(August 1, 2013 at 3:50 pm)John79 Wrote: This is a question i have wanted to ask atheists (and anyone else) for a long time. I would like to understand what you believe is the cause of the universe and the world's existance. Obviously Christians moslems and others believe in creation, and I think its true most or all atheists believe in a big bang theory.
i have read some about this theory and I can't find where the cause of it is explained. What do you think?
Gosh John, I don't know how everything started. I don't know if everything really ever had a beginning. The big bang marks the beginning of everything we can observe and everything we can know. But we don't know what lies beyond what we know nor do we know what the conditions were which preceded the big bang which has given rise to ourselves as well. But how reasonable does it seem to expect a rock solid answer to such questions?
Lets try understanding some easier phenomena just to get some sense of how reasonable it is to expect to get closure on the ultimate beginning of everything.
Now numbers aren't properly 'things' but they start out easy to understand and recede into the esoteric just as questions of beginnings can. So counting numbers are most obvious and easily understood as representing quantities. Negative numbers are more of a reach but most of us manage to get our heads around them. Fractions are cognitively more difficult as I witness every day in my line of work, and even more so when they are used as exponents. Most of my eighth graders usually manage to get this far with some degree of success. Fortunately making sense of imaginary numbers isn't something I have to work for because this would be even more beyond the reach of much of the general population.
Understanding the beginnings of things likewise starts out easy and can get much, much more difficult. A watch is obviously a mechanical device which requires a maker, whether human or robotic. How exactly a human being is assembled is not yet entirely understood. We understand something about genes and inheritance and dominance but how exactly the information contained in DNA leads to the assemblage of each and everyone of us in not fully understood. Yet it is reasonable to expect progress here. Likewise how organisms change overtime is pretty well understood by way of evolution. But abiogenesis is not fully understood. This too we expect to make more progress on. But EVERYTHING? It is a real conundrum to imagine where anything would have come from prior to there being anything else. However you have to resist thinking that attributing it to the action of something even more farfetched or magical really advances our understanding. If at any point you have to say it was a genie or a god you have basically quit trying to understand. Magic is the opposite of understanding. At the very least you must still try and understand how genies and gods began, and if you want to say they have just always been then you might as well say the same about the universe as we find it. Better to quit the pursuit of understanding honestly than to think citing magic has any value.
