Its not really a fair comparison. String theory explains the nature creation, but it doesn't explain anything about the first principles on which it is derived. God, by definition, is the first principle on which everything is derived. So whether you are a theist or an atheist your world veiw rests on first principles which have no explaination whatsoever.

At best all I think you can claim is that string theory and emergent complexity are better explainations for the current state of affairs then religious accounts of creation. But you can't really substitute string theory for God any more then you can say string theory is the first principle upon which it itself is built.

Yea thats really all i was going for, I wasn't trying to say it is neccesarily more likely to be true. I might say, however, that it is more likely to be deemed true or false than God is, simply because few are actually looking for god in the sense of something that is objectively present.

David, I am not arguing in this thread(or forum for that matter) the case for any particular religion but rather I try to make a case for an intelligent conscious creator.

Also a bad explanation, I really suggest you read the Deutsch book.

I'm thinking about it. I looked it up and it seems like it would be an interesting read.

Krauss addresses this objection at about the 48:30 mark:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUe0_4rdj0U

"The definition of nothing for theologians is 'that from which only God can create something'."

Except he is wrong. Most theologians would define "nothing" in the traditional philosphical sense....i.e. nothing = not anything.

If he is claiming "The definition of nothing for theologians is 'that from which only God can create something" then he is obviously making a straw man argument and it should be immeadiately dissmissed as such.

Could be wrong here, but my guess would be that you are taking this too literaly. It seems like he's making on comment on the fact that, while Theists often use the argument "something can't come from nothing" as a premise for the existence of god, God himself would have had to create the universe out of nothing. So, something can be created out of nothing, but only god can do it... which I assume he would call special pleading

The claim, "something can't come from nothing", is a statement about the apparent necessity of a pre-existing frame work for something to exist. In the case of theology that pre-existing frame work is thought to be God. In the case Lawrence Krauss presents that pre-existing frame work consist of certain physical laws. For instance gravity is something and if you removed that something from the framework Krauss's idea falls apart completely.

Neither Krauss nor a theologian can ever credibly claim the universe came from nothing. Krauss should have named his book, "A Universe from Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity". It wouldn't have sold as many copies but at least the title would have been more accurate.

It pays to slow down and think about what you are doing. I would think that if your spelling improved you reasoning couldn't get worse. You know.. by building the habit/virtue of thinking things through before you blurt out a response.. The fact that you misspell the same word repeatedly shows that you incoporate wrong things into your mind without much hesistation and believe them to be true.

This is not an either/or question--I would say the correct answer is that both (A) and (B) are correct.

Same here.

You claimed above that the god hypothesis was "elegant and explanatory," but I don't see how. Have we figured out how to quantify the god hypothesis? Test for consequences? Have we even made any significant advances in this idea since the medieval period?

So you're now saying that when theologians (including WLC) claim that God created the universe out of nothing, that they are also misusing the idea of "nothing"? So what you're saying is not that Krauss is ignorantly going against some philosophical/theological notion of "nothing," but that he is going against the idea of nothing as you mean it.

I never made any comments about "God creating the universe out of nothing". What I said was this:

I would think WLC would agree with me that God is not nothing...that God is a something....that the pre-existing framework from whence the universe came is God.

Krauss and Dawkins discuss this, but much like you guys, they don't get very far.

It's just not an interesting debate, there's too much unknown and you're just going in circles.

I have no doubt that Krauss is a smart guy and a good scientist, but this whole issue over the meaning of nothing is almost comical. Nothing means "nothing," as in "the absence of anything." There is nothing theological or philosophical about it. It is a kindergarten level basic definition. If you ask me what I had for lunch, and I answered "nothing," you would not ask how it tasted. It means I did not eat anything for lunch.

Under this basic definition, quantum vacuum energy is clearly not "nothing." End of story. Krauss' spin on this is so silly it is somewhat painful to read.

I think Krauss's point is that the energy you're referring to itself arises from nothing, not just that other things arise from that energy.

No, that's not his point. The main premise of his book is that the universe spontaneously appeared in the so-called "nothingness" that is quantum vacuum energy. But his glaring problem is that quantum vacuum energy is not "nothing." If he believed that the energy itself came into existence from nothing (literal, actual, nothing), then Stu is correct, Krauss would only be helping to prove the Kalam cosmological argument.

That isn't what he says in the video. He says that particles arise from a zero energy state, and that the particles themselves have energy which is attributed to their rest mass, and that this energy is exactly cancelled out by the negative energy from gravity, which satisfies energy conservation. However, I can't comment any further until I've read the book like you have.

When world-class physicists start asking for advice from philosophers, I'll assume philosophers have something relevant to say about cosmology. Not until then.

I'm not talking about your own inscrutable views--I'm talking about whether Krauss is using "nothing" in some obviously incorrect or misleading way. If you think that his usage is the same as that of theologians when they claim that God created the universe out of nothing, then I'm going to take it that his usage is fairly standard and so Craig's criticism is (according to you) incorrect.

I'm pretty sure that Craig accepts the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, so yeah, he would say that the universe was created out of nothing.

I haven't read Krauss's book, so I'm not going to comment more on his usage of "nothing," but I think the assumption that should be challenged here is that what we should be looking for in a theory of the origin of the universe is how it came from nothing. In fact, we have no good reason to suppose that the starting point for the universe, if there is a starting point, was the null set. This seems to me more a hangover from Christian doctrines of creation than any kind of scientific or philosophical necessity. For instance, you mostly see the opposite assumption in ancient Greek philosophy and Indian philosophy.

I think the problem is that a bunch of people here seem to think that the question of the universe's origin is somehow (a) not a cosmology/physics question and (b) actually a philosophical question.

This view seems weird to me just as a matter of professional disciplines. Most of the philosophers I know, with the exception of a few that hang out in the philosophy of religion ghetto, view this question (if sensible) as clearly a scientific issue with little to be added by philosophers. And this makes sense to me. After all, the origin of the cosmos would seem most naturally to fall under the ambit of those who most directly study the nature of the cosmos--i.e. cosmologists and physicists.

We do have good reason. Not that it is settled but the borde-guth-vilenkin theorem gives us good reason to believe that the universe is past incomplete.

But no one here is questioning the physics presented in the book. So I am not sure where your first statement is coming from.

Craig would claim the universe had a cause. Krauss would claim the laws of physics allow for the universe to just appear with no apparent cause.