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This is a common meme, a recasting of the atheist position into something more easily ridiculed.
To the best of my knowledge, when pressed on what came before the big bang, no scientist has EVER said “Nothing”. Ever(1)Thank you, Lawrence Krauss. The world renowned physicist who discovered dark energy has now come out and said that it’s at least possible we DID come from nothing. So now I must add this caveat. None the less nearly no atheist believes we came from nothing, and this remains a strawman argument. Even Dr. Krauss says he doesn’t know what we came from, leaves “nothing” only as a possibility, and uses the word “nothing” differently than most people use it (indeed, his “nothing” has weight… go figure). . And that’s not the position of scientists.
The truth is we don’t know what came before the big bang. We don’t. There are some theories (as I write this, the discovery of the Higgs- bosen has hinted that we live in a multiverse, with other big bangs going on outside our universe, creating other universes). While it’s convenient for theists to recast “I don’t know” as nothing, it’s not true.
There’s always been a frontier of science, that which we don’t know, and theists have always used that as “proof” of God. What causes the waves to move? What causes gravity? What causes mars to move backwards? Don’t know? See, God is real!
Notice the reliance on both the Prime Mover (here) and God of the Gaps (here) arguments, neither of which come even remotely close to proving God. Further this argument requires a blatant misrepresentation of what an atheist is (here).
The atheist position on the matter is simple: I do not know. I do not know how the universe started (if I did, I we wouldn’t need science to figure it out).
The universe is an infinite place(2)I get called out on this one—it’s not infinite, it’s 14 billion light years across. But I use the word Universe in a broader sense, to include even things that might be outside it… tachyons, material moving faster than the speed of light, or multiverse, all of which there is evidence to support. We don’t have a word for that—for something bigger than the formal universe, so I use universe., or at the very least it would appear that it’s large enough that we’ll never understand all of it. On the micro level, we’ve never found an irreducible component, everything appears to be made up of smaller things, and every question we answer gives us ten more. On the macro level, we’re already finding the possibility of other universes around us, possibly an infinite number of universes, each with different physical laws. Our minds are finite, and as we get into really strange concepts (beyond the strangeness of spacetime, but to quantum probability and strings) our brains are simply not designed to intuit these things. Our minds rebel at the thought of an infinitely reducible world, an infinity expanding multiverse, and the notion of events without a cause. There will always be concepts that defy our ability to grasp them.
But none of these prove God. That we can’t understand or explain something (or everything), that there are gaps in our ability to comprehend, is evidence of a finite brain trying to grasp a rather wild universe. We are not gods ourselves, there will always be things we don’t understand.
The atheist argument isn’t “I know there is no god”, it’s that “I don’t see any evidence for god” (and the corollary, “since I don’t believe in things for which there is no evidence, I don’t believe in god”). When faced with the unknown, the theist insists on pressing god into it (this is the god of the gaps argument). The truth is that we don’t know how the universe came into existence, we have no idea. Our limited minds insist on putting an answer in there, filling that void—we genuinely prefer a bad answer to no answer at all, so the deist say’s god did it, and the theist takes it a step further and says that their specific god did it (this is a Prime Mover fallacy. Even if a higher power started the universe, that’s not evidence for theistic claims, like the divinity of Jesus).
No atheist says that “something came out of nothing”. The atheist says “I don’t know”. This is similar to other god of the gaps arguments. 300 years ago one could say “The atheist must believe that mars is alive and can change its course on its own, because that is the only explanation if you think God isn’t causing retrograde”. It’s unfairly casting silly beliefs onto atheists, straw man positions, to make them easier to take down. The patient atheist who says “I don’t know” how something happens is far, far more productive than the theist who says “It was god, and let’s leave it at that.”
This is a prime mover and god of the gaps argument. The atheist is comfortable saying “I don’t know”. The Theist feels compelled to insert an answer into that ignorance. They claim that ignorance is proof of god, and denounce the non-believers as refusing to admit the “Evidence”. It is a textbook god of the gaps argument, and I say this without hyperbole or exaggeration, it is the single most refuted, most failed argument in the history of human discourse.
Footnotes
| 1. | ↑ | Thank you, Lawrence Krauss. The world renowned physicist who discovered dark energy has now come out and said that it’s at least possible we DID come from nothing. So now I must add this caveat. None the less nearly no atheist believes we came from nothing, and this remains a strawman argument. Even Dr. Krauss says he doesn’t know what we came from, leaves “nothing” only as a possibility, and uses the word “nothing” differently than most people use it (indeed, his “nothing” has weight… go figure). |
| 2. | ↑ | I get called out on this one—it’s not infinite, it’s 14 billion light years across. But I use the word Universe in a broader sense, to include even things that might be outside it… tachyons, material moving faster than the speed of light, or multiverse, all of which there is evidence to support. We don’t have a word for that—for something bigger than the formal universe, so I use universe. |
I was compelled by an
We dont know how universe began is correct position based on empirical data, as there is no such data but reason and logic can help answer what could be before universe started. Let’s call it A. Is A something which itself depends on B for existence or jt does not need anything else for existence, hence a Self existing being? If depends on B, then the question shifts to B and then to C, infinite regress and impossible to be true. Hence whatever ultimately is the point of origin must be Self existing, must also be Eternal (no beginning) and must be One(non composite one, not a numerical one). You can call it multi verse, quantum fluctuation or God but it must have these attributes. This is not God of gaps argument but the only rational explanation of existence of universe.