I have always wondered why most religious people's counter argument of the Big Bang event usually is that one cannot create something from nothing, while most documentation about deities also do not explain where these deities suddenly came from.
The derivative is seen in the real world in things like motion. If we know something's position changes over time we can calculate its speed (over time), and acceleration (the derivative of speed over time).
Motion is (kinetic) energy. Energy, manifested as motion, is transferred to an object not as force over time ('tis but a proxy) but as force over distance. This is why the continuous application of a fixed force to an object in motion transfers more energy to the object in a unit of time when the object is moving faster to begin with. (kinetic energy for an object of a certain mass is proportional to speed^2)
But imagine that an object is truly "at rest". No motion. A force is applied. Why does it start moving in the first place?
How common is that though? I'm think your statement doesn't generalize very well, and probably only applies to a small subset of religious people (e.g. wacky young-earth creationist flat earther types).
IIRC, the Big Bang is often embraced by religious people as (more or less) proof that the universe was actually created and that something can be created from nothing (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creatio_ex_nihilo#Creatio_ex_n...).
It's a strange response to me. I think St. Augustine's argument for why there is a God assumes that there was no beginning to the universe because he said that if the universe had a beginning then obviously there is a god. St. Augustine would have viewed the big bang theory as irrefutable proof that there is a god.
Augustine of Hippo wrote a book called The Literal Meaning of Genesis. In which he said that its literal meaning is that the Seven Days were all instantaneous and simultaneous.
"Biblical literalism" is fundamentally a (non-magisterial) Protestant position, and insists that the Bible "literally" says things which nobody ever thought it said until the 19th century (e.g. dispensationalism). Turns out that "literal" means whatever you want it to mean.
But a lot of people (particularly in the US) make the mistake of equating "evangelical Protestantism" with "Christianity", or even with religion in general, attributing to the latter two things which are rather unique to the former.
The closest it comes to commenting on the age of the universe is where it says in Genesis the earth was created in six "days". Note that these days do not correspond to 24-hour days (e.g., the creation of the day/night cycle is also referred to as being done in one day), but simply, an unspecified period of time devoted to a particular activity, which could be millions or even billions of years.
Also, note that the Genesis account implies the universe and the earth was existing for some period, before action was initiated to prepare the earth for human/animal habitation.
I studied in a religious school in the 70's and we learnt about dinosaurs. We were taught that the "days" in Genesis were metaphors. Creationism is frowned upon. I made a science project explaining the different theories about the origin of the Solar System.
This assumes a single linear timestream.
If you're the "being", and you're running a simulation of some system, you can absolutely create many parallel timestreams with different initial conditions. You can even return to some point in the simulation and try several intermediate conditions, resulting in different causal outcomes.
The many worlds interpretation would absolutely allow agency on the part of such a "being".
In a sense, a self originating physical universe would have to have infinite intelligence for it to be plausible, which we don't see. What we see is intelligence in human, who period and scope of existence is but a very tiny part of the universe.
I guess this is why people think there must be something bigger than the physical universe out there, and I think it makes sense.
At any rate, you believe something can exist without being created and in this we are agreement. I too believe that something can exist without being created.
I don't think "the group of people" you are referring to actually have any significance. You are attacking a strawman version of the cosmological argument, which no philosophically sophisticated theist would defend – and if it so happens that a handful of philosophically unsophisticated theists actually believe your strawman (because they can't see the obvious holes in it), so what? There are philosophically unsophisticated atheists too, who argue for atheism on grounds that intellectually serious atheists find embarrassing. When evaluating any point of view, we ought to focus our attention on its most thoughtful defenders, not the thoughtless ones.
I don't think they actually are engaging in "logical contortions" or rationalisations.
Theists can be divided into three groups:
(1) Those who don't accept any cosmological arguments: either they believe in God purely on the basis of faith, or else they believe on the basis of some non-cosmological argument
(2) Those who accept some philosophically sophisticated cosmological argument – e.g. the kalam argument, or Thomas Aquinas' argument from contingency. They have a ready-made answer for "why if the universe requires an external cause doesn't God too?". I don't find those answers convincing myself, but I think it is unfair and intellectually uncharitable to just dismiss them as "logical contortions" or "rationalisations"
(3) The unsophisticates who engage in cosmological argumentation, but have never seriously thought about the question "why if the universe requires a creator doesn't God too?". Do they actually have "logical contortions" or "rationalisations", or are they just not thinking?
Cosmological arguments for God's existence generally follow this structure:
1. Everything having property P must have a cause external to itself which lacks property P
2. The universe has property P
3. By (1) and (2), the universe must have a cause C external to itself which lacks property P
4. Since C (by the above) lacks property P, (1) does not require C to have any external cause
5. Let us call C "God" (either simply by defining "God=C", or else by further arguments that C must have various God-properties)
Different values of P create different specific cosmological arguments. If P="has a beginning in time", you get the kalam argument. If P="is a contingent being", you get the argument from contingency.
Given this, I don't think your response is valid. It works against some unsophisticated caricatures (strawman versions) of the cosmological argument, but not the argument as defended by major theist philosophers.
That said, I personally find all cosmological arguments unconvincing, for a different reason. They have the burden of arguing that premise (1) is true (for whatever P they've chosen), without presuming God's existence in doing so – and I've never been convinced they've actually succeeded at that.
The essence of arguments you wrote boil down to assuming that god has no property which falls into the category of “must have cause outside itself”. Such a belief is without a firm basis in my opinion. At any rate, any believer in an eternal god must be comfortable with the notion that things can exist without cause/beginning/whatever term one wishes to use.
Intellectually sophisticated theists usually have some awareness of the arguments of (at least some) major theist philosophers. Maybe you never speak to intellectually serious theists?
> The essence of arguments you wrote boil down to assuming that god has no property which falls into the category of “must have cause outside itself”. Such a belief is without a firm basis in my opinion
I think your criticisms are targeting the wrong point. That God "has no property which falls in the category of 'must have cause outside itself'" is true by definition, given the classical theist definition of God (and even by some non-classical definitions). If something has a cause outside itself, by definition it cannot be God; if it (somehow) turned out everything has a cause outside itself, it would logically follow that God does not exist.
I think it makes much more sense to target the premise "everything having P must have an external cause lacking P". For the Kalam argument (for example), that would be "everything having a beginning in time must have a cause lacking a beginning in time". The burden is on the advocates of the Kalam argument to convince people that premise is true, and personally I don't think they've succeeded, and I doubt you would think that either.
> At any rate, any believer in an eternal god must be comfortable with the notion that things can exist without cause/beginning/whatever term one wishes to use.
Yes, but they conditionalise that comfort. Many theists would say they are comfortable with changeless entities existing without cause, but not changing entities; or necessary entities but not contingent entities; or timeless entities but not temporal entities. As a result that comfort of theirs extends to God but not the universe. Is their conditionalisation of that comfort legitimate? How do we even begin to answer that question?
Myself, I believe in God, but I'm unconvinced that any cosmological arguments actually work in demonstrating God's existence. So I think you are right to reject them. But I think some of the specific reasons you give for rejecting them are misplaced, overly simple.
There is nothing scientific about this conjecture, simply a thought I haven't had time to fully contemplate. What if there were loops and turns such that light and energy from distant galaxies would loop back around not just in space but in time creating weird feedback loops.
Also time and space get flipped inside a black hole. All of your futures point further into the black hole.
There is a line of thought that the deities come from when humans "suddenly" became conscious. The creation of the world is the creation of the human mind.