@BillRM,
BillRM wrote:
Energy not being conserved is that your problem????
You reduce my posts to something you can arbitrarily respond to with something generically topical.
Quote:Well by some modern theory the sum total of energy is zero.
So what? That's sophism. What does it mean that 'the sum total of energy zero?' It sounds relevant without actually saying anything.
Quote:I think off hand the subject was address in the book the Universe from nothing at all.
It's naive to make things sum to zero and then use sophism to try to make it meaningful. For things to 'sum to zero,' they have to be quantified as positive and negative. Nothing negative cancels out anything positive in reality. Particles and antiparticles annihilate, but that just means they combine to form a common daughter particle/wave.
Quote:Sorry there are a lot we do not know and may never know but some all powerful super being that is outside the universe that is the engine of creation is not at all likely.
You don't even know what a 'being' is or isn't. You just make assumptions based on what you assume constitutes a 'being' or not.
If understand the physics of everything being made up of particles/waves, what makes some combination of particles/waves a 'being' while another combination isn't?
Quote:An of course even as a child my question, when the claim that the universe could not had come into being without an all powerful designer, is where the hell did this designer come from was there a whole serial of gods each more powerful then the one before creating them?
The designer is built into the universe. It designs itself as it evolves. The metaphor of God as a physical/material entity separate from the universe is just a metaphor. In reality there is simply higher power, higher authority, and every aspect exhibited by humans must exist as latent potential in the laws of physics that have governed the universe throughout its existence.
There is intelligent design because the universe designs itself intelligently. We attribute agency for the universe because we experience ourselves in terms of agency. Humans didn't create themselves, so it doesn't make sense to say that intentional agency spawned from nothing at some point in the history of the universe. For anything to exist, including consciousness/intent/agenecy, it had to always exist in some latent form prior to its emergence in the form we understand it. As such, we can say that humans were created in the image of whatever created them, therefore there must be God at the level of the universe, i.e. the cause of the latent potential that has manifested itself as everything nature and humans have become.
In terms of a more tangible example, let's say you look at a fruit, say an apple, and you see that it comes from an apple tree; but you examine the leaves and branches of the tree and you don't see them as being anything like an apple. But at the genetic level, the apple, leaves, branches, roots, etc. are all manifestations of the same DNA and even the tree itself was sprouted from an apple seed that came from an apple produced by a parent tree, etc. So there is intelligence in the entire system that produces each tree and causes it generate fruit and thus reproduce, but if you imagine the god of apples as some ultimate apple tree that created all the other apple trees, that's just a metaphor because ultimately apple trees and their DNA are just part of a broader pattern of creation and evolution whose authority goes much farther and deeper than just apple trees and their fruit.
Likewise, God's existence and power goes much further and deeper than just humans, but as humans we can recognize the universality of God in ourselves as products of His creation, just as a sentient apple could recognize itself as a manifestation of the same DNA that manifested its parent tree, etc. So as humans we understand our human existence on different levels, e.g. the level of our material culture, the body, mind, emotions/heart, consciousness that experiences all these different perceptions/emotions/memories/thoughts/etc. so by becoming aware of ourselves on all these different levels, we can begin to extrapolate the existence of all those different aspects of our being at a more universal level; so for example if there are alien beings who look like Octopuses or whatever, we can still see that they have eyes to see, and minds to think, etc. so there is something universal about seeing light or thinking with a brain that exists as latent potential within the universe and the laws of nature.
