Let me pinch -hit for jimmie, because until you understand the opposite argument, you cannot effectively judge it let alone response to it. And also I doubt that he is now going to respond to my posts, because he knows his tactic has been countered.
You track back along the evolutionary line to abiogenesis, the formation of the earth, solar system, back to galaxies and stars, the universe and the Big Bang, which does have supportive evidence. Supposing all that is given credit, what caused the Big bang? We can now go back to quantum foam or the Higgs -Boson field. Effectively a matter -Chaos out of which the Big Bang ball was composed.
Who did all that? Who made the Stuff in the first place? No matter how far back you go, First Cause has to have got the sequence of events started off. So, as they say - who started off First cause? It is very convenient (and persuasive - though I don't know whether intrinsically or of through having is dinned into me) to simply say that something started it all off that didn't itself need to be started off.
It is also intuitive to suppose that this thing had enough smarts to say "Go". and that given everything that was going to happen, is not only a cosmic -sized smarts, but a knowledge of everything that is going to happen (1). If that isn't a god, and indeed a monotheistic god, I don't know what is.
This seems so much the most "obvious " (TM
) answer that hypothetical mumblings about 'perhaps it came from nothing" just sound like unbelievers trying to find some excuse Not To Believe. But there are reasons why some alternative to Goddunnit have to be a fair alternative.
Just where did that cosmic mind come from? To say that a Mind could exist in NOTHING with the capacity to know everything that would happen and plan it ahead and execute it - and that without any origin at all, is absurd in the highest degree. To claim that it was always there is really no better. In fact "God" has no explanation to a serious logical objection.
On the other hand, Something from Nothing only has two objections: it has never been observed (which is not the same as saying it never happens) and it is against science and reason. That is a bit of a hoot from those who always say that science is always changing its mind. In fact something may not now come from nothing just as life does not now seem to come from non -life or indeed amphibians from fish. But that doesn't mean that it couldn't or didn't happen back when conditions were very different.
I don't know how much it coincides with current thought in physics or cosmology, but the answer seems to be the same - find where they meet. then there isn't much of a change to be done. If you can have a nothing that is so nothing that it is actually Not unreasonable to postulate that it didn't need to be created, and then have it acting like it was something (and the illusion of matter is very much like that) then you have all you need for your quantum foam or Higgs -boson -field.
So at worst you have a theory that is at least an alternative to a Creator (and you can see the Intent to Do loaded in that there term) and in fact it doesn't suffer from serious objections .
On top of that, you have circumstantial or indirect evidence. If the whole shebang was made, then there ought to be signs of it being made. Really there aren't that many. There are a few Constants, but there is an element of 'no other explanation' about them. But the other claims of order and complexity are invalid, from Fibonacci's series to the suggestion by (or at least pinned on) Hoyle, Jeans and Einstein that there must be a planning mind behind it.
That doesn't stand up. Really. Indeed I watched a you tube on why the cosmos isn't one that a mind would design. Can't remember any of it
but there it was,
The objections such as origin of biochemicals and heavy elements is now explained (supernovae) and that incidentally disproves a 6 day universe (perlease!
) and the other nice little argument for God 'Zones of comfort or Goldilocks zone' - "it was done just right to enable humans to appear" fails when the evidence says that two major extinctions had to occur or we wouldn't be here. I know I mention in the foopnote below that the "Matrix" (or so I termed the concept before that bloody film swiped the title
) but surely it wouldn't have been necessary to do anything more than make man perfectly - just as it says in Genesis, in fact.
And if reason and evidence counts for anything, we were
not made and evolution did a job with a few production flaws.
So, that is the case for and against and why I think, on balance, the Natural explanation is actually more feasible logically and evidentially. and Goddunnit is not.
And we didn't even need to ask "which God?"
(1) I can't resist putting the answer to the problem of Evil, prayer and free wills. We have all that, which was factored in before creation even started. That is why we still have free will even though God already knows what we decided. There you are, God -apologists, you can have that one for free.
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