(September 14, 2012 at 3:34 am)Tobie Wrote:(September 13, 2012 at 8:26 pm)Lion IRC Wrote: Feel better now?
I hear atheists asserting that the universe is a - no God required - perpetual motion machine.
What proof should I demand from them that this assertion is true?
Within modern science, the universe doesn't require a god to have started. It's called Big Bang theory. As for the perpetual motion machine - I assume you mean the constantly expanding size of the universe (which has swathes of evidence, and last years Nobel Prize for Physics was given to some scientists that showed the universe was expanding at an accelerating rate), which is not perpetual motion, because it is "powered" by something called Vacuum Energy - this problem hasn't actually been solved satisfactorily yet - The Cosmological Constant problem is one of the biggest questions for modern physicists, so much so that whomever solves it is pretty much guaranteed a Nobel Prize.
I read somewhere that the cosmological constant argument is no big deal. Apparently, it's not as tough as it seems. For starters, the universe could have come and gone billions of times in the past and each time, it didn't meet the constant and so there was no viable life in it. But whenever the constants are met, and there is life in the universe, someone will always say the cosmological constant proves that there is God.
Also, another possibility is even without the constants, all is not lost. It's just that we may get a universe that's quite unlike what we can imagine but it may very well lead to something we really don't know. And the folks in that WEIRD universe will say if their constants aren't met, there wouldn't be a viable universe.
So, I really think the cosmological constant argument is bunkum if it's going to be used to support the existence of a God.
