Who created god?

[Gabriel Syme]

huh... my parents created me.
Their parents created them... and so on and so on...

Having possession of this naturalistic explanation, why do you require the assumption of a god thing to "create" humanity?

You are only describing the mechanics of procreation here - how life works. Looking back at previous generations gives us a chain of our personal ancestry, but it tells us nothing as to where humanity, life, everything came from to begin with, or why.

We know the Universe had a beginning (big bang) - mainly thanks to a Catholic priest, Georges Lemaitre, who was also an astronomer and professor of physics. Prior to him, scientists thought the Universe had always existed, ("Universe as God", if you will).

Selected quotes:

According to the Big Bang theory, the expansion of the observable universe began with the explosion of a single particle at a definite point in time. This startling idea first appeared in scientific form in 1931, in a paper by Georges Lemaître, a Belgian cosmologist and Catholic priest.

The theory, accepted by nearly all astronomers today, was a radical departure from scientific orthodoxy in the 1930s. Many astronomers at the time were still uncomfortable with the idea that the universe is expanding. That the entire observable universe of galaxies began with a bang seemed preposterous.

It is tempting to think that Lemaître’s deeply-held religious beliefs might have led him to the notion of a beginning of time. After all, the Judeo-Christian tradition had propagated a similar idea for millennia. (my edit - the similar idea being that the universe came into existence via a creation event).

Yet Lemaître clearly insisted that there was neither a connection nor a conflict between his religion and his science. Rather he kept them entirely separate, treating them as different, parallel interpretations of the world, both of which he believed with personal conviction. Indeed, when Pope Pius XII referred to the new theory of the origin of the universe as a scientific validation of the Catholic faith, Lemaître was rather alarmed

http://www.amnh.org/education/resources/...aitre.html

I like how he described how he thought of science and religion, as "parallel interpretations of the world". Of course they are. More crudely, I suppose you could say that "science = how, religion = why".

Anyway, you can only keep deferring the question of our origins back to the big bang, and there you must finally confront it. It is not (should not be) intellectually satisfying to the free thinker to simply stop at the big bang and wonder no more.

In addition to knowing how things happened, we should also seek to discover/understand why they happened, because there are massive implications from this: eg how we regard and understand ourselves as human beings, our priorities, our consideration of what life means, the types of lives we lead etc etc.

Thinking about the big bang:

- something cannot come from nothing, basic logic

- even the laws of science require an environment to exist in

- whatever stimulus caused the big bang must have come from outside our own universe, given our own universe didn't exist yet.

And every argument which states the universe / life / whatever "just exists" is always infinitely less plausible than "God" "just existing".

Cheers
GS