(December 5, 2018 at 7:26 am)Cherub786 Wrote:(December 5, 2018 at 7:22 am)Jehanne Wrote: I think that you are taking Dawkins out of context. Read his The God Delusion sometime, which I just saw on the shelves of Barnes & Noble here recently!
As for the Universe being "not eternal", if you read Fundamentals of Physics by Halliday, Resnick and Walker (voted by the APS as being the greatest undergraduate physics textbook of the 20th century), they say that speculating what came "before" the Big Bang is a meaningless question, that is, nothing came before the Big Bang. This is, of course, a very old observation.
That's what I've been saying all along. The universe had a beginning,
The universe as we know it had a beginning at the big bang; we do not know whether the matter.energy that makes up the universe began then or not.
Quote:and is therefore finite,
That does not follow. It has a boundary in spacetime at one end but that doesn't make it finite. The set of positive numbers is bounded at the lower end but still infinite.
Quote:and before it there was nothing, so the universe came from ex nihilo.
That has not yet been demonstrated, only asserted. Some physicists/cosmologists are proposing it but it is still speculative as far as I have seen.
Quote:The question I'm posing is what caused it to come into existence and how.
The "cause" of the big bang is unknown, and there may be none. You can't extrapolate the laws from within this universe and apply them to something that is completely undefined.
Atheism: it's not just for communists any more!