Quote:
Originally Posted by walkby
I mean when it comes to God it's so reasonable that it's worth taking seriously.
If itÂ’s so reasonable, then please explain it to me in a rational way. If you are going to start quoting books written thousands of years ago, donÂ’t bother - we will just be talking past each other.
In point of fact, belief in God is IMO quite the opposite of reasonable. Take the topic of this thread - can something come from nothing? The theist says that belief in God is reasonable because something cannot come from nothing. The question I then have is “Is God something?” This leads the theist to an inescapable dilemma. If the answer is no, then God is nothing and cannot be invoked to explain the existence of the universe - something cannot come from nothing. If the answer is yes, then God is a something. But something cannot come from nothing, so where did God come from? Did God come from “Uber-God” who created our God? Maybe, but then that just pushes the dilemma back to “Uber-God” and obviously leads to infinite regress of more and more powerful deities invoked solely to create other lesser ones.
God has always been here. ThatÂ’s the typical theist answer. But is that really a reasonable one? The atheistic alternative seems more reasonable when considering the properties of the entities involved. The atheistic answer is that something has always existed, namely an energy field (usually referred to as an inflation field in modern cosmology). This field, like all fields is not unchanging but subject to quantum fluctuations. One such fluctuation led to a state where an exponential inflation of space occurred and the energy of the field was converted to radiation and matter.
If “God has always existed” is reasonable, then how is “a field has always existed” less so? The field need not have any of the special properties that God does, like intelligence, omnipotence, etc. The field only needs to exist. It seems more likely and reasonable to think that there is an eternally existing entity without any special properties than that there is such an entity that must have very special properties