But with that, you just make god into a universal cork to plug the holes of ignorance in our theories. To me, it’s always been somewhat strange that believers, to whom by all accounts god supposedly is the greatest, highest thing there is, in the end belittle this idea by making him merely a stopgap measure. If I were inclined towards faith, this would not be a god I could see myself believing in – not least since historically, gaps tend to be closed, and one ends up having to make god ever smaller in order to still have him fit (where once gods stood behind every lightning bolt and rainbow, now one already has to hide them at the beginning of the universe, and in other, similarly hidden and dimly-lit places and abstractions). Why would anybody put their faith, hope, and worship onto something that’s little more than a band-aid for our ignorance?
Then what was the universe doing during the several billion years that elapsed between the big bang and the evolution of the first perception organs?
Oooh, I know, I know!
GOD observed it.
He hears falling trees in the woods too.
Our ignorance needs more than a band-aid.
If God did create the universe, where did God come from? It’s the same problem except that if anything, it’s more complicated.
You can’t prove that.
What’s complicated about a First Mover? A First Mover is a damned sight simpler than spontaneous quantum flunctuations. Easier to spell, too.
Where did your First Mover come from?
An intelligent being is a complicated thing. You need lots of interconnected parts if you’re going to think thoughts and make plans. A god powerful enough to intentionally design and create an entire universe would be a very complicated thing indeed.
Of course, if you imagine God as some sort of primal spark that started the whole thing in motion, then you don’t need complexity. But a primal spark god can’t design or plan anything. It doesn’t have intentions or a will or purpose. It certainly can’t play a meaningful role in human life.
Very few people actually *believe *in a god like that. He mostly comes into play only when theists feel backed into a corner.
Don’t you think the honest approach would be to stick with the label you started out with and probably use in everyday conversation(“God”), and not give it new labels(like “First Mover”)? You aren’t fooling anyone into believing that you aren’t talking about the same deity you were talking about before-your capitalizing the first letter of each word was a big clue, btw.
That’s a start. And what is God made of? What laws of physics apply to him, and if he predates the universe, how did he come into being? How is he able to affect the universe? Saying he’s a First Mover doesn’t answer any of those questions, and saying we can’t know may be an article of faith, but it’s a dodge. Theophane can believe whatever he wants, but this certainly isn’t any simpler. There’s a saying that people have a clearer idea of what God is not (corporal, bound by time, etc.) than what he is. As I see it, atheists and theists both have to explain how the universe exists, which is something we can do to some extent but can’t do completely. Theists have the additional problem of explaining how God exists if God created the universe. In science there’s a preference for the most parsimonious explanation, and that’s not it.
I don’t see why theists can’t explain the existence of god. In science there is the conservation of mass and energy. So where exactly did these masses and energies come from? Scientists would argue that they’ve been here since the beginning of time. How did they get here? Scientists: that’s none of your business, they were just here.
so wouldn’t science and religion coincide?
Why don’t you just stick with whatever it is you think religion explains, and leave the talking about what science is or isn’t to those that have at least looked up the word in a dictionary?
How did all this gold get under the Earth? Scientists: that’s none of your business, it was just there. Oh, wait. We eventually figured out it was interesting and important to figure out how it got there.
How did all this money disappear from the bank vault and end up under my mattress? Police: that’s none of your business, it was just there. Oh, wait. We eventually figured out it was interesting and important to figure out how it got there.
This is an incredibly specious argument.
Well, the whole point is trying to figure out “how did they get there in the first place?” Throwing up your hands and simply labeling it “God” or “the ineffable will of the Universe” or the “Flying Spaghetti Monster” or “My neighbor Ted” is antithetical to actual scientific practice.
Even if it is God or the FSM or my neighbor Ted, from what we can tell, the universe operates according to certain principles. So, figuring out that those principles lead to God or the FSM or Ted is also scientific.
Also, just because science can’t explain this particular point doesn’t mean your own preferred explanation is correct, either. It’s a common logical fallacy: you are wrong, therefore I am right. This ignores the possibility that both are wrong (though one side may be closer to correct than the other).
Because they can’t. Do you have any answers to the questions I posed? Saying “it’s a First Mover” or “it’s an uncaused cause” doesn’t answer them.
We’re getting closer to the limits of my personal understanding of physics, but the universe came into being in the Big Bang. The mass and energy that was created with the universe at the Big Bang can’t be created or destroyed.
Time as we understand it starts with the Big Bang.
Scientists don’t say that.
Both of them are in the general field of explaining the universe, but they do it in very different ways and their paths have diversed further and further over the centuries. That’s partly because science is a method of inquiry and religion essentially starts with the answer. Physicists are looking into questions - like how The Big Bang happened, why matter has mass, why anything is here at all - and looking to create theories that hold up to logical scrutiny and testing, and actually answer the questions rather than asserting the answer and forestalling further discussion. The religious answer tends to be “God did it, the end, and we’re not supposed to understand how.” People with that attitude often go on to say that we should stop asking questions because questions take time away from thinking about God, and anybody who wants us to think about a solution that doesn’t require God is evil.
So wait is your argument that theory of conservation of energy and mass existed at all times or are you arguing that it existed upon the occurence of the big bang?
So did the big bang itself obey the conservation of energy and mass or did it just make the theories.
interesting if the big bang itself did not obey the conservation of energy or mass then where did it come from or why did it blow up?
Should we rewrite history as “in the beginning there was nothing…then it blew up for some apparent reason.”
Like I was saying, we’re getting to the limits of my knowledge about physics. I’ll just link to this. The general idea is that the Big Bang (and the universe) obeyed those laws.
It didn’t “blow up.” That’s a misunderstanding of what the Big Bang is. It’s not an explosion. It was the rapid expansion of matter and of space itself. As for where it came from- physicists are working on that.
That’s how the Bible goes, not history.
but that doesn’t explain the question. Your argument is “Theists have the additional problem of explaining how God exists if God created the universe.”
but wouldn’t scientists have the same issue as well? Mass cannot be created nor destroyed. The same with energy. So how did it all get here?
I hear the logic that god has to be created by somebody but yet scientists have the same problem. If the theory is everything has been here since now and forever, how did it get here?
I notice you haven’t gotten around to answering that one either. 
As I said, this is a problem physicists are working on. Quoting from the article I linked to:
That was my point: everybody faces the problem of explaining how the universe got here (I didn’t say science had all the answers there). People who believe God put the universe here have to explain how God got here.
That’s really not the theory. Before the Big Bang a lot of people believed in what was called the Steady State universe - the idea that the universe had always existed and looked pretty much like it does now. Thanks to advances in technology, we can see that’s not the case, and it’s evident the universe began around 13.7 billion years ago.
as to your earlier quote, you only mention that theists have an additional hurdle to prove how god created the universe and who created god. You said nothing about scientists having this extra hurdle. That’s why I’m clamping down on you