Atheists’ Affirmative Beliefs Your friend has rejected religion. There is not a God, he believes. There is not a Creator of the universe. There is not a Sustainer of it. There is not a God present among us in some way. There is not a God component to our conscious self-awareness. There is not a transcendent […]
Read more...Tag: something from nothing
Philosophy Presented as Science
More Confusion about “Nothing” In the post First Cause, we mentioned a book by Lawrence Krauss, A Universe from Nothing, (Free Press 2012). The basic point of the post was that Krauss seemed not to have adequately grasped what “nothing” is, when he argued that material things came from nothing. One has to read more […]
Read more...First Cause
Does the very existence of physical things mean there is a God? Uncaused Cause The stuff of the universe had to have come from somewhere. One can trace one’s own being to one’s parents, and their parents before them, and so on. But where did the first parents come from? And whether those first parents […]
Read more...“Nothing” Is Not Religious Neutrality
We considered the concept of “nothing,” for example in Is Nothing Something, and in It’s Not Nothing. Instead of conceiving of truly nothing, we tend to think instead of a something. That something may be simple or minimal or invisible or insubstantial, but it is not nothing. Something from Nothing The tendency to mis-conceive nothing […]
Read more...Agnosticism and Belief in Nothing
Physics If we begin to think of “nothing” as being, really, some sort of something, then we can convince ourselves that all of material reality came into being spontaneously. How? If the nothingness before material reality was really a kind-of-sort-of something, then the present universe could be only the result of a physical phase transition. […]
Read more...Review: God—The Failed Hypothesis, by Victor Stenger
This book is exasperating, because Stenger sets up a meta-analysis that games the entire discussion. Having built for himself the restrictive form in which his reasoning is to be poured, he ends up with exactly the structure he set out to build. The trouble is that it defies reason, not to mention, in many instances, […]
Read more...It’s not “nothing.”
The jump to materialism Here’s a curious phenomenon. Many Americans today come from a Christian background but become disaffected by it, for one reason or another, and then find “permission” in the culture to reject it altogether, saying they’re now atheists. Didn’t they skip a step? If we’re to come off the claims of Christianity […]
Read more...Is nothing something?
Analogy: the absence of light You’re in a deep cave. The tour guide directs you and those with you to find a comfortable place to stand, or lean, and to get ready for the sensation of total darkness. Then he switches off the lights. The darkness is so complete that you imagine it to have […]
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