Was There A First Cause?

[Tero]

I got as far as empty space is responsible for 90% of the matter. At 21 minutes. Good thing I work with atoms. They are just hard ping pong balls.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

I don't think you read what I meant to say in that post.

No, I didn't get it.
Did you mean the other side of the event horizon?

The Big Bang. It could have been the "output" from a black hole in another universe.

It doesn't much matter since the Big Bang theory is almost certainly wrong.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Black holes are just flatulence from God.

There's a grandeur to this vision of life...

There is a Larry Niven/Jerry Pournelle novel title in there....

The Flatulence of God -- An astounding new novel by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle.

The Poop In God's Eye.

[mistermack]

The conundrum is, can something come from nothing?
The religious argument is that this is impossible. Only nothing comes from nothing.
Therefore, there must have been a first cause, outside of space and time, and that was god.

But I've never had an answer to the big question. What did god make the Universe OUT OF?
There are two basic possibilities. He made it out of SOMETHING, or NOTHING.

If he made it out of something, then you don't need a god. Something became something else.
If he made it out of nothing, then something CAN come from nothing after all, so you don't need a god.

So it boils down to "something cannot come from nothing, but if it did, god did it".
It's actually the old problem of infinity all over again. If you start with nothing, and something appears, then you have an increase of INFINITE proportion. Something is INFINITELY bigger than nothing.

So it's the old religious trick. Throw in an apparent infinity, point out that an infinity is impossible, and conclude that only a god can fill that gap in our knowledge.


The only other possibility is a cyclic universe. But that doesn't answer anything. How did THAT come about?

Possible solution: there is no nothing.

You call that a solution? What does it solve?

[Atheist-Lite]

My own intuition is that there is just nowhere near enough data to make a accurate model of the cosmos just yet.

[Brian Peacock]

My own intuition is that there is just nowhere near enough data to make a accurate model of the cosmos just yet.

Indeed, but there are lots of things which we can say about it concerning is age, mass/energy, its size, its topology, its future, and why there is something rather than nothing etc...