Why is there Something Instead of God?

[blastula]

In the story where Jesus turns water into wine, why is that not an act of a magician?

 

[George S]

In the story where Jesus turns water into wine, why is that not an act of a magician?

It is a made up story. In that story Jesus demonstrates his power over (the goddess mother) nature. His magic, so the story tells, comes from His being an avatar of the One God YHVH. A fabulous work of literature. These are written by Greek speaking authors and damn good ones at that. It was the language of the intelligentsia of the day. Mark wrote the first version of the story going 'round. Then Matthew then Luke and Acts (by the way those are not the names of the authors) rewriting the story with embellishments.
In modern story telling we find many versions of Sherlock Holmes.
Read the Gospels as stories and you will find the omniscient author all over. How does the author know what Jesus did when He was alone?
You will find stories with patterns. Events A B C D E in that order, then the main point F, followed by ~E ~D ~C ~B ~A. Events lay out like this in stories and never, ever in real life.

Forgive the ramble. Miracle is merely god-caused magic.

 

[DBT]

The bible does NOT claim magic.

What does it claim?

 

[Lion IRC]

Penn and Teller would not call the parting of the Red Sea or healing the sick "magic".
Jesus wasn't doing card tricks or pulling rabbits out of hats.
THAT would be magic.

But if you're merely quibbling over semantics and want to use the word "magic" as a placeholder for stuff in the bible that you can't understand/explain (and therefore don't believe) that's your problem not mine.

 

[DBT]

Penn and Teller deal with well understood physical principles, illusions, sleight of hand,etc...so if miraculous healing of the sick, for example, somehow bypasses physics, curing cancer by merely laying of hands, then it is not in the same category as stage magic, not like sleight of hand, but actual magic, an event that bypasses physics, a magical event, a miracle.

 

[Learner]

Theology. The study of gods. With the existence of more than one god what is or is not a miracle becomes problematic. Shall we go with only one Creator god?

Of course we are talking about a particular theology (what it seemed to me at least) i.e. The Biblical theme. Within the the bible,there are many gods. The bible acknowledges other (pagan) gods. There can be only be one "ultimate" originator ; many gods "orinating" from ONE ultimate creator: is what the bible highlights. It's not problematic in this regard , according to the biblical texts with many (lesser) gods.

I will offer Mother Nature as the single Goddess. The thing is, She is quite unconscious. Having done the deed and turned on Our Universe She fell asleep. Where there was nothing before there was the tiniest of baby universes. So small and all; it was at the minimum size -- so close to non-existent only a god could tell the difference. It behaved, then, in a certain way. "Certain" in the sense of inevitability. Its first behavior was to grow and expand over time. A sphere whose radius expands at one second per second in the time dimension along with expansion in the space dimension.

Nature , assigned a gender and you call it a goddess, not that I suggest this is your religious view (some people out there do, no doubt).

She's "unconscious" , predictable , fixed and formulaic and behaves rather more cosmically clockwork-ish ... a creation , rather than a Creator.

 

[Learner]

...Making uninformed guesses about what it 'must' imply is just pointless and moronic.

I guess the point is, if he can make everything possible "in concept" then he can believe anything he wants.

In this case its only according to bible ,the concept (not believe just anything , but I get your point).

You'll have to note "defining restrictions" to God (seen in posts, Bilby and Juma's ) making the claim it seems e.g. what one "thinks is impossible" because its the science and study of the naturalistic material world , (so far as it's currently understood).

 

[blastula]

Penn and Teller would not call the parting of the Red Sea or healing the sick "magic".
Jesus wasn't doing card tricks or pulling rabbits out of hats.
THAT would be magic.

But if you're merely quibbling over semantics and want to use the word "magic" as a placeholder for stuff in the bible that you can't understand/explain (and therefore don't believe) that's your problem not mine.

I don't believe it, but I can explain it easily. Those stories are mythical, duh.

 

[Speakpigeon]

No. But only because you seem unable to observe. Look around. Do you see a magic spaceman, cosmic magician, gods of any kind? On what observational basis do you conclude that there should be zero universe?

No, read again, I didn't say "there should be" and I never even mentioned this "zero universe" you're talking about.

