Oddbean new post about | logout
 "In nature nothing is created..." Lavoisier. We know this almost 300 years ago. 
 Without any additional context that quote is just not true. Animals create their offspring, birds create nests, etc. But more fundamentally, God is conceptualized to be outside of time and space (nature). No one is arguing that a being inside time and space created time and space. 

No mental gymnastics will change the fact that believing that no one created everything from nothing requires more faith than believing the universe was created by an intelligent personal being. 

A painting implies a painter. Atheism cannot explain how we went from dust to a bacteria like organism with incredible complexity that was capable of reproducing without a whole lot of assumptions. It can’t explain how the non living matter even got here in the first place. 
 > the fact that believing that no one created everything from nothing requires more faith than believing the universe was created by an intelligent personal being

I started to refresh myself on big bang theory in preparation to call your claim subjective but I realized you have a good point. I read about 6 theories addressing the concept of matter existing before the singularity and they’re all speculative. One observation that stuck with me is religion is to faith as science is to doubt. But maybe I could rephrase your claim that science crosses into the faith area before the singularity. 
 Also the idea that one has to reject the scientific method in order to believe in God is false 
 Pls say more on that 
 Nothing about science definitively says the universe can’t be the creation of another being.

If pro science people can entertain the simulation theory then there’s no reason they can’t entertain a different type of creator 
 Dude! Your humility is legit. Very rare. Followed.
-A Christian Bitcoiner attempting to be humble like you 
 Thank you, sir 
 God is outside of time and space, sooooo, it doesnt exist in the nature. PERFECT. 👏👏 Tomism is kind of atheism.
A painting implies a painter, right. But if nothing ever was created implies theres no painter.
God explain everything u can imagine, and science is full of doubts and incertainty, right, the diference is the courage to assume your ignorance or make of it a god. 
 He doesn’t only exist outside time and space. He had to have existed outside time space for him to have created time and space. But nothing prevents him from also interacting with or being inside time and space. 

Right, I am saying painters exist and they make paintings because everything was created. Are you saying paintings (or anything) don’t exist because nothing was created? Is your stance that everything always was since nothing was created?

Thinking nothing was created and stuff just always existed is an assumption perhaps just like thinking there is a creator can be seen as an assumption. One makes more sense than the other. There is no evidence that there can be an effect without a cause. But there is abundant evidence that effects have causes. 
 "In nature nothing is created..." Lavoisier. Theres no evidence that anything was created, ever. Cause and effect are terms to the transformation of what exists, theres no logic in associate cause and effect to the creation of something. 
 If there was no evidence of intelligent design (DNA, laws of physics, etc.) and it was just blobs of matter floating around that would be a persuasive argument. But just like when I see a message written on the sand that says “bob loves mary” I don’t think it was randomly created by the waves, but rather a message created by an intelligent being. 

But even if one is obtuse enough to dismiss all that, at best one can say we don’t know if there is a creator or if everything always existed. But one can’t claim like you did in the original response that there is no creator 
 Theres nothing in the universe like "bob loves mary", nothing.
I was responding you, not explaining how I can prove that god doesnt exist. I can, if you have courage. 
 Of course there is. Look around. We are part of the universe last I checked. But even if you selectively exclude humans from what can be considered evidence of intelligent design, we still have millions of life forms where even the simplest of them have much more complex messages in their DNA than “bob loves mary” 
 You already read about junk DNA? Or Endogenous retroviruses? 
 Assuming there is junk DNA ( https://magazine.washington.edu/feature/no-such-thing-as-junk-dna-researchers-say/ ) that doesn’t imply that the rest of DNA isn’t far more complex than a message about Mary. It’s literally language, a blueprint how to make beings.