| quigontcb said: 1) Most people do believe in a creator. Pretty much every culture that I'm aware of believed there is a creator/higher power. It is our nature to think this and wonder, not just live by bodily instints as animals do. Not only this, but many people accept there is a creator/higher power through logic. Science can take us back to the big bang, but what caused the big bang? I heard Stephen Hawking recently said that he no longer thinks God is a part of that equation, that gravity fills the God-part of the puzzle. My question is, what did gravity have around to have an effect on to initiate the big bang? What caused gravity to be? Was gravity around before existence as we know it? |
This argument is faulty.
Why? Because "What caused god to be?"
It's called infinite descent. One famous scientist, I can't recall who, was speculating on the universe during a seminar, when someone in the audience stood up and proclaimed that none of the speculation was true, that that person knew what it really was. This person claimed that the earth was being carried on the back of a giant turtle. When the scientist responded by asking what was carrying the turtle, the person answered "Ah, I've already thought of that - it's turtles all the way down!"
You have only two ways to get around the infinite descent problem. Either you have to find some arbitrary line to draw, and declare that THIS thing has always existed, or you have to invoke an infinitude of solutions, as with the "turtles all the way down". Believers often draw the line at God. But it's an arbitrary line to draw, because the same reasoning can be applied to the universe itself - that the universe has always existed.
And just to avoid the obvious next question - no, I don't actually believe in the big bang. I'm a mathematical physicist who suspects (I wouldn't go so far as to call it a belief) that the universe has always existed, and is of infinite extent. I've yet to hear evidence for the big bang that isn't just as consistent with an infinite universe, and most of the arguments against the infinite universe fall apart for multiple reasons (which I won't get into, here, since this is about religion). Oh, and I'm a non-believer. A 'weak' atheist - I don't believe in a deity of any sort, but I'd willingly respond to decisive (even subjective) evidence to the contrary.
Oh, and Stephen Hawking is not a very good choice of person to base a statement regarding the universe on - he's well-known, but he's by no means mainstream in terms of scientific circles.
Also, regarding the tendency to believe in some sort of creator, I'd put that down to the same thing that had people believing that things like water, fire, and air had mystical properties - it results from ignorance. People are very quick to attribute anything they don't understand to "god" or "gods", or to the "devil", or to other supernatural beings. This isn't to say that such a creator doesn't actually exist, just that the tendency to believe in one as found in so many cultures isn't evidence for it in any sense.