Because there cannot be nothing. Nothing comes from nothing yet I exist, therefore there cannot have been the state of nothing.

Sure, there is something so there cannot be nothing but that's not the question. Why is there something rather than nothing? Sure we know there's something but we don't actually know that there couldn't have been nothing instead.
EB

That's silly. What would nothing be? How would one identify it, observe it, describe it, etc.?

Nothing isn't something. Nothingness would be a situation where there would be literally no thing at all. And if there was nothing then there would be no observer, and therefore nobody to "identify it, observe it or describe it". I don't see that would have been a problem at all.

People focus on the "why?" but go on saying "nothing" as if it's something. But why not doubt the concept itself?

"Nothing" only makes sense in the context of something. We say "nothing in the cup" when we mean there's no coffee or tea in the cup. "No coffee" becomes "no thing" in order to generalize. So "no thing" is just replacing the noun with a more generalized absence of all things. And that's always wrong because there is always a "thing" in the cup even if it's not what a person expected to be there.

Then somebody wanted to generalize an already flawed concept, from the absence of things (coffee, tea, water) inside of a thing (the cup), to an absolute absence of all things universally. Add a "-ness" to the end of "nothing" if wanted, to emphasize that an inconceivable degree of abstraction is being toyed with. The proposed "absolutely nothing" is still relative to something no matter the pretense that this level of abstraction names anything. It's still a matter of "no this and no that"... no space, no time, no vacuum, no energy, and on and on ad infinitum.

I broadly agree on the analysis although I wouldn't say there's anything wrong with the notion of "nothing" applied at a situation where there's just no coffee inside the cup. We all understand. The wrongness only comes from using "nothing" as if it somehow meant or could mean "something". A lot of people unfortunately do that.

As to nothingness, why would this notion be a problem at all? You don't actually have to list all the things that wouldn't be there. The only difficulty we have, and it's a big one, it's that although we can conceive of nothingness, we can't imagine it because our imagination indeed always come with something, space, time, and perhaps an inevitable observer, ourselves. So, people with a weak capacity for conceiving have to compensate with their imagination and that's where they will get the wrong notion of nothingness.
EB

It would be a problem because it means zero universe. What is that?

Sorry, I don't know what is this "zero universe" you're asking me to tell you what it is. You may want to start a new thread on that if you want to know what it is. This thread is about somethingness and nothingness, not about any "zero universe".
EB

 

[bilby]

...Making uninformed guesses about what it 'must' imply is just pointless and moronic.

I guess the point is, if he can make everything possible "in concept" then he can believe anything he wants.

In this case its only according to bible ,the concept (not believe just anything , but I get your point).

You'll have to note "defining restrictions" to God (seen in posts, Bilby and Juma's ) making the claim it seems e.g. what one "thinks is impossible" because its the science and study of the naturalistic material world , (so far as it's currently understood).

You misunderstand; This isn't about people thinking things are impossible, it's about demonstrating that they are.

Science has always been about disproving hypotheses.

It's now clearly and demonstrably true that there is no way in which a hypothetical soul could interact with a physical human.

So a large number of longstanding hypotheticals can be discarded as 'certainly false'; and an afterlife, various psychic abilities, divine revelation, and a whole swathe of other ideas that depend in some way on an interaction between the physical world and some hypothetical 'supernatural realm' are amongst them.

We know ALL of the ways that matter on human scales can be influenced. ALL of them. There cannot be any others, without our best tested and most certain scientific evidence being, not just wrong, but wildly wrong.

Set against this mountain of hard evidence, is a bunch of sad fools saying 'We can't demonstrate anything, but we want to believe that the science is mistaken'.

That's not a debate. It's just some people who know what's real, and some idiots who haven't bothered to learn shit, because they believe some stuff written down by a bunch of guys they don't have any reason to trust, four hundred years ago.

There's nothing further to discuss - If you believe in gods, or in ghosts, or in the afterlife, you are simply wrong. Wronger than if you believed that the next time you drop a bowling ball, it will fall upwards.

