Why is there?
Why is there anything? Why does anything exist at all? Why is there a universe? planets? stars? space? Well, one could say the Big Bang theory explains this, but does it really? Even if the Big Bang theory were proven beyond a doubt, what caused the explosion. What sparked this big lump of mass in the universe to explode eventually leading to the formation of the stars, galaxies, etc? Why was there a big lump of mass in space? Why was there a space? How did any of it get there. If space and this mass are infinite, what elements caused a change that would lead to an immense explosion?
I don't know why I thought of this tonight, as I sat researching sports trivia, but I couldn't get these interesting, relevant to existance, questions out of my head. Are they answerable? I don't know. A funny thing creation is; unexplained, expansive, abrupt, ever insuing. I wanna hear some feed back from people from a non Christian point of view on this topic if I could. I want to hear the nitty gritty logic of the cosmos and how it came to be. I could come up with a religious answer; shoot, this is part of the reason there is religion, and part of the reason there will always be religion, but I want to hear something non religious; something tangible.
I don't know why I thought of this tonight, as I sat researching sports trivia, but I couldn't get these interesting, relevant to existance, questions out of my head. Are they answerable? I don't know. A funny thing creation is; unexplained, expansive, abrupt, ever insuing. I wanna hear some feed back from people from a non Christian point of view on this topic if I could. I want to hear the nitty gritty logic of the cosmos and how it came to be. I could come up with a religious answer; shoot, this is part of the reason there is religion, and part of the reason there will always be religion, but I want to hear something non religious; something tangible.
posted by Adam | 12:11 AM
2 Comments:
This is what Richard Dawkins says, though it is really full of holes:
"We can safely conclude that living bodies are billions of times too complicated - too statistically improbable - to have come into being by sheer chance. How, then, did they come into being? The answer is that chance enters into the story, but not a single, monolithic act of chance. Instead, a whole series of tiny chance steps, each one small enough to be a believable product of its predecessor, occurred one after the other in sequence. These small steps of chance are caused by genetic mutations, random changes - mistakes really - in the genetic material. They give rise to changes in the existing bodily structure. Most of these changes are deleterious and lead to death. A minority of them turn out to be slight improvements, leading to increased survival and reproduction. By this process of natural selection, those random changes that turn out to be beneficial eventually spread through the species and become the norm. The stage is now set for the next small change in the evolutionary process. After, say, a thousand of these small changes in series, each change providing the basis for the next, the end result has become, by a process of accumulation, far too complex to have come about in a single act of chance...
There is a temptation to argue that, although God may not be needed to explain the evolution of complex order once the universe, with its fundamental laws of physics, had begun, we do need a God to explain the origin of all things. This idea doesn't leave God with very much to do: just set off the big bang, then sit back and wait for everything to happen. The physical chemist Peter Atkins, in his beautifully written book The Creation, postulates a lazy God who strove to do as little as possible in order to initiate everything. Atkins explains how each step in the history of the universe followed, by simple physical law, from its predecessor. He thus pares down the amount of work that the lazy creator would need to do and eventually concludes that he would in fact have needed to do nothing at all!
The details of the early phase of the universe belong to the realm of physics, whereas I am a biologist, more concerned with the later phases of the evolution of complexity. For me, the important point is that, even if the physicist needs to postulate an irreducible minimum that had to be present in the beginning, in order for the universe to get started, that irreducible minimum is certainly extremely simple. By definition, explanations that build on simple premises are more plausible and more satisfying than explanations that have to postulate complex and statistically improbable beginnings. And you can't get much more complex than an Almighty God!"
This is all I could find...I'll look later when I have time...
it's interesting, but doesn't quite satisfy my curiosity. It doen't answer my question about existence of anything, but rather assumes that there is already everything and then goes onto explain it. I don't really know if any of this can be answered, but I would like to hear more.
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