PeterS

So my question is, if god came from nothing then why wouldn't the universe been created the same way?

liberalhunter Loc: Your mom's house

Were you molested by your uncle in a church? Typical liberal trying to start s**t for no reason...... maybe they will come answer your stupid questions in person...... I would, just to see the fear in your milky eyes.

Bad Bob Loc: Virginia

Rose42

Be honest. Your intent with these posts is to ridicule not to seek t***h.

God didn’t come from nothing. But in your heart you know God exists. All mankind does but its man’s nature to rebel.

Spiritual warfare is very real and there is a battle for your soul. Only God can free you from your bitterness. You should listen to the testimony of Al Aceves who used to be a violent man. Its remarkable.

rk

www.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3Dw6AHcv19NIc" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://duckduckgo.com/?q=time+space+and+matter+proving+god+exists&t=h_&iax=videos&ia=videos&iai=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3Dw6AHcv19NIc

BIRDMAN

🤪🤪🤪🤪

Milosia2 Loc: Cleveland Ohio

So , the question
“ Did god create Man ?
Or did Man create god ? “
Is still a relevant argument.

Or
Hawking concludes with his most direct, personal answer to the universal question:

It’s my view that the simplest explanation is that there is no God. No one created the universe and no one directs our fate. This leads me to a profound realisation: there is probably no heaven and afterlife either. I think belief in an afterlife is just wishful thinking. There is no reliable evidence for it, and it flies in the face of everything we know in science. I think that when we die we return to dust. But there’s a sense in which we live on, in our influence, and in our genes that we pass on to our children. We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe, and for that I am extremely grateful.

Milosia2 Loc: Cleveland Ohio

The Marginalian
Is There a God? Stephen Hawking Gives the Definitive Answer to the Eternal Question
BY MARIA POPOVA

Is There a God? Stephen Hawking Gives the Definitive Answer to the Eternal Question
“Every formula which expresses a law of nature is a hymn of praise to God,” the trailblazing astronomer and leading Figuring figure Maria Mitchell wrote in the second half of the nineteenth century as she contemplated science, spirituality, and the human hunger for t***h. Every great scientist in the century and a half since has been faced with this question, be it by personal restlessness or public demand. Einstein addressed it in answering a little girl’s question about whether scientists pray. Quantum theory originator Max Planck believed that “science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature [because] we ourselves are part of nature and therefore part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.” His fellow Nobel laureate and quantum theory founding father Niels Bohr defied the sentiment in his incisive distinction between subjective and objective reality, noting that religions have always addressed the former, while science addresses the latter, which is measurable and therefore knowable. Wolfgang Pauli, whose groundbreaking scientific ideas were greatly influenced by Bohr’s, concluded that the effort to reconcile science and religion “will always be full of pitfalls and one can fall down on both sides.”

It takes a mind of rare courage and insight to address this abiding question without falling into the most pernicious trap of all — that of artificial compatibilism; to take a lucid stance without fright of offense, then to explain the basis of that stance thoughtfully and sensitively, systematically dismantling every reflexive argument against it.

That is what Stephen Hawking (January 8, 1942–March 14, 2018) does in his final book, Brief Answers to the Big Questions (public library) — a collection of ten enormous questions Hawking was asked regularly throughout his life, by children and elders, by entrepreneurs and political leaders, by men and women young and old attending his prolific lectures and public appearances, with answers drawn from his extensive personal archive of correspondence, notes, drafts, interviews, and essays. The book — which was conceived during Hawking’s lifetime but finished only after his death with help from his family and academic colleagues, and proceeds from which benefit the Stephen Hawking Foundation and the Motor Neurone Disease Association — opens with the question that has bellowed in humanity’s chest since science first confronted superstition: Is there a God?


Stephen Hawking (Photograph: Gemma Levine)
Hawking — whom many consider the greatest scientist since Einstein and whose residual stardust was interred between Darwin’s and Newton’s in Westminster Abbey — enlists his disarming deadpan humor in placing the query in a personal context, then uses the fulcrum of his magnificent mind to pivot into the serious answer to the universal question:

For centuries, it was believed that disabled people like me were living under a curse that was inflicted by God. Well, I suppose it’s possible that I’ve upset someone up there, but I prefer to think that everything can be explained another way, by the laws of nature. If you believe in science, like I do, you believe that there are certain laws that are always obeyed. If you like, you can say the laws are the work of God, but that is more a definition of God than a proof of his existence.

