Origin of Matter

[LadyForCamus]

Dear RedSox,

The question concerning the origin of matter is a very interesting one which is hotly debated in the scientific community. However, I get the impression that your question, the way it is presented, does not really touch upon this debate but tries to rather superficially short-cut to a philosophical conclusion. I do not know any meaningful definitions of "paranormal" and "supernatural" that can be used in such a debate, and I am inclined to say that the origin of matter is by definition natural.

Thanks, downbeat.  I hear ya on whatever the origin of matter being natural.  Can you expand on that given the two questions here:
(1) Wouldn’t matter being the origin violate the theory that matter can neither be created nor destroyed in a closed system… and only transferred across open systems?  Am I incorrectly understanding that theory... I may very well be.
 
(2) Additionally, if matter is the origin of matter then what is the origin of the earliest matter that ever existed… would it be infinite?  Not talking about the universe or planets here, just matter itself.

Allow me to chime in here.

Now, the principle that matter cannot be created or destroyed does not exist - it is patently untrue since other forms of energy can be converted into matter easily and vice versa. What you are looking for is probably the principle that energy is conserved. This is largely true in nature on short time spans and small scales - the principle of  conservation of energy for example forces us to convert other forms of energy into a usable form to keep civilization going rather than have it come out of a perpetual motion machine.

That being said, conservation of energy is not so straightforward when we look at the cosmos at large scales, or even the universe as a whole. If you for example send out a light beam to a remote place, it will have lost a little bit of energy when it gets there because of universal expansion and the consequent red shift. This loss is not noticeable in everyday life because the Hubble parameter is so tiny, but it is very noticeable when we look deep into the universe and consider cosmological time scales of billions of years. So energy is not conserved in the simplest sense once you take the dynamics of space-time into account. But - people have  discovered an extended concept of energy which would be conserved again: one has to take the curvature of space-time into account as a form of energy, and if one does that correctly, the loss of energy from cosmological red shift is compensated by space-time gaining a bit of energy.

I think you can already see that in extreme conditions as we expect them to be present in the early universe, when space and time themselves are affected by quantum fluctuations and can undergo extreme changes, the issue of conservation of energy is far from clear-cut. But even in the regime where it is still applicable, there is an astonishing possibility: the geometry of space-time generally carries negative energy, and it is very well possible that the total energy of the contents of the universe and space-time itself is zero. In this case, we wouldn't even have to account for the origin of energy, because the universe does not contain net energy. While this is still an active field of research, and many questions are far from settled, I hope that you at least get a first impression that the somewhat naive philosophical musings about time and causality which many apologists engage in are often painfully stuck with outdated  simplistic notions of cosmology and physics.

p.s. and before you drag out the BGV theorem as W. L. Craig likes to do like the dishonest fool he is even after he was corrected by experts, no, it doesn't prove that the universe must have been created.

AK!  Can you expand a little on this BGV theorem (for dummies like me) and how, exactly, creationists try to use it to argue god?  I'm interested, and I tried reading through the Wiki entry but it went way over my head.  Like, WAY up there, lol.