Hi everyone, 

So last night, before falling asleep, I thought of a potential argument for the existence of God (and this isn't the reason why I believe in God), and would like to see feedback on whether it's a good argument or not and why. So this is how it goes:

The universe had a beginning. Therefore there can be only two possibilities: either it was created from nothing, or it created itself. The universe couldn't have created itself because it was nonexistent before its creation. And if it was created from nothing, because nothing existed, there were no factors to narrow down creation to a certain kind of thing, and thus nothingness had an infinite amount of options to choose from to create something. We know that it did choose a particular one. Therefore, by choosing a particular one, it (nothingness) discarded all the other options. Hence, nothingness has an inherent quality of picking certain things and not picking others, and also the power to create its chosen option. But how can nothingness have such qualities of power and choosiness; it is nothing; it  has no quality or disposition! If nothingness does indeed have these qualities, then it is no longer nothing; it would be a powerful, choosy being that has the ability to choose freely (because there are no factors to limit its choice) and hence has a free will, and is uncreated. Sounds a lot like God!

Keep in mind that the resulting "nothingness" with its mentioned qualities does seem to match with the Islamic concept of God, because in Shia Islam, Allah (God) is nothing but His Qualities; His Qualities are Him, and are His Essence.

(June 17, 2015 at 3:24 pm)TheMuslim Wrote: The universe had a beginning. Therefore there can be only three possibilities: either it was created from nothing, it created itself, or God created it (an Uncreated, Eternal, Self-Subsisting, Willing, Powerful Being).

Leaves out that nobody actual knows or claims to know what was before the big bang and what is beyond our known universe.

(June 17, 2015 at 3:24 pm)TheMuslim Wrote: The universe had a beginning.

You're off to a bad start. We don't know anything about the state of the universe before the Plank era, so any assertions you make about it are going to be entirely untestable and unverified.

Quote:Therefore there can be only three possibilities: either it was created from nothing, it created itself, or God created it (an Uncreated, Eternal, Self-Subsisting, Willing, Powerful Being).

How do you know those are the only 3 possibilities?

Quote:The universe couldn't have created itself because it was nonexistent before its creation.

Another flat assertion. We don't know anything about the universe before the Plank era, and I don't know of any accepted theory in science that asserts there was 'nothing' before the universe, especially because 'nothing' means about a dozen different things depending on its usage.

Quote:And if it was created from nothing, because nothing existed, there were no factors to narrow down creation to a certain kind of thing, and thus nothingness had an infinite amount of options to choose from to create something.

More of the same vapidity.

Quote:We know that it did choose a particular one. Therefore, by choosing a particular one, it (nothingness) discarded all the other options. Hence, nothingness has an inherent quality of picking certain things and not picking others, and also the power to create its chosen option. But how can nothingness have such qualities of power and choosiness; it is nothing; it  has no quality or disposition! If nothingness does indeed have these qualities, then it is no longer nothing; it would be a powerful, choosy being that has the ability to choose freely (because there are no factors to limit its choice) and hence has a free will, and is uncreated. Sounds a lot like God!

Keep in mind that the resulting "nothingness" with its mentioned qualities does seem to match with the Islamic concept of God, because in Shia Islam, Allah (God) is nothing but His Qualities; His Qualities are Him, and are His Essence.

Your entire 'argument' is based off of completely baseless assertions about the origin of the universe. You've literally started with one massive, untestable presupposition and then keep tacking more and more additional untestable presuppositions onto it.

Nothing in your argument can be tested, nothing in your argument can be measured or examined, nothing in your argument can be used as a basis for further argument.

Your argument kinda sucks. It's some Kalam-on-steroids bullshit with about as many bald proclamations of knowledge as I've seen in such a short space.

You apparently assume that linear continuous time is something that exists independently from the universe. Otherwise, an act of creation before the universe exists is not defined. This is not justified as we know that time and space are not separate, but intimately related. They are probably subject to quantum effects. Your intuitions about causality are not applicable to the early universe.

More Kalam? *cries*

Oh good, another lazy repetition of Kalam, only this time with added false dichotomy!

Yeah, we don't know how the universe "began" or if that notion even makes sense. No one knows. Anything at all is speculation at this point.

Based on you guys' feedback, your main objection is to the statement "The universe had a beginning."

Anything that moves must rationally have a beginning, because if there was an infinite amount of time before a certain movement, then that movement would never come to be (because you would have to go through an infinite number of years before you 'reached' the movement). So moving objects (including our universe) couldn't have existed forever. They must have began.

Apart from this, most empirical evidence suggests that the universe had a beginning, such as the Second Law of Thermodynamics, expansion of the universe, regularity of cosmic microwave background, and data from the BICEP2 (including direct evidence of gravitational waves). Most physicists and cosmologists agree that the universe did have a beginning. As Dr. Pluijm of the Universtiy of Michigan said, "The scientific evidence is now overwhelming that the Universe began with a 'Big Bang' about 15 billion years ago. The Big Bang theory is the most widely accepted theory of the creation of the Universe." Dr. Louis Clavelli, professor of physics at the University of Alabama, similarly reaffirms: "A large body of astrophysical observations now clearly points to a beginning for our universe about 15 billion years ago in a cataclysmic outpouring of elementary particles." Stephen Hawkings, after giving a lecture on time, said: "The conclusion of this lecture is that the universe has not existed forever. Rather, the universe, and time itself, had a beginning in the Big Bang, about 15 billion years ago."

Have you considered the possibility of an 'oscillating' universe?  That is, a Big Bang, followed some billions of years later by a Big Crunch, with everything collapsing into a singularity.  After an unspecified interval, the singularity expands into a new universe, and so on, ad infinitum.

I'm unaware if the evidence supports such a scenario (I'm not a physicist), but it at the very least, it pretty neatly addresses the problem of whether the universe had a beginning:  Our universe may have, but we might conceivably be the latest in an infinitely old string of universeS.

Boru

(June 17, 2015 at 6:03 pm)TheMuslim Wrote: Based on you guys' feedback, your main objection is to the statement "The universe had a beginning."

Anything that moves must rationally have a beginning, because if there was an infinite amount of time before a certain movement, then that movement would never come to be (because you would have to go through an infinite number of years before you 'reached' the movement). So moving objects (including our universe) couldn't have existed forever. They must have began.

Apart from this, most empirical evidence suggests that the universe had a beginning, such as the Second Law of Thermodynamics, expansion of the universe, regularity of cosmic microwave background, and data from the BICEP2 (including direct evidence of gravitational waves). Most physicists and cosmologists agree that the universe did have a beginning. As Dr. Pluijm of the Universtiy of Michigan said, "The scientific evidence is now overwhelming that the Universe began with a 'Big Bang' about 15 billion years ago. The Big Bang theory is the most widely accepted theory of the creation of the Universe." Dr. Louis Clavelli, professor of physics at the University of Alabama, similarly reaffirms: "A large body of astrophysical observations now clearly points to a beginning for our universe about 15 billion years ago in a cataclysmic outpouring of elementary particles." Stephen Hawkings, after giving a lecture on time, said: "The conclusion of this lecture is that the universe has not existed forever. Rather, the universe, and time itself, had a beginning in the Big Bang, about 15 billion years ago."

The universe had a beginning.

Prove it.

Let me jump to the end. You can't. Your argument is based on a fallacy of proof by assertion, and can thus be discounted by that alone.

You are conflating terms in addition. 'A beginning' is incoherent and nonsensical when we consider a pre-big bang universe. Why? Read the above.

And even if it did have a beginning, and even if this beginning was a being of somesort, still doesn't mean you're right and that it was your particular plagiarized Jewish God.