With an eye to the discovery, which began in antiquity and culminated with Kepler and Galileo, that “the heavens” are in fact a complex universe governed by discoverable and discernible physical laws, he builds upon his earlier reflections on the meaning of the universe and adds:

I believe that the discovery of these laws has been humankind’s greatest achievement, for it’s these laws of nature — as we now call them — that will tell us whether we need a god to explain the universe at all. The laws of nature are a description of how things actually work in the past, present and future. In tennis, the ball always goes exactly where they say it will. And there are many other laws at work here too. They govern everything that is going on, from how the energy of the shot is produced in the players’ muscles to the speed at which the grass grows beneath their feet. But what’s really important is that these physical laws, as well as being unchangeable, are universal. They apply not just to the flight of a ball, but to the motion of a planet, and everything else in the universe. Unlike laws made by humans, the laws of nature cannot be broken — that’s why they are so powerful and, when seen from a religious standpoint, controversial too.

[…]

One could define God as the embodiment of the laws of nature. However, this is not what most people would think of as God. They mean a human-like being, with whom one can have a personal relationship. When you look at the vast size of the universe, and how insignificant and accidental human life is in it, that seems most implausible.

I use the word “God” in an impersonal sense, like Einstein did, for the laws of nature, so knowing the mind of God is knowing the laws of nature. My prediction is that we will know the mind of God by the end of this century.


Illustration by Garry Parsons from George’s Secret Key to the Universe — Hawking’s children’s book, co-written with his daughter.
But even with the laws of nature conceded, Hawking recognizes that their existence still leaves room for religions to lay claim to the grandest question — how the universe and its laws began. He addresses the question both plainly and profoundly:

I think the universe was spontaneously created out of nothing, according to the laws of science.

[…]

Despite the complexity and variety of the universe, it turns out that to make one you need just three ingredients. Let’s imagine that we could list them in some kind of cosmic cookbook. So what are the three ingredients we need to cook up a universe? The first is matter — stuff that has mass. Matter is all around us, in the ground beneath our feet and out in space. Dust, rock, ice, liquids. Vast clouds of gas, massive spirals of stars, each containing billions of suns, stretching away for incredible distances.

The second thing you need is energy. Even if you’ve never thought about it, we all know what energy is. Something we encounter every day. Look up at the Sun and you can feel it on your face: energy produced by a star ninety-three million miles away. Energy permeates the universe, driving the processes that keep it a dynamic, endlessly changing place.

So we have matter and we have energy. The third thing we need to build a universe is space. Lots of space. You can call the universe many things — awesome, beautiful, violent — but one thing you can’t call it is cramped. Wherever we look we see space, more space and even more space. Stretching in all directions.


A 1573 painting by Portuguese artist, historian, and philosopher Francisco de Holanda, a student of Michelangelo’s and a contemporary of Kepler’s, found in Cosmigraphics: Picturing Space Through Time
The instinctual question is where all the matter, energy, and space came from — a question we hadn’t been able to answer with more than mythological cosmogonies until the early twentieth century, when Einstein demonstrated that mass is a form of energy and energy a form of mass in what is now the best known equation in the history of the world: E=mc2. This reduces the ingredients of the “cosmic cookbook” from three to two, distilling the question to where the space and energy originated. Generations of scientists built upon each other’s work to deliver the answer in the Big Bang model, which holds that in a single moment around 13.8 billion years ago, the entire universe, with all its space and energy, ballooned into being out of the nothingness that preceded it.

Half a century after Nabokov’s poetic admonition against common sense, Hawking echoes Carl Sagan’s observation that common sense can blind us to the realities of the universe and addresses this deeply counterintuitive notion of generating something out of nothing:

As I was growing up in England after the Second World War, it was a time of austerity. We were told that you never get something for nothing. But now, after a lifetime of work, I think that actually you can get a whole universe for free.

The great mystery at the heart of the Big Bang is to explain how an entire, fantastically enormous universe of space and energy can materialise out of nothing. The secret lies in one of the strangest facts about our cosmos. The laws of physics demand the existence of something called “negative energy.”

To help you get your head around this weird but crucial concept, let me draw on a simple analogy. Imagine a man wants to build a hill on a flat piece of land. The hill will represent the universe. To make this hill he digs a hole in the ground and uses that soil to dig his hill. But of course he’s not just making a hill — he’s also making a hole, in effect a negative version of the hill. The stuff that was in the hole has now become the hill, so it all perfectly balances out. This is the principle behind what happened at the beginning of the universe.

When the Big Bang produced a massive amount of positive energy, it simultaneously produced the same amount of negative energy. In this way, the positive and the negative add up to zero, always. It’s another law of nature.

