Yehuda: I never argued with abiogenesis; I just felt that your article was somehow using abiogenesis to disprove religion while I don’t think there is a connection.

Sorry, incorrect. My article specifically rebuts an assertion made by one theist that believes that this assertion “proves” religion to be true (by “disproving” science). I’m not the one making the claim that science and religion are directly contradictory in that case, though I do in fact think they intersect and that every place they do intersect, science has uniformly come out victorious. The fact that I’m rebutting a person who believes his claims prove religion over science, does not mean that I’m using my article to prove science over religion.

Yehuda: I never suggested you disprove the theory of a creator.

Um, what about:

Yehuda: Even by your logic, you have not disproven G-d.

Frankly, I’m not interested in DISproving something that’s been suggested without evidence, nor am I particularly interested in going round and round about whether one thing is “more likely” than another without some kind of baseline. Saying something is “more” or “less likely” actually has to mean something — you can’t just use it to buttress your own feelings when what you mean to say is “I would prefer it if X were true rather than Y”.

One of the things I’m suggesting is that yes, matter could conceivably have been “in existence” forever, in other forms. We can’t see back beyond the Big Bang, so we don’t know what those forms might have been, though we could conceivably develop testable hypotheses in the future. But honestly, saying that matter has existed forever is NOT the only alternative. There are other plausible alternatives. For instance, matter might have come from the collision of multiple branes of reality (look up brane-world). Or perhaps matter could have come from energy since we know energy and matter are interchangeable. If matter came from energy, I know of one really energetic event in our distant past — the Big Bang. Or perhaps this universe has Bang’d and collapsed repeatedly, and all the same matter that’s here now is the same matter that was here last time.

The ideas you’re using to support your god do not lend to there being other alternative possibilities. You’re suggesting that because one cannot DISprove this alternative, it’s the only possible explanation. That’s definitively not the case. One must eliminate all other impossibilities, and whatever’s left, however improbable, must be the truth.

As George postulates, if his single particle that had infinite/zero mass on a different dimensional plane was somehow testable as a hypothesis, we could actually learn something about the universe from it. But since it’s unfalsifiable, like your god, it has no explanatory power. It’s a just-so story, mythmaking of the purest kind. I’m not going to accept pure mythmaking, especially when your myths have testable parts that have been tested and shown to be incorrect.

But you’ve still not explained why you believe what you believe. In fact, you haven’t told me what you believe. Is it the Judeo-Christian god? Is it the god of the Bible? If it is, why do you accept abiogenesis where others (like Joe Cienkowski) believes the Bible contradicts the possibility via the account of Genesis?

2) I never suggested you disprove the theory of a creator. Nor do I suggest that you accept it. I suggested you provide an alternate acceptable explanation for how matter came into being. Neither your point of view nor the theistic one can be proven nor disproven. I said pretty clearly it is unexplained but appears to be the only possible explanation. I am coming from a process of elimination. There must be a source and that source must not be physical (because anything physical would itself need to be created). Though I am one, I am not arguing as a theist but simply presenting the reason for such a theory. To explain the unexplained. Your theory that matter existed forever would explain things, but I just don’t think such is the nature of physical things to just exist without source.

You are suggesting that matter existed forever and I simply don’t recognize that as possible. That is the crux of the issue. I never argued with abiogenesis; I just felt that your article was somehow using abiogenesis to disprove religion while I don’t think there is a connection. The debate is over and we can disagree. That is how most debates end, is it not? The point of a debate is to present ideas so others can decide using the information presented. I never expected to convince you just as Barack Obama cannot convince Michele Bachman to vote for him in 2012, or convince Iran’s President to set aside their differences and be his golf partner.

“You can’t claim infinity for your thing, because it’s impossible. But mine is totally possible.”

“Nuh-uh!”

“Uh-huh! Coz I said so!”

“Well mine’s infinity before yours is!”

“You can’t do that because mine called dibs!”

This isn’t a philosophical discussion, it’s a children’s playground argument.

You might also want to look up “burden of proof”. We claim only that there is a universe, and that we know some things about it, and that there are a number of possibilities for how it began, but that we don’t know for sure one way or the other. You’re postulating that it all got here because of a god, but you’ve provided no evidence for it and demanded that we disprove it. We cannot disprove your concept of god any more than you can disprove our concept of an infinite universe, so there’s nothing to decide between them which hypothesis is better. You’ve chosen your concept of god for other reasons than the ones you’re presenting to us — you’ll, in other words, never convince us the way you’re attempting to. Why don’t you, instead, tell us what convinced you?

And do you have anything at all to say about abiogenesis itself? Because I just got done banning someone for refusing to talk about the topic at hand when there was a readily available thread for discussing what they wanted to discuss (incidentally: they wanted to discuss themselves). I’m not threatening you with a ban, merely suggesting that we try to find some way to make this discussion actually relate to the post’s topic.

It cannot be proven either way whether the universe existed for an infinite period or not. I am merely suggesting that it makes more sense that there was a point of ‘creation.’ Simply because we’ve never encountered nothing and are liable never to encounter it, does not mean it never was.

>>”Even if there was nothing in this physical plane, could there be nothing in all physical planes?”

No. Nothing cannot have existed on any “physical” plane. By virtue of it being physical, it exists and cannot contain nothingness. Whatever existed before our physical plane must not have been physical. You could call it a spiritual plane, unexplained plane, plane X, or some other word if your prefer. In my mind, using the word ‘plane’ to even describe it almost suggests some sort of existence which in a state of nothingness could not be. In physical terms there would be nothing in such a place. But in spiritual terms, there could be. There is no other way to explain. You appear to be stuck on the idea that these things cannot be proven, and they cannot be. But I think the fact of the matter (pun intended) is that it is the only possible explanation for how that original speck of volume and matter came into being. And I think it makes more sense than the universe having existed for an infinite period.

So you’re asking how a G-d, or whatever force caused that first spark of space and matter, could ‘exist’ in a state of “nothingness.” I would think the answer is that the idea of a G-d suggests the unexplained. It is as unexplained as nothingness itself. It could not be any other force but a G-d or whatever you want to call it, or you would be right because such a force could not exist. At least in my religion, G-d has no shape nor form and is omnipresent, or at all places and nonplaces at all times. It is not composed of matter as hard as that could be to understand. It is the epitome of the unexplained because as you correctly state, it cannot be understood according to our physical laws. But it must be true according to believers as that first piece of matter with all its masterful, self-arranging properties, needed a source. It needed a creator. And believers proceed to say that we must show gratitude to that creator for the universe and our lives. You are welcome to hypothesize what else such a source could be, but as you state, it cannot be explained. Your last sentence stating ,”if there is nothing, then there is no prime mover” assumes the prime mover has mass and can be explained according to our physical laws. Not being a physical entity, this does not hold true. Science can only explain that which exists and has mass or could be defined with some other variable. Without such data, it cannot be explained via scientific means.