RE: Atheism and the existence of peanut butter
September 17, 2021 at 11:41 am
(This post was last modified: September 17, 2021 at 11:41 am by Fake Messiah.)
(September 17, 2021 at 11:22 am)polymath257 Wrote: Precisely. Usually that phrase means something along the lines of 'at one point, it did not exist, and at a later it did because of some process'.
That is manifestly NOT the case with the universe. Again, since time is part of the universe and causality depends on time, there was no *time* when the universe did not exist.
And isn't the big bang just the point where the known laws of physics started working, meaning that it doesn't mean that there was nothing before the big bang, it's just that we can't know because the known laws of physics weren't working yet?
Like the center of the Black Hole, which is a place where all laws of physics completely break down so it is unknown what is going on there, but it exists, nevertheless. It's not nothing.
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"