It is difficult to ask an atheist any thing about atheism because they arrive at there on a personal path. There are no atheist leaders, or teachers of any significance. My path to atheism is not yours. We have no classes or schools. I can not speak for atheists. No body can.
Everything in the universe has always existed and will always exist in some form.
Are there processes that I can’t explain? Are there processes that no one currently understands? Yes to both. Why should that automatically mean there is an even harder to explain creature?
If this is true how do you explain us not being at infinite entropy?
over 100 years ago Einstein came up with relativity, at the time it had no use for everyday people…now we rely on it every day for several things, the biggest (probably) being gps, no relativity, no gps systems.
knowledge doesnt need a direct “now” application.
to the op, I really wish I could remember the guys name, but there is a bit he said about science v religion where he points out that when religion ruled most of humanity lived in poverty, when science began to take steps lives began to improve and that there is virtually nothing religion has done to improve the lives of most of humanity over the centuries.
Probably not who you had in mind, but Christopher Hitchens has some things to say along these lines in his book God Is Not Great.
Which reminds me – some agnostic Doper should write a book God Is Meh. 
>Certainly it’s good to use your imagination, but postulating on things that are entirely untestable–especially if untestability is part of the definition–really all you’re doing is making stuff up.
But, Sage Rat, this isn’t how it works. Cosmologists make various predictions that have not been observed yet, and go out and look for them. If you find the prediction was correct, that is evidence you are on the right track. If it was incorrect, the way prediction and observation differ provides clues often used to make different predictions.
For example, very early and distant objects like quasars, active galactic nuclei, with huge black holes in them, ought to be subject to lensing effects by other bodies along our line of sight to them. Therefore, if we look for them, we should find arc shaped luminous bodies that share both a common center and spectra that are strongly redshifted. When cosmologists went out looking for that very distinctive kind of object, they kept finding them. This is very good evidence that the predictions about the number and size and distance and age of objects that would appear this way, and the mostly similar predictions about the other objects in between us creating the effect, are correct.
Another example, though this one is decades old now. Astronomers made predictions about how black holes behave when they are near stars (for example in a binary star system where the larger and hotter star dies young, collapses to a black hole, and then feeds off the other star when that one grows a large envelope on its way to death). The predictions were very specific in certain ways. The envelope of gas getting sucked in is going to be somewhat unsteady, so clumps of gas will often get consumed. As a clump falls into the black hole, it will heat up, and incandesce even in X-rays. It spirals in through the accretion disk and its spectrum changes as the temperature increases. But it also is getting Doppler shifted back and forth as it goes around in a spiral, sometimes going toward us and sometimes away. As it gets closer to the black hole, the Doppler shifting gets larger, because the velocities are bigger. But the shifting, which is sinusoidal, also happens in a shorter and shorter cycle, because the orbit time is going down. So you have this very distinctive hot spectrum going back and forth faster and faster at larger and larger amplitude, and then it stops. This was predicted first, and then observed. It’s quite strong evidence that what we thought was going on is actually what’s going on.
How do I look for an invisible salt shaker hovering in front of me when I have no known nor theoretical way to test for it?
Put a bunch of slugs on a plate and wave it around?
If you had a working, unique theory of everything which naturally described a scenario for the creation of the universe, would you say that scenario was wrong just because you can’t actually observe that creation?
If you wouldn’t, then, even in the absence of such a theory, I don’t think you can categorically state that such assertions are nonsensical.
It’s the quantum soup where particles and anti-particles come and go - hence Hawking Radiation and the evaporation of Black Holes.
Ah, the benefits of my mis-spent youth. AC Clarke. From Multivac through Cosmic AC.
Spoiler for the end of the story:
LET THERE BE LIGHT
Agreed.
Exactly. Why not infinite entropy?
As I understand it, nature tends to go from order, to disorder, in any isolated system.
The Big Bang supposes a whole lot of disorder, in all directions.
Organic molecules are supposed to combine spontaneously from the primordial soup into a sytem that uses light for energy to synthesize other organic molecules?
I’ve never said that the existence of a deity is nonsensical nor impossible. I have said that it’s silly to pray to or hold rituals to or to believe that you personally have received moral guidance from it, when you have no particular reason to do so.
I can postulate and test for an invisible salt shaker all I want, but I’d be rather silly ordering my food without salt thinking that it will magically appear for me because I want it to.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply that – I took you to mean that speculating about the origin of the universe is nothing but idle navel-gazing, and just wanted to point out that there are natural cases where that’s not so.
I fully encourage people to study things that they think might have some testable reality and come up with that test. But so far as I am aware, we aren’t aaaaanywhere near that point. Debating whether God has a beard or not when:
- We don’t know that there’s an origin to the universe
- We don’t know that the origin is linked to some outside force
- We don’t know that this force is a sentient being
- We don’t know that this sentient being is human-shaped
Well I mean I would have that’s fully just navel gazing by any standard. At some point in time it may be something worth testing and pondering, but we just are so far away from that point in terms of what we can observe that saying it’s reasonable to ponder it because otherwise we won’t ever try to come up with a test, is silly. You’re just cutting past too many levels of the onion to reach that point.
I don’t know the origin of the universe.
I see no reason and feel no compulsion to fill this gap with God.
Isaac Asimov.
I don’t really see it as quite that useless a hypothetical – regarding your point 1), there’s likely a finite number of options for that (the most obvious being, it has an origin and it doesn’t have an origin, but also retrocausal models, or perhaps some involving a gradual development of causal space-time), and there’s at least some merit in probing those with theoretical models, perhaps the most pertinent being that the higher the energy density (and thus, the closer one gets to the beginning in a big bang cosmology), the easier it appears to be to unify the known physical forces, i.e. that unification only exists past certain conditions that naturally emerge when ‘back-calculating’ the development of space-time. So hypothesising about the beginning conditions of the universe may well lead to new physical descriptions, and if those descriptions hold in the here and now, then that’s at least some evidence that the conjectured beginning might work; and even now, there are theories emerging that allow glimpses of the beginning of the universe.
So, generally, I’d agree with your points 2) to 4), seeing no particular reason for postulating some outside force, much less for speculating on its characteristics or beard, however I think that any complete description of space-time would have to naturally include its own beginning, and thus it’s not fruitless to look at that beginning in search of such a description.