It's over. Being too poorly educated to realise that it's over doesn't change that fact. After centuries of hard work, experiment, measurement, hypothesis, testing, analysis, and re-testing, culminating in the detailed examination of subatomic particle interactions at such huge energies that they can measure the precise mass of the Higgs Boson, we can now say with as much certainty as we can say ANYTHING, that gods, ghosts, and life after death are all impossible.

Sorry, but at this point your options as a theist have been reduced to two - realise you are mistaken, or remain wrong.

You needn't take my (or anyone else's) word for any of this. It's not hidden or secret knowledge, it's available to anyone who wants to put in the effort to go see for themselves. You don't need to have faith, or to trust anybody - all of the advances in science have been presented with detailed instructions on how to show them to be mistaken, and given to a bunch of people who are highly motivated to do just that - and who have failed. If you want to prove this stuff to be wrong, then not only are you encouraged to try; You can get both riches and fame if you succeed.

So, go for it - demonstrate that QFT and/or the Standard Model are incomplete in ways that permit the supernatural to interact with human scale objects.

We'll wait.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

Sorry, I don't know what is this "zero universe" you're asking me to tell you what it is. You may want to start a new thread on that if you want to know what it is. This thread is about somethingness and nothingness, not about any "zero universe".
EB

You're making my point quite nicely.

Nothing is the same as having zero universe. But because something, the universe, is everywhere all the time it doesn't make sense to talk about zero universe, nothing. It's some kind of religious creationist fantasy. That's why biblical creationism is nonsense.

What's revealing is that this bizzarro world of zero universe has to be invented in order to have biblical creationism. The very bedrock of the religion is gibberish.

It's also kinda cool that the qualities of the magic spaceman are the same as nothing, rendering it equally nonsensical. It's why there is something instead of god. The universe is real while gods are just arguments for hocus-pocus.

 

[Speakpigeon]

Sorry, I don't know what is this "zero universe" you're asking me to tell you what it is. You may want to start a new thread on that if you want to know what it is. This thread is about somethingness and nothingness, not about any "zero universe".
EB

You're making my point quite nicely.

Nothing is the same as having zero universe. But because something, the universe, is everywhere all the time it doesn't make sense to talk about zero universe, nothing. It's some kind of religious creationist fantasy. That's why biblical creationism is nonsense.

What's revealing is that this bizzarro world of zero universe has to be invented in order to have biblical creationism. The very bedrock of the religion is gibberish.

It's also kinda cool that the qualities of the magic spaceman are the same as nothing, rendering it equally nonsensical. It's why there is something instead of god. The universe is real while gods are just arguments for hocus-pocus.

Sorry, I can't find anything in there relevant to what I said myself on the subject of nothingness. You don't seem to even understand the notion of engaging with the issue, or indeed with the point of the other side. Your choice.
EB

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

Sorry, I don't know what is this "zero universe" you're asking me to tell you what it is. You may want to start a new thread on that if you want to know what it is. This thread is about somethingness and nothingness, not about any "zero universe".
EB

You're making my point quite nicely.

Nothing is the same as having zero universe. But because something, the universe, is everywhere all the time it doesn't make sense to talk about zero universe, nothing. It's some kind of religious creationist fantasy. That's why biblical creationism is nonsense.

What's revealing is that this bizzarro world of zero universe has to be invented in order to have biblical creationism. The very bedrock of the religion is gibberish.

It's also kinda cool that the qualities of the magic spaceman are the same as nothing, rendering it equally nonsensical. It's why there is something instead of god. The universe is real while gods are just arguments for hocus-pocus.

Sorry, I can't find anything in there relevant to what I said myself on the subject of nothingness. You don't seem to even understand the notion of engaging with the issue, or indeed with the point of the other side. Your choice.
EB

Hey pigeon,

I am seriously disappointed. Are you being coy? Let me try to explain.

If someone says to you that that he has nothing in his hand and you see that his hand is empty, you understand that he isn't holding any objects, something, in that hand. But being a person of sufficient intellect you obviously understand that his "empty" hand still is full of the universe. His claim to emptiness or nothing is just language. His empty palm still contains the universe. Quite contrary to the nothion of nothingness it is still full. It just contains zero objects like apples or marbles or roses for his lovely.

