Christians, what is your VERY BEST arguments for the existence of God?

[tavarish]

The standard big bang model or the lambda-CDM model holds that about 13.7 billion years ago the universe started expanding in all directions from an infinitesimally small, infinitely dense point known as a singularity. All of space-time and all it contains including energy/matter had its origin in this explosion (by explosion I mean the abrupt appearance of expanding space time, not the chaos seen in an atomic bomb explosion) see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambda-CDM_model. According to this model space-time began with the singularity, the model fails to address what happens prior to t=10^-43 s, because beyond that point all we are left with is speculation. But there is no doubt that the universe began to exist in scientists minds, since the universe began to exist it did not exist eternally:

Most cosmologists reject this alternative because of the severe problem of the second law of thermodynamics .Applied to the Universe as a whole, this law states that the cosmos is on a one-way slide towards a state of maximum disorder, or entropy. Irreversible changes, such as the gradual consumption of fuel by the Sun and stars, ensure that the Universe must eventually "run down" and exhaust its supplies of useful energy. It follows that the Universe cannot have been drawing on this finite stock of useful energy for all eternity.http://www.fortunecity.com/emachines/e11/86/daybegan.html

1. The Big Bang does not describe the singularity, as our understanding of it breaks down with our methodology. It only describes the sudden expansion.
2. Nothing does not mean absolutely nothing in the way you're thinking. I find it quite ironic that the second reference listed in your wikipedia article is from physicist Lawrence Krauss, and linked to a video I myself posted on this site. I suggest you check it out, it addresses this exact topic:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ImvlS8PLIo

[quote='roundsquare' pid='65840' dateline='1271850901']
If the universe began to exist so did its content (energy, and matter) this is a conclusion that seems rather axiomatic. Energy exists in a vacuum, in space, no space-time no energy, its a self-evident conclusion.

The following quote from Prof. Hawking further demonstrate what I have been saying about the big bang:

Http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/arch...verse.html
For thousands of years, people have wondered about the universe. Did it stretch out forever or was there a limit? And where did it all come from? Did the universe have a beginning, a moment of creation? Or had the universe existed forever? The debate between these two views raged for centuries without reaching any conclusions. Personally, I'm sure that the universe began with a hot Big Bang. But will it go on forever? If not, how will it end? I'm much less certain about that. The expansion of the universe spreads everything out, but gravity tries to pull it all back together again. Our destiny depends on which force will win." —Stephen Hawking
How did the universe really begin?
Most astronomers would say that the debate is now over: The universe started with a giant explosion, called the Big Bang. The big-bang theory got its start with the observations by Edwin Hubble that showed the universe to be expanding. If you imagine the history of the universe as a long-running movie, what happens when you show the movie in reverse? All the galaxies would move closer and closer together, until eventually they all get crushed together into one massive yet tiny sphere. It was just this sort of thinking that led to the concept of the Big Bang.
The Big Bang marks the instant at which the universe began, when space and time came into existence and all the matter in the cosmos started to expand. Amazingly, theorists have deduced the history of the universe dating back to just 10 -43 second (10 million trillion trillion trillionths of a second) after the Big Bang. Before this time all four fundamental forces—gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces—were unified, but physicists have yet to develop a workable theory that can describe these conditions.

I bolded an important bit.

Again, there is nothing that says that the universe (in some form, perhaps a superdense singularity or something else) did/did not exist in a timeless state. We cannot make the call. That is exactly my point. Not to mention the universe is taken as the universe as we know it, with physical laws that dictate how things within it react to each other. What is to say that it could not have functioned as a universe completely unlike our own, with different laws, or no laws at all?

I highly suggest you watch the video, as the "nothing" you're talking about is completely different from absolutely nothing.

Here's another interesting vid, dealing with the sum energy of the universe and origins using the lambda-CDM model:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Gy1e2olvMw



[quote='roundsquare' pid='65840' dateline='1271850901']
Hawking on the beginning.
Public Lectures - The Beginning of Time
In this lecture, I would like to discuss whether time itself has a beginning, and whether it will have an end. All the evidence seems to indicate, that the universe has not existed forever, but that it had a beginning, about 15 billion years ago. This is probably the most remarkable discovery of modern cosmology. Yet it is now taken for granted.

Yes, time had a beginning. I don't dispute that.

Of course that is its definition, but it is also a space-time boundary, because beyond it space-time discontinues.

according to the classical cosmological models, the universe began with the big bang, another space-time boundary, a singularity where all matter of the universe is compressed to infinitely high density.http://www.aei.mpg.de/einsteinOnline/en/navMeta/dictionary/s/index.html#singularity

Beyond an infinitely high density? I'll assume you know what infinity means.



[quote='roundsquare' pid='65840' dateline='1271850901']
Again you have drifted away on immaterial points, and in so doing you have missed the point that I tried to make that simultaneous causation is a reality, but if you arr dissatisfied with the first example, I can give you a couple more examples of simultaneous causation which do not rely on gravity, and here they are: pulling a spring, bending a ruler, the sensation caused by a fly coming to rest on your face, etc. As to the pillow example gravity isn't required for the simultaneous causation to hold, example an astronaut in space can jab the pillow and cause a depression, devoid of gravity. So again time poses no problem for the KCA. God created the universe at the same time as it came into existence, at t=0.

1. None of your examples are instantaneous, as they all function within TIME, as they are subject to physical laws in our universe. If I jab a pillow, it still takes time for the pillow to overcome inertia and start to depress. The depression is far from instantaneous, as you can sequence the events in such a way that you can verify them using the physical laws they are subject to. It also assumes that at one point in time, the pillow was not compressed, which can be demonstrated, something that is not possible with your kca assumption, as there was no time beforehand.
2. You again go on to the assertion that God created the universe as a huge assumption, without evidence or definition of such an entity.

Cause and effect are not dictated by physical laws, what physical law dictates the causal principle? Please fix my ignorance. I will address you design arguments as I get time, right now I am still a bit busy to forward a proper response to each and every point you raise.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causality_%28physics%29

An exceprt:

In physics it is useful to interpret certain terms of a physical theory as causes and other terms as effects. Thus, in classical (Newtonian) mechanics a cause may be represented by a force acting on a body, and an effect by the acceleration which follows as quantitatively explained by Newton's second law. For different physical theories the notions of cause and effect may be different. For instance, in Aristotelian physics the effect is not said to be acceleration but to be velocity (one must push a cart twice as hard in order to have its velocity doubled[3]). In the general theory of relativity, too, acceleration is not an effect (since it is not a generally relativistic vector); the general relativistic effects comparable to those of Newtonian mechanics are the deviations from geodesic motion in curved spacetime[4]