So where is all this negative energy today? It’s in the third ingredient in our cosmic cookbook: it’s in space. This may sound odd, but according to the laws of nature concerning gravity and motion — laws that are among the oldest in science — space itself is a vast store of negative energy. Enough to ensure that everything adds up to zero.

I’ll admit that, unless mathematics is your thing, this is hard to grasp, but it’s true. The endless web of billions upon billions of galaxies, each pulling on each other by the force of gravity, acts like a giant storage device. The universe is like an enormous battery storing negative energy. The positive side of things — the mass and energy we see today — is like the hill. The corresponding hole, or negative side of things, is spread throughout space.

So what does this mean in our quest to find out if there is a God? It means that if the universe adds up to nothing, then you don’t need a God to create it. The universe is the ultimate free lunch.

This is where the wheels of our common-sense understanding screech to a frustrated halt — after all, in our daily lives, we can’t just manifest a cone of ice cream or a long-lost lover with the snap of our fingers. But on the subatomic stratum undergirding our physical reality, things work differently — particles pop up at random times in random places only to disappear again, governed by the laws of quantum mechanics, which seem downright mystical in their manifestation but are in fact discovered and calculable laws of the universe. Hawking explains:

Since we know the universe itself was once very small — perhaps smaller than a proton — this means something quite remarkable. It means the universe itself, in all its mind-boggling vastness and complexity, could simply have popped into existence without violating the known laws of nature. From that moment on, vast amounts of energy were released as space itself expanded — a place to store all the negative energy needed to balance the books. But of course the critical question is raised again: did God create the quantum laws that allowed the Big Bang to occur? In a nutshell, do we need a God to set it up so that the Big Bang could bang? I have no desire to offend anyone of faith, but I think science has a more compelling explanation than a divine creator.


Another painting by Francisco de Holanda from Cosmigraphics.
Once again he illustrates this assault on our basic common-sense intuitions with that supreme lever of understanding, the analogy:

Imagine a river, flowing down a mountainside. What caused the river? Well, perhaps the rain that fell earlier in the mountains. But then, what caused the rain? A good answer would be the Sun, that shone down on the ocean and lifted water vapour up into the sky and made clouds. Okay, so what caused the Sun to shine? Well, if we look inside we see the process known as fusion, in which hydrogen atoms join to form helium, releasing vast quantities of energy in the process. So far so good. Where does the hydrogen come from? Answer: the Big Bang. But here’s the crucial bit. The laws of nature itself tell us that not only could the universe have popped into existence without any assistance, like a proton, and have required nothing in terms of energy, but also that it is possible that nothing caused the Big Bang. Nothing.

This explanation, Hawking points out, rests on the shoulders of Einstein’s groundbreaking relativity theory — that daring leap of the imaginative intellect, which furnished the staggering revelation that space and time are a single entity comprising the basic fabric of the universe. Hawking writes:

Something very wonderful happened to time at the instant of the Big Bang. Time itself began.

To understand this mind-boggling idea, consider a black hole floating in space. A typical black hole is a star so massive that it has collapsed in on itself. It’s so massive that not even light can escape its gravity, which is why it’s almost perfectly black. It’s gravitational pull is so powerful, it warps and distorts not only light but also time. To see how, imagine a clock is being sucked into it. As the clock gets closer and closer to the black hole, it begins to get slower and slower. Time itself begins to slow down. Now imagine the clock as it enters the black hole — well, assuming of course that it could withstand the extreme gravitational forces– it would actually stop. It stops not because it is broken, but because inside the black hole time itself doesn’t exist. And that’s exactly what happened at the start of the universe.

[…]

As we travel back in time towards the moment of the Big Bang, the universe gets smaller and smaller and smaller, until it finally comes to a point where the whole universe is a space so small that it is in effect a single infinitesimally small, infinitesimally dense black hole. And just as with modern-day black holes, floating around in space, the laws of nature dictate something quite extraordinary. They tell us that here too time itself must come to a stop. You can’t get to a time before the Big Bang because there was no time before the Big Bang. We have finally found something that doesn’t ha

Rose42

Hawking was smart but not wise.

EmilyD

Atheism: Hopeless, Meaningless, Purposeless

"In our secular Western culture, the religion of atheism is on the rise, especially among the millennial generation. Young people are increasingly abandoning the religion they grew up with and turning to life without God. But all they’ve done is replace one religion with another one—the religion of atheism."

The Religion of Atheism

"Now, when I call atheism a religion on social media, many atheists get very upset. They h**e having atheism referred to as a religion or a belief system. But that’s exactly what it is. One of the definitions of religion is: A cause, principle, or system of beliefs held to with ardor and faith.