That's what I mean when I say that there is no such thing as zero universe. One need not make the entire universe vanish, one only need demonstrate their claim to nothingness, whatever that is, a claim which quite simply means that all the somethingness of the universe is absent in full or in some part. Fair enough?

 

[George S]

That's what I mean when I say that there is no such thing as zero universe. One need not make the entire universe vanish, one only need demonstrate their claim to nothingness, whatever that is, a claim which quite simply means that all the somethingness of the universe is absent in full or in some part. Fair enough?

Begin with [~x for all x.] Nothing exists in such a state. Among the absent x is t, that is, time.
The situation of [~x for all x] existed for no time.
At the beginning of time the universe was not only small in the time dimension but equally small in the space dimensions. If it was going to demonstrate its reality it had to change. If there is no change then time is meaningless. If the change were chaotic time would be meaningless as well. When there is a frequency, a naturally repeating <anything> time has meaning. It couldn't get smaller so the it demonstrated its existence by getting bigger. And the rest is, as they say, history. Literally.

 

[skepticalbip]

That's what I mean when I say that there is no such thing as zero universe. One need not make the entire universe vanish, one only need demonstrate their claim to nothingness, whatever that is, a claim which quite simply means that all the somethingness of the universe is absent in full or in some part. Fair enough?

Begin with [~x for all x.] Nothing exists in such a state. Among the absent x is t, that is, time.
The situation of [~x for all x] existed for no time.
At the beginning of time the universe was not only small in the time dimension but equally small in the space dimensions. If it was going to demonstrate its reality it had to change. If there is no change then time is meaningless. If the change were chaotic time would be meaningless as well. When there is a frequency, a naturally repeating <anything> time has meaning. It couldn't get smaller so the it demonstrated its existence by getting bigger. And the rest is, as they say, history. Literally.

That reads like you are a fan of Roger Penrose's conformal cyclic cosmology.

 

[Learner]

we can now say with as much certainty as we can say ANYTHING, that gods, ghosts, and life after death are all impossible.

So you keep saying! You and Juma haven't shown us yet , (Lion asked once already).

 

[bilby]

we can now say with as much certainty as we can say ANYTHING, that gods, ghosts, and life after death are all impossible.

So you keep saying! You and Juma haven't shown us yet , (Lion asked once already).

I'm sorry, but if you can't identify and click on a link, and read the information at that site, then there's not much I can do to save you from your ignorance. At least, not much I feel like doing, given that you aren't paying me for my effort.

Read the linked article - and if necessary, the links provided in that article. I can present the information to you; But I cannot read it for you, nor understand it for you.

Here - I'll even save you the effort of scrolling back to the post where I included the evidence you claim I never provided:

No, Juma is correct; Our options, given the state of the art right now, are EITHER to conclude that the afterlife, miracles, and souls are impossible; OR that the Standard Model is not just wrong, but wildly and completely wrong.

As the afterlife, miracles and souls have not even been rigorously described, much less demonstrated; And as the Standard Model is the best tested and most accurate model of physical reality ever, it is only invalid to claim that miracles are impossible if you set a value for 'impossible' that excludes everything. Or, to put it another way, it is VASTLY more likely that the Moon is, in fact, made of cheese than it is that miracles, the afterlife, and/or souls exist.

Only ignorance of the science, or an extraordinary devotion to the most pedantic definition of 'impossible', can allow us to claim that the supernatural can possibly influence physical reality.

http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2011/05/23/physics-and-the-immortality-of-the-soul/

Anyone who rejects the Selenotyroic Hypothesis* on the basis that science disproves it, must also reject miracles, souls and the afterlife.








* From the Greek 'Selenos' (moon) and 'Tyros' (cheese), the Selenotyroic Hypothesis ought to be the name for the idea that the Moon is made from cheese, and as there isn't currently a fancy-sounding name for this notion as far as I am aware, I have made my own. Feel free to use it elsewhere.

 

[Speakpigeon]

Sorry, I can't find anything in there relevant to what I said myself on the subject of nothingness. You don't seem to even understand the notion of engaging with the issue, or indeed with the point of the other side. Your choice.
EB

Hey pigeon,

I am seriously disappointed. Are you being coy?

