You were talking about all the basic chemical elements, which got me thinking about how the big bang left us pretty much a universe composed of hydrogen and that the heavier elements all came from stellar fusion, the ones heavier than iron only coming from supernovae, and that’s a pretty mind-blowinging cool concept, so I forgot about what you were saying.

Then I got thinking about how you went from “a cause” to “an intelligent first cause”, which got me confused because those seem like very different things to me, and then I wondered that since every thing has to have a cause, what was the cause of this “first cause” that you speak of, and then I just guessed it was turtles all the way down, which got me thinking about the turtle in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, and then I wondered whether you were asserting that god was, in fact a turtle, which I think, in retrospect, would explain a lot.

Then I got wondering why somebody would think that the answer “we’re not sure what caused the universe if even if there was a cause of it” requires more faith than the answer “I know exactly how the universe was created and it was god that did it”, and that the person who asserted that probably wasn’t thinking that clearly.

And then I got tired of typing.

Posted: January 8th 2011

See all questions answered by Eric_PK

What is a cause? It’s something that changes reality. The state of things after the cause is different from the state of things before the cause. To be a true cause a thing has to be close in time and space to the effect, otherwise it’s just co-incidence: the hammer has to hit the nail, the photon hit the atom.

Now take a look at intelligence. It’s one of the most important things in the universe. Intelligence can think, and plan, and so have intent and purpose. It’s taken a very long time for our intelligence to appear on this world, hundreds of millions of years of evolution, an uncountable sequence of causes and effects. We are latecomers on a world that has been filled with life for over three million millenia.

Intelligence is big, it’s full of thoughts and memories and skill of reasoning. Our brains have cosmic complexity: there are as many connections between cells in your head as stars in a thousand galaxies. If complexity was light, we would each be a supernova.

Intelligence takes power, as each thought is cause and effect racing through the synapses of a mind, and all such processing burns fuel to keep the neurons sparking in the vast neural networks that give sentience. The cause and effect only stops with death.

Let’s weave these strands together. Our energetic minds, full of potential intelligence, with thought (effect) following thought (cause) every instant, tries to think of origins. What do some of these minds come up with…

An intelligence that can’t involve cause and effect, because it is uncaused. An intelligence that had no origin, even though we know of the long evolution that produced ours. An intelligence that is vastly more complex that ours is, and yet which is supposed to be more reasonable as an explanation of origins than something unknown and yet infinitesimally small at the quantum level.

No, it doesn’t work, does it? Intelligence, with it’s thoughts and memories has to develop within time and space, and yet those have to be absent for the first cause, as if they were present, there would be no need for that cause.

Finally, an intelligence cannot be a first cause of anything, because intelligence itself involves cause and effect. There will always have to be a cause of the first thought, the first memory.

Posted: January 6th 2011

See all questions answered by Steve Zara

By saying that there is really only one basic chemical element: hydrogen. All of the others were formed when massive amounts of hydrogen condensed into stars and then fused together to make heavier elements (hydrogen is the lightest one there is).

It’s hardly a leap of faith to suppose that an amount of matter has always existed without a cause, it’s a simple extrapolation.

Firstly, as in the case of a god, if it’s always existed then it never began to exist and it doesn’t need a cause. (Incidentally, we’ve never seen anything physical truly begin to exist. The things around us have merely been formed from pre-existing matter. Therefore, we have no basis at all on which to assume that things which begin to exist need a cause.

Secondly, and of more practical importance, a large amount of matter and energy evidently exists now. According to the law of conservation, which demonstrates itself regularly, matter and energy cannot be created (let that sink in for a moment) and cannot be destroyed either. They can only be converted into each other.

Therefore, if matter and energy exist now, and could not have been created (or destroyed and re-created) at any point as far as we know, the simplest explanation is that matter and energy have always existed. Building on that and the Big Bang theory, it’s reasonable to suppose that at some point in its probably infinite history the matter was all in a simple form such as hydrogen. After that, we know the mechanism whereby the other chemicals were formed.

If we knew there were an immortal, invincible, immutable God, we could probably use the same logic to establish that He had always existed instead. We have no available, substantive evidence that a God currently exists, though, so we can’t extrapolate Him into the past. Therefore believing in Him in the past, present or future really is a leap of faith.

Posted: January 6th 2011

See all questions answered by SmartLX

The classic response is this: if the universe requires a cause, then why not god? If god doesn’t require a cause, then why does the universe?

But not everything has a cause. Quantum physics suggests that particles pop in and out of existence constantly, apparently without cause. This is particularly relevant in light of the possibility that the big bang was such a quantum fluctuation, albeit a much rarer sort.

By the way, the origin of the chemical elements is a well understood problem. As you probably know, stars are fueled by nuclear fusion. You may not know that this fusion is capable of producing iron and lighter ions. Iron is the boundary between the heavy elements that require energy for fusion and the light elements whose fusion produces energy. When a dying star explodes in a supernova, it has all the energy required to fuse heavy nuclei, and all the heavy elements in the universe come from supernovae.

Posted: January 5th 2011

See all questions answered by George Locke

To directly answer the original argument you seem to be plagiarizing, no, I’ve never seen a muffin without a baker… but I’ve never seen a baker without a mother either, and that’s what theism insists upon. I’d be much more surprised to see a motherless baker than a bakerless muffin.

Posted: January 5th 2011

See all questions answered by Reed Braden

First, let me draw your attention to a little sleight of hand you have performed there: when speaking of the 'basic chemical elements’ (a slightly misleading description of what cosmologists posit, I think, but that’s by the by), you describe them as existing 'without a cause’; yet when speaking of your intelligent first cause, you describe it as having 'always existed’. We see what you did there.

If it is possible for something to have always existed, and not to have needed to be caused to exist, then there is no need to seek a first cause for the universe at all: we can simply say it – or the quantum mechanics that probably triggered it – always existed. Period. There is no reason whatsoever to allow your god-hypothesis exclusive use of this argument: there is no evidence that your god exists at all, let alone that it always has existed – that is simply how believers have defined it: it carries no empirical weight whatsoever and there is no reason whatsoever to think it reflects reality.

If you’re going to say the universe can’t exist without a cause, then that applies to any intelligent designer you want to posit too. You can’t simply exempt your preferred answer from the constraints you are choosing to impose on all the others.

Secondly, I make no claim to expertise in physics or cosmology, so I will leave it to others to point you towards more technical answers if they wish, but it is my understanding that scholarship is pointing with more and more confidence toward an astonishing degree of simplicity underlying the universe, and toward the trigger having been something extremely simple indeed – something as simple as a random quantum fluctuation, for instance.

An intelligent designer is as far from being simple as it is possible to get. A mind – any mind – is phenomenally complex. But you’re not just positing an ordinary mind – you’re positing a mind with the ability to create a universe! You simply cannot get less simple than that! Now add in the ability to devise all the laws of physics; to either create all living forms or devise the process of evolution to bring them about; next add in (because let’s not pretend when you capitalise 'First Cause’ and refer to it as having always existed that it’s not the Abrahamic God you’re talking about) the ability to work miracles, listen meaningfully to millions upon millions of prayers simultaneously, see into billions of hearts, be grieved by and then forgive sins, act as cosmic judge, be everywhere and know everything, and you have something very very complex indeed – something far more complex than the universe you are trying to invoke it as an explanation for, and therefore something whose existence would be a far greater puzzle than that of the universe itself.

And then you claim that it takes a greater leap of faith to believe in the possibility of ultimate simplicity having no cause, than it does to believe in that degree of complexity having no cause? I think not.

Posted: January 5th 2011

See all questions answered by Paula Kirby