Q about arguments for God's existence.

[Catholic_Lady]

Gotcha.

That makes more sense. I thought yall were 100% certain there was no God. I can understand now. Thanks.

You're welcome

Of course, I only speak for myself. Any other atheist may tell you something entirely different about what they think. But I would wager most atheists would agree with what I said.

You are right, in the mathematical situation I gave, I do have an idea what the answer is, in that I am aware of sensible boundaries. In this case, the boundaries are non-negotiable so it's not the same as with God. That one was meant to be a warm-up which I should have made clearer!

I have absolutely no idea at all how many metaphysical snooker balls are floating around my head at any given time. I have no information about them, no way to detect them, and no way to tell them apart from nothing at all. But I can still say that the suggestion that I do have such snooker balls going round me is absurd, because there is no reason to believe it is true. It goes against everything I've ever experienced, and the person telling me this information clearly has no way to know either. It's more reasonable to assign a high probability (not certainty) to there not being such snooker balls.

Otherwise, if we say it's just 50:50 we have opened the door to everything. We now have to consider it even money that there are also metaphysical dragons, metaphysical drain inspectors, metaphysical manifestation of Beethoven ideas and metaphysical angry Giants also orbiting me all at once. To me, it's not reasonable or indeed useful to consider all those possibilities as 50:50.

Let's take it further. I have absolutely no idea if there's a metaphysical trap that has just appeared on the other side of the door which is going to kill me in some horrific way when I open it. No way I can possibly know. Do I call it 50:50? Or do I assign a very high probability to there not being such a trap, due to no evidence?

If we have to consider everything that we can't prove isn't true, we would never be able to act. We'd be forever paralysed by absurd possibilities.

Just to be clear, this isn't me saying "You are wrong", this is me explaining why I consider some ideas and explanations to be less probable than others, without having to assume absolute certainty about anything. Waiting for absolute certainty would also lead you to never act. It's a red herring.

Thanks for taking the time to explain that to me!

---

I did not know there were other options available that you guys considered. My apologies.

The thing is, the whole "everything came from nothing" bit is so wrong it doesn't even reflect a possible option, in my view. At least not one I could consider with any degree of seriousness, at the moment. It's an apologist tactic to make atheism look oversimplified and impossible, a way to turn opposition into a cartoon to be laughed at, not an accurate reflection of the state of affairs.

With regards to the options, there's a whole bunch of them, as there's a point in our universe's history where what we can understand about it breaks down, at the Planck time. Things are... different, there. Space and time occupy new states that we can't even begin to predict, at the moment of the big bang, we can't rely on anything we understand about this reality there. The short answer is that we don't know what's beyond it, but that appealing to the mechanics of causality in this universe is like appealing to mechanical engineering for knowledge of how to make a sandwich; the two aren't applicable to one another.

So it's not "everything came from nothing," because nothing does not accurately describe the state of affairs prior to this universe. In actual fact, it'd be more accurate to say that the universe came from everything, given that all that is within this universe was bound up in the matter of the big bang, in one form or another. Where did all that come from? That might not even be a question that makes sense, there. For something to come from somewhere assumes a level of causality that we can't even be sure existed prior to the big bang.

The point is, it's a big, complex topic with a bunch of qualifiers, that our best science doesn't even get yet. There's no need to simplify it any.

Thanks for clarifying!