I disagree and say creation alone is evidence. How good can mankind run if "nothing" created everything. That we have both man and woman to reproduce and have just the right living conditions on the planet to avoid extinction.

ok np, i gotta get goin too

Maybe you should study a book on evolution iamunLUCKY

BTW, there are billions of stars on the universe where the living conditions are not right.

99% of the species to ever exist on this plant are extinct. High fives all round to the great living conditions.

What does evolution have to do with cosmology?

Yes except you have no authority and no evidence, so your "I say" amounts to a total value of 0. DUCY?

There isn't - there's spacetime and as I understand it, the most commonly accepted theories do allow travel 'backwards in time'. However, that's not really important. The important thing is, even if the above were true, it doesn't answer the question as to why an infinite regress is impossible.

With regard to your thread title I think the best answer is 'mysteriously'. With regard to how 'quantum fluctuation' is an answer I'm afraid I have very limited knowledge, however as I understand the 'layman's account' (though read the bolded bit at the end):

Our belief in discrete, separate properties is an artifact of our perceptions and not some truth about reality. The most well known example being that momentum and position are not, in fact, two discrete properties but form a 'pair' which are irrevocably tied together. The more precise one of these values is, the less defined the other becomes. If a particle has an extremely tightly defined location in spacetime, it's momentum is always defined over a wide range. Note that this isn't anything about our knowledge of the momentum - it actually is a superposition of many different potential momentums, not some well defined specific one.

Time and Energy are another of these pairs - the more precisely defined a moment of time, the less defined is the quantity of energy (I suspect this is more properly regarded as within some region of spacetime). Thus, in a true vaccuum, with nothing there, positive amounts of energy can arise for small periods of time. The actual state of affairs is more complicated than this, since I'm still speaking as if the two concepts are discrete and unentangled properties, however I believe this effect has actually been observed - the existence of virtual particles (ie energy) in the form of matter-antimatter pairs popping into existence for brief periods before annihilating themselves.

One theory I've heard put forth is that this is part of an explanation as to how the universe came to exist. The energy within the universe 'arose' for a brief instant in an entirely natural way and then, through some unknown mechanism, the universe rapidly expanded 'interrupting' the process of creation and annihilation.

This is all half-remembered from a popular lecture in the 80s or 90s so I'm confident it's wrong in many important respects. The point is that the current scientific answer is 'there is no explanation, but there are a few lines of enquiry being pursued' (what I discussed above was one of them, I've heard of a couple more and no doubt there are many which have never made it into popular consciousness). One premise implicit in your question is that there must be an explanation available to us. (ie your approach seems basically to be "If there's no natural explanation, it must have been god"). I would reject this quite vehemently, why do you think we should expect to be able to find an explanation for the universe? Some further objections I would make would be to question whether God is an explanation anyhow - "God" doesn't say much more than 'quantum fluctuation' does it?

I'd also agree with Stu Pidasso. "Why do the laws of physics hold?" Is a more interesting (and even more inaccessible) question, in my view. With any luck someone will, someday prove that they arise as a necessary consequence of some obviously true fact. However, I'm not holding my breath. Maybe we'll never know.

Or we could just guess and say a god did it and he is infinite, why is he infinite you ask, cos he has to be in order for the guess to make sense.

Putting faith in its place video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wV_REEdvxo

Donald Rumsfeld's brilliant insight applies to just about any field of study!

nice

OP abandons thread in

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All energy that exists in the universe has always existed--there was never nothing. It was an infinitely dense point which contained all known energy and matter--this point exploded, the universe expanded, cooled and settled. Because of gravity, matter and dust began clustering to form galaxies. The presence of nitrogen and oxygen on the earth's atmosphere lead to the development of the first single celled organism. Yes, the conditions needed to be perfect for this to happen. But we are one of 250 billion galaxies; chances are the perfect conditions also occur somewhere else, and this has lead to life there, as well.

We think of time as linear only because that is how we perceive it. All time exists right now, just as all space does. You can either believe Einstein, or millions of rednecks across the mid-west who's answer lies a book written just 2000 years ago, by people less educated than you and I today, in a universe that's 14 billion years old.

Man isn't "running" all that well, if you haven't noticed. Our extinction is inevitable, just like 99% of all other species that have existed. The development of both male and female can be explained without the characters of Adam or Eve.

It's taking the "The chances of the conditions for life are 1/trillions" argument and saying, "Yeah, and there were trillions of opportunities." It's like buying 10,000,000 lottery tickets, winning on one of them, then talking about how lucky you are because winning the lottery is so unlikely.

So you have an ancestor that was a tiny single cell organism....which today has developed into a human being. I think thats run good. So much could have happend to interupt the living conditions leading to extinction, but it hasnt (yet). I find it hard to believe that it all happend by chance.

talking about human beings here

Do you consider yourself to be a vertebrate?

Its senseless to think that creation doesnt need a creator. The computer you own was manufactured as was your car and you kitchen table was made. You dont look at those things and say they may have been created from nothing, thats ridiculous. So why is it okay to say the universe was created from nothing?

Does it make sense to you that it was created in 6 days?

There isn't any evidence to support this. Big bang theory states the universe expanded from a hotter and more dense state. The "infinitely dense point" is the product of somebody's imagination and not the consequence of some scientific theory. The laws of physics as we currently know them break down before we can model the actual beginning of the universe.

Just sayin

More sense than the universe doing a magic trick that created the big bang

Do you also believe that God talked to Moses via the burning bush that was not consumed?

This is completely off topic. If you must know I'm Christian and believe the Bible is the inspired word of God.

Atheist tend to flee away from my initial question because its irrational to think such a thing, so i guess this was expected...

OK

Do you consider yourself to be a vertebrate?

Vertebrates originated about 525 million years ago during the Cambrian explosion, which was an event of massive rise in organism diversity that occurred in the Cambrian period.

nothing and everything are the same thing. 'something' is a part of the origin, and only the origin exists, and the origin, by nature is infinitely nothing and so still infinite. When there is infinity, there is no such thing, as straight, so there we have cruves, and waves, and spirals,within the origin (the infinite point of nothingness) which is all everything is in its simplest form.

Try and figure out the yin and yang puzzle, the answer is there imo