Atheism is a system of beliefs that atheists cling to with both ardor and faith. Below are some of the tenets of this belief system. Notice that none of them are scientifically proven (and even go against science!)—that’s where atheists’ faith comes in. They accept these assertions based on faith that they are true.

• There is no God or gods.
• There is no supernatural.
• Everything is the result of naturalistic processes over time.
• Life evolved from a single-celled organism.
• Death is the end—when you’re dead, that’s it.

Atheism—A Good Alternative?

"Is atheism a good alternative religion? Does it provide its followers with hope, meaning, and purpose, something human experience shows we all crave? Or is it a religion devoid of hope, meaning, and purpose?"

Hope?

"Consider this: according to the atheistic religion, there is no God and death is the end. Because we are nothing more than animals, our fate is the same as the animals—we return to the dust. We have maybe 80 years on this planet—more if we are especially fortunate, less if we’re not so fortunate—and then we are gone. We won’t remember we ever lived, and eventually no one else will either.

Things are just as bleak in the cosmic view. According to evolutionary ideas, the universe will continue expanding forever, all the usable energy in the universe will be converted into a useless form, and life will be impossible. Not only is each individual human rushing headlong toward the grave, so is our very universe. Our species, just like every other species, is destined for extinction. None of our accomplishments, advancements, breakthroughs, triumphs, or heartbreaks will ultimately matter as we face extinction along with our universe. This is certainly a bleak and hopeless perspective."

Meaning?

"Why am I here?” is a question that every human wants answered. We innately know that our lives have some kind of meaning. But where does it come from and what is it? Does atheism give the answer?

Well, some atheists will say the meaning of life is found in helping others or making humankind better. Now this seems admirable—after all, who doesn’t want to end world hunger, cure cancer, or clothe the orphaned?—until one asks, “Why?”

You see, in an atheistic worldview, we are animals headed for the grave, and our universe is spinning each day toward the end. Why does it matter if we help anyone? Why does it matter if we make humankind better? We will die, and they will die.

Other atheists seem to have made it their personal meaning in life to attack religion (except their own)—particularly biblical Christianity. They claim religion (other than their own) is responsible for war, hatred, and ignorance. But again, why does this matter? If Christians—and everyone they come in contact with—just die, and that’s it, why does it matter what they believed? If it ultimately doesn’t matter, why do they fight so hard against Christianity? (The Bible tells us they fight so hard against Christianity because they are suppressing the t***h in unrighteousness [Romans 1:18] because they love darkness and sin [John 3:19], as do all men before claiming Christ as their Savior [1 Corinthians 2:14; 6:11]).

In an atheistic view, our lives have no real meaning. We are just the result of random, chance processes over millions of years, and it’s just an accident of nature that we happen to be here. How’s that for meaning for your life?"

Purpose?

"Does atheism offer a sense of purpose for our short lives? To put it simply, no it doesn’t. You see, in an atheistic worldview it doesn’t matter how we live or what we do, because there is no ultimate standard for right and wrong and because everyone’s fate is the same—death.

In this view there can be no right and wrong. Since there is no God, there can be no ultimate foundation for morality. So who decides what is good and evil? Is it the individual, society, a specific government, whoever has the most power or the biggest guns?

In the atheistic view, we are simply animals doing what animals do. Animals k**l, steal, abandon their offspring, practice promiscuity, and, generally speaking, just look out for themselves. If we’re just animals, then these things can’t possibly be wrong for us anymore than they are wrong for any other animal. So in this view, why does it matter what we do? Nothing is right or wrong. Why not just live however we please and do wh**ever we want?

If there’s no ultimate right and wrong and no ultimate justice, then it doesn’t matter how we live our lives. It makes no difference if we live as a Mother Theresa or a Hitler—indeed who is to say one is better than the other? The things Mother Theresa did might make us smile and feel good, and the things Hitler did might make us shudder, but, really, that’s just one person’s personal opinion on what is admirable and what is detestable. In the atheistic worldview, there is no ultimate authority by which to either praise or denounce these actions; since there is no ultimate justice, it doesn’t matter how either of these people lived. Indeed, if death is the end, then the best thing to do is to live however makes you feel good—if you only live once, live it up!"