You're kidding, right?

Let me try to explain.

If someone says to you that that he has nothing in his hand and you see that his hand is empty, you understand that he isn't holding any objects, something, in that hand. But being a person of sufficient intellect you obviously understand that his "empty" hand still is full of the universe. His claim to emptiness or nothing is just language.

So, if somebody tells you he has nothing in his hands, you don't believe him?! Just because his hands are supposed to be "full of the universe"? You must be kidding.

Sorry, it's just crap. People say they have nothing in their hands and they understand each other, i.e. they understand what one means when one says he has nothing in his hands, which is definitely not that they don't have any part of the universe in their hands. So, it's not a claim to actual nothingness, not even a claim to actual emptiness, it's just a claim of relative emptiness. To have nothing in your hands just means you don't have the thing or kind of things which will be of some concern in the context of the situation.

This idea has therefore nothing to do with the idea of nothingness. So, you can drop the parallel. There is none.

His empty palm still contains the universe.

You really must be kidding. You've just dismissed talk of having nothing in your hands as not possibly literally true and you're now yourself talking of having the universe in your hands. What? Literally?! You must be kidding. Go on, go and try convince people saying they have nothing in their hands that they have the universe in their hands.

Quite contrary to the nothion of nothingness it is still full. It just contains zero objects like apples or marbles or roses for his lovely.

Sure, and who ever pretended otherwise?! We all know what having nothing in your hands means.

Your parallel between everyday talk of "having nothing in your hands" and the notion of nothingness is vacuous.

That's what I mean when I say that there is no such thing as zero universe.

Then just drop it because this has nothing to do with the question of nothingness.

One need not make the entire universe vanish, one only need demonstrate their claim to nothingness, whatever that is, a claim which quite simply means that all the somethingness of the universe is absent in full or in some part. Fair enough?

What claim to nothingness?! You're just making stuff up. Seems either you don't understand my French English or you haven't read my posts. Or something else.

Debate, and conversation, and discussion etc. all require that you be civil enough to pay attention to what the other guy is actually saying, and then reply with arguments and considerations relevant to that, and in a logical fashion. Well, for now, you ain't doing well in all these respects.

So, please start from what I actually said about nothingness. If that doesn't interest you, fair enough, just don't pretend you're replying to what I said, which is what you have done so far and it's no good at all.
EB.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

Remember, though, we're talking about creationism and the tangential question of 'why there is something instead of nothing.' It's a question creationists like to ask in an attempt to argue that without their magic spaceman there would be 'nothing.'

The point of the thread is to state that both god and nothing are just language when compared to an actual something, like the universe or any part thereof, because neither concepts are demonstrable like the universe is demonstrable. The two concepts that underpin creationism therefore are just fantasy compared to the universe.

So, no, not kidding.

Hope that clarifies.

 

[bilby]

Remember, though, we're talking about creationism and the tangential question of 'why there is something instead of nothing.' It's a question creationists like to ask in an attempt to argue that without their magic spaceman there would be 'nothing.'

Sure, but all this semantic stuff, and indeed, any argument about the meaning of 'nothing', is irrelevant.

They have forgotten what the question was that their god was meant to be an answer to.

If we ask "There is something; If there was once nothing, how did we get from 'nothing' to 'something'?", then there are two possible answers - "Something arises spontaneously from nothing"; OR "There was always something". 'God' is an attempt to have their cake and eat it too - they reject "There was always something" (because that leaves god with nothing to do, because there never was an act of creation ex nihilo), but then they forget that that move necessarily and unavoidably rejected their god, and say "God always existed", which directly contradicts their rejection of "There was always something".

Either there was always something; Or there wasn't. If we are allowed to claim that there was, then why make that claim for gods we have never seen, and not for the universe that we see all around us? If we are NOT allowed to claim that there was, then 'gods' are no explanation at all, because we still need to explain their origins.

Invoking "God" as an explanation of why there is something instead of nothing isn't a coherent attempt to address the question in the first place. By definition, the ONLY way something could come from nothing is spontaneously and without cause, because if you have a cause, no matter how magical, then you didn't have nothing, and were not even considering the actual question.