Thursday, April 17, 2008
God's Mysterious Existence
If we see a cathedral, we assume that it was built by people like us, and since we are acquainted with people, we can assume that the cathedral designer and builder also had loves and hates, hopes, fears, bodily needs like food and sex. But we have never met anyone who designed and created a galaxy. We cannot assume that it still alive, or conscious, or indeed, that it is a spirit without end or a being without a beginning. Much less do we have a right to assume that it too has loves, hates, orgasms, or involved with stupid politics, or with stupid religion that’s keeping our world poor, sick, insane, and backward. In the meantime, a cathedral is nothing but a monument to human stupidity. Poch Suzara
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2 comments:
Indeed anthropomorphism is a pitfall that all traditional supernaturalisms had fallen for. They had projected human characteristics onto the beings they assumed inhabit the heavens.
One fallacy of believers is to claim that the universe was created by some super being. But every cause that predates the arrival of hominids is naturalistic and physical. There is no known cause that is supernatural. The earth and all the planets were created naturally. The elements and compounds that made up the cosmic dust (which became the solar system) was created in stars. These stars came about naturally as well. And everything else all the way to the Big Bang.
It does not follow that the universe (the Big Bang) had to be created by a being. It could've been caused by naturalistic causes as well. Or it could've been uncaused Physics is now beginning to shed light even on this.
According to physicist Victor Stenger given current observational astronomical data, the universe has a net total of zero energy. In other words the amount of "positive" energy and "negative" energy in the universe are the same and thus cancel out each other. This includes the energy equivalent of matter (we're all familiar with E = mcc, right? Here's an application of that.) One implication of this zero energy state of the universe as a whole is that it was possible for the universe to have come from literally nothing. Nothing was needed to create the universe. Our universe--everything in it, all matter, energy, space, time--could've come into its own without any outside force/energy/event/entity/or whatnot.
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