this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2023
150 points (79.8% liked)
Asklemmy
43786 readers
959 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy π
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Yes. (Jewish)
If there is a cake there must be a baker
A baker. Pay attention.
There's the law of conservation of energy: energy can't be created nor destroyed. Then how did we get the initial energy? The laws of physics must have been violated by some kind of god
No. Conservation of mass and energy only prohibit the total mount of mass and energy changing. The universe could have always existed with that mass and energy. We have good evidence that a lot of mass and energy was spread out by the expansion of a much smaller universe around 13.8 billion years ago, but we don't know what the universe was like before that, it could have always existed, or it could have been formed by the collapse of another universe, we don't know for sure.
Anyway, the laws of physics are just empirical observations, they have been proven wrong before. Einstein's general relativity disagrees with Newton's laws of motion and, further study reveled that Newton was (very subtly under normal conditions) wrong.
If you know the math you know that Newton was in fact not wrong, but merely incomplete. Einstein merely added one addendum, which for Newtons experiments was always zero (for all practical purposes) anyway, so in his empirical setting he was as right as he could possibly get.
I think itβs a misrepresentation to call Newtonian physics βwrongβ
The problem with this reasoning is that it assumes 'nothingness' as a default state, despite the fact that nothingness seems to be a philosophical concept incapable of actually existing (even in a vacuum there's zero point energy).
So "how did we get something from nothing" necessitates the task of proving a plausible case for nothingness as an initial state.
And the answer of 'God' as a mechanism just kicks the can up the road, as then you are faced with the question of what created God.
If you claim eternal preexistence of God, then you've landed at the same rejection of nothingness as an initial state just with unnecessary extra steps.
Wrong, it was GodGod
Eh. Humans have (confidently and incorrectly) assumed such causal links for millenia. There's thunder, so there must be a thunder god. There's a sun in the sky, so someone must have put it there. There's people, so someone must have build them from clay.
What we could conclude logically: There is something - so something, somehow, once began.
That's it. It's also kind of recursive. It's factual, but there isn't anything meaningful inevitably following from this.
And everything else is an assumption.
You can say "I chose to believe that this somehow was a someone." You could decide to believe that there was a personal entity as a single cause for all that is. Someone who had somewhat of a consciousness, who willingly and deliberately created everything. You could assume that this someone was eternal and all-powerful and therefore later on or even until right now still alive/active. You could speculate about this entity being interested in creating a specific planet with a very specific ecosystem. You could ponder whether this entiry would be interested enough in one species within this ecosystem to watch, influence, and even hold something like a relationship with them.
A bit far fetched, but sure. You wouldn't be the first one to assume all these from a simple "There is a cake".
Except for the divine cake. That one just always existed because I say so.