A question to all atheists!

[LadyForCamus]

You apparently aren't even aware of your implicit outdated/inconsistent assumptions - if you ask me whether I think the natural world has always existed or not, you are already assuming an eternal and linear timeline which is independent of the natural world. So, you are either begging the question or saying something inconsistent.


My position is that contemporary scientific evidence strongly suggests that your hypothetical is not a consistent question that can be answered because time, as a part of spacetime, is a dynamic object with an "ontological status" on par with the contents of the universe (matter, radiation), therefore constitutes a piece of the natural world. Therefore, if time exists as we know it, the natural world exists automatically.

So if the natural world didn’t exist, then time wouldn’t exist. Which is what I’ve been saying.
 
So do you believe there was never a state of affairs where there was no natural world? If so, then you believe time, including the natural world, has always existed. Therefore, the natural world is past-eternal. Which is what I've been saying is the most logical explanation (if you're atheist).
 
If you don’t agree with the above then I don’t know what you’re saying. It sounds like you’ve been reading and listening to things that are over your head, that you don’t completely understand, and now you’re just repeating them. Sort of like how a parrot can repeat human language without knowing what it's saying.

There's also holes in the idea of time being part of the natural world, but I won't get into that. Let's just assume for the sake of discussion that time is part of the natural world so if the natural world doesn't exist, then time doesn't exist. So if the natural world has always existed, then time, along with the natural world, has always existed.

So do you believe the natural world has always existed? That there was never a state of affairs (hopefully you know what this means) where there was no natural world?

Alex is a physicist, you dolt. You're the one who is listening to explanations beyond your ability to comprehend.