“All is Vanity”

"Did you know the Bible agrees with this bleak view of life without God? The Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes, a philosophical look at the meaning of life, expresses the hopelessness of life void of God with the constant refrain “all is vanity” (Ecclesiastes 1:2, 14, 2:17). The author, King Solomon, writes about the seeming hopelessness and purposelessness of life when he says, 'For what happens to the sons of men also happens to animals; one thing befalls them: as one dies, so dies the other. Surely, they all have one breath; man has no advantage over animals, for all is vanity. All go to one place: all are from the dust, and all return to dust. (Ecclesiastes 3:19–20)

Solomon tries all the typical ways to find meaning and purpose—money, relationships, pleasure, power—yet again concludes, “All is vanity” (Ecclesiastes 12:8). Without God, life is simply vanity—meaningless. The Apostle James puts it this way: “For what is your life? It is even a vapor that appears for a little time and then vanishes away” (James 4:14). The psalmist writes, “Man is like a breath; his days are like a passing shadow” (Psalm 144:4). Man lives, dies, and is gone—where is the hope, meaning, or purpose we all yearn for?"

“The Conclusion of the Whole Matter”

"If we only look to this world and start our thinking with man’s ideas about the past, the only logical and consistent conclusion is to echo the words of Solomon, “All is vanity.” If we’re simply animals and when we die, that’s it, we’re dead, what is the point of our existence? Should we just throw up our hands and cry “vanity” and then go about pretending our short lives have meaning? No!

At the very end of his search Solomon declares,

'Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter:

Fear God and keep His commandments,
For this is man’s all.
For God will bring every work into judgment,
Including every secret thing,
Whether good or evil.' (Ecclesiastes 12:13–14)'

Life has no meaning without God. But there is a God. We are not animals who happened to evolve through millions of years of random chance processes. The Bible describes us much differently:

So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them (Genesis 1:27).

For you formed my inward parts;
You covered me in my mother’s womb.
I will praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. (Psalm 139:13–14)

Before I formed you in the womb I knew you (Jeremiah 1:5).

As Solomon writes, the things we do in this life, indeed our very lives, have a purpose: “fear God and keep His commandments.” We don’t obey the Lord simply as a “get-out-of-jail-free card” from some cosmic prison, as many atheists contest. We also don’t obey Him to try to somehow give meaning to our actions and lives. No, we obey the Lord because it is the mark of those who love Him: “If you love Me, keep my commandments” (John 14:15). But in obeying, we get the purpose and meaning that we so desperately crave. God has created humans to desire meaning and purpose of their life because it is only found in Him!

Our Creator also gives us hope: “For God will bring every work into judgment, including every secret thing, whether good or evil” (Ecclesiastes 12:14). Both the good and evil things done in the world, even those things done in secret, will eventually be judged by the perfect Judge. There is ultimate justice for everyone. So we can’t simply live any way that we please with no regard for right and wrong. Right and wrong are given to us in God’s Word, and our choices have weight and significance for more than just today. Even in the midst of evil and chaos, we can have hope that justice will indeed be served."

“A Living Hope”

"We can also have hope because of Someone who came from the lineage of Solomon’s father, King David. Jesus Christ, the God-man, stepped into history when He was born of a virgin and was laid in a humble manger. He lived a sinless life, perfectly obeyed His Heavenly Father, and chose to die on the Cross. Through His sacrificial death He took the penalty that we deserve—death—upon Himself (1 Corinthians 5:21). But He didn’t stay dead. He rose from the grave, conquering death. He now freely offers eternal life to all who will put their faith and trust in Him (Romans 10:9).

Because of what Christ did for us, death is not the end for those who believe. His death and resurrection removed the sting of death (1 Corinthians 15:56–57). Now “to live is Christ, and to die is gain” (Philippians 1:21). For Christians, death means entering the presence of the Lord (2 Corinthians 5:8) and dwelling with Him for eternity in a place free from death, suffering, pain, and tears (Revelation 21:4). We can have hope for eternity because of the sacrifice of our Lord. Do you have this hope? If not, I encourage you to give your life to Christ today, believing in His death and resurrection so you can have “a living hope” (1 Peter 1:3) for all eternity."


*****************************************************************************************

We have been uniquely created and formed by the Creator of the universe. We are not accidents.

*****************************************************************************************

https://answersingenesis.org/world-religions/atheism/atheism-hopeless-meaningless-purposeless/

Bad Bob Loc: Virginia

padremike Loc: Phenix City, Al

There is always room in our minds reserved for mystery.

The essence of God is completely unknowable; mankind can acquire an incomplete knowledge of God in His attributes (propria), positive and negative, by reflecting upon and participating in His self-revelatory operations (energeiai). Gregory of Nyssa 

Rose42

This really sticks out - “Life has no meaning without God”. T***h

EmilyD

This is the paragraph that sticks out for me - "In this view [Atheism] there can be no right and wrong. Since there is no God, there can be no ultimate foundation for morality. So who decides what is good and evil? Is it the individual, society, a specific government, whoever has the most power or the biggest guns?"

martsiva

Hawkins was an atheist so of course he said those things!!