(August 14, 2010 at 6:27 pm)Captain Scarlet Wrote: Cosmologists and physicists have calculated that the amount of matter and energy is matched by the amount of negative equivalents in the universe eg anti matter etc. So it could be that the net universe is nothing rather than something. Whilst there are a whole host of other defeaters for the cosmological argument, wouldn't this observation rather undermine any starting poistion for this argument as there was literally nothing for god to do?
A few important points:
1) Matter and Antimatter collisions do not result in 'nothing.' It results in energy. Neither particles are annihilated but rather converted into energy with 100% efficiency. When physicists talk of energy, energy is still considered 'something' and not 'nothing.' More to the point, all of the energy that was created during the big bang is still around in one form or another.
2) There is a laboratory-confirmed study stating that there is a discrepancy between the formation of matter and anti-matter in matter's favor, which is why the universe is not 100% energy intsead of merely being mostly energy. In essence, we now understand why the universe has matter.
3) The estimated total mass-energy of the entire observable universe is 4 x 10^69 joules, not zero.
4) It has never been observed or experimentally confirmed that energy or matter can be created from nothing, nor has it been confirmed that the opposite can happen. Thus, the first law of thermodynamics: energy cannot be created or destroyed; it only changes forms. On another point, the theory of relativity states that matter and energy are equivelent and anti-matter is another kind of matter.
In conclusion, you're incorrect on all points.
If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach in the public schools, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools and next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers...
Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers; tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth centry when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind. ~Clarence Darrow, at the Scopes Monkey Trial, 1925
Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first. ~Ronald Reagan
Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers; tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth centry when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind. ~Clarence Darrow, at the Scopes Monkey Trial, 1925
Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first. ~Ronald Reagan
